by Silas House
My legs felt so weird. The air stung my skin and I felt like a different person somehow.
When Mum came home, we showed her my legs and she said that was the last time she’d leave Kiku in charge. She said I was too young and that Daddy would be mad at her. Then she gave me some cocoa lotion that burned, and said the hair will grow back thick and coarse and I will have to shave my legs for the rest of my life. But I don’t care. I like how it looks and no one can laugh at me now, and when I am very old, I will let it go hairy and wild again.
Right now I am sitting on the floor, wrapped up in a red-and-purple blanket Dadi knit. It was hot yesterday but today it is freezing. I can see out the window onto Orchard Street. The crispness of the air changes the streetlights. They look brighter and sharper than they do in the summer. I love when it gets cold. Do you? It makes me want to curl up with a book and a hot cup of tea.
I have been saving the best for last. Daddy was home this past weekend. He took the bus in and we met him at the Port Authority and went bowling. There is a bowling alley right at the bus station. Isn’t that funny? Their fountain soda tastes great. Better than soda from a can. Anyway, Kiku won, like he always does, and I got one lucky strike and a lot of gutter balls. It makes us all laugh how Mum kneels at the end of the lane and pushes the bowling ball with both hands. She got three strikes doing that, and we laughed till we cried. Bowling is something we never did in India. Kiku tried it one night with his friends here, then showed us.
After bowling, we stayed up late. I read to Daddy from my journal so he would know what we’ve been doing and wouldn’t feel left out. Mum gave him the muffler she has been knitting. It is blue and the stitches run in long tight chains. I love the way it looks. I have never seen people knit here the way we knit in Mussoorie. Up at Landour Bazaar, the women walk, or sit in a circle, and make sweaters and gossip about whoever is not there that day. Their fingers move faster than their tongues, and they never look down at their work and they never make a mistake. Well, Mum gave Daddy the muffler and said she had thought of him with every stitch. It was not cold that night but Daddy wrapped the muffler around his neck anyway. It went around twice, and he said, “I am a lucky man.” It was sweet.
Have I told you before that Daddy works at a catering hall? I can’t remember. It is a good job that Sushil-Uncle got him. If you work in a restaurant, some nights are slow and you get bad tips. But if you work in a catering hall, you are always guaranteed to make $150 a night, and whatever else you make in tips. Daddy eats for free at the catering place five days a week, and he shares a room in a hotel with three of the busboys, who are all from South America.
Daddy loves to watch people and tell stories. At the catering hall, he sees lots of weddings and sweet sixteens and anniversaries and corporate meetings and confirmations and bar and bat mitzvahs. He has told us about all of these things. It is crazy how much money people will spend on a party that lasts only one night.
Here are the two best stories Daddy told about his work:
#1 One night a sweet sixteen happened at Old Miller Ridge (that is the name of the catering hall). The birthday girl wore a pink dress and a diamond crown. There was a DJ at the party and everybody ate lobster, even the children. The teenagers at the party were rude to the waiters and waitresses, and the girl’s father kept talking about how much money he had. (Daddy said the man never even talked to his daughter. He was too busy showing off.) At one point, the man stood on a table and ripped a $100 bill in half! Daddy said he did that to show he had so much money he could afford to waste it. And all of the teenagers applauded. Well, right when the party ended, someone got sick from drinking beer and threw up in the hallway. Daddy was very irritated and went to get a mop, and when he opened the cleaning closet, he saw the girl’s father in there. The man was kneeling on the floor in the dark, and guess what he was doing . . . he was putting that ripped $100 bill back together with Scotch tape!
Oh, we laughed so hard at that story! Daddy acted out all the parts. You should have seen him leaping on the table.
Here is the other work story he told:
#2 It was a nice wedding with yellow flowers and salsa music. The bride was a pretty girl with a lot of energy. She danced for hours and talked to everyone. She was from Mexico, and only her mommy and daddy had come to the wedding. The rest of her family was still in Mexico. Her husband was American, and Daddy said you could see he loved the girl, and so did his family, because they all kept hugging her. In the middle of the party, the girl came bursting through the kitchen doors. Her dress was white and full and made lots of swishing sounds. She came into the kitchen to tell everyone how good the food was and to say thank you, and then she started talking a mile a minute in Spanish to the cooks, and it turned out her cousin was from a village close to Javier’s (Javier is the head chef at the Miller Ridge). She sat down on a grapefruit crate, with her dress spread all around her. Next to her was a big bucket of potatoes and a peeler, and all of a sudden the girl picked up the peeler and started to work. She sat there for fifteen minutes in her beautiful white wedding dress and peeled potatoes and swapped jokes with the young dishwashing boys, who had all fallen in love with her. She would have kept on working and talking, except that her mother came looking for her, so she had to go. At the very end of the night, the bride and groom came into the kitchen with the leftover wedding cake and champagne and told everyone to enjoy it. Daddy said the cake tasted like butterscotch and the champagne gave him a headache and he couldn’t stop laughing because the dishwashing boys kept fighting over which of them the bride had liked best.
I asked Daddy why the girl had peeled potatoes, and he said he thought the boys in the kitchen reminded her of her family in Mexico, so she wanted to be with them for a little while.
It seems like there are so many homesick people in the world. It seems like so many of us live far away from where we were born. Is it like that in Black Banks, too?
On Sunday Daddy had to go back to New Jersey. I am sorry to have written so much in this letter. I have been trying to tell stories to make you feel better. I hope it has worked. You can talk to me anytime, about anything.
I am still sitting on the bedroom floor, but now the moon is shining bright through the window. It is just two days past full, with a little chip off the top. It is hard to see the page, so I think I am writing crooked, but I don’t want to turn on the lamp and wake Mum. I hope you can read this. Write to me soon.
Your friend,
Meena
P.S. I translated this for you so you could meet Dadi:
Corn is hung from the ceiling. Loki and pumpkin are done. Cauliflower, garlic, and mooli are coming up. Tomorrow I will plant potato. Anjali is still talking about the chai-wallah who asked if she liked his mustache. When I walk near the school across from the church, I hear the children chanting lessons. They do not teach the months of the year in Hindi anymore. Make sure to practice and not forget. Are you keeping warm? Eating well? Is Kiku? I had a little fever last week but took the musk deer pills and it went away.
This year the snakes are bad. No one is grazing their goats by the river. Still, one was lost. No matter how you plan, something always happens. Bahadur came for a visit and said the Gujjar boy was grazing his goats high up and a huge eagle came and swooped and a baby goat got scared and ran away from its mother. The eagle chased the baby off a cliff, and it fell on the rocks and died. The Gujjar boy saw the eagle flying with the baby goat in its claws. It was beating its wings deep and slow, going towards the high peaks. I know you are feeling sorry for the baby and its mama, but remember that the eagle must also eat. I think it was very smart about getting its dinner.
The autumn festival has started. Much dancing and singing and drumming. The village girls came in their best dresses for Dussera. I saw old Usha and her granddaughters from Kolti. She is still as strong as a bull and stubborn as a mule. We stood with each other and watched the parade. You remember her grandson who always had the hiccups? He is also in
America, in a place called Michigan. Usha says they have a lake there as big as an ocean, but it is natural, not from a dam. I am practicing my letters and reading the schoolbooks you left. My spelling is bad, but what can an old woman do. Today I made your favorite mooli paratha for breakfast and sat out under the trees to eat and watch the monkeys. I think of you with every breath and pray that God is keeping you safe.
Grandmother
4 November 2008
Dear Meena,
We are out of school for Election Day, but I had to get up early anyway because Mamaw wanted me to go with her to the voting booth this morning. She says that it’s important for me to understand how lucky we are to be able to vote. She votes at the fire station, and even though it was cold and gray and drizzly, there was a long
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long line of people waiting to vote. Mamaw says she can’t remember ever seeing so many people turn out. It’s because people feel so strongly about this election, with lots of them for McCain and Palin and some of them real big on Obama. I wasn’t allowed to go inside with Mamaw when she voted, so I stood there and studied everybody, and I thought it was really cool that people would stand in the rain to make their voice be heard. It made me want to be old enough to vote.
When she came out, Mamaw nodded and smiled to the rest of the people in line, but then this man I’d never seen before — he had a big bushy beard and his mouth was real little and real red — hollered and said, “I bet you enjoyed pulling that lever, didn’t you, tree hugger?”
“You bet your ass I did,” Mamaw said. I had never, ever heard her cuss before. Some of the people in line laughed, but most of them just kept their eyes on the ground. I felt like I should defend Mamaw, but I didn’t know what to do. So I just gave him the dirtiest look I could muster up. He laughed at me, which caused his little red mouth to spread out and show his yellow teeth. I was so mad I couldn’t stand it, but when we got in the car Mamaw told me to let it go. “He’s just stupid, honey. Ignorant people don’t know any better, but stupid people WANT to be stupid. So just forget it.”
I am really glad your dad got to come home. It sounds like you all had a real good time together. Mine won’t be home until Thanksgiving, but I talked to him on the phone last night. Our conversation didn’t go so great because I was telling him how the mine is getting bigger and bigger and how worried I am over it and all that and he said that I should just accept that one person can’t change things.
I don’t believe this. Last year in history we read about a student in China who stood in front of a tank when the government didn’t want to listen to any young people’s complaints. After that, people started to pay more attention to how people in China had lost their freedom.
But when I said that, Dad just said, “Yeah, and he’s never been seen since, either, has he?” So, see, he completely missed the point. Because I think the point is that if that boy hadn’t stood up for what he believed in, then people wouldn’t have paid as much attention. And also that tank driver refused to run over him, although they were killing people left and right. So that says something about him, too. Have you ever heard this story? This happened ages ago, like in the ’80s sometime, if I am remembering right.
When I told Mamaw what Dad said, she just shook her head and she tried to bite her tongue and not say anything, but you know her, she couldn’t stand it, so she up and said that sometimes she didn’t know where he got some of his beliefs, because they sure weren’t from her.
The mountaintop removal is getting worse over on Town Mountain. Mamaw goes over to the cliffs every day and makes sure the ’dozers are not getting over on our land. The coal companies are real bad to just take whatever they want, she says. It worries me because even though Mamaw is a true firecracker of a person, she is still old, and sometimes her head swims because she has the sugar diabetes. So I worry about her being up on the cliffs.
I have to stay after school every day because I have basketball practice. I do love basketball. It is one thing that Daddy taught me that has been of use to me. Sometimes, when I get real frustrated, there is nothing that feels as good as running down that basketball court and jumping up to swoosh that ball right through the hoop. It’s like flying, sometimes. Seems like when I let that ball leave my fingertips, it’s like my troubles are floating away with it, too. Not always. But a lot of the time.
Used to be I liked most of the boys on the team, too, but lately it seems like the only one I can really talk to is my buddy Mark. I’ve been knowing Mark Combs since the first grade, and we have always been good friends. (He’s my best friend here, but you are my best friend period.) He likes to read, too. He’s a real brain, although you wouldn’t know it to talk to him because he only talks about playing Wii and basketball, but when you go over to his house he has shelf after shelf full of books. He loves all those Narnia books and he’s crazy over Harry Potter and he’s dying for me to read The Hunger Games, which is his favorite book, but right now he’s hooked on the Twilight books. He says he only reads them so he’ll have something to talk to the girls about, so he can get them to go out with him, but I think it’s because he really loves them.
Mark’s mom picks us up every day after practice and then they drop me off. Mom can’t come get me because her headaches are getting worse. And Mamaw has started working at this office downtown where they are organizing stuff to fight mountaintop removal.
I always have Mark’s mom drop me off at the end of the driveway (which always bothers her because she feels like she should drive me all the way up to the house) so I can walk through the woods along Lost Creek. Well, yesterday as I was walking through there I saw that the creek was muddied up really bad, the way it gets after a big storm, when all the leaves and branches and sand along the banks have been washed in. But it hadn’t rained. And as the creek ran on I saw that it wasn’t just muddy, but there was some kind of orange gunk in it, too. Our creek has always been as clean as a whistle, so clean that I used to drop down onto my knee and scoop up a handful of it on a really hot day. I told Mamaw and she called some people to come test it.
A couple evenings ago Mamaw and I were out taking our walk in the cool of the day. Rufus was trotting alongside us. Usually he likes to take off occasionally, then come back to check on us, but this time he stayed with us the whole time, like he was afraid to leave us alone. Every once in a while he would look up at me and smile, his tongue lolling out. He’s the best dog. It was so warm that some crickets were even still hollering, and it almost sounded like springtime in the woods. The best thing about Mamaw is that she doesn’t talk your head off about stupid stuff. She only talks when she has something to say. A lot of grown-ups will always ask how things are going when they don’t really care, but she actually wants to hear what you’re saying. Anyway, I really like that sometimes Mamaw and I can just be quiet with each other. And that’s what we were doing. Looking at the night sky. Listening to that little bunch of crickets that were still hanging on into the fall of the year. I love the way Mamaw walks, easy and slow, but determined, like she has somewhere important to go.
All at once, out of nowhere, Mamaw turned her face to me and said, “It may be that I have to get into some trouble over these mountains, River.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I quit walking.
“I mean, it might end up that I get arrested or something. But sometimes the law arrests you to make a point. If I were to get arrested, you remember that I intended to, OK?” She dragged out the word “intended.”
I just nodded. I still didn’t really get it. Still don’t.
“And people might say bad things about me at school. But you just tell them that I’m standing up for what I believe in. If something legal is unjust, sometimes people have to do something illegal to get attention. It’s called civi
l disobedience. Have you all studied Rosa Parks yet?”
I asked her if she meant the woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus, and she said yes, and that was an example of civil disobedience.
I told her if anybody ever said anything bad about her at school I’d bust their mouth, but she didn’t like that one bit. She talked real fast and loud. She said that was no way to act, and that kind of attitude was what got countries into wars they didn’t belong in and caused many a good soldier to die.
Then we listened to the crickets some more, quiet while we looked out at the darkening world.
Some really cool things in your letter:
That the Hindi word for forest is “jungle.”
That those women fought for the trees.
That old folks can get food for a dollar and a quarter a plate! Everybody always says that food in the city is REAL, REAL high, but I guess not.
That the parakeet sits on the dog’s rump.
That there is a bowling alley at the bus stop. Our bus stop is the parking lot of the Burger King. I only know this because Dad had to ride the Greyhound home from Biloxi one time because his car was broke down.
That the bride peeled potatoes. Mamaw told me that when my parents got married my mother wouldn’t let anyone spend money on flowers from the florist because she thought that was a waste of money. So instead she and Mamaw and Dad went up into the mountains and cut ivy and wildflowers and honeysuckle and decorated the whole church that way. So that girl peeling potatoes reminds me of that somehow. This was back when Mom laughed and danced in the living room and wore lipstick and looked at herself in the mirror. Back before her headaches and before Dad lost his job in the mines and had to go off to the Gulf to find work.