Grace

A Short Story

by Robbie Clipper Sethi

SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT HER MARRIAGE of convenience would be anything but. She had seduced him easily enough. Their love affair was all a big cliche: they’d met at a party near the University of Pennsylvania campus; he was one of the few people there who cared anything about design, perspective, the re-creation of life in two dimensions; she had asked him if he’d care to see her paintings.

He liked her geometric heads, their crossed eyes and twisted lips. “I wanted to study photography,” he said, “but we were middle class.”

“We’re middle class.”Worse: her father worked the

line at Campbell’s Soup.

“In India only the rich can take a chance on not making money.” He had come to Wharton for an M.B.A.

“I can’t support myself with this,”Grace said. She was looking for an assistant professorship; meanwhile, she was waiting tables, which paid more than part-time teaching.

In some ways marrying a well-paid man seemed easier than supporting herself, as long as he was willing to spend his salary on paint and canvases, and save Grace the time she would otherwise have had to waste taking orders, wiping tables, and picking Lip tips.

Living together might have been enough if she had known what to call him:

“boyfriend” seemed too immature, and when she referred to her “liner,”everyone assumed that she was living with a woman, so thoroughly had homosexuals expropriated the term.

Her parents didn’t like the obvious cohabitation without papers, but they had spent all their lives avoiding conflict; they went out of their way not to mention marriage. “What is he,”her mother asked, “a Hindu?”

Her father said, “At least he’s not a Catholic.”

When Inder finished his degree, Ins parents and his sister wrote him letters asking him to come back and “settle down” with “a good girl of your own choice.”

“That means they’re finding me a wife,” he said.

“Don’t they know about me?”

“Are you kidding? They don’t even know I’ve given up the turban, or shaved my beard! They’d be over here in a minute, trying to persuade me that I’d been seduced, that you were only interested in my money.”

“You have been seduced,” she said, “and your money is keeping me out of the bars six nights a week.”

“I can’t go anyway,”he said. “Immigration would never let me back.”

They were married in city hall, the statue of tolerant, immigrant William Penn standing over them. They didn’t dare tell Grace’s parents. Only after Inder was sure that he could get back into the country did he write a letter to his mother and father:

I am planning a trip to India in January. 1 have met someone I very much respect. I would like to bring her with me to meet the family, according to your wishes.

W ith highest respect, your loving son,

Inder Singh

The first call came in three weeks: Inder’s mother was ill, he had to come right away; his father was weak, only God could sav whether he would live to see his son again; his sister shouted so loud that Grace could hear her voice across the room.

In the end they got on a plane together, watched four movies, ate five meals, and leafed through every magazine in the racks.

At the airport Inder’s mother clung to his neck and wailed while big tears disappeared into his father’s beard. Until they could pry his mother off him and lead her to the taxi—hordes of people were watching this display— Inder’s sister crushed Grace in her fleshy arms. Grace was glad her parents had not had the money to come and be on hand to witness this display of excessive emotion.

Days passed on the string cots and jute mats in the courtyard of Inder’s parents’ house. His mother shouted in Punjabi while Inder sat, hardly reacting, on one of the steel-and-linoleum chairs of their dinette set.

“My brother was so handsome with the turban and the beard,” his sister said. “Bibiji and Darji cannot accept.”Inder’s uncles came, their wives, their grown-up sons. Everybody had something to say, mostly in Punjabi.

Grace finally saw Inder alone, on his way out of the bathroom, which was separated from the house by the open courtyard. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“We’re getting married.”

“Here you are!” his sister said, walking across the courtyard. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Grace wore one of Inder’s sister’s saris, rose silk embroidered with silver marigolds, wrapped around her own black leotard. She stood before a crowd of people in their temple and heard a bearded priest say something like her name—Ga-race Mad-i-son. Then she and Inder walked four times around the holy book and stood under a shower of flowers, the like of which were used to decorate their marriage bed, the only double in the house.

“This is the first time I’ve been alone with you the whole trip,”Grace said.

“We’ve got our whole lives to be alone,” he said.

She didn’t see much of India, either. She got up to the smell of dung smoke every morning, the sound of vegetable hawkers and prayers.

She sat in the courtyard anti sketched the sunlight coloring the cement walls of the house. “What are you drawing?” people asked, and they looked from her sketch pad to the walls and back again.

“We would have had the whole house painted,” her father-in-law said, “but you gave so little notice.”

She dressed in brilliant skirts, saris, or baggy pants, rode taxis through streets teeming w ith oranges, golds, yellows, and reds, and then slept for an hour or two. Inder’s sister would wake them up, saving that it was time to visit some relative.

She couldn’t wait to get home.

Back in the bigger and sunnier bedroom of their new two-bedroom apartment, she painted the evil eyes of peacock feathers, the stripes of the Bengal tiger. She framed the batiks and Rajasthani paintings she had bought, and painted Philadelphia girls, their breasts bulging out of midriff tops.

Inder let her paint. He was the only man who had ever let her paint. Other men had interfered, tried to finish the paintings for her, tried to outpaint her. Inder told her what he thought only when she asked for it.

“This is the most productive summer I have ever had,” she said.

IN THE FALL HIS MOTHER CAME. SHE CLEANED the apartment every day, from time to time bursting in on Grace with a handful of corner dust for her inspection. In the afternoons she sat behind Grace, coughing every time Grace opened a tube of paint. Toward evening she banged pots loudly. The smell of cooking oil seeped into Grace’s oil paints.

Grace watched, speechless. Unlike Inder’s sister and father, his mother spoke no English, and Grace was far too busy painting to learn Punjabi. The closest language to it that she could have studied was HindiUrdu, and the University of Pennsylvania was so expensive that she couldn’t afford to take the course anyway.

“Why doesn’t your mother go home?” she asked. “Two months is long enough to visit anyone.”

“She has a four-month visa,” Inder said.

“I can’t take another two months!”

“I can’t tell her to leave. In India a parent is always welcome.”

“But this is not India!” “She doesn’t care about that. I’m her only son. She wants to make sure I’m well settled.”

“Well, tell her. You’re very well settled. She can go home and get on with her own life.”

“She will. She’s worried, anyway, about my father and sister.”

And she did go home, but not until six months later, after her visa had been extended for four more months.

ANOTHER SUMMER, AND GRACE PAINTED folds of fabric, cascading hair, the sun on russet skin. She and Inder bought a house and made love on the screened porch, waking to the songs of birds. “This is even better than last summer,” Grace said, and she wished it could go on forever, but just as the nights were turning cold, Bibiji came back, with Inder’s father.

“I cannot live alone,” he said. “I am infirm.”

“What is he talking about?” Grace asked. “They live with your sister.”

“He’s retired,” Inder said. “His pension won’t even pay the taxes, let alone the bills, and in India you don’t take money from your daughter. People say you’re stealing from her dowry.”

“Your sister’s forty-four years old!”

“They tried for fifteen years to have me,” Inder said. “When my father lost the business, Behanji had to go to work. Her dowry went to pay for my school.”

“You already stole from her dowry! Are you saying this is it? ‘They’re here to stay?”

“Of course not. They’re happy in India.”

In the mornings, after Inder went to work, Grace would go downstairs for her coffee. Her father-in-law always joined her at the table. Her mother-in-law went right on cleaning. One morning her mother-in-law shouted from the family room, w here she was on her hands and knees, dusting the floor.

“Bibiji wants a baby,” her father-in-law said, almost blushing.

“Isn’t she a little old?” Grace asked.

He laughed. “Not hers,” he said. “She is impatient for a grandson to carry on the name.”

“It’s your name,” Grace said.

She told Inder, in the bathroom, the only place she could get to him alone when he came home from work, “If I thought you wanted babies, I wouldn’t have tied you down with me.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t want babies.”

“Well, your mother does.”

“Of course she does. She has no other chance for grandchildren, and in India children are everything. Don’t you remember all the jokes my aunts made about American grandchildren?”

“I couldn’t understand your aunts. Do you want babies?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Because if you do, you never should have married me. If I had a baby, I’d never get any work done. Even now I can’t concentrate on a simple sketch with them shouting at each other—”

“What do you want me to do? I can’t tell my parents what to do.”

“But you can tell your wife she can’t live the way she wants to in her own house.”

“You can do anything you want,”he said. “I’ve never told you what to do. Have I? Have I?”

She had to admit that he never had.

“It’s only temporary, Grace. A few more months.” She tried to turn away. “Grace? Please let me handle this. I just don’t want to hurt them.”

She stuffed her ears with wax, couldn’t even hear when Darji knocked on the door. He would come upstairs to the third bedroom and stand behind her, for how long she never knew. She’d turn, jump, sometimes let out a little scream, which he would return, and Bibiji would shout from the kitchen. He would tell Grace, every day, “We have no milk, no eggs. What are you cooking for dinner?”

When Inder came home, she would corner him in the bathroom. “They’re mature adults. Why can’t they get their own groceries?”

“They can’t drive.”

“Teach them.”

“Me teach my father how to drive? He never even drove in India.”

“This is not India.”

“They’ll only be here for a few more months,” Inder said. “If they need groceries, I can buy them on the way home.”

She could never get them to complain to him directly. Darji would wait until Inder had gone off to work. “Your mother-in-law is not feeling well,” he’d say. “She must see a doctor.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked—once. After that she learned.

“Some pains in the neck,” her father-in-law said.

“Have you mentioned this to Inder?”

“She does not want to worry her son.”

She took them to a doctor she had confided in when she was still supporting herself serv ing double scotches to medical students. Darji translated Bibiji’s complaints; then he told the doctor about his own muscle pains, fatigue, indigestion, confusion with the fast talk on the television.

“Get a little exercise,” Joel said. “Your wife, too. Walk an hour every day.”

“We cannot walk,” Darji said. “Our legs are weak.”

Joel sent them out into the waiting room. “I could order tests,” he told Grace, “but my suspicion is it’s arthritis, lack of exercise, old age. And tests can be expensive. Do they have insurance?”

“I don’t know.” She felt like crying—if only Joel had specialized in psychiatry.

“Yo,” he said. “Where’s the Grace who used to get me drunk? Professionally speaking, that is.” She had to leave, she knew it. He had other patients. Besides, she scared herself with a sudden urge to rub her face against the auburn stubble on his pasty cheek.

On the way home Darji asked if they could do a little shopping. With whose money, Grace wondered. She had just dropped sixty bucks for their medical hallucinations. Their very presence in her Japanese subcompact depressed her—Darji on the seat beside her with his turban pressed against the roof, Bibiji in the back in her polyester pantaloons and 1940s dress. Even the Philadelphia boys in their tight black pants and tank tops made her want to stop the car, get out, and hang out on the corner. She was, she realized with a touch of alarm, beginning to prefer her own kind.

Grace had never been able to approach a conflict with anything more flammable than paint, but arguing with Inder had given her practice. “Darji,” she said, “why don’t I enroll you in a driving school, so you don’t have to keep asking me to take Bibiji shopping?”

“I cannot drive,” he said. “My legs are too short!" The old man’s eyes filled with tears, and he shouted, his voice breaking, “It is for the children to care for the old. What is time to them? We have little time left. How much trouble can it be to take your Bibiji and Darji to the shopping center so we will have some time outside our stinking, paint-smelling house?”

Grace tore home, left them in the driveway, and backed out again to scream at the highway. “The bastard! It’s bad enough I was stupid enough to marry one man. Now I have to deal with two. Who is he to expect me to walk him around the local mall? How does he know how much time I have? I wouldn’t put it past him to outlive me!”

When she came home in the evening, they were sitting in front of the television, watching a situation comedy with a laugh track so loud that Grace could hear it even before she touched the doorknob. Darji turned around, a smile stretched across his face.

“Hello, daughter!” he shouted. “Did you buy the milk? Potatoes? Cooking oil?”

She found Inder in the bathroom. “Send a letter to your sister,”she said. “Tell her that we just can’t take it anymore. She has to take them back.”

“I can’t say that!”

“Well, you’ll have to say something. I drive around for hours not wanting to come home and face the noise, the demands, the expectations. When does their visa run out?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’ve applied for permanent residency.”

“What? They can’t stay here! Are you crazy?”

“It’s not to stay here. It’s just so they can come back anv time without being hassled by Immigration.”

“I’m not sure I want them to come back any time.”

“They won’t,” Inder said. “They’re bored. That’s why they have so many aches and pains. Do you think they like being dependent on us?”

“I don’t know what they like,” Grace said. “Except for afternoon TV, shopping, and—oh, yes—babies.”

“It’s hard for them,” Inder said. “Everyone they know is dying.”

“It’s hard for me,” Grace said. “I’m dying—”

“Don’t say that!”

“I’m dying, you’re dying, we’re all dying!”

He put his arms around her. “Don’t even say it. If I ever lose you, I’ll lose everything.”

She wanted to believe it. She even thought she wanted to have his baby—someday, when she’d done enough work, had enough success. His arms still felt good. Even with his parents downstairs, he was sexy, dark like the Philadelphia boys, but different—educated, on his way to wealth, exotic.

“I need a place to work,” Grace said. “I’m going to have to rent a studio.”

“How much will that cost? They’ll be here for onlv a few more months.”

AFTER ANOTHER month he finally sent the letter. His sister answered it by telephone, collect. “What? You have the whole house to yourself,” Inder said.

And his sister said all the rest: she was bankrupt; the house was a mess; she had nothing to repair it with, so she had rented it to Uncleji, who had moved in with a woman of a different caste and questionable morals; Bibiji had told her that Inder had three bedrooms, air-conditioning; she had no place to go; she had no husband, no children of her own. She threatened to commit suicide if she could not see her mother and father again, her brother and his wife.

They put her in the third bedroom. Grace moved her canvases into the basement. While she carried a still life down the stairs, Inder’s sister stood in the doorway, apologizing. “Do not worry. When you start your family, I will sleep in the room with the baby. When he cries, I will get up and bring him to you in the bed.”

“I can’t stand this,”Grace told Inder. “We’ve got to get them an apartment.”

“Behanji will go back,”he said. “She’ll never be able to live without doing business, and this country operates so differently from India, she’ll never get a job.”

But she stayed for weeks, months. She sat up all hours with her mother, sobbing. “When are they going to take her back?” Grace asked. “I thought Bibiji wanted to go back and kick her brother out of the house.”

“It’s difficult to get rid of a tenant in India,”Inder said, “especially if the tenant is a relative. Besides, none of them have an income.”

“Well, send them cashier’s checks,” she said. “I’m looking for a job. At a college or a school—where I can use the studio. I can’t work in this house anymore.”

“Anyone will hire you,”Inder said. “Your stuff is ten times better than it’s ever been.”

“I haven’t painted in weeks.”

“It hasn’t been that bad, has it? You can paint in the basement.”

Inder put track lights in the basement, his father supervising. The effort was wasted. Her colors came out wrong. The dampness warped the canvases. She bought a dehumidifier. The noise helped to drown out the TV, the floorboards groaning under Behanji’s weight, Bibiji’s shouting from the kitchen. The smell of onions, spices, and simmering meat drifted down the steps every day.

Still she tried to paint. She’d trace a perfect jawline, dead set on re-creating that face in her mind.

Behanji would knock on the door. “Am I disturbing you?”

Grace would hold the image just behind her eyes. Unlocking the door, she’d tell Behanji, “Yes. Later. I can’t.”

“One second,”she’d say. “Mummy is afraid you will ruin your eyes, so I have ground up almonds with milk. You must drink it. I will bring it to you. I will not disturb you. One second only.”

“Okay, put it there.”She would go back to her canvas.

“I will, only you must drink it. Mummy told me, ‘Make sure she drinks her milk,’and I must. She worries. Even I worry.”

It would be hours before Grace could even think of that face again, and by then the jaw was ruined.

She spent the night, whenever she ran out of tolerance, with her parents. They were no help. “Those Indians,” her father said, “they’re just like the Italians. One of them gets over here, they bring the whole family.”

Grace’s ancestors, a hundred years ago, had each come over from Europe alone, forgetting even the countries they came from.

“Why don’t you get them an apartment?” her mother said. “How old is Inder’s sister? They’re hiring at the K-mart.”

“In India,”Grace said, “it’s just not done.”

She sent resumes to every college and private school within a hundred-mile radius. Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t look for schools a thousand miles away.

“When you’re working full time,” Inder said, “it won’t be all that bad. You won’t have to come home until the evening, and they’re all in bed by nine.”

“I’ve got a better idea: why don’t we blow my first three months’ pay on three one-way tickets?”

“It’s not the money. If it was the money, they would leave. Grace, you’ve got to get used to them living with us.”

“Can you get used to them living with us?”

“They’re my family! Behanji gave up her life to send me to school.”

“To study something you didn’t particularly want,”she reminded him. “In America you give up your family to take a wife. I thought you could do that.”

“I did do that.”

“No,” Grace said. “No.”

WITH A FULL-TIME SALARY AT LAST, SHE had enough to rent a studio across the river, in the city they had moved away from when they needed the room that Inder’s family had filled. She set her easel in front of a long, bare window overlooking the street, and furnished the room with chairs and tables she found by the curbs on her way to work. She bought a mattress for one corner; then she went out and bought sheets, a comforter, and two feather pillows. Her own bed. filling up one corner of the room, scared her, but she lay on it and almost fell asleep, t hen she made a cup of coffee and stared at her half-done portrait, pretty bad, in the waning light of the afternoon.

Through the window she watched the men and women in their winter coats. How lonely she had felt in the house in the suburbs, but with no peace to justify the loneliness! She would have preferred the trees, even the lawn mowers, to the traffic, but the city was the place where she had started with Inder, so it was the only place she could return to. Besides, the campus was a block away. From a phone booth across the street she called Inder at work.

“I’ve got a studio,” she said.

“That’s great!”

“Move out with me.”

“Are you crazy? We can’t.”

“It’s the perfect solution. Let them have the house. We can go back to being lovers. I married you, not a whole damned household.”

“Don’t say that. I’d like to be irresponsible too, but we can’t.”

“We can be anything we want. You told me that.”

“I meant it. I’ll be getting six figures by the time I’m forty, and you’ll have so many shows you’ll have to hire someone—”

“I don’t want to hire anyone,” she said, sobbing.

She unwrapped her palette and stroked a little paint onto the canvas. Then she walked to the bank where Inder worked and waited for him. “Let’s go home,” he said. “They’ll stay up all night if we don’t come home.”

“Don’t you ever make a move unless they make it first?”

“What do you want me to do? Give up my family?”

“You don’t have to give them up,” she said. “Just put them up. Somewhere else.”

“They wouldn’t go,” he said, “even if I asked them to move out. They made a pilgrimage to every temple in India just to have me. They sacrificed themselves to send me to the best schools.”

“So now you must sacrifice yourself,” Grace said. “But you can’t sacrifice me.”

“I’m not asking you to sacrifice.”

He looked as gray as the paints she’d been pushing around that afternoon. “Come home with me,” she said.

“You come home.”

“Couldn’t you take them out some night, so I can come and pack my clothes?”

“I don’t have to take them away,” he said. “They forgive everything.”

HE COULD HAVE GALLED HER ANY TIME, but she could understand. She might even have welcomed the silence if it hadn’t left her staring at the phone, lunging for it on the first ring, dialing him at work and then hanging up before his secretary could answer. She didn’t dare call him at home, even at night.

She threw her energy into teaching, spent too much time with her students, though she couldn’t wait to get home and work on her painting: long, lugubrious faces, their complexions gray, their eyes mere holes.

After three weeks he called. “I wish I’d never supported you in the first place,” he said. “You might not have left as soon as you got some money of your own.”

“It’s not the money,” she said. “I thought you understood.”

“I do. They don’t. You’ve got to come over.”

“Are you alone?”

“I thought you’d rather see them here. They’re talking about looking for you at the college.”

“They wouldn’t!”

“They need to feel like they tried to reconcile us. That’s how things are done in India.”

“This is not India,” Grace said. “Don’t they know that their ‘little India’ split us apart?”

“You won’t say that, will you?”

“Neither one of us says anything,” she said. “That’s the problem!”

When she walked through the door, Darji took off his turban and laid it at her feet. Bibiji, kicking it out of the way, threw her arms around her and made kissing noises in the air. Behanji wept: “I will give you my gold, all my diamonds, if you will return.”

Inder stood in front of the door, his face blank, as if he had never had anything to do with any one of them. Grace stared at him and remembered her painting. She wanted to slap him; then she wanted to comfort him— anything to shock him into loving her again, but not in this place. She pushed Bibiji away. “I haven’t come to take your gold or your turban—”

“You must come back,” Behanji said. “This is ridiculous. You and my brother have no differences that cannot be reconciled. If you wish, you can sleep in the room with me. Look at you, you are young, you are healthy. You will have many children. It is true what I say, no?”

“No,” Grace said. She stared at Inder, unable to find words. “Tell them,” she said. “Tell them, damn it.”

“Grace needs some time alone for a while,” he said.

“No!” she said. “No. What Grace needs is a house of her own. If you want to stay with them—”

“I can’t!” he said.

“I can’t either.”She pushed him aside and opened the door.

“Wait!” Darji said. “I am elder of this family. I forbid you to divorce my son.”

Grace laughed. His mouth fell open. Inder said, “No one said anything about divorce.”

“Do not go,” Behanji cried. “You will stay tonight, have some food. Leave that place in Philadelphia. I will give you new clothes.”

“I left my clothes here,” Grace said. “All I have in Philadelphia are my paints.” She turned and walked out the door.

“Grace!” Inder said.

Darji stood up and fell on his face on the threshold. “I have humbled myself!” he cried. “Witness: I have touched my daughter-in-law’s feet!”

Grace drove away before he could throw himself in front of the car. The silence of the road felt almost warm, like the comforting silence of her mother when as a child she was too sick to go to school, and lay on the sofa all day, sipping ginger ale. Her studio was even quieter. She lay on the mattress sipping wine until the voices stopped ringing in her ears.

Inder had seemed not to be there at all. Turning himself off was the only way he’d managed to accept the situation. Grace understood that. But she could never have learned to ignore what was going on right in front of her face. For one thing, it would have killed her work.

Living without him wasn’t easy. She taught. She painted. Sometimes she spent a weekend with her parents, but after a night outside the studio she began to miss the smell of paint, the incomplete portrait, the hours spent looking into space while lines and figures flashed before her eyes. Within a few more weeks she had almost grown to like missing Inder.

For months she heard about him. Behanji sent accusatory letters to her at the college. At first Darji was dying, Bibiji had lost ten vears off her life. Inder lost weight daily and snapped at his family all the time. Then Darji was better, but would never smile again; Bibiji was eating, but only small-small bites. Inder was developing a horrible temper and would listen to no one.

The last letter shunted all the blame:

I have been blind, my sister. Now I see. He is cold. He is my own brother, but I call him cold. I do not see how you could have made a love marriage. When he was born, the only son, he was spoiled by too much love. I tell you, they are my mother and father, but they are wrong. He grew up expecting everything and getting everything he wanted. And because of him— this boy—because he went to the best schools, wore the best clothing, and had more toys than I got in my lifetime, because of this I have had no dowry. I did not marry and have sons of my own because my brother got everything. It is a fact. That is why I am forced to live on his charity, to share his home. If I had any other choice, I would not.

So, Grace thought, a sixyear-old child is supposed to prevent his family from killing itself for him. That would make a good mythic triptych. No: a twenty-oneyear-old woman is supposed to know she can’t give up her future for a six-year-old brother, who will one day leave the family and find a woman of his own. No doubt in India people had d fferent ideas. She wrote a letter:

Look here, Behanji, maybe he is cold, though for a rime I thought he gave me all the warmth I need. Maybe you should blame your parents. But blaming anybody after twenty-five years is no way to get on with your life. Get a job, for God’s sake. Learn to drive. You’re only forty-five. Lose a little weight and you might meet some lonely divorce a damn sight warmer than your little brother.

Her letter may have been a bit harsh, but absence had made Grace’s heart a good deal harder, and though the same absence told her that she’d never again live with Inder, she thought the least she could do was leave him with a better life than they had lived when they had tried to live together.

She avoided other men. Men had always gotten her into trouble. Why had she expected Inder to be any different? She went to the campus. She came home. She painted. She was happy with her latest. It portrayed a grav-faced man, abstractly outlined with a skeletal jaw, a hanging, startled mouth, and big, uncomprehending eyes. A little derivative, but it worked. Her current canvas was so far nothing but a blur of the same grayish white.

As the months went by, she put off the decision to file tor divorce. She knew Inder was putting it off too. That had always been his way. She loved him. She always would. But she had loved other men, still loved some of them, and had gotten over them, except in memory. Such memories were often sweet.

In the corner that she had turned into a rudimentary kitchen, she watched half a pot of coffee materialize, feeling as if with this little space that no one else trod, no one else dirtied, no one else cleaned, she ow ned the world. Pouring a cup, she unwrapped her paints and began to put the finishing touches on a piece she liked even better than her last— two gray-white faces this time, with just a touch of yellow. Elongated, the figures stretched from crown to abdomen as if they were hanging from the skyline behind them. They wore the same wide-eyed stare as their frightened brother, but she’d managed to work a touch of comprehension into their ev es, like the reconciliation to fate she envisioned in the heart of Ghrist, hanging on the cross, right after he had cried out to his Father, “Why have You forsaken me?” and understood the silence of God’s reply.

SOMEONE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR. SHE HESItated. This was her day to paint, and she’d been saving the whole day to finish this portrait. Grace. She’d begrudged every minute spent showering, brewing coffee, getting dressed.

She opened the door. Behanji stood there, lugging two big bags. She dropped the suitcases and threw her fat arms around Grace.

“Sister! We will not be alone.”

“Are you crazy? What is this?”

“All that I own in the world.”

“I told you,” Grace said, “I don’t want it. Inder and I are no longer together. There’s no changing our minds.”

“I know, sister. Oi! So many steps! I must sit.

Her big haunches spread out on the mattress. “We need furniture, sister.” From the mattress she could see Grace. Its dual stare turned her face as gray as the paint. “You made that?” she said.

“I haven’t made it yet. I was about to make it when you came in. How did you find my studio?”

“Telephone, sister.”

“I never got your call.”

“The address book.”

“Inder told you? I’ll kill him.”

“No, no, you can’t do that,” she said. “Listen, I will tell you. I know that you and Inder are divorced.”

“We’re not divorced.”

“Do not worry, I am reconciled. Even Mummy and Daddy are reconciled. Perhaps it is too soon to say, but when he is ready, they will find him another wife.”

“Another wife?”

“He will be happy. Don’t worry, sister. I will lose weight, I promise. As for marriage, what is a woman when she is too old to have children? We will find for you, my sister. I have wasted my life for my brother, but I will not waste it with my sister!”

“I’m not—” Grace started, but what Behanji wanted to call her was not entirely the point. “You’re forty-five years old! When are you going to live your own life?”

“I will find a job,” Behanji said. “You will paint.”

“I can’t paint! I can’t even breathe when you’re around. I need privacy. I need to be alone.”

“Paint. I won’t disturb you. I’ll unpack quietly. Like a little mouse.”

“No! No, no. I want my own home, my own space, not just to work, to live in.”

“But we feel it is the same house,” she said. “My brother’s house is my house. Just as it is your house. You see, it is the same house, brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, and wives. Just because you are divorcing my brother does not mean you are not still my sister. I think of you that way. And my sister’s home is my home. See?”

“No,” Grace said. Behanji would never understand. Grace wished she had learned Punjabi; maybe it would have been easier to communicate with them, even Inder. “Would you like a cup of tea?” She remembered that they always took tea in the afternoon. Behanji shook her head.

“Well, I’m going to tell you, even if you don’t understand. My problem was never with Inder. It was with you.”

“Me? What have I done?”

“I can’t work with you around. I can’t work with anyone around, and I need to work, all the time, even if it’s only in my head. Even if it looks like I’m not working.”

“Everyone works too hard in America.”Behanji sat, staring at the painting.

Grace stared too and found herself longing, more than ever, to get back to it. “Shall I call you a cab?”

“I can manage,” Behanji said. “There are many taxis on the corner.”

Grace kept staring at her painting after Behanji had left. She didn’t like it nearly as much. She dialed Inder’s office. “Your sister was here.”

“Oh?”

It was the first she’d heard his voice in months. She almost forgot what she wanted, hearing that voice. “She wanted to move in with me.”

“I take it you didn’t let her.”

“I’m sorry it took me so long to call,” Grace said. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“That’s news.”

“I made a big mistake. I’m sorry.”

“Is there anything else? Because if that’s all you wanted to tell me, you could have told me months ago.”

“I haven’t exactly been out of touch,” she said. “Your sister has been writing me letters.”

“That’s not all she’s been doing.”

“I think you ought to pay her back that dowry.” “What?”

“It wouldn’t take much: her own apartment, driving lessons, and if you’re feeling generous, a car, some employment counseling.”

“Are you coming home?”

“I am home. And even here I can’t get away from your family. They should hate me. Why don’t they hate me?”

“In India a marriage is for life.”

“Is that why we haven’t filed for divorce?”

“Do you want a divorce?”

“It’s not why I called.”

“Come home,” he said.

“You come here.”

“I have a meeting in two minutes.”

“I’ve got work to do myself.”

But neither one of them hung up.

“If your sister can stop by,” she said, “I don’t see why you can’t.”

“If I stop by,” he said, “I’ll be caught in the middle again.”

“You are in the middle.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Good-bye.”

She cursed her stupid luck. The lines of her portrait blurred in front of her. She tried a wash. By nightfall she had managed to blend the foreheads of the figures into the cityscape behind them. The painting needed something, She opened a tube of primary red, put a dab of paint on the tip of her finger, and touched a dot above each figure’s eyes.