Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 4

I spent my first night at the YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge, an inexpensive accommodation recommended by my guidebook.

Each night I had to keep the window wide open; it was the only source of air in the stifling room, and the noise was intolerable.

Her hands, folded together in her lap, had long pallid fingers, with swollen knuckles and tough yellow nails.

As vigorous as her voice was, and imperious as she seemed, I knew that even a scratch or a cough could kill a person that old; each day she lived, I knew, was something of a miracle.

At times I tried to picture the world she had been born into, in 1866—a world, I imagined, filled with women in long black skirts, and chaste conversations in the parlor.

We had spent only a handful of days in each other's company. And yet we were bound together; for six weeks she had worn an iron bangle on her wrist, and applied vermillion powder to the part in her hair, to signify to the world that she was a bride.

I remembered my first days in London, learning how to take the Tube to Russell Square, riding an escalator for the first time, unable to understand that when the man cried “piper” it meant “paper,” unable to decipher, for a whole year, that the conductor said “Mind the gap” as the train pulled away from each station.

I wanted somehow to explain this to Mrs. Croft, who was still scrutinizing Mala from top to toe with what seemed to be placid disdain.

I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on Mala’s feet, all but obscured by the bottom edge of her sari.

At night we kissed, shy at first but quickly bold, and discovered pleasure and solace in each other's arms.

I had not thought of her in several months—by then those six weeks of the summer were already a remote interlude in my past—but when I learned of her death I was stricken, so much so that when Mala looked up from her knitting she found me staring at the wall, unable to speak.

My son always expresses his astonishment, not at Mrs. Croft’s age but at how little I paid in rent, a fact nearly as inconceivable to him as a flag on the moon was to a woman born in 1866.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.