Domestication of an Imaginary Goat

She wanted to sew him a goat, but the idea of it incomplete was unbearable. She would find it, in a drawer, beneath the sweater he had bought for her when she shivered as they walked toward the beach. “Are you cold?” he had asked, and she answered, “I’m all right.” He handed her the towels, the umbrella that she could not open by herself if the wind was blowing (that gusty day, years ago, when he had gone to buy lemonades and she opened the umbrella, alone, and it was torn from her hands, had sailed down the beach and landed in the water among the breakers. She dragged it back to their towels; it was sodden, heavy. When he returned, he laughed with his head thrown back, his Adam’s apple trotting up and down, the lemonade spilling carelessly over the sides of the paper cups. He opened the umbrella swiftly, with one hand, despite its heaviness, despite the wind, and she drove the cups of lemonade into the sand, liking how the grains stuck to the wet sides in sharp patterns, like rangoli). But that was before the sweater. “You look cold,” he had said and handed her the goggles, hers with prescription lenses; one could be carefree, careless, when they had never known blindness—she always thought that of him, his unflawed vision and unmarred temperament, and he jogged away. She turned to watch him, his heels kicking up the golden sand, the soles of his feet, white and narrow, jogging to the shops near the parking lot where he bought her a sweater, mauve, a color she did not like, but he had wanted her to be pleased with him, she could see that, she could see what he wanted, and so she smiled and thanked him, and later, when they were home with salty legs and brittle hair, she put the sweater in a drawer, but she never wore it, never; it was mauve, a shade that made her complexion sallow. So she thought, if there was to be an incomplete goat, she would put it under the sweater since she rarely touched it and certainly never looked underneath it. She was not ungrateful; she knew how kind he was, how good. It was simply that she did not like mauve, and he knew that, but he had decided her dislike was unimportant. What was important, he thought, were the simple things: that he noticed she was cold, that he wanted to please her and make her warm. That was all true—she agreed. But she did not like that he had decided. She would not change her mind. She did not like mauve, and that mattered.

But perhaps beneath the sweater was too obvious a place for an incomplete goat. Perhaps she should put the goat somewhere darker, a space that was less likely to be often encountered, like the closet full of spare soaps, saline solutions, hotel shampoos, boxes of tissues, and detergent. A bottle of detergent could last six months, and there were already two in that closet (not to mention the full bottle on top of the dryer) which, all told, would account for a year and a half. If the incomplete goat were shoved behind the bottle of detergent, it could be forgotten for at least a year and a half. And maybe, after she used the bottle on top of the dryer and the first bottle from the closet, she would feel compelled to buy more detergent, for she liked to have two of everything. She despised needing something and not having it, not preparing for the eventuality of necessity or fancy, especially because he never prepared for anything, not for loss or expenditure or the depletion of household resources. (That would make him laugh, her saying, “the depletion of household resources.”) She had a list, of course, every organized person has more than a few, but when she sent him shopping he would forget the list and buy what he thought would please her. It was not hard to figure out what pleased her. He only had to pay attention. If he paid attention, he would know what she liked, and more importantly, what she did not like, but he was drifting, dreaming (and that was why she would make him a goat. One night, a few weeks ago, they had seen an orange, spreading light in the sky, toward New Jersey; she knew it was man-made, a satellite, a test explosion near the air force base, but he thought it was something magnificent, never seen before, like God or aliens, so convinced he was, so excited, as if this was the moment he had been waiting for, the moment when something extraordinary happened, when he was selected for greatness, and then she had mocked him and called him a Space Goat—the name had just burst from her and they had known what it meant, known it was appropriate, for he was always drifting, dreaming, out of this world) and so at the store, he bought what he thought would please her and was hurt when she grimaced. And then she would feel sorry and force a smile, and say “Thank you,” but with her eyes averted, and she would hate the clutter the things he thought would please her created in the closets and drawers.

But how sweet of him to try. He couldn’t help his drifting any more than she could help her organization. How good of him to want to please her, to ask for her approval. How good of him to love her. And so she would not begin the goat, for fear that she would not finish it, fearing the reason (the only one—once she began something, she always finished it; it was part of her organization), the only reason that would cause her not to finish the goat: that he would be gone. That there would be no one to give the goat to. That there would be no one who liked to please her, to make her warm, for she had driven him away, had asked a dreamer with a cheerful temperament to be organized. Demanded it. When what she liked best about him was his drifting, his imagination, his attraction to clutter and the spur of the moment. How easily he laughed and dragged her out of her tidiness, her adherence to duty. If he was gone, there would be no reason to finish the goat, and it would be shoved, incomplete, under the mauve sweater or behind the third bottle of detergent, to be discovered in a year and a half, maybe two.

The thought of the unfinished goat was impossible. One day she would find it. That was what she could not bear. What combinations of incompleteness would the goat suffer from? A head, and no body? Three lanky legs and two gangly horns, unpointed and limp because she had run out of stuffing? Stuffing for a cloth goat was not something she knew how to prepare for. Perhaps it would have only one eye? No mouth? A creature with no mouth is a terrible thing. Worse than one without eyes. Why was that, she wondered? What is it about a mouth? She had seen a painting, once, of a woman without a mouth. The woman had small eyes, with long lashes, black hair, ears shaped like shells, the suggestion of breasts, large ones, beneath a blue blouse, fingernails even, and a wedding ring. But there was no mouth. The painting was terrifying. The woman had no mouth. Where it should have been was a smooth, flesh-colored space, as if skin had grown over the mouth, as if the woman had been born without one. It would have been better to see lips sewn shut, or stapled. The benign absence of the mouth was horrible.

She stood looking at the painting until a man and his girlfriend (girlfriend, because she, too, had no ring on her finger) stood next to her, and the girlfriend said to the man, “She has no mouth,” and the man responded, “I’d like to paint yours out sometimes,” and he had meant it, he had really meant it, and the girlfriend had been ashamed. Not that he had said it, but because a stranger, a woman, had overheard him.

She had moved away from the painting then. A creature without a mouth—a goat, a woman—is ashamed, mutilated. But the words that sometimes come from the mouth. From her own mouth. Those could be horrible, too.

She did not want to buy him a present; she wanted to make him one. It had not been difficult in the past: she made roses out of metal funnels and pipe cleaners and green sandpaper cut into leaves. She had made a hedgehog once (before he was a Space Goat he had been a Sleepy Hedgehog) out of a sea sponge and nails and drill bits and mini-wrenches that she had taken from the emergency toolbox in the trunk of her car (because if there ever was an emergency, she would not know how to use the wrenches, she would stand there with them in her hands, her face lit by the emergency flares he insisted she stow under the passenger seat, but even with the flares, the wrenches, she would not know how to solve the problem). Now she wanted to make a goat. To sew it. But then there was the idea of it unfinished.

What if she vowed (to herself—those are the only vows that matter) that if the goat had to be discarded before it was complete, she would push the needle she had used to sew it, and the green thread (for the thread would be dark green, she had already picked it out, already purchased it—she hated the thought of a white goat, she wouldn’t make it white just because it was supposed to be white), she would push the needle—the dark green thread looped through it and umbilically attached to the incomplete goat—into the fabric (sea green with small red and yellow flowers: a green goat with budding skin), poke it into the fabric so the bright, shiny steel of the needle laced through the cloth, and then, yes, she would promise herself to throw out the goat, the needle, the thread, the spare scraps of fabric, the black-button eyes, the beanbag stuffing, the plastic orb (she had bought a tin ring from a machine outside of the grocery store. The ring came in a plastic orb that she knew would fit around the head of the goat, an astronaut’s helmet so that the goat could be transformed into a Space Coat—he would appreciate that sort of detail, that type of whimsy. She knew what he liked. She knew how to please him). She would throw it all out in a garbage can, far from the apartment, so there would be no chance for nostalgia, no doubling back, no rummaging frantically through the can as if her life depended on recovering the goat, for if she threw it all out in a garbage can, far away, she would never find the incomplete goat, and upon finding it, remember how she had sewn it—for him—how she had hoped. And it was this idea of a goat, forgotten, symbolic, that prevented her from ever beginning, and so the dark green thread, the fabric, the button eyes, the stuffing remained inside a paper bag deep under the bed so he would not find them if he happened to lift the dust ruffle, which he rarely did, unless he lost a shoe or a sock.

The idea of the goat frightened him. Mostly, it was her face (how open it could be, how unprotected) when she talked of the goat. She asked him if he liked the name, Yama (she laughed, and shouted, Yama, Goat of Death, her thin fingers spread wide), and when she shouted, he was reminded of first meeting her, years ago; she approached him, a stranger then, standing outside of the Chelsea post office, and asked which idea he liked better: museums filled with beds, you could pick what kind of sheets you wanted, flannel, silk, cotton, stretched taut over a single, double, queen- or king-size bed (it would be all about choices, the museum, choices and comfort) and the art would hang from the ceiling; or, an adult playground with slides and swings and seesaws, where grown-ups could wail, stand in sprinklers, and throw tantrums for no reason (it would be all about release and joy). He liked that she shouted, but sometimes he wished she wouldn’t, for what did people think when they saw a thirty-five-year-old woman shouting about a goat. (He had preferred the playground; the idea of her growling and pushing him down a slide made him laugh.) It was what he liked about her. Her ideas. Her childishness. But how easily she was hurt. It always surprised him.

Sometimes he wondered if it was time and work that held two people together. He had tried to say the words the way she wanted him to: garro, Hyderabad, sai bhaji, Guea me sura. If he said them incorrectly, she called him a ghati, and laughed uproariously, savoring the full meaning of a word he had never heard before. The places she talked about, far away, not even part of his imagination. And then she had told him about her grandmother, about her grandmother’s wealth, her short, modern hair (Sindhis do as they please, she said; we’re a wild bunch), and how the old woman, honored for her age and ability to tell the story of everyone’s birth and death, save her own, would milk thirty bakri, thirty goats, every day before dawn (in her white sari, manik necklace, and a man’s brown derby). He had learned to make loli the way her grandmother did, had learned to say “Partition” with bite, with loss in the voice. But then she had started with the goat. And he hadn’t been ready.

What do you think of goats? she had asked. They’re great, he said. Yes, they are, she agreed, and went on to describe a house they would have (one day), and land (always, she talked about land) with a small, fierce stream running through it, and she would beat his shirts on the rocks even though she hadn’t done that in India (there were dhobis for that). Can’t you just see it! she said, and we will have a goat, she said, and he will drink from the stream and crop the grass with his rectangle teeth and you will never have to mow the lawn, but you must fence off my herb garden and protect it from the goat; I will grow tulsi, for Girdhir, Lifter of the Mountain, and Guru Nanak. He had not wanted to think of a house they would one day live in, and she saw that, and it made her more persistent and she said All right, then we won’t speak of the land or the house, but at least tell me what you would want to name the goat (I will make cheese! she shouted, forgetting that she had called the goat “he”), and she was persisting, pressing, and he felt himself pursued by horns, by cleft hooves and swinging udders, and she grew desperate and hurt (he could always see it in the skin around her nose—it shrunk, and he knew then, she was hurt. She said her nose was Sindhi, with pride and sadness, but hers was the only Sindhi nose he knew, and he could not share in her pride or sadness, although he did like her nose). Just tell me what you would name the goat, she said, or tell me if you would want a white goat, brown or black or speckled. Just imagine the goat, it’s not real, just imagine it, and he knew he could reverse her hurt if he would just agree to imagine the goat, it was not so much for her to ask, really, he knew that, but she was pushing, he could see the forelock of the goat, could smell its hot, grassy breath, could feel it nipping, unraveling the hem in his trousers, and there she was now conjuring a hammock, now a screened-in porch, now making him tea the way she did with cloves and milk and bringing it to him as he sat outside with the goat, and then suddenly there was a child and she named it herself, did not even ask him, gave it a name, Usha, and a sex, girl, and sat it on his knee while he taught her to fix carburetors (she wanted a girl who could fix carburetors and play the tabla, or a boy who danced ballet and Kuchipudi), and all the while the goat looked on, cropping the grass so that he did not have to mow, but he had always liked mowing, why couldn’t he mow if he wanted to? And he began to resent the goat for doing what he wanted to do, began to resent that goat for existing in his imagination, and now she was naming it, calling it Yama, Goat of Death, with her long, pretty fingers spread wide. (How the tendons showed, how narrow her nailbeds, how fast she rolled-out dough and sprinkled rangoli when she was especially land-sick, as she called it. Sindhis must make their home where they are, she said, we are not homeless, only landless, like so many others.) He did learn his lessons well, after all; he loved that she let him shuffle through the rangoli, destroy it, for that was the point, that destruction is part of life, eventually it comes to all, even goats, even children named Usha, nations and borders, the Amil neighborhood in Hyderabad, Sindh, before Partition—said with bite and loss—even houses and fierce streams and rocks. He did think Yama a good name for a goat, especially a goat that butted into his business, but he would not say so, for to say so would be to play along with the game, her game, to admit that he too could imagine the goat, and if he could imagine the goat, then of course she would go on to the next thing, she would not let it go at the goat, she would demand that he imagine the land, the house, the child named Usha (Dawn, she explained, it means dawn, with that look that excluded him, that meant she was remembering something outside of him. He had read somewhere that “exclusion” was the dirtiest word in the English language). She would know that he could envision the hammock and porch swing (Arrey, jhoola, she said, tweek-a-tweek), the tea, sweet and hot in his mouth, and so he shouted at her, saw the skin near her Sindhi nose that made her so proud and sad, shrink. He shouted: “I don’t want the damn goat! Get rid of it!” And then he started to laugh, he threw his head back and laughed, and he was glad when she began to laugh too, because sometimes he would laugh and she would rage or weep, but this time they laughed together for fighting over a goat that did not exist.