by Jamie Gilson
“Hi,” Tuan said, holding out his hand when Mr. Saine came over to greet us.
“Why, hello, young man.” Mr. Saine shook his hand, looking pleased by good manners and all that. “I’ve been expecting you. How’s his English?” he asked me, his voice lowered.
“I’m teaching him,” I said.
“Good, fine.” He sat back in his chair and started looking through some papers. “First you take him to homeroom. And after that we’ll line up some diagnostic tests to see where square one should be, since there aren’t any transcripts. Understood?”
I nodded. The kid smiled, understanding nothing. I could read the look by now. Mr. Saine shuffled through a stack of papers on his desk. “Reverend Zito tells me your name is …” He clamped his hands together, took a deep breath, and pronounced it all wrong.
And that was when I got the idea. If the kid really did want to be an American and to be one fast, the name Tuan Nguyen wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do any more than short pants on a cold day. You put that name in lights or across a headline and people would get it wrong almost every time.
“He’s just decided to change it. The name you’ve got isn’t right. It used to be Tuan Nguyen. But now he’s going to be …” I tossed the sounds around in my head a few times until his name turned, without any problem at all, into … “Tom. His first name is Tom.” Mr. Saine glanced at Tuan/Tom, who smiled and nodded, but clearly understood not a word. Mr. Saine wrote down Thomas. I took a breath, and before I let it out, had the whole thing. From Nguyen to Gwen to Win, easy as that. “Win. His full American name is Tom Win. W-I-N.” I felt like an artist painting a brand-new picture.
“And a fine name it is, too,” Mr. Saine said loudly to the kid, who was still staring blankly into our fog of too-fast words. “Welcome to Pittsfield and Pittsfield Junior High School, Tom Win!” His voice made the trophies on the shelf vibrate.
“Thank you.” Tuan smiled politely. “Shut up,” he said, a little louder.
Mr. Saine’s jaw dropped open. So did mine. The room turned suddenly still, as if somebody had vacuumed out all the sound. My knees felt like rubber bands. Mr. Saine’s face was gray.
Tuan kept smiling, though he did look uneasy.
“I … I … I …” I stuttered, my voice turned high like I’d just swallowed a balloonful of helium. “I think … I think … See, I told him, I taught him, that ‘shut up’ means ‘be quiet.’ I think”—I swallowed hard because my throat had become a desert—“he means you don’t have to shout. A lot of people have been shouting at him, thinking it will help him understand. And it doesn’t help, really. I taught him ‘shut up’ because it sounds a lot like Vietnamese bicycles.” Mr. Saine’s frown deepened. “He means to be polite. He learns fast. I even told him to say it loud, I—”
“All right, Harvey,” Mr. Saine interrupted me, still looking grim. His face was flushed. “I’ll accept that.” He said it, but I wasn’t sure he meant it. “It’s late,” he said, using his normal voice. “Give these papers to your homeroom teacher, and, Harvey”—he took a deep breath—“re-explain ‘shut up.’”
“Good night,” the kid said, beaming.
We hurried out of the office toward homeroom, Tuan looking so cheerful I started to laugh out loud. He was positively the only kid in the whole school, in the whole world, maybe, who could get away with saying “shut up” to Mr. Saine. I was laughing, but my knees wobbled as I walked.
“Oh, by the way,” I told Tuan as we reached the homeroom door, “your new American name is Tom.” I stopped, opened my notebook, and wrote it down. “Tom,” I repeated. “You.”
“Tuan,” he said. “Me.”
“You have a new name, Tom Win. It’s a terrific name. I made it up myself. I wish it was mine. I mean, like, it goes more with jeans and tennis shoes than the old one did. When you hit a homer at the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, they’ll say, ‘Win wins!’ Tom Win,” I repeated slowly. “The American you.”
He stopped and thought about it. “Ba Noi say no. Father say no.” The last bell rang.
“Do you want to be American or don’t you?”
He nodded. “But Ba Noi say …”
“OK, then, just at school. Tom Win at school. Tuan Nguyen in the privacy of your own home. Ba Noi won’t have to know. To her and your dad you’ll stay Tuan. No kidding, could I be Vietnamese and have a name like Harvey Trumble?”
He laughed and shook his head. “OK,” he said. “Tom Win is me.”
I rushed him into homeroom, a new kid.
The class, most all of them in their seats by now, looked up from what they were doing and stared at us.
“Uh, Miss Schwalbach,” I said, handing her the papers Mr. Saine had given me, “this is the new Vietnamese boy we’ve been talking about, only he’s changed his name. It’s … uh … Tom Win. Mr. Saine says after homeroom he’s supposed to go to the office for tests.”
“Of course.” She beamed at him. “So it’s to be Tom Win?”
He glanced at me. “Yes,” he told her. He held his hand out, and she shook it.
“We’re glad you’re here, Tom. People,” she told the class, “I want you to be sure to welcome Tom Win cordially.”
“That’s not what I heard him called.” Quint tilted back in his chair.
“Goes to show you don’t know everything,” I said very casual, like of course I did. “He’s called Tom Win,” I announced to the class. My kid, named by me.
Miss Schwalbach motioned to an empty place in the front row. “Sit here, Tom.”
He sat. Tom Win sat. He could host a game show with a name like that.
While Miss Schwalbach read the Daily Bulletin, I could hear Quint telling kids around him to call the new guy Hot Dog, and he told everybody why. “They eat dogs where he comes from, you know. My uncle—who was there in the war—says so.” The kids he told all gagged and yucked until Miss Schwalbach had to say, “People, act your age. Sometimes you sound like three-year-olds.” Quint stuck his thumb in his mouth and started sucking it, and everybody around him laughed.
When the bell rang for first period, I delivered the kid to the office. Even though I said good-bye and wished him good luck, I was certain they’d be calling me out of science or language arts to help him with the tests. The morning went by without a messenger, though, and I guessed they’d given up on him or something. So I was really surprised when I got to the cafeteria at lunch and there he was, still smiling, sitting with Suzanna, eating a hamburger layered with pickles, mustard, and catsup.
“I just explained that hamburger isn’t made out of ham.” Suzanna popped a french fry in her mouth.
“It is cow,” Tom told me. “It is good.” He took another bite.
“Did the whole family change their names?” She drew a smiley face in a pool of catsup with her last fry.
“Not yet.” That might take some doing. We’d break it to them slowly. It was going to be some trick keeping the Tom/Tuans straight. The kid had this double identity like a spy. If only I could change my name, too. Tom Win would have suited me fine. “How’d it go?” I asked him. “Were the tests hard?”
He took a gulp of chocolate milk and blinked at the taste, licking his upper lip. “Words hard, Harvey. Numbers … weird.”
That was a word I’d taught him by making faces. Weird. He liked it, but I guess it was like shut up. He didn’t know what it meant. Numbers are a lot of things—like impossible. Weird, though, they’re not.
But Mr. Tandy, our math teacher, sounded like he thought so, too. “A little strange,” he said when class started. He smiled at Tom, who had finished his tests in time to come to the last class of the day. “Yes, class, you’d think that math was math the whole world over, but there are differences. I talked to our remarkable new student, Tom Win, this morning as he was taking some tests, and he suggested that some of our ways with numbers were unusual. I thought I’d check it out with the rest of you.”
The kid looked at the floor, embarrassed. “T
om, go to the chalk board. And Quint, you too, just to demonstrate the differences.”
Quint, wearing his fabulous-me face, brought the kid with him to the board. They both took pieces of chalk and, when Mr. Tandy told them to, wrote down 675 divided by 15. Quint’s problem looked normal: When he finished doing the problem, he looked over at the kid, who already had the answer. “Bizarre,” he said. Mr. Tandy grinned. The kid had written, very neatly:
“Why’d he do it like that?” Quint asked, cocking his head. He shrugged. “I could have done it in my head.”
“I expect he could have too, but that, of course, is not the point.” Mr. Tandy was annoyed with him. “Now, both of you, write down twenty-five dollars.”
Quint scribbled out $25.00 as fast as he could. Nobody was going to outrace him.
Carefully, the kid wrote: 25$00.
“More bizarre,” Quint said, and everybody had to agree.
“You boys can sit down.” I never saw Mr. Tandy quite so pleased. He grinned like everybody had gotten the extra-credit question right, or something equally miraculous. “And in Vietnam, when two thousand is written down it’s …” Glancing first to the ceiling, where he always looks for approval, he wrote on the board 2.000. “There’s a point after the thousand. On the other hand, they use a decimal comma. Thusly.” He wrote 1,52. “Anybody think of a reason why one system is any better than the other, aside from the fact that you’re used to it?”
Nobody raised a hand. He chuckled. “Neither can I. Isn’t that fascinating!”
Quint rolled his eyes. “Knocks me out,” he said sarcastically. A few kids giggled. Mr. Tandy laughed mildly, too. He knows not everybody is as crazy about math as he is. But he could afford to laugh. He was passing out a pop quiz. Aaarg.
“So, will this test count?” Caroline asked.
“Pieces of paper can’t count. But I certainly hope you can. Any other questions?”
“Yes.” Caroline sighed. “Do we have to take it?”
“You’re wasting our time, Caroline.”
All the time in the world wouldn’t help. I knew I should have studied the night before instead of helping the kid learn English. We’d fooled around at Felix for a couple of hours, watched a little TV, sung with the commercials. I scratched on.
When Mr. Tandy said, “Exchange papers, please,” a mass groan swelled out over the desks. I wasn’t finished. A lot of kids weren’t. The story problem was quicksand sucking me under.
Quint had already turned his paper over on his desk so no one could cheat from it. He was cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick.
Suzanna grabbed the kid’s paper quick before I could. How she thought she was going to read it, I couldn’t imagine. “What do I do about the commas and points?” she asked.
“If everything else is OK, grade them right. He’ll get the knack of the mechanics soon enough.”
“That’s not fair,” Quint complained.
Mr. Tandy started down the row, asking kids for answers and talking about problems.
“So, what do I do when Quint’s decimal point’s wrong?” Caroline asked. “Because one is.”
“Mark it wrong. He knows better.” Quint leaned over to look, not believing it.
When we got to the last problem, Suzanna raised her hand excited, and said, “Tuan … or Tom, whatever, got them all right. He did most of the marks our way. But he skipped the story problem.”
“Terrific! Tom? The story problem?” Mr. Tandy pointed to it.
“I cannot read it.”
Mr. Tandy looked at the ceiling again with a smile. He’d found another math person. Big deal. “I think it’s remarkable that he’s adjusted so quickly. Suzanna, mark the paper one hundred percent. And a big A. It ought to give him a real boost. He’ll be able to read the story problems as well as you can before long.”
“That isn’t fair,” I said. “If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. He’s got to learn that.” I’d gotten it wrong. And half the other problems too. There’s such a thing as being too nice. I didn’t want my kid spoiled. Besides, he’d kept me from studying. And he’d had all day Wednesday and Thursday to look at the books I’d brought him from school. He couldn’t read most of the stuff, and so he’d probably spent all his time on the math I’d told him we were doing. He’d been studying. Hours probably. He didn’t have anything else to do with me gone. “No fair,” I said again.
Quint, who’d been looking pretty mad himself, suddenly crossed his arms and tilted his chair back. “Oh, forget it. He’s no real hotshot,” he said to me. “But he’s no Zilch either.” Then he looked at me funny. “You didn’t teach him that stuff, did you?”
I smiled, genius in disguise.
“Your problem,” Mr. Tandy said to the class, “is that you’re not reading carefully enough. You’re not following directions. I want you all to read that story problem over tonight and then to work it correctly.”
Caroline opened her assignment notebook. It was plastered with puffy and smelly stickers. “Tonight’s Friday,” she said. “That’s T.G.I.F.”
“As good a night as any. Do this as part of your weekend homework. You must learn to follow directions.” He chopped the air with his hand to pound out every single syllable. “Follow the di-rec-tions!”
Tom Win stood up at once. All heads turned to him. He turned his to me. What did he think he was doing? “Harvey?” he asked me.
I shrugged and stared down at the field of initials scratched on my desk. I didn’t know what he was getting at. He was embarrassing me, standing there all by himself saying, “Harvey?”
“Where,” he asked Mr. Tandy, “where is … Directions … so I can follow him?”
The bell rang, but even though it was Friday, the kids stayed in their seats and laughed out loud. He was a big joke to them. A hundred percent in math, and he thought it was time for Follow the Leader. And they weren’t just laughing at him. I could feel it in the hairs on the back of my neck. They knew he was mine. They were laughing at me, too.
But when I looked up again, Quint had already gathered the kid up and was heading him out the door.
“Marbles,” Tom Win called, holding up his bag of them. “Good night.”
Quint waved. “This foreign person may be more interesting than I thought. I’ll find out if my uncle is right. Anyway, your clone,” he said, “has flown.”
I couldn’t possibly have followed them, even though follow seemed to be the word of the day. I’d have been late for work. But, I decided, the kid seems to be pretty smart. He’ll figure Quint out in a hurry. It’ll be good for him. I headed off, whistling, ready to push the pig’s snout for luck before stacking boxes of vile green mouthwash high on the drugstore shelves.
7
T.G.I.F.
Oooooooooouu, baby, baby,
Oooooooooouu, baby, baby,
You make me crazy.
Maybe, baby, maybe.
Oooooooooouu, baby, baby …
I couldn’t actually hear Caroline sing. Maybe she was just lip-synching to the record. She was dancing like crazy, waving her arms like they were windshield wipers in a cloudburst.
With the tables and most of the chairs pushed over against the walls, the cafeteria didn’t look like itself. It didn’t even smell like oranges and bananas. And half the big square ceiling lights were out—on purpose, I guessed, so the few girls who were dancing wouldn’t look more than half dumb.
All the girls but Caroline had jeans on. She was wearing this red and black plaid dress and shoes with real heels on them. I mean, she looked different, so I couldn’t help but notice. I watched her from the door for a while, wondering, off and on, how much time she’d put in on her math before coming to T.G.I.F. Probably as much as I had. I carry my math book home under my arm every weekend hoping I’ll soak in the stuff without having to think about it. How much time Tom Win had spent, I didn’t know.
He hadn’t even come home for supper. While I was still at work, Quint had called. “He asked me to tell you,�
� Mom said, “that Tuan is staying there for supper. His mother’s in Springfield, but Wayne apparently wanted to talk to him about Vietnam. If I’d had enough chicken, I’d have asked them all to come here, but…. Then they’re going to that party at school.”
“They’re going to T.G.I.F.?”
“Is that what it’s called? He said if you came to bring marbles.”
Bossy kid. I found the bag of marbles in the basement where I’d left it, but I’d had to work late, so even though I swallowed my pot pie and baked apple practically whole, it was all of seven-twenty before I got to school. The thing started at seven. Still, Quint and the kid weren’t there. Or at least they weren’t in the cafeteria. I tried the gym.
All the lights were on in the gym, at least, and nobody was going, “Oooooooouu, baby, baby.” So I walked in. The folding room-divider was pulled to separate the gym into halves. On one side kids were playing floor hockey, the red plastic sticks whaling on the yellow plastic sticks, with the puck skimming over the waxed floor almost as slick as on ice. A lot of action, but no Quint or Tom.
On the other side of the divider, kids—mostly boys—were lined up at the baskets, shooting. POW-pow-POW-pow-POW. It never stopped, a better beat than the music. Somebody heaved a ball across the room at the wall. It bounced down and off my head. I thought for sure that was Quint, but it wasn’t—just an accident.
Wandering back into the hall, I pulled off my jacket and tossed it on top of the heaps of coats that lined the floor. Still, no Quint. What was he doing with my kid, anyway?
A high school guy was setting up a mike in the cafeteria, blowing into it and going, “One-two-three-testing.” I went in to see what was happening and got myself in a long line for brownies and the cold, cloudy cider that Suzanna and some other girls were selling.
A few guys trailed in from the gym, thirsty, so, anyway, I wasn’t the only boy around when the announcer finally got the mike going and boomed, “SNOW … BALL! OK, you guys, it’s time for a huge, dynamic SNOWBALL!” He turned a record up so loud you could feel the beat as strong in your ankle bones as you could in your ears.