“Maybe you’ll see her again tomorrow. You can bring her food then. But there are places she can go for food, Grandfather. She’ll be all right.”
“It is not the same,” he said quietly. “Standing on a line at a soup kitchen, that is not the same. It would be better if one person stopped to give you food. It would make you feel like someone cared, like you were honored. Even in Lémabantunk, when I was a Mendicant, it made a difference how people said the blessing when they put coins or food in your bowl. Some of them muttered it like an annoyance, and did not even stay to hear your response, and you knew they were in a rush to get somewhere else. Some of them smiled and looked you in the eyes. Those were the best people.”
Zamatryna blinked. She knew that there had been Mendicants in Lémabantunk; she knew that her grandfather, who still knelt on his prayer carpet every morning and evening, had gone to the Temple at home. But not until now had she realized that, of course, this meant that Timbor had served his year as a Mendicant, too. He’d never talked about it before. She had a sudden dizzying sense of how much of Gandiffri she would never know, how much she and her family had lost.
But she was an American now. That was her job, to be an American. Mourning for Lémabantunk was like mourning for Atlantis, a lost place that might as well never have existed at all.
She heard footsteps on the walkway outside, and turned around to see Aliniana coming home with several bags of groceries. “Hello, hello, Zama, will you help me put these things away? Timbor, why do you look so sad? Where are the other children?”
“Rikko and Jamfret have wrestling practice,” Zamatryna said, getting up to carry a carton of eggs to the fridge. “Polly went to the mall with friends, I think. I thought you were working until six today?”
“No, Veronica didn’t show this morning so they called me to come in early, so I’m home early, too. Ai, what a day! I do not know why it was so busy on a Wednesday. Non-stop customers, many mothers with babies, and the babies howled so much you would have thought they were having their heads cut off, not their hair, and I had to listen to this while I painted nails. It was very unpleasant.”
“I guess everybody had a bad day,” Zamatryna said. She was going to tell Aliniana about Timbor’s customer, but her aunt and grandfather both looked at her, their eyebrows raised, and she realized that she’d given herself away. Maybe she’d meant to.
“You had a bad day?” Timbor asked quietly. “What happened, dear one?”
“Oh, nothing, really. My guidance counselor hassled me about some stupid stuff. He wants me to change the name of the gardening club. He thinks ‘Growing Girls’ is sexist and will keep boys away. I told him boys didn’t want to join anyhow.”
Timbor chuckled. “You could call it Planting Persons.”
“Or Horticulture Helpers,” Aliniana said.
“Or Fertilizing Folks,” said Zamatryna, and they all laughed.
“Get some boys to join with the name you have now,” said Aliniana. She put the last grocery item, a bag of rice, in the pantry and sat down at the table. “Then the counselor will not complain. What about your boyfriends? How many do you have this week? Three? Get them to join.”
Zamatryna wrinkled her nose. “They aren’t really boyfriends, Auntie. They’re just people I do things with. Bill from cheerleading, he’s gay, so we just hang out, and Donald from the yearbook is funny but we’re just friends, and Enrico’s just my math study partner, that’s all. They’re nice guys, but I’m not in love with any of them. I’m too young for that.”
“Oh, oh,” Aliniana said, rolling her eyes and throwing her hands in the air, “excuse me, I forgot how grown-up you are, so grown-up that you know you aren’t grown-up enough to be in love, well excuse me, Miss Zama, but that’s very silly. When you fall in love you won’t sit down and weigh it all out like meat, so many pounds of this and that, and what’s the best thing for dinner. It will just happen. It is your soul matching someone else’s. When I met Macsofo”—she gave a huge sigh, and Timbor and Zamatryna smiled at each other, knowing they were in for a familiar tale—“oh, I looked at him and I knew at once that I would be with him forever. It was in the courtyard of my parents’ house, where he had come to fix a brick wall. The first day I just watched him, and the second day I spoke to him about the weather and the garden, and the third day I gave him a cup of water and our hands touched, and I knew then that he knew, too.” She sighed; her eyes had begun to grow moist, as they always did when she remembered Lémabantunk.
“Some souls match at once,” Timbor said mildly, “but some souls only join over time.” Zamatryna knew he thought that Aliniana and Macsofo were growing apart; she had heard him discussing it with her father. Macsofo often came home from work later than he should have, and he was often moody. He had never gotten over his bitterness at their exile; Zamatryna thought he didn’t want to. “And this is America, Aliniana. Zama must do as people do here.”
“Other American girls have boyfriends,” Aliniana said.
“If you’re with only one guy, he wants to have sex,” Zamatryna said. “I don’t want to do that yet. I want to wait.” One of her more persistent theories about Darroti’s tragedy, based on careful study of soap operas, was that Gallicina had been pregnant, and had pursued the family in rage that her child had also been killed, also been broken and silenced. “Lisa says that’s really smart.”
“Smart,” Aliniana scoffed. “Certainly it is smart. But when you meet the man you love, smart will fly out the door. Certain things you cannot plan, Miss Zama. Certain things are gifts you could not have imagined. That is why, at home, people getting married gave gifts, instead of receiving them: to repay what they received in each other. People here act like the man and the woman getting married are poor!”
Zamatryna shrugged. “Sometimes they are.”
“Not if they love each other!”
“People who love each other still need furniture and cooking pots,” Timbor said. “I think it the same thing, Alini: a way of using humans to represent the graciousness of the Elements. And some people getting married here ask their guests to give to the poor. A passenger of mine said her daughter was doing that.”
“Ellie Etiquette says that’s bad form,” Zamatryna said. “She had a column about it in the paper last week. You aren’t supposed to ask your guests to do that, because you aren’t supposed to act like you’re assuming they’re going to give you anything at all.”
“Aaaaah.” Aliniana waved a hand in disgust. “That is stupid. People here are selfish.”
“Some people in Gandiffri were stupid and selfish, too,” Timbor said. “Lémabantunk was not paradise, even if it was home.”
“Aaaah, listen, last week I did manicures for a young woman getting married, and her mother, and very fussy they were too, and all they could talk about was the gifts she was getting, where she was registered and who had bought her which piece of fancy china and why hadn’t uncle so-and-so been willing to spend more than thirty-five dollars, and didn’t I think that was a shame? I never even learned the husband’s name! Does this sound to you like someone in love, or someone generous?”
“Did they tip?” Zamatryna asked.
“Yes, but only ten percent.” Aliniana sniffed, and Zamatryna and her grandfather shared another smile. “Listen, Miss Zama, when you get married, you give gifts to your guests. You be generous.”
“She is already generous,” Timbor said.
“Well, I’ll try to remember my husband’s name, anyway.” Zamatryna looked at Timbor and said, “Are you going to try to find that woman tomorrow? The homeless woman?”
“I will look for her, yes, if I can. If my routes permit it.”
“Take her a jar of peanut butter. We have two now. Peanut butter and some crackers. She doesn’t need a place to cook, to eat that.”
Timbor patted her hand. “You are a good child, Zamatryna.”
And then the phone rang and it was her friend Suki from Growing Girls, calling with a request f
rom a woman who needed her rose bushes trimmed, and of course Zamatryna had to tell her about the conversation with Rumpled Ron, and then the twins came home from wrestling practice and Macsofo and Erolorit came home from their jobs and it was time for dinner, and then Zamatryna had homework to do, with half her brain, while she talked on the phone with Jenny from cheerleading and Ross from the yearbook; and then Bill and Donald and Enrico all called, one after the other, so she talked to them too; and by the time she went to sleep, she was feeling much better. She had lots of friends, and her grades were good, and that meant she was successful; and if she was successful, she had to be happy.
But putting her clothing away—for she had maintained her habits of neatness from childhood—she saw the beetle in its jar, and felt a pang of guilt. She only fed it once a day now, and she saw that this morning’s lettuce had begun to rot. That couldn’t be very nice for the beetle. So she unscrewed the lid of the jar and held the insect gently between her fingers, so it couldn’t fly away, and dumped the lettuce into a tissue with her free hand. She’d flush the tissue down the toilet. “You’ll get more food tomorrow,” she told the beetle. “I don’t have any more right now. I didn’t bring you anything from dinner, you stupid thing. I’m sorry.”
X.
Zamatryna shook her head. “Gallicina, I hope you weren’t this boring when you were a person.” Then, with a sigh, she dumped the beetle back in the jar and replaced the lid. What a dull life the creature led! No flowers, no sunshine, just bits of lettuce and radish, and drops of water, and the slick sides of a glass jar. Such an existence had to be as bad as Stan’s hell, as painful and dreary as roasting like a chicken would have been. “I’m tired just looking at you,” Zamatryna said, her compassion mingled with disgust. “I’m going to bed now. Goodnight, Gallicina.”
She was tired the next day, too: tired and irritable, sick of classes. She sat with the yearbook staff during lunch—she tried to rotate between the yearbook, the cheerleaders, and the gardeners—but couldn’t interest herself in gossip about whether the school nurse’s picture looked so much better this year than last because she’d been giving herself Botox injections. Zamatryna picked listlessly at her fruit and cottage-cheese salad, which was only food here, which didn’t contain anyone’s soul. She found herself wondering what her life would have been like if the family had been able to stay in Lémabantunk. Would she have been bored there, too, learning to cook and clean house, keeping the garden, maybe helping out in the Market? Had Gallicina been bored? Was that why she had fought so hard to be a Mendicant?
She sighed and excused herself from the table, getting up to bus her tray. When she turned around she saw Jerry Zanger, the senior quarterback of the football team, coming toward her. He was Jenny’s boyfriend. He was going to UNR next year to study accounting, and he was the most boring person Zamatryna had ever met. All the air seemed to drain out of the room whenever he opened his mouth.
He stopped a foot away from her, and blinked. “Hey, Zama.”
“Hey, Jerry.” She stood waiting to hear what he’d say next, and trying to be patient. Jerry’s synapses fired very slowly; she always pictured them trying to turn over, like a car engine, and failing. Jerry’s brain needed a new starter.
He scratched his ear, and blinked again. “So, Zama, Suki told Jenny you talked to Rumpled Ron yesterday. And Jenny told me.”
“Yes, Jerry,” Zamatryna said, trying not to gasp for oxygen like a beached fish, “I did talk to Rumpled Ron yesterday.” Behind her, she heard someone in the yearbook clique snicker, and immediately felt a visceral surge of indignation. Jerry was pathetic, but they still shouldn’t laugh at him. “But I can’t imagine why you’d find that interesting.”
Jerry coughed. “Well, Suki told Jenny that Rumpled Ron says you need guys in that, uh, gardening club. And that you need a new name.”
“Ron says it would be a good idea to add guys,” Zamatryna agreed politely. “If we add guys, I guess we need another name. Do you know any guys who want to be added?”
“Well,” Jerry said, shifting from one foot to the other, “Coach is saying the football team should do community service. To show people we aren’t just dumb jocks.” Someone at the table began making choking sounds; Zama turned around and saw Ross doing a Heimlich maneuver on Christabel, the Layout Goddess.
“Oh, cut it out,” she snapped, and Christabel hawked up a piece of chicken, and Ross gave a thumbs-up sign, and everybody else at the table made vomiting noises. “Go back to kindergarten,” Zamatryna said, and turned back to Jerry. She wondered if he had any idea that they were making fun of him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Football people and yearbook people never get along. It’s an ancient rivalry. Like the Middle East, without car bombs.”
Zamatryna felt her eyebrows rising. “He knows the word rivalry,” Christabel said in a stage whisper.
“He’s studying for the SATs,” someone else whispered back—not Ross, or Zamatryna would have hit him over the head with her cafeteria tray—and Jerry actually laughed.
“I already took them, dumbass. I didn’t do so badly, either. Zama, do you need help with that tray?”
“No,” she said. “But I need to bus it. Come on, tag along, and tell me whatever you were going to say before they started their little comedy routine.”
“Well,” he said, standing next to her as she dumped her uneaten salad into the trash, “the football team needs community service, like I said. And a bunch of us do lawnwork anyway. Pruning bushes, mowing grass, you know, that kind of stuff.”
“Stuff with power tools,” Zama said, tossing her silverware into a tray of soapy water.
“Yeah,” Jerry said, falling into step beside her as she left the cafeteria, “stuff with power tools: that’s right. So I thought we could team up with you. It would make sense. But then you need a new name.”
“You mean the football team doesn’t want to be known as Growing Girls?” Zamatryna asked, and Jerry laughed again.
“No, I don’t think so. But then I thought we should help you with the name.”
“Ah,” Zamatryna said. “That’s very nice of you. Well, I’d like to keep it as a pun, and something that alliterates.”
“Oh,” Jerry said. She wondered if he’d ask what “alliterate” meant if he didn’t know. There was a long pause—she was walking to her locker now, and he was still beside her—before he said, “Well, I’d thought of Seeds of Hope. That’s a pun, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s a cliché. That’s not the same thing.”
“Oh. Okay.” Zama started spinning her locker combination, making a list of the books she needed for her afternoon classes. Calc, bio—lab book, not textbook—English. They were reading Crime and Punishment, which she found so mind-numbingly dull that being trapped in a glass jar and fed moldy lettuce would have been preferable. “What about Seeds of Kindness?”
“What?” She turned, vaguely startled that Jerry was still there.
“Seeds of Kindness,” he said. “That’s not a cliché, is it?”
“No. But it’s not a pun, either. And it’s mushy.”
“Oh. Well, I guess we can’t have that.” She turned back to her locker to collect her books, and Jerry said, “Vegetable Love?”
“What?”
“Vegetable Love. You know, the name of that punk band. But it was from a poem first, I think. By somebody named Marvel? Some comics guy?”
Zamatryna shook her head, kicking her locker closed because she needed both hands for the stack of books. “That sounds perverted, which is worse than mushy. Look, it would be nice to keep a verb in there somewhere. Like ‘growing,’ you know? An action word.”
“Oh. Okay. You need help carrying those books?”
“No,” she said. Jerry had used up all his synapses remembering the word rivalry, and he was becoming a serious annoyance. “I carry my books every day. I do it all by myself. But thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Where are you going now?”
<
br /> “Math,” Zamatryna said. “Where we’re studying the Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus.” She hoped this information might dissolve Jerry’s synapses entirely, but it didn’t work.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Hey, what about Pruning Pals?”
“What?”
“Pruning Pals. As the name of the gardening club. You know: pals who prune. You know, bushes.”
She was almost at her math classroom, and glad of it. “Er, no. That sounds like we’re chopping away at our friends with shears. Because it could mean that we were pruning the pals, not just that we were pals who were pruning.” A teacher walking by gave her a mystified glance, and Zamatryna realized how inane this conversation must sound. Well, it was inane. “And we do more than prune, anyway, so it isn’t even accurate. Jerry, this is my class. I have to go inside. See you later.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks for explaining that. I’ll keep thinking about it.”
“Great. You do that. Thanks for the suggestions.” She escaped gratefully inside, wondering how Jenny put up with this bonehead. Jenny said he was really sweet, but surely she could have done better. What in the world did they talk about? She probably just went out with him because he was the quarterback, a trophy guy. Jenny was very insecure.
Calc was easy. The bio lab was easy. English was beyond boring. When Zamatryna got home that afternoon, feeling as if her brain had been turned into a howling wasteland, she found Timbor sitting at the kitchen table again. He wasn’t singing or weeping this time: he was arguing with Macsofo, who was still in his gritty work clothing, gulping hot tea.
“Why are you giving our things away to a crazy woman? Father, it isn’t right!”
Zamatryna knocked on the screen door to let them know she was there, and then let herself in. “Uncle Max, what are you doing home so early?”
The Necessary Beggar Page 20
