Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  Now her rising sense of coming back to life matched with her father’s support for her long journey and with Peter and Rebecca’s gentle, firm and unrelenting support as her surrogate family. It all began to sink in, with the result that more and more time was spent with Zubaida as the girl they knew and were growing to love, and less time with her spontaneous displays of anger or aloofness.

  For Zubaida, the main change in her behavior was that even though she still had no answer to the haunting question of whether or not the fire had burned away her ability to control her thoughts and her behavior; the question itself simply stopped popping up in her head so much. Most of the time, she was too busy with school and a mix of after-school activities to remember the question at all. Whatever squabbles she got into with the other girls, they were typical of their age and background, so that no one seemed to feel any concern about it. Broken friendships re-formed within days, and she began to reply more heavily upon the telephone to keep her in after-hours touch with the other girls, wrapped up as they were in the daily drama of why Amber was so mean to Tiffany out on the playground that day.

  Her language was still awkward, verb conjugation was hit or miss, but her learning didn’t proceed on an even line. She spent more time talking with the other girls than she did in class itself, so that her growth in certain areas often leaped ahead of the rest of her progress. Even though she still stumbled over when to use “I” and when to use “me,” she was already mastering a rapidly growing command of special Southern Californian English via her peer group.

  Her existing mastery was already strong over the range of interpretation that can be given to a certain word through pronunciation. She quickly absorbed the considerable knowledge required to pronounce the word yeah in the appropriate tone of voice, and to employ its conversationally powerful nuances across a range of agreements whose intensity could be adjusted from cautiously affirmative to wildly enthusiastic.

  Most powerfully, she learned to use the proper tones of yeah for personal commentary, satirical mockery of an agreement that not only negated the opposite opinion but simultaneously discouraged any prospective opponent from wanting to appear so thick in the skull and slow in the wits that he/she would even pursue an argument in the first place.

  Throughout the experience of her life, Zubaida had only known herself as a dominant personality. Except for the time she spent imprisoned in the scar jacket, she had always gravitated toward ways of influencing current events among the group. Now, with mastery of the Southern Californian American English yeah, Zubaida was able to snuggle in a little tighter with her circle of local girls. According to her established nature and without requiring any real planning on her part, she began to take a leadership role among them. The change wasn’t dramatic. It was just that more and more often, the girls got together to do any given activity because Zubaida seemed convinced that it was a good idea.

  The next major step occurred quietly enough, during that same holiday season. Peter Grossman later said that while he couldn’t recall the exact time that it took place, he would never forget the sensations that washed through him the first time that Zubaida spontaneously switched from calling him Peter to calling him “Dad.” Little hairs stood up at the base of his neck while a smile inched its way across his face. He watched her for some change of expression, or of any other acknowledgement that she realized what she had said, but Zubaida just went right on chattering as if nothing had happened.

  That didn’t answer the question for him, though. He knew that she tended to play her way through any emotionally charged situation with a poker face. Only afterward did she seem to process her feelings about whatever went on, and only then did she form her response—if she made one at all. Peter couldn’t tell at that moment whether her fear of a potential rejection from him prevented her from acknowledging it, or whether “Dad” just slipped out in some unconscious way, but he appreciated that the small shift in her name for him revealed a tremendous deepening of her personal trust, far beyond the medical trust that she otherwise had to place in him.

  Peter felt the weight of that, and it hit him at a level that he could never have predicted back when he first saw her terrible medical photos and agreed to help her. However, he had learned from experience that to push her about any emotional topic usually resulted in getting back a silent and sullen response. She seemed to do best when she could sort things out at her own pace and then work up her confidence in a response. That particular coping mechanism was far more likely to be effective in a society which operates at the pace of her small desert village. But the saturated sensations of an ordinary day in affluent America can stimulate more nerve endings than a month of her life was spent at home.

  Peter considered her proud way of carrying herself and her sometimes haughty behavior as being components of her emotional mask, thicker than her scars. When the pressure on her became too much after days or hours or sometimes only minutes of forcing a nonchalant attitude, something had to go. The occasional outbursts that detonated inside of her with no apparent cause may have simply revealed her survival instinct in action, dumping another overflow of accumulated emotions.

  So on the day that she called him “Dad” for the first time, he focused on the challenge of following her rambling conversation through a thicket of grammar breaks and mispronunciations—and let the rest of it pass by. The moment was just too nice to jeopardize by pushing it.

  Even though Zubaida was still a nine year-old when her outdoor life effectively ended, she had already become familiar with the ways of the public marketplace. She grasped the entire process of bargaining for the best price and bringing home something to show for your efforts at the end of the day. Of necessity, the primary rules are always the same for every tribe who gathers at every town bazaar or roving outdoor marketplace.

  No one is trusted. It makes no difference if you have seen them before, it makes no difference if you have had good dealings with them before, it makes no difference if you know their name and their cousin’s name and you have helped them to clean up after their camels. Be certain that your own camel is tied down and keep your eyes on the other person’s hands at every moment. It is understood; in the marketplace, one takes care of oneself first, while always remaining alert for someone who doesn’t know that.

  The marketplace may not even be there tomorrow. Even if it is there tomorrow, this person may not be there tomorrow. This person may never be seen by you again. But even if that person is there tomorrow and even if you accost them, the fact that you are not allowed to kill or injure them means that your privilege, in such a case, is nothing more than to yell and wave your arms around until you get tired of wasting your time.

  Therefore no one is trusted.

  Zubaida already had a clear, if limited, picture of the adult world as a place of constant tricks and slippery negotiations that never ended until both parties walked away feeling like happy thieves. Even within her familiar culture, surrounded by native speakers of her language, she had felt the Otherness of the marketplace. She would never be allowed to compete with the men in such a place, never match her own wits up against their sly traps and cool deceptions. The Otherness did not come from the ways of the marketplace; it came from the knowledge that she would never be permitted to join in the fascinating and never ending game. It came as an invisible dream crusher, leaving behind an energy drain that was the sure sign of contact with the Others. She was aware that, as a nine year-old, she was being permitted to freely observe this marketplace in a blunt way that she would no longer be able to do, after she turned ten. It was a place where she would one day be expected to walk with her face covered and her head down. It was, by and large, a place of men.

  She knew all the stories that her mother’s generation told about their way of life in the days before the reign of the Taliban. Just out of reach from Zubaida’s living memory, there had been plenty of Afghan women occupied with honorable trades of buying and selling in th
e marketplace. Of course such things had been forbidden ever since she was old enough to recall, although a women who had an old and familiar clientele might dare to continue working on the black market. If she did, she took a life-endangering risk, so that the work was most often taken up by widowed or abandoned mothers, anyone facing the daily reality of hungry little ones and who has seen all other considerations fall by the wayside.

  The Taliban were supposed to bring peace after stopping the feuding warlords, but they were just another army with a new list of people to kill.

  No one is to be trusted.

  It is widely known among students of human nature that it is far easier to develop a suspicious attitude than to get rid of one. Learning how and when to lower her guard was a task as difficult and frustrating as any other. The natural longing of a young girl to feel affirmation and closeness made her feel hungry for more of Rebecca’s attention and approval, and for more good-natured Dad time with Peter. She found herself in close moments with each of them, without realizing how they got started, then suddenly at a loss for her next response. It was like running into a blind alley in a strange city in a bad dream. Sometimes it was all she could do to stuff everything inside and shut herself down and keep her face blank. It would happen like the pull-away reaction that everybody gets when they touch a fire; suddenly she was off the floor, out of the spotlight, tucked back inside of herself and covered in a giant tortoise shell where nobody had the power to touch her in any way. In a place like that, it’s safe to brood long and hard on the nagging feeling that somebody is to blame for all of this. Yes, these Americans were trying to help her, working on her in the hospital for free and then pouring all this time and money into her after taking her into their home. Her culture respects the value of generosity and hospitality, and so did she. She also knew that all of it was highly dangerous because she had no control over events and that you never look to make friends in the bazaar, or trust anybody inside of a marketplace.

  * * *

  By the time that the 2002 Christmas holidays approached, Zubaida was able to flip herself up into a good feeling and be with people without feeling anxious or afraid at all. She couldn’t hold it for long, but sometimes for hours at a time, it felt as if some invisible weight lifted off of her shoulders and all of her Perfectly Good Reasons to be suspicious vanished.

  That was when it became the most fun with the other girls. Zubaida’s growing vocabulary gave her more opportunities to interact with each other girl in more personal ways, and the passing bursts of light heart and easy spirit somehow gave her the power to make people fall in love with her and have fun doing it.

  This was the perfect time for her torments to ease, with the natural procession of family gatherings and parties with friends. It was easy to take her eyes off of everybody’s hands and let herself take a good look around at things. She danced without caring what people thought or what they might say. She did it because she could make her body do what she wanted again.

  When Zubaida got into spats with the other girls, they seemed to pass as quickly, with feelings somehow smoothed over. She was eager to work at making the other girls like her—she could see a good reflection of herself so clearly in it, whenever she pulled people into her orbit.

  In that state, she could meet the wonderful strangeness of the season and the very generous customs and the frequent displays of too much food with open joy at dealing with its surprises, followed by a quick imitation of somebody who’s been there a hundred times already. Any American ritual that looked like fun was fine with her and she didn’t care what anything meant; all she had to do was let Peter and Rebecca make sure that everything got taken care of while she let herself roll with the situation.

  The game where the girls took turns at standing in front of the rest and then closing their eyes and falling backward, trusting the others to catch them, struck her as particularly funny and made her jump up and down while she laughed.

  So when Rebecca offered to put together a slumber party with four of Zubaida’s best friends, she jumped at the idea. Within a few days, Zubaida and four of her friends from school were there for the night. The girls talked and shrieked their way through the evening until darkness fell and everyone was in their pajamas.

  Then Rebecca sat them on the floor and filled the girls in on a little something that she suspected was missing from their childhoods. “I know that Halloween is over, but back in Texas when I was a girl, there was a Halloween tradition that we had, and the secret of that tradition is that you don’t have to wait for Halloween to do it. You can do it anytime! You always want to do it after dark, though, because whatever you do, you never want to let them catch you!”

  She had their attention now. They were five school girls, giddy from hours of near-hysteria, pleasantly full after dinner and comfortably sloppy for the night. They caught Rebecca’s drift right away—something big was coming. Something secret. They were all going to be in on it. The very charge hanging in the air set them to giggling and trying not to look each other in the eye because then they would explode and they knew that they weren’t supposed to do that while the adult in the room was talking. And after all, it was very interesting when she described to them the proper technique for executing the noble tradition of toilette papering somebody’s yard.

  Zubaida understood—sort of. She had played around with pulling long sheets off of a toilet paper roll, so she could picture the idea of holding onto the paper while you throw the roll over the top of a tree. The concept struck her as so utterly foreign and bizarre that at first she didn’t feel much of a reaction to the thought at all.

  You hold one end and throw the roll over a tree or a bush. As soon as the roll hits the ground, you pick it up and hold the paper again and throw the roll back over the tree or bush. You repeat this as many times as you can, or until another target appears.

  If a team of five girls is assisted by an unapologetically regressed Texas girl and everybody works with genuine cooperation, Rebecca guessed that much of an entire front yard could be majestically draped in just a few minutes.

  When Rebecca began teasing the girls about how they should each take a role and go around the corner to a friend’s house and strike, Zubaida giggled along with the other girls. Nobody actually thought that she meant it, but they seemed to get the humor in it and their giggling was contagious. The idea itself still wasn’t doing much for Zubaida. She hated being the outsider and tried to get in on the joke, but when she made a mental picture of throwing perfectly good paper around in the air, it all just seemed pointless.

  Still, the excitement kept making her giggle while she hurried along in the dark with Rebecca and the other girls, running across people’s front yards and around the corner of the block, to the victim’s house. She played along with the other girls at first, just imitating what they were doing with the paper rolls, even though she began to get the idea as soon as her friend Caitlin threw the first roll and everybody watched it land. After a while she realized that it was pretty funny after all, just to be in this impossible dream world where she and these other girls could run through the night and do this foolish wasting of paper. Pretty soon everyone was staggering around snorting with laughter that they attempted to suppress with varying levels of failure. She tossed her paper roll until her arm got tired.

  What she didn’t realize was that Rebecca had saved the game’s real trigger, and that she planned to pull it just as soon as the paper streaks were thoroughly laced over the tops of everything in the front yard. Just when the girls began to run out of paper and the yard was thoroughly whitened, Rebecca let out a long, high whoop that scared the girls in the first instant and sent them into riotous laughter in the next.

  When they saw her jump onto the porch and ring the doorbell, they didn’t have to be told to take off running and sprint back around the corner. By the time that the shrieking girls made it back to Peter and Rebecca’s house, Zubaida was laughing so hard that she c
ould barely stay on her feet. She tried to run but mostly just staggered along laughing harder than she could remember doing in a long time, maybe harder than she had ever done. Within her realm of permitted existence, this level of public excitement and girlish play simply did not exist.

  The girls tumbled into Rebecca’s living room half crazed with excitement and completely elated. None of the other girls had actually done this before, so for Zubaida as well as the others, this was their first chance in this life to deliberately create a great big sloppy mess and purposely draw attention to it—and then openly flee the adult authority before they can come barreling down onto you.

  It was the high point of the sleepover and it would require some explaining to the other parents, but it was a powerful blast of pure adrenalin and girlhood camaraderie that Zubaida and each of the others were likely to never forget. Since it was an arranged strike and Rebecca had tipped off their “victim” that afternoon, the girls were spared the possible consequence of an outraged neighbor hammering at their door at night. Instead they spent the next couple of hours rehashing the experience and slowly drifted back down to earth.

  Zubaida fell asleep easily with the rest of them. It felt the same way that it did back home when there was a houseful of visiting family members who sometimes stopped by and always had to be entertained, no matter how meager the fare might be. Experience had sharpened Zubaida’s ability to sense the presence of the other people in the house, even after the lights were out and everyone finally grew quiet.

  It was almost as if she could feel the space that they occupied in the air. There was a solidness to the clannish feeling that the sleepover gave her; it was a familiar one. She pulled it up around herself like a warm blanket and took long breaths of the air that was filled by the other girls.