you kill yourself. Terrible karma, that. You’ll just have to go through everything you tried to escape, in a different form. In any case, this husband whom you consider to be the bane of your existence, he came to you because of your own desire. Don’t you see it?”
Her words shot through me like voltage, charging the dead battery of my brain, bringing to life a lost memory. I was astounded because what she said was true.
IT IS THE DAY AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. VIVIENNE SITS in her mother’s Formica kitchen (lemon yellow, baby-chick yellow, color-of-hope yellow), eating the world’s best peach pie with Debbie. Debbie has just told Vivienne she has persuaded her father to let them run his bakery for six months.
“We’ll be in charge of everything!” Debbie ends, smiling all over her good-natured, freckled face. But instead of the squeal of joy Debbie is waiting for, Vivienne can only say, in a hollow tone, “That’s wonderful, Debbie. But I have some news, too.”
“Don’t tell me-” Debbie starts. “You’re getting-” Then something in Vivienne’s expression silences her. Vivienne holds out her left hand, which she has been hiding in her lap until now. On her finger is a ring.
“Lance proposed, and I said yes. He’s got a job offer in Tulsa. He wants us to get married next month, before he moves.” She talks fast to keep Debbie from saying the things she doesn’t want to hear. Debbie doesn’t think Lance is right for her-too intense, too serious, his black eyes boring into whomever he looks at. “He wants too much,” she told Vivienne once.
Debbie also thinks Vivienne hasn’t known Lance long enough. (He started working for Pete Albright, who owns a secondhand car dealership, two months ago. A week after he moved to town, he came into the bakery where Vivienne and Debbie work after school to buy pumpernickel bread. He ended up asking Vivienne out.) But that’s exactly what Vivienne finds exciting about Lance: he doesn’t talk about the usual boring things-his family or where he grew up. That’s all behind him and of no importance, he tells her. Only the future matters, and about that he has a lot to say. The high-powered jobs he’s determined to get, for instance, or the mansion he plans to buy for his wife.
And that’s just fine with Vivienne, thank you, because she has lived in the same house since she was born: three bedrooms, two baths, aluminum siding, dripping kitchen faucet, dark, practical carpets that stubbornly hoard odors. She has gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten. Her parents’ friends, whom they meet for church picnics or bridge, have known her since she was a tantrum-throwing toddler. She’s ready to take a little risk, to follow the yellow brick road into romance and a house on a hill with all-white carpeting. (Tulsa, they’ve both decided, is only a stepping-stone.) She’s ready to want too much, along with Lance.
So now she speaks to Debbie about decorating their beautiful new home, baking her best desserts for Lance, holidaying in exotic destinations, eating at restaurants where the menu is in French and the wineglasses are crystal. And having babies, lots of babies. Already she’s imagining the birthday cakes she’ll create, confections extravagant as Disneyland that will be the talk of the neighborhood.
“You’ll do fine without me,” she ends, trying not to look at Debbie’s fallen face.
(Debbie will, indeed, do fine. She’ll get one of her other friends to join her, and Debbie’s Delights will become a hit in their hometown. But Vivienne? How will Vivienne do? In forty years, when she looks into the ledger of her life, at the profit and loss columns, what will she see?)
“I want you to be the maid of honor,” Vivienne says. “Will you? Please please?”
And because ultimately a girl can’t resist the tinsel lure of weddings, the happily-ever-after she’s been conditioned into dreaming of since her first memory, Debbie examines with some envy the minuscule diamond in Vivienne’s ring, and agrees.
THE MEMORY SEEMED TO SPOOL FOREVER, BUT IT MUST HAVE taken only a moment. When I came out of it, the nurse was holding my hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Feeling your palm,” she said. “That gives me a sense of what’s waiting for you.”
The machine light tinged her hair green, but her features were in shadow. I felt heat radiating from her fingertips.
“Is it like palmistry?”
“Not exactly. It’s possible for you to break out, if you really want to. But changing your karma will not be easy. You’ll have to be alert and intelligent at every step.”
Much as I wanted to break out, I wasn’t sure I possessed these prerequisites. Karma-changing sounded complicated, and every part of me-body and nerves and heart-felt overwhelmingly stupid.
Still, because I liked the sound of her voice, I asked, “What do I need to do?”
“Stop blaming your husband,” she said. “And yourself. Accept. Forgive. A path will open.”
I didn’t like the sound of this advice. Maybe Mr. Pritchett had sent her to talk to me. Maybe she wasn’t even a real nurse.
“Your husband didn’t send me,” she said, startling me. “I came because you need help, and I need to help you. Let me tell you something that happened to me. Some years back, I had a supervisor I really disliked. She was a harsh woman, always finding fault. I was positive that she hated me. I should have ignored her. Or quit. But I obsessed over it until I did some bad things-to her and then to me.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have spent so much energy hating her. I should have focused on the little things I loved.”
I scowled in the dark. Hadn’t I been focusing on little things all this time? And hadn’t the biggest thing then slipped away?
“What I want is to go somewhere I’ve never been,” I said, “like you, to start a new life.”
“You don’t want to be like me,” she said.
I was only half listening. “I’m not sure where to go,” I said. “Can you tell which would be the best place for me?”
“I don’t think going anywhere will help.”
“Why not?” I asked angrily.
“You’ll still be carrying yourself. Even into another lifetime, you’ll carry your old, tortured self.” Was it my imagination, or did her fingertips turn chilly as she spoke? “Remain where you are and work on your heart. Once you’re dead, it’s much more difficult.”
Was this a joke? She seemed serious. “What I’m telling you is, don’t try to kill yourself again. I have to go now. Remember, if you change inside, outer change will follow.” At the door she waved good-bye. I tried to see her face, but the light from the passage shone in my eyes.
A few minutes later, another nurse came in. This one was square and bulky and carried a clipboard. She turned on the night-light, checked my vitals, and forced me to take a pill. When I grumbled about her disturbing my sleep by coming so soon after the first nurse, she pursed her lips and wrote something on her clipboard. I asked for a damp towel to wipe my face, and while she went to fetch it, I glanced at the board. In the comments section at the bottom, she had written
WHEN I RETURNED HOME, I TRIED TO RISE ABOVE LETHARGY and follow the first nurse’s advice. (Had she actually been a nurse? Was she even a real person?) But her words had grown indistinct, a landscape seen through smoke. The smoke seeped inside me. Was it the result of the numbing medications the psychiatrist insisted I take, or was it a deeper malaise? She had said something about enjoying my days, and I tried. The fact that I was alive was a miracle. But the seeping smoke had filled my cavities. It was hard to feel thankful with Mr. Pritchett hovering, bags of worry under his eyes. And harder still to admit that it was I (a foolish I, a too-young- to-know-better I, but I nevertheless) who had brought calamity upon myself by choosing to marry, against the advice of friends and family, a man I had not understood. One thing had changed: I no longer wanted to commit suicide. But secretly, I increased the dosage of my medication. The numbness brought some relief. Still, I was carrying my old unhappy self inside, I didn’t know how to get away from it, and I felt guiltier. So when Mr. Pritchett showed me the picture of the Indian palace, those curtains delicate as spiderwebs blowing in a foreign breeze, and asked if I wanted to go there, I was struck dumb with joy. It was as though the universe had opened a door.
Now that I’m probably not going anyplace, I, like Mr. Mangalam, have a confession to make. This is why I was so excited about going to India: Once I got there, I planned to leave Mr. Pritchett. I planned to dive into that roiling
