The new girl in town might have counted as my one female friend. Except that she didn’t count. She’d come just the last month of school. I was a sophomore—Jimbo and Em, loud, cocky juniors—and the new girl and I had met, briefly, after nearly colliding in front of the water fountain down by the old gym.
Naturally I knew who she was, her being the only one in our school even close to her color—though I can’t say I knew anyone who’d spoken with her. At the fountain, the new girl motioned for me to drink first.
“Before me, you may proceed,” she told me, and nodded her head real formal.
“No, really, you go ahead.”
“Please, I insist upon it.” She stepped aside, and held out her hand to me, like we were both there on business. “If I may present myself, I am Farsanna Moulavi.”
I’d heard people say she was strange—more than her color, I mean—and just that one stiff, stilted speech was enough to make me wonder if people weren’t right. And her face was odd too—her expression, that is. Because—and here was the thing—there wasn’t any expression at all. Except in her eyes. And they looked out of her paralyzed face a little too dark, a little too deep, maybe a little unsteady, like they were black pits that might or might not be hiding explosives.
“Shelby Lenoir,” I told her. “I’m Shelby Lenoir Maynard.” And I almost added, “There’s some call me Turtle.” But that was reserved for friends.
I drank, and to cover for the water dribbling down my chin, said the first thing that poked into my mind: “Cool accent.”
“The accent is to you the strange thing, no?” She asked this with an almost-smile, some kind of not-smile hanging at the edges like shadows.
“Well … your skin’s a nice color,” I told her then because it was true—though it sounded peculiar somehow, saying it out loud to her face.
Farsanna Moulavi was the color of the hot cocoa Jimbo Riggs’ mother made from Nestlé dark chocolate, powdered sugar, and dried milk. The kind the Riggses drank in their basement rec room when they played Parcheesi on Friday nights.
“I come from Sri Lanka,” she said, watching me. “You perhaps know it as the former Ceylon.” She held up her right hand flat against the air, as if it were a map. “If this would be India, then this,” she placed her left fist by the lower thumb knuckle of her right hand, “is Sri Lanka.” She turned to drink, then rose up straight, all in one piece, like her spine didn’t bend. “The accent and the skin, they come both from Sri Lanka.”
“Sri Lanka.” I nodded to show I’d recognized the map she could make with her hands, and that I knew where it was—close enough, anyhow. My father was the city desk editor of our local newspaper and he was a Yankee, so he likely knew all about Sri Lanka, or would sound like he did anyway—which, I’ve learned by living in Boston, is pretty much the same thing.
Now Momma, had she been there with the new girl at the fountain, would’ve offered up quick something sweet—maybe a second cousin’s having seen that part of the world lately and loved it. Just loved it. Momma made certain everyone in her path felt affirmed at all times, even if she had to perjure herself, or her second cousin, to do it.
But I stood staring at the new girl’s homemade-cocoa color, and thinking how Momma would whisper that a lady does not stare or that Jesus would make a stranger feel welcome.
But I was not Momma or much of a lady or Jesus, and “Oh” was what I managed instead.
I turned then to leave, but Emerson and Jimbo’s baseball team was just burrowing up from the locker room. I’d had a crush all spring on both the shortstop and pitcher, Quincy and Quirt, identical twins, and one of them—I never could tell them apart—had smiled at me once from the dugout. So I dropped to retie a shoelace that hadn’t come undone, and with a quick flick of my tongue, popped my retainer clear out of my mouth and straight into my gym bag.
I flashed a smile up at the new girl but mostly at the shortstop and pitcher cleating up behind her. “You liking the school and everything okay?” I asked the new girl, just like I wanted to know.
She looked startled, like our little exchange had been suddenly tossed, then retrieved —and no reason for either. But she took—after a second—the rope-end of talk I held out.
“This mountain for you has always been home, no?” she asked. I sure couldn’t see how that answered my question.
“Me? Shoot. Six generations on Momma’s side. But my father’s a Yankee.”
She cocked her head, and I noticed how still her hair lay on her shoulders. Dark as I’d ever seen. And so thick. I wondered if it were heavy as it looked.
My shortstop-pitcher matching pair had already passed—without so much as looking my way. Emerson gave me a punch in the gut. And Jimbo gave out his signature wave, his whole arm flapping, and winked. Only at me. His one dimple dug in deep.
I winked back, just like always, but then he was waving again, a little barely-there wave, and not looking at me. And he grinned, right at the new girl, and drilled in his dimple again—which was like him, giving that smile out to just anybody happening to be standing in the same hall.
At the back of the herd moved Morton Beckwith, a Clydesdale behind skittish ponies. The other boys’ cleats clattered and pinged against the hall’s tile, but under Mort’s bulk the hall echoed like a blacksmith’s hammer against a draft horseshoe. He played catcher, and while he missed a wide world of think-quick plays to the first baseman and pitcher, he excelled at scaring runners headed home with his size and his snarl. He had the build of a fullback and the mind of one too—one who’d taken all hits with his head.
He nodded at me—it’s not in the Beckwith nature to wave—and then his eyes latched onto Farsanna. He passed not more than three inches from her and never took his eyes off her face. His bottom lip jutted out nearly straight from his gums, the skin more or less permanently distended from the tobacco he dipped. For some reason, lips like his defined manly good looks on our Ridge—reminding me always of National Geographic full-page photos of remote island natives who weight their earlobes, stretching them down to the base of their necks. So the bulge of Mort’s bottom lip in particular might have brushed up against the new girl had his head not towered above her.
Then, just past her, as if in slow motion, he spit.
It was nothing but normal, a boy—a Southern boy, and a baseball player at that—dipping tobacco and needing to spit. But brown juice did land near the sandaled feet of the new girl, and maybe spattered a little like hamburger grease onto her toes. They were brown too, though, so it didn’t show.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything. Though a chill did run down my neck into my hands, and maybe that’s what stood the hair up on my arms as it passed.
Swinging his big head only once to glance back, the whites of his eyes always too yellow and the skin around them puffy and dark, Mort hoofed back into the herd. Quincy and Quirt were slapping each other on the behind and Emerson and Jimbo had disappeared: So the whole team had passed by, and my purpose for standing by the fountain seemed pretty much passed too.
“Well,” I told the new girl, “see ya.”
And I left … those eyes, flammable-looking, just watching me go.
_________
It did occur to me, at least once or twice, to feel guilty for walking away so awfully fast, and a little defensive, too—like the new girl might lump me with everyone else. Like I was one of those on Pisgah Ridge who might spew brown spitjuice on her bare toes, or ignore her because she was different. Far from it, though. I ignored her because she might be the same—like every other fifteen-year-old female I’d found not much worth knowing.
So the new girl walked on alone down our high school’s concrete-block halls, the late spring air hot and thick, smelling of locker rooms and chalk dust and fried okra and greens, tobacco dried in linking rings on the tile floor.
I
went to a public school, which probably goes without saying, since my father, who’d gone to Dartmouth, marched with Dr. King, sat in at a Greensboro lunch counter, and settled South only to marry Momma, who’d been shopping, right through the sit-in, at the Greensboro Woolworth’s. My father believed in what he called The Enunciation, and clung to precise, Dartmouth-man diction like a lifeline, like if he let one “g” go unsounded, he might be sucked whole, quicksanded into the slurred Southern culture around him. “What I’m saying,” my father pronounced, “is quite simply that no child of mine will be part of any white flight to the monochrome elitism of private schools.”
But there were no blacks on Pisgah Ridge, in the town or the schools, public or private. Sure, there were the ones who cleaned our houses and mowed our lawns, but they all left on the last bus every evening down to their homes in the Valley. And they knew enough to never miss that ride down.
Yet here in my fifteenth summer was Farsanna and the Moulavi family come to our Ridge, plain as Pete, just smiling, polite. And all of us wondering if they knew they’d broken the rules.
_________
Even after school let out for the summer, my having walked away from the water fountain—the new girl left standing alone, her and brown spit—kept me uneasy. So maybe, then, it was guilt that made me bang on the back of Emerson’s truck cab several weeks later, asking him to stop at the new girl’s. Or maybe I was just too hot to think straight.
The Moulavis’ house sat on our mountain’s main road. The house—more of a box—was more painfully ugly than just nondescript, and I was cringing all over as we drove by. I saw the new girl staring out a plate-glass window onto a lawn where red clay showed through the grass like worn spots in old carpet. So from my usual spot in the pickup bed, nestled among boys, shovels, and mulch, I thumped on the cab’s glass.
“Hey, stop! Turn around, Em.”
Emerson stuck his head out the driver’s-side window without pulling over. “How come? You forget the cooler again?”
“No. Just saw the new girl back there in the window. She looked hot.”
“You know anybody in town who’s not?”
“But, come on, that yard—you see it?”
“Yeah? So what?”
“So it’s …” I reached for something he’d tap his brakes for, “it’s like the scorched plain in Dante’s Inferno.” I’d not read the Inferno—only skimmed the back jacket, which I’d reckoned was plenty—but I was guessing Emerson secretly had. I’d recently found our father’s college copy, not at all dusty, behind Em’s dirty clothes hamper. Me, I’d devoted my summer to the Brontës.
Emerson and I came from a family of readers. But my brother billed himself as a bona fide jock and hid books, old poetry mostly, in issues of Sports Illustrated, like Pisgah’s drugstore wrapped Playboy in brown paper. No kid sister was going to blow his cover in front of his friends.
“The what?” he yelled back. “In who’s where?”
“Nothing. You reckon she’d want to come with us?” I called.
Em likely hadn’t thought to form an opinion one way or another, which naturally argued for ignoring his sister. He opened his mouth to say so.
But Jimbo stopped his strumming on “ye saints of the Lord,” and spoke up. “Oh, go ahead. Stop,” he called up to Emerson.
“Why?”
“Why the howlin’ hole not?” Jimbo said, with a lopsided smile, because there were plenty of reasons why not, and we all knew it.
Emerson must have decided it was too hot to oppose his best friend, or to avoid appeasing his sister, so he U-turned back to the Moulavis’ house.
I poked my head around from the truck bed to the driver’s-side window. “Em, you can be real nice when you want.”
“Go jump,” my brother told me.
“I love you too, Emerson, hon.”
The house itself, a small, red brick warehouse affair, was a rectangle—and so was the front plate-glass window and the narrow, pine veneer door and the little plot of seared, treeless lawn—all of the rectangles sharp-sided and bare.
The bed of the pickup held Jimbo and me and my cousin L. J., the pack’s resident genius, and Bobby Welpler, whose daddy walked out years ago but whose momma still sometimes showed up for Bobby at their trailer home. The boys kept the back of the truck full up with talk they traded like baseball cards, all about girls and cars and sports, and more girls. They curbed their comments not at all for my sake.
“You’re not much of a girl,” Emerson explained to me once, “as girls go.” Which I reckon he meant as high praise.
But when Emerson’s pickup rattled into the Moulavis’ straight-gravel drive, all the swaggering talk suddenly—too suddenly—hushed. We watched the new girl, wearing a long-sleeved blouse with a high neck even in this broiling heat, and a long red cotton skirt that fell to her feet, emerge from the box. A black and white spotted dog, not much more than a pup, sat at her feet and she crouched to pet him. The dog, a not-very-lucky toss of genetic dice, had the gangly black legs of a Lab and the long, silky ears of a Springer Spaniel, and his nose bobbed up and down as he wagged, like his head had to agree with his tail on being just real glad to see you.
Bobby Welpler—we called him Welp—shook his head as Farsanna began approaching the truck. The stick he’d been whittling snapped clean in two. “Y’all can’t be thinking of taking her with us. Can you?” He raised his voice. “She don’t need to be coming with us. Y’all gone crazy on me?”
Jimbo put his index finger up to Welp’s lips. “Cork yourself, Welp. You’re bordering on sounding unneighborly. And put that knife away before you go shishkabobbing somebody.”
Emerson looked back through the cab window. “Girl’s got a dog,” he said, like that was some kind of powerful argument either way.
Truth was, I don’t remember much caring one way or another, and then coming to think of Jimbo’s grinning at her that time by the fountain, and her following me with those way-too-black eyes when I left her alone and walked on off down the hall, I was starting to wish I’d kept my mouth shut about stopping the truck. But I’d have had my nose crocheted shut before I’d been caught siding with Welp.
Jimbo reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Go ahead, Turtle. You got a bead here on the right thing to do. So you shoot.”
I no longer much wanted to shoot, but it was Jimbo asking me to, and there wasn’t anything much short of illegal—and maybe a good bit of that—I wouldn’t have done for Jimbo.
I made the new girl the offer from where I sat—it was too hot to get out of the truck or stand. “We’re going four-wheeling and swimming at the Blue Hole.” It wasn’t much of an invitation—or an apology either. “Wanna come?” I threw in to be clear, since her English wasn’t so good.
She nodded, but didn’t move for the truck. Instead, she went on scratching the dog behind his long, silky ears.
She looked over the boys, one at a time, first Emerson, nodding to her from the driver’s seat, then Jimbo, who waved, then L. J. who nodded, then Welp, who huddled down into himself, his arms crossed.
Em swung his legs out of the cab and walked toward Farsanna. “That your pup?”
Farsanna shook her head no. “A lost.”
“Stray,” L. J. corrected from the truck bed. Correcting was what L. J. did best—or if not best, at least a whole lot.
“However, I gave to him food this week. Now he sleeps there,” she pointed, “beside the door.”
Emerson knelt beside the new girl to stroke the dog’s head. “Reckon he’s yours now.” He stood. “You know, he can come too, if you’d like. Big Dog—she’s mine in the truck—never misses a trip to the Hole.”
She thought about this as she rose. “Thank you. But he is most safe here. Do you think?”
Then she stepped toward me. “I have nothing for the swimming. Wou
ld these,” she nodded down at her clothes, “be to this place acceptable?”
I could smell curry and onions on her breath—or maybe it just reeked from the house—from where I sat in the truck bed, and could feel the boys’ eyes all on me—all of us wondering in what sort of world a person eats curry in her own home smack in the middle of the day, and owns not one single swimsuit.
But this was how I came back: “Why, shoot, nobody’ll notice.”
It was what Momma would have said—I wouldn’t know about Jesus—and it wasn’t even remotely true.
She cocked her head at me, like she was deciding whether to peek around the curtain of what I’d said to see whatever really sat behind it.
“You will follow me?” she asked, already retracing her steps back up the chipped sidewalk to the front door.
“Inside?” I looked from one of the boys to the next, hoping one of them would explain why I couldn’t possibly go inside with the new girl. They studied the bed of the truck. All except Jimbo, who grinned and stood to offer me a hand to help me out of the truck.
I followed Farsanna in and saw a woman standing at the kitchen sink looking out the back window. She did not turn as I slunk barefoot after Farsanna through the living room, unfurnished except for a small, shabby couch.
Perhaps it was the sight of her mother’s headscarf, covering her wrists and ankles in addition to the top of her head, that reminded Farsanna to glance back at me—me and my cutoffs, my dirty bare feet and stork-skinny legs and tank top. She held up a hand for me to wait by the door.
I watched Farsanna approach her mother from behind, lay a hand gently on each of her mother’s shoulders, and kiss the back of the headscarf. Her mother turned then, one hand reaching to stroke her daughter’s hair. Then both hands cupped the curve of Farsanna’s jaw. Their foreheads touched, and the two stood like that for a moment. Their touches had spoken so clearly, I was a little startled when the mother said something I couldn’t make out.
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