A Temporary Matter
qq农场进不去Jhumpa Lahiri
纬度英文The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to t it right. The work would affect only the hous on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years.
死灵魂“It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never remble.
She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She ud to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy
to wash her face, too eager to collap into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.”
“When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his disrtation on agrarian revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”
“It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had nt the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year.
“Today then,” Shoba announced. “You have a dentist appointment next Friday, by the way.”
He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he’d forgotten to brush them that morning. It wasn’t the first time. He hadn’t left the hou at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the
more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop.
Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference in Baltimore when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due date. He hadn’t wanted to go to the conference, but she had insisted; it was important to make contacts, and he would be entering the job market next year. She told him that she had his number at the hotel, and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport, Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her body.
Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering. It was cavernous compared to their own car. Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands too big ever to rest comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back at. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist草莓奶昔的做法
appointments. He imagined himlf gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, the images of parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the first time.
A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical convention rooms and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was only a telephone number, but Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When he returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead. Shoba was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so small there was barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the hospital they hadn’t been to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta had weakened and she’d had a cesarean, though not quickly enough. The doctor explained that the things happen. He smiled in the kindest way it was possible to smile at people known only professionally. Shoba would be back on her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to indicate that she would not be able to have children in the future.
The days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He would open his eyes and e the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dresd, sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she arched for typographical errors in textbooks and
marked them, in a code she had once explained to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do the same for his disrtation, she promid, when it was ready. He envied her the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. He was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity. Until September he had been diligent if not dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper. But now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the clot which Shoba always left partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trours he would not have to choo from to teach his class that mester. After the baby died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching duties. But his advir had arranged things so that he had the spring mester to himlf. Shukumar was in his sixth year of graduate school. “That and the summer should give you a good push,” his advir had said. “You should be able to wrap things up by next September.”
But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom hou, spending as much time on parate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own hou might be rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled,
or whispered his name on tho rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before sleeping.
In the beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and Shoba would get through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three. She was strong, on her feet again. But it wasn’t a consolation. It was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar would finally pull himlf out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring out the extra bit Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the countertop.
Shukumar gathered onion skins in his hands and let them drop into the garbage pail, on top of the ribbons of fat he’d trimmed from the lamb. He ran the water in the sink, soaking the knife and the cutting board, and rubbed a lemon half along his fingertips to get rid of the garlic smell, a trick he’d learned from Shoba. It was ven-thirty. Through the window he saw the sky, like soft black pitch. Uneven banks of snow still lined the sidewalks, though it was warm enough for people to walk about without hats or gloves. Nearly three feet had fallen in the last storm, so that for a week people had to walk single file, in narrow trenches. For a week that was Shukumar’s excu for not leaving the hou. But now the trenches were widening, and water drained steadily into grates in the pavement.
“The lamb won’t be done by eight,” Shukumar said. “We may have to eat in the dark.”
“We can light candles,” Shoba suggested. She unclipped her hair, coiled neatly at her nape during the days, and pried the sneakers from her feet without untying them. “I’m going to shower before the lights go,” she said, heading for the stairca. “I’ll be down.”
Shukumar moved her satchel and her sneakers to the side of the fridge. She wasn’t this way before. She ud to put her coat on a hanger, her sneakers in the clot, and she paid bills as soon as they came. But now she treated the hou as if it were a hotel. The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her. On the enclod porch at the back of the hou, a crisp white bag still sat on the wicker chai, filled with lace she had once planned to turn into curtains.
While Shoba showered, Shukumar went into the downstairs bathroom and found a new toothbrush in its box beneath the sink. The cheap, stiff bristles hurt his gums, and he spit some blood into the basin. The spare brush was one of many stored in a metal basket. Shoba had bought them once when they were on sale, in the event that a visitor decided, at the last minute, to spend the night.
It was typical of her. She was the type to prepare for surpris, good and bad. If she found a skirt or a pur she liked she bought two. She kept the bonus from her job in a parate bank account in
her name. It hadn’t bothered him. His own mother had fallen to pieces when his father died, abandoning the hou he grew up in and moving back to Calcutta, leaving Shukumar to ttle it all. He liked that Shoba was different. It astonished him, her capacity to think ahead. When she ud to do the shopping, the pantry was always stocked with extra bottles of olive and corn oil, depending on whether they were cooking Italian or Indian. There were endless boxes of pasta in all shapes and colors, zippered sacks of basmati rice, whole sides of lambs and goats from the Muslim butchers at Haymarket, chopped up and frozen in endless plastic bags. Every other Saturday they wound through the maze of stalls Shukumar eventually knew by heart. He watched in disbelief as she bought more food, trailing behind her with canvas bags as she pushed through the crowd, arguing under the morning sun with boys too young to shave but already missing teeth, who twisted up brown paper bags of artichokes, plums, gingerroot, and yams, and dropped them on their scales, and tosd them to Shoba one by one. She didn’t mind being jostled, even when she was pregnant. She was tall, and broad-shouldered, with hips that her obstetrician assured her were made for childbearing. During the drive back home, as the car curved along the Charles, they invariably marveled at how much food they’d bought.
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It never went to waste. When friends dropped by, Shoba would throw together meals that appeared t
o have taken half a day to prepare, from things she had frozen and bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herlf with romary, and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes. Her labeled mason jars lined the shelves of the kitchen, in endless aled pyramids, enough, they’d agreed, to last for their grandchildren to taste. They’d eaten it all by now. Shukumar had been going through their supplies steadily, preparing meals for the two of them, measuring out cupfuls of rice, defrosting bags of meat day after day. He combed through her cookbooks every afternoon, following her penciled instructions to u two teaspoons of ground coriander eds instead of one, or red lentils instead of yellow. Each of the recipes was dated, telling the first time they had eaten the dish together. April 2, cauliflower with fennel. January 14, chicken with almonds and sultanas. He had no memory of eating tho meals, and yet there they were, recorded in her neat proofreader’s hand. Shukumar enjoyed cooking now. It was the one thing that made him feel productive. If it weren’t for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for her dinner.
Tonight, with no lights, they would have to eat together. For months now they’d rved themlves from the stove, and he’d taken his plate into his study, letting the meal grow cold on his desk before shoving it into his mouth without pau, while Shoba took her plate to the living room and watched game shows, or proofread files with her arnal of colored pencils at hand.
At some point in the evening she visited him. When he heard her approach he would put away his novel and begin typing ntences. She would rest her hands on his shoulders and stare with him into the blue glow of the computer screen. “Don’t work too hard,” she would say after a minute or two, and head off to bed. It was the
one time in the day she sought him out, and yet he’d come to dread it. He knew it was something she forced herlf to do. She would look around the walls of the room, which they had decorated together last summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing trumpets and drums. By the end of August there was a cherry crib under the window, a white changing table with mint-green knobs, and a rocking chair with checkered cushions. Shukumar had disasmbled it all before bringing Shoba back from the hospital, scraping off the rabbits and ducks with a spatula. For some reason the room did not haunt him the way it haunted Shoba. In January, when he stopped working at his carrel in the library, he t up his desk there deliberately, partly becau the room soothed him, and partly becau it was a place Shoba avoided.
Shukumar returned to the kitchen and began to open drawers. He tried to locate a candle among the scissors, the eggbeaters and whisks, the mortar and pestle she’d bought in a bazaar in Calcutta, and ud to pound garlic cloves and cardamom pods, back when she ud to cook. He found a flashlight,
but no batteries, and a half-empty box of birthday candles. Shoba had thrown him a surpri birthday party last May. One hundred and twenty people had crammed into the hou — all the friends and the friends of friends they now systematically avoided. Bottles of vinho verde had nested in a bed of ice in the bathtub. Shoba was in her fifth month, drinking ginger ale from a martini glass. She had made a vanilla cream cake with custard and spun sugar. All night she kept Shukumar’s long fingers linked with hers as they walked among the guests at the party.
Since September their only guest had been Shoba’s mother. She came from Arizona and stayed with them for two months after Shoba returned from the hospital. She cooked dinner every night, drove herlf to the supermarket, washed their clothes, put them away. She was a religious woman. She t up a small shrine, a framed picture of a lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the bedside table in the guest room, and prayed twice a day for healthy grandchildren in the future. She was polite to Shukumar without being friendly. She folded his sweaters with an experti she had learned from her job in a department store. She replaced a missing button on his winter coat and knit him a beige and brown scarf, prenting it to him without the least bit of ceremony, as if he had only dropped it and hadn’t noticed. She never talked to him about Shoba; once, when he mentioned the baby’s death, she looked up from her knitting, and said, “But you weren’t even there.”
It struck him as odd that there were no real candles in the hou. That Shoba hadn’t prepared for such an ordinary emergency. He looked now for something to put the birthday candles in and ttled on the soil of a potted ivy that normally sat on the windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand straight. He pushed aside the things on the kitchen table, the piles of mail, the unread library books. He remembered their first meals there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living together in the same hou at last, that they would just reach for each other foolishly, more eager to make love than to eat. He put down two embroidered place mats, a wedding gift from an uncle in Lucknow, and t out the plates and wineglass they usually saved for guests. He put the ivy in the middle, the white-edged, star-shaped leaves girded by ten little candles. He switched on the digital clock radio and tuned it to a jazz station.
“What’s all this?” Shoba said when she came downstairs. Her hair was wrapped in a thick white towel. She undid the towel and draped it over a chair, allowing her hair, damp and dark, to fall across her back. As she walked abntly toward the stove she took out a few tangles with her fingers. She wore a clean pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, an old flannel robe. Her stomach was flat again, her waist narrow before the flare of her hips, the belt of the robe tied in a floppy knot.
It was nearly eight. Shukumar put the rice on the table and the lentils from the night before into the microwave oven, punching the numbers on the timer.
“You made rogan josh,” Shoba obrved, looking through the glass lid at the bright paprika stew.
Shukumar took out a piece of lamb, pinching it quickly between his fingers so as not to scald himlf. He prodded a larger piece with a rving spoon to make sure the meat slipped easily from the bone. “It’s ready,” he announced.
The microwave had just beeped when the lights went out, and the music disappeared.
“Perfect timing,” Shoba said.
“All I could find were birthday candles.” He lit up the ivy, keeping the rest of the candles and a book of matches by his plate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, running a finger along the stem of her wineglass. “It looks lovely.”
In the dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair, ankles crosd against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table. During his arch for the candles, Shukumar had found a bottle of wine 望远镜排行榜
in a crate he had thought was empty. He clamped the bottle between his knees while he turned in the corkscrew. He worried about spilling, and so he picked up the glass and held them clo to his lap while he filled them. They rved themlves, stirring the rice with their forks, squinting as they extracted bay leaves and cloves from the stew. Every few minutes Shukumar lit a few more birthday candles and drove them into the soil of the pot.
“It’s like India,” Shoba said, watching him tend his makeshift candelabra. “Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch. I once had to attend an entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby just cried and cried. It must have been so hot.”
Their baby had never cried, Shukumar considered. Their baby would never have a rice ceremony, even though Shoba had already made the guest list, and decided on which of her three brothers she was going to ask to feed the child its first taste of solid food, at six months if it was a boy, ven if it was a girl.
“Are you hot?” he asked her. He pushed the blazing ivy pot to the other end of the table, clor to the piles of books and mail, making it even more difficult for them to e each other. He was suddenly irritated that he couldn’t go upstairs and sit in front of the computer.
“No. It’s delicious,” she said, tapping her plate with her fork. “It really is.”
醉翁之意不在酒是什么意思He refilled the wine in her glass. She thanked him.
They weren’t like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her proofreading files. Eventually he gave up trying to amu her. He learned not to mind the silences.
真西游记“I remember during power failures at my grandmother’s hou, we all had to say something,” Shoba continued. He could barely e her face, but from her tone he knew her eyes were narrowed, as if trying to focus on a distant object. It was a habit of hers.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A little poem. A joke. A fact about the world. For some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of my friends in America. I don’t know why the information was so interesting to them. The last time I saw my aunt she asked after four girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson. I barely remember them now.”
