Sightseeing Read online

  I left, the keys to the Mazda hot in my hands. I thought of getting in the Mazda and driving off. But I didn’t know where I would go. Perhaps I would pick up Noon from her house. Perhaps she would know.

  “What did he say?” Mama asked. I put the keys on the kitchen counter, walked to my room. “Ladda,” Mama called after me. “What did he say?”

  I sat down and tried to study for a trigonometry exam. But I couldn’t concentrate. Right angles, hypotenuses, tangents, sine, cosine: They all passed before my eyes without meaning. After a while, those lines and equations seemed like just another sport men had created to pass their time on this earth, and it occurred to me then that the difference between cock-fighting and trigonometry was a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Both were diversions designed to amuse, games with varying odds for victory. All human activity suddenly seemed to me composed of such sport: We each chose the game we thought would yield the most for us and our own. We gambled, gambled selfishly, gambled more than we could afford, the odds staggeringly stacked in somebody else’s favor. Papa, of course, was an obvious example. But Mama, too. She’d spent a good part of her life making bras for anonymous women living in faraway places she’d probably never see. She called it an honest living. But, as I sat in that room, those triangles staring at me from the textbook, it didn’t seem like much of a living. Mama’d wagered her strength and her labor and the sweat off her brow and the high-noon decades of her life, but in the end she only stood to make Miss Mayuree wealthy. Noon, too, with her monomania for boys, the way she indiscriminately anted her affections in the hopes of unattainable rewards. Because love was the biggest gamble of them all. Love had the worst odds. The rules were convoluted and mystifying and changing all the time. Even Papa’s sister must’ve known this. The house would always win that bastard game, so I decided at that moment to become its undying enemy forever.

  I put the book away. When I looked up, I saw the Range Rover parked in our driveway, Little Jui and his goons and that Filipino boy Ramon getting out of the car. I moved to the side of the window so they would not see me.

  Mama went out, a fist around the Mazda’s keys. Little Jui had a bouquet of roses nestled in his arms. As Little Jui spoke, Mama kept shaking her head, like she couldn’t believe what he was telling her. She kept looking toward the chicken house, waiting for Papa to appear. But he never did. After some more talking, Little Jui handed Mama the roses and Mama gave him the keys to the Mazda, as if making an equal barter. Little Jui tossed the keys to Dam and the goons went to Papa’s truck. Little Jui got back in the Range Rover with Ramon and soon they all disappeared down the road. Mama just stood there with an astonished look on her face, as if the Mazda had come to life and decided on its own to accompany the Range Rover into town.

  She came into my room.

  “These are for you,” she said, throwing the bouquet onto my bed, a few loose petals flying across my sheets. “I don’t want them, Mama,” I said curtly.

  “That’s it, Ladda,” she yelled suddenly. “I’ve had enough. Pack your bags.” Mama’s hands shook involuntarily. She stared at them, clasped them tightly together to stop the shaking. “Mama,” I said. But before I could ask her to calm down, she sat on my bed and seemed to slump from some enormous, invisible weight. She started to cry, hands in her lap, lips quivering, eyes staring angrily ahead. I went over, sat down beside her, put an arm around her shoulders.

  “C’mon, Mama.”

  She wiped snot with the back of a hand. She steeled herself against more tears. “I’ll kill him before he can go back to that cockpit.”

  “Mama—”

  “What’s with the roses, Ladda?” Mama asked. “He said you two were in love. I told him I’d cut off his dick before he ever got near you again.

  “He’s been bothering me, Mama,” I said, relieved to be telling her at last. “I ignore him, though,” I said. “I hate him more than you can imagine. I’d cut his dick off too, Mama.”

  Mama patted my knee. She got up and gathered the roses into her arms. She walked over to my window and opened the screen. “Hey,” she yelled, throwing the roses out the window toward the chicken house. They landed impotently a few feet away. “I hope you’re satisfied,” Mama said. “Have fun walking to work from now on.”

  XV

  Saturday night, Papa came into the house and said this would be the last time. He asked us for patience. We stared at him blankly. He was going to bring all the remaining cocks to the cockpit tomorrow, he informed us, staring at his feet as if embarrassed. Win or lose, he wouldn’t be going back again. He was sorry. He never meant to hurt anybody. He looked at Mama, looked at me, waited for an answer. But Mama just said the house would be empty when he returned. Papa nodded, like a criminal accepting his sentence, and walked out of the house, dragging his slippers across the yard, his head hanging limply from his neck.

  Mama got up and called Miss Mayuree. As she talked into the phone, I abandoned my dinner and walked outside. Years before, my feet would’ve led me to the chicken house, to Papa; they wanted to go there now. The air was thick with humidity. The monsoons were coming in a few months. The mosquitoes were hatching. The first of the season’s cicadas had arrived to creak and whir in the rubber trees. I listened to them. My feet began to lead me toward their sound. I walked across the yard, I don’t know why. I suppose I simply wanted to get away.

  When I arrived at the ditch, I hopped over it easily, and soon I found myself under the dark rubber canopy, all around me the shrill soprano cries of the cicadas in the eaves, their song reverberating through the trees like prayer echoing around some temple pavilion. The air thrummed with the noise. When I was a child, I’d always been afraid of the rubber grove, with its strays howling like so many ghosts during the nighttime hours. But now, standing in that pitch-black forest, watching Mama’s light in the kitchen window and Papa’s light in the chicken house shining through the thicket like two equidistant flames, I felt safe among the trees and I felt that out there, outside the grove, was where real danger lay. There were no ghouls here—just animals foraging for food, mating and fighting and singing their songs.

  I sat down cross-legged. I felt I might be able to sit there forever. But then the feeling passed. That’s your life, the cicadas seemed to say to me as I looked out at our property. That small patch of ground. Those are the people you love. Those two distant lights. That’s your papa in the chicken house. That’s your mama in the kitchen. You can’t hide in here forever. I got up and walked farther into the trees, turning my back upon the property, thinking I might get myself lost. But the cicadas told me no. They reminded me that this wasn’t even a real rubber forest, just an abandoned plantation. I’d only end up in town if I went any farther. So, after a while, I turned around and walked back toward the house. I paused at the ditch, thinking I might go into the trees again, thinking I might never come back, wondering how long it would take for Mama and Papa to notice my absence. But that feeling soon passed as well. I went back over the ditch.

  XVI

  Sunday, under a bright and cloudless sky, Mama and I watched Papa from the porch as he put the four remaining cocks into a rusted wheelbarrow. Mama stood there chewing her cuticles, leaning against the house. In a quiet voice Papa said he’d understand if we weren’t here when he got back. He said he loved us both. He said he would put in overtime at the roofing factory. He said, “I’m sorry, Saiya,” but Mama looked right through him. He stood there dumbly, lips parted as if he might say something else, and then he walked out the driveway, his whole body leaning into the wheelbarrow’s weight while the chickens clucked noisily.

  “Oi,” Mama muttered, still staring at the empty road. “I guess we should pack our bags.”

  “You sure, Mama?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Mama said sternly. “I’ll call Miss Mayuree now.”

  “I don’t know, Mama—”

  “What don’t you know, Ladda?” Mama scoffed. “What are you so unsure about? Yo
u want to stay? Fine. Stay. Suit yourself.”

  Mama went inside the house. For a while, I sat on the porch and stared at the wheelbarrow’s tracks on the driveway, its light lines trailing through the gravel like veins. There was a cold, eerie silence in the yard—this was the first time, I realized, that our property didn’t echo with the noises of chickens. I heard Mama pick up the phone to call Miss Mayuree. “Yes,” I heard her say. “Thank you, ma’am. You’re too kind. Yes. Just a few days. Of course we will. Thank you so much.”

  Mama came back, stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. She said Miss Mayuree was sending somebody to pick us up. I turned to face her. “Are we really leaving, Mama? Is this it? You don’t ever want to see him again?” Mama didn’t answer me at first. She just crouched down and packed her sewing machine into its plastic case. “We’ll see,” she said. “It’s not up to me. It’s up to your father.” I stood. “Don’t you love him, Mama?” She smiled. “Of course I do,” she said. “But that’s not the point, Ladda. Love or no love, the men in this world don’t leave women with much choice sometimes. It’s all we can do to hang on to our dignity.”

  I nodded as if I understood, though what she’d said made no sense whatsoever. What did a woman’s dignity have to do with anything? I wanted to ask her. What kind of dignity would we have by going to Miss Mayuree? Wasn’t it Papa’s dignity in the balance? Wouldn’t we just add to the sum total of his humiliation by leaving him? I felt a slow, recalcitrant heat blooming in my temples. After a moment, the heat seemed like some dogged flower pushing against the top of my skull. Mama must’ve sensed my distress; she walked over and reached out to touch one of my shoulders.

  “C’mon, Ladda,” Mama said softly. “Go get your things. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll probably be back by the end of the week.” I shrugged her hand off my shoulder. “This isn’t permanent,” she added. “At least I don’t think it is. I just want to scare some sense into him. We can’t go on like this anymore.”

  I walked to my room. I sat on my bed, watched the shadows list back and forth across the floor. The throbbing in my head had traveled to the rest of my body; I felt as if I might combust, burst into flames, liquefy from the inside out. I grabbed the wooden hairbrush on the nightstand and flung it across the room. The brush bounced off the wall, landed quietly on its bristles. It was a disappointing gesture. I caught my reflection in the mirror and felt terribly foolish. I got up and started to pack my things.

  Soon, Miss Mayuree’s blue sedan appeared. The driver honked, got out of the car, and opened the trunk. He didn’t say anything, though every so often he would smile knowingly at me. After a few trips, we managed to pack all our bags. We got in the backseat, the vinyl sticky against our skin. Upcountry music played softly on the radio. As we gathered speed along the road, Mama kept staring at her feet, as if she couldn’t bear to watch the house disappear behind us.

  Miss Mayuree was waiting. She smiled as we pulled into her driveway. She put an arm around my shoulder. “You poor thing,” she said, shaking her head. “You poor, poor thing.” She smelled like baby powder. She wore a belt with a large gold buckle that glinted when she breathed. A fat, smiling Buddha had been carved into the buckle, and I stared at the thing, afraid that if I met Miss Mayuree’s eyes I might say something rude.

  She showed us the back room where we would be sleeping, a small concrete cavern behind the kitchen. A solitary lightbulb hung by a wire from the ceiling. Mold hugged the cracks along the bare gray walls. On one wall, there was a calendar from the lingerie company, a picture of a skinny white woman with eyes closed, slender hands cupping gigantic breasts. “This is where the maids used to sleep before I built them their quarters,” Miss Mayuree said proudly. Mama thanked her while I stared at the moth-eaten pallet in the center of the room. “Just help around the house when you can, Saiya,” Miss Mayuree said. Mama nodded demurely and thanked her once again.

  “Ladda,” Mama said after Miss Mayuree left us. “Manners. She’s doing us a favor.”

  “I don’t care if she wipes my ass, Mama,” I said. “She gives me the creeps.”

  “Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”

  We didn’t say much to each other the rest of the day. After unpacking, we went to the yard to help trim the hedges. We introduced ourselves to the maids, picked up shears and gloves. As we worked, Mama told them our predicament and they nodded absentmindedly, as if they’d heard the story before. Every so often, a pickup truck would drive by and people would peer out their windows to look at Mama and me working in Miss Mayuree’s yard. The rumormongers would have themselves a party today, gabbing about our family.

  Miss Mayuree came out and told me she didn’t want me doing any work. She said I should rest. “You poor thing,” she said again. “You’ve been through so much.” She thought she was being kind; it made me want to trim her hedges even more. I snipped my shears enthusiastically, pretended that the branches were the blue-green veins on Miss Mayuree’s pale, wrinkled neck. “She’s just like her mother,” she said to Mama. “A good worker.”

  We worked on the hedges well into the evening. I kept expecting to see Papa pushing his wheelbarrow down the road. I wondered how he was doing at the cockpit today. I wondered if he’d already come home to find the house empty.

  As Mama and I lay down side-by-side on the foam pallet that night, I realized I hadn’t slept with my mother in a long time. I realized, too, that this was the first time I had slept in a room that was not my own. When I turned in that darkness to face the far wall, I half expected to find a window letting in light from Papa’s chicken house; instead, I found the woman cupping her breasts on the lingerie calendar. I listened to Mama’s breathing; I could tell from its short, choppy rhythm that she was still awake. I closed my eyes.

  I had a dream. I dreamed that Papa and Mama were running a sideshow involving chickens. The show took place in our front yard. People came from all over to watch. Even the strays had stationed themselves on the road in front of our house, howling happily along with the crowd. I watched everything from above. The town and the streets and the rubber trees and our property lay before me like a model train set. All of Papa’s chickens were there, alive. Papa made them fly through hoops of fire while Mama stood beside him smiling and gesturing in a glittering pink and lavender bikini. Then Mama stood against a makeshift wall as Papa threw the chickens at her like knives, the chickens gliding gracefully through the air, their sharpened beaks missing Mama’s face and body by inches, the crowd oohing and aahing in anxious delight with each throw. The trick completed, Mama put the chickens into her mouth, slowly swallowing each one whole, their bodies and their feet wriggling between her lips before disappearing into her cavity. The crowd gasped in horror. Papa produced a top hat and pulled out the chickens one by one and everybody, even I standing above it all, laughed and clapped and cheered him loudly. As I did so, I realized that everybody was looking up at me, that all those tiny little people were pointing at me, standing above them in their sky like a god. Somebody screamed. The crowd began to scatter like flies, even Mama and Papa and the chickens. I called out to them, told them in a booming voice to come back. A trembling rage passed through my body. I wanted to reach out and squash them all between my fingers, but as I began to pick one out from that model world below me, I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and I woke up to find Mama peering at me through the darkness.

  “Ladda.” She was whispering into my face. “C’mon, baby. Wake up. We have to go. Your father’s in the hospital.”

  XVII

  Noon had come to Miss Mayuree’s house that night, pounding on the back door, asking for my mother and me. Mama was still awake when she heard the pounding. She bolted to the door. A few minutes later, the three of us were walking the three kilometers to the hospital in town. Noon didn’t know what had happened. She’d only heard her father say, when he got home from the cockpit, that Papa’d been hurt and was now in the hospital. “It’s a shame” is what her father had
said to her mother. “It’s an abomination.”

  Mama walked fast. We had trouble keeping up with her, and soon she was far ahead of us, her slippers slapping loudly against the concrete. Noon reached out and took my hand, squeezed it, and I returned the gesture. Mama broke into a light trot then. Without turning around, she told us to meet her at the hospital. I had never seen Mama run before.

  When Noon and I arrived at the hospital, I was surprised to find that we were still holding hands. “It’s going to be all right,” Noon said at the door, letting go. It was almost one in the morning; the hospital was empty except for a few orderlies flitting in and out of the hallway. When we got to the front desk, the receptionist looked up and said, “Room 451,” as though she’d been waiting all night for us to arrive.

  I panicked. For some reason, the room number made everything intolerably real to me, even as the world suddenly became charged with a strange, dreamlike quality: Colors became impossibly bright, the slightest sound boomed raucously, the air became a thick, coppery substance on my tongue. I felt myself hover about like a ghoul. Inside the elevator, the fluorescents buzzing loudly above us, I felt as if Noon and I were falling quickly through an infinite cavern, though I knew the contraption was taking us up to the fourth floor. Noon was saying something to me, but when I looked at her lips, they moved quickly and soundlessly, like a movie on fast-forward, and I wanted to ask her why she’d want to play tricks on me now.

  The door to Room 451 was ajar. It was dark inside. I looked in and saw Papa laid out with bandages wrapped around his temple. A morphine drip ticked at his side, its tubes like the shadow of some gangly tree. Mama sat beside him on the gurney, a hand on his thigh, staring into his sleeping face, which winced intermittently as if he were deep in some strange and painful dream. Mama didn’t look up when we arrived. She just kept staring at Papa’s face, mesmerized by his features. She was still winded from running. I watched her collarbone tilt back and forth beneath her nightgown. I walked into the room. Noon remained in the doorway.