Always, at the end of some hodgepodge Christian-Hindu rite, we hovered toward each other for the finale kiss.
“She’s still my sister,” I tell him. And for a moment, I see, as clearly as I used to, the roiling sea of Henna’s face. Which is my own, a little lighter, just as open-and-shut. Eyes scrunched, lips puckered, expectation glistening on her tongue.
My parents waited till the morning of the final to give me my glasses, bulletproof squares I finally slipped on in some nameless park. Suddenly, the penguins plucking classical on the lawn turned into lean Jews cradling violas. The pointillist mist cleared into bow-tied judges and hatted mothers gliding under a striped tent.
Still, I could feel the weight of the sinking sun, and sweated into the darkest corner to stuff my mouth. All us immigrant kids had congregated—to slog down sparkling cider and gorge on chocolate-covered strawberries—and to watch the border of the tent. Dandelions and dogwoods had spilt gold all around us, on streets sizzling with summertime skirts, beneath cars blaring hip-hop poetics. Every block simmered with oye! amor, boiled over with dark bodies gleaming for beach, a resurrection we rushed out yearly to witness. Though this once, we couldn’t trespass past the white tent spikes. We were made up too nice, combed and suited.
Supposedly frothing to speak, to tell our stories for ten minutes on a wood podium.
Three of us were left: the Jamaican spider boy, me the African princess Indian, and then there was Cassandra. Cassandra Pashupati, an Energizer bunny of a twelve-year-old who’d won the city title two years straight. Like her namesake, this high-class storyteller was a hard-to-believe legend. Despite her melodramatic gesturing, her tic that made her push up her glasses, her choked sobs when some other story pushed hers to second, she’d always pulled through to the final. Her story alone won in the end. No wonder we worried—until, of course, we met the Blessed One herself—and then we were paralyzed. With fear. With awe. With envy.
When she entered the tent, dressed in a flouncy white dress that was almost a Sunday school outfit, it was like running into my stunt double. My better twin. Not only was Cassandra Indian, she was more put together, more confident than I’d ever be. Flashes went off as she trotted, her better side angled to the audience, to her front row seat, a posse of mother-father-sisters-male cousins-galore trailing her. She patted her slick black bob, X-ray scoped me and the Jamaican, licked one forefinger before flicking each page of “Thumbelina.” Already, I could hear my mother if she won. You should’ve practiced more. Why didn’t you act it out? Don’t you know what charm means?
But if someone had asked me, I would’ve said, I liked my understated, precise manners. Cassandra was a parody like, say, Dolly Parton. Someone might’ve said, but you love Dolly, and Cassandra seduces her audience, even reluctant little you. And I’d admit: when Cassandra marched up front, clasped her hands behind her back—FLASH—turned on like a high-voltage billboard in Times Square, I paid attention. To her toothy grin, wide fluttering eyes, swiveling head that met every face in the room. You! Yeah, I’m telling this story to you! But I would’ve added: her voice, somewhere between a bird’s rich trill and a tree frog’s plaintive croak, sounded forced to me. As if she too were storytelling for her life.
I’ll admit also: I could’ve beat Cassandra, who stuttered twice, mixed the toad and the mole, called Thumbelina “Tumble-ina.” Hell, she read the story of a homeless girl, bandied between animals who tried to marry her, as if orphanhood were bursting with positive energy. But I knew where the poetry lay: in Thumbelina’s silences, the broken-winged swallow she tended in secret, the strangers who helped her as she floated through landscapes, looking for home. I could’ve even beat the Jamaican, who read as perfectly as a robot, the life spooked out of him by the crowd. Not a single laugh for all those great trickster lines.
But I lost. From stage, I crystal-balled a dozen blemishes on a hundred faces, my parents’ coal eyes and Mrs. Chapman’s whitened smile looming up front. Could they see me as I saw them? All those afternoons, I had read fairy tales, I had not noticed the red rims of my father’s eyes, the sag of my mother’s pretty cheeks, the way my teacher’s left hand clutched her throat, as if she too wanted to speak but couldn’t. Instead of asking what had led them to their expressions, under this tent, I had memorized a royal savannah that belonged to no one I knew.
A judge thumped his pencil, but I looked past his back row to the street beyond the tent. Beyond its row of twelve saplings, to the silhouette of road against brick against gloaming sky, a cobweb more vast and complicated than any Anansi might spin. I did not know what to call these roads that had led to this gussied-up park, but I saw how they ran past the tallest buildings, round the dingiest lots, spiking right into the red sun before it blazed out. I guessed at all the suns these roads would cross on the way to how many towns, and what strange moons they, like Manyara, would witness. All I had to do, to name streets that had always run by me, was walk them.
But first business first, I made up a story right there and then. The Fabulous Sequel to Thumbelina, I said. Her Adventures Part II. I don’t remember what the hell I babbled, just the sounds as I stared at those faraway streets: people flipping through programs that gave a different title, the Jamaican’s name, Robert Jewles, when he won, my parents hissing at each other in the car, and Mrs. Chapman, who was quiet in the backseat, holding me, her heart going pitpatpit into my face.
“Tonight’s gonna be fun!” Brook cries, running out in her punk rock chick undies while I set a bag of old books down in Aster’s kitchen. It’s a play-date once Aster leaves, me cutting up Brook’s salmon, munching seaweed she feeds me, rubbing her down with lavender oil. Then the ritual: spooning under a quilt embroidered with her Indian name, Shakti, reading into her ear the way my mother read into mine. How Nyasha and Manyara vied for a prince, how the Wawalak sisters were reborn from a serpent, how Grimm sisters were doomed to spill things whenever they spoke. One sister, flowers, and the other, frogs.
“I like frogs,” Brook says, squirming round to assess me with her brown button eyes. “Do you?”
“I don’t know if I like them more than flowers,” I say.
“Under water,” she says, “they look like jewelry.”
She wants Thumbelina last, insisting the pipsqueak travel to stranger lands, visit weirder critters, hide in more exotic orchids. For every detail I miss, she claps my mouth—”You forgot!”—till she drools off in her curls, and Aster eases into the bedroom to find my mouth clamped.
“False labor,” she laughs, rubber-banding thyme and sage into my purse. When I ask about her on-and-off dates with her off-the-rocker husband, she folds her hands. “I suddenly realized. My daughter is my true love.”
Is this true, I wonder as I bike about Aster’s woodsy grounds, about mothers pushing daughters on swings, fathers catching sons off monkey bars, geese waddling after each other across grass. And I hear Brook’s question, “Where’s the Momma?” for every story that had none. Immaculate male conception, I wanted to tell the midwife’s kid, but what do I know of life’s miracle passages? Why my Tibetan friend points to the gap in her seven-year-old’s grin and jokes, The Gate of India. Why my Assamese friend named her son Neela Kantha, after a god who, having drunk poison, got a blue throat but wouldn’t die. Why my Kannada friend, a widow who calls her baby and dog her traveling circus, taught them stop, good girl, I want.
Or why my mother called this week, to ask about colors neither of us really see. She and my father are draping silk about the pillars of the altar, since Henna wants a royal look. When I say I hadn’t heard but like purple, she cries softly, as if afraid someone might hear her.
“What happened?” she says.
“I couldn’t answer that,” I say, and she sobs. In hiccups, the way I do, nostrils probably pinched, the way mine get.
“This is a house of khong,” she says, slipping into Oxomiya the way I will, when I weep behind knolls. Nights she cannot sleep, she says, she watches videos of Henna and me. Dancing, singing,
sparring. My face flushes but I say nothing, and my mother switches to other things. How many times the altar fell, leaning too far left, too far right, how they found it in shambles each morning.
“Aji thakise. Finally,” she says. “You know your Deeta. He doesn’t give up.”
I call my father as I yank up shriveled herbs, flowers, sticks. But his phone rings without end—he still can’t set up a voice box—so I measure the broken fence encircling my upturned soil. When I’d first stepped through, I’d planned to set the jagged rails straight, buy a latch for the ghetto string. I’d learn all this when my father visited, so no matter where I lived, I’d be safe. But my folks came once the first year, and hid from sun in my bedroom, then spent this year erecting planks in their living room. Marking each sturdy post with numbers and arrows, a blueprint for the first house my sister and her husband will stand in.
My phone rings just as owls rustle onto my lone lemon tree. Moon-faced creatures with startling eyes that see sideways, they’ve nested outside my window. Dozing, peering, blinking until night, when they hunt. Whoo, whoo, they call as my phone trills on—I haven’t set up a voice box either—and I imagine my father. Scarfed, pressing against wind that slows him down Lydig, where he walks daily to outrun his fate. I imagine the question he’ll toss, the words I’ll toss back. If I come, where will I stay?
My parents almost killed each other my storytelling night. To be less melodramatic, they crashed dishes into the sink. Ripped curtains off the racks. Flashed the very things they said belonged to low-class people: knives, scissors, broken glass. All the things I was supposed to stay away from because I was better than that. How were we royalty when we didn’t even act middle-class? Or was this it, the fantabulous American Dream?
“Because of you,” my father said, “she lost. You didn’t practice with her. You let that other woman do your work.”
“I’m on Zerega Avenue with you 24/7,” my mother cried. “Should I cut myself in half? Take this! Cut me in half! Then everyone can have a piece!”
“Crazy,” my father muttered. “Your family is crazy, you’re crazy, and now she’s turning crazy too. You spoil everything!”
“The only thing I spoiled was my life,” my mother said, “the day I married you! And now she’s turning out daughter-like-father! Spoiling my life again!”
I ran—out-out-out onto those faraway streets. Maybe, I thought, as I passed the synagogue, the hospital, the intersection where police lights swirled, I was a coward. I’d left my parents to that house, faces swollen red behind the rails, mouthing the words, Nirmali, where are you going? Maybe, I thought as I stalked the parkway flitting with leafy shadows, I was Manyara. I’d forsaken my family to find comfort in darkness, unguided. Or, I thought as I crossed the overpass of straggling cars, teenage boys on mini-bikes, I was Thumbelina. An anomaly from birth, doomed to roam without a people.
Whatever I was, I didn’t know where I was going—until one familiar street, then another, and another, turned onto Zerega. Before the house my father built.
The full moon lit Zerega into a haunted mansion, something out of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Poe, another Bronx storyteller who’d wandered these streets. This street too was dead, cars sugared and concrete frosted before black-icicled houses. I wondered if behind screen doors, children cried; if in shaded rooms, parents fucked in recompense; if families sat to dinner like ghosts, clamoring over marrow that was their own, licking wounds invisible to each other.
But I knew the secrets to just one house, so I crawled through the basement window I’d left ajar. The afternoon before this sudden snow, I’d been watching our Jamaican neighbors, a cellist and a trumpeter with a little boy and a littler girl always dressed in plaid, the picture of refinement sipping hot cocoa around their patio table. Centering the table was a pot of geraniums that bloomed blood all winter—magic, I thought as I tumbled through the window onto the dune-molded floor. But no magic in our deserted house—just the skeleton of drip-drop pipes along the peeling walls, and that nonchalant moon, wiggling its way up the whiny stairs to the done-and-redone living room.
Those mirror walls: silver, prismatic, perfect.
I was a shadow in all three walls, all nine panels.
Too perfect.
I couldn’t bear the flashy beauty of this room, its obsession with image, how no matter where I turned, I couldn’t hide from myself. For Chrissake, mirrors were supposed to go on closet doors, walls were supposed to be bare. White. Plain. But no—of course my parents liked the gaudy look of money, of course they kept walls that might crash down and kill us, of course they wanted customers to notice not the patchwork house but their pristine reflection in it.
Well, that wasn’t what I wanted.
My mother had left the toolbox by the entrance, and I picked out the wrench.
A heavy red thing, as long as my calf, with a serrated iron mouth, and when I swung it up like a bat, I was the goddess Kali the moment before the world ends.
SMASH—a spider grew across the right wall, first panel—CRUNCHCRUNCH—glass sprinkled down in huge triangles, jagged flakes—PING-SCREECH—I dragged lines across the unscarred mirrors—KAPOW—I banged into each wall, giving every panel its due, liberation from this prison.
And then—with glass falling like pieces from a puzzle, into my sweater, my scalp, my eyes that were no good—I sank into the middle of that empty room. I knew who I was. I was the ghost trapped in the other house, and even here among the glass, no one heard me. I sobbed like an animal, shrill at the moon. Then I wept in a low, soft tune punctuated by hiccups. At last, I went mute, simply waiting for dawn, rubbing the glass I’d loosened in sparkles on my skin, rubbing it all slowly in.
Sugar, Smoke, Song
SUGAR
After our Woodland spat, Yusuf disappears for three days. Anita, my South Indian roomie who dates nerdy Europeans, says, “Give it time. He’s not a bad guy.” Which is the phrase that got me back in Davis moping rather than in the Indian casino gambling.
Yusuf had stridden in as usual that afternoon, wearing his caramel leather jacket and plopping on our couch, but this time, he suggests driving through Woodland. When I ask why, he says, “Because it’s finally raining. Because we always stay inside. Because you’ve never been, have you?”
First clue: he’s smoking again, a habit he said he’d kicked, along with gambling and drinking and Zuleikha. But like a dope, I drive exactly where he wants me to. Up the county road, between sheep farms and olive groves, the hair on trees swishing down droplets, the sun flaming down ahead of us. I’m squinting so hard and driving by feel, while Yusuf goes on about how he used to drive up here almost daily.
“I’d be here all night sometimes, then go straight to work.”
He’s already on edge, dragging on the cigarette, but I ask, “I don’t get it. What’s the draw?”
He frowns at the sun. “The chance of beating the house.”
“Wow,” I say. “You are bad.”
“How,” he says, tossing the cigarette, “can you say that?”
“I meant, you’ve done some risky things.”
Yusuf’s voice crescendos. “Risky? Bad? Dangerous? You know that’s what black men get called! I’ve never touched a joint to this day and I have to worry a hundred times more than coked up white boys about getting hounded by the cops.”
I pull over by some ranch-style house on some winding side road and squeeze the wheel. “Please stop. You’re scaring me. I hate arguing in the car.”
Evil, he says, is when a regime locks up your father because he’s a socialist. Evil is when you have to leave home at thirteen and learn that n—— is America’s nickname for you. Evil is when you have to keep your voice down when your girlfriend’s folks call or leave the apartment when they visit. Because you’re not the same religion, you’re not the right color.
I slap the dashboard and Yusuf jumps. “Stop talking to me like I’m some white girl. Don’t ever pull that shit on me!”
I’m clicking open the door and he grabs my wrists. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
I hurl the keys at the backseat and say, “Go to hell or the casino or wherever the fuck you want with my car.”
I sprint down the side alley, sobbing in Assamese: how I’ve ended up running down another strange road; how I haven’t seen my folks in a year, haven’t talked to my sister in four, and what does someone with a hundred siblings and aunts and uncles know about losing family; how I’m always the one who has to shut up and listen. I don’t know if it’s the slanting fence over some random lot of dead grass that catches me, but I lean over and feel how far I am from anything like home, despite all my maneuvers, all my bets. I stay angling like that toward the melting sun, the raucous birds, the inevitability of nowhere-else-to-go until I’m breathing normally, my sniffling’s stopped, and I begin to regret stranding Yusuf. As I walk slowly back, I think, What if he’s left with my car? What if something’s happened to him? How will each of us get out?
Yusuf is stalking back and forth before the car, yelling on the phone. I imagine it’s Tariq because he’s talking half in English, half in Amharic. “Yeah man, she just left me out here! In the middle of redneck Woodland!” When he sees me, he slams the phone shut and climbs into the driver’s seat.
“Give me the keys.” He extends his hand without glancing at me. “I would’ve left if I could’ve found them but you hid them real well right before you jumped.”
I cover my face with my palms as I sob against the pane, and Yusuf glowers straight ahead as he drives the county road, tar against indigo sky.
Only when he pulls over at a gas station does he reach out his hand.
“I hate the silent treatment,” I say. “I’m not gonna pay for shit if you don’t talk!”
“So you gonna leave now?” he says. “You don’t like it when I talk, you don’t like it when I don’t talk. Then you strand a brother in the middle of this racist-ass place. Nobody I know would pull a stunt like that. You know what it feels like for me to come out here?”
Sugar, Smoke, Song Page 13
