by Jodie Toohey
Mama insists Maja and I go to high school and college. We study all the time so our grades will be high enough to get into high school. I would rather be a hairdresser. Then I wouldn’t need good grades but Mama tells me I will not be a hairdresser. She wants me to be a lawyer. My parents work very hard. They did not have any money to go to school when they were kids so they want us to have everything they didn’t. I will tell you about my school, then you tell me how your school is same or different.
I started school when I was six years old in first grade. Mama took me to school the first day and ever since then, I walk to school. It is a long walk but it is peaceful. I just went to school in mornings until the grade five. Then my schedule began to alternate each week. One week I will go to school from 8 o’clock in the morning until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. The next week, I go to school from 1 o’clock in the afternoon until 6 or 7 in the evening. The week after that I go back to mornings, then afternoons, then mornings, then afternoons. This continues all through the school year. Our last day of school is usually in middle of June around my birthday on 17 June. We get a month off from school around Christmas time.
When is your birthday? I will be fourteen this year. I hope my parents will let me have a party. It will be so much fun to hang out with friends and dance. We will eat little sandwiches and drink punch. I will also invite my boyfriend, Mate. Mate is so cool and is really nice to me. He takes me for rides on his motorcycle. Tell me about this Larry Benson. Why do you like him? Maybe you can send me a picture. Is he cute? I have a picture of Mate on his motorcycle but it is my only picture so I don’t want to send it. I will ask Mate if he has another copy I can send to you.
I am sorry I must end this letter now. I have to finish studying before it is time to go to bed.
Please write back soon!
Your friend,
Nada
*****
By then it seemed trivial and irrelevant to continue the letter I started before about food so I started over, but I couldn’t finish.
As I read that first letter from Nada after Emily’s death, the knot in my throat so familiar then but which I hadn’t really remembered was there, took me back. Emily’s funeral was on Thursday, March 28th, and I went to school the next day. Mom told me I didn’t have to go but I wanted to get away from my house and the grieving faces. Since the day after Emily was killed, Aunt Shari and Uncle Matt spent the night, sleeping in Mom’s bed while she slept on the couch. I couldn’t look at them anymore. They just reminded me Emily was gone, so I thought going to school would help me forget. But for a reason I could never explain, I took Emily’s picture to school with me.
As soon as I walked through the doors, I was met with hundreds of eyes. A lot of them had never glanced in my direction before. Their eyes looked at me knowingly, their mouths tightened, and the corners descended into slight frowns. Some of them cocked their heads to the side. A few hands reached out to brush my shoulder and pat my back. I just looked down at the floor and walked to my locker. I opened its door and Krissa approached me. She reached her arms around me and hugged me sideways.
“I’m so sorry.” I saw tears in her eyes. She thrust a folded up piece of notebook paper into my face. “Here.” I took the paper and she walked away as quickly as she’d approached. I opened the note. She wrote she couldn’t say the words because she didn’t want to cry, said how sorry she was Emily had died, and told me she was there for me if I needed her. I folded the paper and pushed it into my jeans pocket. I swallowed the saliva funneling into my mouth and took a deep breath, hoping no one else would hug me. The eyes and sympathetic looks followed me to math class; everyone knew and I just wanted to be invisible.
I went to my seat and laid my head in my arms on the top of the desk until the tardy bell rang. When I looked up, Mr. Munck was drawing triangles on the blackboard. I took Emily’s picture from my binder’s front cover and stared at it. What am I doing here? I thought. Emily is dead and all Mr. Munck wants to talk about are sines and cosines? I hated his apparent ignorance as much as I hated all of the staring. I watched the blackboard while my classmates worked on their geometry. The chalk numbers began to blur. I started to cry; tears slipped silently down my face. Mr. Munck picked up the receiver of the phone on the corner of his desk and whispered into it. A few minutes later, the guidance counselor came in; she picked up my books, grabbed my hand, and led me to her office. Mom picked me up to take me home and I spent the rest of the day curled on my bed listening to tapes.
I went back to school on Monday and everyone went back to ignoring me. I took a test, turned in a book report and three math homework assignments, and earned A’s on all of them. On Saturday night, I babysat Forti and Prio while Uncle Matt went out with his friend, Charlie, and Mom and Aunt Shari went to dinner and a movie. I put Forti and Prio to bed at eight and I sat down in front of the TV. I tried to watch the weekly made-for-TV movie, but it just took me back to that last Saturday night when I was trying to get Emily to stay in bed.
Three of the kids in my grade had volunteered and been chosen to be trained as “peer counselors”; Larry Benson was one of them. Using the telephone on the wall in the kitchen, I dialed his number. My heart pounded in my ears and my whole body shook as I listened to the phone ringing through the line.
“Hello, Benson residence.” I recognized the voice as Larry’s little sister, Shelly.
“Is Larry there?” My voice cracked.
“Hold please.” I almost smiled at Shelly’s exaggerated politeness. I heard a clunk and faint, “Larry, it’s for you.”
I almost hung up just before Larry got to the phone. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi. This is Ami Sinkey.”
“Hi.” I waited. “I was wondering if you had a few minutes to talk.”
“Not really. I’m watching the Bulls,” he said.
I wanted to yell at him but I just hung up. I got angry. What kind of peer counselor is that? I decided then I hated Larry Benson.
Somehow the rest of April passed. I busied my mind with school work and hating Larry. When the weather was warm enough, I walked. I loaded jackets with cassettes recorded with my favorite songs and played them on my Walkman. The only concrete things I remember during that time until I got Nada’s next letter was staring either at the ceiling or into the river and listening to music. Sometimes I imagined Larry crawling to me, devastated with guilt, and begging my forgiveness. I would begrudgingly give in and then he would become my boyfriend. Mostly I just concentrated on the words in the music I listened to, imagining myself singing them to packed audiences.
*****
1 May 1991
Dear Ami,
I will try to tell you about what it is like to live in Republic of Croatia in Yugoslavia. I have never been to Serbia. But I am Serb. At least this is what I’m told by my country. The religion of my parents’ parents and their parents before them was Catholic Orthodox so my religion is Catholic Orthodox. We are not devout. We attend church mainly on holidays. Most people where I live in Rijeka are Roman Catholic and they are called Croats. I do not know why this is so. I do not know why Catholic Orthodox and Roman Catholic are different. I know at one time they were same religion. They split in year 1054. I do not know why. I know there are some differences in how we do things. Orthodox Catholic churches do not have chairs and our holidays fall on different days. To make the cross on our bodies, Orthodox Catholics use three fingers and go from left to right. Roman Catholics go from right to left with their full hand.
I became a communist when I was seven years old and I was happy. One of the first things we do at school is pledge ourselves to communism during the PRIMANJE U PIONIRE ceremony. My new classmates and I wore blue pants, white shirts, yellow scarves, and blue berets with red stars on them. We repeated the oath. We sang a Yugoslavian hymn and received red carnations. They gave us pictures of our President, Tito, and cards declaring us parts of the communist party. We were communists but we did not know what a communist was
. But we went to school, played, and had families who loved us. We had clothes to wear and food to eat so it was good to be communist. It was a few years before I learned I am a Serb. I am only now beginning to learn it makes a difference.
Homework and school come before anything else in my family. I am in seventh grade so the grades I earn this year and next year in eighth grade will determine the rest of my life. Mama is pleased I have been able to earn all A’s so far.
I did not get a letter from you since I wrote my last letter to you. I don’t know if it got lost in the mail so I decided to write you again. Please write back soon!
Your Friend,
Nada
CHAPTER SIX
A month passed; I wanted to write Nada but I didn’t know what to say. I received another letter from her in June.
*****
3 June 1991
Dear Ami,
I do not know if you are writing me or if you are not getting my letters. I don’t know if our mail is messed up because of what is happening. I will keep writing until I get something back from you. If you are getting my letters, please write me back.
Have you ever had anything happen that made life seem perfect but later realized it was too perfect and you should have known things would change? This happened to me yesterday. When I was high enough up the hill between school and my house and I could feel it on my back, I turned to face the sea. It was deep blue and pierced by ships docking or departing the harbor. It felt like its breath snuck up the hillside and blew in my face. It was warm and sweet with a hint of salt. My house has three neighbors on one side and four on the other attached in a row, all looking out onto sea. Before I walked through my front door, I turned once more toward the sea. I looked ahead to two weeks to my fourteenth birthday swimming in that very water.
Maja ran up behind me and I pushed the door open wider to let her in. “I didn’t know it was a race,” I said. I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I was calm, not like Maja. She came in. When she lost her grip on the door, it slammed shut, sucked closed by the pressure from the warm wind cutting through the house. Mama left the windows on back sides of our fourth and fifth stories and front side of our second story open so the sea’s wind would enter and rush up the stairs out the back windows. It was so nice to stand there and feel the wind sweep fresh air through my house. I had to force myself to do my homework.
I had just enough time to finish homework and do chores before Tata would be home and it would be time to start cooking supper. Then I would be able to sit down while supper is cooking to watch television instead of returning to school work.
At three o’clock, I put my studies away and began my chores. I swept all of our brown tile and hardwood floors. There seemed to be more dust.
Tata arrived home just before four o’clock. He is a postman and delivers mail for Croatia. He said hello and hugged my sister and me as usual. He was quiet as he began to fry ground beef and cut vegetables. I finished sweeping and returned broom to narrow closet by our back door. I peeled the green outer leaves from a head of cauliflower and began to chop it into bite-size pieces. We made Musaka. It is one of my favorite dishes. The bottom layer is a mixture of cooked onions, ground beef, cauliflower, and tomatoes. It is topped with a layer of sour cream.
Tata didn’t ask me about my day at school like he usually does while we prepare supper. I thought he forgot so I tell him about my latest math problems. He nodded but did not seem to listen. After Tata placed Musaka into oven and I finished cleaning up the preparation dishes, I went upstairs to living room. I sat down on floor and watched television.
Mama, disheveled and tired as usual, returned from business suit factory just as the closing credits began rolling across the screen. She, too, seemed unusually quiet as she helped Tata set the table for supper and checked over Maja’s homework. Mama remembered to ask us about our days at school but without excitement. I began to wonder if something was going on but the fresh tomatoey taste of Musaka soon made me forget.
Last night, I heard my parents talk in their bed in bedroom below Maja’s and mine in anxious whispers. They talked about their votes in the referendum last month, how the majority of people voted opposite, and what it might mean for future of Yugoslavia and Croatia. Before Mama and Tata went to vote in the election, they explained to Maja and me there were many people in Croatia who no longer wished Croatia to be part of communist country of Yugoslavia. I had been a communist since my oath to honor the communist party. They voted for Croatia to stay a part of Yugoslavia but they were in minority. In their bed, Mama and Tata talked about how they do not know what will happen. Because they do not know what is going to happen, they did not want to worry Maja and me.
I did not tell them I saw a news broadcast at end of last April about how mortar shells were fired at the village Vukovar in middle of the night. But I did not worry. Vukovar is on other side of the Republic of Croatia nearly to border between it and the Republic of Serbia. That day when they came home from work, they were in their usual cheerful moods. I remember the air was just beginning to be warmer and the days were growing longer. We took a walk after supper that night. I thought if Mama and Tata did not think it was safe, they would have told us and would have kept us inside after supper. Now I wonder if they are afraid such fighting might extend all the way to Rijeka.
I’m sorry this letter is so long but I needed to tell somebody about what is happening.
Your friend,
Nada
*****
My mom put Nada’s letter on my nightstand next to my bed on Friday night before she kissed me goodnight. I had not moved all day and didn’t until Saturday morning when I had to get up because my dad insisted on taking us to Camanche’s annual town festival.
I took nearly an hour to get dressed and yawned all the way to the park. Kids were running in every direction with mothers and fathers trailing behind futilely attempting to steer them around mud puddles disguised by flattened, overgrown grass. Each one of the two dozen carnival rides played competing music and my head pounded. It was cloudy and cooler than it had been, but the air was thick and I couldn’t pull in enough oxygen.
Dad walked up to the ticket booth. “Three all-day wrist bands, please.”
“No, just two,” I stood on my toes to see the kid in the booth over Dad’s shoulder.
“What?” my dad said.
“I don’t want one.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“Just two, I guess.” He wrapped the paper bands around Forti and Prio’s wrists. “Stand still.” He barely got the ends stuck together and they ran off toward the Ferris wheel, hand in hand. “Come right back here when the ride’s over.”
I followed them to the Ferris wheel line.
“Ami,” Dad said.
I turned around and squinted the diffused sunlight out of my eyes.
“Ami.”
I rolled my eyes and shrugged. “What?”
“Ami, what is the matter with you?”
“What?”
“You used to love coming to the carnival and riding all of the rides. Now you are always so quiet and you don’t want to do anything. I just don’t know what has gotten into you.”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t know what is wrong with me?” I turned and walked away, splashing into a mud puddle.
“Ami.” He grabbed my shoulder. “You need to stop dwelling on Emily’s death.”
“Dwelling? In case you can’t read a calendar, Dad, she died less than three months ago! How can you tell me that? Just because you left and don’t care anymore, it doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t care.”
“I just meant you need to move on with your life. Go out with friends. Have some fun. Don’t mope around all the time.”
“Don’t tell me what to do! If I’m so hard to be around, why did you even bring me here? Emily was my favorite cousin! I spent every Saturday night with her. She was a baby. How can you tell me to forget about
her? Sorry, Dad, but obviously, I can’t forget about family as easily as you can!”
I sat on a park bench for the rest of the day. Occasionally, Forti and Prio took a break from riding rides to sit next to me or hug me. Dad seemed to pretend I wasn’t there.
By Monday, I felt worse about not writing to Nada. I didn’t want to be selfish, but I didn’t know how to explain Emily’s death in words. It had been eleven weeks since Emily died. It was obvious the world was not going to stop turning without her, even though it seemed impossible it should. But it wasn’t Nada’s fault. I thought about how I’d feel if I’d kept writing her but she didn’t write me back so I did the best I could.
*****
June 10, 1991
Dear Nada,
I am so sorry it has taken me so long to write back. On March 25th, my favorite little cousin, Emily, died. She was hit by a car when my aunt was pushing her home from the park in her stroller. So I have not known what I should write to you, but I will try to answer the questions in your last letter.
School in America is the same time every day. I go to school from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Once in a while, I have homework but I have a class we call study hall where I usually finish all of my homework. I walk to school also but it is not very far away, so it is not a long walk. I started school at kindergarten when I was five years old but I turned six years old early in the year so I was six for most of kindergarten. My school usually starts around August 20th and ends at the end of May or the beginning of June. It depends on how many snow days we have to make up. Do you have snow days in Croatia? Snow days here are when the weather is too bad to go to school and usually the bad weather is a lot of snow. Sometimes we also get snow days when we get freezing rain or when the temperature is below zero.