The Melting Pot Read online

  “I guess they’re an Indian couple.”

  “Indians?” Her grandfather’s voice rises. Bows and arrows?

  “From India. You know, Gandhi, Nehru, no eating cows. That’s what the women wear.”

  “I know what India is. I read the papers too, Rita. I’m not as ignorant as you think.”

  “Sorry, Papa.”

  “How do they live? Nice?”

  She shrugs. “I guess so.”

  “Yes. They’re not the same as the colored.”

  “Oh, Papa, don’t start.”

  The Indian couple is moving unusually slowly, their heads cast down. They look like a devoted pair; they walk in step, rhythmically. As they turn into the front yard next door, to the left, he swings the gate open for her.

  Much later, when Rita tells Sanjay about the first time she saw him, he says they might have been coming from the doctor; it was the month when his wife had some tests. The tests said yes, but it would probably not get really bad till the end.

  It is strange, Rita thinks now, that she was with her grandfather when she first saw Sanjay.

  A scene from one of Rita’s silences: Her great-uncle Peter, her grandfather’s twin brother, is a philanthropic dentist—he fills the cavities of Orthodox Jewish orphans for free. Also he checks Rita’s teeth. Her grandmother drives her to his office for a checkup every six months, on a Sunday morning. The tiny waiting room is crowded with old people—fifty years old at least; where are the orphans of legend? They wait in the little waiting room which smells of dental supplies—sweet, medicinal, like wintergreen—until all the paying customers have had their turns, which may take an entire Sunday morning. Rita and Sonia share many qualities of temperament, notably the impatience gene. They wait with difficulty. Though they like to talk, they find no solace in the small talk that accompanies waiting. They leaf through magazines, they go to the superbly clean bathroom smelling of mouthwash, they pace the tiny waiting room. Sonia, unable to be confined, goes out to walk around the block. Rita cannot take such liberties since it’s her mouth waiting to be examined, and her uncle might take a notion to sneak her in between the creaky patients. Her grandmother walks fast, round and round the block; Rita imagines her tense, bony body crackling like November twigs. Sonia’s short auburn hair is alive in the breeze, and her fierce mind works on the fabric of the past, ripping stitches, patching.

  At last it is Rita’s turn. Her great-uncle, bald and moonfaced, rotund in his sparkling white jacket, round-collared like a priest’s, beckons, the outstretched hand making a swift fluttering motion, giving the impression that she has been dilatory, that she has kept him waiting. He greets her using a Hebrew name that no one ever uses. She feels he is talking to some invisible person in the room. “What a pretty complexion,” he says, in a way that suggests perhaps it is not, a consoling way. And, “What strong white teeth!” In a stage whisper, over her head: “She must get those from her mother.”

  “I have strong white teeth too,” Sonia says with savage energy. “When have you ever had to fix anything in my mouth?”

  Sonia dislikes her brother-in-law passionately. All the dislike she cannot expend on her husband she transfers to his twin brother. Peter and Sol are cautious people, supremely timid in the face of life. Yet they came to the New World as infants and know only by hearsay what they escaped. Sonia, who came later, remembers, and finds their timidities an indulgence. Her family are extravagant-tempered Russians whom Russians never accepted as such, which is why they journeyed so far. Genetically defiant people with hyperactive brains, willful, angry, ebullient. Their bones snap, the veins in their temples throb. There is nothing they cannot feel passionate about, and so they lavish huge and frightful energies on life and live long, propelled by their exuberant indignation. Rita is fascinated by them and bored by her grandfather’s docile family. She sees the two sides of the family as opposing teams, opposing stances towards life. When she is older she sees her grandparents in an incessant game of running bases: they throw the ball back and forth—the ball is truth, how to live—and she, Rita, must run between them, pulled now to the safety of rules and traditions, now back to the thrills of defiance and pride.

  Once she is in the funny chair, Peter gives her avuncular rides up and down, chattering affectionately, almost too affectionately, as if he is trying extra hard. There are whispered words with her grandmother, exchanges Rita doesn’t grasp except that Sonia wants none of his proffered commiseration. “You can’t trust one of them, not one,” he mumbles. “That’s the way it is, that’s the way it will always be.”

  “Shh, shh,” Sonia hushes him in disgust. “Just do her teeth, no speeches.” Sonia always sticks up for her; with crackling Sonia she is utterly safe.

  “Such beautiful dark hair.” He does seem to like her, in the brief time he has available. Yet he calls her by the wrong name, which you do not do to someone you like. That’s not who I am, Rita wants to cry out, but there is something peculiar and mysterious about who she is that keeps her silent, open-mouthed like an idiot. She sometimes gets glimmerings of losses below the surface, like sunken jewels that divers plunge and grope for in vain. They might be memories of a different climate, or the feel of an embrace, or a voice, feelings so fleeting and intangible she can hardly call them memories. But they have been with her since she can remember—wispy vapors of another way she might once have been, another mode of feeling the world, as believers in reincarnation sense their past lives.

  That’s not who I am, she wants to cry out, but she can offer no more, she knows nothing more, and anyway he is all frothing joviality and patter, while his hands nimbly prepare the instruments. Rita is enthralled by the rows of false teeth lined up on the cabinet, pink gums and ivory teeth, the many different shapes waiting like orphans to be adopted, for mouths to come by and take them in, ready to be pressed into service chewing and forming the dental consonants. Unspoken words and stories are hiding in the teeth.

  “So. Are you going to play Queen Esther this year?”

  “No.” She rinses and spits. “The teacher said I should be Vashti.”

  “Well, Vashti is good too. She was very beautiful.”

  “She gets killed in the beginning. I was Vashti last year.”

  “Finished?” asks Sonia impatiently.

  Fortunately Rita’s teeth are excellent, she can be disposed of in five minutes. Rocks, he says every time. She has rocks in her head. And he tells her that her teeth, like her grandmother’s, will last a lifetime. Good news. Sharp and hard, they bite, they grip, grind, gnash, and clench. They make the words come out clear. Sonia grinds her teeth all night, Sol remarks at breakfast. Good, Rita thinks. They will be useful in times of stress. They will help her chew hard things and grind them down, make them fit for swallowing.

  When Sanjay’s wife died, Rita paid a neighborly call, as her grandfather taught her to do. Solomon was conscientious about visiting the bereaved. He would enter their houses with no greeting (that was the rule), seat himself in a corner, open a book, and pray as though he were alone in the room and the universe, which in a sense he was, for all around him people continued to speak, eat, and even make merry as survivors will.

  The rules behind her, no book to guide her, Rita brings a rich, fruity cake to Sanjay and greets him. They have exchanged greetings on the street, she has inquired with concern about his wife, but she has never been in his house before. She notices he has some Indian things—a big brass tray, a lacquered vase with an array of peacock feathers, and several photos of Allahabad, his home town, a very holy place, he tells her, where two holy rivers meet. One photo shows masses of people, the tops of heads, mostly, bathing in a holy river banked by two fantastical buildings, castles out of a tale of chivalry. Otherwise it is a San Francisco kind of house—airy, with thriving plants and colorful pillows. It smells spicy.

  They become friends. They go to an occasional movie, a restaurant. He asks her advice about relatives who need green cards. She asks if he can fix her
dishwasher. She loves the way he moves, his great weight treading softly, the smooth sound of his voice and the way after all these years he keeps pronouncing certain words in the British fashion—“dance,” “record,” “laboratory”—his slow, very inquisitive eyes and hard mouth.

  Finally, after several months of decorous behavior they meet by chance on the street one evening and get to talking. Something feels different. Ripe. His eyes and his speech are slower, more judicious than usual, almost ponderous. He asks her into his house and she smells the sharp spices. He gives her some stuffed chappattis his daughter brought over that morning; he insists on warming them in the oven first. Delicious. The bread is important; it is, she understands, part of the seduction. Standing very erect, shoulders squared, like a man about to deliver a speech, he says, “Well, Rita, I have never courted an American young woman before, so you’ll have to forgive my ... ineptness. But it seems time, to me. And you? Will you?” She nods. He looks so safe.

  Upstairs, the furniture in the bedroom is weighty, built for the ages. It reminds her of the furniture in her grandparents’ apartment. Married furniture. The first thing Sanjay does is turn his wife’s photograph to the wall.

  Rita lets herself be undressed. “Oh. Oh,” he says, touching her. When he takes her in his arms she feels an immense relief—at last!—as if she has been freezing for years and suddenly a fur coat is thrown over her, the kind of coat shown in photos of Russian winters, and she realizes she has wanted him from the moment she saw him from the window three years ago, looking out with her grandfather. She can feel his immense relief too, but that, she imagines, is because he has not held anyone in his arms in months. Oh God, she hopes it will not be ... like that.

  No, he is in no hurry. He proves to know a lot about women. Maybe in a past incarnation he was a woman—she can almost believe it. Also, from the way he touches her, she feels how he must have loved his wife. She wonders if she feels like his wife, if maybe all women feel alike, after a certain point. In his arms, Rita forgets who she is. She could almost be his wife. And then she falls immediately asleep.

  When she wakes, the bedside lamp is on and Sanjay is weeping into the pillow. He looks up and sees her watching.

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me.” He stops abruptly.

  Is this all she will ever be, a link to the beloved dead?

  “Really, I’m terribly sorry, Rita. I thought you were sleeping.”

  “It’s all right, Sanjay, it’s all right.” What else can she say?

  She does not sleep much that night but watches him sleep. For hours, it seems. She has shielded herself so far, but now it envelops her like a shower of gold threads, of red powder, and she sees that love is the greatest defiance of all. She is afraid of it.

  She has to leave early, go home to the other side of the wall and change, pick up her cap and gown. She is graduating from law school that very day. Sanjay says he wants to be there, so she gives him a ticket—she has them to spare since her grandparents are not flying out this time. Sol’s heart is too irregular.

  Just before she leaves to take her place in the line, he slips her a tiny candy wrapped in silver paper. “For luck.”

  She starts to unwrap it.

  “No, no. You eat the paper too.”

  She trusts him infinitely. She eats the paper. Silver, sweet, delicious. Bits of it stick in her teeth, making the taste linger.

  When he announces months later that he loves her and wants to marry her, that he has thought it over and waited to speak until he was quite sure, she takes the information skeptically.

  “Why? Can’t you believe that I loved her and now I love you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have loved other people. I don’t think about them.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You do love me, though,” Sanjay says. “I know. Must I see a problem in that, perhaps?” This is comical, she thinks, this interrogation. He can be so matter-of-fact, even imperious. There is a sliver of amusement in his eyes, too. Whatever he is, she loves.

  “I never felt this before. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Come now. You must have. American girls ...”

  “I was busy with other things.”

  “What things?”

  She can’t tell him how she spent her college years. It’s too crazy. Not yet, anyway. So instead she says something hurtful. “You’re too old for me.”

  He seems impervious, tilts his head carelessly. “That can’t be helped. And anyway, you don’t really mind.”

  It’s true, she doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

  Rita and Sanjay find that their backgrounds have a number of things in common. A preponderance of rules for proper behavior is one, especially rules about not consorting—eating or sleeping—with members of another caste. This, like pioneers, they have both left behind. Arranged marriages is another. This one does not seem so far behind.

  “So you never really knew her before you were married?”

  “We knew each other, but not in the way that you mean. The families met several times. We spoke. It’s not really so preposterous. The idea is that you come to love each other. We trust in proximity to breed love.”

  Rita frowns. He is still trusting.

  “It sounds very unromantic, I know. But it doesn’t exclude romance of a kind.”

  “Does it work? I mean, for most people?”

  “Well, more than you’d expect. Some love each other with a goodwill kind of love. Some even have passionate love. But there are other ways to love besides those, more ways than are recognized here. You can love someone simply because she’s yours, part of you. You’ve accepted each other and you don’t question it. My parents were like that. Are still like that.”

  “And what about you? What kind of love was it?”

  He closes his eyes. The pain of loss, regret? Or merely impatience. “Why do you keep asking? You know the answer.”

  She knows. The goodwill kind, the passionate kind, the totally accepting kind. Often, those first three years, she saw them walking arm in arm down the street, their steps falling together in rhythm. Belonging.

  “You were lucky. Did she know, the first night, what she was supposed to do?”

  “Not precisely. She was a very sheltered girl.”

  “But you knew, I presume?”

  Sanjay takes a deep breath and his face begins a little performance—his face has a great repertoire of expressions. His eyes roll, his forehead wrinkles, his lips curl. “What do you think?”

  “Was she appalled?”

  “No.”

  Rita would like to know, in graphic detail, exactly how Sanjay made it clear what was expected. She is not a voyeur by nature; rather, she is mystified by the transmutations of love—how indifference turns into love, love into indifference and even worse. But it is useless to ask. He doesn’t tell. It must be too precious. Yes, because he does love to tell stories about his parents, his brothers and sisters and cousins. She has heard comic stories about bicycles capsized in the mud and a flirtatious widowed aunt, stories of school pranks and festival antics, and painful stories about a baby sister who died of diphtheria on the day Gandhi was shot. But no stories about his wife.

  “I know what you’re thinking. But people can love more than once, Rita. After all ...”

  “I know, I know.” Yet she knows only in the abstract. She feels generally ignorant on the subject. She thinks that what she saw, growing up, was not love but a species of belonging.

  Her grandparents’ marriage took place in 1927 and was also arranged, though not as strictly as Sanjay’s. The couple was introduced; they took several walks together over the Brooklyn Bridge; they went to a few movies and even to an opera, Madame Butterfly. This was all quite ordinary. But the wedding itself was extraordinary. The father of the groom had collapsed and died two days before. No matter; the rules say ceremonies must take place as scheduled, like Broadway shows. And the bride did not r
efuse; she had not yet learned how. But she had her doubts, surely, Rita thinks. For it is hard to imagine the Sonia she knows being so compliant. Surely she must have been astounded, felt that such a beginning did not augur well and maybe she had better pull out before it was too late? But it was already too late.

  “Can you picture that wedding?” she queries Sanjay.

  “Well, quiet, I’d imagine. Very quiet.”

  No doubt. A dearth of dancing, the musicians laboring to rouse an unappreciative crowd. Rita’s various aunts and uncles, disguised as young people, gathered around linen-covered tables, eating sweetbreads and drinking sweet wine while salt streams down their faces. The children fretful and confused—no one is urging delicacies on them or swinging them through the air. Her own father not yet an outcast, not even born, a gleam, as they say, in his father’s very gleaming eye. As her grandparents toast their life together, the groom weeps under the harshness of his own discipline. He can barely drink and cannot eat. He does not need to eat. Self-pity and self-satisfaction are his feast—for this ordeal will make him a better person, bring him favor in the eyes of his God. What kind of eyes could they be?

  Very quickly the couple has an indissoluble connection, a son. Sonia’s first decade of marriage is a depression, then comes the war.

  Throughout their married life there are many changes in the world. The maps of Europe, Africa, and Asia change drastically. There are immense shifts of population, new technologies, cures for diseases; wonders and horrors as usual. The twentieth century. But—and she has to admire his tenacity—Rita’s grandfather’s world remains the world he grew up in, a small world left over from the youth of the century, a bit cramped and crowded, like a room to which new pieces are added but from which nothing is ever thrown away, a thoroughly benign and safe world, according to his stories—for he is, yes, a storyteller, with a magnetic eye, bluest of blues, and a magnetic voice.