All this is all hearsay. I’ve never been. Neither has Whitney, and we won’t be going this year, either.
“Why don’t you go stag?” Mom asked me. “If you want to go, that is. You and Whitney can dance together.”
“No way. I don’t want to go,” I told her. Next thing, she’d be fixing me up with a date. “I’ve got plans anyway.”
My plans are to spend the night at Whitney’s house. I have Mom drop me off after dinner with my little overnight bag. Whitney greets me at the door and waves a DVD in my face.
“I rented a movie,” she says. “My mom’s making popcorn.”
On the way to her room, we pass by Nathan, who’s cross-legged on the living room floor, playing a video game.
“Hi, Nathan,” I say.
“Hi!” He nods his curly head my way. “That last issue of Gadget Girl was great!”
“Thanks,” I say.
He turns back to his game and lets out a belch.
“Gross!” Whitney drags me onward. “You’re so lucky you don’t have any guys in your house.”
“Well, there’s Raoul,” I say. He has dinner with us almost every other night now.
“Yeah, but he and your Mom are just dating. He’s on his best behavior so she won’t break up with him. He doesn’t actually live with you. Believe me, if he did, he’d be leaving the toilet seat up.”
It’s hard to imagine that a man like Raoul, who wears an apron while cooking, would be a slob. But what do I know? Maybe when he’s home alone, he’s totally different.
We duck into the kitchen to say hello to Whitney’s mom, who is indeed popping popcorn on the stove.
“Hi, Mrs. Goldman.”
Whitney’s mom is dressed in sweatpants and a big button-down shirt, untucked. Her frizzy hair is pulled into a scrunchie. She looks comfortable and, well, homey. The kitchen is comfortable, too. There’s a jar of homemade cookies on the counter and notes tacked onto the refrigerator door with animal-shaped magnets.
“Hi there,” she says, hugging me. “I hear you’re going to France.”
“Yup. Mom’s got a big show.”
“You watch out for those French boys,” she says. “They’ll be all over you.”
As if. “Sure thing, Mrs. Goldman. Hey, do you want me to bring you anything? Un baguette? Your favorite perfume?”
“Just send us a postcard, hon. That’ll be plenty.”
The rat-a-tat-tat of the popping slows to an occasional burst. Mrs. Goldman turns off the heat, dumps the fluffy white kernels into a big bowl, and sprinkles them with salt. “Here you go, girls. Enjoy.”
Whitney grabs a couple of cans of Diet Coke from the refrigerator and we move on to her lair. I drop my bag on the floor.
If my room is holiday-in-Japan, then entering hers is like time-traveling to the heyday of Hollywood. Her vanity looks like a backstage dressing table, what with the feather boa draped over it and the rows of lightbulbs around the mirror. The walls are plastered with posters advertising blockbuster movies—Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and Giant. I take a good look at the latter and check out Sal Mineo.
“He is cute,” I say. Rumor has it that he was gay. “Too bad he’s dead and gone.”
Whitney rolls her eyes. She’s heard this from me before. “A girl can dream, can’t she?”
We plop ourselves on Whitney’s bed. For a moment, there is only the crunching of popcorn and the hiss of cans being opened. Then Whitney says, “I heard that Luke asked Stacy Jones to the dance.”
Her voice wavers, as if she’s about to cry. So she really does like the guy. I feel a stab of guilt knowing that Luke would have asked Whitney to go with him if I’d given him any sort of encouragement. She would have finally had a chance to wear the turquoise evening gown with spaghetti straps—a copy of the dress that Grace Kelly wore when she accepted her Academy Award for The Country Girl—that’s been hanging in her closet for a year now. But then again, she deserves so much better.
“So did she say yes?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Who cares, right?” She works up a smile and tosses her hair.
Obviously, Whitney cares. Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have said that she was interested in someone else. Maybe I should have told Luke that he had a chance. I could have spent one miserable night alone. It wouldn’t have killed me.
“Maybe he’ll ask you to the next dance,” I say.
“Yeah, maybe,” she says doubtfully. “Maybe by then we’ll both have boyfriends.”
I doubt that. We’ve known the same boys since elementary school, and none of them have ever expressed the slightest interest in me. And why would they? There are plenty of girls at our school who don’t limp, and who don’t have a hand like a claw.
“So what movie did you rent?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
She hands the DVD over. “The Song of Bernadette. It’s about this French girl who became a saint. In honor of your impending trip to France. Have you ever seen it?”
“No.”
She sighs, as if she can’t believe how uncultured I am.
I read the back of the case. “Bernadette Soubirous is a sickly 14-year-old girl who sees a vision of a ‘beautiful lady,’ and never suffers from her illness again.”
Kind of a strange choice of movie for a nice Jewish girl, I think. I would have picked something else: Romantic comedy. Horror. Something by Hayao Miyazaki. But hey, I’m just visiting.
We shove her mountain of stuffed animals aside, get all comfy on her bed, and start the movie.
Jennifer Jones is the star. During one sleepover, we watched her in some old movie where she played Gregory Peck’s sexy mixed-race girlfriend. But here she’s sort of slow and sweet. She does a lot of coughing in the beginning because her character has asthma.
When Whitney’s mom comes in with more popcorn, Bernadette is going to collect wood at some old dumpsite. It’s here that she has her vision. Of course, no one else can see the beautiful lady in white that she speaks of. No one believes her. But she stops coughing and suddenly good things start to happen to her desperately poor family.
I wasn’t raised as a Catholic. My mother has basically brought me up without any kind of religion at all, so I’ve never been one to believe in miracles. But a chill goes down my back all the same. What if Bernadette really did receive a vision? What if she was truly capable of curing people of their hideous diseases? What if she was capable of curing me?
I glance over at Whitney, wondering if she’s thinking the same thing.
Her eyes are glued to the screen. She’s so intent that she’s not even eating the popcorn. I grab a handful and stuff it into my mouth.
I watch as the Empress brings her sick son to be doused with water from the spring at Lourdes. He gets better almost immediately. Maybe it was just a coincidence and the virus had already run its course. But maybe that water had special power, just like people said.
The end is sad. I feel sorry for Bernadette when she gets shipped off to the convent, and even sorrier when she dies. A few tears streak down my face. Whitney, on the other hand, is sobbing. I hold the Kleenex box while she plucks tissue after tissue and presses them to her eyes.
“That’s one of the most tragic stories I’ve ever seen,” she blurts before blowing her nose.
“Yeah,” I agree. But inside, I’m feeling a flicker of hope.
15
Although hanging out with Whitney is one of my favorite things to do, I can hardly wait to get back home to my computer on Saturday afternoon. I want to do some research about Lourdes, but I’m too embarrassed to admit to anyone—including my best friend—that I might believe in miracles.
As soon as I’m secure in my room, I log on and start a web search. I find the official site for Lourdes and click onto the webcam. Maybe I’ll see someone transform and kick aside her crutches, live as it happens! But no. It’s totally dark. I forgot about the time difference. It’s nighttime in France right now.
There are pl
enty of stories about miracles past, however. I read about this guy named John Traynor who got all shot up by a machine gun in World War I. He had all kinds of problems—epilepsy, paralysis—and he had to have someone lift him in and out of his wheelchair. He decided that he would go to Lourdes on some church trip, even though his doctor said the travelling would probably kill him. When he finally got there, he went into the grotto and bathed in the water and was completely cured! He woke up the next morning and bounded out of bed. He’d had a hole in his head from the shrapnel and it disappeared at Lourdes.
I feel a little bit shaky after reading Traynor’s story. It sounds incredible, but there were witnesses. Proof! And he’s not the only one to have been cured at Lourdes. I close my eyes and imagine dipping my stiff left arm into the water, letting the liquid dribble over my leg. What would a miracle feel like? A jolt of electricity? A ticklish tingle accompanied by the sound of bells and the flutter of angel wings? I imagine taking a step, finding my limp gone, and then running across the square. Maybe it’s impossible, but I need to find out. Once we get to France, I have to find some way to convince Mom to take me there.
On the afternoon of the last day of school, Mom tells me to sit on my bed and close my eyes. I scrunch them shut and then I hear wheels rolling along the hardwood floor and a thunk as something is hauled over the threshold.
“Okay! Open ’em up!”
Et voila! A brand new pink suitcase, with a matching pink bow adorning its handle, stands in the center of my room. Not my color, really—I would have picked black, but Mom has always been big on pastels. When I was small, my leg braces were lilac-colored, or butter yellow, and the wheelchair I used up until I was seven was, you guessed it—pink.
“It’s an early birthday present,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“You can take it to Paris.”
“Yeah, okay. Cool.”
She bites her lip. “Don’t you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s great.” I open my arms and she moves in for a hug. “I love it.”
Maybe if I scuff it up a bit and put some stickers on it, it’ll look better.
Whitney comes over a couple of days later to watch me pack. She sits on my bed while I rifle through my drawers.
“You’ve gotta take some copies of Gadget Girl,” she says. “I’ve heard the French love comics.”
She should know. She’s been taking French since seventh grade.
I layer some leftover back issues of Gadget Girl on the bottom of the suitcase.
“You can leave them on café tables and park benches,” Whitney says. “Or in the Paris Metro. Who knows? Maybe you’ll become famous over there!” She seems more excited about this trip than I am.
“Do you want to take some to the woods?” I ask, teasing. I heap a nightgown and some T-shirts with ironic slogans on the bed.
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.” She holds up a shirt with a Keith Haring dog on it, then frowns. “You need a little black dress for your mom’s opening. You know, like Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
I grab the T-shirt from her and throw it on top of the comics. Then I bury them under a pile of underwear. “I’ll just wear jeans,” I say.
“You can always go shopping when you get there,” Whitney says, ignoring my comment. “Paris is Fashion City. La capitale de la mode.”
Raoul cooks dinner the night before we leave: pasta with tomato sauce, and a green salad. The voice of Billie Holiday adds a melancholy vibe. I figure this is Raoul’s way of saying that he’ll be sad, all alone in Michigan, while we’re eating croissants on the other side of the ocean.
“You’ll be turning fifteen, eh?” Raoul says. “If you were staying here, we could celebrate with a quinceañera.”
I’ve heard of quinceañeras, but I don’t know what they involve. “Like a bat mitzvah?” I ask, thinking of Whitney. When she turned thirteen, her mother threw her a big party.
“Yes, sort of. When a girl turns fifteen, we celebrate her transition from child to adult. The birthday girl chooses special friends to be members of her court, and she dresses like a princess in a gown and a tiara.”
It sounds sort of like a high school homecoming where the popular kids are crowned king and queen. Who would be in my court? Whitney, yes, but who else?
“And there’s usually dancing, and at some point the girl’s father gives her a pair of high heels to replace her flat shoes.”
For a moment, I imagine my father flying over from Japan to give me a pair of shoes. I imagine his blue hand cupping my heel as he slides a pump onto my feet. And since this is all fantasy anyway, and unlikely to come true, I conjure up a picture of us twirling and trotting across a parquet floor. My left hand is on his shoulder—supple, not stiff. In this daydream, I’m not limping.
In reality, I don’t do so well in heels. I force my thoughts back to the here and now. “It sounds cool,” I say, but I’m thinking it would probably be a disaster. I’m glad we’ll be in Paris.
Which reminds me. I need a favor. “Can I ask you to do something for me, Raoul?”
“Sure. Anything.”
“Would you take care of my indigo plant? I’ve written the instructions down. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
To tell the truth, I’m a bit worried about my plant. Although it responded well to the music of the Silk Road, it has been looking a tad droopy ever since. I’m not sure what the problem is. I’ve bathed it in sunshine and given it a reasonable amount of water, but it hasn’t thrived. I’d like to bring it along, but I’m sure the shock of foreign travel would be more harm than help. Also, it would probably be confiscated at border patrol and dumped in the trash. If anyone can keep it alive while I’m gone, I figure it’s Raoul, the son of migrant workers. Considering his family’s history in agriculture, he’s the perfect guy for the job. If all goes well, I’ll be able to harvest the leaves a few weeks after we come back from France. Then I’ll start fermenting them and making the dye.
“I’d be happy to,” Raoul says.
“Thanks.” I’m instantly relieved. “For the record, it seems to like the zils.”
“Good to know,” he says.
After dinner, I help clear the table, and then prepare my fledgling plant and hand it over to Raoul.
“Have a great time,” he tells me. “I’ll miss you, kid.”
There’s a little catch in his voice, and it makes me tear up. I realize then that I’ll miss him, too. I move toward him with open arms and he enfolds me in his embrace for the first time. It’s warm and safe inside his arms. I close my eyes and pretend I’m hugging my dad.
paris
“Paris is always a good idea.”
—Audrey Hepburn
16
We get to board first because I’m a gimp. Mom hates it when I call myself that, but no matter how nice you try to make it sound, the truth is I have a serious limp.
While we’re sitting in the waiting area no one notices my legs. I catch the middle-aged woman across from us staring at our faces. Maybe she’s trying to figure out why an Asian chick like me is traveling with an Aryan in tie-dye. Mom made that dress herself, by the way. She did some indigo-dyeing while she was living in Tokushima.
For as long as I can remember, people have been asking if I’m adopted. They think Mom is some kind of saint for taking me on. But then she says, “Aiko is my biological child,” and the look turns to pity.
Written with different ideograms, Aiko means “love” and “child.” Love child. In English, that means someone born out of wedlock, like me. In Okinawa, where there are lots of mixed kids from American army guys hooking up with Japanese women, ainoko is a bad word. I wonder sometimes if strangers think that I am that kind of child. A love child. Then again, not many people have studied Japanese. They wouldn’t know the meaning of my name.
It’s none of their business whether I’m adopted or not and I don’t know why my mother doesn’t say so. “Why are you always so open with strangers, but you
won’t tell me more about my father?” I’ve asked this a million times, and she always answers, “Some things are better left unsaid.”
We make our way down the skywalk and into our bulkhead, economy class seats. Once we’re airborne, I dig my iPod out of my backpack and insert the earbuds. I downloaded a couple of Raoul’s shows for the flight—one of Japanese Indie rock, which he actually dedicated to me. He played songs by bands with names like “Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her” and “Thee Michelle Gun Elephant.” The other show is of Nigerian pop.
I unfold my tray table and arrange my sketchbook and pencils. Already I’m thinking about the next volume of my comic: Gadget Girl Goes to Paris. I need to get the plane’s interior down on paper. I figure Lisa Cook will fly over, like a normal person.
Mom pats my arm, then closes her eyes for a nap. As soon as she’s asleep, I get busy with my pencil.
For the rest of the flight I read manga, watch a movie, and eat chicken. And then we’re touching down at the Charles de Gaulle Airport.
After we gather our suitcases from baggage claim, we flash our passports and enter the arrivals area. Almost immediately, a honey-skinned woman plastered in a tight black suit steps up to us. Her black hair is in a pixie cut, and she is oh-so chic.
“Mademoiselle Cassidy!” she says.
“Yes,” Mom replies.
“I am Giselle, Monsieur Le Clerc’s assistant. I will take you to your hotel.” The woman leans forward and air kisses Mom on each cheek. Mom puckers up as well.
“May I present my daughter, Aiko,” she says, putting her arm around my shoulders.
Gadget Girl Page 5