The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  “She does,” says Big Zeinab. “Leave half your wood. With the rest, your mother will cook you a warm porridge with sorghum and sugar and milk.”

  “We do not have any of those things, Tata,” says Little Zeinab.

  “That is because the united nations of the world do not know how to eat,” says Big Zeinab. “She will make a porridge of corn and oil. Inshallah.”

  “The best for us is what God chooses for us,” I say.

  “Aywa,” says Big Zeinab. “He who takes to the road will find a companion. God has chosen me to walk with you, and I say you must not stop here.”

  We walk again.

  “Did you meet Professor Adeeba in her aunt’s village?” Big Zeinab asks.

  I do not answer, for my thoughts must tell each leg in turn to move. My legs are strangers to each other.

  And I am remembering what I have tried to leave in Umm Jamila—the foul men spitting as they left and the children crying and my father walking out and my mother sending me with Kareema to her hut.

  • • •

  It is gray now, no sun left behind the clouds.

  “You are tired, Tata?” Little Zeinab asks.

  “She is braver than she is tired,” says Big Zeinab. “I see a lion beneath those clothes. It is my turn now to tell stories.”

  She speaks of her daughter’s wedding, the meeting of families, the preparation of a feast. I cannot tell my ears to listen as well as my legs to walk, so the story comes and goes. But Big Zeinab’s voice is a rope that I keep my hand upon as we move forward in the starless dark.

  K.C.

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  Everyone complains about Mondays, but Tuesdays are just as bad, the weekend worn off and nothing but worksheets ahead. Mom reminded me to bring my wellness poster downstairs, but somehow it never made it out the door, so Mrs. Closer’s on my case. Avoid stress: Skip health class. But there’s nowhere to hide. Kathy groans about staying up half the night studying for the social studies quiz.

  “What quiz?” I whisper.

  I quietly pull out my social studies textbook during the movie about responsible personal choice. It opens to Nawra’s letter. God, I didn’t even finish reading it. Maybe Nawra was telling me to study.

  Mrs. Closer spots me, so now I’m in double trouble for forgetting the poster and trying to bone up on justice for Ms. DeBarkalonis instead of watching the teens on the screen skip a party full of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll so they can go roller-skating in full body armor.

  Where you really need a helmet is in social studies, where Ms. DB fires questions at us nonstop. Incoming! Most of the time I duck, but her quizzes land even in the back of the room. What Ms. DB calls quizzes most people would call exams—never less than eight pages, really tiny type, never any multiple choice for guessing, with diagrams, sidebars, and instructions with more layers than a wedding cake (“Before you formulate your answer, refer to Question 6, Paragraph 4, Part C”).

  The first day, she told us she quit law school because she was so worried that American kids don’t know anything about their own government. “Ignorance is disenfranchisement,” she always says, which she had to explain, since “franchise” to most people means McDonald’s and KFC. But when you’re “enfranchised,” you have all your rights, like voting; you’re the franchise owner who gets to decide whether to sell burgers or chicken and make the money. Even after the civil war ended slavery, bad laws disenfranchised black people by claiming separate was equal, even though it wasn’t even close. But then the civil rights movement “called Americans to account,” as Ms. DB likes to say. I bet Nawra would like this story. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are like our conscience: They’re there telling us the right thing to do, but we don’t always listen.

  I like social studies when we talk about that, but not when Ms. DB makes civil rights a short-answer question.

  “Quiz means quick,” she says, collecting papers and stopping right beside my desk. I’m still on page 1 of 117, trying to find my way through the maze to the question mark.

  “Finish up,” she says.

  I write OUT OF TIME and hand her the paper.

  After that I have lunch, so I lie down outside on the grass, which is where Parker finds me. It’s a beautiful day, blue sky with cotton-ball clouds and a light breeze shuffling through the leaves. September is Richmond’s fourth month of summer. Maybe in New England the leaves have started changing, but here they’re still just dreaming about putting on their party clothes.

  “Tanning or sleeping?” Parker asks, plopping down beside me.

  “Dying.” I tell him the social studies quiz revealed my disenfranchisement.

  “DeBark is worse than de bite,” he says, which is what kids whisper behind her back. Parker says everyone struggles with Ms. DB’s long, involved tests.

  “Did you?” I ask.

  He pauses, then says, “No.”

  His honesty makes me glad. Probably when all the kids have a gripe fest, he joins in. Emily does that sometimes, moans with the rest of us, then acts all surprised when her test comes back with a big old A at the top. I don’t let her get away with that. Deep down she’s not ashamed of being smart, so she shouldn’t pretend to be. Especially with me, her best friend. I’ve offered to lend her a D minus any time she needs one.

  “Probably the last course Ms. DB took at law school was contract writing,” Parker says.

  “You want to go to law school?”

  “Maybe,” Parker says. “Or be a professor.”

  “My dad applied to law school once. I just found that out from my mom. But he didn’t get in anywhere,” I say. “Bad grades and test scores. They run in the family.”

  “Baldness runs in mine,” Parker says.

  “Maybe it’s those overheated brains,” I say. “Lean over. Come on. Lean.”

  I sink my fingers into his hair. I’ve been wanting to do that. I close my eyes. It’s thicker than I expected, softer. Parker parts on the side, very proper, but the combover hunk has a little wave and unruly ends, as if it’s sticking its tongue out at him. The color is maple syrup mixed with sunlight, but never sticky-looking. I swear some boys use their head for a napkin.

  My hand slips down his neck and arm, and beneath my fingertips, I feel goose bumps pop up like prairie dogs.

  “Hey,” he says, sitting up straight.

  I open my eyes. His face is red. I’ve embarrassed him. God knows how many sophomores were watching him being patted by the dummy on the lawn. “You’ve got a few good hair years left,” I say.

  I wait for him to take off—See you later, like, never—but he opens his lunch: milk, carrots, peanut butter and banana sandwich in foil. Foul. “You and Wally,” I say.

  “Great minds think alike,” he says. “Thomas the Tank Engine and PB and B.”

  We talk about Wally, who started kindergarten this month. His mom worries because he’s so shy when he first meets people; he either hides behind her butt or throws himself facedown on the sofa. This summer Mrs. Clay read him just about every starting-kindergarten story ever written. I thought he needed a shield, so I tie-dyed a T-shirt and told him it was made out of Nawra’s magic fabric spun from elephant tusks. Unfortunately, Mrs. Clay really wanted him to wear his blue-and-white-striped polo shirt on his first day, for picture taking, but he insisted on my shirt. In fact, for the first week of school Wally made his mom wash it every night (plus, the dye ran and turned the family’s socks green). But that gave me an idea to tell him the fabric radiated power so that anything near it in the drawer would protect him.

  Sometimes I feel that way about Parker, like he radiates smartness.

  “Need help with anything?” he asks. Asks hopefully?

  I look in my backpack. Math’s not his thing. Social studies—too late. Ms. DB made a big deal about no makeup tests. But I pull out the textbook anyway.

  It falls opens to Nawra’s letter.

  Save the Girls should fire me. Nawra deserves a better A
merican.

  “Is that from your Sudanese pen pal?” Parker asks.

  “My Sudanese sister.”

  “Can I read it?” he asks. “Or you read aloud.”

  Is that the tutor talking, or the boy with goose bumps? In either case, I have to avoid humiliation. “You read it to me,” I say. “I’m the dying woman.”

  It takes a while because he keeps stopping to ask questions and take bites of carrot. I’ve told him about Nawra, of course, but I have to explain where she’s responding to something I wrote. I fill Parker in on smoky three-stone fires and haboob sandstorms.

  “You know a lot about Darfur,” he says.

  For a moment I think, Why can’t my teachers just write me letters? Then I imagine reading fifteen pages on Mr. Hathaway’s love affair with the apostrophe. That’s not going to work either.

  Emily joins us. Along with the poster I forgot my lunch, so she shares her egg-salad-and-sprouts sandwich on spelt bread, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Sometimes I stop Parker as he reads. He says hadith is the wisdom of Muhammad the Prophet, but he isn’t sure, so he looks it up in the dictionary on his Kindle. “ ‘A report of the sayings or actions of Muhammad or his companions, together with the tradition of its chain of transmission,’ ” he reads. Then he says, “That’s good history. You’ve got to know who said what to judge how reliable it is.”

  Parker’s voice gets low and serious as he reads about the IDP kids drowning in the wadi.

  “That isn’t the worst of it,” Emily says. “I just read about some rebel ambush on an African Union base in Darfur.”

  “The African Union’s supposed to protect Darfur people, right?” I ask. “And the rebels are on the Darfur side against the government and the Janjaweed. So why are rebels attacking an African Union base?”

  “It’s a big mess,” Emily says. “The African Union troops are in over their heads, and sometimes they get freaked out. The UN’s sent peacekeepers too.”

  “Do peacekeepers carry guns?” I ask. “Ha.”

  “They kind of have to, in a war zone,” says Emily. “They look just like soldiers, except their helmets are blue. Baby-blue helmets and berets. They’re called Blue Berets.”

  “Because they’re on the side of the sky,” I say.

  “How come this stuff is never in the news?” Parker asks.

  The way he and Emily talk, you’d think American kids actually read the paper instead of skimming for the cell phone ads and sports scores.

  Emily, Ms. Model UN, says the Blue Berets are going to make all the difference, although I don’t know how you keep peace if there isn’t any to begin with. Forget the blue hats; the UN should give them blue suits with red capes like Superman.

  We joke around as Nawra describes Adeeba’s boyfriend. I love the way she teases Adeeba. Then Nawra drops the bomb.

  “Nawra’s going to have a baby?” I scream.

  “Calm down,” Emily says.

  “She’s younger than me!” Everybody on the lawn looks over at us.

  “Yikes,” Emily says. “Now Melissa and the Gossip Gaggle are going to spend all afternoon trying to figure out which freshman is Nawra.”

  Parker passes the letter to Emily. “Maybe you should read the next part,” he says.

  It gets scarier and scarier.

  “I hear women have a hard time giving birth because they’ve been circumcised,” Emily says.

  “What exactly does circumcised mean?” I ask. Emily turns to Parker.

  “I can only speak to that from a boy perspective,” he says, blushing. “And I’d rather not.”

  “Some people call it female genital mutilation,” Emily says. “You know, cutting out the clitoris. Some places they stitch the labia together.”

  I can’t even imagine. Human anatomy’s pretty funky even without messing with it.

  We all look down in our laps as Emily resumes reading. I think about Mrs. Clay and her People magazine and God never making a mouth and leaving it—only aren’t there a lot of hungry people in the world?

  “Who has a cell phone?” I ask.

  “What?” Emily says. “You can’t call Sudan.”

  “Cell phone,” I demand.

  Parker doesn’t have one, and Emily’s battery is dead. She has to pay by the minute anyway. I scan the bodies on the lawn. Where is Chloe when you need her iPhone? Finally I recognize some Hispanic girls from summer school, so I run over and ask if I can borrow a cell phone because this girl I know might be dying of childbirth in Darfur. They just look at me like I’m some Japanese tourist asking directions, so I pantomime with key words—“teléfono,” “emergencia”—and finally Florinda—easy name to remember because she spritzes herself all the time with flowery body splash in remedial math—digs into her purse and pulls out a Razr.

  “We speak English, you know,” she says.

  “I do too,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean anybody understands me.”

  Florinda laughs and hands me the phone.

  “Thank you, thank you. I’ll bring it right back,” I promise.

  “Hope your friend is okay,” Florinda says.

  “She was raped,” I say. The girls cringe. “And lots of her family were killed.” Florinda murmurs something about Dios and crosses herself. “She’s really brave. It’s just she’s living in this miserable IDP camp, and there’s nobody but her best friend to help deliver the baby. Later I’ll tell you—” I say, pointing to the phone, Emily, Dios in the sky.

  “Go,” Florinda says. “Make as many calls as you need. Tell you what”—she looks at her watch—“just meet me at the flagpole after dismissal.”

  As I run, I flip open the phone—one more reason Mom should let Dad replace mine, so I can dial 911 in an emergency. I’ll have to tell Nawra about 911. The magic number. She needs one.

  “What are you doing?” Emily asks.

  “Calling my 911,” I say.

  “K. C., don’t,” Parker says, so kind and patient, like I’m some lunatic about to jump off a skyscraper. “You can get in big trouble for false—”

  “Mom,” I explain.

  I hope she isn’t counseling some client about the importance of deodorant. Her temp agency places all kinds of people: inexperienced students, rusty moms, even some high-powered career switchers, but the flakiest ones they send to Mom. Three rings. How am I going to leave her a message when I don’t even know which number I’m calling from? But just before voice mail, she picks up.

  “Susan Frantz. How can I help you?”

  For just a second, I always think I’ve reached some stranger since around us Mom still goes by Cannelli. Once when the Mean Girls in my class were calling me Kooky instead of K. C., Mom told me that her classmates used to chant, “Susan Frantz, Susan Frantz, doesn’t have enough money for underpants.” Then she’d answer, “Money can’t buy you love,” which is the gospel according to the Beatles. Every generation has its Mean Girls.

  I tell her to pick me up and drive straight to D.C.

  “What?”

  I assure her I haven’t broken my leg, haven’t been sent to the principal, haven’t taken the cell phone off a dead classmate while some gunman rampages through WJLL.

  I tell her about Nawra’s baby. “We have to go to Save the Girls.”

  “Oh, K. C.,” she says. “Don’t you have math . . . now?”

  She really should be a teacher; she has bells in the back of her head. Everyone’s picking up and going inside—Parker’s gone. Mom promises to call Save the Girls and call me back at 1:20, after math, as long as I turn off the phone and pay attention in class.

  I do better on the first part than on the second.

  After math I step outside because we’re not allowed to take calls in school. Mom says a Save the Girls intern told her the director of overseas communication is traveling, but she’s due back next Monday. Monday! No way can I wait that long not knowing. Surely somebody knows something, or maybe we could track down this director lady at her hotel or something.
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  Mom tells me to calm down, go to my last class, and she’ll call me again.

  I update Emily and Parker in passing on my way to Spanish, which is a lost cause. I keep thinking about Nawra giving birth on that dusty plain in one of those scrappy little tepees.

  We all meet by the flagpole as the buses are loading. Florinda, too, but I hold up my finger, one minute more please, as her phone rings.

  Mom says she reached the deputy director of Save the Girls, who said the communications person is off trying to set up an operation in Afghanistan, which is another place hard on girls, but even if they could find her, she wouldn’t know about Nawra. No one will know until the field contact—that would be Saida Julie—returns to the camp. When a girl in the program dies, the field person slips a note into the envelope for the sponsor, who can pick up another girl if she wants because they never run out of girls in need—although they totally understand when a sponsor drops out after a death.

  Like they have this whole procedure!

  Mom says, “Brace yourself, K. C. Women and babies sometimes die in childbirth, even in the best hospitals.”

  “Nawra won’t. She hasn’t. I just know it.”

  “If Nawra were here, what might she say?”

  In my head I flip through Nawra’s letters. I wish and you wish, but God does his will. The buses are leaving, so I give Florinda her phone. Everybody touches me on the arm, their fingers little sponges soaking up my worry, so I feel a bit lighter.

  Surely God wants Nawra to live. But what if he’s having a bad day?

  Nawra

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  I dread the pains, not for what I feel in my body but for what I think in my head. I lose my hold on Big Zeinab’s voice and hear nothing but the wails of mourning in Umm Jamila.

  • • •

  After a time my mother came to Kareema’s hut with her needle. She washed me with water and stitched. I wept, but she did not say anything. She passed the needle through the fire and offered it to Kareema, who shook her head.

  “Stay with Kareema,” my mother said.

  Through the walls we listened to the comings and goings. Through the walls I heard my father return with my aunt and learned of my cousins who had died. Kareema and I lay down, but we slept little. I did not think of Kareema’s humiliation, the first wife, childless, and now dishonored. I thought only of my own, burning inside and out.