High School 2 - Diversity - The Clash

by Paul Swearingen

  Carla considered her computer skills. “Well, I can type, I took a class in Integrated Computer Applications, I can create a database …”

  “Okay! Sounds good so far. And you have a social security number?”

  “Sure do. Had that since I was a baby.”

  “Fine. Just don’t drool when you’re talking to the boss, and look him right in the eye. I think you’re in.”

  * * *

  The interview with the station manager lasted all of ten minutes; another ten minutes of paperwork, and she was employed at slightly above minimum wage. She spent the rest of the afternoon watching Bob cut commercials in the production studio and trying to remember his explanation of running the console, recording to a hard drive, mixing, levels, timing, and naming and filing each spot, or commercial, until her head spun.

  Suddenly, she looked at the clock above the double-paned window.

  “Oh, my god! I forgot about calling Pop! I think today’s his day to get off early.”

  “What time does he expect you home?”

  “An hour ago! He’ll kill me!”

  “I doubt it. I guess we’re done here. I can drop you off, I suppose, although in the future my schedule probably won’t fit yours; you probably need to get a bus schedule – there’s a stop just down the road from here, and I think the bus runs by the school.”

  “Okay, okay. Thank you. Let’s get outta here. Maybe if you just drop me off I can convince him that I was at the library studying …”

  “Har-de-har-har. The midget studies. That’s a new one.”

  “Very funny. Ha. Ha. Now, can we ple-e-e-ase go?”

  * * *

  She convinced Bob to drop her off a half-block from her house, and she ran down the sidewalk but stopped short and plodded the rest of the way when she caught sight of her father’s pickup parked in the driveway. The first thing that she heard as she walked through the front door of her house was her father’s voice.

  “Carla. I’m in the kitchen.” It was a command for her to appear.

  “Damn!” she muttered under her breath. “I really am dead meat now.” She tossed her backpack onto the living room couch and as slowly as possible stepped into the kitchen.

  “Carla, you’re late. And the school called. Seems as if they missed you first hour. And you were late to second. Or maybe you just hid behind some football player in the back of the room?”

  “Ha, ha.” Her father stood only a hand span taller than she, and she knew that short jokes were about both of them, not just her. “Pop, I had a little … conflict with someone, and I decided that avoiding him would be in my best interests today.”

  “I’m sure. And after school? You should have been here an hour ago.”

  “I was hiding out?” It was a joke, not a lie. “I’m sorry, but … Guess what, Pop? I got a job!”

  Her father gave her a long look. “Behind bars? Or out so far that they don’t have phones?”

  “No … nothing like that. Pop, I’m gonna be a radio announcer! I got a job at the radio station!”

  She expected him to yell at her. She even took a small step backwards in anticipation of a very negative reaction. But she wasn’t prepared for what came next. Slowly, his face crumpled, and he sagged against the counter first but then took a step forward and slowly put his arms around her.

  “Mija …” He hadn’t called her that since she was in kindergarten, when her mother had called her that, too.

  Carla leaned her head on his shoulder for a moment and then pulled away from him.

  “Pop. What’s wrong? Is it because I didn’t call? I’m sorry; I was so-o-o into watching Bob record commercials that I simply forgot what time it was.”

  Her father caught one of her hands and pulled her down into a kitchen chair and then sank into another one next to her.

  “No, daughter of mine. It’s not that. Although next time you get a hot-shot job … and we need to talk about that … you need to let me know where you are and what you are doing. I thought … well … I’ve been noticing that you haven’t been too happy lately, like you used to be when you were …” And he buried his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, Carla, I thought you might have run away.”

  She looked at him in astonishment. “Pop. That’s just not possible.”

  “Okay. Okay. But I guess I need to tell you something. About your mother.”

  She didn’t need a mirror to know that the expression on her face was something between simple shock and being whacked with a two-by-four across the bridge of her nose.

  “Wait. Just wait. Let me get something to drink. You want something, too?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  She pulled a tumbler out of the cabinet and poured it half full of RC Cola from the refrigerator and returned to her chair.

  “’K’. Now.” She took a short sip, plopped both elbows on the table, and leaned her chin on her hands in her best I’m-paying-attention pose.

  “All right. You probably didn’t know that your mother worked at KNTK for a short time. She was a secretary or something; wrote commercials, maybe. I never did know exactly what she did, but she was there for around three months. She worked only when you were at school, so you probably didn’t know about it.”

  Carla took a sip of RC and frowned. “I sort of remember my teacher asking me about it one day, now that you mention it.”

  “I suppose your teacher liked country music; the station played country music back then, too, so you and your friends didn’t listen to it then, either.”

  “Yeah, but the advertisers like it, and guess who’s paying for my salary, Pop?”

  He gave her a sharp look. “I told you we’d talk about that. Okay … now …” He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “Carla, it’s true that your mother left me, and we got a divorce. You’ve known that, right?”

  She nodded. This was getting much more intense than the interview with the station manager.

  “Well. One day a traveling Tejano band dropped by the station. You know, to promote their concert at Fiesta Mexicana in Chanute. I guess your mother was the one who wrote up the commercial for them, and she had to get information from the band members, and …”

  His eyes were on the edge of the table, and his voice dropped to a level so low that she had to lean forward to hear him. “I guess one thing led to another, pretty quickly.”

  He buried his face in his hands, and Carla thought she heard a soft sob. “Carla, your mother ran off with the lead singer in the band, and I never saw her again.”

  Chapter Six

  “Oh.” Really brilliant, she thought. Pop is in pain, and all you can come up with is a grunt.

  “I … you’re right. I didn’t know. I’m … sorry, Papi.” She hadn’t used that name for a long time, either.

  He straightened suddenly. “Yes. But it’s over; it was over a long time ago. And when you came flouncing in here with the wonderful news that you, too, were at that place, I suddenly went back about ten years. I guess I should have told you the whole story a long time ago.”

  Carla leaned back in her chair and tried to think about how she felt when her mother was no longer in the house. She recalled being left alone on weekends, although Alaina, who lived down the street, was often her babysitter after school. She remembered the smell of cigarettes left to burn in ashtrays more than anything else, along with her father snoring in the living room and later in the night, after she had put herself to bed, the sound of him stumbling along the hallway on the way to his bedroom. And then the next day always an empty bottle on the coffee table.

  “What happened between you and … my mother? I mean … what if …” She shook her head.

  “What if what?”

  “Okay, Pop. You know that you drank too much back then. And you worked two jobs. Still do.” She barely saw him weekdays; he was usually out the door at six in the morning to spend the early shift on the line at the candy factory, and then evenings from six until nine or so was for his jack
-of-all trades job at the grocery store, where he did everything from stocking shelves to sacking groceries to occasional deliveries.

  “Carla, when was the last time you saw me take a drink?”

  “I know, I know – I really don’t remember, but I’m not talking about now, Pop. I’m talking about then. Maybe she … just got tired of it all, you not being here, and out of it when you were here.”

  He slammed both hands on the table, and she jumped but stayed in her chair.

  “Now you sound just like … her. She was always nagging at me to do this and not do that, always trying to change me. Okay, maybe I worked too much and tried to relax the wrong way, but …” He waved a hand over his head. “At least we’re not living in a tent under a bridge.”

  “I know; I’m not trying to criticize you for anything, Pop. What was, is over. She reached across the table and touched his hand. “Pop, I’m not going to be like her. I’m not gonna leave you. And I’ll even be helping out with my job, right?”

  He sighed and picked up her hand and rubbed it absent-mindedly between his hands. “Look, I know I made some mistakes, and if I told you that you couldn’t take that job at the station, there would probably be another one. So here’s the deal. You work, but you keep your grades up. And you tell me when you’re working and when you’re supposed to be home and if you have a problem, I want to know about that, too. All right?”

  “Deal, Pop!”

  He nodded his head. “All right. First problem. Why did you skip today?”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but she knew that her father would probably stay at least one step ahead of her. The conversation between them after the last time she had skipped, which had been over two years ago when she was in the eighth grade, had lasted only a minute or so and resulted in her being grounded for a month.

  “Okay. Well, there’s these girls. One of them thinks that I’ve been trying to steal her boyfriend, although all I did was to let him give me a ride home after school when it was so cold last week.”

  “And …?”

  “And she and I had a disagreement in the cafeteria which Coach Greene sort of stopped, and that was that. Except I’ve been avoiding her since, and I almost ran into her in the parking lot alone this morning.” She tried to squeeze a tear from one eye but failed. Probably she ended up looking as if she had a nervous tic or something; undoubtedly a tear would have been much more effective than a tic any day, but oh well …

  “Okay, I get the picture. You don’t want to get into a fight with this girl. Right?”

  Carla looked down at her fists and imagined the right one planted in the middle of Miranda’s face. “Sure. That’s pretty much it, Pop. But I think I’ll be okay. I just need to get to school maybe five minutes earlier, when everyone is still around, and she’ll leave me alone.”

  “You want me to call a counselor? Your principal?”

  Jeez, and give Miranda another reason to pound on her? “No, Pop, I can handle this one. Me and my friends.” She tried to give him a convincing grin, but somehow shooting the same pearly-whites at her father wasn’t the same as at that substitute teacher, who probably never had anyone smile at him before in his short career.

  “All right. Let’s get this straight. You get into something you can’t handle – you tell ME first. All right?”

  She briefly considered her self-imposed status as a loner and a survivor and then put it aside. “Pinky swear.” They interlocked their little fingers.

  “Oh, Pop? You know it would have been more convenient for me to call you if I’d had a cell phone.”

  He pretended to stare her down. “And you could have called me a lot earlier on the phone at the station if you had paid attention and had been more responsible, right?”

  She nodded but didn’t answer. After a month or so on the job she might be able to afford a cell phone. And things went well with Pop, she might even be able to keep it.

  “All right, Pop. Things will be different around here from now on. I promise to be more responsible. Hey, I’m a working girl now. I gotta watch myself now. Keep those grades up. Right?”

  He nodded. “As if you’ve ever let them slip. That’s an easy one for you. But I tell you what; if you can afford to buy your own cell phone, and you have at least a “B” average when semester grades come out, you can get one. Deal?”

  She stared at him. This was going better than she had anticipated. “Deal, Pop.”

  Chapter Seven

  The weather had warmed slightly, and Carla actually felt invigorated by the fresh air as she walked along the sidewalk a few blocks from the school. She ran the memories of what her father had pulled from his “memory” chest last night and had shown her: a rebozo, or shawl, that had belonged to her mother and had been overlooked by her relatives when they showed up to collect her belongings after her sudden departure; an onyx ring, which he solemnly placed in her palm with a sigh; a packet of love letters tied up with a blue ribbon, which he didn’t remove and replaced in the chest; a wedding photo of both of them which he also replaced in the chest, and other artifacts from a terminated relationship including a manila envelope which contained somewhat faded representations of dancing skeletons.

  Her father said that the skeletons had been used during a past El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, celebration, and her mother had strung them around the house; in fact, it had been almost exactly twelve years ago to the week, he said. Carla dimly remembered the decorations and wasn’t frightened by them; they were all grinning and seemed happy to be skeletons. She didn’t really associate them with death when she was a pre-schooler, and now they were merely part of her past: faded paper nostalgia. She had stared for them for a few minutes and then had carefully laid them inside her history book, and now they were in her backpack on the way to school to be taped to her locker door.

  When her mother had left, her dual association with two cultures had diminished, and for years she had resented the fact that her mother had abandoned her. She never had known much about her mother’s family nor their Hispanic culture – no, Mexican culture – and now that her father had filled in some blanks for her, maybe it was high time that she got more in touch with her Hispanic heritage. November 1, which was the traditional Día de los Muertos, was just a few days away, and she knew Snooty Sandra and Frank were trying to raise money for something dealing with the holiday, although she didn’t know exactly what.

  Carla was careful to mingle with a group of students as they trooped noisily through the front door of the building, and she moved down the hallway and stood in front of her bare locker door. She took her history book and a tape dispenser out of her backpack, slipped the skeletons out of the book, and removed several pieces of tape, curled them into cylinders, and applied them carefully to the backs of the dancing skeletons and pressed them against the door. She stepped back, surveyed the door, stepped forward and detached one skeleton and moved it an inch lower. That would work.

  * * *

  She didn’t even notice the call slip being brought in, and she jumped a little when Mr. Brady dropped it onto her desk. She refocused her eyes: she was being summoned to the principal’s office. √ Immediately.

  She wasn’t even able to sit in the chair in front of the main office counter, as the secretary told her to walk right into the principal’s office. On top of the papers and forms that covered his desk were the dancing skeletons that she had pasted onto her locker.

  “Miss Cross, please sit down.” He motioned to an unpadded wooden chair in front of his desk, and he held up the paper skeletons and then dropped them onto the top of the pile on his desk.

  She sat. He glared at her and then the paper skeletons.

  “Just what does this mean, Miss Cross?”

  “You mean those …?”

  “Skeletons. Are you trying to make fun of someone or somebody? You know we had a freshman who died from leukemia just after school started, didn’t you?”

  Carla leaned back in her chai
r. “I think so, but those don’t have anything to do with any person.”

  “Explain.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. You know how Hispanic Club is trying to raise money? And the day after Halloween is El Día de los Muertos?”

  He shook his head. “I gave approval for the fundraiser for Hispanic Club, but I didn’t give my explicit approval for anyone to put up these … figures. You know the rules for Halloween – no costumes with masks, nothing that would scare smaller children when the grade schoolers parade through the halls on Halloween.”

  “Oh. Well, those skeletons are used in Mexico during the Day of the Dead …”

  “The … what?”

  “El Día de los Muertos. Day of the Dead. Same thing. They celebrate their ancestors. Who are dead, of course.” This wasn’t going very well. She realized that she didn’t know much of anything about the celebration other than the skeletons and skulls and other decorations used during the celebration. In fact, no one had ever really asked her much, if anything, about her Mexican heritage; she could not ever recall having to defend who she was.

  “Let me get this straight. You put up these paper skeletons, which would definitely scare the little ones?”

  Carla looked at the slightly-rumpled paper figures on his desk. They didn’t look at all scary to her. She nodded. “Anyone who’s Mexican or even … well, part Mexican knows about it. The kids in Mexico expect it. It’s a big deal down there, and they’d be really disappointed if they lost it. It’s almost as big as Christmas in some areas.” Some of the facts she remembered from a film, but she also remembered now her mother talking about El Día de los Muertos when she was little.

  The principal rubbed his jaws. “All right. I know nothing of this Mexican celebration, but until someone is able to tell me more, and ask for approval to celebrate it and hang things like these around, I think you’d better forget about the whole thing. Now – take them home. I don’t want to see them again. Understood?”

  It was a dismissal, and she stood. “Yes, sir.” She carefully removed them from his desk, squared them up, and turned to leave.