Same Sun Here (16 page)

Daddy could not see the show because he had to go back to New Jersey. Mum was supposed to come to closing night but Mrs. Rankin had an emergency at work, so Mum had to stay late babysitting. Sometimes it makes me mad that those two little children see more of Mum than I do. I was really sad about Mum missing the show, and Kiku and Mrs. Lau tried to make me feel better.

They both got dressed up. Mrs. Lau wore a long red skirt and a black turtleneck and a jade comb in her hair, and Kiku put on Daddy’s suit (he called Daddy first to make sure it was OK). We ate an early dinner and Mrs. Lau called Kiku “good-looker” and they argued about politics. Mrs. Lau doesn’t like Obama as much as Kiku does, and that makes him really mad. Afterward, when we were cleaning up, Kiku sat on the couch and watched TV. I said, “Hey, good-looker, do you think you’re too pretty to wash dishes?” And he said, “I’m too pretty to wash. But not too pretty to dry.” He took off Daddy’s jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves and we stood together in the kitchen, me washing, Kiku drying, Mrs. Lau putting everything away.

The show was so good. I wish you could have seen it. Beforehand, we did voice warm-ups, and Ms. Bledsoe made a speech about togetherness and gave us each a red carnation. I saw her in the wings crying during “What I Did for Love.” As for me, I only messed up one light cue, at the very end, and Kiku said no one noticed.

Some things did go really wrong, though, like one of the trombonists got a nosebleed in the middle of “At the Ballet.” And Alice Tong stuffed socks in her leotard so it would look like she had boobs, and one fell out while she was dancing. Also, Peter Schiff had an asthma attack just before his solo number.

It is so amazing how all this stuff goes into making a play and how all these crazy things happen backstage, but to the people in the audience, it looks perfect and easy. It’s like there are two worlds in Drama Club. The world onstage and the world backstage. It reminds me of how I feel all the time. Like there is America right in front of me, but backstage, in my mind, are Mussoorie and Dadi and the mountains.

At the end of the show, the audience gave us all a standing ovation. Everyone who worked backstage, like me, also came out and got to take a bow. I could see Kiku and Mrs. Lau smiling and clapping in the third row. I wished Mummy-Daddy and Dadi and you could see me. Afterward, Mrs. Lau said maybe it was good that Mum hadn’t been there, because she would have been upset about the girls in leotards. Kiku said, “That was my favorite part.” Totally Gross. But then he said he was proud of me, and when we got home, he told Mum about everything and said it was the best play he’d ever seen.

I am really glad I joined the Drama Club. It makes me feel like I belong at PS 20. I can hardly wait for next year’s play. We are going to be doing
Oklahoma.

It’s the time of year in New York when lots of Christmas trees are dragged to the trash. There’s tinsel flying everywhere in the street. There aren’t many trees out at the curb in Chinatown, but where I go to school, which is a little bit north of here, there are. In six days, the streets of Chinatown will be filled with confetti and firecrackers for Chinese New Year — the Year of the Ox. Mrs. Lau knows the boy who will be dancing in the head of the dragon. She used to work at the factory with his grandmother.

Things with the apartment have gotten bad. There is a big CONDEMNED sign on Jennifer’s door, and Mrs. Lau is worried that we will be found out soon. We wait at the top of the stairs and listen before walking down so that we won’t see anyone in the building. We used to say hi to people, and Mrs. Lau would tell them we helped her with cooking, cleaning, and laundry and to expect us to be coming and going all the time. But now it seems better to disappear. At least for a little while. None of us has been sleeping much.

A few days before New Year’s, Mum woke me up in the middle of the night and said, “Help me cut my hair.” The light was bright and I was sleepy and confused. I sat up in bed and watched her as she stood in the middle of the room and cut off her hair. She said she had to do something to change things, to feel different, or she’d die of grief. Her hair fell all over the floor in big black ropes. It used to hang past her waist. Now it is as short as a boy’s. What’s weird is that as soon as her hair was cut, she looked in the mirror and said she felt better. And she’s been happier ever since. I think she looks quite pretty with short hair. And I like seeing her ears. They are small and sweet.

Daddy came home a few days later. He got upset when he saw Mum. He loved her long hair. He said she looked American, not Indian. She said, “It will grow back; don’t worry,” but he went in the bedroom and shut the door. The next day, they had a big row because Daddy gave Mum money for the electricity bill and she said she didn’t need it, she’d already paid the bill. Daddy started shouting and, well, since I’m on the computer, I’ll type it out for you like a play:

DADDY
(shouting): You already paid it?

MUM
(whispering): Be quiet — they’ll hear you downstairs.

DADDY
(quiet now but still very mad): So these days you pay the bills and tell me what to do? Who is the man and who is the woman?

MUM:
I
have
to be the man while you’re away.

DADDY:
And now that I am here, there are two men?

Here Mum started to cry and went over to Mrs. Lau’s to get away from Daddy. I sat with him on the couch. He had the citizenship study book open on his lap, but he wasn’t reading. He said, “Nobody needs Daddy anymore. Everyone is fine. Making their decisions and paying the bills.” I told him that wasn’t true and that Mum had only cut her hair because she was so sad and she needed to make a change. He looked surprised but then nodded. By the way, I forgot to say all of that actually happened in Hindi.

I know just how Daddy feels. Sometimes when Mummy-Daddy-Kiku talk about something that happened before I lived with them in New York, it hurts my feelings. I feel left out and small, even though I know they don’t mean to make me feel that way. Like over New Year’s, they talked about their second year in New York and how they had gone to Times Square and gotten confused about the subway. . . . They laughed so much as they told the story, and I could see it had been a really good time. I thought of me and Dadi at home in Mussoorie while the three of them were laughing in New York. It hurt. Kiku noticed I was sad and he made a face at Mum and they changed the topic. But it still hurt.

Mum always says it was money and immigration laws that kept us apart all those years. But I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like they just abandoned me. Like they wanted to leave me, like they wanted to go off and live a happy life without me and Dadi. Maybe that sounds crazy but I don’t think they missed me as much as I missed them.

I better get off the computer. I have been typing to you for 17 minutes and 20 seconds. Since the library has free computers, there’s a time limit: 20 minutes for each person. It makes it easier to share. Write soon and tell me what is happening with you and Town Mountain. I am getting the telepathic messages from you but I still get worried. OK. Time to press
PRINT
.

Bye for now,

Meena

P.S. Yes, an aarthi is a kind of prayer with lamps and oil and burning wicks and bells and singing and gods and goddesses. It is very beautiful to watch. Mum does this two times a day.

13 February 2009

Dear Meena,

I am so sorry that it has taken me so long to write you back. Even though I’ve been thinking of you every single day, I haven’t been able to write, mostly because I haven’t been able to think straight here lately.

I have been over at the hospital a lot, with Mark.

They had to cut off his left leg.

All the way above the knee.

Every time the sheet is off him I get a little sick to my stomach when I see his half leg there. I don’t mean this in a bad way. I think I just get sick because I feel so bad for him. I think of him and the way he was always running and jumping. If you think about a thing like that too much it’ll drive you crazy. So I can’t even imagine how Mark is feeling. But the weird thing is that he’s just as happy as can be all the time. He has bad days sometimes, but for the most part he is upbeat.

I was at the hospital the other day and he was telling all these jokes and laughing big and loud and I was thinking how I hoped I’d be like that if I were in his situation (I started to write “if I were in his shoes,” then that seemed weird since he only has one shoe now).

Anyway, I must have zoned out, thinking about that, because all at once Mark was slapping his hands together and hollering, “Earth to River! Hey, man, are you still there?” And so I realized that I was staring off into space. Mark knew what I was thinking, though. “The way I look at it, them rocks could’ve killed us, man,” he said. “So I feel lucky.”

They say Mark will be in the hospital for at least two more months.

Yes, in the group picture I am the boy at the end of the front row. With the freckles. It’s kind of cool to know that you see me every time you go to your refrigerator. It’s weird to think I am in somebody’s kitchen in New York City. There were two or three photographers who came here yesterday. One of them was from New York. I asked him if he knew you, and he laughed real big and said, “Well, New York’s a pretty big town there, partner.” I hate it when people call somebody “partner.” It’s stupid. And it embarrassed me in front of the whole class. I knew that New York was a big town, but I thought there might be some weird coincidence where he’d know you. You know what I mean? But I didn’t say that to him. He also said, “I’d sure as heck remember a name like that,” when I said your name. It made me feel like he had insulted you. Anyway, out of all the photographers, one of them was the nicest and he was from
People
magazine. They took a picture of me and all the other boys gathered around Mark’s bed. I am sitting up on the bed right beside him. I think they said it would be out in a couple of weeks, so look for it. Do you all have newsstands out on the streets like they always show in the movies of New York?

We were out of school for snow on the day of the inauguration (since we have real curvy mountain roads and are not used to that much snow, we get out of school even if it only snows a half inch), so I watched it at the hospital, with Mark.

Usually the hospital is a big noisy place with nurses hollering to one another or joking with the patients, people running this way and that. But when the inauguration started, everything got very quiet. Lots of people were gathering in the big waiting room down the hall to watch it, and Mark said he wanted to watch with everybody else, so I wheeled him down there in his wheelchair. His mom went with us. The waiting room was so packed with people that she and I had to stand behind Mark’s chair and watch. Nobody said a word the entire time, but when Obama was sworn in, I heard someone let out a little weeping sound and I looked around and there was Dr. Patel. I hadn’t even known he was there. He had tears in his eyes. So then I looked at every single person and MOST of them had tears in their eyes. Mark’s mom kept her hand over her mouth like she was amazed. This little old woman sitting in a plastic waiting room chair beside me dotted a wad of Kleenex to her eyes. It was the strangest thing.

So then I thought about what it meant, to be watching something so historic. The first black person to become president. If he could overcome the odds, then so could a hillbilly, or an Indian, or anybody. And it made me feel like anything was possible. People are always saying how you can be anything you want in America, but I had never really believed it, or even thought that much about it. But when Obama was sworn in, I DID believe it. And I think that’s why everyone had those tears in their eyes, because they knew that, too. I’ll never forget that moment.

But then, later that night, I was in the waiting room getting a bag of Funyuns and a Sierra Mist and this big beardy man was in there talking bad about Obama to this little nasty-looking woman who just nodded to everything he said. He said the country was going to hell, and he called Obama the N-word. When he said the word, I felt like somebody had punched me in the belly. There were lots of people in there, including some people I had seen with tears in their eyes earlier, but nobody said anything. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there with my pop and my Funyuns and I gave him the dirtiest look I could. It took him a minute to realize I was staring at him on purpose, but then he went, “Take a picture, boy.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just stomped off.

I feel really terrible about that. When I got back to Mark’s room I kept thinking how I should have said something, how I should have told him that he shouldn’t have said that word. But I didn’t know how. I felt like a big coward, like the biggest chicken in history. Since then I have thought of lots of good comebacks (like “Who’d want a picture of somebody as stupid as you?” or “I wouldn’t want to break my camera” or “I don’t take pictures of racists”), but at the time I just froze up.