Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,52

had one standing order: if anyone was to call or visit, he was napping. His friends took the hint and stayed away. His coworkers at Blue Grass Realty sent a potted bamboo, the stalks deformed into the shape of a heart. Only Ivy, his girlfriend, continued to call. I’d almost forgotten the stuffed-up sound of her voice, the nasal quality that made a stuttering idiot out of me. “Seems like his narcolepsy kicks in every time I call,” she said.

I laughed a little too loudly. I told her he’d call her back.

“I can’t believe you’re still doing that,” Amit said, after I hung up. “Christ.”

“Doing what?”

“Your voice, when you know it’s her. Your James Earl Jones impression.” He lodged a cheese puff, like a tumor, in his cheek. “You sound like a serial killer.”

Amit and Ivy had been dating since high school. At first, my dad didn’t approve because her parents were Chinese, and he’d long held the notion that all Chinese people were calculating and aggressive, as evidenced by some decades-old invasion of India that continued to work him up. As the years went by and Ivy stuck around, she and my dad moved toward a cool détente, though it still pained him to report when an Indian person we knew had married outside the tribe. His tone would be like that of a newscaster reporting casualties—another woman lost, another man down.

I’d been sweet on Ivy since the day she asked Amit to the senior prom; that she’d done the asking suggested an alluring form of Chinese aggression. She even picked him up in her dirty white Saab, wearing a pink satin pouf that made no secret of her cleavage. “I got it at a thrift store,” she said to me, doing a twirl. “Isn’t it hideous?” Before I could answer, Amit thundered down the stairs in his tux, and her face tilted up, filling with light.

I watched them speed off, thinking, Him? Really? I attributed her mistake to the fact that she was a transplant from San Francisco and didn’t know any better. Here was a girl who could surf as well as her brothers, who sang at the talent show a sultry cover of “Oh! Darling” while strumming her own acoustic guitar. Not that I deserved her either. Ivy seemed to be on another plane of special altogether, destined for a life of big cities and backstage passes. Amit, I assumed, was a youthful detour.

A week passed, and things began to improve after I ordered a copy of Planes, Trains & Automobiles, a movie that Amit and I had watched so many times as kids that we knew whole scenes by heart. I usually played Steve Martin, the hapless traveler forced to cross the country with John Candy, a boisterous shower-ring salesman. Watching it again, so many years later, brought a strange sense of relief. Most of the time, I was laughing because Amit was laughing.

After the first screening was over, I wheeled Amit to the bathroom and left him in there. He visited the bathroom only two or three times a day, usually for an hour each time. It took that long for his bladder and bowels to function. I kept his bathroom stocked with issues of Rolling Stone and Time, books of crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

He’d been in the bathroom for ten minutes when I glimpsed Ivy’s Saab crawling up our driveway.

“Amit?” I said through the door. “Ivy’s here.”

Silence.

“Amit, you okay?”

“I’m not here, got it? Tell her I’m not here.”

“Where do you plan on going?”

“Don’t tell her I’m in the bathroom, Neel. Tell her I’m asleep.”

“That’s what I always tell her. She’ll know I’m lying—”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell her I just stuffed a fucking suppository up my ass and I can’t come out or else I might shit all over myself, huh? How’s that?”

The doorbell chimed.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

I opened the front door to find Ivy standing with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Her hair was shorter, fringe over her eyes, which were lined and tired. “Oh, hey, Neel.”

“Hey, you!” I said, regrettably.

We hugged, then stood there, nodding at nothing. She looked down at the ramp of wooden planks beneath her feet, which Diego had hammered together. “Been a while,” I said.

“Yeah. Hey, how’s your writing?”

“Okay, I guess.” I leaned against the door frame, attempting a pose as casual as hers. “I finished a draft of my novel.”

“Really? What’s it about?”

“Brothers,” I said. “Basically.”

“Uh oh.” A