Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“You shouldn’t waste it on things like this, Pappa. The taxi alone must’ve been a fortune.”

“I didn’t take a taxi.”

“Then how did you get to the store?”

He had walked. He’d remembered the route to Toys “R” Us, having seen it on our car rides to the mall. It was really no trouble. Just seven miles of padding along the highway in his lavender robe, and seven miles back, bag in hand.

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On Monday morning, I wanted to tell Newt what had happened with Brown Ken, but he wasn’t sitting in front of me. Usually I spent all ten minutes of homeroom talking with Newt, who would twist around in his seat to complain about the psoriasis on his elbows or his sister’s retainer, which she’d leave on his pillow just to torture him. No one took any notice of our conversations. The girls found him too slight and pale to be cute, and the boys found him irrelevant because he couldn’t catch a football. Newt had no use for them either.

Since last Thursday, times had changed. Newt had called my grandfather a jerk, and Cotillion was shaking up our social order.

From what I’d gathered, Cotillion was a cult where girls wore floral Laura Ashley dresses and learned how to curtsy and dance with boys in neckties. Newt had sworn to me that he’d never join Cotillion. He called it White People 101, which wasn’t altogether accurate since Eric Madembo had joined, but Mrs. Madembo made him join everything.

That day, in homeroom, I learned that Newt had attended a Cotillion class over the weekend.

Somehow, in that one class, Newt had gained not only friends but female fans. In the hallway, a small flock of them watched as he went over the fox-trot with Betsy Warren, and I pretended not to watch from my desk. He cupped her narrow waist and steered her around, looking her right in the eye as he counted out the beats. “God, Daniel,” said Lydia Coe, accompanied by a groan of such admiration and ardor, it was almost obscene. “How do you make it look so easy?” Only our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Main, called him “Daniel” or, when she was feeling chipper, “Sir Newton.”

The bell rang. Newt let go of Betsy and said something that made the girls laugh, which came as a surprise to me since Newt wasn’t all that funny in public settings. They trickled into the classroom. At the doorway, Lydia Coe stole the glasses right off Newt’s face and slipped them into her pocket. She insisted it was for his own good; he looked so much better without glasses. Betsy Warren totally agreed.

Without even glancing at me, he sank into his chair. I thought he looked weird and planned to tell him so. “Hey,” I said. He brushed his ear with his shoulder, as if warding off a gnat. “Hey, Newt.”

He whipped around and told me it was Daniel. Just Daniel. There was a pink, bean-shaped welt on the side of his nose.

“Sure, Newt,” I said.

“Ew,” Lydia said to Betsy, who was sitting to my right. “Amy’s trying to flirt.”

Betsy made a gagging face. Some of the surrounding kids turned to smirk. Amy Abraham: flirting! My face burned.

Fortunately, Mrs. Main clapped twice and directed our attention to the large cardboard box in the front of the room, beneath the chalkboard, on which was written GUATEMALAN TOY DRIVE. Pinned to the box was a foldout poster of children in tattered dresses and onionskin T-shirts, all dust-tousled hair and round, raw eyes. Chris Sarmiento asked to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Main told him that he should’ve gone before the bell rang. She went on to read from a brochure and pointed from face to face: “Carlo, Cristián, José, Juan, and María.” She circled the whole gang with her forefinger. “These are our friends from Guatemala.”

We listened to her list several facts about running water, toilets, and nutrition, each of which began with a number out of every ten homes. I zoned out, distracted by Mrs. Main’s necklace of faded brass and wooden beads; a small gong hung from each of her ears. She was always wearing oversized necklaces from other countries and twisting them thoughtfully between her fingers as she explained where each was from. She’d once claimed that she got her earrings in Mozambique, but I saw the same pair at Dillard’s, and after that I felt a little sorry for her.

“So as I understand it,” she told us, “we have to fill this box with toys. Dolls, games, books with not too many words. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you want?”

I tore off a corner of notebook paper and wrote, Hey Newt. You have a weird new mole on the back of your neck. Maybe cancer . We had learned about lethal moles in health class; I was only trying to help him out. I folded up the note and tossed it onto his desk. Lydia Coe was watching me. I bugged my eyes at her until she faced forward.

As soon as he read the note, Newt’s hand shot up in the air. “Can we bring our old stuff? My sister has some Barbies …”

I prodded him in the back with the eraser end of my pencil.

“And a Ken,” he added.

I sat back in my seat. When Mrs. Main was done with her presentation, I noisily scooted my desk and chair a few inches away from Newt’s, until Madeleine Peelle, behind me, complained that my braid was getting all over her desk.

At dinner, I distilled the necessary information for my mom — the Guatemalans, the dirty water, the infant deaths, the toys. “Toys?” she said, grimacing as she poured a pot of boiled rice into the colander. “They don’t have proper food and clothes, and you want to give them toys?”

I was still mad at my mom for kidnapping Brown Ken, but she didn’t seem to notice. After last week’s Cosby episode, my dad had stopped by my bedroom with a bowl of strawberry ice cream and told me to be nice to Mom because she was having a hard time. She had, in a way, lost both her parents at once. But it was tough being around my mom and the toxic sadness that trailed her all day. Whole hours went by with her supine on the bed, listening to a bland channel on talk radio. When I wandered in and asked what she was listening to, she always said, “I don’t know, some trash.” She continued to lay there, her forearm over her eyes, as if her brain were receiving a necessary transfusion of thought.

After that conversation with my dad, I resolved to be nicer to her. But sometimes she made it impossible, like now, by suggesting that I donate Brown Ken to the Guatemalan Toy Drive. “Appachen can’t find the receipt,” she said.

“My Ken? Why can’t I have him?”

My mom handed me four plates to put on the table. I stood there, glowering, panicky, plates in hand. Steam curled up around her as if she were casting an evil spell in the sink.

I went to the table, where my grandfather was already seated, and plopped down three plates. “Easy, easy,” he said, even though the dishes were plastic.

When my mom came over with the pot of rice, my grandfather raised a finger to speak. “I could buy a different doll for her to give the school.”

“Don’t waste more of your money, Pappa. Amy is too old for these toys.”

I reasoned, as I had many times before, that the Barbie box said “5 & Up,” a limitless upper limit she refused to understand. Getting no reply, I said, “You just want everyone to be in a bad mood because you’re always in a bad mood.”

My mom paused before ladling rice onto my grandfather’s plate. I wondered if I had hit upon something true, but rather than waste time trying to pick it apart, I focused on what I understood: I wanted my Ken.

I slid down in my seat until I was eye level with the table.

“Ammu,” my grandfather said quietly.

“Sit up,” my mom ordered.

“I hate rice,” I said. “Every day: rice, rice, rice.”

“Shut your mouth.” My mom grabbed my shoulder and yanked me into a sitting position.