Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Julian wanted to know how the menorah worked, so I sent him downstairs to get some candles while I tried to polish it up a bit. We had all kinds of candles all over the place back then, because of the power failing every ten minutes. The ones Julian got back with didn’t quite fit, but I made them fit, and I told him about Chanukah—about the Syrians and the Maccabees, and the one last little cup of consecrated oil for the new temple altar in Jerusalem burning miraculously for eight days, until somebody finally showed up with fresh oil. It’s a good story, and while I was telling it, I almost forgot that I was pissed at everyone in the world.

When Julian asked me if Jews had Chanukah carols, I went completely blank for a moment—Sally and I weren’t exactly the most observant family on the West Side—and then I remembered the blessing that you chant when you’re lighting the candles. That one I know, because Grandma Paula taught me, and I sang it for Julian.

Julian’s always been quick with songs. He had this one in no time, his Hebrew pronunciation no worse than mine, and we sang it together while I lighted the lead candle, the shammes , and then lighted the first-night candle from it, just to show him how it was done. So there we were, Julian and me, kneeling on the floor in that cold, cobwebby room, the walls lined halfway around with Sally’s boxes, and with tattered old trunks and valises from some other Sally, who always meant to get around to going through them, one day soon. There we were, the two of us, chanting our heads off, praising a God neither one of us believed in for commanding us to light the Chanukah candles. You have to see us, it’s important.

Because that was when I smelled vanilla.

Meena, if you’re the least bit cool you’ll skip this part. I’m going to have to pretend you’ll mind me, because otherwise I’m never going to be able to write it. Okay?

Okay. In the spring, the girl who’d sat next to me in Lower Third form room dropped out because her father got a job in Namibia or somewhere, and Meena Chari moved down a row. We hadn’t spoken two words to each other that whole first term, even on the bus. Not because she was Indian or anything, but because she was so pretty. I don’t mean knock-down, drop-dead, movie-star gorgeous, like Stacy Altieri back home—Meena doesn’t look like that at all. But she’s got this incredibly smooth brown skin, which wouldn’t know a zit from a jelly bean, and big dark eyes like pansies, even behind her glasses. And even in that school uniform, Meena’s always really wearing some elegant sari—you can tell by the way she moves. You had just better not be reading this, Meena!

I don’t go around with girls who look like Meena, that’s one decision I made early on. A lot of girls do—at Gaynor, people like Tracy and Vanessa had their own little packs of groupies, all hoping it would rub off on them somehow, or that boys would try to get to the pretty ones through them. Which happened, I’m not saying it didn’t work, but I couldn’t. I just hung with Jake and Marta and was glad I had them.

But Meena. What are you going to do with someone like Meena, who doesn’t know the rules about things, who doesn’t act pretty? I know, right—when you look the way Meena looks, you can afford not to care, but she really doesn’t . Girls mostly think she’s conceited, and boys are mostly afraid of her, because she gets perfect marks and she’s going to be a doctor, like her grandfather. She’s as cool and neat as I’m hot-tempered and sloppy, and it was a long time before I could start to believe that she actually wanted to be friends with me. Nothing to do with modesty—I just understand the rules.

We’ve talked about it a couple of times. The first time, she took forever to get what I was asking. She kept saying, “Why shouldn’t we be friends, tell me that? We like the same books, the same kind of music, we laugh the same—we have so much in common, you might as well have been born in Madras, or I in New York.” Meena talks like that. Her mother and father have Indian accents, but with Meena it’s not the way her English sounds, but the way she uses it. Same thing as the uniform—you see one thing, or you hear one thing, but you feel something else. And Meena doesn’t even think about it.

When she finally caught onto what I meant, she didn’t answer right away. She put her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips, and she looked at the ground for a long time. Then she looked up at me, and she said, “Because I’m a very good girl. I’m an only child, and I’m everything my mother and father ever dreamed about. Very good student, perfect English, perfect manners—presentable enough, yes—right on track for a double First at Cambridge, where we always go. Nice if I were fair-skinned— you get a better choice of husbands that way—but there, you can’t have it all, Jenny, do you see now?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I do.” What I thought was that I probably ought to be angry, and I was trying to work up to it. “You mean I’m your absolute opposite—I’m so different from you I’m like a novelty? Like that?”

Meena looked as though I’d hit her. “Not that! Not that, no!” She jumped up and grabbed both my hands. “You have such spirit, you make your own plans—you wouldn’t go along with what everyone else wanted, just so they’d go on thinking you were a good girl. You don’t care what anybody thinks—that’s what I admire so much about you. I wish I were like you, Jenny truly.”

Nobody else in my whole life had even come near saying something like that to me. Nobody. I told Meena so, but as smart as she is, there’s no way she could ever really know what it meant when she said that. Meena understands a lot, but if she understood something like this, she couldn’t be Meena. That’s just the way things get set up.

Anyway. We first got to be friends when we both hid out in the girls’ john, ducking Games, and then later when Meena started helping me with Spanish and I helped her with a music project she was doing, comparing the way Indian singers improvise with how Western jazz singers do it. Once I told her it didn’t count like helping, because of my parents being musicians, and she got really angry with me. She said friendship wasn’t a bloody cricket match, you didn’t keep score, there wasn’t a point system. I almost like watching Meena being mad, because she does it so well, considering it lasts maybe five minutes, no more. Meena can’t ever work up a good sulk.

She lives just outside Yeovil—her mother’s at the hospital there, and her father commutes to Dorchester to teach physics at the university. The first time I ever went to stay overnight at Meena’s house, I was edgy because I didn’t know if I should be different with Meena there than I was when it was just us, and she was edgy about how her parents would be with me. And they were edgy because Meena hadn’t brought anyone home from school before, and they didn’t know if I could eat Indian food, or how Jews were about graven images and shrines in the front hall. So between us we had the makings of a real disaster, but it worked out all right. Mr. and Mrs. Chari were as nice as they could be to their daughter’s weird American friend, and I didn’t knock anything over or say anything really stupid. And I know about Indian food—I’m from New York, for God’s sake.

So it was a lot easier when Meena came to spend a weekend at Stourhead Farm. Tony and Julian fell in love with her the moment she walked in the door—okay, I was a little jealous, especially watching Julian following her around, offering to carry things for her—and I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Sally wishes I looked like that and acted like that . But I was proud of her, too, — she’s my friend, what’s that make me ? —and at the same time I felt guilty that I wasn’t ever like that with Jake and Marta. Some days there’s no damn way I can let myself alone.