Not Your All-American Girl

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

  “This is my Lauren,” Safta said when we got inside.

  “Our Lauren,” said Wai Po, introducing herself to Mrs. Mather.

  “I see the resemblance,” Mrs. Mather said. She gave me the once-over, and I gave her one back. Mrs. Mather looked like she had been in the sun too long; her skin was tan and leathery, but her wrinkles also looked like they came from smiling a lot, which I liked. I wondered which grandmother she thought I resembled. Most of Safta’s friends thought I looked “very Chinese,” and Wai Po always said that my face was shaped like my dad’s, like an oval.

  Mrs. Mather had made up a humongous pink T-shirt for me to wear. It looked more like a nightgown, with the words TO A TEE spelled out on the front, surrounded by rainbows, kittens, hearts, and other decals the store would iron on if a customer picked them out. She spray-starched the T-shirt so it was hard and stiff. “It looks like what people think of when they think of T-shirts,” she explained. “A perfect T shape.”

  I hoped, as my bodyguard, Wai Po would protect me from the T-shirt, but she watched as Safta helped me yank it on over my regular clothes.

  “Don’t move so much,” said Safta. “It will break.”

  “I’m trying not to let the fabric touch my skin.” The shirt was scratchy. It reminded me of the cast I had in fourth grade, when I broke my left arm. Mrs. Mather stuck a pink hat on my head, which I couldn’t stop her from doing because I couldn’t raise my arms. The front of the hat said ASK ME ABOUT TO A TEE! I wasn’t sure how I was going to answer questions from people if I was supposed to be singing, but she was the boss.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. Mather. “Now go out there and drum up some customers!”

  “She is only doing this because of the cat,” Wai Po said, but softly, so Mrs. Mather couldn’t hear.

  “Shouldn’t we wait until there are some people out there?” I asked. Even though it was Friday afternoon, the mall was like a ghost town.

  “Nonsense! We won’t get any people until there’s a reason for them to come to the store!” said Mrs. Mather. She handed me a bunch of helium balloons. “Hand these out to little kids. I’ll wait in here to make T-shirts.”

  I walked out to the front of the store, with the balloons and my grandmothers trailing behind me.

  There was a shoe store directly across the way, and a vacuum repair shop next door. They were both empty, except for the people working there.

  “This seems weird, singing into an empty space,” I pleaded with Safta and Wai Po. “And I thought she would have a song for me to sing. I don’t know any songs about T-shirts.”

  “You don’t?” said Safta. “I can’t tell what they are singing about in those songs on the radio. There has to be a T-shirt in there!”

  “Well, there isn’t,” I said. Most songs were about wanting someone to love, actually being in love, or mourning a breakup. No T-shirts.

  “Maybe you could sing some show tunes,” said Safta.

  “Show tunes?” said Wai Po, in the voice she usually used to describe Safta’s cooking. “Why don’t you take the songs from when you were a little girl and put in the word T-shirt. That is more appropriate.”

  “It is not a terrible idea,” Safta said, which from her was like saying Wai Po should win the Nobel Prize. “Why don’t you start with ‘Mary Had a Little T-shirt.’ ”

  “Old MacDonald could also have a T-shirt,” said Wai Po.

  If Tara had been here, we probably would have come up with something better. I went with Old MacDonald.

  Old MacDonald had a farm

  E-I-E-I-O

  And on that farm, he wore a T-shirt

  E-I-E-I-O

  With a T-shirt here

  And a T-shirt there

  Here a T, there a T, everywhere a T-shirt

  Old MacDonald had a T-shirt

  T-I-T-I-O

  “You look like you feel sick,” said Wai Po. “We should go home.”

  “That’s just nerves,” said Safta. “Try looking happy. You’re selling T-shirts! Sing louder!” She said this last part like a command.

  I pasted a smile on my face and sang the song again. Louder. This time, the shoe store guy came out of the store and watched.

  Safta smiled and pointed at me. “My granddaughter.”

  Wai Po looked as if Safta had just revealed my secret identity.

  “You guys offering any discounts to your fellow mall employees?” the shoe store guy said. I supposed if Old MacDonald had T-shirts, he would have shoes, too.

  Safta grabbed him by the arm. “I’m sure we can work out something. Let’s go in!” She steered him into the store.

  “Good,” Wai Po said. “Now you can take a break.”

  “I just started,” I said. I saw a mom and two kids heading toward the carousel. I wondered if I could get them to come over.

  “What should I sing?” I asked Wai Po. They were younger than me, but not so little that they’d like nursery school songs.

  “Something respectable,” said Wai Po.

  Maybe it was because Wai Po was hassling me, but I started singing the “I’m a Little Teapot” song, which would have worked, except that I forgot to actually replace the word teapot with T-shirt.

  I stopped singing the song abruptly, looked down, and threw my arms upward, which was not easy to do in the stiff shirt. “Hey, I’m not a teapot! I’m a T-shirt!”

  The kids, a girl and a boy, came running and gazed up at me in my pink-shirt-and-hat glory. “Your song is funny,” said the girl.

  I handed each one of them a balloon and pointed at To a Tee. “There’s a new store that you can visit. It has lots of different colored T-shirts to choose from, plus decals like this one.” I pointed to a kitten on my shirt, which had lots of sparkles.

  “I want a T-shirt like hers!” said the little boy. At first I thought he meant the kitten, but then he added, “A big pink one!”

  “Her parents have good jobs,” said Wai Po, which had nothing at all to do with the color pink.

  “Oh, Steven,” said the mom. “Boys aren’t supposed to like pink!” She said it like it was a law.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  The mom frowned. “Pink’s for girls.”

  “Pink is for people who like pink,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was actually saying these words, but they kept coming out. I smiled sweetly. But I didn’t feel sweet. Wai Po looked at me and shook her head.

  “I love pink,” said Steven. “Not bright pink. Like a carnation.”

  “I like green,” said the girl. “All the greens.”

  “Well, we can take a look,” said the mom. She tugged at their hands.

  Wai Po waited until they walked away. “You should not have said those things. That’s not your business. She is going to think your family did not raise you properly.”

  I fiddled with the neckline of the T-shirt. “It’s just that I’m getting tired of people always talking about supposed to, when it’s stupid. Like why couldn’t he like pink? What would happen if he had a pink shirt?”

  “He might get teased at school,” said Wai Po.

  “But there’s nothing wrong with him liking the color pink,” I said. “The problem is other people.”

  Wai Po was quiet for a moment. “I think I understand.” She looked around in her purse and pulled out a tube of cream. She began rubbing some into her hands and the smell of cherry almond floated toward me. “When I was a student, I wanted to study physics, but my father wanted me to be a teacher.”

  It was weird to think of Wai Po as young, but she hadn’t been born a grandmother. “What did you do?”

  She shrugged. “It ended up not mattering. Mei guanxi. I had to stop my studies during the war.”

  “Why did you want to study physics?”

  “Physics explains things we cannot see,” she said. “Gravity, heat, sound, motion. Physics explains why those people can hear you when you sing.”

  I wondered if there were terms for the unseen forces in middle school. Why were som
e kids popular and others not? Why was it easier to make friends in elementary school? Why did teachers sometimes seem crabby, even when you were trying to be good?

  This thing about physics was a side of Wai Po I had never seen. “Do you miss physics?” I asked.

  “Miss? I don’t miss it.” The way she said miss made me think that it didn’t mean the same thing to her that it did to me. “But I’m glad I got to study it, even a little.”

  “Is it weird to grow up during a war in China, and then end up with your granddaughter in a shopping mall with an indoor merry-go-round, singing about T-shirts?” I asked.

  “That,” said Wai Po, smiling, “is not what I would have guessed would happen.”

  Maybe that was what happened without supposed-tos—the really unexpected.

  AFTER STEVEN, WE DIDN’T SEE ANY more kids. But a few adults stopped to listen.

  A man tried to give me a dollar, but Wai Po didn’t let him. She took the dollar out of my hand and thrust it back at him. “We are not beggars,” she said.

  “No one thinks we are beggars. He was just trying to be nice,” I told her as the man gave Wai Po a strange look. But Wai Po made her mouth into a tight line and shook her head. “I was afraid this was going to happen.”

  Safta came back after dealing with the shoe store guy. She and Wai Po trailed me as I walked back and forth through the mall. I sang “Row, Row, Row Your T-shirt” and “The Itsy-Bitsy T-shirt.” Finally it was time to quit. I tried to lift the T-shirt to get it off.

  “It’s stuck,” I said.

  “What do you mean ‘stuck’?” said Safta.

  “Go out the way you came in,” said Wai Po.

  “My arms don’t bend that way,” I said. “No one’s arms bend that way.” I imagined going through life with a hard, pink outer shell. Beetles did that. Not people.

  Mrs. Mather took me into the storage room, and Safta borrowed a pitcher from the people at the ice cream shop and poured water all over me, so the T-shirt would bend. Wai Po yanked it off me, trying to hold it away from my skin so my clothes wouldn’t get wet, but I covered up with my wet arms, so it did anyway. I thought Mrs. Mather was going to be mad about having water all over her back room, even though we tried to mop it up with the T-shirt. But she said I could design another shirt of my own, for free, so I guessed she wasn’t. I picked a purple shirt and asked if she had a decal with Patsy Klein.

  “The singer?” Mrs. Mather wrinkled her forehead. “I have Def Leppard and KISS.” Which were bands that sounded nothing like Patsy Klein. I picked a decal with a cat that looked like Mini instead.

  Then, right in the middle of pressing the decal on my shirt, Mrs. Mather said, “Your grandmothers are right. You have that something special.” She said it very matter-of-factly, like she was announcing that I had a new purple shirt or black hair.

  Wai Po and Safta beamed.

  “Have you ever thought of going on Star Search?” asked Mrs. Mather. “You’re as talented as those kids.”

  “Me?” I said, as if the thought had never occurred to me.

  Even though Safta said it all the time, it was different to have Mrs. Mather, who wasn’t even related to me, make the suggestion. It made still wanting to audition for Star Search seem less foolish. But it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who wanted something.

  “I’m thinking of going to law school,” Mom said at dinner. We had already lit the candles for Shabbat. We had been lighting them more since David’s bar mitzvah, and it was normally one of my favorite parts of the week. It was like dividing the week into the part that was everyday and the part that was special. Peaceful. But I didn’t feel peaceful about Mom’s announcement. I was holding the salad bowl when she said it, and then I wasn’t sure if I should pass the bowl or put it down.

  “Why would you want to do that?” I said.

  I hadn’t been thinking about law school. I’d been thinking about Patsy Klein being Jewish and what it would have been like for her family to hear her sing the prayer over the candles in that low, bendy voice. Or the prayer over the challah or the wine. We always went through those prayers pretty fast, but it would have been different in Patsy’s house. Neighbors probably gathered around the open windows at sunset, just to hear her. I’ll bet if she sang in synagogue on Saturday mornings, they would get more than old people and kids studying for their bar mitzvahs.

  My why question did not go over very well.

  Wai Po made a gesture, like she was shooing my words away. “Because being a lawyer pays better and is more prestigious!”

  “Law school is expensive,” my dad said. “Though it would be worth it in the long run. You haven’t mentioned this in a few years. Why now?”

  “During the trial, one of the lawyers said to me, ‘You think about these issues as well as anybody. Did you ever think about going to law school?’ It moved the idea back to the front of my mind.”

  Just like Mrs. Mather and Star Search. I wanted to tell Mom that just because people tell you things doesn’t mean they’re going to happen.

  Dad tilted his head to one side. “My wife, the lawyer. That has a nice ring.”

  “In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to be a justice on the Supreme Court,” said David.

  That was just three years ago.

  “Maybe you’ll be the second,” he added.

  “My wife, the Supreme Court justice, has an even nicer ring,” said Dad.

  “I bet the judge on People’s Court makes more money than the Supreme Court justices,” said David.

  “Being on TV is not dignified,” said Wai Po. “A legal career, that is dignified.” She nodded her head approvingly.

  “We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.” Mom laughed. “We need to figure out finances. I would need to study for the LSAT. And take it. I’d have to figure out where I can apply, though I think some of the partners would write me good recommendations. Law school is three years, longer if I go part-time. And after all that, I’d have to pass the bar exam.” Mom ticked each of these items on her fingers.

  I looked at everyone else’s excited faces and felt like I had failed another magazine quiz on how to be a True-Blue Daughter. Because I thought it was a terrible idea. It was hard enough to get her attention while she was working; it would be twice as hard if she was going to law school, too.

  “Lauren?” said Mom.

  I dabbed my mouth with a napkin, and spoke mostly into the folds. “I think you wouldn’t have much time to be a mom,” I mumbled.

  “Oh!” Mom jerked back, as if a scorpion had suddenly appeared on her dinner plate. She blinked, one, two, three times.

  I felt everyone else at the table glare heat beams of indignation at me. My face turned red, but I didn’t feel sorry.

  “Your mom is trying to give you the best life,” said Wai Po. “You should be grateful.”

  “No, no,” said Mom. “Lauren is just saying what she thinks.” But she sounded disappointed.

  “If Mom becomes a lawyer, you can have those bogus jeans you’ve been whining about,” said David.

  “Not necessarily,” said Mom. “The jeans are not just about money; this is about what we value.”

  “Great,” I said. “So I don’t even get jeans?”

  Dad put his hands up. “Let’s not get overheated.” He made a patting motion on the air. “This is a new idea. Let’s give it time to breathe. Let’s all think about it, okay?”

  I looked at the candles glowing on the hutch.

  What else was there to think about? It seemed like we had said everything that needed to be said.

  MONDAY MORNING, TARA CAME running up to me at my locker. “How was your debut professional singing performance?”

  I’d helped pull an extra three customers into the store. Most people had just ignored me, which was worse than singing to an empty space. But Mrs. Mather had made that comment about me having something special. I kept that compliment with me all weekend, letting it glow inside me. When we wat
ched Star Search that Sunday, I’d paid extra attention to the teen vocalists and started to imagine what I would wear on Star Search. Maybe a Gunne Sax dress, if I promised to also wear it for my bat mitzvah.

  I didn’t tell Tara about the compliment. Instead I pulled out one of the coupons that Mrs. Mather gave me. “It was good. And here. You can get a T-shirt for thirty percent off.”

  Tara squinted at the coupon. “Oh! It was at the Carousel Mall. I thought it was going to be at Oak Faire.” And just like that, the warm glow turned into a cold, black lump.

  It was just a stupid thing my grandmother arranged, and not even at the good mall. I got paid in T-shirts and coupons, not real money. Mrs. Mather probably just said what she said to be nice.

  “Nope, just good ol’ Carousel Mall.” I hunted around for something else to say. “My mom says she’s thinking about going to law school.”

  “Whoa,” said Tara. “That’s kind of huge.”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved that she got it. “My whole family was so rah-rah about it, but no one wanted to talk about how hard it would be.”

  “I remember when my dad was studying for his exams to become an insurance agent. We hardly saw him.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “And my mom’s still thinking about this mayor thing.”

  I loved how I never had to explain things to Tara. She just understood. “How was your grandmother’s?” I said, putting off the question I was really supposed to be asking.

  “Good. She’s started a walking club in her neighborhood. They walk three miles a day.”

  “Did she make chicken piccata?” I knew that was Tara’s favorite.

  “She made pork chops and mashed potatoes. That’s my dad’s favorite. Plus apple pie.”

  If I had my way, I’d stop with my questions there, but there was one more, the question I should have asked first.

  “How was oratory?” There. I’d said it.

  Now Tara got a huge smile on her face. “I thought I had gone over the time limit, but it turned out I just made it. I totally forgot to say my line about trees and roots, so that helped.”