Blue Boy Page 12

  I am speaking the truth. In the past, I thought that by telling on my classmates, I would put an end to the name-calling and the pranks. Once, when John Griffin, whose fists are like small hams, made me give him my lunch (a feast of daal and rice that he looked at with horror before throwing it in a huge Hefty trash can), I marched right into Mrs. Hatton’s room nearby and told her what he had done. I added graphic detail, saying John unlocked the Ziploc of sweaty basmati rice and threw its contents at me. I said he forcefed me the daal like I was an infant and he was an insanity-ridden salesman from Gerber Baby Foods. Mrs. Hatton’s red face cringed with anger and disgust, and she marched right out from behind her desk and went on the prowl for John Griffin. She found him playing with a couple of his friends out on the playground and immediately started yelling at him. I stood in the doorway from the school to the playground and watched her berate him.

  Then Mrs. Hatton did the worst thing she could have done: she pointed back at me, who was cowering in the doorway. I know that she meant well, meant to show John Griffin how much he had hurt me by presenting me as a tortured victim. But even from my cowardly position, I could see the glint in John Griffin’s eye. What Mrs. Hatton did not understand was that kids like John Griffin thrive on having such an effect. They enjoy seeing people cower. And even though the first solution you might proffer, then, is to react with courage instead of cowardice, it is not such an easy proposition. Because when John Griffin and his goons corner you in the same hallway the next day and slug you with their porcine fists, when they call you a feggit, when you feel the actual pain of it all—not some theoretical fear that has taught you that, ouch, a fist in the gut must hurt, but the real, real pain of a tightly clenched ball of fingers and fire pushing too far into your groin—then you know courage is simply an imaginary construct that people have made to disguise their inferiority.

  “Mrs. Goldberg,” I say. “Please don’t make me a tattletale. Please. I beseech you.”

  I picked this handy phrase up from Romeo and Juliet and have been using it like it’s going out of style. Whenever I say it, I imagine that I’m long-and raven-locked, with white cleavage stayed by a red velvet dress.

  “I beseech you, Mrs. Goldberg. I can’t deal with the extra pressure. I just can’t.” Even though I am not crying, I imagine that I am, one fat tear rolling off my chin and plopping onto the fake wooden top of her desk.

  Mrs. Goldberg watches me without judgment. Her eyes don’t criticize, but they also don’t encourage. She reaches one hand forward and puts it on mine, her palm cold but soothing, like a poultice. (Another word from Romeo and Juliet; I said it the other day when my dad used Ben-Gay after his tennis match with Sanjay Uncle. My dad didn’t seem to understand the word; he asked why I was talking about turkey.) Mrs. Goldberg’s nods her head and relents, picking up her copy of Warriner’s English Grammar and asking that I turn to page 132 in my copy.

  I am learning how to diagram sentences. It’s a pretty fascinating activity, one that unifies two of my greatest loves—drawing and language. Mrs. Goldberg teaches me how to find the subject and predicate of sentences, how to draw a spade-shaped diagram and place the subject on the handle and the predicate in the scoop like a piece of earth. The more intricate the sentences we choose, the more intricate the diagrams become, and I find today that there is little difference between the many-limbed bodies I draw in my blue reverie and the spindly drawings that are our grammatical fare. It doesn’t take me long to voice this perceived similarity to Mrs. Goldberg, albeit accidentally.

  “Drawing these diagrams is just as fun as drawing everything else,” I say, finishing the last one with a final flourish of my pen.

  “Really? And what, pray tell, have you been drawing?” Mrs. Goldberg says while taking a sip from her white coffee mug. The mug has a picture of a very red apple printed on it, the emerald sprig of a leaf curling off its top.

  My first impulse is to tell her that I’ve been drawing pictures of myself from a past life, but something stops me. It feels weird even to me as I say it in my head, and I decide to proceed with more restraint.

  “I’ve been drawing pictures of the Hindu god Krishna.”

  “Which god is that?” she asks, not in an ignorant way but in a genuinely concerned way.

  “He’s the blue-skinned god. The god of love.”

  “The god of love, huh? A regular Casanova, that one.”

  I let slide the fact that Mrs. Goldberg has just compared a pillar of my religion with a lecherous gigolo simply because she at least knows who Casanova was.

  “So, what sort of pictures have you been drawing, Kiran?” Mrs. Goldberg asks, and once again, she mimics with ease the rolled “r” in the name.

  I unzip my bright pink Jordache backpack and take out a stack of drawings that, with its bright hues of marker, looks sort of like the marked-up spelling tests on her desk. I straighten the stack like Mrs. Goldberg has done with those tests, and then I hand her the drawings. A bubble rises through me as I realize that she may not share my enthusiasm for this art, may think it odd, may think me a lunatic. As she flips through the drawings, I notice just how many peacock feathers I’ve drawn, just how garish some of the hues appear, and I have half a mind to grab the stack right back, smile awkwardly, and run out the door yelling, “See you on Thursday, Mrs. Goldberg!” But instead, I shift my focus from the drawings to Mrs. Goldberg’s face, which is static. Each time she looks at another drawing, her face seems calmer and more unmoving; the drawings are terrifying her into paralysis. When she has finally turned the last page—a rainbow of color, with a sky-blue Krishna surrounded by magenta veils and glowing golden stars—she looks at me with a face that seems years younger, smooth.

  In a few seconds I will find out that Mrs. Goldberg loves the drawings. Her face will break into a proud smile and she will embrace me, her body a cloud of Folgers and that nice perfume (I’m pretty sure it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds). She will flip through the pages one at a time, showing me what she likes about each one, telling me how creative they are and how sophisticated the artistry is even though I am so young. (“So young!” she exclaims over and over, as if proclaiming herself equally young with each squeal.) She will hug me again, then tell me that she is going to go to Mrs. Buchanan, the art teacher, first thing in the morning and tell her to put these drawings in our lobby’s display case. She will make me feel wonderful, accepted, and she will make me return to my talent show with a renewed sense of purpose and artistic zeal.

  But let us go back to that moment of not knowing. Let us go back to the blank expression on Mrs. Goldberg’s face. For after the initial joy I feel at her acceptance, I realize that my first impulse was to expect the worst. I have been conditioned to feel ashamed. By my classmates. By the other Indian kids. By my father.

  When someone motions to strike you, when someone throws something at you, you flinch or wince. But I have always felt that something is being hurled at me, so I guess I could say that I have lived my life in a perpetual flinch. Even though I draw my drawings in a sort of ecstatic flush, somewhere in my mind lurks a constant desire to prove people wrong, to best people by showing them how free my mind can be. It saddens me in this moment that I expect shame instead of the enthusiasm that Mrs. Goldberg so readily gives me. When, I wonder to myself, will my default emotion be confident, shameless optimism?

  “Kiran, I can’t wait to speak to Mrs. Buchanan about displaying these,” Mrs. Goldberg says, taking a light pink Post-it note and writing on it with a black felt tip marker, “See Barbara.” As in Barbara Buchanan. “Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow during lunchtime and we’ll speak to Mrs. Buchanan together?”

  The next day during lunchtime, I meet Mrs. Goldberg in her office. She smiles when I enter the room, and I can’t tell at first if it’s because she’s excited about my art or if it’s because I decided to use some of my mom’s Caress soap to shampoo my hair this morning and the stuff wouldn’t wash out completely and now I have a shin
y, sticky pompadour. I should have learned the last time when I tried this—it was the Oil of Olay that my mother uses on her face—and though it didn’t transform my hair into the thick disaster it is right now, it made my hair shine really, really brightly.

  Mrs. Goldberg doesn’t dwell too much on this, although she does do a doubletake once I come closer. “Let’s get a move on!” she says brightly, and I stride alongside her through the school corridors, feeling somewhat excited to be walking with a teacher I respect so much, and to be away from all the other kids, who are either finishing up their lunches or playing on the blacktop. I feel a twinge of guilt when I remember that I forgot to tell Cody I’d be missing lunch, and I imagine him hunched all by himself at the lunch table, munching on cold pizza or cold fries or warm ice cream. Although given our recent fight, he may not mind my absence after all.

  Mrs. Buchanan’s “classroom” is actually a big, unfinished space with cold, dusty cement floors, high ceilings striped with exposed, half-rusted I-beams, hanging lightbulbs that look like fiery tears, and long, wide tables covered in acrylic paint and modeling clay smudges and papier mâché. Mrs. Buchanan stands in the middle of this avant-garde scene and is as unlikely an occupant as you could possibly imagine. She wears dark brown leggings and a woolly cardigan. She has cropped gray hair and thick glasses and enormous breasts that stick out like torpedoes. She stands with her hands clasped against the soft hump of her pelvis, as if she’s been expecting us all morning. It’s really a terrifying sight. Doesn’t this woman have anything better to do with her time than stand in the middle of a crazily constructed room and wait for people to walk in the door?

  It’s a rather lonely profession, teaching. I guess Mrs. Buchanan has to spend most hours of the day, most days of the week, in this maddening room. Away from Mr. Buchanan, who must be a heavy oaf of a man who loves beer and football and who wears plaid flannel shirts and a John Deere trucker hat. Or maybe he’s a thin, mousy man whose eyes are level with his wife’s ample bosom and who works as a clerk in some depressing office. Or maybe he’s dead, resurrected for this odd woman in the projects her students create—she sees his eyes reflected in a pair of blue beads glued to a sock puppet’s face or thinks of his warm breath when she lifts the lid off the kiln and heated air wafts out.

  “Hi, Linda,” Mrs. Buchanan says to Mrs. Goldberg, and I laugh internally at this salutation. It’s crazy to think that teachers have real first names, real lives, and I never think of Mrs. Goldberg as Linda. “Mrs. Goldberg” indicates a caring, encouraging lady, but “Linda” conjures up a free-spirited woman who wears long, flannel jumpers in the fall, the collars turned up like they are in L.L. Bean catalogs, and who has a golden retriever and a sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked husband.

  “Hi, Mrs. Buchanan,” Mrs. Goldberg says, putting her hands on my shoulders and pushing me forward. “You know Kiran, don’t you?”

  Boy, does she. There’s one thing that I forgot to tell you about Mrs. Buchanan. In addition to being my art teacher, she once yelled at me really loudly.

  It was when I was doing my own papier mâché head for her class. In case you don’t know how to make a papier mâché head, it involves taking a balloon and blowing it up, then covering it with newspaper strips that are coated in a paste of flour and water and glue, then letting them dry and harden, then taking a pin and popping the balloon inside, and then painting this oval-shaped mass so that it looks like a head. I thought long and hard about what to do for mine—we only got one chance at it, and every fourth grade class had its papier mâché heads displayed prominently in Mrs. Buchanan’s studio before a select few were hung out in the lobby. Since every other grade had Mrs. Buchanan for art class, it was always a big deal to have a nice papier mâché head displayed in her room because it was a sort of instant celebrity. Likewise, people who made terrible papier mâché heads became instant pariahs; Marcy Smith made a Madonna head that looked like someone had thrown acid in the Material Girl’s face and teased her hair out into a wispy mess, and it was only a couple of days after it was displayed that people started transforming “Like a Virgin” into “Like a Monster” and serenading Marcy with it everywhere she went. So I thought long and hard about what I could do, knowing that I would have to execute the creation of this project deftly so as to avoid ridicule. Naturally, the first image that came to mind was Strawberry Shortcake, but I eventually decided against this because, in the freak instance that I made a terrible head, I couldn’t bear the thought of it defiling SS’s beautiful visage. Sculpting her strawberry hat alone would require some marvelously intricate papier mâchéing, and I just couldn’t risk it. SS must be perfect, and papier mâché is an imperfect art.

  It was when I had my chin resting on my hand, daydreaming about the project, staring at the wall of the classroom and the paintings some other students had done, that I discovered my muse. One of the kids had painted a portrait of Early Bird, the bright yellow-and-pink mascot from McDonald’s. Early Bird basically looks like Daisy Duck, except with yellow feathers and long brownish orange braids and an aviator cap and pink clothes. So I guess she looks nothing like Daisy Duck. (I just like the name “Daisy Duck.”) Anyway, I was really inspired by her. Every kid would know who she was because we all live for McDonald’s, and all of us, at some point in time, had had a birthday party there, with stacks of puffy hamburgers and greasy golden fries and soft-serve cones and a birthday cake with sugary red, blue, and yellow balloons on its top.

  Since she was accessible to boys and girls alike, Early Bird didn’t make for too girly a sight; I could get away with making a feminine character because she represented something so exciting and delicious to all of us. And she presented a creative challenge without being all that hard to conjure up. For starters, Early Bird’s head is bottom-heavy, not top-heavy like most heads, and so I would have the chance to do something different: I would flip my balloon upside down and use the narrow end of the balloon as the summit of Early Bird’s head, while the wider, rounder end would form her plump chin. Painting her actual face would not be too hard, and I could even place my old swimming goggles on top of her head and paint their border pink.

  The more I worked on the head, the more ingenious my ideas became. I managed to sculpt Early Bird’s beak out of leftover papier mâché. The kids around me began to notice the exciting genesis of this birdy creation over the next few weeks, and soon their own projects began to suffer because they were too busy watching me—how I painted Early Bird’s bright eyes, placing one tiny dot of white paint in each large black pupil to show the light reflecting off it, and how I braided orange yarn to make her hair. Each time Mrs. Buchanan walked by my table, I would cover my head playfully and wag my finger at her, promising her she would be impressed with the results.

  Finally, we all had to present our projects to the rest of the class. By this point, I had crafted a throw cloth out of Brawny paper towels to prevent others from seeing Early Bird. When it was my turn to present, I carried the Brawny-plastered orb to the front of the room like Salome carrying the head of John the Baptist. I pulled off the sheets in one swift move, and the classroom ooh’d and aah’d at what I’d done.

  I expected Mrs. Buchanan to echo their awe, but instead, she crossed her arms and frowned.

  “Key-ran! How could you?”

  As this was the last thing I expected to hear, I reacted with a mixture of sadness and confusion. Interestingly enough, so did the rest of the students in the class.

  “Key-ran, what made you think of doing this bird as your head?”

  “I like Early Bird,” I said. “And so does everyone else.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes!”

  “Is that so?” Mrs. Buchanan got up from her desk and swayed her skirted self over to the wall opposite my chair. She put one thick index finger to the picture of Early Bird that had sparked my epiphany. She raised an eyebrow at me, an eyebrow knitted with consternation and exasperation. She looked like the ever-disappointed Bea Arthur in
Golden Girls. “What about this?” she said.

  I shuddered. “What about it?”

  “Key-ran! How can you be so careless about copying!”

  “Copying!” I said. “I didn’t copy! I took inspiration from it!”

  “‘Inspiration’! Oh, come on, Key-ran. That’s a big word to use, even for you. I know the difference between inspiration and copying when I see it!”

  “Just think of this as a form of flattery!” I said, almost screaming with purpose. “I am not copying. I am using Early Bird as an icon.”

  Mrs. Buchanan harrumphed loudly, in that way that conveys ignorance instead of informed anger.

  At this point, Cody, bless his soul, piped up. “Mrs. Buchanan, I think it’s really cool.” To my surprise, the class agreed, a few similar supporting comments spewing forth. But Mrs. Buchanan would not hear of it.

  “Class, I want you to learn something from this. There is a difference between inspiration and copying, and this is copying.” With that, she walked over to me and tried to take the head from my hands. I held on to it for a second but had to let go; the force of her hefty pull was about to rip the damn thing in two. As Mrs. Buchanan headed back to her desk, the head swinging in her hand, I imagined Early Bird’s face contorting into a pained scream. (Although I guess I can’t say “scream,” since Mrs. Buchanan would probably say I was ripping off Edvard Munch. Not that the ignorant cow would know who Edvard Munch is.)

  Mrs. Buchanan made me stay after class that day and went on for almost ten minutes about how plagiarism—plagiarism, she called it!—was the most reprehensible of crimes and how I needed to learn that now before my lying got me into more trouble. Throughout the speech, she held Early Bird’s head up as if it were a stinking thing. During the speech, Mrs. Buchanan kept saying, “Look at me,” so I had to hold my head erect and look into her stern face. Inside, I was crushed, but the more Mrs. Buchanan spoke, the more I stuck out my chin. At one point, Mrs. Buchanan reproached me for not looking repentant. I assured her that I was, and yet something curled inside of me—a desire to be defiant.