Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

by David Sedaris

  “I know you children like to hear these things,” she said, “these secrets, and that is why I am telling you all this.” We nodded. It was better than doing comprehension questions for the readings in Broad Horizons.

  “I will tell you one more story,” she said, “and then we will have to do arithmetic.” She leaned over, and her voice grew soft. “There is no death,” she said. “You must never be afraid. Never. That which is, cannot die. It will change into different earthly and unearthly elements, but I know this as sure as I stand here in front of you, and I swear it: you must not be afraid. I have seen this truth with these eyes. I know it because in a dream God kissed me. Here.” And she pointed with her right index finger to the side of her head, below the mouth where the vertical lines were carved into her skin.

  Absentmindedly we all did our arithmetic problems. At recess the class was out on the playground, but no one was playing. We were all standing in small groups, talking about Miss Ferenczi. We didn’t know if she was crazy, or what. I looked out beyond the playground, at the rusted cars piled in a small heap behind a clump of sumac, and I wanted to see shapes there, approaching me.

  On the way home, Carl sat next to me again. He didn’t say much, and I didn’t either. At last he turned to me. “You know what she said about the leaves that close up on bugs?”

  “Huh?”

  “The leaves,” Carl insisted. “The meat-eating plants. I know it’s true. I saw it on television. The leaves have this icky glue that the plants have got smeared all over them and the insects can’t get off ’cause they’re stuck. I saw it.” He seemed demoralized. “She’s tellin’ the truth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think she’s seen all those angels?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t think she has,” Carl informed me. “I think she made that part up.”

  “There’s a tree,” I suddenly said. I was looking out the window at the farms along County Road H. I knew every barn, every broken windmill, every fence, every anhydrous ammonia tank by heart. “There’s a tree that’s…that I’ve seen…”

  “Don’t you try to do it,” Carl said. “You’ll just sound like a jerk.”

  I kissed my mother. She was standing in front of the stove. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you have Miss Ferenczi again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “She was fine. Mom,” I asked, “can I go to my room?”

  “No,” she said, “not until you’ve gone but to the vegetable garden and picked me a few tomatoes.” She glanced at the sky. “I think it’s going to rain. Skedaddle and do it now. Then you come back inside and watch your brother for a few minutes while I go upstairs. I need to clean up before dinner.” She looked down at me. “You’re looking a little pale, Tommy.” She touched the back of her hand to my forehead and I felt her diamond ring against my skin. “Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and went out to pick the tomatoes.

  Coughing mutedly, Mr. Hibler was back the next day, slipping lozenges into his mouth when his back was turned at forty-five-minute intervals and asking us how much of his prepared lesson plan Miss Ferenczi had followed. Edith Atwater took the responsibility for the class of explaining to Mr. Hibler that the substitute hadn’t always done exactly what he, Mr. Hibler, would have done, but we had worked hard even though she talked a lot. About what? he asked. All kinds of things, Edith said. I sort of forgot. To our relief, Mr. Hibler seemed not at all interested in what Miss Ferenczi had said to fill the day. He probably thought it was woman’s talk: unserious and not suited for school. It was enough that he had a pile of arithmetic problems from us to correct.

  For the next month, the sumac turned a distracting red in the field, and the sun traveled toward the southern sky, so that its rays reached Mr. Hibler’s Halloween display on the bulletin board in the back of the room, fading the pumpkin head scarecrow from orange to tan. Every three days I measured how much farther the sun had moved toward the southern horizon by making small marks with my black Crayola on the north wall, ant-sized marks only I knew were there.

  And then in early December, four days after the first permanent snowfall, she appeared again in our classroom. The minute she came in the door, I felt my heart begin to pound. Once again, she was different: this time, her hair hung straight down and seemed hardly to have been combed. She hadn’t brought her lunchbox with her, but she was carrying what seemed to be a small box. She greeted all of us and talked about the weather. Donna DeShano had to remind her to take her overcoat off.

  When the bell to start the day finally rang, Miss Ferenczi looked out at all of us and said, “Children, I have enjoyed your company in the past, and today I am going to reward you.” She held up the small box. “Do you know what this is?” She waited. “Of course you don’t. It is a tarot pack.”

  Edith Atwater raised her hand. “What’s a tarot pack, Miss Ferenczi?”

  “It is used to tell fortunes,” she said. “And that is what I shall do this morning. I shall tell your fortunes, as I have been taught to do.”

  “What’s fortune?” Bobby Kryzanowicz asked.

  “The future, young man. I shall tell you what your future will be. I can’t do your whole future, of course. I shall have to limit myself to the five-card system, the wands, cups, swords, pentacles, and the higher arcanes. Now who wants to be first?”

  There was a long silence. Then Carol Peterson raised her hand.

  “All right,” Miss Ferenczi said. She divided the pack into five smaller packs and walked back to Carol’s desk, in front of mine. “Pick one card from each one of these packs,” she said. I saw that Carol had a four of cups and a six of swords, but I couldn’t see the other cards. Miss Ferenczi studied the cards on Carol’s desk for a minute. “Not bad,” she said. “I do not see much higher education. Probably an early marriage. Many children. There’s something bleak and dreary here, but I can’t tell what. Perhaps just the tasks of a housewife life. I think you’ll do very well, for the most part.” She smiled at Carol, a smile with a certain lack of interest. “Who wants to be next?”

  Carl Whiteside raised his hand slowly.

  “Yes,” Miss Ferenczi said, “let’s do a boy.” She walked over to where Carl sat. After he picked his five cards, she gazed at them for a long time. “Travel,” she said. “Much distant travel. You might go into the army. Not too much romantic interest here. A late marriage, if at all. But the sun in your major arcana, that’s a very good card.” She giggled. “You’ll have a happy life.”

  Next I raised my hand. She told me my future. She did the same with Bobby Kryzanowicz, Kelly Munger, Edith Atwater, and Kim Foor. Then she came to Wayne Razmer. He picked his five cards, and I could see that the death card was one of them.

  “What’s your name?” Miss Ferenczi asked.

  “Wayne.”

  “Well, Wayne,” she said, “you will undergo a great metamorphosis, a change, before you become an adult. Your earthly element will no doubt leap higher, because you seem to be a sweet boy. This card, this nine of swords, tells me of suffering and desolation. And this ten of wands, well, that’s a heavy load.”

  “What about this one?” Wayne pointed at the death card.

  “It means, my sweet, that you will die soon.” She gathered up the cards. We were all looking at Wayne. “But do not fear,” she said. “It is not really death. Just change. Out of your earthly shape.” She put the cards on Mr. Hibler’s desk. “And now, let’s do some arithmetic.”

  At lunchtime Wayne went to Mr. Faegre, the principal, and informed him of what Miss Ferenczi had done. During the noon recess, we saw Miss Ferenczi drive out of the parking lot in her rusting green Rambler American. I stood under the slide, listening to the other kids coasting down and landing in the little depressive bowls at the bottom. I was kicking stones and tugging at my hair right up to the moment when I saw Wayne come out to the playground. He smiled, t
he dead fool, and with the fingers of his right hand he was showing everyone how he had told on Miss Ferenczi.

  I made my way toward Wayne, pushing myself past two girls from another class. He was watching me with his little pinhead eyes.

  “You told,” I shouted at him. “She was just kidding.”

  “She shouldn’t have,” he shouted back. “We were supposed to be doing arithmetic.”

  “She just scared you,” I said. “You’re a chicken. You’re a chicken, Wayne. You are. Scared of a little card,” I singsonged.

  Wayne fell at me, his two fists hammering down on my nose. I gave him a good one in the stomach and then I tried for his head. Aiming my fist, I saw that he was crying. I slugged him.

  “She was right,” I yelled. “She was always right! She told the truth!” Other kids were whooping. “You were just scared, that’s all!”

  And then large hands pulled at us, and it was my turn to speak to Mr. Faegre.

  In the afternoon Miss Ferenczi was gone, and my nose was stuffed with cotton clotted with blood, and my lip had swelled, and our class had been combined with Mrs. Mantei’s sixth-grade class for a crowded afternoon science unit on insect life in ditches and swamps. I knew where Mrs. Mantei lived: she had a new house trailer just down the road from us, at the Clearwater Park. She was no mystery. Somehow she and Mr. Bodine, the other fourth-grade teacher, had managed to fit forty-five desks into the room. Kelly Munger asked if Miss Ferenczi had been arrested, and Mrs. Mantei said no, of course not. All that afternoon, until the buses came to pick us up, we learned about field crickets and two-striped grasshoppers, water bugs, cicadas, mosquitoes, flies, and moths. We learned about insects’ hard outer shell, the exoskeleton, and the usual parts of the mouth, including the labrum, mandible, maxilla, and glossa. We learned about compound eyes, and the four-stage metamorphosis from egg to larva to pupa to adult. We learned something, but not much, about mating. Mrs. Mantei drew, very skillfully, the internal anatomy of the grasshopper on the blackboard. We learned about the dance of the honeybee, directing other bees in the hive to pollen. We found out about which insects were pests to man, and which were not. On lined white pieces of paper we made lists of insects we might actually see, then a list of insects too small to be clearly visible, such as fleas; Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge.

  Interpreter of

  Maladies

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to the toilet. Eventually Mrs. Das relented when Mr. Das pointed out that he had given the girl her bath the night before. In the rearview mirror Mr. Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly from his bulky white Ambassador, dragging her shaved, largely bare legs across the backseat. She did not hold the little girl’s hand as they walked to the restroom.

  They were on their way to see the Sun Temple at Konarak. It was a dry, bright Saturday, the mid-July heat tempered by a steady ocean breeze, ideal weather for sightseeing. Ordinarily Mr. Kapasi would not have stopped so soon along the way, but less than five minutes after he’d picked up the family that morning in front of Hotel Sandy Villa, the little girl had complained. The first thing Mr. Kapasi had noticed when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Das, standing with their children under the portico of the hotel, was that they were very young, perhaps not even thirty. In addition to Tina they had two boys, Ronny and Bobby, who appeared very close in age and had teeth covered in a network of flashing silver wires. The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors. Mr. Kapasi was accustomed to foreign tourists; he was assigned to them regularly because he could speak English. Yesterday he had driven an elderly couple from Scotland, both with spotted faces and fluffy white hair so thin it exposed their sunburnt scalps. In comparison, the tanned, youthful faces of Mr. and Mrs. Das were all the more striking. When he’d introduced himself, Mr. Kapasi had pressed his palms together in greeting, but Mr. Das squeezed hands like an American so that Mr. Kapasi felt it in his elbow. Mrs. Das, for her part, had flexed one side of her mouth, smiling dutifully at Mr. Kapasi, without displaying any interest in him.

  As they waited at the tea stall, Ronny, who looked like the older of the two boys, clambered suddenly out of the backseat, intrigued by a goat tied to a stake in the ground.

  “Don’t touch it,” Mr. Das said. He glanced up from his paperback tour book, which said “INDIA” in yellow letters and looked as if it had been published abroad. His voice, somehow tentative and a little shrill, sounded as though it had not yet settled into maturity.

  “I want to give it a piece of gum,” the boy called back as he trotted ahead.

  Mr. Das stepped out of the car and stretched his legs by squatting briefly to the ground. A clean-shaven man, he looked exactly like a magnified version of Ronny. He had a sapphire blue visor, and was dressed in shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt. The camera slung around his neck, with an impressive telephoto lens and numerous buttons and markings, was the only complicated thing he wore. He frowned, watching as Ronny rushed toward the goat, but appeared to have no intention of intervening. “Bobby, make sure that your brother doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” Bobby said, not moving. He was sitting in the front seat beside Mr. Kapasi, studying a picture of the elephant god taped to the glove compartment.

  “No need to worry,” Mr. Kapasi said. “They are quite tame.” Mr. Kapasi was forty-six years old, with receding hair that had gone completely silver, but his butterscotch complexion and his unlined brow, which he treated in spare moments to dabs of lotus-oil balm, made it easy to imagine what he must have looked like at an earlier age. He wore gray trousers and a matching jacket-style shirt, tapered at the waist, with short sleeves and a large pointed collar, made of a thin but durable synthetic material. He had specified both the cut and the fabric to his tailor—it was his preferred uniform for giving tours because it did not get crushed during his long hours behind the wheel. Through the windshield he watched as Ronny circled around the goat, touched it quickly on its side, then trotted back to the car.

  “You left India as a child?” Mr. Kapasi asked when Mr. Das had settled once again into the passenger seat.

  “Oh, Mina and I were both born in America,” Mr. Das announced with an air of sudden confidence. “Born and raised. Our parents live here now, in Assansol. They retired. We visit them every couple years.” He turned to watch as the little girl ran toward the car, the wide purple bows of her sundress flopping on her narrow brown shoulders. She was holding to her chest a doll with yellow hair that looked as if it had been chopped, as a punitive measure, with a pair of dull scissors. “This is Tina’s first trip to India, isn’t it, Tina?”

  “I don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore,” Tina announced.

  “Where’s Mina?” Mr. Das asked.

  Mr. Kapasi found it strange that Mr. Das should refer to his wife by her first name when speaking to the little girl. Tina pointed to where Mrs. Das was purchasing something from one of the shirtless men who worked at the tea stall. Mr. Kapasi heard one of the shirtless men sing a phrase from a popular Hindi love song as Mrs. Das walked back to the car, but she did not appear to understand the words of the song, for she did not express irritation, or embarrassment, or react in any other way to the man’s declarations.

  He observed her. She wore a red-and-white-checkered skirt that stopped above her knees, slip-on shoes with a square wooden heel, and a close-fitting blouse styled like a man’s undershirt. The blouse was decorated at chest-level with a calico appliqué in the shape of a strawberry. She was a short woman, with small hands like paws, her frosty pink fingernails painted to match her lips, and was slightly plump in her figure. Her hair, shorn only a little longer than her husband’s, was parted far to one side. She was wearing large dark brown sunglasses with a pinkish tint to them, and ca
rried a big straw bag, almost as big as her torso, shaped like a bowl, with a water bottle poking out of it. She walked slowly, carrying some puffed rice tossed with peanuts and chili peppers in a large packet made from newspapers. Mr. Kapasi turned to Mr. Das.

  “Where in America do you live?”

  “New Brunswick, New Jersey.”

  “Next to New York?”

  “Exactly. I teach middle school there.”

  “What subject?”

  “Science. In fact, every year I take my students on a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. In a way we have a lot in common, you could say, you and I. How long have you been a tour guide. Mr. Kapasi?”

  “Five years.”

  Mrs. Das reached the car. “How long’s the trip?” she asked, shutting the door.

  “About two and a half hours,” Mr. Kapasi replied.

  At this Mrs. Das gave an impatient sigh, as if she had been traveling her whole life without pause. She fanned herself with a folded Bombay film magazine written in English.

  “I thought that the Sun Temple is only eighteen miles north of Puri,” Mr. Das said, tapping on the tour book.

  “The roads to Konarak are poor. Actually it is a distance of fifty-two miles,” Mr. Kapasi explained.

  Mr. Das nodded, readjusting the camera strap where it had begun to chafe the back of his neck.