Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

This time, though, I was more than usually peeved and didn’t look up from my vocab list when he stood beside me. He was wearing a fresh mundu , which now fell to his ankles, and over this, my mother’s satin lavender robe, because satin, he said, made him feel expensive.

“Ammu,” he said, “I cleaned the drain.”

“Good.”

“It’s still not working.” Sighing heavily, he seated himself on the edge of my desk, his lavender rump on the corner of my vocab sheet. “I didn’t mean to yell at you, but my knees get tired, squatting in that tub.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, and I nodded. Malayalam didn’t come easily to me, but it was all he knew. By the time I’d piece together a complex sentence, he’d be rambling on to his next.

“What happened to your friend?” my grandfather asked. “The little one. He never comes around anymore.”

“He moved.”

“For good?” My grandfather perked up at the thought. He’d always been a little jealous of Newt and all the time I spent with him. “ Sarilla , Ammu. We’ll play our own games. We can play marbles — you love marbles.”

He reminded me of the glass marbles I used to play with as a little girl, how I had my very own pouch of them in swirled reds and cloudy blues, how I used to play with my boy cousins by the tamarind tree. My grandfather got up and peered out the window by my desk. “Where is that tree …”

“I don’t want to play marbles.”

He seemed surprised, and slightly hurt. “Then what do you want to play?” He followed my gaze to the Barbie and Madge dolls, which were sitting upright on the corner of my desk. He took crew-cut Madge by the ankles and gave me a sidelong look. “Dolls? Still?”

“I have to do my homework.”

I covered up the definitions column and tried to remember the difference between imply and infer . I did a few more words before realizing that my grandfather was still standing there, looking deep into Madge’s tiny eyes. I could see his mind sliding in a wayward direction, as often happened at dusk. Something about the end of each day rattled him, made him jostle his dentures around for relief.

“Hey,” I said gently.

He returned Madge to my desk and started cracking his knuckles, another tic. “But the tree … where is it?”

Here is where my mom would have insisted that there was no tamarind tree, that we were in Louisville, Kentucky, where tamarind trees didn’t grow.

“We cut it down,” I said.

My grandfather pursed his lips, his eyes still out the window, as if he couldn’t trust the scenery to stay in place. These were the hardest times to witness, when it seemed as though he were teetering at the edge of his fantasies. I hated the thought of him looking down, tumbling headlong into grief.

“The tree is gone,” I said, taking his hand and squeezing it until his eyes found mine. “We had to cut it down. It’s gone.”

Ammu was my mom’s mother. I’d never seen a picture of her as a young girl, but I assumed that she and I must have looked something alike. Before she fell sick, I’d sink kisses into her soft, downy cheeks, and afterward she would wipe my mouth, joking that her darker pigment would rub off on my skin like cheap newsprint. It was the sort of endearment that irritated my mom.

The month before, my grandmother had died of a cancer that began in her thyroid. At the time, she and my grandfather were living with my uncle in Chicago, where her doctor administered modest doses of drugs that left her weak but alive. The disease simmered for a few years, then flared through her lungs. She was buried in Calvary Cross cemetery, surrounded by gravestones bearing American names, the first among our family to be buried far from home.

My grandfather had no opinions on the matter. His Ammu wasn’t dead, as far as he was concerned. Adult Ammu was waiting for him to return to her, somewhere in the future, if only he could find his way back there.

My mom thought that if we kept denying my grandfather’s claims about time travel, he would regain his good sense. My dad and I weren’t so sure. I liked that my grandfather preferred me over everyone else in the house. I thought it funny that he was shy and polite around my parents, whom he considered his in-laws. And for the most part, he took care of me just fine while my parents were off at work. He walked me to and from the schoolbus stop and made cucumber sandwiches, sliced into tiny triangles, because Ammu took pleasure in delicate, Anglophilic things, like tea bags and butter cookies in fluted paper cups. I hated those crumbly cookies, but I ate them just to please him, and when they were finished, I got to keep the royal blue cookie tin.

•

One thing my parents and I could agree on was The Cosby Show . Every Thursday at 7:55 p.m., I bellowed through the halls, “Cosby Show, Cosby Show!” and took up my cross-legged post before the television. In the old days, my dad would plop onto the sheet-covered couch and my mom would put her feet up on his lap, just like Clair Huxtable home from a hard day’s work. We’d chuckle at Theo’s high-pitched distress, groan when Clair and Cliff got frisky. I enjoyed the show as much for the Huxtable clan as for the sound of my parents’ laughter, though that gasping and giggling never echoed through our house anymore. Sometimes I laughed extra loud to encourage my mother’s laughter, but she remained silent, her feet on the floor, her chin in her hand, as if the show were something to endure.

My grandfather never joined us for The Cosby Show . He mostly ignored the television because he hated sitting in any one place for too long. But one evening, just as the show began, he hovered over me and dangled a plastic bag in front of my face. I tried to peer around it. I wanted to study the opening dance sequence and learn Rudy’s move.

“Ammu.” My grandfather gave the bag a shake.

“Amy,” my mom said sharply, for my grandfather’s benefit as much as mine. “Appachen is talking to you.”

I gave up and looked at him. Beaming, he dropped the bag into my lap and clasped his hands, waiting for me to open it.

Inside the bag was the pink top of a box, a bubblegum pink that seized at my heart, the pink of mini-pumps and mini-hairbrushes and all things palm-sized and perfect.

“What is that?” my dad asked.

My grandfather answered but didn’t take his eyes off me. “Just a gift for Ammu. An early birthday gift.”

“Amy’s birthday was three months ago,” said my mother, in her patient but firm voice. I wasn’t listening. I was staring at my gift, a brown-skinned Dream Glow Ken, set against a purple backdrop studded with stars. His skin was the smooth hue of Ovaltined milk. His hair was a thick, stippled helmet of black. Painted bushy eyebrows. An oyster-gray tuxedo. A pink bow tie. A sparkly vest and corsage, both of which allegedly glowed in the dark. I felt the urge to run away with him to the nearest, darkest closet.

“Is he black?” my dad asked.

“He’s brown,” my grandfather said while I plucked at the lid. “There were so many of the brown ones left, and they were half the price of all the others. Is this the one you wanted, Ammu?”

“Don’t open that, Amy.” In seconds, my mom was towering over me. “You told Appachen to spend his money on this?”

I looked to my dad for help, but he was frowning. I concentrated on the ancient scar beneath my mom’s thumbnail, from where a boy once slammed a door on her hand, a mark that spoke of wild, reckless times, a life long left behind.

“I didn’t tell him,” I said. “I implied.”

She snatched up the Ken and asked my grandfather for the receipt.

He smiled weakly, sheepish, as if he’d been scolded. “I can’t buy Ammu a gift? It’s my money.”