The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  In books Mira read later, she came across bullies whose motives arose from being richer or dumber or somehow inse-cure. She read these books and contemplated what Lucy’s motives might have been. There were girl bullies in those books, girls with charisma, who delivered sharp, quotable dialogue to their tragic girlfriend minions. They were beautiful; they had original thoughts. Mira tried to picture Lucy Chin with a sizzling personality, but it was impossible. Her only creativity came out in the various punishments she thought up.

  “I’M LUCY CHIN,” Lucy Chin had said on the first day they met, patting Mira jovially on the shoulder, like a colleague. She always used her full name, but later Mira began calling her just Lucy in her head, in silent rebellion.

  They lived on the same street, and before they met they had orbited around each other — in different kindergarten and first grade classes, different after-school activities. They had probably passed each other on bicycles, Mira thought, initially pleased with this idea, to have found a potential friend, so close. This must mean there were other people and things she hadn’t discovered in her small universe, an infinite number per- haps. It was like the time she’d lifted a rock in her front yard and found an oblong beetle and then couldn’t identify it in her book of insects and thought she’d discovered a new species.

  That first time at Lucy’s house, she noticed it had a yeasty smell, as though organisms grew anaerobically out of the carpet. Not that it wasn’t clean — the trinket display was absent of dust and a lower step held a basket of folded laundry — but the windows seemed as though they’d never been opened and the walls seemed to take up more space than in other houses, overstepping their boundaries and bulging with gratuitous corners. After about ten minutes of drinking orange juice in the kitchen while the mothers worked out a babysitting schedule and Ravi opened and closed all the cupboard doors, Mira asked to use the bathroom. Lucy Chin led her down the hall. They passed a small living room where Mr. Chin read the newspaper, sunk into a suede loveseat. He hadn’t said hello. Behind him was a shelf lined with jars that looked like they were full of somebody’s tonsils. She never found out if that was what they were. In the bathroom, after washing her hands with the green shell-shaped soap and drying them on flowered paper towel, Mira tried to open the door but couldn’t. She worried that the walls had grown too close to the door edges, their paint sticking against each other and sealing, and that she would be trapped forever in this square, airless room. At least she had drinking water, she thought, looking at the faucet.

  She tried the door again, aiming not to make too loud a sound. The lock looked easy enough, the same as at her house. She yanked at the door. She said “Mom?” quietly, knowing she wouldn’t be heard. “Ravi?” she said, banking on her brother’s superhuman hearing. She thought about calling Lucy’s dad, since he was closest, but hesitated at saying “Mr. Chin” aloud. Then the door opened, suddenly and easily, and Lucy stood outside of it.

  “The door was stuck,” said Mira.

  “It’s never been stuck before,” the girl replied, in a voice that refused to fluctuate in tone. But then she smiled and took Mira’s hand and pulled her into the kitchen, where their mothers had finalized the arrangements.

  “I’M THE BOSS of you,” Lucy said to her in the back of the class- room while they cut fake leaves out of construction paper to glue on to the fake autumn tree on the wall. When second grade started, they’d been put in the same class for the first time.

  “What do you mean?” asked Mira, pausing in her task.

  “I tell you what to do and you do it,” explained Lucy almost patiently, her safety scissors open and ready.

  “You mean like a game?” she asked, and Lucy shook her head.

  The teacher came by and collected their leaves.

  The boss of you. It reminded her of robots, boxes of galva-nized metal arranged on top of each other, filled with a tangle of red wires, square faces blinking with lights, walking and talking and operated by remote control, programmed to make breakfast but not to eat it, saying pre-recorded robot words in electronic voices. To really have somebody be your boss, she figured, you’d have to have almost no brain. You had to be detached, or have a wire loose somewhere. Even robots rebelled, in movies. You had to have enough of a brain to do things but not to think about them.

  Like those kids in 314, where her brother was now. They kept one kid in that class on a leash though he must have been twelve years old, a squiggly phone cord leash that tied his wrist to the teacher’s when they ventured into the hallways. One time, Mira had peered through the classroom window and watched the teacher grasp Ravi’s hand, which was holding a pencil, and guide it pointlessly over a piece of notebook paper.

  “GO OVER THERE,” said Lucy Chin.

  There meant Fantasia, the pink brick building across the street from the McConnaghey Centre, where they had their Brownie meetings, in downtown Richmond Hill. After the Brownie meeting, if Mira’s mother was late to pick them up, Mira and Lucy stood and observed the women who lingered outside its doors in their costumes, slender and fragile as insects, smoking cigarettes and laughing into each other.

  “Why would I go over there?”

  “Just do it. Go inside,” Lucy said.

  Mira wouldn’t mind going inside. A hundred times she’d passed by that building with her mother, on the way to the library, and every time her mother made a clicking noise with her tongue and hurried her along. In daylight, the building reminded her of discarded bubblegum wrappers — not only the colour, but the way the brick looked crumpled. Now, at night, lit up with pot lights under the roof, Mira thought the colour was more fuchsia or magenta, colours she’d only just discovered. The inside, she imagined, would be like nothing else in Richmond Hill. The building appeared small from the outside, only one storey high, with a flat, shingled roof, but she pictured the inside as cavernous, with multiple lower levels opening into the ground like the open pit mines she’d seen pictures of at school. She imagined the walls painted black, floors in slippery gold, but nobody would ever slip. The women would mingle, their elbows rubbing against each other as they made clever, biting remarks, as men in suits brought them drinks — fuchsia/magenta drinks in clean glasses with hip-shaped curves. Her mother owned a few glasses like that. On Sunday afternoons, Mira, her mother, and Ravi made mango milkshakes in the blender and poured them into the glasses, drinking from straws almost too narrow to carry the dense liquid to their mouths. Mira thought the inside of Fantasia would be as perfect as mango milkshakes in lovely glasses when her mother was in a good mood and Ravi was almost normal, only amplified with lights and colour and sound.

  “I think only older people are allowed to go in there,” said Mira, wishing it weren’t true.

  “Obviously. You’ll go in, they’ll tell you to get out. Just go in for a second.”

  “Aren’t you going to come too?” It seemed to Mira like the sort of fun adventure girls might have, sneaking into a place and solidifying their friendship; she still thought they might be friends.

  “No, I’ll stay here.” Lucy stared at her, angry. Mira couldn’t figure out why she would be angry, but she stepped forward to the curb, looking both ways at the fast yellow lights of cars speeding down that congested, narrow area of Yonge Street.

  The women looked down at her as she passed, but only smiled and exchanged looks. Mira opened the pink wooden door and went inside. It was as dark as outside, and she couldn’t see much, because a partition blocked her view. Lines of coloured light flickered over the wall, and music played, quieter than she’d expected. A tall man in a black T-shirt sold admission and Mira thought of slipping past his knees unnoticed, but then a customer plucked the back of her brown Brownie uniform dress.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “My dad’s inside.” she lied.

  “How about I go get him for you,” the man said.

  Mira wondered if
there was an Indian man inside who would pass as her father. She thought of Lucy waiting on the other side of the road, and of her mother coming to pick her up. The man looked at her with impatience. A girl’s leg flashed behind him and she observed it, knowing she was too self-contained to run around the man and make her way inside the place. “I’ll wait for him outside,” she said, and jerked out of his grip, turned and left, the man and the other man laughing and laughing. Her dad’s here while the kid’s at the Girl Scout meeting!, they laughed. She had disgraced her father’s name, she thought, before she deleted the memory of the too-soft music and the men she’d seen — dressed not in black blazers but in wrinkled, cotton blends — and kept her old imagined image of Fantasia brilliant and intact. In the car on the way home, Lucy pinched her arm, digging in her fingernails. Neither her mother nor Ravi saw. She thought about how people pinched each other or themselves to prove they weren’t dreaming, to prove they were really there. They dropped Lucy off at her house, waiting for her to open the door, turn and smile and wave, her hair turning with her like a scuttling beetle, round and shiny and black.

  “WAIT AT THE other bus stop,” Lucy told her, indicating the next stop on the bus route, about six blocks away.

  Mira barely noticed that, waiting for the bus each morning, she’d been crossing her fingers and praying not to see Lucy’s pale face in the window. What Lucy wanted her to do was walk the six blocks from this stop to the next, after her mother dropped her off. She didn’t mind the walk, because she passed houses she didn’t normally notice, and she liked to see who matched which garage door colours with which bricks. It delighted her to see a cream-coloured house with a bright turquoise garage. She didn’t even worry about being abducted. The problem arose in that her mother sometimes dropped her off at the stop only a couple of minutes before the bus arrived, which didn’t leave much time to get to the other stop. She’d first wait until her mother had driven away, and then check her pink velco-strapped watch, which she’d synchronized with the school clocks. If she had fewer than five minutes, she’d run, feeling the heavy thermos inside her backpack hitting her back as she ran.

  The actual bus ride held other stresses. Lucy and Mira shared a seat and Lucy shared her thoughts, for example that the teacher only liked Mira because she was the only Indian in the class (Mira questioned if this was true and if it mat- tered), that Mira had too-long hair and should cut it short (but Mira loved her hair, loved hiding under it and twirling it around and pretending she had the inky tentacles of an octopus), that Mira was ugly, hideous even, and didn’t smile enough, and didn’t talk enough (strange, since Lucy Chin also fell into the quiet category), that she needed to improve herself, her posture, needed to do better on math quizzes (according to Lucy, Mr. Chin said spelling never got anybody anywhere), and if she didn’t make these improvements, boys would never like her (Mira found boys completely irrelevant, except in comparison to girls, the gender she might forever distrust).

  Lucy Chin traded stickers unfairly, gave Mira a single used scratch and sniff sticker, in the shape of a pear, for a whole package of shiny zoo animal stickers. Mira gave the sticker to Ravi, who stuck it on a piece of blank paper and then drew other pears, exactly like it, in even rows across the page.

  Lucy Chin made her push a bird’s nest off her second storey bedroom window ledge, her reasoning being that it obscured the view of the backyard. The nest had three blue eggs in it, like Cadbury eggs. They cracked when they landed in the grass. On days with nicer weather, Lucy Chin’s mom took them to Mill Pond and they fed the swans and geese the crumbled ends of bread. When The Liberal reported dead swans found, one-by-one, with twisted, broken necks, scattered here and there, wings spread wide along the Mill Pond walkways, Mira knew Lucy hadn’t done it — the crimes had happened at night, and the birds were too big — but she still pictured her thin, eight-year-old friend standing by the dark water with her arms around a huge, white, struggling bird.

  Lucy Chin attended Mira’s birthday party, along with six girls — chosen randomly. They went to the newly opened Richmond Hill wave pool. The pool alternated between periods of waves and calm. During one of the wave periods, Lucy held Mira’s head underwater for a stretch of time. Mira carved the water with her hands, trying to push away Lucy’s slippery arms. Back at Mira’s house, before Mira opened her presents, Lucy whispered, “You can open mine, but don’t take it out of the packaging. I want it back tomorrow.” Ravi ate pizza next to them, playing with the melted cheese. Mira’s mother took pictures. One of the other girls, Cynthia, hugged Mira, big and genuine, after Mira gave her a loot bag. Mira shrank for a second and then hugged her back. Cynthia smelled like cake frosting, and Mira didn’t want to let go.

  Lucy Chin’s present turned out to be a ceramic doll, its head tilted coyly downwards. Its skin had the iridescence of carnival glass. Instead of returning it, Mira wanted to smash it with a cloth-covered hammer, like she’d seen in a craft book at the library, and cement it into a mosaic plate, and eat odd and lovely things from it, things Lucy Chin could never guess at — frozen red grapes, clumps of brown sugar, white overgrown cucumber seeds.

  Every day after school, they walked from the afternoon bus stop to Lucy’s house. Lucy made Mira walk ahead of her. She kicked the backs of Mira’s knees until they ached. Mira longed to spring away, but needed some invisible flare gun to loosen her legs. She watched the ground, counting the sidewalk squares and the shadows of trees, angling in the afternoon light. She created games with illogical rules. If she avoided stepping on all the lines on the ground, Lucy Chin would move away to a foreign land. At night, Mira felt her legs throbbing to the phantom rhythm of Lucy’s steps. She hid most of the bruises from her mother by being more private with her bathing and dressing rituals. Still, her mother must have thought her exceedingly clumsy, to accept not only the bruises, but the occasional bite, and several paper cuts, where Lucy had tested the sharpness of paper across Mira’s arms.

  She told her brother once. He was sitting on the carpet in front of the television at home, watching an educational show, swinging his head back and forth, singing along to a song, with incorrect lyrics. “Lucy Chin might be a bad person,” she said. She listed some of the things Lucy had done. She imagined him finding her and beating her up, like a brother should.

  Her brother nodded.

  “Lucy Chin is mean,” she said.

  “People should always be nice,” her brother said.

  One day, Mira got on the bus and Lucy wasn’t there.

  “Lucy’s at home sick today,” Lucy’s mother told her.

  The seat next to Mira remained empty throughout the drive to school. The amount of extra space was overwhelming. I could keep my backpack here next to me, she thought, and moved it from her lap to the seat. I could stretch my legs out, she thought, but wasn’t sure if it was safe to sit sideways, or if Lucy’s mom would yell. She didn’t yell often, only once in a while at her house after school, when she’d yell at Lucy’s brother in Chinese and then he would scoot to emptying the dishwasher. Lucy’s mother was kind to a fault, so Mira assumed she had gotten it from Mr. Chin, with whom Mira had interacted only minimally. On the occasions when she had seen him, he had spoken only of newspaper articles.

  In class, Mira went through lessons as usual. She worked on a craft project, taped feathers to corrugated cardboard and stapled paper to paper, solved math problems, and leaned sleepily against a chair while the teacher read aloud. During the first recess, Mira played by herself, removing a loose button from her sweater and burying it, then searching to retrieve it again. Scooping the sand, and even letting grains fly back in her face was mildly pleasing because Lucy wasn’t there. By lunch, Mira felt three feelings. One was the ache she had on Sunday nights, knowing she would have to get back on the bus with Lucy the next morning. The second was loneliness. The third resulted from the first two, and had a hint of strategy in it — if she could align herself with other girls
, make other friends, it might be her way out. Lucy Chin would return to school but Mira would have moved on. Mira would walk right by her on the bus and link arms with a different classmate, whose mother could probably take over as babysitter.

  At lunch, Mira clutched a granola bar and stood at the edge of the yard, considering her options. There were several groups of girls from her class, huddled outside portable classrooms and in the playground. She ruled out the bigger groups, not sure she could speak loudly enough to join them. A few of the smaller groups were eliminated based on members (intimi-dating) or activities (Cops and Robbers). Finally, she decided on a group of three girls — one was birthday party Cynthia — talking quietly on a low bench that faced away from her. Their hair appealed to her, one girl’s climbing the air with static, another’s ponytailed, the third’s swirling to her shoulders. Her own hair would make a reasonable fourth. All three of them were pulling the tips of their shoes (sneakers, Mary Janes, out-of-season sandals) through the gravel at their feet. Maybe they were talking about their shoes, comparing them, or maybe about the gravel, the grating sound it made as it moved.

  She approached, opening her granola bar and chewing it, to seem more casual.

  “Hi,” she said, but wasn’t close enough yet, so they didn’t hear her. “Hi,” she said again, stepping closer to the side of the bench, and this time it was startlingly loud.

  “Hi Mira,” said Cynthia. “Where’s Lucy today?”

  “She has a cold so she stayed home.”

  “Oh.” The three girls looked at her.

  “What are you guys doing?” Mira asked.

  “Nothing,” static-hair girl said. “What are you doing?”