Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page B

her breast? Home , I whisper desperately, homehomehome , and suddenly, intensely, I want my room in Calcutta, where things were so much simpler. I want the high mahogany bed in which I’ve slept as long as I can remember, the comforting smell of sun-dried cotton sheets to pull around my head. I want my childhood again. But I am too far away for the spell to work, for the words to take me back, even in my head.
    Then out of the corner of my eye I catch a white movement. It is snowing. I step outside onto the balcony, drawing my breath in at the silver marvel of it, the fat flakes cool and wet against my face as in a half-forgotten movie. It is cold, so cold that I can feel the insides of my nostrils stiffening. The air—there is no smell to it at all—carves a freezing path all the way into my chest. But I don’t go back inside. The snow has covered the dirty cement pavements, the sad warped shingles of the rooftops, has softened, forgivingly, the rough noisyedges of things. I hold out my hands to it, palms down, shivering a little.
    The snow falls on them, chill, stinging all the way to the bone. But after a while the excruciating pain fades. I am thinking of hands. The pink-tipped blond hand of the air hostess as she offers me a warm towelette that smells like unknown flowers. The boys grimy one pushing back his limp hair, then tightening into a fist to throw a lump of slush. Uncle’s with its black nails, its oddly defenseless scraped knuckles, arcing through the air to knock Aunt’s head sideways. And Aunt’s hand, stroking that angry pink scar. Threading her long elegant fingers (the fingers, still, of a Bengali aristocrat’s daughter) through his graying hair to pull him to her. All these American hands that I know will keep coming back in my dreams.
Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land
Where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold?
    When I finally look down, I notice that the snow has covered my own hands so they are no longer brown but white, white, white. And now it makes sense that the beauty and the pain should be part of each other. I continue holding them out in front of me, gazing at them, until they’re completely covered. Until they do not hurt at all.

THE WORD LOVE
    Y OU PRACTICE THEM OUT LOUD FOR DAYS IN FRONT OF the bathroom mirror, the words with which you’ll tell your mother you’re living with a man. Sometimes they are words of confession and repentance. Sometimes they are angry, defiant. Sometimes they melt into a single, sighing sound. Love . You let the water run so he won’t hear you and ask what those foreign phrases you keep saying mean. You don’t want to have to explain, don’t want another argument like last time.
    “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he’d asked, throwing his books down on the table when he returned from class to find you curled into a corner of the sagging sofa you’d bought together at a Berkeley garage sale. You’d washed your face but he knew right away that you’d been crying. Around you, wads of paper crumpled tight as stones. (This was when you thought writing would be the best way.) “I hateseeing you like this.” Then he added, his tone darkening, “You’re acting like I was some kind of a criminal.”
    You’d watched the upside-down titles of his books splaying across the table. Control Systems Engineering. Boiler Operations Guide. Handbook of Shock and Vibration . Cryptic as tarot cards, they seemed to be telling you something. If only you could decipher it.
    “It isn’t you,” you’d said, gathering up the books guiltily, smoothing their covers. Holding them tight against you. “I’d have the same problem no matter who it was.”
    You tried to tell him about your mother, how she’d seen her husband’s face for the first time at her wedding. How, when he died (you were two years old then), she had taken off her jewelry and put on widow’s white and dedicated the rest of her life to the business of bringing you