Not Your All-American Girl

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

  “You were definitely better,” Tara said. “I mean, with the oratory contest, I’m not sure I could even do it if I got a part.”

  “You’ll get a part,” I said.

  Secretly I was imagining myself as Brenda Sue, and Tara in the ensemble. Normally Tara was the one who shined a little brighter. On swim team, we both swam in the B meets, but only Tara swam in the A meets. Last year, when we worked on our history projects, only Tara got a “Superb!” I got a “Nice work, Lauren” without an exclamation point.

  In the play, we would be the Royal We again. Only this time, I would be the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  WHEN I GOT HOME FROM SCHOOL, my grandmothers were attempting to watch Star Search on the VCR. Star Search is a talent show where the challengers try to beat the champions in categories like singing, dancing, and comedy. Wai Po, my Chinese grandmother, lives with us, and Safta, my Jewish grandmother, lives around the corner. It’s convenient for arguing and watching Star Search. It’s the only thing they have in common besides me; my brother, David; and Burt Bacharach, the man who wrote “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

  They’ve been fighting over me pretty much since I was a baby, when Safta wanted to put me in lacy pink or white dresses, and Wai Po said white was for mourning and that I should wear red, a happy, lucky color. Sometimes I feel like a toy being pulled between them, each grandmother hoping I’ll be more Jewish or more Chinese. But right then, if you asked me what I was, I would say: a singer.

  Wai Po stabbed at every button on the VCR. “David said he recorded it for me,” she said. Making a recording on the VCR was always dicey because you weren’t sure you’d done it right until after the show you wanted was over. The TV screen remained stubbornly dark.

  “Did you remember to change the input?” Safta prided herself on keeping up with technology.

  “Of course! I changed all the inputs.”

  “Did you change the TV channel to three?”

  “It’s on three.”

  “I could just tell you who won,” Safta said.

  “I don’t want to know. I want to watch,” said Wai Po.

  Watching Star Search is a ritual in my house on Sunday nights. Only this week, Wai Po missed it for mahjong. David, I suspected, watched for the spokesmodels, but he paid attention to the other categories, too. We usually agreed with each other on who should win, but we didn’t always agree with the judges.

  Safta and I had a ritual at the end of the show. “Those teen singers were good,” she would say when Ed McMahon brought out the winners and shook their hands while everyone was dancing. “But they’re no Lauren Horowitz.” And then I would say, “Safta,” and roll my eyes, like it was the silliest thing she could say. But here’s what nobody knew, not even Tara: I spent large amounts of time wondering if I could sing on Star Search. If I got a part in the play, maybe it would be a sign.

  “I like that Sam Harris,” said Wai Po, pushing the VCR button one last time. “I hope he moves on to next week.”

  “Well,” Safta said. “It is your lucky day.”

  “I told you not to tell me,” Wai Po said.

  “All I said was that it’s your lucky day.”

  Wai Po changed the inputs again. “So now we don’t need to watch.” In a way, she seemed relieved.

  “How was school?” asked Safta. Since my mom, who was a paralegal, was away working on a trial for most of the week, my grandmothers were trying to fill in for her. The big things they did were making sure we ate something besides breakfast cereal and asking about school.

  I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “My audition went great! I’m definitely going to get a good part. I think.”

  “Keinehora!” said Safta. “Spit!” She believed that saying something good will happen brings bad luck. Spitting is supposed to cancel it out, although there is no scientific evidence to support this. I pretended to spit. Pooh, pooh, pooh.

  “Of course you will get a good part. You have a beautiful voice,” said Wai Po. But she didn’t sound happy about it.

  “What are you doing?” said Safta. “Now you spit.”

  “Fine.” Wai Po leaned over and spit for real into a wastebasket. “This is silly.”

  “Says the woman who told me not to sweep the floor last month.”

  “You want to sweep away your fortune? Next Chinese New Year you sweep, but at your own house.”

  “We always knew you were going to be a star,” Safta said to me. “The bar mitzvah confirmed it.” For some reason, Safta didn’t feel like she had to spit when she said this.

  “A doctor is the star of the OR,” Wai Po said. “An accountant is the star of tax season. A lawyer is the star of the courtroom.”

  “So she’ll be a Broadway star who finds a cure for cancer,” said Safta. “She can be anything she wants.” This was something my mother always said, too.

  She seemed to have forgotten that blood and diseases were not my favorite subject.

  “I’m going upstairs to do my homework,” I told them. Then I sang, “Homework! It’s time to do my homework! I’d rather sing than do my homework! But I don’t have a choice!”

  I bowed and ran upstairs. My main homework was studying for a math quiz on negative numbers. Before I started, I got out my button maker from under the bed. It was a Hanukkah gift from my parents, because I wore so many buttons and they thought it would be fun—and cheaper—if I made my own. A button maker wasn’t the same as designer jeans, which was what I’d originally wanted. These were jeans made by famous fashion designers, like Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein. Their names were signed in thread on the back pocket, the way artists signed their paintings. Dad said maybe I could write Gloria Vanderbilt’s name on a button and pin that to my back pocket. For a nurse, he wasn’t thinking through the dangers very well.

  I decided to make a button that would commemorate the play tryouts. It couldn’t be obvious. It couldn’t say “No. 1 Hula-Hooper” or “A star is born!” Since I had a math quiz, I settled on

  I thought I might even show it to my math teacher, Mrs. Fink, who had a good sense of humor for someone who inflicted mathematical torture on students. I guess anyone named Fink would have to have a good sense of humor, for self-preservation.

  On the way to school the next day, I saw tons of things that reminded me of hoops. A Circle Tour bus. A Buick with its round logo. The wheels on a bicycle. Were there always so many round things on my way to school, or was it a sign about my future?

  When I got to school, I heard someone say, “There’s the girl I was telling you about,” and wondered if they meant me. Ann Hooper, who was a friend of a friend and actually had the word hoop in her name, gave me a thumbs-up.

  Normally I would have felt nervous, waiting for a teacher to post something like callbacks. This time, I was excited. Everything in my life was going to start as soon as Mrs. Tyndall taped those papers outside her door, right before the first lunch shift.

  Tara passed me a note during science: YOU ARE GOING TO BE A★! We had to pass notes because Mr. Kirby was like our elementary school teachers who said we talked too much when we sat together. As soon as the bell rang, Tara and I ran-walked toward Mrs. Tyndall’s classroom, which was at the other end of the school. I got to go to lunch, but Tara would have to go to class as soon as we saw the list.

  “Everyone is talking about your audition,” Tara said between breaths.

  “I hope we both get parts,” I said. I figured we could practice in my room. The bed could be a stage.

  “I hope, I hope, I hope,” she said.

  Mrs. Tyndall had made two lists. One said ENSEMBLE and one said CALLBACKS FOR MAJOR ROLES. My heart beat faster as I searched for the names that made up the Royal We.

  I was not the star. I was not even under consideration for being the star. All the air squeezed out of my lungs, leaving them flat and heavy. But that wasn’t the worst part.

  “IT’S GOT TO BE A MISTAKE,” TARA said.

  “It’s not—my na
me is over here.” I pointed to the ENSEMBLE list. “And your name is over here.” I pointed to the CALLBACKS list. “Congratulations.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Tyndall got confused,” said Tara. “And left your name off by accident.”

  “And put it on the ensemble list? Maybe my singing just sucks.” I tried to say it like a joke, but even as I said it, my heart tightened up. If Mrs. Tyndall said that, I might die. Anyway, that wasn’t what anyone else had said. Not my grandmothers. Not Hector, who was a finalist for Theodore Goreson, the boy who Brenda Sue likes. Not the strangers in the hall. Not my best friend.

  “We should ask Mrs. Tyndall about it,” Tara said firmly. We. The Royal We.

  This was why adults liked Tara—because she knew how to get stuff done. The door to Mrs. Tyndall’s office was closed, but we could tell she was in there. Tara knocked before I could back out.

  “Hello, girls,” said Mrs. Tyndall. “Lauren and Tara, right?”

  “That’s right,” Tara said.

  I looked at her and shook my head. Let’s not do this.

  Tara said, “Mrs. Tyndall, we just checked the lists, and we wondered if Lauren was supposed to be on the callback list. She had a really good audition, didn’t she?”

  “Lauren did have a good audition. That’s why she’s been cast,” said Mrs. Tyndall. She smiled, and I couldn’t tell if she was acting. “You also had a good audition.”

  “Thanks,” Tara said. “We just wondered”—Mrs. Tyndall didn’t know about the Royal We—“if Lauren was supposed to get a callback for Brenda Sue, too.”

  I wanted to hug Tara. But Mrs. Tyndall didn’t look like she wanted to hug anybody. She sighed and took off her glasses. “You definitely have some musical talent,” she said to me. “But I have to consider the audience. You don’t want the audience to be taken out of the story for any reason. The audience comes to the theater for ninety minutes of magic. Right?”

  We nodded.

  “So when we go to the town of Pleasant Valley, Tennessee, we want to see it onstage: an all-American town trying to do what’s right for its young people.”

  Something inside me started to feel like one of those dreams where you begin to fall. And keep falling. “I have a second cousin in Tennessee,” I said, though I knew that was not the point.

  “Look at Tara,” said Mrs. Tyndall. “When people see her, they won’t have a hard time imagining she’s an all-American girl from Pleasant Valley. It’s our job in the theater to make it easy for the audience to imagine they are right there with her.”

  She made it sound so reasonable.

  She said: Tara looks like she’s from Pleasant Valley.

  She meant: You look like you’re from someplace else. Someplace that isn’t Pleasant Valley. Someplace that isn’t even in the United States. Why hadn’t I sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” for my tryout instead?

  “You’ll do a great job in the group numbers. You’ll help everyone stay on pitch,” said Mrs. Tyndall. “Don’t forget, every role is important, or it wouldn’t be there. Most girls would feel extremely lucky to make the ensemble.”

  I would have felt extremely lucky to be in the ensemble, too, if Mrs. Tyndall hadn’t said what she’d said. And if Tara wasn’t poised to be the peanut butter and jelly. Again.

  “Won’t the audience wonder why there’s one Chinese Jewish girl in Pleasant Valley?” I asked, just to show her that I got her point about sticking out. Though there was only one Chinese Jewish girl at Eisenhower Junior High, too.

  “You’re Jewish?” said Mrs. Tyndall. “Are you sure?”

  I wanted to say I wouldn’t have spent so much time being bored out of my mind in Hebrew school if I weren’t Jewish, but I decided against it. The Chinese part of me was the part she could see, but the Jewish part of me was always there, too.

  Mrs. Tyndall made a little sweeping motion with her hand. “Anyway, that’s the ensemble. They’ll barely notice.”

  Because I was an apple. A French fry. A green bean and corn and macaroni and cheese. I was the side dish. I didn’t have reddish-brown hair or blue eyes. I had black hair and brown eyes like my mom and a dimply smile like my dad. Some girls in my grade liked to put their arms against mine and say how tan I was, even at the end of winter. I had thought that was a good thing. Until now.

  “What about Hector Clelland?” I asked. Hector’s mom was Cuban, and Hector had her almost-black wavy hair and dark eyes, but his skin was lighter than hers. It was lighter than mine, possibly from spending so much time in the basement playing Atari. I crossed my fingers that I hadn’t just messed up his callback.

  “Hector?” Mrs. Tyndall wrinkled her forehead. “Well, Hector looks like your all-American boy.”

  Because he is all-American, I thought. Like me.

  “I’m just talking about appearances,” Mrs. Tyndall said. “Pleasant Valley.”

  The Royal We walked out of Mrs. Tyndall’s office together. I couldn’t look at Tara, her blue eyes and freckles. She was also wearing her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. They fit her perfectly. The one time I’d tried them on, I’d had to roll up the cuffs.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said. The less I spoke, the smaller the chance that I would start crying.

  “I was so sure there was a mistake,” said Tara. “Really. But I guess I kind of get her point? About the audience?” She stopped. “I bet it’s also because we don’t have a lot of Chinese kids in our school. Like, there aren’t enough kids to look like your family.” Brenda Sue had a brother and two parents in the play.

  “My dad isn’t Chinese,” I pointed out.

  “Right, but at least one of your parents should be Chinese,” she said. In our school, that left my brother, David, who was allergic to acting.

  “Why couldn’t Brenda Sue be adopted?” I said.

  “She could be, I guess. But maybe that didn’t happen a lot in the fifties?” She looked as if she was trying to solve a math problem.

  I knew that she was trying to make me feel better, so I tried not to feel worse.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said. “We’ll be together. We’ll have fun. And if I don’t get the part, maybe I’ll be in the ensemble, too.” She said this like there was a chance she wouldn’t get it.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I tried to squeeze my disappointment as far down as it would go and pasted a smile on my face as I went to the cafeteria and Tara went to English. I didn’t want to mess up her chances of getting the starring role because I was sad. That’s not what a good friend would do, right?

  Sneaking into my house when you didn’t want to talk to anybody was hard. Even James Bond couldn’t have done it. I could usually make it past my dad or my brother okay. Wai Po’s dog, Bao Bao, didn’t bark when people came into the house; he barked when they were already inside. But the women in my house had bionic hearing.

  I let out the smallest sigh when I was just outside my bedroom. It was such a relief to be home, to not have to pretend to be okay anymore.

  “Was that Lauren?” asked Safta from down in the living room.

  “Of course it was Lauren,” said Wai Po. “I heard her coming through the door.”

  “I heard her outside, when she was on the street,” said Safta.

  “How can you hear her on the street when you do not hear me when I ask you to help fold laundry during General Hospital?”

  “I have excellent hearing,” said Safta. “Especially when it comes to Lauren.” She switched to her shouting voice, which wasn’t so different from her regular voice. “Lauren?”

  I had two choices: I could crawl out the upstairs window and shimmy down the drainpipe like they do in movies. Or I could answer them.

  “I’m doing my homework,” I called from the stairs. I wished Mom were home. Mom knew when it was a good time to ask questions and when you just needed someone to sit quietly with you. This was not my grandmothers’ specialty.

  “Good. Homework is important,” said Wai Po. “Grades are important.”


  “She knows,” said Safta.

  “I did not say she did not know,” Wai Po said.

  I walked slowly back downstairs with my backpack still on my shoulder. They were going to find out sooner or later.

  “So. How did it go?” asked Safta, her voice clearly expecting a certain outcome.

  “I’m not one of the stars,” I said. “I’m in the ensemble.” The Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m Just a Bill” pushed its way into my head with the sad-looking rolled-up piece of paper. I’m just a side dish, yes, I’m only a side dish.

  “Ensemble?” asked Safta. “Are you sure there isn’t a mistake?”

  “It’s not a mistake,” I said. “I checked. Like, really checked with the teacher and everything.”

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” said Wai Po. “You can be in the play but still focus on school.”

  “And you made it into the play!” Safta said. “The ensemble is wonderful. You’ll get to sing! Maybe they were saving the big parts for the eighth graders.”

  “Maybe,” I said. And then I blurted out all of the things I’d been holding inside all day. “I didn’t even make callbacks. It was mostly eighth graders who got callbacks, but Tara got one. The teacher basically said she was Brenda Sue Parker. The star.”

  My grandmothers sucked in their breath at the same time. If there had been any bugs in the room, they would have been vacuumed right up.

  “What’s going on?” said my dad, coming in from the kitchen. Bao Bao chose that moment to start barking. He’d been barking more since Wai Po had put him on a diet.

  “Can’t you ( yap) get him ( yap) some ( yap) manners ( yap yap)?” asked Safta. She and Bao Bao had warmed up to each other, but she still thought he needed refining. Wai Po picked up Bao Bao and put him on her lap to get him to shush.

  Safta looked over at me to see if I was going to give my dad the latest theatrical bulletin. When I didn’t, she said, “Lauren has suffered a disappointment.” She made it sound as if I had broken my arm or something.