by Shana Burg
“Boys and girls, what words does Clare need to know?” Mrs. Tomasi asks the class.
“Muli bwanji,” says a tall boy who sits in the front of the classroom.
I already know that muli bwanji means “How are you?” All of the most basic phrases were on the list Dad gave me. Still, I keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to act like a smart aleck.
“Norman, tell our new friend what muli bwanji means,” Mrs. Tomasi says.
The boy turns in his seat. His dark eyes sparkle. “ ‘How do you?’ ” he says.
“ ‘How are you?’ ” Mrs. Tomasi corrects. “Your turn, Clare. Muli bwanji? How are you?”
“Thirsty,” I croak. “I’m a little thirsty.”
Holy mackerel! You’d think I said My rear end is sunburned. Everyone chokes out these quiet little laughs, Memory and Agnes included, which means that my rib cage gets poked from both sides this time.
“Clare,” Mrs. Tomasi says, “you shall say what I do. Muli bwanji?”
A light goes on in my brain: a flashing red doofus light! I’m not supposed to answer the question, only repeat it. I reach to the floor for my bag, but we’re packed in so tight that Memory has to get up in order for me to grab hold of it. I pull my water bottle out and suck half of it down, not only because I’m thirsty, but also because I need to extinguish the fire that’s burning up my face. While I guzzle, Agnes and Memory both stare. I get the distinct feeling I should offer them some water, but my dentist told me kids can get gum disease from sharing drinks, so, really fast, I twist the cap back on and chuck the bottle into my bag.
When we finally get past the whole muli bwanji situation, Mrs. Tomasi asks, “What other words shall we teach Clare?”
The boy who sits at the table in front of me raises his hand. His hand has a scar the shape of Florida on it. When Mrs. Tomasi calls on him, he turns and looks at me. “Chabwino,” he says. “It mean ‘wonderful.’ ”
“Your turn, Clare,” Mrs. Tomasi says.
I can hardly get air into my lungs to activate my vocal cords, but somehow, I manage that one little word: “Chabwino.”
When Mrs. Tomasi asks for yet another vocabulary suggestion, Agnes’s hand shoots up. “Yes, Agnes?” our teacher says.
Agnes’s voice is sharp like her bones. “Bongololo,” she says.
“Why must our new student know bongololo?” Mrs. Tomasi asks.
Agnes leans over the side of her desk, and as she reaches for something on the floor, she pokes me with her elbow for a third time. When she sits back up, she dangles a hideous hairy wormy creature in front of me. My heart hammers in my chest.
“Agnes,” Mrs. Tomasi shouts, “this is not how we treat visitors!”
Agnes finally moves the snake away from my face.
Mrs. Tomasi sighs. “In English, you call this centipede. In Chichewa, we say bongololo.”
I take another look. That’s when I see it’s true. The little thing does have a hundred squirmy legs that are all wiggling in different directions at the exact same time. “Bongololo,” I whisper while Mrs. Tomasi points to the doorway and Agnes flings the vile bug outside.
“What do I tell you?” Memory says, loud enough for Agnes to hear. “The girl is satana.”
I nod once. Then I crack the knuckles on each of my fingers and pray, pray, pray that I won’t cry.
After vocabulary, it’s time for math. “Handlebar,” Mrs. Tomasi says, “please fetch a new chalk.”
“Handlebar?” I whisper to Memory.
“Before the birth of this boy, the father ride the mother to hospital to deliver baby,” Memory whispers. “The mother sit on bicycle handlebar to get there.”
I never thought about it before, but suddenly, I want to know what my mother was doing right before I was born. Watching a movie on the couch? Walking through a museum? Was she nauseous? Did she feel fine? What did she do when she felt me kick really hard? Was she scared or excited? And did she ever consider naming me anything but Clare? I feel like a book with the pages torn out at the best part.
When Handlebar returns to the classroom a few minutes later, he’s holding something that looks like a potato. With a small knife, Mrs. Tomasi peels off the top of the vegetable and uses it to write equations on the board, until finally, Mr. Special Kingsley rings his bell. Must be time for lunch. “Excuse me,” I say to Memory. “I need to get my bag.”
“Oh, no!” Memory tells me. “It is not the time you think.” Agnes cackles and Mrs. Tomasi says, “Mr. Kingsley rings bell to send youngest students home. The senior classes learn for many more hours.”
“Well, then, when do we eat lunch?” I whisper to Memory. But it’s Agnes who answers.
“My profound and sincere apology to the Glorious Blessing from America,” she says. “Here in the Warm Heart of Africa, we do not eat lunch.”
Tears burn the corners of my eyes. I try Marcella’s trick: I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and silently recite the alphabet backward. My tears stay hidden, but my stomach growls right out loud.
“Perhaps if you drink the rest of your store-bought water,” Agnes says, “your American belly shall feel full.”
By the time school really lets out, I don’t even know if I have enough energy to walk up the hill. Dad’s surrounded by kids. They check out the Land Rover like it’s a rocket ship while he presses his stethoscope onto one little chest after the next.
When I show up, he pats the top of my head. “Muli bwanji?” he asks, as if the silent treatment is so old I’ll probably just forget about it. I throw open the Land Rover door and get in. While I wait for him, I decide he’s right. This silent treatment is getting tired, so as soon as he wraps the stethoscope around his neck and opens the door, I scream, “Hungry! For your information, they don’t even serve lunch in this place!”
Dad looks surprised, but I don’t know if he’s surprised because I’ve actually spoken or surprised about lunch.
I fold my arms and stare out the window.
“I thought they’d at least give you some porridge,” he says. “That’s what they always used to do.” He turns the key and waits for the swarm of kids to get out of the way.
“I want to get out of here,” I say.
Dad reaches over and takes my hand. I pull it away. As soon as we turn into the driveway, I throw open the Land Rover door and run right past Mrs. Bwanali, who’s carrying a bucket of clothes outside to wash by hand. It looks like it’s going to take her forever. Too bad this dumb house doesn’t come with a washing machine.
I slam my bedroom door shut and yank off my sneakers. They are teeming with heat. I also tear off my soggy socks and shove on the ruby slippers Marcella wore when she played Dorothy last year. She gave them to me as a going-away present. “Just so you’ll remember there’s no place like home,” she’d said.
I climb under the mosquito net and collapse in bed on my stomach. A minute later, Dad knocks on the door. I don’t say anything, but he goes ahead and trespasses because there isn’t even a lock on the door.
“Where’d you get those?” he asks.
I bang my heels together three times. One of the slippers falls off and clatters to the floor.
“Here,” he says. He pushes aside the mosquito net and throws a banana and a bag of chips onto my bed. The bag crackles as I pull it open and inhale the salty potato scent.
“I’ve got to get back to the hospital for a few hours. But, Clare?”
I chomp on a pile of chips.
“You’re going to be fine.”
Then that’s it. Dad walks out of the room and out of the house. Lately, I wish he’d walk out of my life.
I’m sketching a self-portrait. I’m lost on a raft in the ocean. I doubt anyone will ever find me. There’s a shark fin in the background. Maybe I’ll get eaten. Or maybe first I’ll starve.
Mrs. Bwanali knocks on the door. “Yoo-hoo!” she calls.
“Come in,” I mutter.
She carries over a tray with nsima and boiled pu
mpkin. “For you,” she says. But other than those two words, she doesn’t try to talk to me at all. She doesn’t pull aside the net and sneak a peek at my sketchpad either. She just sets down the tray on top of the dresser, and before I can say zikomo, she’s gone.
So I eat in my bed while I watch the sky change colors out the window—dianthus pink, manganese blue, cobalt violet. It’s shortly after I hear the first bush baby cry that I remember the night critters, and I carry the empty tray back into the kitchen, where Mrs. Bwanali’s standing at the stove. Lentils whimper at the bottom of her pot under a cloud of smoke.
She stirs the beans. “Mrs. Bwanali can talk,” she says. “Yes, but Mrs. Bwanali do listen even more good. You know, Clare, I have five daughters of my own. These ears listen better than a dog.”
I think about it then. Here she is, cooking for Dad and me, cleaning our house. Who is cooking and cleaning for her family? I wonder what daydreams whisper to her while her pot sizzles, what pictures glitter in her mind.
“It was yummy,” I say. I set the tray on the counter and leave to go back to my room.
“Clare, before you exit, I must tell you what we say here in Malawi.”
I turn in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“We say mwana wa m’zako ndiwako yemwe.” She tosses the dishrag over her shoulder and walks toward me. “What does this mean?” she asks, and takes my hands in hers. “It mean ‘the child that belong to my neighbor also belong to me.’ ”
I swallow. I want to stay in the kitchen with Mrs. Bwanali, but even though she likes to listen, I don’t know what I’d say. I mean, how do you explain to someone that a part of you has died? How do you tell someone that you feel like a ghost without a soul?
You don’t.
Which is why I mutter “Bye” to Mrs. Bwanali. Then I wander back to my bedroom, stretch out on my bed, and fade into the indigo night.
Dad shakes me awake. “Feeling better?”
For a second I am, until I blink a few times and realize that it’s already the next morning. I fell asleep in my uniform, and now it’s a wrinkled mess.
“Good news,” Dad says. I can’t imagine what it could be. “While you were sleeping, I tightened the pipes. Shower’s working better. But keep it short or we’re going to run out by the end of the day.”
I walk to the bathroom and turn the shower on. Lo and behold, it is good news. Now there are eight strands of water coming out instead of five. I scrub myself with a washcloth, but even with the increased water pressure, no matter how hard I rub my skin, I’m covered with dirt. It’s under my fingernails, in the cracks between my toes. I haven’t even put the shampoo in my hair when the showerhead sputters and half the water strands disappear. At this rate, I’ll run out of water with a headful of soapsuds. I cut my losses and get out.
I put on my rumpled uniform again, since I have to wear the same thing to school every day except for Wednesday, uniform wash day. When I tromp into the kitchen, Mrs. Bwanali says, “Do this dress wrinkle in the sun like a dried fish?”
“I slept in it,” I say, embarrassed that I didn’t even have the energy to change out of my clothes last night.
Mrs. Bwanali sets breakfast on the table—boiled cassava, avocado, and eggs. As I swallow it down like a python swallowing a pig, Mrs. Bwanali says, “I shall find some hot rocks.”
“Hot rocks?”
“To press the uniform,” she says.
Dad stands in the kitchen doorway and checks his watch. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for ironing right now,” he says. “Today Clare’s going to get to school on time.”
I bug out my eyes and silently plead with Mrs. Bwanali for help.
“The hot rock special iron do not take long, Dr. Silver,” she says. “I fear that I cannot let this beautiful girl attend school in a dried fish uniform. You shall sit and drink Mrs. Bwanali’s sugared tea and read your report and get smart. It shall take only a minute.”
“But—” Dad begins.
“But you shall sit like a king in his throne,” Mrs. Bwanali says, pulling out the kitchen chair. She waits for Dad to sit before she takes the pot off the stove and pours him a cup of tea.
As I traipse down the hill to school in my perfectly ironed uniform, I scour the field for anyone who looks familiar. There are hundreds of students milling around, but no one I recognize.
I plant myself on the sidelines and watch the barefoot boys kick a soccer ball made out of garbage bags and rubber bands. At each end of the red dirt is a goalpost made from three tree limbs nailed together. It looks like the boys are disputing whether the ball has gone offsides, but there are no borders to the field. Everything is imaginary.
Well, I can play that game too. I can imagine. So I imagine that Marcella is on one side of me and our friend Sydni on the other. Are you ready for the date? Marcella asks.
What are you going to wear? Sydni inquires.
Have you told your father? Marcella asks.
I’m smiling, thinking about going out with Isaiah, but they’re so excited for me that I don’t even have a chance to answer their questions. I bet he’s going to plant a big kiss right there. Sydni points to my lips, when I feel a tug on my wrist.
“Hello!” Innocent says. He smiles and pop, a dimple puckers on each cheek. I snap out of my daydream. I’m here at Mzanga Full Primary, but at least I’m not alone.
Two of Innocent’s little friends are at his side. Innocent points to the boy with cheeks as big as apples. “Silvester,” he says. Then he points to the boy with almond-shaped eyes and says, “Abel.”
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Clare.”
Silvester and Abel point at my face. I bend down. “What is it?” I ask.
The boys jab dots in the air with their fingers—poke, poke, poke. Soon the three of them go wiggly with laughter. Did I leave some breakfast on my face? Do I have a zit? I reach up and feel my nose. But it’s smooth as satin.
“Oh,” I say, and chuckle. While Dad is tall, dark, and Jewish, Mom was a redheaded, freckle-faced Catholic. I get my spray of freckles from her. She always said they give me personality. “Blood of the Irish!” I tell the boys, but they just look at me cross-eyed. So I stand up straight and proud, point to my nose, and try not to think about Mom anymore. I try not to think about how her skin was the color of peaches and cream, how she’d smell like rain after her bath. Instead, I point to the dots on my own nose and say, “Freckles.”
“Ooh!” they say, fascinated by the extraordinary information. “Frrrreeeckles.”
Mr. Special Kingsley walks past us and shakes the bell in his hand. Immediately, the soccer game stops. Hundreds of kids scatter to class, kicking up dry red dirt like a hurricane. Suddenly, my blood swooshes in my ears, and the hustle and shuffle fades farther away.
I forget where I am. Forget where to go.
My heart’s pounding when a little hand grabs mine and drags me from the field to the school building. We reach the standard eight door. A brown and white chicken struts inside, where my classmates are busy unpacking school supplies from their plastic grocery bags: notebooks torn in half across the middle and tiny pencil stubs. “Zikomo,” I tell Innocent. “Zikomo very much.” Mrs. Tomasi isn’t in the classroom yet, but Memory and Agnes are.
“Good morning!” Memory says as she moves off the wooden bench to let me in. Agnes is busy talking to the boy with the Florida-shaped scar on his hand, who sits at the table in front of us.
“Agnes comes to school exclusively to find husband,” Memory explains. “Husband who own fancy shop in city.”
The chicken pecks at my feet.
“I come to school to beat you,” Agnes says to Memory. “Next term I shall be number one.”
A girl sitting in the front of the classroom turns in her seat. She’s stocky like a locust. She yells out something in Chichewa, her eyes full of horror.
“Patuma, you read,” Agnes calls to her. “Maybe you shall be number three student someday. But not yet. Please do
not worry about the American girl. We need not impress her.”
“All you girls fight for me. I shall declare a winner soon,” says the boy with the scarred hand. His fingers are extra-long and thin, and his eyes sparkle like he just stepped out of a swimming pool. “Winnie and Sickness shall fight for me as well.”
Two girls, one with bulbous cheeks and another with silver hoop earrings, turn at the sound of their names. Both of them look healthy to me.
“Yes, let it be known. I shall be a very rich man,” the boy tells me. “Do you know I sell reeds in the trading center on the weekend days? You may like to buy some for your roof.”
“This boy is called Saidi,” Memory explains.
Agnes holds her hands over her heart and bats her eyelashes. “Memory adore Saidi, but Saidi love only Agnes. It is what you call the love web.”
“Love triangle?” I say.
“Love triangle,” Memory says, and laughs. “What do I tell you? Agnes is not here to learn language of English.”
“Only language of love,” Agnes says.
Mrs. Tomasi wanders in. Today she’s wearing a light purple print dress. She looks exactly like a lilac in spring. Since I have hay fever plus a really good imagination, the power of suggestion is pretty strong. The second I see her, I sneeze.
Mrs. Tomasi walks over to our table and hands me a piece of paper with Chichewa vocabulary words and English translations. The words are written out by hand. “Clare, you must copy each word five times. I shall quiz you tomorrow,” she says. She heads to the front of the room, sits down at her metal folding table, and summons my classmates. One at a time, they kneel in front of our teacher as she quizzes them on their English vocabulary words.
Meanwhile, back at my bench, I copy over sukulu, which means “school,” and mbandakucha, which means “early morning before sunrise, between first and third rooster.” When Agnes returns from being quizzed, she stares at my paper. I lift it to my face so she can’t see what I’ve written, but she inches even closer. “I see you have a magic pencil,” she says. “A pencil that draws letters in color.”