The Bones of Grace (4 page)

The food arrived. The sandwiches looked small and pale sitting alone on their heavy porcelain plates. The tea was in a giant mug, the orange juice in corrugated-plastic cups.
I picked up the sandwich, which was almost as high as it was wide, and took a bite. The egg came loose between the layers and spilled onto my chin, the plate. I was embarrassed, and tried to keep my lips closed, alarmed by the intensity of flavour and volume in my mouth.

At this point, I believe you may have thought you'd committed a faux pas. You said, ‘There's sausage in that sandwich – you don't eat pork?'

I allowed myself to hesitate a little before laughing. ‘It's all right,' I said, ‘just don't tell my parents.'

You pulled the plate from me. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘I'm joking. Really, I am. My parents don't care, they're not religious. Give me my sandwich.' I pulled the plate back. You asked if I was Muslim, and I said yes, I was, but that I came from a family of sceptics. Nationalism was the religion in our household. ‘They're communists. Sort of. The Bangladesh war changed them.'

I think I may have mentioned at that moment, by way of explanation, that my mother drove an ambulance during the war. I wanted to bring up the subject of my adoption again. To repeat that my parents were not my only parents, that I had other parents, parents I had hardly thought about until last night. The image of your home – the cabin, the maple trees – was deepening in my mind. I could smell pine and hear the clamour of your family. Your story made my story into a sad one, and I began to regard you with some envy. Also, I could not understand why you were suddenly in limbo, after having had what appeared to be such a privileged life. You mentioned again that you'd been to India, that you might like to go again.

‘I had a friend from there, I went to visit her family. And then we travelled together to Nepal, and Bhutan.'

I sprang back into the moment. I wanted to ask you the name of this girl. I crossed and uncrossed my arms, trying to find the most casual, relaxed pose I could to express how much this story was not bothering me. I told myself that people fell in love with you all the time. You were cartoonishly handsome. Even your forehead was sexy, big and flat and serious. I tilted my orange juice till there was nothing left at the bottom of the cup, and then, not being able to resist, I said, ‘Was she your girlfriend?'

‘She was, for a long time. But it was over by the time I went to India.'

‘Did you break her heart?' The longing to be that girl, drawing you towards me from across the continents, was so strong I felt a surge of blood to my legs.

‘No.' I would learn, over time, that you were the master of the meaning-burdened one-word answer.

I looked into the pools of your eyes, the light ring of your eyelashes, allowing you to see inside me. ‘Last night, you looked so beautiful when you cried. I've never seen anyone cry like that,' you said.

‘Can I ask you now why you are dressed so formally?'

‘Today is my grandmother's funeral.'

You told me you had sauntered into an internet café in Pondicherry, ready to write a long email to your family about that town, the fort and the little shacks on the edge of the beach where you had admired the sunset, each evening a different shade of pink, and you were thinking how different the sun was there, bigger yet somehow further away than in Vermont, where it stood alone without the frame of clouds. And then you discovered your father had been trying to reach you for days, calling all your friends and asking if they knew where you were. But you had travelled to Pondicherry alone – Reeva, the girl, had left
you in Mysore and gone back to Delhi. As you told me this story, that lost expression came over you again, the one I had seen last night as the lights came on in the auditorium, and now I wanted to tell you I was looking for something too, something that couldn't be found in the ankle bones of a whale. You pulled your chair forward and pressed your chest against the rim of the table.

‘How terrible for you,' I said. ‘I'm so sorry.' And we stayed that way for a long time. And then I told you. I hadn't meant to, not right then, but it just came out. ‘There's something I should have said yesterday. About me.'

‘What's that?' I had slipped off my sandals and I was sitting cross-legged on the chair, but now I straightened up and planted my feet back on the ground.

‘I have a person – a boyfriend – back home.'

‘Really?'

‘His name is Rashid.'

‘Rashid,' you repeated.

‘We've known each other our whole lives. We'll probably get married or something,' I said, letting it all come out in a rush. ‘Of course, not that you care, or anything, I just – I just thought, since we just met—'

‘I wish I'd met you before.'

‘I didn't want to give you the wrong impression.'

Our sandwiches had been devoured, the mugs emptied. The waitress returned, tore a page from her pad, and left it on the table. I couldn't tell if you were disappointed. Were you? Or perhaps, with the death of your grandmother, you were unable to register much of anything at that moment, your every feeling crowded by some other feeling. Even now, when I think back, I wonder if our story would have ended differently if I had told you at some other moment, or in some other way.

‘So,' you said, inhaling deeply, ‘what were you planning to do your last few days in Cambridge?'

‘Nothing much. Finish at the lab, return some library books.'

The meal was over. I put my palms on the table. ‘Thank you for breakfast.'

‘I wish it was two weeks ago,' you said again. ‘Or last year.'

‘Me too,' I replied, believing I meant it more.

We looked at each other, wondering what to do next. Finally you said, ‘Would you like to come to my grandmother's funeral?'

I tried to imagine what would happen if my grandmother died and I brought you to her funeral. ‘No, I don't think so.'

‘How about later? We're having lunch at my mother's.'

I didn't want to meet your entire family, not like this, but I wanted an excuse to see you again. I said, ‘I thought about last night, and it all made sense to me. It's because I'm going, and I'm not sure when I'll be back – something like that.'

‘You're an intermediate species, like
Ambulocetus
.'

‘Exactly.'

‘Maybe if we'd met under different circumstances, we might have decided to see what it was like. To be together. But if that's not on the cards, that's okay. I still want to spend time with you. Is that all right?'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘I do too.' I was unsure if I had gotten what I wanted. Without being coy or hesitant, you spoke about our being together, and accepted with equanimity that we would not be. I should have been relieved – an awkwardness averted – but instead I felt disappointed, as if the conversation had hurried past me and I had failed to hail it down.

You asked if I had ever heard the Goldberg Variations. I hadn't. ‘You remind me of number thirteen,' you said. ‘Shostakovich is okay, but Bach is the source.'

I had to go to the MCZ and pack up my lab.

You checked your watch. ‘Call me when you're done,' you said. I wished you good luck for your grandmother's funeral. I wanted so much for you to hold my hand, to put your arms around me like you had last night, but the moment, if it had ever existed, had passed, and so I settled for walking back down Mass Ave with you, the sidewalk warm beneath our shoes, everything brilliantly cloudless above.

I shared a large, brightly lit room on the ground floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology with six other graduate students and a visiting professor. A bank of windows faced out towards Kirkland Avenue. Everything smelled of old wood. When I arrived to pack up my desk, Kyung-Ju was photographing the ankle bones of the
Pakicetus
we had borrowed from the University of Michigan, and I could hear some of the others in the back room with the scanner. The lab had been my home for the last three years, and after breakfast with you I found myself indulging in a moment of nostalgia, because I knew now that whatever happened on the dig, I would return to Dhaka, and that meant the end of late nights in here, over-sugaring my tea and arguing about when the Tethys had finally dried up. The department was moving anyway, to a brand-new facility on the other side of the quad.

I had first discovered the whale while leafing through an article in
National Geographic
, which my parents, like so many of their generation, dutifully collected. Photographs of
Ambulocetus
, with her hind legs and long, slender mouth,
fascinated my younger self. I was naturally curious about origins and unusual digressions in history, such as a whale who walked and also swam, while all the other animals were pulling themselves out of the sea and making their homes on land. My mother had not been pleased. ‘Fish?' she kept saying, when I told her I was doing a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. My mother had been an ambulance driver and a revolutionary and the kind of woman who stood in front of picket lines. She had been in a war. And I was hiding behind very large sea creatures. But what was my alternative? Medicine, like her? I was good at science, but I did not like bodies, at least, not the ones that hovered between life and death, the scale tipped by my hand – too much responsibility, that – or English?, my love of novels started young, deepened by the lack of company, and although my parents' shelves were on the dry, political side, I read Ibsen and
The Last of the Mohicans
and
Bleak House
, and, too early,
Jane Eyre
, and there were totems in those books: with every age I recognised the clues that would lead me, Gretel-like, through life, but who wants to know and be known like that? Not me. Jane was poor, obscure, plain, and little, I did not want to know her, or the her that lurked within me. Hiding in plain sight, that was my habit, or maybe I should have been some kind of humanitarian, but the reasons against that should be obvious by now, because I would have been looking around the corner for myself, the subject and object at the same time. Bettina would have said it was possible to auto-anthropologise, but that sounded too much like ‘apologise'; I would have spent the whole time feeling sorry for all the people I would never become, trapped in guilt like my mother, and again we return to her, because she made everything possible and impossible.

So, you see, there was nothing for me but those skulls and bones and taxonomy and strata, Hutton's earth, with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end', that was what I chose: the earth with its hot centre, and its rocks that threw up history, and bones, enduring bones, skipping back to a time when I couldn't be found.

‘Ready for departure?' Ju said, holding the camera at arm's length and clicking. She smelled strongly of soap. Neither of us mentioned the night before.

‘Not nearly,' I said. ‘Though I finished packing the apartment late last night when I couldn't sleep.'

I had brought a small carry-on suitcase with me the week before, when I'd begun putting away my papers. Now I started with the filing cabinet next to my desk. There were old articles I had photocopied; course syllabi; teaching materials for Archaeology 101, which I had worked on as a tutor for three semesters, winning rave reviews from my students; essays; transcripts; the whole catalogue of my three years as a graduate student. I threw most of it away, keeping only a thin file of papers that related to the dig. Around midday, I sped up, clogging the blue recycling bin and bequeathing my model of the 50 million-year-old
Rodhocetus balochistanensis
skull to Ju. We hugged goodbye, Ju holding on for an extra few seconds by way of apology, and I promised to keep in touch. I took out my phone and dialled your number, but there was no reply. I thought I'd sit under one of the big oak trees in the Quad for a few moments before trying you again, but when I went through the double doors, dragging the suitcase behind me, there you were on the steps. You had removed your jacket and rolled up the sleeves of your shirt, and for a brief moment I imagined you making love
to your Indian girlfriend and how your forearms would have straddled her body and how she must so desperately miss those forearms, in fact, was probably thinking about them at this moment, that she and I must be having the same dream, and how much she would hate me for being closer to your forearms than she, thousands of miles away in Delhi. Poor girl. Poor Delhi.

‘Are you all right?' I asked. You passed me a pamphlet, printed on craggy recycled paper.
Clementine Alexandra Rowena Morris. Cartographer, Adventurer, Poet, Activist, Mother, Dancer, Artist
.

The day had cracked open, the sidewalks shimmering in the heat. We walked in silence, struggling with the upward slope of Mass Ave as it neared the wider streets of Somerville. You stopped to look in the window of an origami shop and we discussed paper, and folding, and cranes, then we turned into a side street, and you led me to a pale yellow house with rocking chairs on the porch and wilting daffodils in the front yard. The sort of house I had walked by many times, Obama posters in the window, the smell of laundry and Thanksgiving, modest, Protestant, indifferently grand.

The door was open. A few people stood on the porch, and, as we approached, one of them waved and called out your name. I saw a tall man with wide shoulders and a square, friendly face who shook my hand and introduced himself as your uncle, and as we passed through the front door and more guests said hello and patted you on the back, you took my hand and guided me through. People's shoes were noisy on the wooden floorboards and their voices rose up to the high, white ceiling. The house was bright and frayed and bigger than it had seemed from the outside. We entered a room at the back with tall windows and double doors that opened onto the garden beyond.
Immediately you pointed out a woman who you said was your mother. She was slim under long, loose layers of black and dark grey, with tousled hair and a pair of eyes that matched yours in warmth and colour. You told her my name and she smiled distractedly and asked me to make myself at home. I gripped your arm, and we turned towards an older woman with a narrow face. She held out a thin hand, the bones close to the surface, and you told me she was your great-aunt.