Whereas his father was extremely calm, his mother often appeared agitated, dropping a dish or banging a spatula against the kitchen counter. She asked me questions that made me uncomfortable. “Your family must be proud that you’ve come to America and done so well,” or “Tony has always liked the unusual.”

She attended church regularly. Her husband preferred to spend the time working on his model airplanes in the basement. Tony had rarely gone even when a child. He had been thin, serious, the kind of boy who got involved for hours in a project. His mother had to remind him to eat or sleep.

At night, lying in bed with Tony, I felt protected by the erotic current enveloping us. We talked, holding each other closely.

“It’s almost spring and it’s still snowing,” he said.

“I know. I love to see the snow this late in the year.”

“Soon we’ll be married.”

“Yes.”

“I never thought I’d get married until I met you. It always seemed like too much of a commitment.”

“You’ve known a lot of women.”

“None of them were like you. You don’t seem to have any expectations about marriage.”

He was right—I had no domestic skills, no ideas of how to handle money, or life with a man.

I had so much to learn from him. The names of kitchen items and foods that had slipped by me in the college years when I had lived in the dormitory, what brands to shop for, how to budget money—we were both on small fellowships. Other things besides: how to write a good paper, how to finish a test quickly, how to organize my time.

I began to live for his coming and going, submitting myself helplessly to him, keeping nothing back. In so many ways he was the opposite of me. His ease with women. The lack of complications and mysteries about his past—his family life indicated an effortless, uneventful upbringing. His unquestioned sense of belonging to his own culture. He was gentle, charming, and yet I was full of an anxiety that somehow I did not have a firm hold on him. He might abandon me without explanation, or die, or just disappear. Even with him in the room, in bed with me, I suffered fear of loss.

I would ask over and over, “Do you love me?”

“I married you, didn’t I?”

“I want you to say so anyway.”

“I love you.”

I clung to him. “I’m so afraid I’ll lose you.”

“But that would mean I’d lose you too.”

“Don’t say that.” I covered his lips with my fingers.

Later he said, “I married you because you’re far away from home, without a tangible past.”

“So that you can make me to your own image?”

More and more I tried to be like him, like his world, fighting memories.

16

In the morning I got up before Tony and went into the courtyard to wash. My uncle was standing by a walnut tree, shaking it. An orange cat had climbed up the tree and was looking down, mewing.