The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “Not much. Eating a granola bar because I didn’t have time to finish it inside.” Mira thought it sounded like one of her mother’s phone conversations with Lala Aunty.

  “Yeah we would go on the playground but it’s so crowded we might fall off and get killed,” Cynthia said. Mira liked the exaggeration of this.

  “And Cops and Robbers is such an idiotic game,” static-hair girl said.

  “And what are you supposed to do with stickers once you’ve collected them?” said ponytail. “You look at them, and then what? You can’t even stick them on anything, because then they decrease in value.”

  “Her dad is a stock broker,” said Cynthia.

  Mira agreed with them, and tried to think of a matching apt comment of her own. “What about jumping rope? I know it’s pretty foolish,” she added quickly, quoting Lala Aunty, who called everything foolish.

  “Yeah but it’s good exercise,” rationalized Cynthia.

  Unfortunately, none of them had a rope, so Mira couldn’t figure out what to say next. The girls kept looking at her, per- haps waiting for her to leave so they could resume confiding in one another about their families and secrets and ambitions. “Well, I should go,” Mira said, remembering how Lala Aunty said one should not overstay one’s welcome.

  The girls seemed surprised, and then Mira regretted saying goodbye. The bell rang as she was leaving them, and the three girls went back together to the school entrance. Mira followed just behind them, matching their pace, pretending to be a fourth in their little group, until all of the students in their class formed a line for the teacher to direct inside.

  Lucy returned the next day, though Mira had hoped she might have tuberculosis. At recess, she saw Cynthia looking at her, and she said to Lucy Chin that maybe they should go over there. Lucy glared, and they stayed where they were.

  “YOU HAVE THE longest hair out of all the girls in the class,” said Lucy, but she didn’t mean it as a compliment. Bending her head to touch Mira’s like they were dear friends or co-conspir-ators, she compared her own hair, short and straight, to Mira’s, long and tangled.

  “It’s not that long,” said Mira, willing her hair to seem shorter than it was.

  “You better not get on the bus tomorrow with that hair,” she said. “It should be shorter than mine. Otherwise, my brother will kill you.”

  Lucy’s elusive brother was older, in ninth grade at least, and Lucy often used him as a threat. Mira was uncertain about what “kill” meant in this case. Whenever Mira saw him, she would try and judge if he were the type of person who might attack a little girl. He must be. Mira never knew what to think about other people’s brothers, who acted cool and argued and said funny things.

  So Mira went home and got the scissors from the kitchen drawer. In her mother’s bathroom, she climbed up on the counter to see better, and rested her bare feet in the sink. She marvelled at Lucy’s care in not cutting the hair herself, not letting the evidence accumulate on the floor of her own house. She whispered goodbye to her hair, silly but necessary, and held the scissors up. She cut bangs first, a straight line across her forehead, thinking they might look okay, but they didn’t. So she cut them shorter, and then moved the scissors around to the back, first just shortening the pieces an inch at a time. She had never had her hair really cut before, except for trims her mother did herself. Finally, she took a fistful of it and closed her eyes and snipped until there was nothing left to snip. When she opened her eyes, her hair stood out from her head like a boy’s, except where a few long pieces hung off her scalp, but worse than that, her mother had opened the door and come in, silent in her shock, rushing forward to take the scissors away.

  “What are you doing? Why would you do that?” She shook Mira’s arms until her whole body shook, and picked her up off the counter and stood her in front of her. She put her fingers through Mira’s hair. “Mira! You look ugly! You know that? Why would you do that?”

  And Mira started to cry, and almost, almost, told, but she couldn’t, not just because of Lucy’s brother, but because she didn’t want her mother to know how stupid she was, how brain- less. Now she was stuck, and maybe it would go on forever. She should have been smarter. “Don’t cry,” her mother said, looking surprised at the outburst. Her mother sat down on the closed toilet lid and sighed and hugged her, and said reas-suringly that it would grow out, but that really she should have just asked if she wanted a haircut and they could have gone to a hairdresser. She pressed her face to Mira’s as though to share her tears, and bits of hair stuck to her cheeks where the tears made them wet.

  When Mira came home with multiple bee stings on her face and arms, she told her mother she’d gone over to the bee corner to retrieve a stray tennis ball and had stumbled across a hive. It was the same story she’d told the recess monitor. Before telling anybody, she’d gone to the bathroom and rinsed off the applesauce. When the teacher asked her to point out the hive so the janitors could remove it, Mira had started crying — she was turning into a crier — and he had let it go unanswered, deciding aloud that with so many bees, the hive couldn’t be too hard to find.

  Her mother put hydrocortisone on the stings, and gave her a swig of Benadryl, but it still took a long time for Mira to fall asleep. She wondered if she’d die like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl. She kept thinking she heard bees in the room. The heat from the air vents sounded like buzzing, and the blankets on her felt like millions of tiny, landing legs.

  The next day was the weekend, and Mira’s mother took Mira and Ravi to Hillcrest Mall because Ravi needed shoes. They took the movie theatre entrance, the hallway of which was decorated with movie posters, framed in glass. One of the posters had, in its centre, a large brown eye with dark lashes, and faint red veins surrounding the pupil. The pupil revealed the shadow of a menacing man, which Mira dis- regarded. A bee perched at the edge of the eye, where the skin touched the eyeball. Enlarged in the poster, the bee was about the size of Mira’s fist, so large you could see strands of its fur, amber-coloured, matching its translucent wings. Its legs looked almost metallic, golden in the light, and sharp; its front legs literally touched the eye, as though the bee were trying to enter it.

  Mira couldn’t make herself walk past it. Her mother and Ravi had gone a few feet ahead before realizing that she had stopped.

  “It’s just a picture, Miru,” said her mother, but Mira barely heard her. She was remembering the bees and how they had congregated on her face, and how she had wanted to brush them away but more bees had gathered on her hands. Her eyes had closed automatically, even more terrifying, because she could only hear them, flitting at her ears. Was a bee like an earwig? Would it go inside an ear? Easily, it could burrow its way inside, choose to live inside her, turn her body into a hive. Her body would sound constantly of buzzing; she would hear it and try to find it, to eliminate the source. They’d sculpt their hexagonal honeycombs in stacks down her throat. When she spoke or breathed, it would be through honeycomb, which sounded sweet or pretty, but wasn’t. She had eaten honeycomb before, but took too big a bite at once, so she struggled to chew on the wax and nearly choked on the cloying, too-intense flavour.

  She stayed a few feet away from the poster, took it in, but had a worry — one she knew was irrational — that the bee would come out of the picture, and that more would follow.

  “Mira, come on inside,” her mother said. She picked Mira up and carried her, facing her away from the poster, down the hallway into the mall.

  IT ENDED WHEN Lucy Chin grew out of it. One recess near the end of second grade, Lucy Chin joined a game of Cops and Robbers and left Mira alone in the grass, where she sat and made chains of dandelions. Another recess, Lucy Chin went to play handball with a group of boys; for five minutes, Mira watched her dashing here and there in her bicycle shorts, which everybody was wearing those days but made Lucy Chin look like she was trying too hard, and then Mira got up and invited herself to
skip rope with her three desired friends, and though she kept looking over at Lucy Chin, she never saw Lucy look back at her. They didn’t sit together in class after that recess, and when they went to Lucy’s house after school, they watched television silently until Mira lied and said her mother was coming home early that day, and walked home, using the key she still kept around her neck to enter the house, and ate potato chips she found in one of the kitchen’s hiding places. When her mother came home, Mira declared that she did not need a babysitter anymore.

  On the second-last day of school, Lucy Chin stood up in class and announced that she was moving to Vancouver, where her father had found a new job. The teacher insisted Lucy exchange addresses with everybody in the class, to keep in touch. In July, Mira received a letter from her, on unicorn stationery. It had ordinary sentences in round letters; she couldn’t believe Lucy Chin had written it. “How are you? I am fine. Our new house is big.” She didn’t answer it. Years later, cleaning out her desk, she found the address and paused her cleaning to write Lucy Chin a letter. She began the letter as ordinarily as Lucy’s, then deleted it, then wrote in some questions, some accusations, demanding to know why, why her, why at all, then started listing all the tortures she could remember, then thought maybe they weren’t so horrible after all — stickers, birthday presents, birds? — then she worried that Lucy Chin might not even remember her, and deleted the letter entirely. She composed a new letter, giving an update on herself and changes in the town. The letter was posted with her mother’s bill payments, but Mira never received a response. In college, she typed in Lucy’s name on the internet and found a dozen Lucy Chins, said to herself, haha, she has multiplied. The search yielded one photo that might have been her — a girl with long, black hair that had been tinted red. She stood with two other girls, whose demeanours Mira checked for signs of abuse. There was affection in their body language, in their faces, and Mira tried to conjure up a memory of laughing with Lucy Chin, but this proved impossible.

  IT WAS IN the spring before Lucy Chin had left — March, Mira remembered, because they’d just returned from a week of break, which hadn’t really been a break for her because she had spent it at Lucy’s house — when Mira’s mother drove Mira and Ravi to their bus stop, and they spotted a boy out the window.

  “Isn’t that the bully?” their mother asked. Mira thought she meant Lucy Chin at first, and was surprised to see the swaggering, red-haired boy who had chased Ravi. The chasing had dwindled somewhat under the eye of Mrs. Chin, but it still happened when both Ravi and the bully were at the bus stop early enough. Months ago, Mira’s mother had asked Mira to point out the boy in the school record, which had pictures of all the kids from kindergarten to eighth grade. “That’s him?” her mother had asked. “He’s so small.” In the pictures, every- body looked small, thought Mira. The record was printed in black and white and laminated. The faces were bleached out under the gleaming plastic. Lucy Chin looked like a picture that went along with an obituary in the paper, ghostly, from another time.

  Mira was surprised when her mother recognized the boy now, and surprised again when her mother dropped them off and parked her car around the corner. Mira noticed, but the boy must not have, because he immediately started chasing after Ravi. Ravi began to run, his arms lifted as though he thought he could fly. Mira stood at the bus stop and felt her irrelevance, felt herself become smaller in the distance as her brother ran farther away, and for a second, she saw how her mother must have seen him — with a clutching pride that he could run so elegantly, his legs beating through the air. He whipped over the pavement and only at the end of the street, where the pond began, did the boy catch up, because there was nowhere left for Ravi to run. He shoved Ravi once, hard, and retreated, began his swagger back up the street.

  At the shove, Mira saw her mother’s car begin to move. She saw her mother roll up the sleeves of her shirt and accel-erate over the concrete towards the boy. He waited for the car to stop, but it didn’t. The car headed straight at him, much faster than Mira had ever seen cars go on the neighbourhood road, and the boy jumped, his legs nearly buckling under him. He stumblingly switched directions and ran away from the car — too stupid, Mira thought, to run sideways onto the lawn where the car couldn’t go, or maybe he thought she’d drive right up there after him, crush him under the wheels with the lawn ornaments and discarded tricycles. She wished wistfully that Lucy Chin were the one running. But even if she told her mother, it wasn’t like her mother could run down Lucy with her car. Lucy Chin would never place herself vulnerably in the middle of a road. Even if, by chance, she did, and Mira’s mother began to drive the car towards her, Lucy Chin wouldn’t move. She’d stand her ground and get run over, and then Mira’s mother would be in trouble, though probably not for murder, since Lucy Chin was the type of girl who would be run over by a car and still survive.

  Mira’s mother chased the boy almost to the end of the road before the boy regained his senses and turned onto a house driveway. Mira’s mother swerved the car right up to the garage door, followed until she was inches from his legs — she was going to run over him, Mira thought, knees first — and then the car stopped. The boy was gasping, his face pink and chest pulsing, as Mira’s mother backed up the car.

  “I’ll drive you to school,” she told Ravi and Mira once they were both in the car. The other kids at the stop spoke inaudibly. The car door shut; their mother started driving. And then Ravi started laughing, his cheeks round, his mouth wide and exposing his miniature teeth. Mira wondered if her mother would get angry, but, as Mira watched with disbelief, her mother began laughing too, squinting so she could still keep track of the road, and then Mira was laughing, falling back to her seat and touching one cheek to the glass of the window, their laughter electric and volatile and wild and piercing.

  Breaking

  “I’M THE BOSS of you,” Mira said to Ravi.

  It was the fall after Lucy had left. Mira and Ravi and their mother had large pieces of paper in front of them on the dining table. Mira was reconstructing Pangaea on hers for a school project. She’d found a tall, floppy Atlas at the library, and the librarian helped her photocopy its pages, lifting the lid of the copier and placing the book down carefully on the glass. Mira used scissors to cut carefully around the edges of South America, then held it up next to the other continents. She was confused; she couldn’t remember which country went where, and the edges didn’t match exactly like a puzzle, as her teacher had said they would.

  “Which one goes where?” she had asked her mother, holding up Africa and Australia. Her mother took them from her and moved the pieces of paper this way and that way in the air.

  “Let me run and get the globe,” her mother said, and jumped up from her chair.

  Mira waited, closed the scissors, and put them back in her pencil case. She looked over at Ravi’s piece of paper. It had a sort of map on it, too, and the ocean was covered with wavy stripes of different blues. “What is that supposed to be?” she asked him.

  “It’s countries,” said Ravi.

  “Those aren’t even real countries,” said Mira. She sat up on her knees in the chair to get a better look. “You should look at the map and do it. Or no, you could try inventing your own world — with new countries! What do you want to name them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Ravi, as though she’d asked him what he wanted to drink.

  “You can name them after people we know, maybe?”

  “That’s okay,” said Ravi.

  He never wanted to do anything. She glared at him.

  “I’m the boss of you,” she said. “If I tell you something, you have to do it.”

  “No you’re not!” said Ravi, shoving her.

  He was smarter than she was. She narrowed her eyes at him, and then, in a voice so angry it was out of breath, said, “I am. Go get me a glass of water.”

  Ravi squealed and hit his hands against the tab
le, dropping the crayon he was holding. But then he went and got the water, brought it back.

  “Thanks, Ravi,” Mira said, forgetting that Lucy Chin had never thanked anybody. She glowered at him again to make up for it.

  “What?” he asked.

  Their mother came back with the globe, popping it from hand to hand like a basketball. “All right, I’ve figured it out …” she started to say.

  “What?” said Ravi again, widening his eyes at Mira.

  “What is it, Rav?” their mother asked. She was facing away from Mira, so Mira held her finger up to her face and silently shhhed him, turning her head slowly from side to side, like how she imagined a stranger would when offering candy.

  “Mira’s bothering me,” he said.

  “Mira, stop it,” her mother said.

  Mira stopped it, but glared at Ravi again when her mother looked away. She called up the cruel image of Lucy Chin like some kind of spirit guide, as she would call it up again in the future, pale and indefinite in her memory, hoping it might give her the capacity to be mean.

  THAT SAME EVENING, Mira had to go to the basement to complete her chore of vacuuming the prayer room. She had never fretted about this chore before, had never worried much about insects before Lucy, had picked up ladybugs and let them wander over her clothing as she admired their backs, smooth and glossy as jelly beans, had collected crickets in open-topped boxes, tenderly encouraging them to vault over the cardboard walls. Spiders guarded corners, not fat hairy spiders, but slender ones, with speck-sized bodies and legs like the women at Fantasia. They pulled thin webs across the blue walls, and were barely noticeable until you aimed at them with the vacuum cleaner, and then the spiders would begin to run, fighting against the suction, their webs shaking under them and casting tremulous grey shadows.

  Despite its seeming sacrilegious to murder the tiny creatures while the many visages of gods looked on from paintings and sculptures and statues, Mira had loved this task. The gods lined the prayer room walls with their placid faces, sitting on lotus petals or tigers, holding out palms for blessings, as if they approved.