Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“No, wait,” my grandfather begged, laying an arm over me. “Leave her, it’s okay—”

“You shut up, too!”

I stared at my mom. She had never yelled at him like that. My grandfather withdrew his hands into his lap.

“I have one child,” she said, a quaver in her voice. “I don’t need two.”

She slapped spoon after spoon of rice onto his plate, building a hot white heap he couldn’t possibly finish, then stuck the ladle in the colander and went to her room. Moments later, I could hear water gushing from her bathroom. She always took a shower when she wanted to cry.

My grandfather picked up each grain of rice that had scattered onto the table and placed them in a neat row on the edge of his plate. I stood and spooned some rice off his plate and into mine.

After dinner, I trimmed my grandfather’s nails. He sat on the edge of the tub, staring drably at the drain, while I sat on the closed toilet, newspaper spread across my lap. Normally, I prided myself on my lapidary nail-cutting style, but today I made quick work of each finger, three brisk bites and on to the next.

He sniffed the air. “I can smell the nishagandhis . It’s the midnight hour, when they bloom.”

I maintained a pointed silence. All I smelled was a plug-in air freshener.

“Why am I here?” he asked the drain. His hand began to rattle in my own. His was flat and pale, limp as a glove. “Your mother never liked me. That’s no surprise. I just wish I had some other place to go.”

I wanted him to stop, for once. Dinner had left me shaken and guilty. I picked up a shard off the floor, a thick gray crescent. “There is nowhere else to go,” I told him.

“Except down the drain. Remember?” I didn’t respond. “Oh, you never remember. Should I explain it again?”

He blinked at me with his small, merry eyes, so much like my mother’s.

“I know where you can go,” I said in English.

It always unnerved my grandfather when I spoke to him in English. His smile faded and his face grew cloudy. His eyes moved from left to right across my face, as if he were trying to read my features.

“To a nuthouse,” I said. “That’s where you belong.”

He looked away. He began cracking his knuckles, methodically, up one hand and down the next, wincing as if he were causing himself pain, which filled me with a different sort of pain, awful and eviscerating, that helplessness.

I clapped my hands over his knuckles. “Okay, it’s okay. Tell again about the drain.”

He took up where he’d left off, mostly repeating the details he’d already told me many times before. I cradled his hand and finished the rest of his nails.

In homeroom, Mrs. Main sorted through the Toy Drive box and singled out the gifts she liked best: the seven-piece tea set, the pair of badminton racquets, the plastic sewing machine that punched yarn through paper. She dangled a silver pistol between two fingers and called it “inappropriate.”

I was half-hoping that Mrs. Main would call my gift “inappropriate” too, and that she would return it to me as she had returned the toy gun to an indignant Randy Porter. Instead she deemed my donation “excellent.” She said it was thoughtful of me to gift the children with an ethnic doll.

Of course I wasn’t planning to leave Ethnic Ken in the Toy Drive box. I thought about sneaking in during recess or getting a detention, pulling off the heist, and keeping him under my lint-ridden bed for all eternity. What could I do to get a detention? Walk barefoot to the bathroom? Say shithead with the authority of an eighth grader? Public disobedience didn’t come easily to me, like a side ponytail I couldn’t really pull off.

I was still hatching plans when Newt twisted around and whispered, “Which part of him glows in the dark?”

“His Afro,” I said.

“Really?”

“No. Just his vest.”

Newt grinned, paused in a way that seemed to mean he was sorry. I knew Lydia Coe was giving me massive amounts of stink eye, but I couldn’t help smiling privately at my desk. That was how much I missed him.

By recess, Newt had abandoned me again. I sat on the front step of the kindergarten building, at the top of a tall concrete flight of stairs, trying to concentrate on my library book, Amazing Myths from Around the World . I kept eyeing Newt in the distance, merenguing on the asphalt with his little fan club. It was hard not to watch. Even Mrs. Main came over, arms crossed, impressed. He glided from step to step, his feet always moving but his face relaxed, twirling a girl behind his back or looping her arms over his head — flirty, surprising moves. The girls always looked a little stiff, smiling anxiously as if trying to guess his next step, but Newt seemed to discover the dance as he went along. They kept time to the Gloria Estefan music pulsing from Lydia Coe’s mini-stereo.

Lydia Coe was bopping along, off the beat. At one point, she released her ponytail, flipped her head over, and gathered up her hay-straight hair into an even higher ponytail — one of those elegant, thoughtless gestures that I’d never be able to make with my own fuzzy curls. The other day, I’d heard her in the bathroom with Betsy, saying that Daniel was super close to asking her out. I wanted to tell her that her calculations were off by miles.

At some point during his dance, I caught Newt’s eye, then went back to scanning “Loki’s Quarrel.” I tried to look engrossed in Loki, whoever he was.

At some point, Newt climbed the stairs and asked what I was reading. I clapped the book shut. “Nothing.”

He sat down beside me. We watched the flock of girls he had left behind. They were still shuffling around, using each other as partners, not one of them as natural as Newt. “I can teach you, if you want,” he said.

“I dunno. Salsa isn’t really my thing.”

“Merengue,” he corrected me.

I rolled my head around my neck, like my mother did when annoyed. “How can you dance so long with Lydia Coe? She smells like a coconut.”

“Coconut lime verbena. It’s a body spray.”

“I bet she can’t do the Running Man.”

“Can you?”

I shrugged like it was no big thing and picked at some pebbles between my feet. I could see him smirking out of the corner of my eye. “So who came up with Cotillion anyway?”

“I don’t know. It sounds French.”

“Like French people know about dancing,” I said.

“They probably know more than you.”

As he got up and walked away, I pitched a pebble down the stairs. “Yeah, well, you look like a total fruit out there.”

At the top of the steps, he turned. I’d gone too far. My words cut close to the truth or what I had always perceived might be the truth. Last year, someone had penciled Fag Newton on the back of his chair, and I’d erased it, hoping he hadn’t seen.

“At least I don’t play with dolls,” he said loudly.

“I don’t play with dolls. I collect them.”

But Newt was on a roll. He raised his voice to a yell. “And at least I have friends! All you have is your crazy grandfather!”

I dropped the book and charged at him; he raced down the stairs. Halfway down, he tripped and fell forward, rolling the rest of the way in two or three thuds. I stopped on the stairs. Newt was no more than a crumple at the bottom, his cheek against the concrete, his foot at an odd angle. I couldn’t move.

Newt twitched, whimpered. I hurried the rest of the way down. He shifted, just slightly, and told me to go get someone.

I sprinted across the grass, past some of the girls, who were already running toward him. Lydia Coe shrieked above them all: “Amy, what did you do ?” Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. I yelled for Mrs. Main, who, in her cowrie necklace, seemed suddenly a savior. With one glance at me, she started jogging in my direction, her shells chattering like teeth.