House of Waiting by Marina Tamar Budhos
Global City Press, $12 paper You may not be able to go
home again, but nothing can keep you from circling the place
continuously.
Sarah Weissberg, the protagonist in House of Waiting, Marina
Tamar Budhos’ first novel, desperately wants a home. Left on the
orphanage
steps with a note pinned on her blanket by her mother that reads, “Just
remember: my daughter is Jewish,” six-year-old Sarah arrives at the
home of her
adoptive parents, like a lonely moon sucked into the gravitational pull
of a
large, cold planet.
As Sarah explains, Frieda and Samuel Weissberg, strict Orthodox Jews,
“seemed
nice enough, but they left a chill that stiffened into a cold knot at
the
bottom of my spine.” Frieda is a tyrant about the apartment, requiring
teacups
be hung on their special hooks, counting her hair pins, and, in 13
years, never
once rearranging the furniture in their rear tenement. Samuel, who had
fled
Russia before the worst of World War II, nurses “a wound that seemed to
flow
darker and angrier each year” and is “suspicious that anything unknown
must be
dangerous.” Although she learns to love her parents for “the small
things” and
excels at school to please them, it’s no surprise that serious,
studious Sarah
is bedazzled by someone like Roland Singh, who takes her by surprise as
she
hides in the stacks at the NYU library by offering her food, and not
just any
food, but an Indian pattie – pungent, steamy, and spicy. What in the
world
would her suppressed parents say if they saw her sharing this food with
a
stranger, licking her fingers clean among the books?
In a nutshell, the Weissbergs say Sarah is no longer their daughter
if she
runs off and marries this curly headed, dark-skinned immigrant from
British
Guiana. But she cannot resist Roland’s charms and their shared feeling
of being
outsiders in 1950s America. So begins Sarah’s orbit around a second
family made
up of Roland and his East Indian and Indo-Caribbean friends. I guess
they’re
friends, but despite the time they spend with one another, it’s hard to
tell if
Roland even likes these people. Perhaps it’s the constant pull from his
homeland, where he’s left behind his child by another woman and
Guiana’s
political struggle for independence from Britain, a struggle in which
he
incessantly wants to play a part. Soon his allegiance to his country
overpowers
that for his American wife, and he leaves a pregnant and disconnected
Sarah to
wait for his return.
When Sarah, Charles and Sarita Magalee, Vijay and Claire, and half
a dozen
families from their Indo-American Club decide to rent a house in the
Catskills
for the summer, the task seems no less a challenge than what the
freedom
fighters in Guiana must face. Thinly veiled prejudice by landlords and
realtors
makes these outsiders’ determination to rent a house so fierce that
after a day
of frustrated searching they grab at the last house they stumble upon
in the
moonlight, a “dark, vagrant mass.” When they finally take possession of
the
house on Memorial Day weekend, the bright sunlight treats their summer
dream
home less poetically. Half the window panes are broken, the roof leaks,
tar
paper hangs from the porch rafters, and inside it smells like “an
emptying
drain.”
This summer house, which should be a lark and a carefree
adventure,
drives its occupants apart and then back together in new and strange
allegiances. The ill-conceived terrace Charles wants to build off the
second
story to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July becomes a symbol of
his
desire to rise above their struggles in the city and overcome the
narrow-mindedness of the summer colony. At the same time, it’s the
source of
betrayal by his friend and the catalyst for his wife’s insurmountable
unhappiness. And yet, in the end, it’s this rickety tower – built
without a
permit, or guidance, or help – that brings the occupants of the summer
house
together to watch, not the fireworks of Independence Day, but the
lightning
storm that follows.
As the first drops of rain begin to fall, Sarah realizes “that was
the last of
it, as if the many directions we were all moving toward, like some
hidden
design, had finally taken hold.” Sarah seeks out Frieda and Samuel, who
is
dying, and begins to understand, if not accept, their tight-fisted
lives. But
before she is forever locked within their world, she leaves them again
to find
her husband in Guiana in the midst of civil upheaval. And she brings
him and
his Guianan daughter back to the summer house as the leaves fall and
the air
turns cold. And the house – possibly Budhos’ main character – again
transforms
its inhabitants, revealing the author’s knack for transforming even bit
players
from one-dimensional props into fully realized characters with a
succinct
observation or two: Ranjit is a man who is “used to neatly sweeping up
big
ideas, spreading them out on his thin fingertips”; Tara’s rigidity and
cold
judgment of Americans becomes believable when she grimaces as guests at
her
home drain their glasses of beer and she shrilly scolds her nephew for
running
around with American girls. And Ed Rowe’s boundless prejudice rises
like bile
when he demands of Sarah, “So how’d you end up with these folks?” He is
the
kind of man who will never understand Budhos’ message that we don’t
“end up”
with people.
We are drawn to certain people for reasons that are hard to explain.
We are
born into families that may or may not want us. We chose friends and
lovers
that we can adore and hate in the same moment. But once you begin the
orbit,
the only way to break free is when an even larger body – adoptive
parents,
passionate love, even a summer house – passes by and pulls you in. n
This article appears in September 1 • 1995 and September 1 • 1995 (Cover).