Close Together

The year that we met for the second time was when Sara had her second baby and I had my first one. She’d said to the others, I found out later, to bring thoughtful gifts for my baby. And they brought gifts for Sara’s child too because they were sweet women. “We weren’t going to forget about you!” they laughed.

And Sara made that funny sound she made, pfft, with the “Come on! My baby’s not news!” look. It was such a warm look, and made us all feel like we had a perfect right to be in her big house and be served by her maid, her cook, her chauffeur, and her gardener.

Amal asked how things were between me and my husband, and I laughed and rolled my eyes and said, “Oh you know. Work, work, work. I might as well be invisible.”

This was not true because ever since the baby was born my husband had put aside his projects—all these great documentaries he wanted to make—to spend more time at home. He even bought me flowers sometimes. When I nursed the baby, he stroked my flabby arm and said we were such a lucky little family that didn’t care about money. As soon as the baby was done I handed her to him and ran to the bathroom, pretending to take a shower. One afternoon I was in there with the water on when I found my tweezers and an old bad habit. I found that cutting could still feel good, even with a pair of blunt ends.

I had once made the mistake of telling this to Sara. She’d said that what I had was the “baby blues” and I was lucky to have such a devoted husband, not like poor Amal, who never knew when hers was coming or going. So a few days later, I called Sara and told her I was doing so much better now, she had been such a help.

In Sara’s home, in a corner, Amal pressed a small box tied with a ribbon into my hands and whispered to me that she was so happy for me. At the door as we were leaving, Mina warned me about eating too much because babies sucked energy and life out of a person, leaving an enormous vacuum inside the mother’s body. It’s what her mother had told her. All of my friends helped me carry the gifts to my car.

The next year my husband made a short film on water and it won him a small award. He had worked hard on his film. He’d skipped meals, become hol-

low-cheeked, let his hair go uncombed for days. I used to shake him awake as he lay sleeping on the couch in last week’s clothes, and bring him trays of warmed meals. Once at midnight with his eyes bright with caffeine he had asked me, “Do you see how water is everywhere? Everywhere.” He’d jabbed the air with his long fingers as if they were pointers. I thought I could see moisture in the air. Sometimes when I walked the baby to sleep I could hear water sloshing about in my cells.

Amal called to congratulate us about the award as if it were a family achievement. I wished I could see her face. If there was one thing I could not stand, it was people who pretended to be happy about you when really all they wanted was for you to be hit by a bus. Sara called as well but it was to say that we must meet again, all of us with our little children so they could love each other the way we did. And we were like sisters to her, her soul friends! She wanted to make food for us, so please, could we please meet? And she had new covers on the sofas and there were two new lamps with hand-painted shades and she would be devastated if we refused to go see her.

I did not want to go to Sara’s house. I did not want to see anybody. The baby was growing, growing, and becoming louder, and there was always something to do in each room of our apartment. I was always hungry and dry-skinned and smelly.

The one we ended up visiting was Amal. “I need some good, solid advice because things are a little tricky around here,” she said on the phone, speaking clearly and calmly. Her words, if written down, would look like planes taking off. I went with my little daughter to her house. She lived closer to the south of the city and had tried to be tasteful about how she decorated her home. I have never forgotten the hideous red and orange rug she had nailed to the wall in her drawing room.

I noticed that Mina had let hair grow absurdly long, all the way down to her waist. It made her look shorter and childish, but what we said to her was that she looked younger. She played with our children while Amal told us that if her husband didn’t even care about his wife and his child then she had no use for him. Did we think she should get a divorce? Her voice was as strong as wood.

Sara said, “No! You need a marriage counsellor.”

Mina said, “Maybe you should stay together for the sake of your daughter.” I said, “You will be so lonely, Amal.”

Then Amal cried long and hard, and I had never seen her do that, not when we were little and she’d fallen into wet mud and all the children had laughed at her,

and not even in college when a boy she’d liked had told her she bored him. Amal, beautiful Amal, who had always chased and chased. In school, she had trained the insides of our chests to get worked up into a fevered state, oscillating between agony and ecstasy. She used to push herself away from me and the school wall and walk toward the crowd of loosened ties and tanned arms. I’d stayed back, imagining her heart beating strongly with the inevitability of her attractiveness. And now here she was.

Later that day, she made us tea and we felt better. We looked at our little ones playing next to each other and smiled and fed them cake.

And later the next year, my husband became thinner and cried sometimes and bought me a flower one evening to apologize for all the sadness in his heart. Then he wiped his nose and his eyes and shut his notebook full of crossed out ideas and said in a voice full of resolve, “I’m not going to sit around and wait to be appreciated by ingrates. Thank you for standing by me.” When he won another little award his voice became stronger and happier. Perhaps this time the documentary had been about food because he’d been consuming so little of it for fear of wasting it.

We used some of the prize money for a budget holiday in another city. Our children played in the swimming pool and collected shells on the beach. My husband wrote and wrote in his notebook. Whenever he looked up to smile at the children, the sun in his eyes made him look golden. The sea looked so beautiful that I had to imagine a conversation: “What are those lines?” he asked, his eyes on my forearm, his face crowded with concern and surprise. “Stretch marks,” I said, radiant with attention.

That was a good time in our lives. Once we even went to a small dinner party. The host had a broad, kind smile and wrinkled clothes. He was shorter than me and I felt bad that I had to look down on him, especially since my husband had told me that he wasn’t having any luck being a writer.

He was full of talk on the way back. The woman in the hideous orange dress, who’d sat next to me, was an artist, but after ten years she had yet to sell a single painting. She held exhibitions in galleries because her father had left her a lot of money and her husband was a wealthy cardiologist. The man with the moustache was a writer. He’d wrangled publication in third-tier journals. He had no wife because he thought that being married would distort him. The couple who had been inseparable had ordinary jobs—she was a teacher and he worked in a bank.

But they made up for that by travelling to two extraordinary destinations every year. Or maybe they went to ordinary places in unusual ways.

“Imagine being together for weeks like that,” my husband said. “We’re lucky, aren’t we, having our own things to do.”

His statement brought to my mind an image of me running a vacuum cleaner across a carpet, then lifting the nozzle into the air to catch an escaped feather. The nozzle and my triumphant smile were bright in the sunlight. It was too bad there was no one at home to witness the brilliancy of that moment.

Another good thing happened that year: Mina and her husband moved to a house on the same street as Sara. I couldn’t help thinking about them often: now they must be having tea. Now they must be talking, heads bent close.

One afternoon, some years later, Mina called to tell me that she had seen Sara’s son riding his bicycle, scolding loudly, and shaking his fist at no one she could see. Mina’s breath was tight with excitement. “What should we do?” we’d wondered. In the end, we had thought that it was best to keep it to ourselves. We didn’t want to alarm or embarrass our dear friend Sara.

I felt a little closer to Mina after this. Still, the thought of her standing in a corner of her kitchen, thin arms hugging her bony chest, irritated me a little.

Soon after this, Sara called me asking for help. She said that she had no one to turn to, and I said that was nonsense—what were old, close friends for? By the time I had finished the laundry and the cooking and the ironing and gone to see Sara—it had taken a few days, maybe—her son was already in the psych ward of a government hospital.

“He should be in a better place,” Sara said, shrinking into the thin cover of the waiting room chair, not looking at the people who walked about with black holes for eyes and the people who muttered.

“You can always sell your chandeliers,” I suggested. But she turned her face away while people we didn’t know gave her son medicines and shots and goodness knows what else behind a door at the end of the corridor. Somebody was crying in a room but thank God it wasn’t the one with her son. I felt special because Sara had called me and no one else and I worried about how I could surpass her expectations. I bought her a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits and a small, thick magazine.

Sara’s son used to go to the same school as my daughter, who never mentioned him, not even when he stopped going to school. Sometimes I worried that maybe

someone else won’t talk about my children at their own home either, and I will miss the warning signs. I started asking them more questions about their friends and fears, and tried to listen for longer. I used concealer under my eyes and perfume on my clothes so they wouldn’t notice the burdens their father wore on his face. He had not won an award in a long time.

Later, when all our children were done with school, we went to Sara’s home. This was because we felt sorry for her because our children were moving on to universities and jobs and her son was in the hospital again. She leaned against her dining table. She looked like a bunch of splintering sticks held together at the neck. In school, all the girls had wanted her thinness, she’d told us once. She saw our faces and smiled.

“Talk, please! Let me hear your lovely voices. I have missed you, you know.” Mina, narrow, hard and slightly sour, said to Amal, “Tell your daughter to get married.”

“Why would she want to get married? Look at me!” Amal laughed at herself for a few seconds and when she stopped the corners of her mouth were lower than before. But I did not feel sorry for her because she looked so strong, so healthy, so beautiful. She looked like she could travel alone all over the continents and sail their rivers, giving her independent daughter a pat on the back on the way.

“It is ungratefulness, is what it is,” Mina said to no one in particular. She spoke about our children as if they were hers too, for lack of her own. When she criticized them, we tried to stamp hard on our egos.

“Well. Three out of five isn’t bad,” Amal said, also speaking in the possessive about all of our children, the entire collection of them.

“Go visit your daughter, Sara,” Mina said.

Amal had once said that Sara worried that if she visited her daughter it would turn her luck upside down. It would make her husband leave her and it would make her children ill. That’s why she only spoke to her on the phone and tickled her grandkids long distance.

I tried to recall the face of Sara’s daughter, who had gotten married and moved to faraway Canada and a house in the suburbs. I could only remember a school photograph. My children standing next to Amal’s daughter and Sara’s boy and girl. They were in their school uniforms, squinting in the morning sun. When they were younger, our children had shrieked each other’s names while playing in the rooms

and lawns of our homes. Sometimes we had allowed ourselves to relax a little and really sit back. Sometimes we’d even managed to detach the ghosts of our past failures and future hopes from them.

I wanted to go home now but it wasn’t time to leave yet and they would have asked me so many solicitous questions. What I did for myself was, I stopped looking at the faces of my friends and looked interested in my surroundings instead. The two chandeliers in Sara’s drawing room, heavy and rhombus-shaped, looked dusty. There were age spots in the mirror with the ornate frame.

Then Sara brought out the food. She had cooked so much. There were pots full of rice, and chicken and fried fish, and soup and beef.

“I take him meals every day in the hospital,” she said. “I label his boxes so that they know it’s only his and no one else’s.” She turned to me. “How is your son?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, swatting the air as if my son made me real mad. “He’s too busy for his old mother. Like father, like son.” That did not seem enough so then I quickly talked about how, on her wedding day, my daughter had gouged small holes in her nail polish and picked the skin around her nails until they were bleeding.

Amal looked at Sara and issued statements like a seer. “Your son, you’ll see, he will get out of that psych ward, and he will be perfectly fine. It’s just a matter of time. He will have a good job and he will get married. And you’ll end up with a daughter-in-law just like on TV and then you’ll wonder what the fuss was all about.”

In the beginning, we used to be full of solutions. We used to know all about how to correct marriages going off course, and how to fix the anxieties of our growing children. If she would only . . . we used to think. None of us had past selves we could now greet warmly with, “You! I’ve been expecting you! Come here!”

When I got back home, I pulled down the sheet that I’d covered the mirror in my bedroom with. I am still here, I thought with some surprise. Then I went to the kitchen to put away the food Sara had sent us all home with. It’s one of the ways she liked to take care of us. I decided to reheat the chicken curry for dinner. It’s what my husband liked to eat.