The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  My mother has our porch light on a timer. And she makes the first kid home call her at work. She and Stacy come from different parent planets.

  Getting off the bus, I put my key in gouge mode, just for practice. Our street’s a step up from Emily’s, plus, I know a lot of neighbors since we’ve lived here almost since I was born. Still, I’m always secretly glad to see the light in Todd’s room.

  I lean on the doorbell and listen to Todd’s size elevens thump down the stairs. Pause, peep through the hole, turn the lock.

  “Forget your key, Sievebrain?” he says.

  “Just making sure you get some exercise,” I say, waving my eyeball skewer toward his face. I wonder, does blood or some other liquid come out? Maybe you just find the eyeball halfway up your key, like an olive on a toothpick. “Any word from Mom?”

  “Start your homework.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say to Todd’s back. I make a small detour into the kitchen for cheese curls and fridge inspection. Defrosting burger means either chili or tacos.

  Up in my room, I make a little bed nest out of pillows and fleece, the perfect place for listening to music and basking in the glow from Hollywood pinned up on my wall. Hello, stars. No matter how much I mess up, they’re always smiling down at me. Of course, I’d be smiling too if somebody handed me a TV show or a billion-dollar record contract. I totally get why the Greeks loved their gods. Zeus, Hera, Apollo—they were celebrities, almost human, only luckier and better-looking, with personal assistants to do their bidding.

  Do personal assistants do homework? Probably not. But I bet you can bid them to look it over.

  • • •

  Next thing I know, Mom is knocking and entering. “K. C., hi, cupcake, it’s your turn—oh.”

  I sit up fast.

  “Sleeping? This is a terrible time to nap.”

  “Thinking,” I say. Although thinking what I can’t say because my head feels like a snow globe that’s just been shaken.

  “Our deal,” Mom says. She’s looking around, but clearly I haven’t unpacked my backpack, since it’s still downstairs. So that means I haven’t cleaned out my lunchbox and copied new assignments from my agenda to the four-month planner over my desk and started on something due the next day.

  Which means Mom owns my Saturday, and I might not be able to babysit and pay Emily back for the onion rings.

  I could wave my math around and pretend I did it at home, but since it’s downstairs I decide it’s better to go for mercy.

  “I’m so tired,” I say. Mom takes a deep breath. I know what she’s going to say. If you didn’t stay up until all hours of the night . . .

  Before I can ask her to take my temperature, she changes her mind and holds out an envelope. “For you.”

  “Visa again?”

  “Get that out of your head,” Mom says. “Fourteen is too young for a credit card.”

  It’s nice to know that Visa doesn’t think so.

  “Save the Girls,” Mom says. She sounds excited, but the brain flakes are still falling in my head. Then I remember. The present. If you can believe signing someone up to write a million letters when they can’t write is a present. “Want to read it to me?” Mom says.

  Doesn’t she have something better to do, like making chili? “After dinner,” I say. “I’m so hungry. Maybe that’s why I have a headache.”

  Mom punts a couple of pillows and sits down on the rug beside the bed. She leans over and lays her head next to mine on the fleece neck roll.

  Crinkle.

  Suddenly Mom sits up. Following her foot under the bed, she pulls out the empty cheese curls package. And a plate of crusty spaghetti. Oops.

  How many times have I told you not to eat food in your room? But Mom doesn’t say anything. She just looks disappointed, which is worse.

  “Read it to me?” Mom says. She’s all upright again. “Or I’ll read it to you.”

  “You read it,” I say.

  “You open it.”

  The envelope’s as thin as old-lady skin. A swell of missing Granny washes over me, gardenia perfume and fingers in potting soil and the way she calls me Little Miss Bright Eyes. Of course, the only one who’s ever associated “bright” with me lives fourteen hours away by car.

  “How come it has an American stamp?” I ask. “I thought it was coming from South Africa—”

  “Sudan,” Mom says, “which is northern Africa. But that’s a really good question, K. C.”

  I wish I could think of another really good question and another and another, and then maybe I’d be the daughter Mom always wanted.

  “Probably Save the Girls bundles all the letters together for the trip overseas and mails them out in the States,” Mom continues.

  I unfold the square inside—two pages, one all dotted Morse code that Mom says is Arabic, and the other lacy cursive. I pass it to Mom, who reads it aloud.

  “Why does she call me ‘sister’?” I ask.

  “It’s like ‘comrade.’ Sisterhood Is Powerful. That was this book—”

  “What’s for dinner?” I ask.

  Mom stops with a look so sorrowful, I wish I could turn into a stuffie. I’m already filled with fluff. No one lectures a teddy bear; you just hug it.

  “Tacos,” Mom says, creaking to her feet. “I came up to remind you that it’s your night to set the table. Bring your dirty dishes when you come down. Please.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just do better next time.” That’s Mom’s refrain. “I’ll do the table tonight so you can write Nawra. You have the stationery I gave you at Christmas?”

  “Yeah.” Somewhere.

  “Want me to help?”

  “You don’t think I can write a letter?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Do we have real taco shells or just scoopy chips?”

  “Shells,” Mom says. She looks as if she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t.

  “Lots of lettuce,” I call as I hear her step on the stairs, but she doesn’t answer.

  Thank God the letter’s short. Thirty bucks—is that the great gift Nawra’s raving about? Not that I’d mind. I’d put it toward a replacement cell phone. It’s so Mom to send money off to Sudan and then make us eat Cutie Oats instead of Cheerios, everything generic, except for brands she claims really taste better, which is always her stuff, coffee and smoked turkey.

  I hunt for Mom’s present. I remember the box, brown wicker so ridgy I ran my bare feet over it on Christmas for a little massage. Inside were compartments for stamps and pens and paper. Digging through the pile on the floor of the closet, I feel like one of those dogs in cartoons, clothes and old worksheets flying out between my legs.

  Not in closet.

  Not under bed.

  Costume box?

  Tossing jeans and pillows out of the way, I bushwhack to the chest at the end of my bed. Uncle Phil made it, so Mom’s never going to let me get rid of it. Inside I unpack a time capsule: gypsy scarf from third-grade Halloween, stuffed kitty from Chloe’s Build-A-Bear birthday party, notes Mr. Hathaway sent to Mom that I’m sure she’s happier not knowing about. I trash those. I should have stashed the spaghetti plate in the costume box. Near the bottom I find a long white glove that goes all the way past the elbow, a long-ago Christmas present from Granny.

  Dahling.

  How can you eat oozy hors d’oeuvres with gloves on? Maybe your personal assistant eats them for you.

  “Supper, guys,” Mom calls up the stairs.

  I consider wearing the glove but in the end decide against it. No celebrity would dine with a lowlife like my brother.

  In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate

  28 January 2008

  Dear Madame K. C. Cannelli,

  Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong?

  I thank you again for your gift. We have a saying: A friend who visits you when you are suffering is your best friend.

  Saida Julie says you will send
me letters too. Perhaps they are sailing now across the ocean. I have never seen the ocean, but Adeeba says it is like the sky turned upside down, blue with little white clouds on top when the wind blows. She says it moves like the desert, but it is so big that even if I owned one thousand camels, I would not be able to cross it.

  Adeeba has not seen the ocean either, but she saw a picture in a book. She can read and write. Her father taught her and then sent her to school with boys, although his own mother did not approve. He is a journalist. Her parents met at the university. Her mother, God’s mercy upon her, was studying to be a doctor. In the capital, ways are different. The men do not say, A woman has broken wings.

  Adeeba corrects me: Some men do say that, but not her mother’s father, God’s mercy upon him. Her grandfather was a professor, so he sent his son to England to learn about the stars and his daughter to medical school in Khartoum to learn about the body.

  He did not plan for his daughter to follow a journalist back to West Darfur, but her heart was as strong as her head. He could not argue when she said the need for doctors among us was great. So Adeeba’s parents moved to El-Geneina. Her mother could not believe this city called itself capital of the state, with planes that wait to take off until the mud dries on the runway.

  Nonetheless, Adeeba’s parents were happy, which neither grandmother could understand.

  The one in the village thought, How could my son marry a woman who does not stay behind the doorstep but touches the skin and pus of strangers?

  The other in the city thought, How could my daughter marry a man with one foot in jail who buys chickens for dinner with their feathers still on?

  They made a palace out of an apartment and put on the throne their little girl, the sultana Adeeba.

  Adeeba says I should talk about me, not her. Adeeba writes this for me because there was no school for girls in my village, and even if there were, my father would not have sent me. Adeeba promises she will write down everything I say exactly as it leaves my mouth.

  So I will test her now and say that Adeeba is very clever but very bossy.

  Your sister, Nawra

  In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate

  25 February 2008

  Dear Madame K. C. Cannelli,

  Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong?

  When I saw this, I said to Adeeba, Where did all my words go? I cannot write, but I can count. My brother Muhammad, God’s mercy upon him, taught me so that I could keep track of the sheep and goats. That is how we passed the evenings under the stars.

  Why is your pen not moving as fast as my lips? I asked.

  Adeeba said, Your greetings are too long.

  Droughts are too long, wars are too long, but not greetings. Forgive me, sister, if I have been impolite. How are you? And your health? How is your family? How are you? Inshallah [translator’s note: God willing], you are all strong. Your health is good?

  That is better.

  Adeeba does not agree. Write that down, I tell her: We do not agree. Literacy does not conquer stupidity.

  You and your sayings and your greetings, Adeeba says. See how silly it looks to repeat the same words over and over. And what have you told this lady? Writing is different from talking. In writing you must always say something new. People in America are very busy. They do not have time for greetings.

  What do you mean, Americans do not have time? They have mobiles, they have cars, but they do not have time? They may have more meat, more cloth, more medicine, but one thing that God gives in equal measure is time.

  You are as stubborn as a donkey, Adeeba says.

  What do you know of donkeys, City Girl? I tell her. I had a beautiful donkey, Madame Cannelli. I called her Cloudy because she was the soft gray of the sky before a summer rain. My father, God’s mercy upon him, bought her to help corral the herd, but in her heart she belonged to me. When she did not obey, my father beat her with one of the switches he piled beside the house. He beat us, too, so I knew that a switch brings obedience from the outside, not from the inside. Instead I tied some twigs together and scratched Cloudy’s back when we returned tired and dusty from gathering wood for the fire. I saved her watermelon rinds and filled her water hole. Not once did I have to beat her.

  We have a saying: You cannot feed your donkey only when you need to ride it. But that is what people do.

  Adeeba says my stories are as long as my greetings. If you are busy with your household, I apologize.

  I will let Adeeba rest her hand, but know that there are many words behind the few on this paper.

  Your sister, Nawra

  In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate

  27 March 2008

  Dear Madame K. C. Cannelli,

  Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong?

  Your gift comes but not your letters. Perhaps you could put them in the same envelope. At the beginning, Saida Julie said we must write our sisters in America every month, and they will write us. She has kind eyes, as green as the grass after the wadi floods, so I did not feel shy to ask what I should put in my letter. Perhaps I have not been saying the right thing. Perhaps Adeeba is right about the greetings. Know that I say them, but I have told Adeeba not to write them down.

  Most Americans do not know about Sudan, Saida Julie said. Anything you tell will be news.

  We have a saying: When God created Sudan, he laughed in delight. That is all I know. Adeeba tires of my sayings, but they are all I have left of Umm Jamila.

  Describe your village, Saida Julie said.

  Umm Jamila was wide and clean, with acacia trees on three sides shielding us from the wind and beyond them fields where we planted sorghum and millet. At the foot of the far hills we dropped our buckets in deep wells with water so clear and cool that whenever people drank from them they said, Praise the Lord!

  Many people lived in Umm Jamila, at least that is what I used to think, all my father’s people, my uncles and their wives, my cousins, my grandmother, and more than forty families besides. But it was nothing like this camp. Here you cannot smell your own dinner for all the cookpots steaming and cannot sleep for strangers crying out in their dreams. Even if you pick your way carefully, you step on what is left of someone’s life.

  In Umm Jamila, when my sisters and I returned with firewood on our heads, we walked three across holding hands. Most families had several houses, all with thick thatch roofs and strong mud walls we patched every year after the rains. My father slept in one. Another belonged to my father’s first wife, Kareema, God’s mercy upon her. My mother slept with the baby. We children shared a fourth until my father, God’s mercy upon him, gave it to the boys and built a separate one for my sisters and me and another for visitors. Our animals we fenced in a zariba. Around us my mother grew onions, sesame, watermelon, okra, tomatoes, cowpeas, all good things to eat. We picked the red hibiscus blossoms to make hot tea and cool karkade, which tickled our throats as we drank. And she had a mango tree she tended as if it were a baby. She sang to it.

  When we teased her, she used to say, I am not singing to my tree, I am just singing. She always said, If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing.

  Saida Julie said you will be curious what I did every day. Girls do different things in America.

  I milked the animals. I ground millet. I carried water from the wells. I gathered berries, grasses, and firewood in the bush. I washed clothes. I brewed tea. My father, God’s mercy upon him, liked it very, very sweet. My mother did without sugar so he could have double. The women in the village used to tease her, Now we know why you are Ibrahim’s favorite.

  When my father grew angry, my mother handed him a stalk of sugar cane. Chew on this, she said.

  That was my mother before. She could make even my father laugh.

  She will not dance again, but if I could just hear her sing.

  I am sorry. That is all I can say for now.

  Your sister, Nawra

  Nawra
>
  APRIL 2008

  “Maybe tomorrow Saida Julie will come,” Adeeba says. “She is one of the khawaja who keep their promises. Not like Madame K. C. Cannelli. She must be married to a headman. An American Halima.”

  “But Halima would not give money to a nothing girl,” I say.

  “She would if she thought there was some benefit to her,” Adeeba says. “Today we must go together to collect wood.”

  “Like last time?” I say. “No, City Girl, your head is made for different things than carrying wood.”

  “This time I will bring a rope,” Adeeba says.

  “You cannot lead wood like a donkey. It has no legs.”

  “I will tie the wood together and strap it to my back,” Adeeba says.

  “And where will you get this rope?”

  For all her answers, Adeeba does not have one for this.

  “If the next gift comes, you must buy a rope,” she says. “When we are not gathering firewood, we can tie things down.”

  Before these gifts, I had never held money. Now before I spend each coin, I turn it over and over in my hand, like one of my sister Saha’s stones. But the coins do not have the same beauty, for they have been shaped by men, not God, who makes not one thing exactly like another. Round and flat, the coins are pleasing enough with their words and pictures and numbers, but they are all the same.

  Their beauty lies not in their form but in their deeds. The coins have brought my mother healing herbs. And I am grateful for those days I do not have to walk beyond the camp with my fear, looking for firewood.

  Why does Madame K. C. Cannelli not write? I do not think Saida Julie has told her of my dishonor. Perhaps she prefers to aid a smart girl like Adeeba.

  We are still arguing when we hear, “Ayah!” The cry moves through our section, but it has no panic. Words soon embroider it with joy. “The saidas’ car!”

  Adeeba grabs my hand, and we run toward the meeting place. Beside us hurry even those who grumble in their jealousy, who say that the saidas are wasting their money because doing a favor to women is water that has missed its stream. We hunger for news, especially good news, but anything to reshape the sameness of the days.