How to Find What You're Not Looking For

by Veera Hiranandani

  “When are the auditions?” you ask, not answering her question, because other than the color of her hair, she looks nothing like Elizabeth Taylor. Jane has so many freckles, they cover her face in patches. Her thin dark hair that her mother cuts in a short bob hangs close to her chin. Through the picture, Elizabeth Taylor stares at you with her piercing eyes, straight teeth, and perfect red lips. Ma once told you that Elizabeth Taylor is the most beautiful woman in the world. You wonder how one woman could be the most beautiful. Aren’t there different kinds of beautiful?

  “Next week. Audition with me. Please, oh please,” Jane says. She puts her magazine on her lap and turns toward you. She grabs your arms and squeezes them, giving you a little shake.

  She can squeeze all she wants. That will never happen. You shake your head.

  “Not on my life,” you say and mean it.

  “Scaredy cat,” she says and drops her grip on you.

  “I’ll go with you and watch,” you say. This seems to calm her down. She turns back to her magazine, and you take out your notebook and open it carefully, hoping Jane doesn’t ask you what you’re doing. You look at your poem and count the lines in your head. Thirteen. It’s the longest thing you’ve ever written.

  When you see Miss Field in class, you notice she’s wearing the same long earrings, but she doesn’t start with poetry today. She starts with boring old spelling. She writes words and definitions on the chalkboard for everyone to copy.

  After she’s finished writing on the board, she walks over to you and watches you write. You stop and look at her. She smiles. You smile back but don’t start writing again until she leaves. She doesn’t watch anyone else write the way she just watched you. She’s figuring it out, like every teacher does, that something is wrong.

  Just before lunch she asks you to stay behind for a minute. You take in a deep breath and put your things in your desk. She’s probably going to give you those handwriting worksheets as extra homework. All your teachers make you do them.

  “Did you write any more of that wonderful poem?” she asks and tilts her head to the side.

  “No,” you say, and your face gets warm. It always does that.

  “Okay, well, maybe another time. I got the sense that you didn’t finish.”

  You nod.

  “I wanted to ask you about your handwriting,” she says.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s very bad,” you say and drop your eyes to your feet.

  “Ariel,” she says, taking her glasses off. “You don’t have to apologize. Has it always been hard for you?”

  “Yes,” you say and look up again.

  “Has anything helped?” She looks at you carefully.

  All those handwriting worksheets you’ve done, both print and cursive, over and over and over. It doesn’t seem to matter how much you practice, though. Thinking of words, of sentences, of writing them down never gets any easier. “Not really.”

  “Did you like writing that poem?”

  “Yes.” You did like writing it, the way it focused your thoughts, the way it got some of your feelings out. You think of all thirteen lines sitting in your notebook, and your back gets a little straighter. You could take it out and show Miss Field, but you don’t. Not yet.

  “I like writing poems, too. How would you like to write another one? Just like you did before, as short as you want.”

  You just nod again. Why is she telling you all this?

  “I’m going to have everyone write more poetry, not just you. But I think you have something to say.”

  “I guess so,” you reply. Doesn’t everyone have something to say?

  “I’m glad we talked.”

  “Okay,” you say because you’re not sure if you’re glad. You feel sort of excited and embarrassed and confused.

  When you get to the cafeteria, the noise hits you like a gust of wind. Too much noise makes you feel like a thousand people are screaming at once. Ma says you’re too sensitive.

  Scanning the room, you find Jane sitting with some of the girls in her class. You start walking toward her table, but she doesn’t look up, which makes you angry. You feel like she knows you’re there but is pretending not to see you.

  Then you see some of the girls in your class, but you aren’t really friends with any of them. You sit at the end of their table anyway, a little separate from everyone else, and eat your PB&J. The girls ignore you.

  You used to be friends with more of them, but as everyone got older, they treated you differently. Maybe it’s because you’re the only Jewish girl in the sixth grade. Or maybe it’s because people think the way you write is weird. Or maybe it’s because you keep your hair short and you don’t like to paint your nails or wear dresses or makeup. It makes you wonder if there’s just one way of being a girl and if you’re doing it wrong.

  After you’re back home, watching the news because it’s the only thing on just before dinner, you notice you don’t see Ma in the kitchen. She’s not doing her crosswords at the table, either. The silence feels strange. You check in your parents’ room, but she’s not there. Then you go in your room, and you see her sitting on Leah’s bed. Her back is toward you. She sniffs, and her shoulders shake. It reminds you of Leah the last night she was here, when you spied on her talking to Raj and she was crying.

  “Ma?” you say.

  She jumps and turns around. She takes the tissue she always carries in her skirt pocket and dabs her eyes. “Oh, you startled me.”

  “What’s wrong?” you ask her. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. Just like Leah, Ma hardly ever cries.

  “It’s her birthday tomorrow,” she says. “It’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow, and I don’t even know how she is or what her life is like.” She’s holding Leah’s letter, even though you know she’s read it many times.

  “She’s with Raj, Ma. She’s okay.”

  “No, no, don’t say his name.”

  On the day Leah left, she put a note on Ma and Daddy’s bed, explaining her plan to marry Raj and live with him in New York City. Then Leah sent another letter a few weeks later in August. It said they got married at City Hall and were living in Manhattan. She said Raj was working at a record store in the city and going to graduate school at New York University.

  She said she didn’t want to go to college just yet and was teaching a dance class and auditioning for dance companies. She wrote that she was eighteen and in love and had to think about her own life. She also said she would only visit if Ma and Daddy wrote back and accepted Raj as her husband, that even the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriages were legal everywhere and why should her own parents feel any different?

  Ma keeps the letter in her night table drawer, and you don’t know where the envelope went. You’ve snuck into your parents’ room to read the letter many times. Each time you read it, you hope you might have missed something, like the part where Leah tells you she’s sorry she left you all alone. Or where she remembers how good you were at keeping her secret. Or explains why she didn’t include a message just for you, her special sister. The answer isn’t something you like to think about, because it hurts like a big bruise. Leah simply doesn’t love you the way you love her. What other answer could there be?

  Ma turns to you. “Promise you won’t leave me,” she says, her eyes still red. She never talks to you like this.

  “I promise, Ma,” you say. You don’t think you’re going to college, and who would marry you? You’ll probably live here with Ma and Daddy and make cookies at Gertie’s forever.

  After Leah left, Ma told you that because Leah married someone who isn’t Jewish, she can’t be part of the family anymore; it was their duty as Jewish parents to reject her decision, Ma explained. She said it was very painful, but it wasn’t just about her and Daddy or Leah and Raj. It had to do with what her parents and Daddy’s parents went through; with the Hol
ocaust and the history of religious persecution that Jews will always have to carry. She said you would understand these things when you were older, but you weren’t sure you wanted to.

  It made you think of the play Fiddler on the Roof. Ma and Daddy took you and Leah into the city to see it on Broadway two years ago. Your parents were so excited. Your mother said she never thought she’d see a story about her own people on Broadway. They even bought the soundtrack. Your father still sings “If I Were a Rich Man” when he’s frosting cakes at the bakery.

  You remember thinking when you saw the play that the family—a Jewish family in Russia from many years ago—seemed so different from yours. In it, Tevye, the father, says he won’t speak to his daughter Chava anymore because she’s married a non-Jew. You remember how painful it seemed for Tevye but that he felt like he was doing the right thing. Chava was marrying someone who was not only not Jewish, but part of the Russian community who wanted all the Jewish people out of the village, who hated them, who might kill them if they didn’t leave.

  It made sense to you that Tevye wouldn’t want his daughter to marry someone who was part of a group who hated his family. Yet the couple got married anyway. Chava said that her husband didn’t agree with his people, that he was different. But maybe their marriage was a good thing, a small act of love in the middle of all that hate?

  Except Raj isn’t part of a group who hates you. Your family isn’t even that religious. You don’t observe the Sabbath. Sometimes you drive down to Brooklyn for the Jewish holidays, and sometimes you don’t. It feels like Ma and Daddy are figuring out the rules as they go, so why is this rule so important to them?

  You want to know the right answer, to find it sitting in the palm of your hand as sure as a new penny.

  “You’re a good girl,” Ma says and holds out her hand for you to take it. You get a prickly feeling all over. Ma has never called you a good girl before. You don’t know whether you’re scared or happy. You take Ma’s hand; it’s a little cold and damp. You wonder if this means Leah is now a bad girl. It used to be the opposite. You get to be the good girl, but only if Leah isn’t here.

  If Leah returns, you’ll move back into second place. For a moment you imagine what that would be like, being Ma’s favorite. The thought makes you feel guilty, as if you’re taking something from Leah. Ma stands up, smoothing Leah’s bedspread.

  “I’m going to put in the chicken,” she tells you and leaves for the kitchen.

  Maybe you do have something to say. You sit down at your desk and start a new poem.

  The Rules

  There are so many rules.

  But people break them

  all the time.

  Sometimes they get punished,

  and sometimes they don’t.

  But how do you know

  which rules are worth breaking?

  And which ones you have to follow

  even if they break you?

  How to Mind Your Own Business

  You sit in the theater with all the other kids auditioning, but you’re just there to watch. The theater is dark except for the bright stage lights. It smells like wood and dust. You love sinking back into the shadows.

  If you could pick one superpower, you would choose to be invisible. You could spy on any conversation you wanted to. There’s just so much more you’d like to know, so many more secrets than you thought. The funny thing is that in real life, feeling invisible isn’t the same as being able to turn yourself invisible. It’s the opposite of a superpower.

  You scrunch down in your seat, resting your head back, and wonder what Leah’s doing on her birthday today. Would Raj get her a cake? Would they have a party? In a theater, you can’t not think about Leah. You’ve seen her onstage so many times.

  Today, everyone seems a little nervous before they start singing, even the best kids. Leah never looked anxious during her dance performances, but she always got nervous on the way in the car. She’d sit silently with her hair scraped back into a tight bun and tap her foot, her knee bouncing up and down.

  Daddy would get talkative and start telling all sorts of random stories because he didn’t like quiet in the car, but Leah would tune him out. When he’d ask her a question, she wouldn’t answer, and Ma would put a hand on his arm to let it go.

  You once asked Leah what she thought about before she performed. “I only think about who I’m supposed to be in the dance, like I’m in a storybook, not the real world. Then it feels easier,” she said. You wonder if that’s how she felt about marrying Raj.

  Finally, it’s Jane’s turn. She stands on the stage, looking very small, the lights making her eyes squint. She clears her throat, tucks her hair behind her ears, and begins. She sings the song “An English Teacher” from Bye Bye Birdie. She sings loud and strong, not high and wispy like many of the other girls. Her voice fills the theater. Everyone sits up straight and claps hard when she’s done. You wish that a good stage voice would matter most, but in the school plays you’ve seen, the prettiest and most popular girls usually get the best parts.

  “What did you think?” Jane asks as you walk the long walk home since the bus has come and gone. “Tell me the truth.”

  You look at Jane, her nose pink from the sun, her brown freckles reminding you of the topping on the crumb cake at the bakery. “You were the best one,” you tell her.

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t lie about that,” you say.

  Jane glows, and you feel light in your shoes, like you’ve just handed her a shiny gift. Then she frowns. “But I’ll probably get a chorus part like I always do.”

  “It’s all about popularity,” you say.

  Jane touches her hair and smooths it down close to her head. “Will it always be about that? For the rest of our lives?”

  You’re quiet for a minute. You think of Leah in a way you’ve never thought about her before. She’s inventing her own life, doing something completely unexpected. In high school, she was one of those pretty, popular girls who got the good parts. Nobody teased her about being Jewish, at least not that she mentioned. It seemed like she barely even noticed how lucky she was, or she didn’t care. But then you shake her out of your head because if you think about Leah too long, your throat starts to hurt and you have to stop before you cry.

  “Maybe only if you follow the rules,” you say.

  Jane’s smile returns. “Yes, I think you’re right. I’m giving up rules!” she says. She links arms with you, and you both skip the rest of the way home, Jane belting “An English Teacher.” You join her because nobody but Jane is listening. The wind blows your hair around, and you imagine both of you skipping faster, lifting off the ground, taking flight.

  The next day in class, Miss Field says you’re going to spend every Wednesday, as part of social studies, discussing the news.

  “So for our current events unit, once a week, five people will present a chosen headline. I’ll pass out a sign-up sheet,” she says.

  Your heart sinks. You don’t want to stand up in front of the class like Walter Cronkite and present anything because that will mean outlines and showing neatly drawn posters to the whole class—things you’re awful at. If only you could just talk about what you think. It makes sense when it’s in your head, but when you have to put it down on paper, your ideas get all mixed up.

  You do like that Miss Field wants to talk about the news. Last year in social studies, it was always about the past. Your teacher, Mrs. Thomas, would write lots of names and dates on the chalkboard, and you were supposed to memorize them for her weekly quizzes.

  It’s always been hard for you to remember facts that aren’t attached to anything else. They feel like falling leaves. You see them for a little bit, but suddenly a gust of wind takes them away and the new ones that fall look exactly the same.

  Current events are easier because they are all aroun
d you. They are alive. They are stories you hear on TV and on the radio or read about in the newspaper, stories that Ma and Daddy discuss in the kitchen. They think you don’t pay attention, but you listen even more now because of all the things you heard Leah and Raj talk about. It’s as if the world is dying and being born at the same time.

  Miss Field starts writing a timeline on the chalkboard. She’s reviewing major events that happened over the summer. She writes down some topics: The Vietnam War. The protests and riots happening all over the country. The boxer Muhammad Ali sent to jail for not going to Vietnam. The Beatles’ release of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. Thurgood Marshall being appointed as the first Black justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia ruling.

  She keeps going. You can’t believe how many things have happened in just one summer, but the Loving v. Virginia ruling makes you think of Leah again.

  After Leah wrote about the Supreme Court ruling in her letter, you went and looked it up on microfiche in the library and found out all about Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a Black woman who lived in Virginia and got married even though it was against the law. They were even sentenced to prison. Eventually a lawyer helped them fight their case, but it took many years.

  You think about how it’s funny that it’s called the Loving ruling, because it is about love, but it’s also named after them. They had to move out of Virginia for a long time, away from their families, so they wouldn’t be arrested. This past June, the Supreme Court finally ruled that no state could make laws against interracial marriage anywhere in this country. You remember the way Leah showed Ma the newspaper when it was announced in June and the way she cut out the article and stuck it on the edge of her mirror, right next to her picture of Paul Newman.

  “First,” Miss Field says, “you’ll choose a topic here to review for us. Then we’ll move on to weekly headlines.”