The Necessary Beggar (23 page)

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Authors: Susan Palwick

BOOK: The Necessary Beggar
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“UNR.”
“
UNR? The University of Nevada, Reno?
You act like a kid who's aiming for Harvard or Stanford. You don't need to do all this stuff to get into UNR, Zama. Go someplace better.”
“I can't leave my family,” she said. “It's a good school! There's an honors program—”
“Any school's good if you use what's there, but UNR won't look as good on a résumé as Harvard or Stanford would. Not for someone as ambitious as you are. Don't you want to see someplace else, see another part of the country, instead of going to college two miles from where your family lives?”
“No,” she said. “Why should I want that? I already had to leave one place I loved. Why would I leave another one if I didn't have to?”
He gave her a long look, then, and said quietly, “Okay, I'm sorry. I can see that. Your family came here from someplace else, and you got knocked around and you want to stay put for a while. Or they want you to stay put. Sure, I can see that. But if you're thinking career, you should look into scholarships to other schools—you're ethnic, you've got the SAT scores, they eat that stuff up. You want to go to law school? Harvard and Stanford have the best. You do one of them undergrad, you'll have a much better chance of getting into a top law school. UNR won't get you into Harvard Law, kid.”
“That depends on my LSATs.”
“Jesus.” He laughed. “You've got it all figured out, don't you?”
“Yes. I do.”
Ron gave her a half-smile. “Modest, too. No, you don't, not actually. Look, I don't just exist to push paper around. I'm a counselor, Zama. I know something about people. It's my job. And I've seen a lot of kids—and not just from immigrant families, either—working their hearts out to please their parents, and I've seen a lot of them crash and burn because all that stuff wasn't what they wanted to do, not really. It was what they were told they had to do, or what they thought they had to do. Your family must be proud as hell of you. I would be, if you were my daughter. But I'm sure they want you to be happy, too. And at some point you're going to need to slow down and figure out who you are apart from them, and it's better to do that now than when you're fifty and have spent half your life slaving away at something you suddenly realize bores the living crap out of you.”
“I'm happy,” Zamatryna said. Rumpled Ron bewildered and frightened her. What was he talking about? Of course she wanted to help her family; that couldn't be wrong. “What makes you think I'm not happy?”
“Well, you just told me you're bored by all your classes, for one thing. Do you have friends, Zama?”
“Yes,” she said, back on safe ground. “I have a lot of friends! I'm on the yearbook and the cheerleading squad and—”
“Zama,” he said gently, and leaned forward. “I know all that. I've got the list here.” He tapped the file. “I didn't ask you if you had activities. I asked you if you had friends.”
“The other people who do the activities are my friends!”
“
Good
friends? The kind of friends you could tell anything to?” She just stared at him. There was no one like that, not even in her family: no one to whom she could tell anything, because of Gallicina's ghost, the tiny creature who bore the great burden of voicelessness, and had imposed it on Zamatryna.
She couldn't think of a safe answer to the question, so she just nodded. Ron's eyebrows rose. “Yeah? Really? So why do you seem so lonely to me, and why do you look like you're about to cry?”
“I have plenty of friends,” she said, but she heard how small her own voice sounded, and knew she didn't sound very convincing. He was accusing her of being a clown, someone who was happy on the outside but sad inside. Someone like Darroti had been. She didn't want to be like Darroti, but Darroti's secret, which she didn't even know and had no way of learning, had
become hers. She squirmed in her seat and said, “I'm happy. I like the yearbook. I like cheerleading and gardening. Gardening's fun!”
He leaned back in his chair again, steepling his fingers. “Sure it is. But all your fun stuff has to be a line on your résumé, too. Even the gardening. And that makes it work. Is there anything you do just because you want to, even though it won't impress anybody else?”
“I spend time with my family,” she said. She'd gotten her voice under control again. “I talk to my grandfather and my auntie and my cousins. This is none of your business, you know.”
“You're right. It isn't.”
“I came here for help with my application.”
“Zama, you don't need help with your application. But since you asked, here's a piece of advice: the name ‘Growing Girls' is just a little sexist, and I'd change it, if I were you. Boys should be able to join that club.”
She rolled her eyes. “They don't want to! We didn't have a name for our first three meetings, but only girls came, so then we picked the name. We'd have picked something else if boys had come. It wouldn't be good for boys to join. The other boys wouldn't like them. They wouldn't be popular.”
Rumpled Ron laughed. “Well, they certainly won't join with a name like that. Unless they think it's a dating service, and let's not even go there.”
“If a guy wants to join, we'll change the name. The football team is all boys, isn't it? Why is this worse than that?”
He shrugged. “It's not. You came here for advice, so I'm giving you advice. Change the name.”
“But Growing Girls alliterates. It's a pun. It's cute!”
“Yes, it's cute. But you can find something else that's cute and alliterates. You're very clever, Zama. With a verbal SAT like that, I know you can solve this particular problem. And if you aren't going to listen to anything I have to say, why did you come here in the first place?”
“For help with my application!” She glared at him and said, “I have to go to class now.”
He nodded. “I know you do. Get going. And think about what I said.”
She told herself she wouldn't think about it, told herself it was nonsense, that he had no right to tell her who she was or how she felt. He only existed to push papers around. But the conversation nagged at her for the rest of the day, making her irritable and snappish. She found herself unable to concentrate on photosynthesis or the history of perspective drawing or Dostoyevsky. She gave cheerleading practice and the after-school yearbook meeting only half her attention, and was relieved when she could go home.
She found her grandfather sitting at the kitchen table and staring into space. She stood outside, looking through the screen door; he hadn't yet realized she was there. How sad he looked, and how tired! He was playing with something on the table, something shiny on a black cord; he ran the cord back and forth through his fingers, the shiny thing glittering in the light. Zamatryna squinted, but couldn't make out what it was.
He had begun to sing now, an old song from Gandiffri, a lullaby; Zamatryna remembered Harani singing it to her when they were still in Lémabantunk:
Little baby, you are woven of the Elements;
Little baby, you are my most precious possession.
Little baby, drink your mama's milk
And grow like a persimmon;
Sleep in the sunlight, child,
And grow like a snapdragon.
The song ended. Timbor wiped his eyes. Zamatryna, watching, realized that he must have sung the lullaby most recently to Darroti, who had been his youngest son. She carefully backed up ten paces, until she had turned the corner to the garage, and then came back up the walk, slapping her hand on the side of the house and singing “My Best Boyfriend,” the latest hit by the Gabbing Girls:
Sky's the limit
On his credit limit.
He's buying a Ferrari
And I'll be sitting in it.
And so when she walked into the kitchen, Timbor wasn't crying anymore. He was smiling, and his face was dry, and he must have put the shiny thing on its black cord in his pocket, because Zamatryna didn't see it. “Hello, Zama. You are singing that terrible music again.”
“It's what my friends listen to, Grandfather.”
“It sounds like an off-key raccoon who has broken into the aluminum recycling bin and is foraging for crumbs in the cans.”
“Thanks,” she said, hugging him. “I love you too. How was your day?”
“Ah,” he said, and shook his head, making a face. “It was fine until my last customer. I had a bad customer, a very nasty man. Railing against immigrants, you know, because they take jobs real Americans should have.”
“The old story,” Zamatryna said. She felt her stomach knotting, although she tried to keep her voice light. “He sounds tactful.”
“Yes, terribly tactful. I told him I was an immigrant and that the company was hiring drivers if he wanted to do my job and drive a cab.”
Zamatryna laughed, pulling up one of the kitchen chairs and plunking her books down on the table. “Good for you. And what did he say?”
“He didn't say anything, then.” Timbor sighed. “But then we passed a homeless woman on a bench by the river, and I felt sorry for her and I still had half my sandwich from lunch, so I said, ‘Sir, do you mind if I stop for just a moment to give this food to that woman?' And he said no, he said that wasn't what he was paying me for and he was in a hurry, and I could go back later and tell her to drive a cab so she could earn money to buy food. And a block after that there was a red light, you know, and he got nasty and said that if I hadn't slowed down to look at the woman it would still have been green and he wouldn't have been delayed. I hadn't slowed down very much at all; I do not think it would have made a difference. And I was angry, and I said that if I had stopped to give her the food, the light might have been green again by the time we got there, and we still would have stopped, but we would have stopped to do something useful instead of just sitting at a light.”
“Ooooh,” Zamatryna said. “You were in a feisty mood today! I bet he didn't like that.”
“Not at all,” Timbor said, making a face. “Not one bit. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut.”
“So let me guess. No tip from that fare.”
Timbor laughed now, finally. “Right! I was afraid he would not even agree to pay the full fare, because he was so mad I'd slowed down to see the woman. But he did. I hope he doesn't complain about me to the company.”
“I wouldn't worry. He won't want to spend the time. Did you go back to give that woman the sandwich?”
“Yes, but she was gone by then.” He shook his head. “I shouldn't have tried to stop. I know it would not have been company policy, and I should have known that customer would not agree. Others might have. But I do not understand how people can be so mean to beggars here. Especially to women. She was about your mother's age, I think, and she had five big plastic bags.” He hugged himself and looked down at the table, and Zamatryna knew he was thinking about Gallicina.
“Maybe you'll see her again tomorrow. You can bring her food then. But there are places she can go for food, Grandfather. She'll be all right.”
“It is not the same,” he said quietly. “Standing on a line at a soup kitchen, that is not the same. It would be better if one person stopped to give
you food. It would make you feel like someone cared, like you were honored. Even in Lémabantunk, when I was a Mendicant, it made a difference how people said the blessing when they put coins or food in your bowl. Some of them muttered it like an annoyance, and did not even stay to hear your response, and you knew they were in a rush to get somewhere else. Some of them smiled and looked you in the eyes. Those were the best people.”
Zamatryna blinked. She knew that there had been Mendicants in Lémabantunk; she knew that her grandfather, who still knelt on his prayer carpet every morning and evening, had gone to the Temple at home. But not until now had she realized that, of course, this meant that Timbor had served his year as a Mendicant, too. He'd never talked about it before. She had a sudden dizzying sense of how much of Gandiffri she would never know, how much she and her family had lost.
But she was an American now. That was her job, to be an American. Mourning for Lémabantunk was like mourning for Atlantis, a lost place that might as well never have existed at all.
She heard footsteps on the walkway outside, and turned around to see Aliniana coming home with several bags of groceries. “Hello, hello, Zama, will you help me put these things away? Timbor, why do you look so sad? Where are the other children?”
“Rikko and Jamfret have wrestling practice,” Zamatryna said, getting up to carry a carton of eggs to the fridge. “Polly went to the mall with friends, I think. I thought you were working until six today?”
“No, Veronica didn't show this morning so they called me to come in early, so I'm home early, too. Ai, what a day! I do not know why it was so busy on a Wednesday. Non-stop customers, many mothers with babies, and the babies howled so much you would have thought they were having their heads cut off, not their hair, and I had to listen to this while I painted nails. It was very unpleasant.”

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