by Esther Reichek

November 2019

Inhabiting My Name

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When I think of Esther, I picture an old lady with a bun of white spun hair and velvety pants and high heels (black but certainly not patent leather—at all costs not patent leather—too shiny, too crisp), who takes the stairs to prove she can, because she is tremendously proud and stubborn. She hates those wispy eyes of pity people make when they see her cane or her limp. She hates being old. She hates it when those youngsters from down the hall come home too late, with their pierced lips, and laughing too loudly. They always trample the carpet with their leather combat boots, swaying against the walls. She shuts the door when that happens, with a bang, not a soft whoosh. What stories she could tell, if anyone ever listened! But no one ever does. She talks only to the flowers she bought herself, and are now dying.

That is what Esther is. Old and fearless. I love my name, and can’t really think of anything else I would like to be called. But sometimes I think I don’t deserve it. Esther is the name of a queen, a leader, a star. It shines and burns, a star that is born and then dies, leaving a flaming path for the new. It is too valuable, too potent to bury in a heap, to wear, to forget. Stronger than its frivolous cousin Estelle and louder than little sister Hester, it brews and broods like a storm. It is a lullaby interrupted, with a smooth Es lulling one into a dreamy haze, before a sharp t undercuts, a small shock of electricity. Then the h, silent and poisonous, the quiet of a treacherous whisper. The er at the end is a growl, reminding people to watch out. To be aware, to think before crossing it. Esther does not easily forget, nor does it forgive.

When I was a little girl, I called myself Ettie. Maybe it was because I couldn’t pronounce my own name, or perhaps I was just intimidated. Ettie is a good name for a little girl, cheerful and diminutive. It smells like my old plastic dolls. A smooth, clean as rain scent. Wholesome. Esther doesn’t smell that way. Esther is the scent of a fire that should have been put out long ago. Its determination is almost too much, heady and smoky.

Esther is not my name, but my name is Esther. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have a pretty name, a name like the fairies that used to fill my dreams. But no one can subsist on dreams, no matter how pretty and dainty they might be. I have learned that now, I suppose. In my dreams now the fairies fly far away with their filmy flimsy wings across the sky and the sea, never coming back. Esther stays, the North Star that points me home, the fuzzy cirrus cloud that cloaks me until I too learn to fly. Esther is always there. Esther is loyal. One day I will learn how to inhabit Esther.

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Goodbye For Now

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When we first visit it is cold. Not very cold but damp and just cold enough to pierce through my thin jacket. The city smells like wind and rain. The Seattle water is blue like Nepalese sky my mother says. Blue, and the mountains jutting in just so. But it isn’t like that from the cramped airport car speeding on the slick highway. There are so many highways, long lines of cars glinting in each window dancing each night. It’s late and my eyes are crusted shut and all I hear is the white noise and the skid of tires against the rain. Zooming on the pavement, all the way to downtown, which is small but not tiny and we park the car at one of the curbs with the strange machines that aren’t meters. $40.00 for valet, but that’s a lot, even though we don’t have to pay. Too much when there’s street parking three blocks down.

Drizzle soaking through my sweater. Nine pm at the busy restaurant. Checking into the hotel, where they give a free goldfish, and replace it when it dies. The marble floors and the mosaics of leaping dolphins, the room without a smell. Waking up early and the breakfast egg sandwich from the coffee shop. The chills and the rattles of the taxi that you can’t hail…no one uses them anymore, anywhere.

And the houses, all of them that we look at, that we scrutinize and the real frost-rumpled grass, unlike season less home. It looks like winter and when I crush the lawn under my tennis shoes, it cracks like a mirror. The shed in the back with the soil-filled chest. The basement painted turquoise that looks like a room in the sharp light. Papers are signed, credit ratings are checked. Back to the goldfish hotel and more egg sandwiches in the morning. And then, goodbye for now, flying back to what will soon not be home.

Human Eyes

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I had wanted a dog, a dog and not like all of the fish, whose bodies I painstakingly fished out with a pink plastic fork from Ikea.

Months and months I spent learning about dogs. All about them. Every single member of the Bichon family. Every single member of the sight hound family (whippet, greyhound, borzoi…). The best kind of food. The best breeders. The signs of a good dog. We went to the lady with four whippets who had china whippets, too and she told us about how when they fall their heads crack, and bleed and bleed. Just like that. Her dogs were handsome and lean and slender, but really they were china all the same. The other place with the corgis that stank of corgis that ran around shaggy and wet in the mud, in the mud in the rain. I watched the videos, the Animal Planet videos, where they chuck facts about dogs at you and rate them, like that will help you. I went to websites, the dodgy kind where you can take a “Fun Quiz To Find Your Perfect Pooch” and I read the books we got ($0.99 each) from Goodwill. I read a book about Pavlovian theory and abused dogs who suffered and suffered before they too went wild and killed someone. I begged and begged and begged and begged.

Nothing happens until the day Mama gets a call from a shelter! Sitting in the car, staring out the window and I hear the “uh-huhs” and then “yes of courses” and the “how’d you do”s. A shelter dog! The books say they have issues and problems…but I’ve met plenty who are nice and of course I’ll do anything for a dog! A dog! My own dog! Anything and everything for a dog! The dog who will be mine!

And we jump into the car and go and go and go all the way to the shelter. Puppies! Everywhere! They shove little snouts up against metal barriers and bark and yelp. Two puppies chasing invisible demons. Around and around the small sun-drenched courtyard, colliding into each other, so young and so little. Crawling and clambering. The pair Mama heard about. Leaping and crashing. Almost identical, but for the eyes. The small one has meek eyes like the moon. The other has deep dark eyes, human eyes. While the moon-eyed one is content to sniff gingerly at outstretched hands and trot away, the other one, the one with the human eyes, leaps and barks and hurls herself through the air, a package of confetti blowing in the wind. This is the one. Yes, this is the one. The one with the human eyes.

NO DUMPING

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On the end of a block, one block from my house there’s a loop. Not a dead end or a fancy cul-de-sac but a loop. There’s a metal curvy railing that looks like it came from the junk yard and more railings that you can sit on. Below, a steep leafy hill. Right next to the railing is a black weathered sign that says NO DUMPING. What does that mean? No dumping of soda cans and beer bottles? No dumping of candy wrappers? No dumping of used tissues? No dumping of bodies? No dumping of hearts? I don’t know. It just sits there, attached to the ground with a thin black wire. I want to hurtle down the hill, to dump myself on the hill. It would be so bad, so very, very bad.

Sometimes when I feel wicked I perch myself on the curved railing. I feel so rebellious, so free, glaring at the street, my legs dangling an inch from the sidewalk. On most days when I am not at all daring, I just lean over the railing. In the warm autumn evenings you can see a watercolor of firefly cars gliding over a toothpick bridge. You can see the faint outline of a mountain tickling the horizon. But that is only on special nights. Usually it’s just the blinking line of cars skidding on the concrete and the sky smelling like the rain.

Once when I was angry, I slammed my front door and marched to the railing. I ducked under. Standing on the hill, I owned the world. I was on the precipice of something huge and there was an enormous shingled roof below and little dolls of people. I should have stayed and looked or at least slid down the top of the hill. I could have gotten a scrape or bruise or scar or some souvenir of my journey, to prove to myself that I had plunged downward.

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Nanu

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Waiting at the airport. Long lines of people with the crinkled faces of wet lilies. The bustling of trollies and the rattle of overstuffed luggage. And then from the stainless steel lips of the elevator, the grumbling of a wheelchair and of the old woman perched in it. A mouth hardened and downturned from years of making do. Thick wavy hair still auburn from ancient hair dye, going silver at the roots. Mama waves energetically and the chariot bearing the queen, bearing Nanu, cuts forward. We hurry over to her quickly, only time for a pinch of my cheeks and of my brother’s, a hug for her eldest daughter.

Squeeze the luggage in, Mama, I’ll hold open Nanu’s door.

Seated, she swivels her head to stare, no, to glare at me squashed on both sides from the car door and the broad shoulders of the car seat. She makes a face at my brother, her babu. He hides his face, scared by the dramatic frown lines and martyred eyes. Mama’s back and the car is starting. Zooming on the freeway, Nanu zooming into our life.

In the beginning, it’s a good life full of mid-June euphoria. I’m happy Nanu is here, happy I get to sleep in, happy that her bag turns out to full of sequined kameezes, for me. Emerald green with miniscule red beads and folded hems. Tan with indigo swirls under a thin layer of shine. Bright white with fine embroidered flowers.

And every morning, she’s already up drinking her single cup of black tea and munching on biscuits. Mid-morning, we cluster on the couch, eagerly awaiting the escapades of Kokila Modi from StarPlus and her failures to discipline her rebellious niece-in-law. Endless games of Parcheesi are played on the dry dining room table bathed in dusk. Her pieces, the ???? ????, the Nile hathi, the blue elephants, line up in a perfect square, advancing slowly forward. Sometimes she even tries to teach me how to sew, or, as she likes to put it: to machine. And the food she whips up! All perfectly buttery and perfectly oily. Everything is charmed in these last sighs of June and the first breaths of July.

Until one day, I don’t want to do what we always do. I don’t want to play Parcheesi, I don’t want to praise her like she’s four, and I don’t want to coddle her like I’m her grandmother, not the other way around.

Why can’t she grow up? Mama says her life has been hard. Her father dying when Nanu was only ten. Her great-aunt beating her. Her sister competing with her. Moving to a new land, a refugee, at fifteen. Making every single garment her three daughters ever wore by hand. Cooking three meals a day (plus tea), seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. But I don’t want to hear excuses about her. She didn’t have to sew all those clothes or ice all those cakes.

But she made your life hard, too, Mama. That’s why you ran all the way to a different country.

Be nice, be compassionate, Esther.

Mama turns away. I sulk at the buttery parathas Nanu put on my plate, I sulk through Parcheesi, and I sulk at her.

Later, it’s easy to feel sad and bad when her room is full of light and air instead of gloom and old paisley shawls. I wish she would never come back and I fear that she won’t. Wrinkles are multiplying each time I see her and her leg throbs even with the compression brace. I miss her. Now. Easy to miss her, Nanu, when she’s far, far, away.