This is Salvaged E-Book

Vauhini Vara

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 271

Beschreibung

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbour or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbour, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY VAUHINI VARA

The Immortal King Rao

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Vauhini Vara, 2023

The moral right of Vauhini Vara to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

The events, characters and incidents depicted in this novel are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual incidents, is purely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 062 3

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 063 0

Grove Press UK

Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For my sister,Krishna Dweepa Vara

Introduction

—in the end they’d made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

—Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate”

CONTENTS

The Irates

I, Buffalo

This Is Salvaged

You Are Not Alone

Unknown Unknowns

The Hormone Hypothesis

Puppet Master Made the Puppets

The Eighteen Girls

What Next

Sibyls

Acknowledgements

The Irates

FOR A MONTH afterward, our whole house smelled foul. There was no telling what kind of food scraps were gathering mold in the kitchen trash. What kind of unflushable sap festered in the toilet bowl. No one had the will to contend with it. One morning the smell got too disgusting to tolerate. I got in the shower and washed my hair and scrubbed my skin. I put on a T-shirt and cut-offs. I walked out of the house and up the hill and down the path to my best friend’s house. I had barely left home since my brother’s funeral. It was a hot, clear summer afternoon. When I knocked, Lydia opened the door within seconds, as if she’d been lying in wait behind it. My brother was dead. We looked at each other. Lydia’s eyes went wet with need—she wanted to hug, I could tell. She wanted to grieve together, I could smell it on her, this desperation. She said my name—“Swati,” she said.

“You look like you’re crying,” I said.

“That’s normal, I’m sad,” she said, pulling back.

“Let’s go to Capitol Hill,” I said. “I need egg rolls.”

We walked down her street toward the main road where the bus stopped. The air was fragrant. Blooming seemed too formal a word for what the flowers were doing on their stems. They were doing something obscene: spurting; spilling. Sweat oozed from my skin’s folds: my armpits; the backs of my knees; my crotch. I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul. Lydia didn’t seem to notice. At the bus stop, we stood under the shelter and waited. The bus came rolling down the street toward us, almost at our stop. I imagined stepping in front of it.

“People don’t talk about labial sweat,” I said.

“That’s true,” Lydia said. “Do you want to talk about it?” Jesus Christ—she was being so agreeable.

“No,” I said. The bus wheezed to a stop in front of us. We got on and rode in silence, down the street, across the bridge, and up Capitol Hill, until we arrived at the corner where Five Happiness stood.

FIVE HAPPINESS was our favorite place—a Chinese restaurant with a yellow-and-red neon sign. We liked it because they gave out egg roll punch cards. Once you bought twenty egg rolls, you could get one for free. They weren’t expensive—fifty cents each. It was possible to save up for even better rewards—fifty punches got you a carton of fried rice, and one hundred was worth kung pao chicken—but we never could bring ourselves to wait. Once, between the two of us, we filled a whole punch card in one go, and then split the prize egg roll.

It was always the same girl behind the counter selling egg rolls—girl or woman, we couldn’t tell. We called her Little Happiness. She was short and plain and unsmiling, with long, oily, black hair that she wore parted in the center and pushed behind big cartilaginoid ears. Her father wore a name tag that said big happiness, but she didn’t have one—hence the nickname. Every time we showed up, she acted as if she didn’t remember us. Maybe she didn’t. This time, when we walked in, I felt conspicuous, having been gone so long. But she acted the same as usual—raised her eyebrows coolly, didn’t ask what we wanted.

“How many should we get?” I said to Lydia.

“Six—or eight—or what do you think?” she said.

“We’ll do ten,” I told Little Happiness. I took a fresh punch card from the stack on the counter and watched her punch holes in it.

We sat down at a booth, set our paper plate between us, dug in. The place was empty except for a couple of random people. One was a dilapidated-looking man we’d seen there many times before. He had a blotchy face, long white-blond hair that went down past his shoulders, and a rotating set of three or four Stone Temple Pilots concert T-shirts that he wore one after another. We had speculated about him—whether he was homeless, or worked there, or what. He mostly just seemed to sit around and eat. He could be twenty-five or forty-five—no less than twenty-five, though. He was the kind of man you felt like you should avoid.

At another table, a mother ate with one hand while cradling a child with the other arm and nursing it. You couldn’t see the child’s face, but you could see the mother’s entire breast, including a bit of her nipple. The man in the Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt kept stealing glances at it.

My mom had recently framed a photograph of herself nursing my brother. I told her that her nipple was visible, and she said, no, it was only her areola. “That’s part of the nipple,” I said. I told her my brother would have agreed. But my mom thought my brother would have found it beautiful. One problem was that no one could check with Karthik. Another problem was that it depended on which version of my brother you asked. A living person is large, multitudinous. When a person is no longer living, those left behind are not up to the task of re-creating them; it can’t be done. My brother hadn’t been a sentimentalist. Our dad used to call him the Public Intellectual. He read a lot and liked to argue politics at the dinner table. We thought he’d be President. When the World Trade Organization met in Seattle, he organized a group of high-schoolers to skip class and march in protest of globalization.

He was so beloved and so respected that our principal not only gave her blessing but called the editor of the town newspaper, a friend of hers, and suggested that she write it up. This was when my brother was in remission. Everyone was so joyful then, so proud, as if the remission had been another one of his victories—he had been a swimmer, a soccer player, president of the Key Club, valedictorian-to-be. Even while in treatment, he’d gotten straight As. His teachers would come to the hospital with a pile of papers; they’d stay in the room while he took the exams, they’d look away only when he paused to vomit. Now he was a local hero.

He tried to explain globalization to me, he tried to get me to care. Throughout history—he said—the powerful had conspired to become even more powerful, and now it was growing more out of control than ever. He pointed at my jeans, from the Gap, my thick oversized sweater, from Abercrombie & Fitch—“all of this,” he said, indicating my outfit, but then sweeping his hands out as if referring to everything, all material existence, “is part of that.” It relied on people without power being forced to work nonstop under dangerous, inhumane circumstances; it relied on building factories in their villages that pollute their air, their water. How this all mattered to him was a mystery to me—how it all mattered to him given what he’d gone through. The newspaper printed a photo of the protest on the front page: my brother’s head bald; his mouth shaped in an O; the top two buttons of his flannel open so you could see his collarbone jutting. A new millennium was coming. He would make it through.

Later, though, it returned—his cancer. It crept into the new millennium along with us. Toward the end, Karthik sat on the couch and held forth for everyone who came over to see him. The meaning of life was to find your own meaning. Viktor Frankl. He could no longer swim laps, kick a ball around. The cancer and all the rounds of treatment had shrunk him; he had never been in remission long enough to get his muscle back. Even his nose had been reshaped into a delicate nub. He looked like a stranger. This stranger sat on the couch like a little mouse, and everyone gathered around, rapt. Now he was treated as something even more than a hero—as a prophet. He was studying religion: the Bhagavad Gita; the ancient Buddhist sutras; the Old and New Testaments. Everyone had to find their own meaning, within their own constraints. His meaning was to love us and be loved by us. This satisfied him. He was at peace.

It was that version of my brother who might have found our mom’s nipple beautiful.

I wanted to tell Lydia about my mom’s nipple—I wanted to see what I’d need to do to get her to stop being so agreeable, so careful. But when I turned to her, I could see she was distracted. She was pretending to focus on her food but was watching the man in the Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt as he watched the nursing woman. You couldn’t see his eyes clearly because he was wearing sunglasses. He looked like an uglier version of Kurt Cobain. Lydia seemed frightened.

“What?” I said.

“Let’s go, man,” she said.

“I’m still eating,” I said.

“I feel weird,” she said.

I gestured at the man. “What, because of him?” I said. I said it loudly, on purpose. He looked over and smiled. He took out a tube of ChapStick, which he smeared on his cracked lips. He held it out to me and then Lydia, with an awful smile, and when neither of us took it, he retracted it and put it in his pocket. “I think we’re too old to be pedophiled,” I said, smiling in his direction. We were not beautiful—she with her acne; me with my eczema— but neither was he.

The man took off his sunglasses and hung them on his T-shirt. There was nothing special about his eyes. They were brownish. “How old?” he said.

“Eighteen,” I said. We had never spoken to him before.

Lydia took some hand sanitizer out of her backpack. We had discovered hand sanitizer at the hospital, when my brother was in treatment. They said we should all use it to avoid making him sick while his immune system was suppressed. Now Lydia couldn’t get out of the habit. She squeezed it onto one of her own hands, then onto mine. She seemed to have become brittle in our time apart, as if her grief had sucked all the juice out of her. We had been best friends through my brother’s illness. She had slept over at the hospital with me, many nights. My brother had protected her, when we arrived in high school for freshman year, just as he’d protected me. He had found us at lunch, sometimes, and peeled us off from our table to take us to the snack counter and buy us hot, soft Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. He had handed us both our first beers and taught us how to drink them, to be chill, not too much at once. When his audiences gathered—the teachers who would come to visit, the friends of our parents, the old babysitters who had found out about his illness and turned up to say their goodbyes—we would sit and listen. But he also helped us with our geometry homework, our physics, our French. We were only fourteen.

“Rub,” Lydia said.

The man stood. “It’s a mistake to use that,” he said, coming toward our table. He had a scratchy voice, as if he had something stuck in his throat. When he came over, he took the hand sanitizer from Lydia’s hands. He had dirt under his fingernails. He sat in the booth next to Lydia, across from me. He was so close he could lean forward, flick out his tongue, and lick my nose. “It’ll only make you and everyone else in the world sicker,” he said. His breath smelled like milk. “That’s a fact. That’s God’s truth. You can look it up on the internet.”

“The internet,” I said. “That bastion of accurate information.”

“Well, it’s a fact,” he repeated.

Lydia shifted on her seat, and her thighs made a smacking sound.

“That’s not my fact, baby-girl,” he said, turning to her. “That’s the universe talking. That’s God’s fact.” He looked from her to me and back to her again, as if he were trying to figure us out. “You need work?” he said.

His name was Orlando Rossi, and he had been searching for a couple of girls like us. He had been searching all over the place, and now here we were, right in front of him. Fate, he said. He was a businessman. The headquarters of Happiness Services, the business he ran, sat right above this restaurant. He said the fat man who owned the place—Big Happiness—was his girlfriend’s dad. We understood who his girlfriend must be. I looked over at the counter, where the girl who sold egg rolls stood. She was taking a batch of napkins out of their plastic wrapper, paying us no attention.

“Did you just graduate, then?” Orlando said. He had returned his attention to me.

“Yeah.”

“No luck finding work yet?”

“We’re looking,” I said.

Lydia made a face at me. Orlando turned to her. “You’re not looking?” he said.

She gave a tiny shrug, didn’t return his eye contact. “We’re looking,” she said.

THE ROOM upstairs from Five Happiness was small and lit with fluorescent rods. The ceiling was so low that you could stand on your tiptoes and touch it. There weren’t any windows, just posters on the walls. Some had photos of eagles and rivers, with inspirational quotes beneath. On another, a girl straddled a surfboard, her breasts tumbling like grapefruits from the tiniest bathing suit. In the center of the room, one long plastic table was set up with beige computer monitors that had telephones and headsets hooked up to them. The only sound was the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. The only smell was egg-roll smell.

“Have a seat, mademoiselles,” Orlando said, but there were no chairs. He leaned up against the table, and, after a while, I hoisted myself up onto it next to him. The porous feeling had returned to me, the naked feeling. Lydia stood across from us, her arms crossed.

“We call your girlfriend’s dad Big Happiness,” I said. “She’s Little Happiness.”

Orlando laughed delightedly, like a child. “That’s an amazing nickname,” he said. “Should I tell her? I’m trying to figure out whether she’d like that or hate it.” He explained that he had wanted to propose to Jing for years, but her father—though he had plenty of his own demons—wouldn’t let her marry someone who was slightly flawed by virtue of being unemployed. Big Happiness had made Orlando a deal. If he could start a business in the upstairs room and turn a profit, he could marry her. So he and Jing were starting a phone-services business together.

“Telemarketing,” Lydia said.

“Sort of.”

I started laughing. “Telemarketers are creeps!” I said.

He laughed, too, as if I hadn’t just insulted his line of business—as if I had in fact complimented him. “I guess I’m a creep, then,” he said.

I laughed again.

“I love your moxie,” Orlando said. His dirty hand dashed out and tucked my hair behind my ear.

“Swati,” Lydia said. “Stop it.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I said. “He did it.”

Orlando watched Lydia, to see if she would scold him, too, but she didn’t. “We’re just having fun,” he said, his voice childish again. “We’re just playing.”

“Orlando, how old are you?” I said.

“How old do you think I am?”

“You could be twenty-five”—he smiled as I said it—“or you could be forty-five. You have one of those faces.”

“I’m twenty-five,” he said.

“Tell the truth.”

“Twenty-five!” he said.

“You made us tell you how old we are,” I said.

“That was for legal reasons,” he said. He explained. One of the businesses he and Little Happiness—Jing—planned to start was a phone-sex hotline. It wasn’t because they were perverts. It was because phone sex was more lucrative than any other business. You could charge a lot for it. That’s why it had been important to confirm that we were eighteen. He wouldn’t start us on the phone-sex line—we had to earn that, he said. We had to start at the bottom and work our way up. Something about how he said it made me wonder again if he was a pedophile. He really could be. He had potential.

WE STARTED the next morning. Orlando set us up at side-by-side stations, with headsets connected to a computer that automatically dialed the phone numbers for us; for each call, the computer monitor showed some information, in blocky green text on a black screen, about the person we were supposed to be talking to. Age, race, profession, income, how often they answered our calls, how long they stayed on the line each time, what they’d bought in the past.

We began, that morning, with gardening magazines. We sold only a couple—five of them, between the two of us, mostly to old ladies who didn’t seem to understand that they were buying anything. A lot of the people we called were old ladies, because the system focused on people who regularly picked up their phones, Orlando explained, and those people tended to be old and ladies. He had been listening to us and gave us some tips. For example, when the person picked up, he said, we should talk to them as if we already know them—“Hey, Rebecca, what’s going on?” or even, “Rebecca!”—to throw them off guard and make them think it was a friend on the line. The tips worked, especially that one. At the end of the shift, Orlando said we’d done well, it was a good start. He sent us downstairs and said to tell Jing to give us each a free egg roll. Jing did.

After that, we returned each morning and stayed eight hours. We sold more magazines, along with kitchen gadgets and decorative tchotchkes. The saddest was a gig calling people up and telling them they had won a free trip to Hawaii. They would get excited about it until we explained that they hadn’t quite won yet. First they had to watch a promotional film about home improvement. Then they would have a shot at winning: no guarantee, but it was a good shot.

Not that the gigs were all bad. Our favorite was a magazine about Native American history; selling it made us feel like we were doing a good deed. We had to phone strangers up—we called them leads—and convince them to accept a free issue. Once I called an old man with a hard, mean voice. “I don’t read magazines,” he said.

“But this will teach you something,” I said. “It’ll tell you how the Native Americans lived before white people arrived.”

“I get my history from the Bible, sweetheart,” he said, and hung up.

I told Lydia about this on the bus ride home, and she cracked up. I hadn’t seen her laugh in a long time. I thought she was starting to enjoy herself. I get that from the Bible, sweetheart! we said. The Bible, sweetheart! we said. The Bible!

I wasn’t religious. My only relationship with the Bible was that my brother sometimes read to us from it. He read to us from everything. The readings were soothing, like lullabies. Anyone—he said—could feel God’s love. You didn’t have to be a religious person; you didn’t have to believe in one version of God. I didn’t buy it, but Lydia did. She’d grown up Christian. She’d lapsed, somewhat, but my brother was bringing her back around. She was relieved that my brother believed, even if he wouldn’t commit to one particular god—this was probably enough to get him to Heaven. We hadn’t talked about it, but I knew she imagined that he was up there now, watching us. I thought that might be why she was so careful, so tentative, all the time—and so judgmental of me.

Before all that, when my brother had only just been diagnosed, Lydia and I watched a movie about witches and decided to become witches. Every year on the same night—I can’t tell you which, because we promised we never would tell—we sat in candlelight with the soles of our feet touching, wrote a wish apiece on scraps of looseleaf paper, crumpled each of our papers into a ball, dripped hot wax on the balls, and hid the balls in a shoebox in my closet. We both wished for my brother to get better. When he found the box and we explained the concept—just the concept, not the actual wishes—he made fun of us. He thought our crumpled-up wishes looked testicular. We called them waxballs, but he pretended to forget their name. Your little sackballs, he said, your precious sackballs.

Then he died. Afterward, my parents undressed him and cleaned him with a washcloth. They went over his face and his stomach and his armpits and his crotch. His sackballs, his precious sackballs. He still seemed almost as if he were sleeping. My mom told me to choose an outfit to put on him. I chose my favorite flannel of his—the one he had worn to the World Trade Organization protest, the one in the picture where his mouth was a big O. By then he was starting to seem dead, his lips puckered and hard and blueish. When my mom and dad tried to put him into the flannel, his limbs were too stiff, they couldn’t do it between the two of them, so I held his arm up while they got one sleeve on, and then the other arm while they did the other sleeve. We all picked him up and carried him to the living room and placed him on the couch. I sat down on the carpet next to him with my hand on his forearm.

One by one, people came over. When there was a critical mass of Indians at our place, the aunties sang loud, mournful songs. It seemed like a performance to me. It seemed like they were showing off. Our white friends couldn’t tell. They were moved. I sat there in the same position, holding on to my brother’s arm as it cooled. I stared at the cracked leather of the couch. I counted the lines in the leather. Only when Lydia showed up and called my name—her voice high and trembling—did I stand. I got up and ran into her arms, and we stood in the front hall shivering together like that, and I loved her. Then I sat on the other couch with her, across from the couch with my brother on it. I closed my eyes and let her braid my hair. It felt nice. But then she stopped braiding my hair and went over to where my brother lay, to where I had been sitting before. She put her fingers on his arm. She murmured something, a religious chant of some kind. I hated her, then. I can’t explain it.

When my brother was alive, our parents used to make sure all my hours were accounted-for. Even when they were at the hospital, I had to call the nurses’ station with my whereabouts at any given moment. If I even walked to the gas station, I had to make it known. Now that my brother was dead, no one cared where I went each morning. I wondered if they wondered.

I thought about whether Orlando Rossi might be a real pedophile. I thought about whether he might be a murderer. Lydia’s aunt had once been asked on a date by the serial killer Ted Bundy. She said no, so he didn’t get a chance to kill her. If Orlando tried to kill me, I knew what I would tell him. You can rape me, but please use a condom, and please don’t kill me. My brother died of cancer last month, and if anything happens to me, my parents will be destroyed. Maybe he would still kill me. If there was an afterlife—as my brother claimed there was, though I didn’t believe it—I would go and search for my brother there. If there was not an afterlife, that would be the end of me. It wouldn’t be my fault. I would have tried not to get killed. Lydia would escape and tell my parents I had tried to stay alive.

EVER SINCE we had become Orlando’s employees, though, he had been acting less like a pedophile and more like a boss. We were the first employees he had ever hired. He told us this with pride. We were paid minimum wage, plus a $1 commission for each conversion. We were never supposed to hang up before the lead hung up, with one exception—the people Orlando called the Irates. The yellers, the swearers, the demanders of managers. The Irates. I liked the sound of them. “I want an Irate!” I told him. “Give me an Irate!” He laughed. Lydia laughed.

But what I wanted most was to work the phone-sex lines. It wasn’t fair, I told Orlando, that he hadn’t started us on that yet. The rest of it was getting boring—the retirees, the stoners, the stay-at-home moms. When I passed his desk, I grabbed him by the hem of his S.T.P. shirt and tugged. “Come on, don’t we work hard?” I said. “Aren’t we model employees?” This made him laugh, but he promised nothing.

We did work hard. We were model employees. We got on the bus in the morning and didn’t return till after dinner. We gave ourselves goals and surpassed them. Ten conversions in eight hours, then thirteen, then fifteen. Orlando taught us more tricks. It turned out he’d gotten into this business because he used to be a telemarketer himself, at a place down the street; that’s how he had met Jing. Lydia and I pooled our commissions and, at the end of each afternoon, spent it all on fried rice or kung pao chicken. Only the egg rolls were free, and Little Happiness was becoming stingier with them. When the end of August rolled around, Orlando took us to see her. He said he had a promotion in mind for us—he said it with meaning. But he had to ask the boss. When he walked us up to the counter, Little Happiness stared him down. It was the first time I’d seen any expression in her face; it was fierce. He tipped his head toward us and said, “Come on, let’s do it.”

“They’re not legal, dumbass,” she said. I’d never heard anyone say it, dumbass, the way she did; she pronounced the b, which made it sound like a more powerful insult than usual.

“We have ID,” I said, more to Little Happiness than to Orlando. “You can see it.” We didn’t, but I figured we could buy fakes off some corner on Broadway, or whatever people did.

Little Happiness acted as if she hadn’t heard me—as if I didn’t exist. “If you got us in legal trouble, my dad would murder you,” she said to Orlando.

Orlando sighed performatively. “Would you stop being a bitch?” he said. “It’s a highly profitable business.”

She snorted—bitchily, I thought. “Fine, let one of them try it, and keep the other one on Hawaii, the tchotchkes, whatever,” she said. She looked us over. She was tougher than I’d given her credit for being. She was in charge here, she’d been in charge all along. “Give it to whichever one of them has the better voice for it.”

“What kind of voice is better for phone sex?” he said.

“Sweet,” she said. “Like—soft, sweet. You’ll figure it out, babe.”

“Jing,” Orlando said. “Do you have anything to eat?” He said it gently, as if he were the one auditioning to work the phone-sex line.

She gave him an egg roll. Then she gave me and Lydia one each. We followed Orlando back upstairs. The dynamic had shifted. Orlando seemed smaller. I wondered if Lydia noticed. When we got upstairs, Orlando said he needed to hear our voices. He needed to try us out. We should do it one at a time, he said. He looked at both of us, as if trying to decide who should go first. Then he told Lydia to wait downstairs awhile with Jing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lydia said, but she followed his instructions.

Orlando closed the door behind her, then sat on the table and gestured for me to stand in front of him. I remembered the time he tucked my hair behind my ear. I’d been trying to get him to touch me ever since, but he hadn’t. I stepped close to him. “No, don’t,” he said, taking me by the shoulders and pushing me away. “This is about your voice, baby-girl.”

“What about it?”

“You need to show me that you can appeal to anyone. Our customers are from all across the nation—all walks of life. Name a profession that lets you meet such a diverse group of people.”

“Is this the tryout?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“President.”

“Name a profession that people like us could actually get,” he said. He said it as if we were people like him. As if we were—the three of us—in the same situation. As if we had spoken to him in the first place for some reason other than that my brother had died and my house smelled rancid.

“We could be Presidents,” I said. “Lydia and I.”

Orlando widened his eyes and laughed. “ ‘Lydia and I,’ ” he said, imitating me. “See, you come across as stuck-up right there—most people would say ‘Lydia and me,’ but you said ‘Lydia and I.’ That’s why I’m marrying Jing. She’s got street smarts, she’s tough, she doesn’t care about status, she wouldn’t want to be a President. She’s gone through hardship.”

“I’ve gone through hardship.”

“Ha,” he said. “What hardship?”

“My brother died!” I said.

He made an unreadable face. “Is that true?” he said.

I didn’t know whether to answer—I felt like I’d said too much.

“Maybe your brother died,” he said, as if he were deciding whether to believe it. “But Jing—that’s a whole other universe. Jing is an only child. Her dad loves her, but he’s too hard on her; she only has him, her mother died when she was really young.”

Mothers die, I thought. Everyone’s mother dies at some point.