On Fragile Waves

by E. Lily Yu

  Let me see, Shirin said. The movie was over. She and Firuzeh had huddled in the ladies’ to sponge their faces with paper towels and mineral oil. Shirin pursed her lips, licked a finger, and rubbed at one corner of Firuzeh’s eye. There, she said. All gone.

  Gulalai had bolted long before the credits rolled. Mia had departed arm in arm with Liam, giving an airy farewell without looking back.

  Firuzeh said: No one will know?

  Gulalai’s not going to tell. She’s completely humiliated. Besides, she deserved it. And Mia won’t remember anyone but Liam. Did you see her face? That leaves me. I’m not a gossip, are you?

  I meant this, Firuzeh said, her hand circling her face.

  Nah. I did a great job putting it on and an even better job taking it off.

  Shirin’s face crinkled with mischief.

  How do you feel? Do you like boys now?

  I still prefer fish.

  Firuzeh let herself in quietly, the key slinking pin by pin into the lock. Atay would be glued to the television. Nour would be dawdling over his homework or else emptying the fridge. Abay was at work. As she eased the door open, the hinge groaned, as usual. Tonight the sound was infernally loud.

  Firuzeh slipped inside.

  Abay sat in the living room. The TV was dark. Atay leaned against it, head bowed. Nour was nowhere to be seen.

  Firuzeh, Abay said, her voice so mild that the wall clock’s snick, snick nearly drowned it out. Where have you been?

  At school—working on—we had a project—

  As if Firuzeh had not spoken, Abay said: I went shopping today. To buy lamb and rice. To feed you. At the grocery store, I ran into that Iranian madar from parents’ night. How is your daughter Firuzeh, she said. My Shirin talks about her all the time. I said, I am grateful my daughter has such a kind friend. That project they are working on after school today, Firuzeh cannot stop talking about.

  Atay did not raise his head. A fine, stinging sweat formed on Firuzeh’s palms.

  And do you know what she says to me? She stares as if I have grown snake heads and says, What project? The girls are going to the cinema! So, Firuzeh, I ask you one last time—

  Firuzeh could not meet her mother’s gaze.

  Tell me where you got the money, Firuzeh. I called and asked. A movie ticket is eight dollars. Did you steal? Or did you—how could you, how could a daughter of mine—let Shirin pay for it?

  I gave her six dollars.

  Atay ran his finger along the top of the television.

  She said she was buying school supplies.

  School supplies! Do you know how your Atay and I work the flesh off of our fingers for you? For you to lie, to disobey, to disrespect us, to sneak around, to take the money we need for bills, to squander, to waste—

  You do not know the value of life, Atay said, or the worth of what we gave up for you.

  And what’s this? Abay said. She seized Firuzeh’s wrist and sniffed her hand. Perfume. Where did you get perfume? Did you spend money on that, too? And—your eyes. You lined your eyes. Were you with boys? Of course you were with boys. Here’s the proof. Here is my nose and here are my eyes. Do you have no care for what people say?

  There weren’t any boys, Firuzeh said, her lips numb.

  But you are a liar, Atay said. So why should we believe you?

  A lying, greedy, deceitful child—

  Can I go now? Firuzeh said.

  Go ahead, straight to hellfire and the pit. May the grave crush you. Did you forget that paradise lies at the feet of mothers? My feet, right here—

  Her slipper punctuated the last few words.

  Atay added: Abay won’t be paid tonight. Because of you.

  Abay said: From now on, you come directly home from school. You may not go anywhere else. For any reason. No parties, no sports, no trips with friends—

  Okay, Firuzeh said, her stomach knotted. Can I go now.

  Your Atay gave up his business for you. Do you know what would have happened to you if we stayed? Do you know?

  That’s enough, Atay said. She heard us. Go.

  Shaking, Firuzeh went into her room. There was a fort on Nour’s bed, constructed with both of their pillows and his race car doona. His eyes gleamed at her from its depths.

  Done?

  All done, she said, sitting down on her bed.

  Where were you?

  The cinema.

  Did you see something good?

  I dunno.

  Probably not. Girls watch movies about kissing and stuff. Is that the only thing you did? Abay and Atay were very loud.

  Firuzeh said: I also caused six frog species to go extinct, bleached a kilometre of the Great Barrier Reef, and triggered an earthquake in New Zealand.

  Nour cocked his head. That’s all?

  Forgot to mention, I also murdered the PM.

  Ooh, Firuzeh. That’s very bad. Nour stuck one arm out of his fort and waggled his index finger at her. You can’t go killing PMs, they’ll stick another one in, and then we have to memorize an extra name. No wonder Abay was so upset. When my history marks come back, I’ll blame you.

  Her lips twitched.

  Nour said: If you want to sleep—

  I do, she said. Both their heads swivelled toward the door. A battle raged on the other side.

  Nour said: I can do my homework in the bathroom.

  No worries, Firuzeh said. I can sleep with the lights on. You don’t have to go anywhere.

  Thanks.

  But you’ve got to give my pillow back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mrs Sing—“Or Mrs Star,” she told her Year 6 students when they giggled or howled in disbelief, “it’s a homophone in Cantonese”—took up position at the piano.

  “A homo what?” came the perennial cry from the back of the classroom, followed by the annual sniggering.

  This year’s clown was an Afghan boy with floppy hair that fell in his eyes and a smile as sweet as canned peaches on a plate. His family had TPVs, she had heard. He cracked so many jokes, she would never have guessed.

  “A homophone,” she said to him, “is one word that sounds like another. Which is something you should have learned in English. Since you are in such a good mood today, Nour, would you warm us up? Sing us this scale—”

  Her fingers marched across the keys.

  The tones lingered, then melted into air. She nodded encouragement at him.

  Nour’s mouth pinched tight, all laughter gone.

  “Nour? If you could please sing for us—the class is waiting—”

  She played the scale for him again. He swallowed. Swelled. Spat out one note, and then another, that bore no relationship to the notes she had struck.

  He was tone deaf. With hundreds of students, she had not noticed.

  “Thank you,” she said. “A good effort. Class—?”

  She walked them up the scale, step by wavering step. Then back down: mediant, supertonic, tonic. The boy’s face remained flushed and furious.

  “Today,” Mrs Sing said, then hesitated. She was supposed to teach harmony today, but every nerve in her body jangled and rang. Every chord she played would be dissonant.

  Instead, she opened the cabinets that contained percussion instruments donated or collected from op shops around town: tambourines, guiros, maracas, cymbals, triangles, djembes, a snare drum and sticks.

  “Today we’re making music with these.”

  A stampede, then a whirlwind of hands. A din and a rattling, a clatter and clang. Nour staggered back with a djembe in his arms.

  Mrs Sing clapped her hands, and the uproar subsided.

  “If you don’t have an instrument, you’ll clap and stomp.” She provided them with a heartbeat rhythm. Ta ta too. Clap clap stomp.

  “Now djembes,” Mrs Sing said, “play this.”

  “Now, tambourines. Triangles, this.”

  For a moment, Mrs Sing was as young as her students again. Squatting, she tapped a thimbled thumb on the floorboards of her father’s sho
p. Pit-a-pat. The thimble beat time to the rhythmic ostinato of the sewing machine. Now slow, now fast. Waves of silk washed under the sewing machine’s lip and emerged as jackets and butterfly gowns. The scissors, too, had their own scraping beat. Sometimes she sang, but not too loud, so that her father was not distracted. When the scissors slipped or snagged, and whole dollars of fabric fell ruined to the table, he swore and flung spools of thread at her.

  She blinked away the memory and stood once more under the classroom’s fluorescent lights, between familiar squared walls.

  “Now sing something,” she said, “or shout, if you like. Listen. I am. A tea-cher. My name is. Mrs Star. Now you.”

  The student she pointed to blanched. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Say whatever you want.”

  “Twen-ty. Plus for-ty. Is six-ty. I think.”

  “Jake, what about you?”

  Jake dropped guiro and scraper and cupped his hands over his mouth. Btse btse btse btse btse btse . . . tch tch tch!

  “Fantastic,” she said. “Your turn, Nour. Keep playing—don’t stop!”

  “My sis-ter. Is af-raid of. Her sha-dow. And friends.”

  “Ba-con. And fried eggs. And waf-fles. And Mi-lo.”

  “Aya Kha-nem. Se-ta-reh. Mezle khar-eh. Ya sag.”

  Stifled titters, here and there.

  “Poetic,” Mrs Sing said. “Is that something from home?”

  “Obviously.”

  Around the room they went.

  “You’ll come. A-waltz-ing. Ma-til-da. With me.”

  “Co-mo. Se lla-ma. Sí. Bo-ni-ta.”

  “All right,” she said. “On my signal, triangles, drop out. Ready . . . now. Okay, tambourines.”

  She stretched an invisible measuring tape between her hands, again and again, and one at a time the instruments stilled. At last there were only feet and hands. Clap clap stomp. Clap clap stomp. She called for the feet to stop, and for a moment there was only the simple living sound of one hand against the other, a thimble bouncing against the floor, a slap—

  Then, with a final gesture, she cut that off, too. The room crackled and prickled with the sudden quiet. They all held their breaths. Even Nour. Even Jake.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Now we’ll write down the patterns that we played.”

  Her marker squeaked against the board. “That was 4/​​​​​​​4 time,” she said. “Who can tell me what these numbers mean? Megan? Yes. Very good. This is the rhythm we clapped and stomped. Name these notes for me, someone.”

  “Crochet, crochet, minim.”

  “Good. Now show me.”

  They named and counted their way through all the silty layers of rhythm their river had laid down. Then the bell rang. Class was over.

  “Nour,” Mrs Sing said, “would you stay a minute?”

  Jake oo-oo-oohed, and Nour flung him a look of scorn.

  When the classroom had cleared, he said, “Am I in trouble?”

  “No. I wanted to ask your advice. What Juma said—that was Persian, right?”

  “Maybe,” Nour said, studying his shoes.

  “I saw that you laughed.”

  “It was a dumb joke.”

  “About me?” She watched him. “He won’t get in trouble.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Nour said, not meeting her eyes. Thumbs hooked together, hands straining apart. “I’ll tell him not to do that again.”

  “I would appreciate that.”

  She nodded at Nour, dismissing him. Cymbal by drum, she collected the instruments her students had left around the room.

  Mrs Sing said, half to herself, “That Juma. I must be getting old.”

  “Not if you’re still noticing this stuff,” Nour said from the door. A quicksilver smile, and he was gone.

  He was a curious boy. So many of them were. There was perhaps no other school in the greater Melbourne area, perhaps no other school in Australia, that had so many children of war. Some shy, some loud, some laughing, some quiet—and every one of them on a hair trigger. Every one of them swallowing barrels and buckets of the wrath, frustration, grief, and shame that other Year 6 students sipped in juice-box amounts.

  Mrs Sing was born decades after war swept through Hong Kong. Nevertheless, war had left deep handprints across her life. Her grandfather, gasping himself awake. Her father, scarred with secondhand terror, biting and snapping like a beaten dog. And now her classroom was full of children of a different war.

  She had a whole golden hour before her next class. Mrs Sing took her syllabi and curriculum—both of which she would have to revise, rearranging later units of Rhythm and Genre and Period to fit in a unit of Harmony—and walked with whipstitch steps to the teacher’s lounge.

  “They can’t,” Mrs Pierce said. “They can’t do that.”

  Mr Early said, “I’m afraid they already have.”

  “That’s Canberra for you.”

  Ms Anderson said, very quietly, “I’m going to a protest Saturday. If anyone would like to join.”

  “On the bright side, there’ll be more time and resources to go around—for the ones that are left.”

  “If it’s not about educational policy, what the government does is none of our business.”

  “It affects our students.”

  “So does the flu.”

  “If I’m interrupting,” Mrs Sing said, “I’d be happy to leave.”

  “Nah, Shelly, we’re talking politics.” Mr Early shrugged. “Which, well, we shouldn’t be. But it appears that we are.”

  “It’s this TPV business,” Mrs Pierce said.

  “Did something happen?”

  “There’s a Year 8 student at the high school, maybe you taught her . . . Anyway. Her family’s visa renewals were denied. DIMA took the father into custody. But they’ll be deported together, is what I heard.”

  “Who was it?” Mrs Sing heard herself asking from afar, as if her voice belonged to someone else.

  “The name that I heard was Gulalai Zahir.”

  “I had her in maths,” Mr Early said. “Bright girl.”

  Ms Anderson said, “She always had a brave face on. But I thought there was a deep sadness there.”

  “She couldn’t have known, though.”

  “The thing about TPVs,” Mr Early said, “is that they’re inherently destabilizing. Try to get a job with one of those. ‘What’s your five-year plan for working here?’ ‘Uh, I can’t say, I might be deported in three years.’ ”

  “It’s heartless,” one of the others said. “Heartless and evil. I’m ashamed of it.”

  “I don’t think our government would do anything evil. Besides, isn’t Afghanistan safer these days? With the Americans there, and everything?”

  Mr Early said, “I haven’t heard much in the news lately.”

  “That’s good. Isn’t it?”

  “I remember her,” Mrs Sing said, a face and voice finally coming to mind. Contralto, a timbre like warm milk and honey.

  “Here’s a flyer,” Ms Anderson said. “The protest is Saturday.”

  Mrs Sing noted the date and time. “I have a choir concert in the morning.”

  “Bring the choir.”

  “You can’t be serious.” She thought about it. “I might.”

  Mrs Sing did not revise her syllabi that day. She had four more classes, then a rehearsal for the musical, and by the time she reached home a headache throbbed at the back of her skull: crochet, crochet rest; crochet, crochet rest.

  “Hurry up and sit down,” her husband said. “Dinner’s getting cold. And I’m starving.”

  She sat, wincing, and they ate in silence.

  After clearing half his plate of braised pork, eggplant, and tomatoes in eggs, he pushed back from the table. “Xuelai, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, then grimaced. “A headache.”

  “Kids acting up again?”

  “No.” She rubbed her temples. “I mean, they always do. It’s just, today—”

  �
��Here.” He set a water glass and two tablets on the table.

  “This is an awful world,” she said. “These kids, my kids, they deal with so much—” She lifted a slice of eggplant to her mouth, paused, then put it back. “Chengming. I want to stop trying.”

  “They must have been monsters today.”

  “It’s not my current students. A former one. Her name was Gulalai.”

  Crochet, crochet rest. She clapped the tablets into her mouth and gulped the glass of water.

  Her husband stiffened. “You’re serious.”

  “I didn’t know until today. I’m sorry.”

  “If it’s the money—”

  “As if money could stop a bullet. Or a bayonet.”

  “Xuelai, we live in Australia.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We live in Australia. I will not have a child here. Do you know what we’re willing to do to children?”

  “What am I supposed to say? Do you want us to leave?”

  “No.”

  “But you don’t want us to stay.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were impossible in college,” her husband said. “You’re impossible now.”

  “Having a child takes faith, or optimism. I don’t have much of either left. Anyway,” she said, “if we’re talking about college, you couldn’t cook. You called your mother long-distance to ask how to boil eggs—that was two hundred dollars. I should tell your colleagues that sometime.”

  “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “It’s chemistry.”

  But beneath his lightness was an injury. She had wounded him, she saw, just as the day had wounded her: thoughtlessly, irreparably, the way a crane dangling a steel girder might gash the beams around it. And she could not tend to that injury while her own was so raw.

  “Thanks for cooking,” she said. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  Chengming took them anyway. “I hope you’ll feel different in the morning,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Then we’ll both have decisions to make.”

  “I know. Whether we still need all this space. If. And whether I should take my choir kids on an excursion. It’s a lot of paperwork.”

  “Of all the things you could be thinking about . . .”

  “Why not? It’s the natural thing to do. If I want to be more involved. Ha, listen to me. As if I could have any kind of effect on a machine this big. On a world this cold.”