ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “Malayali anno?” Bird asks.

  Anju looks up. The words are a stunning music that fuse the gap of unfamiliarity, which would otherwise take months to fuse between usual strangers. “How did you know?” she asks in Malayalam.

  “Big woolly hair.” Bird holds her hands away from her head to demonstrate. “You ever thought about ironing it straight?”

  Anju says no, though she has, countless times.

  “I used to work in a beauty salon, but now I’m a secretary in a law office. Much more professional.” From her wallet, Bird pulls out a business card and places it on the corner of the open book. Rajiv Tandon, the card reads. Immigration Attorney. In the corner is an address. “You come there, and he’ll show you how to apply for a green card.”

  “How did you know I need a green card?”

  Bird fidgets with the buttonhole of her sweater. “Your accent,” she says. “Sounds like you came off the plane just yesterday. So you want the card or not?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Anju slides the card into her pocket and writes her own number on a scrap of paper for Bird. “And where are your people from?”

  “Me? Oh, from all over.” Bird glances at her wristwatch, too quickly to even read it. She switches to English. “Hah, time is flying! Enough happy hour, back to work.” Moving away, she bumps into a lectern. “Don’t forget to stop by the office. I will look for you. Okay?”

  She waits until Anju replies, “Okay,” before leaving.

  When Bird reaches the doorway, she looks right, then left, weighing each direction. She turns right and disappears. Anju waits. After a few seconds, Bird hurries back the opposite way.

  STEP TWO OF THE CIRCUMVENTION: Duane Reade drugstore.

  The cashiers wear plastic cards on their chests, one of which reads DANITA. Her nails are squarish and spangled in mesmerizing purple and red illustrations. She clatters them against the countertop while speaking heatedly with her coworker CHEYENNE. How strange, Anju thinks, to be on a first-name basis with a stranger before uttering a word.

  “I know he’s old!” Danita is telling Cheyenne. “But he got a nice house, no kids. I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. Nothing wrong with planning ahead.” Cheyenne gives a laugh that shakes her shoulders.

  Anju remembers a similar sentiment once uttered by her grandmother. “Is it so bad if Linno marries someone older?” Ammachi privately asked Anju. “At least she would be looked after. And probably she wouldn’t have to look after him for that long.”

  When the conversation seems to have reached a standstill, Danita looks over at Anju, and in a blink Danita’s face goes from impassioned to passionless, like a light switched off. Despite the name tag, Danita’s expression implies that she and Anju are on a no-name basis.

  “Ace bandage?” Anju asks.

  “Aisle seven, I think,” Danita says. “Seven or nine.”

  THE THIRD PART of the Circumvention takes place on Monday and requires that Anju arrive at school twenty minutes early.

  Since her maiden voyage on the subway, Anju has learned certain matters of etiquette. On a gentle Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Solanki showed her how to buy a MetroCard from the touch-screen machine, how to slide the MetroCard to go through the turnstile, how to prepare for the violent rush of sound and steel as the train whines to a stop.

  At the time, Anju committed a grave error, rushing into the car against the thin trickle of exiting passengers. She muscled her way through, earning herself a seat within a virtually empty car, and several irritated stares from those she had nearly body-checked. An old man in a sweater vest stared grimly into the middle distance, having seen many like her push and shove their way into his city. Mrs. Solanki took the seat next to her and, with undisguised irritation, said: “It’s not like over there. You have to wait your turn.”

  But weekday mornings bring the third-world battle instinct, cloaked in first-world courtesy. Anju has learned all the moves—the grazing push, the “Not my fault!” group nudge. And now, with the subway moaning from afar, Anju prepares to utilize both tactics. Today is not a day for tardiness. After the doors sigh open, one passenger burrows out of the packed car just as Anju slides her way into the herd, the doors chomping at her backpack. People writhe and apologize. A woman groans into the folded newspaper held an inch from her nose. Fingers cling gingerly to clammy poles.

  Anju stands so close to the short woman next to her that with a stretch of her neck, she could kiss the woman on the forehead, a surface so thickly plastered with powder, Anju would prefer to kiss the pole. She focuses on a sign near the ceiling that shows twelve pairs of eyes—sleepy eyes, saggy eyes, kohl-rimmed eyes, Asian eyes—and below this: BE AWARE OF SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES.

  Eventually, Anju notices that the woman is glaring up at her with the same lethal intent as the old family dog back home, dead Jimmi, who used to stare up from the base of a tree and growl at the shuddering branches. This woman harbors that streak of animal fury, crackling just beneath her powdered exterior, her great swoops of blue eye shadow. She is either mad or a failed actress. Perhaps both. One stop later, it seems that the mad actress is pushing Anju, steadily applying a mounting force as if to eject her from the moving car.

  “Madam,” Anju says quietly, “I cannot support you.”

  The mad actress looks at her. They stand nose to nose.

  “You’re an idiot,” the mad actress says.

  “You are heavy,” Anju says.

  The mad actress cuts her eyes at Anju, gathering herself as much as she can within her confines. “If I weren’t a lady, I’d smack the stank right out of your mouth.”

  Smank the stack? Too confused to take offense, Anju means to ask what is meant by “stank,” though what comes out is: “Skank?”

  The woman’s eyes grow wide. “At least this skank knows how to use deodorant! Ever heard of it?”

  Startled, Anju almost declares that she uses talcum powder because, according to Ammachi, a body is meant to sweat. Instead she says nothing.

  Pleased, the mad actress turns only her head, since there is not room to turn away completely. Everyone jostles along in silence, wearing blank expressions, as if discussions of stank are quite natural.

  IDIOT! CLOWN! Suspicious package of lunacy! As Anju climbs out of the subway, she applies these words first to the woman, then to herself. Stupid to speak so openly, to wear her rage like a vulgar dress for all to see. There is no victory in declaring your true thoughts, but this is how people speak to one another here, candid madness in the air.

  While walking, she tries to sniff herself discreetly. No odor that she can distinguish, but who can make out her own odor? Perhaps it would be wise to visit the perfume counters at the department store and hoard the scented paper samples.

  She nearly collides with a blue mailbox before she realizes her school is looming in the distance, a boxy, joyless structure of cement taking up half the block, THE SITWELL SCHOOL declared in white letters on its side. Its roof is staked with an American flag too colossal to clean, its white stripes gone gray.

  Before she came here, this school was part of a grand fantasy, one she used to carefully embellish in daydreams, never assuming that someday the actual sight of her school—the hard angles, the dark, secretive windows—would tense her stomach as it does now. She is free from outward torment and bullying, unlike Silas Bloom, a woeful boy whose pants pronounce his rear, whose face, last week, was driven into a toilet by boys whose names he refused to recall. But Anju’s torments are her own—her ridiculous rolling accent, her oblivious stank, her misuse of facilities, such as the time she tried to rinse her mouth at the water fountain after lunch and as she spat, Mr. Obata, the math teacher, said “No, no, no …” from across the hall, as one might order dead Jimmi to stop urinating in his cage. The prospect of committing an error looms over every morning, with each step, each word destined for mistake. For this reason, she sometimes lies sleepless in bed, dreading the moment of waking e
ven before falling asleep.

  But today demands composure. She unzips her backpack, tears the Ace bandage from its cover. Taking a few deep breaths, she reviews her lines.

  WELL BEFORE THE FIRST BELL, Anju steps into Miss Schimpf’s office, which emits the scent of aging newspapers and jasmine perfume. Miss Schimpf is reading a book titled Media, Sex & the Adolescent, while her fingers stroke a faint rash at her collarbone, presumably from the black metal choker she wore the day before. Behind her, the bolted metal shelves support more books, including Reviving Ophelia and Raising Cain.

  Upon Anju’s arrival, Miss Schimpf looks up. “Oh hello!” Her smile dissolves. “What happened?”

  Anju touches her bandaged right hand, which she wrapped according to the instructions on the Ace package. It looks a bit bulgier than necessary, but therefore more dramatic. “May I please close the door?”

  After doing so, Anju sinks into the plastic chair across from Miss Schimpf, one without armrests, shaped like a bowl rather than a chair that gracelessly sucks her in rear first. She thinks of the last lie she told to Miss Schimpf, standing next to Linno’s painting, the gathering warmth in the room. Anju truly believed, at the time, that she would never take such a risk again, and now it is frightening to consider how she can lie and lie and lie once more. She is reminded of a game she used to play with other children, jumping off a staircase onto the ground, first two stairs, then three, or the low ledge of a wall. She always won, not because she was brave, but because she never let herself look down.

  Keeping her hands in her lap, Anju confesses that she does not want to tell her fellow classmates what she is about to tell Miss Schimpf. The pity would be too much. Solemn, quiet with courage, she says, “I suffer from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.”

  As Miss Schimpf listens with furrowed brow, fondling her throat, Anju explains the statistics that she culled from several library books, including Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis:

  Arthritis affects approximately one in every thousand children. It is an autoimmune disease that can last for months or years, though patients may experience long periods without symptoms.

  When she has finished with her statistics, Anju sighs. A risk, she knows, to embark on such a circuitous journey into falsehood, but she already tried and failed, tried and failed to create anything of worth in the sketchbook. Her pencil never listened to what she meant to draw—an eye became a fish, a tree resembled a hand. Anju resolved, then, that it was time to strategize. A sustained lie is a fragile tower of sorts and requires a continual scaffolding here and there, for fear of the uglier truths toppling down tomorrow. What other choice does she have? Continue drawing pigeons and insisting that they are not seals?

  “I wear my brace at night only,” Anju says. “I don’t want any attentions at school. But today it is bothering me very much so.” She grazes a hand over her bulging wrist, which lies, she hopes, forlornly.

  Miss Schimpf ponders Anju as one might ponder a perplexing geometry proof. Anju waits, her heart in her throat, for interrogation.

  “Does it hurt you to write?” Miss Schimpf asks.

  “Sometimes yes. But to draw is most painful.”

  “When did you do all those drawings back home?”

  “The arthritis, it comes and goes. I only can draw when my hand is not paining me so much.”

  Miss Schimpf presses her palms together, as if to say Namaste. Her gold bracelet, a snake-headed contortion with fake diamond eyes, slides down her freckled wrist. Anju senses that this silence is the sort that precedes the final judgment, as pronounced in a court of law.

  “Anju,” Miss Schimpf says. “Let me tell you a story.

  “When I was a girl, I was stricken with scoliosis. It’s when your spine starts growing crooked. So in order to correct my spine, I had to wear this terrible plastic brace under my shirts, and as you can imagine, my classmates were jerks about it, especially the boys. They knocked on my brace. Called me the Cagemaster. Keep in mind that the women in my family come from a long line of Delaware beauty queens, so the scoliosis was an even bigger deal because, naturally, I had certain aspirations.

  “But I wore the brace all through middle school and finally, after two operations, my spine was fixed. That’s a small price to pay for being the 1989 runner-up to the runner-up of Miss Delaware Diamond, don’t you think?”

  Anju nods, allowing the drone of the air conditioner to fill the room as she envisions a row of lustrous beauty queens in bikinis and heels, one of them trapped in a plastic brace. Nothing is right about these shared intimacies, this photo album of Miss Schimpf’s past, presented with a pure and lucid honesty that Anju will never be able to return.

  “I hadn’t thought of that in a long time.” Miss Schimpf studies her bracelet for a moment, her smile fading. “My point is, I know what you’re going through, sort of. But maybe the student art exhibition will be your Delaware Diamond?”

  Anju shifts in her seat, wondering how best to arrange her facial expression.

  “The paintings you showed me in Kerala,” Miss Schimpf says. “You brought them, right?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  Miss Schimpf explains the details of the student art exhibition, how it is scheduled for December 2, how the winning piece will be shown in the Brigard gallery, downtown. “George de Brigard is an alumnus of Sitwell, and he’ll be conferring the award money on whomever he chooses to showcase.”

  “Award money?”

  “A thousand dollars. A drop in the bucket to George. He made his money in pharmaceuticals a decade ago, and then ran off and opened his gallery. Never looked back.”

  To Anju, a thousand dollars is a green cascade, a deluge so mighty that it will wash away all sins required to obtain it, so great that it justifies one last, delicate lie.

  “Sound good?” Miss Schimpf asks.

  “Sound good,” Anju says.

  “And how are things otherwise? Is everyone treating you well?” Eager to leave, Anju answers a quick yes, but Miss Schimpf tilts her head like a parrot piqued by a particular sound. “Really?”

  “There was a rude beggar on the train,” Anju ventures.

  Miss Schimpf gives her a wincing smile. “Here, we say ‘dis-advantaged.’”

  “There was a disadvantaged beggar on the train.”

  “What about here at school? Do you feel at ease with people? Making friends?”

  “Fish and I are friends.”

  “Ah yes, Mr. Fischer.” She says his name with a flicker of wicked delight. “He’s a character.”

  “Yes. A character.” In the face of Miss Schimpf’s luminous smile, Anju wishes she could come up with something more chummy than this, to be the frothy, affectionate person that Miss Schimpf wants her to be. “Miss Schimpf?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I join the chorus class for an elective? It is compatible with my schedule.”

  “Oh, of course.” Miss Schimpf flips through a binder and makes the necessary check marks by which Anju can be freed from art. Anju sits back in her chair, but before she can relax, Miss Schimpf reminds her to bring in the paintings. “I want everyone to see a side of Anju Melvin that they’ve never seen before.”

  WHAT MISS SCHIMPF does not know is that Anju has more facets than a fake diamond. She glitters with all her many, many sides.

  There is the side she displays to Fish, who tells her stories with hardly a breath between them, as though he has been saving all his anecdotes over the years of her absence. Once, unexpectedly, he tells her about his First Time at age fourteen, and only halfway into the story does she understand that he is not talking about driving a car. “She was Mormon,” he says. “And older. Like sixteen or something.”

  “Hm,” she says. They are sitting on a cement bench outside school, staring with false interest at a fire hydrant. Her wrist feels choked by the Ace bandage, which she wrapped too tightly in the morning. Fish has been kind enough to offer her a copy of all his class notes, spa
rse and careless though they are.

  “She told me to come to her house after school. I thought it was for Bible study, but I went anyway. I guess she was rebelling against cultural constraints and whatnot.”

  “If I rebeled in this way, my grandmother would send me to a convent.”

  “I guess fourteen is kind of young,” Fish admits. “But actually I was really grateful to that Mormon girl. I’d never want to be someone’s First Time.”

  “Me too.”

  Some lies should be properly checked and fueled before launch, but Anju let this one tear out of her mouth prematurely. He glances at her, waiting for her to continue.

  With outward calm, she focuses on the fire hydrant while synapses go firing along the corridors of her brain, trying to gather bits of information from music videos and movies, though the raciest she has seen is the kind that cuts from the first turbulent kiss to the morning after, when people are sucking on cigarettes, sheets tucked under armpits, looking languidly out of windows.

  “How old were you?” Fish asks.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Oh, so pretty recent. Who was the guy?”

  To manufacture a whole new person and past is a staggering task, so she calls upon a name she knows from years ago. “Sri Ram. A Hindu. He was writing me love notes….” (Abort, her brain blares. Dead end. Abort.) “But he died. Killed in a paper mill. Chopped him to death.”

  “Wow.” Fish looks at her, then back to the sidewalk. “Sorry.”

  A bloated pigeon goes waddling after a hunk of bagel on the sidewalk, a wealth of food until several others join in, culling what they can. Fish and Anju watch the staccato rhythms of their pecking for an appropriate period, to honor Anju’s fallen First Time.

  “You’re really nothing like I thought you were,” Fish says, his voice lightly glazed with awe.

  AND THEN THERE IS the side she preserves for Ammachi and Melvin. Every phone conversation has the same cadence and content, so that the questions and answers, leading one to the next, take on the cadence of a broken alarm clock.