Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

When he has drawn the last note, I clap until my father stands and takes a wobbly bow. He puts both hands on my head, which he kisses as if in blessing. “You are the only one who gets me,” he says. “Now go to bed.”

The next morning, I wake up early enough for my mother to rake a brush through my tangled hair and plait it into a French braid. I whimper only once at the pain and sit patiently until she snaps the tail into a hair bobble with purple beads. On the school bus, I keep fingering the taut spine of the braid and sniffing the tail, fragrant with pomade.

All this effort is meant for Wes Lipkin, a boy in my class who double-blinks between every sentence, as if something is permanently stuck in his eye. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Wes gets on the school bus with his lunch box in one hand and a violin-shaped briefcase in the other. He sits alone, toward the front of the bus, with his back to the revelry at the rear, where kids are shouting, kneeling on the seats, bracing themselves for the turns and hills leading to school.

Usually I sit somewhere in the middle rows, but today I take the seat next to Wes. I say hello, but he doesn’t answer. Wes is bent over his notebook, drawing something on the back, a swollen face with huge, veiny eyes and a tiny line for a mouth. “Is that you?” I ask.

“No,” he says wearily, as if we’ve been through this before. There is a placid quality to Wes Lipkin, the sorrow of a martyred saint, and a dorkiness that seems almost willful. His lunch box sits between us, the last of its kind in our grade.

Laying the end of my braid over my shoulder, purple beads in view, I ask Wes if he likes playing the violin. He glances at me as if this is a trick question. I say that my dad plays, and he’s very good. Wes erases something. I say that my dad had to leave his violin behind, in the Gulf, when he came to America.

“Then he’s probably not that good,” says Wes. “I’d never leave my violin just anywhere.”

I ask him if I can borrow his violin, just for a day, so my dad can play like he used to.

Wes bores into me with his big, blinking eyes. Then he says no, and goes back to drawing.

He doesn’t give a reason, just no , again and again. I begin to suspect that he enjoys saying no to me, that it feels like he’s saying no to everyone who has ever said no to him. All I can do is face forward, stuck with a view of a peeling pleather seat.

It is six p.m., and I am finished with my math homework. Sometimes my mother devises extra homework for no other reason than to keep me away from the television, but now that my father is here, she makes no comment when I tug a chair up next to his, just behind his line of sight. My feet don’t reach the coffee table, like his do.

We watch Lynne Russell on Headline News, sneezing every so often because my mother is frying chili-rubbed fish. I keep saying “Bless you” under my breath, until my father says, “ Bleshyew, bleshyew —what does it mean?”

“Something about hell,” I fumble, embarrassed by the sudden beam of his attention. “So you won’t go to hell.”

I am relieved when he grunts and turns back to sensible Lynne Russell and her smooth, sculpted cheekbones. I look at the hair on the back of my father’s hand, a wild tuft above each knuckle, in the exact place where lately I have seen one or two hairs of my own. This is my dad, I think. Today I am going to call him Dad. After my mother goes to bed, I will show him what I obtained at great risk during recess, when I asked to use the bathroom and instead jimmied open Wes Lipkin’s locker. His violin case fit neatly into my drawstring gym bag. At the end of the day, I was the first one on the bus.

The opportunity doesn’t seem to present itself. My father appears more haggard than he did yesterday evening. His eyes are bloodshot. Every so often he takes small sips of orange juice from a big plastic cup. When I ask for a sip, he says no so quickly that tears spring to my eyes. “I’m sick,” he adds, without looking at me.

During the weather report, my mother comes in holding the violin case in both hands. She demands to know where I got it.

I say that my friend Wes Lipkin let me borrow it.

“Then why did Mrs. Lipkin call just now and say you stole it?” she asks. For this, I have no answer. I assumed that Wes Lipkin would figure it out, but I never guessed that he would tattle. “Lying and stealing — this is what you learn at school?”

She takes two long strides and I brace for the blow, but my father’s outstretched legs are blocking her path. He has been sitting between us, looking back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “You’re her father,” my mother reminds him. “Yell at her!”

My father sits up with the cup in his hand, spilling a bit of juice on his knee before setting it under the coffee table. He turns to me, dropping his voice low. “Why did you do it?” My face goes hot and cold at once. I pinch my own thigh. “Huh? Why did you steal that thing?”

“I wanted to hear you play.”

My mother and father stare at me.

“So you can play like you did last night,” I say, a strange sense of panic filling my chest. “The way you used to play over there, in Dubai.”

My mother snorts. “Play what?”

My father listens to me, for the first time, without scorn, his face opening up with faint surprise. Then he glances up at my mother and waves me away. “What kind of nonsense. I don’t know what she’s saying.”

“Remember, with the radio?” I mimic his playing, but he won’t look at me anymore and my arms fall to my sides. I try to steady my voice. “Your friend, the girl who plays the violin?”

“Girl?” my mother says in a voice that is small and strained. It does sound strange when I say it aloud. His friend, a girl.

My mother turns to my father, and as his eyes search mine, I understand that he isn’t lying. He simply doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember saying, You are the only one who gets me , the loveliest compliment of all my eight years.

Quietly, my mother tells me to go to my room and get dressed. She says that she will drive me to the Lipkins’ so I can apologize and return the violin.

Before I have closed the door to my room, the fight has begun. Their voices are subdued and tense, nearly unintelligible until they start shouting, and I learn certain truths at terrible speeds: there is a woman in the Gulf, a woman he left behind for my mother’s visa, a woman who may be watching the road and waiting for him as we once did. And though none of us will ever again call up her presence, the woman will take up space in our house, as ubiquitous as a vapor, a woman at my window with one hand on the sill, tapping on the glass with the bow of her violin.

My mother and father stop fighting only when the old man who lives below us bangs his broom against his ceiling. The old man usually delivers this complaint when I’m jumping rope indoors, and for once I am grateful for his intervention. My parents fall silent.

I hear the door to my mother’s bedroom slam shut. I am still sitting at the foot of my bed, gripping the bedpost, waiting to know what has changed and what will stay the same. Through the wall I hear the sound of soft, stifled weeping.

By the time I get up and pad quietly to my mother’s door, the weeping has stopped. I know how to comfort her, how to crawl into her bed and hang my leg over her hip the way we used to sleep when it was just the two of us. I slip into her unlit room, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out a hunched shape — my father. Alone, he is sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to me. When he wipes the corner of each eye with the heel of his hand, he seems no older than I am, and I will remember this gesture for years. I linger in the still pool of his sorrow. Quietly as I can, I slip back into the hall and close the door.