A Way With Words - Chapter 13
Thanksgiving, 1987
"When we are talking about our sisters and brothers today, I didn't tell you that I have two sisters not just one.... Her name is Mayuri. She's not my real sister and the story is complicated, that's why I don't mention her in front of Ravi and Ragu. She was left in front of our door when she was a baby and I was eleven. Now she is fifteen. When she find this baby, my mother is thinking maybe her mother is one of the plantation workers. She ask my father check to see if any worker maybe had a baby, but nothing. So my parents decide to keep her. They name her Mayuri but they tell people that she is the baby of a cousin in Singapore who died... Because my family is high caste and if she is abandoned then she must be low caste and if people know that it can make problems. Anyway, my mother take her… took her to the temple to be blessed but she doesn’t…didn’t tell the swami the baby is not hers. But first thing he says is, Where did you find this baby? She is surprised and she tells him the baby is left by our door. He says, this baby and your husband were brother and sister in another life. Their parents died when they were small children. He tried to take care of her but she died too. Then she waited a long, long time to be reincarnated so that she can come to him in his next life when he is rich and can take care of her… No, I think he’s just making up a little story to tie her to us. But they never tell Mayuri she is not their daughter. I tell them this is a mistake because someday she will find out. Anyway Mayuri wrote me a letter that I got today. She is becoming a friend now with a girl I knew in Sri Lanka. This is bad news because this girl gave me big problems. I tell you about that another time."
"Dad's going to expect you to help him with that jigsaw puzzle, you know."
"You mean your parents still haven't finished that thing? It's been two years!"
"Mom gave up after a couple months but he still holes up in his study with it at night. He drinks whiskey while he does it and listens to music. I think you'd better apologize to my mother because she swears it's going to end up wrecking their marriage."
The train to Philadelphia was packed; Ennis was glad he'd bought their tickets earlier in the month, otherwise they would've had to drive down for Thanksgiving, which would be worse. It was his second visit to Jay's parents' house. The first time had been in 1985, also for Thanksgiving. They hadn't moved in together yet, he and Jay, but things had changed between them by then and it was just a matter of her finding a new job off the Cape.
That visit to her parents had been a revelation to him. A month later, just before he left for Kansas, Ennis had given Jay a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle to take down as his Christmas gift to them. He hadn't explained his own history with it.
After calling Jay’s parents from the Philadelphia Amtrak station to let them know they’d arrived, they took a commuter train to the western suburbs. Both of Jay’s parents worked at nearby Haverford College, where her father taught literature and her mother was a student counselor.
Rachel Fell was standing inside the door watching for them as they walked down the block. When they turned onto the path, she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. Her welcoming smile reached her eyes, which were a clear, piercing blue, lighter than her daughter's. She had changed in one way since Ennis had first met her two years before. Her straight hair still stopped at her shoulders but it was no longer black; there was so much gray in it that Ennis realized she must have been dying it before. Her monotone wardrobe had lightened along with her hair. Her clothes were still loose and layered, but instead of soot and charcoal they were the color of ash and smoke and sand. The varying shades, textures and lengths and her striking jet and silver jewelry at her ears and neck gave the illusion of flamboyance. To Ennis she resembled the outside of an oyster shell.
They went upstairs to leave their bags in her mother's painting studio, which had a couch that folded out into a double bed. Jay's old bedroom was above them, under the eaves. She'd shown it to him two years before. Jay hadn't lived at home since she'd left for college, though she visited, and the bedroom had seemed stuck in time, with its shag rug and a poster of Luke Skywalker.
But a few months after that first Thanksgiving visit, shortly before she moved back to Boston from the Cape, Jay had visited her parents and reported to Ennis that her mother had redecorated her bedroom, which she didn't appreciate. It was now a guest room, supposedly.
When Ennis came out of the upstairs bathroom, Jay had gone down to the kitchen where he could hear her talking to her mother. The door to the attic stairs next to the bathroom was ajar. He hesitated, curious to see what the room looked like now. He listened again, reached inside the door and flipped the light switch, then slipped up the stairs.
The attic had no dividing walls; Jay had occupied all of it but now two-thirds of it was filled with cartons and old furniture. The carpet had been pulled up. The front third, with the window that looked down onto the street, was arranged as a new bedroom, though with nothing separating it from the storage area but the shine of the floorboards. It looked like a stage set. It also looked completely different from the rest of the house.
At first glance the bedroom seemed very plain, with a bare, stained and waxed dark wood floor, simple, dark wooden furniture, lamp stands made of turned wood, an old-fashioned writing table with a straight-backed chair. But every object in the room invited you to run your hand over it. The single bed's headboard had a mountain landscape carved into it; the wood of the round lamp on the pine nightstand was pitted where it wasn't smooth and the lampshade was made of thick, fibrous paper that had dried flowers and leaves pressed into it. In the small wooden bookcase were collections of poems and short stories but no novels. The window had no curtains.
Covering the bed was a quilt of no particular beauty, made of random patches of different fabrics. This surprised Ennis because Jay had mentioned the quilt and that her mother had made it herself. He'd expected something more sophisticated. He lifted a corner of it and saw the mattress was otherwise bare.
It seemed to Ennis as though the room had been intended for a visitor who would not linger, just the time to read a few poems. He was suddenly overcome with the desire to hold Jay and rub her neck and shoulders the way she liked.
Downstairs, Jay's father had arrived home and she was enveloped in his bear hug. His wireframe glasses were askew and his damp, salt and pepper hair stuck out from his head. He was wearing a fluorescent vest over his rain jacket and the bicycle lamp strapped to his left leg was still switched on. When Mr. Fell saw Ennis he didn't let go of his daughter but smiled and stretched out one arm to shake his hand.
They ate a simple supper and caught up. Afterwards, Jay and her mother stayed in the kitchen to bake pies for Thanksgiving. A few of Mr. Fell's students who were from distant states would be joining them for the meal. Mrs. Fell shooed Ennis out, telling him to go help with that damn puzzle.
Ennis knew where to find Jason Fell. He stood in the doorway of the study and watched Jay's father sitting behind a table in the middle of the room, facing the doorway, a tumbler of amber liquid near his elbow. He was peering over his spectacles at something small pinched between his right thumb and index finger, holding it up to the yellow light that spilled down on him from the floor lamp next to his chair. In his left hand he held the jigsaw puzzle box lid; he looked from the puzzle piece, which he turned this way and that, to the lid and back again. The office reminded Ennis of the one he'd sat in at the University of Kansas years before, with books crowding the shelves and papers piled on the desk and chairs.
The puzzle of a large, complex Jackson Pollock splatter painting that looked to be about eighty percent done took up over half the table. Lashings of scarlet and yellow against splashes and dribbles of black, gray, and beige reminded Ennis of the last glowing embers and sputtering flames in the ashes of a campfire. Music was playing quite loudly on the stereo, not quite rock and not quite jazz, with lyrics as impenetrable as the painting.
Up on the hill
People never stare
They just don't care
Chinese music under banyan trees
Here at the dude ranch above the sea
Mr. Fell suddenly pressed the tip of his pinkie finger on a spot on the lid and half rose from his seat, peering closely at the puzzle. He lay the piece on a spot, pushed it into place and tapped it once, giving a little grunt of satisfaction, then sat back in his chair.
"For the past two years, Ennis,” Mr. Fell said without looking up, “I've been wondering if you hate us." He took a sip from the glass as he reached to the side to turn down the volume on the amplifier.
"Hate you?"
Jay's father just waved his hand over the puzzle.
"Oh. Well, I didn't think it would take you so long," Ennis mumbled.
"I hope you're here to help whip this thing into shape."
"Yup."
"A bit of this?" Mr. Fell said, holding up his glass. He reached down and lifted from the floor a bottle of whiskey with an unpronounceable name.
"Sure."
Ennis removed some books from a nearby chair and pulled it to the opposite side of the table, then sat down and accepted the glass. He took a sip and coughed. It had a funny taste. He'd only ever drunk Jack Daniels and this stuff was nothing like it.
Next to the table was a smaller folding table on top of which were strewn the pieces yet to be fitted.
"There are two methods to this," Jason Fell explained. "You can choose a piece with a distinct color or shape in it and look for it on the cover. But the cover image is one third the size so a yellow splodge like this is going to be minuscule. You have to turn the piece in all directions, like this, and think to yourself: Black shape like Lake Erie, next to yellow dab with fine red line bisecting."
Ennis smiled because that had been his first technique as well. The problem with this puzzle was the image contained nothing recognizable, no objects, no sky to work on nor meadow with flowers. No big solid shapes.
"Now, these loose pieces in the middle are positioned where they should go but the ones that connect to them are yet to be found," Mr Fell continued. "You can look for pieces with color patterns that might match up with them. What are you doing?"
Ennis had grabbed a fistful of pieces and was dividing them into little piles.
"Well, when you get to this point, it helps to sort them by the number of heads they have. Makes it easier to find pieces to fill the isolated holes. You should get some plastic containers to keep them in."
Mr. Fell sat up straight and blinked at him. "You've done this puzzle before?"
"Yeah."
"How long did it take you?"
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks? What did you do, work on it day and night?"
"Kinda."
Ennis recalled with a heavy heart that Easter break of his last year at BU. While Joe was away on his internship he'd stayed in his bedroom with this damned thing and unplugged the phone.
He gestured at the stereo. "Who is this?"
You go back, Jack, do it again
Wheels turnin' round and round
You go back, Jack, do it again
"Steely Dan."
"I think I've heard of him."
"Them."
"Oh. Well, that was before my time."
"Don't make me feel ancient, Ennis. It was only the mid seventies. What band did you listen to while you were obsessed with this puzzle?"
How does he know? "The Smiths."
"The boy with the thorn in his side, behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire for lo-ove..."
Now it was Ennis' turn to blink.
"I've been teaching college students for decades, Ennis, and I'm not deaf. What did you do when you finished it?"
He and Joe had carried the table with the puzzle on it a mile down Commonwealth Avenue.
"I turned it in to my art history professor. I got an A for it, eventually."
Jason didn't respond. He sat back in his chair and took a sip of his whiskey, studying Ennis, who looked away and pretended to be searching the lid for a certain red streak. When the silence stretched out, he looked up again and saw that Mr. Fell was contemplating his glass, smirking.
"I'm thinking I should assign my students to design crossword puzzles based on Ulysses," he said.
"You'd have to do them all, though."
Mr. Fell laughed. “There’s that!”
"I met Jay that day," Ennis said suddenly. "I mean, Robin."
"So completing it coincided with something good, then."
"Well, the name of the painting is Convergence."
Mr. Fell poured another finger of whiskey into Ennis’ glass and then into his own.
"So does it follow that something good will happen when I finish it?"
"Maybe."
"Robin tells me you're helping refugees these days."
The abrupt change of subject startled him.
"Sort of." He explained briefly about the detention center.
"I understand that one of them is a real talker."
Ennis felt a little hitch in his chest at this reference to Kaj. He concentrated on finding a home for the red streak. He realized he didn't know how often Jay talked to her parents. "Yeah, he calls all the time because he's bored."
"So what's this magazine you work for, East West? Is it about relations between Westerners and Asians?"
Ennis felt his pulse quicken. The line of questioning was heading in an unexpected direction. He picked up his glass, tempted to gulp, and forced himself to sip.
"No... it's, well... it was started by this... this institute that teaches something called macrobiotics. Something to do with eating yin and yang, like that. Then they sold it and now it's about, you know, natural health and all that."
"And what do you do?"
Sip. Deep breath. "I... write headlines and... manage the distribution of it. Of the issues."
"Distribution manager, then."
"Right."
Mr. Fell picked up a puzzle piece and studied the lid. Ennis returned to sorting the pieces into little piles.
Who wrote that tired sea song
Set on this peaceful shore?
You think you've heard this one before
"Robin's ambitious. She wants to be a great photographer," Mr. Fell said after a minute.
"I know."
"We were happy when she got hired by the Herald."
"It's not the Globe, though."
"I suppose it was convenient to move in with you."
The dips and swells of this conversation were making him queasy.
"She didn't move in. We found a place together."
"Don't get too comfortable."
What? Ennis began to feel he was drifting in a fog. The whiskey must be getting to him.
"Robin was pretty broken up about that friend of hers who died. Terrible."
Another lurch to starboard.
"Mmm."
"Did you know him?"
"I... I met him once or twice."
"He just withdrew from everyone, didn't he, when he knew."
"That's what I-"
"You went with her to the hospital to see him, she said. You were a great support to her."
Ennis simply nodded. Jason wasn't looking at him though, his eyes on the box cover.
"Are you good together? You’re not just playing it safe?"
What the fuck is he going on about? "Sure." He put his trembling hands in his lap.
She serves the smooth retsina
She keeps me safe and warm
It's just the calm before the storm
"Think you can keep up with her? I mean, she's bound to leave Boston. "
"I haven't thought about it."
"Well you should. You should think about why you're with her."
Well the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast
Can it be that I have found my home at last
Home at last?
Ennis decided to grab the helm. "Why did you change Robin's bedroom? It’s completely different now and it doesn't match the rest of the house."
Mr. Fell was silent for a full minute while he searched the puzzle lid.
"That was Rachel," he said finally. "One of her notions. She had a dream a few months after you came here for the first time, when you told me your nickname for our daughter. Rachel dreamed that Robin's room looked like that." He snapped a puzzle piece into place. Then he looked straight at Ennis.
"Robin was a twin, you know. They were born prematurely and her brother didn't survive."
Ennis sat up, suddenly stone cold sober. She'd never mentioned it. "Does she know that?"
"Oh she knows,” Mr. Fell said, clunking his glass down heavily on the corner of the puzzle and fixing him with a hard stare. “What she doesn't know is what we'd planned to name him."
Chapter 13b >>