Nice Big American Baby

I said, “You should be careful. I’ve heard, people like her, the first time they go to an American supermarket, they have seizures or pass out.”

“Why?” he said.

“They just can’t take it,” I said. “They’re not used to it. The … the abundance or something. Overstimulation.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. Nadia stood at the other end of the room, before a window, so that sunlight set her hair afire and shone right through her pink translucent ears. Her ankles were crossed, her arms folded, a cigarette hung from her fingers. The skin on her face, her arms, was so milky-white her ears didn’t seem to belong to her. Around her people moved in shadows.

“Do you know,” he said, “she lets me hold her hand. In public? Just walking down the street? All the time.”

He was beginning to talk like her, question marks in the wrong places.

“I love her,” he said, in a stupid way. He was talking like one of his moony students. There was something black floating in his drink, next to the ice cube, and he didn’t even notice.

“How do you hold hands?” I said. “Like this?”

“Well … no,” he said. “Usually.… I take her by the wrist. Or grab her thumb. But she doesn’t pull away. She lets me. She likes it.”

“Like this?” I said. “Or like this?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Her wrist is so little, my fingers go right around … like this, see, only hers are even smaller. I can hold them both in one hand.”

His palm was the same, still warm and damp, fingers long and blunt-tipped, hair on the backs. The hair almost hid the new wedding ring. There were bulgy things in the breast pockets of his shirt. The toe of my shoe was almost touching the toe of his. I wondered if she would look up and see us holding hands like this.

But she didn’t. She was absorbed in her cigarette, her halo of sunlight.

Joel was a high school teacher. He loved kids. People always said that about him, first thing: “He loves kids. Such a nice guy” We had always thought it was a wonderful thing about him; it meant he was caring, he was generous, he was nurturing, he was fun. He would be a terrific father. He taught chemistry; he coached the soccer team. He had won the Teacher of the Year plaque three different times. Kids came to him in tears, they trusted him that much, and he’d let them cry through a box of Kleenex and keep his mouth shut and the classroom door open, and then hand them over to the proper counselor or police officer or health-care worker. There had never been a bit of trouble. Not with the girls, not with anyone.He had perfected the art of the friendly distance, the arm’s-length intimacy. We had always known his girlfriend or wife would never have reason to worry about cheerleaders or teen temptresses. Joel was better than that.

At least, we had never suspected anything of him until he brought home this child bride, who must have weighed half of what he did, who sometimes wore her hair in two long braids. Then we had to wonder. Before, we liked to hear him talk about his students. Now there was something off about it, a sour note. “My kids,” he would say. “I love those kids. Do you know what they did? Stephanie Riser and Ashley Mink? Listen.…”And we would listen, but there was something tainting it now, a thin black thread.

“Don’t you think she’s a little too young?” we said.

“Nadia? No! She’s thirty-three.”

“No!” we said.

‘Yes,” he said, looking pleased.

“She must be lying,” we said. “She can’t be.”

“It’s right on her papers,” he said.

“As if that proves anything,” we said. But we said it nicely.

They bought a house together. What does that mean? He bought the house. It was his money. She contributed nothing. What did she do with herself all day? “She makes me happy,” Joel said. Her?

“She’s trained as a doctor,” he said. “She has to pass a test before she can practice here.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“It’s a source of great frustration. She has to relearn things she studied years ago, chemistry, anatomy, in a new language. You should see the size of these books.”

“Are you going to have children?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

But there was no sign of them. So we kept asking.

“Of course,” he said.

“Later.

“Maybe.

“I don’t know.”

Of course we were really asking something else. We wondered if she had her own bedroom in the new house. But of course we couldn’t ask.

“He seems frustrated,” we told one another. “Yes, definitely. Bottled up.”

One of our old friends was chosen to be on a televised game show. We had a party to watch her and invited Joel and Nadia. We screamed when we saw her, taking her place among flashing lights and boldly punching her buzzer. But by the third question, a sweaty sheen had broken out above her upper lip. She faltered, mumbled, and in seconds she had disappeared forever. It was hard to work up any kind of real feeling; it was just dots on a screen. Only a game.

Joel seemed distracted. Nadia stared at the wall and then got up to use the bathroom.

“You have no idea what she’s been through,” Joel said, apropos of nothing. “You have no idea.”

Which is unfair; we have all known suffering, we have all known loss. Certainly I have, and Joel should have known that better than anyone.

The sun going behind clouds, trees creaking in the wind. The house Joel bought was all windows, making it easier for the weather to force its mood upon them. That’s how I explain the gloom. It was a sunless winter. She decorated the house herself, everything backward: hung rugs on the walls, stood dishes on their rims on the shelves, set table lamps on the floor, left the windows bare but hung curtains round the beds. She used a lot of red for someone so lacking in color.

Whenever we visited now she’d be listening to her own music. She’d found a station, way at one end of the AM dial, that played her type of thing. She’d play it for us if we asked her, to be polite. Horns and bells, nasal voices, songs like sobbing. More often, she’d listen to it on the headphones he’d given her, and he’d talk to us. It was easier this way. She sat among us with a blissful look on her face, and we could talk about her without worrying that she’d hear us.

We saw her country on the news sometimes. Shaky camera, people running. Trucks. Shouting. Crowds of people pulling at one another. Are they using black-and-white film, or is everything gray there? She refused to watch.

“Is she afraid she’ll see someone she knows? Does she want to block it all out? Does she still have family back there?”

“I don’t know,” Joel would say. We could no longer tell when he was lying.

“She doesn’t talk about her family?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s angry at them. Maybe they sold her to the mail-order people and took the money.”

“Maybe,” he said, in the way that meant he was not listening at all.

We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of … someone. By … someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia’s chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting, Nadia standing among shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands.

Then again, maybe we’ve seen too many movies. “How do we know her family got the money?” I said. “Maybe she came here to get rich. Maybe she’s the gold digger. Maybe she thought high school teachers make a lot of money.”