The Newlyweds Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Nell Freudenberger

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A portion of this material was originally published as “An Arranged Marriage” in The New Yorker (September 6, 2010).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Freudenberger, Nell.

  The newlyweds / Nell Freudenberger.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95844-0

  1. Newlyweds—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.R479N49 2012

  813′.6—dc23 2011044116

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket image: The Birds of Eastern North America by Charles Johnson Maynard (details). The New York Public Library/Art Resource, N.Y.

  Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

  v3.1

  For Paul

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  An Arranged Marriage

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  ESL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Citizens

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  A Proposal

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  In a courtyard

  She is waiting,

  Wearing a Dacca sari, vermilion in her parting.

  RABINDRANATH TAGORE, “Flute Music”

  1She hadn’t heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and check. Just in case. If anyone saw her, they would know that there was someone in the house now during the day while George was at work. They would watch Amina hurrying coatless to the mailbox, still wearing her bedroom slippers, and would conclude that this was her home. She had come to stay.

  The mailbox was new. She had ordered it herself with George’s credit card, from mailboxes.com, and she had not chosen the cheapest one. George had said that they needed something sturdy, and so Amina had turned off the Deshi part of her brain and ordered the heavy-duty rural model, in glossy black, for $90. She had not done the conversion into taka, and when it arrived, wrapped in plastic, surrounded by Styrofoam chips, and carefully tucked into its corrugated cardboard box—a box that most Americans would simply throw away but that Amina could not help storing in the basement, in a growing pile behind George’s Bowflex—she had taken pleasure in its size and solidity. She showed George the detachable red flag that you could move up or down to indicate whether you had letters for collection.

  “That wasn’t even in the picture,” she told him. “It just came with it, free.”

  The old mailbox had been bashed in by thugs. The first time had been right after Amina arrived from Bangladesh, one Thursday night in March. George had left for work on Friday morning, but he hadn’t gotten even as far as his car when he came back through the kitchen door, uncharacteristically furious.

  “Goddamn thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private property. And the police don’t do a fucking thing.”

  “Thugs are here? In Pittsford?” She couldn’t understand it, and that made him angrier.

  “Thugs! Vandals. Hooligans—whatever you want to call them. Uneducated pieces of human garbage.” Then he went down to the basement to get his tools, because you had to take the mailbox off its post and repair the damage right away. If the thugs saw that you hadn’t fixed it, that was an invitation.

  The flag was still raised, and when she double-checked, sticking her hand all the way into its black depths, there was only the stack of bills George had left on his way to work. The thugs did not actually steal the mail, and so her green card, which was supposed to arrive this month, would have been safe even if she could have forgotten to check. “Thugs” had a different meaning in America, and that was why she’d been confused. George had been talking about kids, troublemakers from East Rochester High, while Amina had been thinking of dacoits: bandits who haunted the highways and made it unsafe to take the bus. She had lived in Rochester six months now—long enough to know that there were no bandits on Pittsford roads at night.

  American English was different from the language she’d learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. Americans always went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in flats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.

  Maple Leaf was where she first learned to use the computer, and the computer was how she met George, a thirty-four-year-old SWM who was looking for a wife. George had explained to her that he had always wanted to get married. He had dated women in Rochester, but often found them silly, and had such a strong aversion to perfume that he couldn’t sit across the table from a woman who was wearing it. George’s cousin Kim had called him “picky,” and had suggested that he might have better luck on the Internet, where he could clarify his requirements from the beginning.

  George told Amina that he had been waiting for a special connection. He was a romantic, and he didn’t want to compromise on just anyone. It wasn’t until his colleague Ed told him that he’d met his wife, Min, on AsianEuro.com that he had thought of trying that particular site. When he had received the first e-mail from Amina, he said that he’d “had a feeling.” When Amina asked what had given him the feeling, he said that she was “straightforward” and that she did not play games, unlike some women he knew. Which women were those, she had asked, but George said he was talking about women he’d known a long time ago, when he was in college.

  She hadn’t been testin
g him: she had really wanted to know, only because her own experience had been so different. She had been contacted by several men before George, and each time she’d wondered if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George had started e-mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the same thing about him, and she’d continued wondering even after he booked the flight to Dhaka in order to meet her. She had wondered that first night when he ate with her parents at the wobbly table covered by the plasticized map of the world—which her father discreetly steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of Sudan—and during the agonizing hours they had spent in the homes of their Dhaka friends and relatives, talking to each other in English while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn’t until she was actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the University of Rochester sweatshirt he’d given her, that she had finally become convinced it was going to happen.

  It was the first week of September, but the leaves were already starting to turn yellow. George said that the fall was coming early, making up for the fact that last spring had been unusually warm: a gift to Amina from the year 2005—her first in America. By the time she arrived in March most of the snow was gone, and so she had not yet experienced a real Rochester winter.

  In those first weeks she had been pleased to notice that her husband had a large collection of books: biographies (Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Cary Grant, Mary Queen of Scots, John Lennon, and Napoléon) as well as classic novels by Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen. George told Amina that he was a reader but that he couldn’t understand people who waded through all of the garbage they published these days, when it was possible to spend your whole life reading books the greatness of which had already been established.

  George did have some books from his childhood, when he’d been interested in fantasy novels, especially retellings of the Arthurian legend and anything to do with dragons. There was also a book his mother had given him, 1001 Facts for Kids, which he claimed had “basically got him through the stupidity of elementary school.” In high school he had put away the 1001 Facts in favor of a game called Dungeons & Dragons, but there were now websites that served the same purpose, and George retained a storehouse of interesting tidbits that he periodically related to Amina.

  “Did you know that there is an actual society made up of people who believe the earth is flat?”

  “Did you know that one out of twenty people has an extra rib?”

  “Did you know that most lipstick contains fish scales?”

  For several weeks Amina had answered “No” to each of these questions, until she gradually understood that this was another colloquialism—perhaps more typical of her husband than of the English language—simply a way of introducing a new subject that did not demand an actual response.

  “Did you know that seventy percent of men and sixty percent of women admit to having been unfaithful to their spouse, but that eighty percent of men say they would marry the same woman if they had the chance to live their lives over again?”

  “What do the women say?” Amina had asked, but George’s website hadn’t cited that statistic.

  George had said that they could use the money he’d been saving for a rainy day for her to begin studying at Monroe Community College next year, and as soon as her green card arrived, Amina planned to start looking for a job. She wanted to contribute to the cost of her education, even if it was just a small amount. George supported the idea of her continuing her studies, but only once she had a specific goal in mind. It wasn’t the degree that counted but what you did with it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper. And so Amina told him that she’d always dreamed of becoming a real teacher. This was not untrue, in the sense that she had hoped her tutoring jobs at home might one day lead to a more sustained and distinguished kind of work. What she didn’t mention to George was how important the U.S. college diploma would be to everyone she knew at home—a tangible symbol of what she had accomplished halfway across the world.

  She was standing at the sink, chopping eggplant for dinner, when she saw their neighbor Annie Snyder coming up Skytop Lane, pushing an infant in a stroller and talking to her little boy, Lawson, who was pedaling a low plastic bike. The garish colors and balloon-like shapes of that toy reminded Amina of a commercial she had seen on TV soon after she’d arrived in Rochester, in which real people were eating breakfast in a cartoon house. Annie had introduced herself when Amina had moved in and invited her out for coffee. Then she’d asked if Amina had any babysitting experience, because she was always looking for someone to watch the kids for an hour or two while she did the shopping or went to the gym.

  She asks that because you’re from someplace else, George had said. She sees brown skin and all she can think of is housecleaning or babysitting. He told her she was welcome to go to Starbucks with Annie, but under no circumstances was she to take care of Annie’s children, even for an hour. Amina was desperate to find a job, but secretly she was glad of George’s prohibition. American babies made her nervous, the way they traveled in their padded strollers, wrapped up in blankets like precious goods from UPS.

  She had never worried about motherhood before, since she’d always known she would have her own mother to help her. When she and George had become serious, Amina and her parents had decided that she would do everything she could to bring them to America with her. Only once they’d arrived did she want to have her first child. They’d talked their plan through again and again at home, researching the green card and citizenship requirements—determining that if all went well, it would be three years from the time she arrived before her parents could hope to join her. Just before she left, her cousin Ghaniyah had shown her an article in Femina called “After the Honeymoon,” which said that a couple remained newlyweds for a year and a day after marriage. In her case, Amina thought, the newlywed period would last three times that long, because she wouldn’t feel truly settled until her parents had arrived.

  In spite of all the preparation, there was something surprising about actually finding herself in Rochester, waiting for a green card in the mail. The sight of Annie squatting down and retrieving something from the netting underneath the stroller reminded her that she had been here six months already and had not yet found an opportunity to discuss her thoughts about children or her parents’ emigration with George.

  2Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had not been tricked (as everyone had predicted) and found herself in a sort of American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport and of the Pittsford Wegmans—a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother during their first conversation on the phone. When she asked about the field, George had explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there.

  After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of Haibatpur, her grandmother’s village. She had been born there. That was when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a fired-dung floor. After she was born, when her parents were struggling to feed even themselves in Dhaka, they had done as many people did and sent their child back to live with her grandparents in the village. Because of a land dispute between Amina’s father and his cousins, it was her mother’s village to which they habitually returned. And so Amina had stayed with Nanu and her Parveen Aunty and Parveen’s daughter—her favorite cousin, Micki—until she was six years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog, holding still in the ragged shade of a coconut palm.

  Her nanu had had four daughters and two sons, b
ut both of Amina’s uncles had died too young for Amina to remember them. The elder, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini like her father, a Freedom Fighter against the Pakistanis, while the younger one, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick God that way, bad things could happen. Khokon had been killed by General Yahya’s soldiers only two weeks after he’d enlisted, but Emdad had lived long enough to marry. Her mother said that Nanu had often congratulated herself on her foresight in convincing Emdad to stay at home, and so it had been almost impossible for her to believe the news, ten years after the war had ended, that her younger son had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar, delivering prescription medicines to the family pharmacy. For months afterward, whenever people offered condolences, her grandmother would correct them:

  “You’re thinking of Khokon, my elder son. He was killed in the war.”

  By the time Amina was grown up, her grandmother had recovered her wits. But by then she had only daughters, and that was the reason she’d become the way she was now, very quiet and heavy, like a stone.

  Little by little, over the eleven months they had written to each other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came from a good family and that her parents had sacrificed to send her to an English medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d said that she had learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen, when her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d tried to explain that it wasn’t arriving in a rickshaw every day, when everyone else came by car or taxi, or borrowing the books other girls owned, or even working twice as hard because everyone else had a private tutor after school. What she couldn’t stand, she wrote to George, was having to leave school a few months after her thirteenth birthday, waking up in the morning and knowing that today she was falling six hours behind, tomorrow twelve, and the next day eighteen. What she couldn’t stand was all the waste.