Laugh with the Moon

by Shana Burg

  Fred clucks.

  I peek in the box. Fred did good! “Nice work,” I tell her. Then I take the egg to the kitchen, where Mrs. Bwanali is cleaning the counters and Dad is sitting at the table reading and shoveling toast into his mouth. I hold out my hand to show him the egg. “Glad you didn’t slice and dice her?” I ask.

  “Mmmm,” he says, and closes the medical book he’s reading.

  Of course, Mrs. Bwanali is more impressed by the finer things in life. “A more beautiful dress,” she says, spinning me around to check out my accessory. “Now not another second! Show Mrs. Bwanali the egg.”

  I hold it up for her to examine.

  She throws the rag onto her shoulder, takes the egg out of my hand, and turns it around as if it is also a girl in a dress. “This egg is a beautiful egg. A beautiful egg that shines. It is an egg like a queen. If this egg is a person, this egg dress in fine clothes. This egg have shoes.”

  I don’t know what to say, but then again, even if I did, I wouldn’t have a prayer of getting a word in edgewise with all the yolky compliments Mrs. Bwanali is frying up. “You may eat this egg for breakfast or give this egg to a school friend,” she says. “Remember, Clare, always keep your hen warm.”

  “Her name is Fred.”

  “Fred,” Mrs. Bwanali says. “I like this American name. This hen, Fred, may like to sleep under the bed, you know. The temperature is good there.” Mrs. Bwanali is full of advice about how to get Fred to produce enough eggs to share with Memory, Innocent, Saidi, Patuma, and Winnie. “Talk to Fred. Tell her what you do, what you like. Ask Fred question about her day. A happy hen is a prize more great than gold!”

  I sit down at the table and Mrs. Bwanali serves me white tea, toast with jam, and the freshest, most delicious egg I’ve ever tasted while I guess who the chicken is from. “I think it’s from you!” I say.

  Mrs. Bwanali is tickled. “My girl, Clare, think Mrs. Bwanali is a queen,” she tells Dad. “She think Mrs. Bwanali have chicken to give here and chicken to give there.” This really cracks her up. “I tell you what, my girl,” she says. “If I do get a chicken to keep, I give it to Fred. Then Fred have chicken friend. Everyone need a friend. Even a chicken.”

  During morning assembly, as I sing along to the national anthem, students from other classes whisper about my new dress. I feel like I’ve walked right out of one of those fashion magazines Marcella reads all the time.

  After assembly, I cross the field to the standard one room, throw back my shoulders, and step inside. I position myself center stage and wait for my audience to file in and take their seats on the floor. With my new and improved uniform, I definitely feel more like a teacher than yesterday. I clear my throat. “Good morning!” I say, and 176 students reply, “Good morning, madam.”

  We play a few rounds of Simon Says before I teach them the hokey-pokey. Soon they are wiggling their rear ends and laughing up a storm. Mr. Special Kingsley has to clear his throat three times before order is restored. At the end of the hour, my headmaster says, “Tomorrow it shall be time to introduce the students to the English alphabet.”

  And I know the jig is up. Sure, I can play games with kids, but real teaching is going to be a whole different story.

  As soon as I meet up with Innocent and Memory on the hilltop after school, I blurt out my question. “Okay, call me stupid,” I say, “but how’re you supposed to teach without any teaching materials?”

  Memory knits her eyebrows together. “Without materials?” she says.

  “You know what I mean—pencils, paper, chalk, chalkboards, even markers, and posters with the letters of the alphabet on them that hang all around the classroom. Colored paper, glue, scissors. Flashcards with math facts. Maps of the world. Teaching materials to help kids learn.”

  Innocent waits for us to get moving, his hand on his little hip.

  “There is plenty,” Memory says.

  I glance at the bookmobile. The bookmobile, which contains all fifty-three books for our entire school. “No, no, I really don’t think so,” I say.

  “Tatiye,” Memory tells Innocent. She points the bookmobile down the hill and marches straight back to the school building.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, following behind.

  Memory doesn’t answer, but a mysterious grin creeps across her face. She walks through the schoolyard to the standard one classroom, parks the bookmobile inside it, and leads me through a thicket of acacia trees to a field.

  A tower rises from the ground like a smokestack.

  “What is this?” I ask, stunned by the odd sight.

  “Mud,” she says. “Home to termite bug.” I glance across the field. Hundreds of termite hills rise against the yellow ochre sky.

  “Wow! Those have to be ten feet tall! Big houses for little bugs.”

  After Memory tells Innocent something in Chichewa, he ambles over to the closest tower, reaches his arms out straight in front of him, and digs his fingers into the mud. A bunch of critters fly out as Innocent pulls off three hunks of clay and gives them to his sister.

  Memory squats on the ground and rolls two long lines and a short one. She pinches the long lines together at the top and sticks the short line across them in the middle. “Letter A,” she says. “Bake in sun to make hard. What do I tell you? Plenty of teaching material.”

  Sure, my students can each have a letter, but how will they scribble and doodle and daydream? Isn’t that what childhood is all about?

  But it’s like Memory can read my mind. She picks up a stick and writes the letter A in the dirt. I give up.

  “I see,” I say with a sigh. “There is plenty.”

  Memory, Innocent, and I are passing the tea farm.

  “What are you looking at?” I ask.

  “Sky,” Memory says.

  As I push the bookmobile, Innocent shows me a few karate moves. Wouldn’t you know it, his uncle Stallard saw a Jackie Chan movie in Blantyre last week and told him all about it. Now Innocent is convinced that one day he’ll break boards with his bare hands. He shows me a sideways kick. “Awesome!” I say.

  Memory’s still got her eyes pinned on the clouds, so I reach up and feel my hair. “You think it’s going to rain?” I ask. My hair always knows the weather first, but the outer layer doesn’t feel rough and frizzy, so if it does rain, I doubt it will be a full-on storm.

  “I search for the airplane,” she says. “Uncle Stallard tell me this is how you and your father travel to our country. He tell me about the girls on the airplane who serve the Coca-Colas. He say one day Innocent shall be a karate master, but I shall be air hostess. When I am the air hostess, I shall take airplane to your country. I shall come to school and watch you teach.”

  Suddenly, I’m confused. Not only about the airplane, but also about my dream. “I was going to be an artist who paints sets for plays,” I say. “But that was before I became a teacher. Now I’m not so sure. I mean, I do love working with my school theater back home, although I did skip out on painting the sets for Grease, but that was only because … well, it’s a long story.”

  By the time I shut my trap, Memory’s staring at me like I’ve got a calabash growing right out of my nose, so I back up a hundred yards. “Well, you know what a play is, right?”

  “A play?” Memory asks.

  “With actors who tell a story.”

  “Inde,” she says. “Sometimes I act out stories behind the hut with my cousins.” She confers with Innocent in Chichewa and then says, “Innocent say he hope you shall be star of the play.”

  “Oh, no, no, no. Not me!” I say, although lately I’ve been thinking I might want to give that a try someday. “For right now, I design costumes and paint sets.” When I finish my explanation, Memory has a mischievous glint in her eyes. “What is it?” I ask.

  “You see that boy?” She juts her chin toward her brother.

  “Of course I see him,” I say.

  “Are you the teacher of this boy?”

  Why do I have the d
istinct feeling I’m being led into some sort of trap? “Yeeesss,” I say, slow and unsure.

  “A good teacher shall use all her godly gifts to teach, correct?” She maneuvers the bookmobile around a puddle.

  “Yeeesss.”

  Memory and Innocent talk for a good long time in Chichewa. Before I know it, he’s grinning from ear to ear and doing karate chops at the air. “My brother agree. He shall be actor in the show.”

  Innocent smiles, those dimples pucker, and before I know it, the three of us are back at my house sitting on the veranda, planning a play to help the standard one students learn more English—a play starring Innocent Matinga! Of course, I have to clean up Fred’s poop first, because even though Mrs. Bwanali and I have trained her to go in the box by rewarding her with bits of banana, sometimes she has a rather smelly accident.

  “There is no better way to learn,” Memory insists as she bounces on the puffy green chair in the veranda, and we all watch Fred prance across the floor.

  “The actors can perform for the whole school,” I chime in.

  “Brilliant!” Memory says as Innocent strokes Fred’s wattle.

  After Mrs. Bwanali serves us orange juice and delicious mbatata biscuits, we get down to the business of writing the script. “What do you think our play should be about?” I ask.

  “Nkhuku,” Innocent tells Memory, who tells me.

  “A chicken? Why a chicken?” I ask.

  Memory laughs. “This boy love nkhuku! For a whole month, he try to catch nkhuku for dinner. The month before this month, he finally succeed. The chicken was boy chicken, so Grandmother let him eat chicken feet.”

  Fred flaps her wings.

  “Shhh!” I whisper. “I don’t want Fred to get nervous.”

  Even though Memory and Innocent think I should consider eating Fred, they are happy to leave with the egg Fred laid today. But they are useless in helping me solve the mystery: who in the world left this happy hen at my door?

  The next morning after assembly, Memory and I catch Mr. Special Kingsley before he disappears into his office. Memory is so excited that she forgets to speak English while she tells our headmaster all about the play. I’m sure he’s going to say we should forget it. I could swear he’s going to say that a real teacher would never come up with a cockamamie idea like this.

  Instead he asks, “Did you designate a part for every student?”

  Memory looks at me and I look at her. Our play has only five roles. But before we can explain this to Mr. Special Kingsley, he says, “Magnificent! Every student in standard one shall act in the show. I shall consult the sing’anga to find out the best evening, the one with the full moon.”

  “Sir, there are a hundred seventy-six students in standard one,” I say.

  “Yes, it is wonderful. All the families shall watch the show on best evening.”

  “Best evening, sir?” I ask. “Best evening for what?”

  “For the play,” Memory says, and sighs.

  “The village chiefs shall invite all the villagers,” Mr. Special Kingsley explains. “It will be an evening of delight for everyone and it shall show mothers and fathers the value of educating their children here at our school.”

  “Sir, we can perform the show for the standard two class,” I say. “I promise you, sir, that audience will be plenty big for us.”

  But Mr. Special Kingsley has a dream of his own, and it seems that now he can’t be swayed. “I anticipate perhaps a thousand visitors to our school for this show. We shall need torches to ward off the snakes.”

  I gulp.

  “You are late for class, girls. Hurry along. And Memory, it is English. Always English for students in the senior standards. I do not fancy to hear you speaking Chichewa again when you are at school.”

  With that, Mr. Special Kingsley pushes his glasses higher on his nose and limps through the doorway into the office.

  “It’s impossible,” I whisper to Memory once he’s out of sight. “There’s no way we can have parts for all the standard one students!”

  Memory doesn’t respond. Instead, she marches straight across the field to the standard one classroom. I lug my down-and-out soul across the schoolyard after her. By the time I arrive, 176 children are giggling, gasping, and screeching like they’ve just been cast on Broadway.

  Mr. Special Kingsley and Mrs. Tomasi have agreed to let Memory work with me in the standard one classroom for the first thirty minutes of class each morning in order to help the students prepare for the show.

  Of course, since Memory’s going to teach like me, she can’t wear a plain old school uniform anymore, so yesterday after we dropped the books off in the trading center, we went back to my house and I let her pick one of my scarves to tie around her waist. She chose the orange one with gold threads woven through it. I untied it from the band of scarves on my dresser.

  “It is like sunshine,” Memory said as I tied the scarf around her waist. “I do feel like the teacher now.” Then she thanked me for the gift.

  This morning, all the girls in our class complimented Memory’s new belt—all except for Agnes, who said it’s even more kunyasa—ugly—than mine.

  It’s hard to believe, but we’ve actually got worse problems than Agnes. The witch doctor said the ninth night of March would have the most moonlight, so now we’ve got the jitters. And yesterday, Mr. Special Kingsley told us that he invited the chiefs to bring the villagers from all the surrounding villages.

  Now Memory and I have added 171 roles to the original script, so every standard one student is a member of the cast. There are fifty hippos, fifty hyenas, and fifty hunters. Plus, twenty-five kids will play the howling wind in the storm scene. And then, of course, there is the nkhuku, performed by Innocent. Our actors will speak in English, and Memory will translate into Chichewa for all the parents and other villagers in the audience, since many of them haven’t gone to school and don’t speak much English at all.

  The good thing is that between listening to Memory translate and studying my vocabulary words from Mrs. Tomasi, I’ve picked up enough Chichewa that when Saidi says it’s time to plan our trip to Lake Malombe, I can tell him, “Nkhani yabwino! Ndakufunitsitsa kunyanja!” In other words, “Wonderful! I can’t wait to relax at the lake!”

  Saidi told me he’s been saving his money from selling reeds on the weekends for a surprise he’ll give to us during our outing. Memory and I are all about trying to guess what he’s got planned. “There is a restaurant at the lake. Perhaps he shall purchase an ice cream sundae,” she whispers to me.

  Today I’m coughing and sneezing like mad. “Saidi will get an ice cream sundae for each of us,” I suggest, and pray that these allergies don’t get the best of me before we set out for our road trip. I kick my backpack to the side of our table. Memory hands it over, and I pull out a packet of tissues I brought all the way from the good old U. S. of A.

  By Saturday morning, the allergy medicine is working and I feel a lot better. My nose is hardly running anymore. I grab my Red Sox cap. “And don’t forget to put on the sunscreen,” Dad says as we bump down the narrow path to the main road.

  “As if!” I tell him. With fair skin like mine, I’m not about to forget. Even with daily sunscreen, my skin has turned a reddish cinnamon hue.

  “And make sure you’re back by dark,” Dad says. “I’ll be home from work by then.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Dad turns on the main road. “Been meaning to ask you, how are the practice tests going?” In addition to the horrible assignment, Mrs. Middleton also gave me a pile of MCAS practice tests.

  “Clare,” she had said, “I’m letting you do this because I know you’re a smart girl. There are plenty of students who are homeschooled, and you are going to be homeschooling yourself. Now learn a lot and have a wonderful experience. I know it will do you good to get away.”

  Even though Dad thinks MCAS stands for Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, I know that it really means Most Clueless Arrangeme
nt of Stuff you could ever think to ask anybody ever! They list problems like:

  The total area of Massachusetts is 10,555 square miles, including bodies of water. If 1 square mile is 2.58998 square kilometers, approximately how many square kilometers is Massachusetts?

  A. 17,000

  B. 20,500

  C. 27,000

  D. 36,500

  But they never list the real answer: E. Who cares!

  Still, I tell Dad that the studying is going fine, because I don’t want him to ask for evidence. I’ve only taken two practice tests this whole time. I can’t bear to do another one.

  Speaking of things I can’t stand, when Dad pulls over at the kiosk near the Slow but Sure Shop, I glare through the windshield at the party crasher. I sure as heck hope she isn’t the surprise Saidi has planned! Agnes stands on the edge of the dirt road, her arm threaded through his.

  Dad opens his wallet. “Here’s a few thousand kwacha. Should be more than enough to help you and your friends get to the lake.” He hands me the bills, which I tuck into my backpack before I slide out of the Land Rover with a big fake smile on my face.

  “Moni!” I call like everything’s cool.

  “Moni,” everyone says, and waves.

  Agnes turns to Saidi. “It shall be lovely to feel the sunshine at the beach today,” she says.

  I definitely don’t want to stand near her, so I go into the Slow but Sure Shop and buy a bottle of water for each of us.

  While we wait at the minibus stop, we guzzle our bottles of water. “I never did drink the expensive water in the bottle,” Memory says.

  “I did,” Agnes calls over to us. “When my auntie visits from Lilongwe she always buys me the water in the bottle. I did drink it already three times in my life.”

  I swallow. I wonder what Marcella would do if she was here. Would she be amused by Agnes and all her drama? Maybe, but I’m not, so I hang around with Innocent and Memory instead.