Blue Boy Page 16

  Just as the dusk dissipates, so does our time here. My father comes back just as the two of us have sat down to watch another block of CNN, another series of bombings reported across seas. He has a bag of groceries whose contents he empties into the appropriate places in the refrigerator and the pantry, then sits down to join us. My mother gets up to make some tea. I slide away to my room, still unable to look at my father without seeing Blueberry Muffin clutched in his hand.

  When I am at last asleep, I dream in quewwali, with high-pitched, strained vocals cascading through my mind as severed hands enflambé encircle me. From this emerges a mess of all the incense-igniting matches my mother has used over the years—cold, coallike lumps of burnt cardboard and tiny anthills of gray ash.

  II.

  Brushfire

  Hunks of Junk

  When my mother is not able to make an escape to the mall, she takes me to garage sales. As long as the weather is not life-threatening, there is at least one sale in our neighborhood each weekend, a fact that is so reliable that the same six or seven lampposts in our neighborhood are perpetually adorned with flyers of differing colors but similar words. Usually, the hosts offer some sort of treat—brownies, lemonade, sometimes beer; one year, the Davies, a quintet of corpulent eccentrics who looked like a set of matryoshka dolls, actually roasted a pig outside on their lawn, not realizing that its meaty smoke was permeating the rugs and dresses they had for sale. The roasting met with various reactions. In one corner, there were the seasoned neighbors who had long ago accepted their one-floor, redbrick boxes and who saw a barbecue of this ilk as grand and delectable. In the other corner, there were the folks who had only recently become neighbors and who did not live in brick boxes but in the houses they had built, in the many-floored, shiny wood-banistered, drywall-enclosed edifices popular at the time. My family theoretically fit into this latter group, but my mother was the secret bridge between the two groups, part of the nouveau riche but not progressive enough to pass up a good sale.

  My mom takes me to a garage sale held by the unfortunately named Hilda Hinderlong, a fiftysomething who lives in a clunky house with smudged white paneling and a porch roof held up by pillars that look like Styrofoam. Her garage and its wares are both so cluttered that it is hard to tell where the mess ends and the sale begins. It also makes me wonder if Hilda Hinderlong keeps any of her belongings in her house. It certainly does not seem so when I sneak a peek through her front screen door; since there is a similar door at the back of the house, when you look directly at the building, you see a wind tunnel cutting through it. The image looks as if a battalion has just launched a cannonball through Hilda Hinderlong’s residence.

  Paintings of various sea scenes, of waves sweeping and frothing, lie askew throughout the sale, some of them depicting beach-strewn wreckage that is in better condition than the furniture on display. A trio of dining room chairs, missing a fourth sibling, mope on legs that look like they are about to disintegrate in termite dust. A lamp bumpy with cracks looks to have been shattered and then reassembled with the aid of a glue gun. An old light fixture, once a stunning assortment of crystals and bulbs, now retains so few of its original adornments that it looks like a crab that tried to dress in drag. (Not to be confused with an Indian who tried to dress like a crab.) Hilda Hinderlong sits amid the refuse in a plastic lawn chair, her wide legs hugged by sky blue slacks and, as I can see at their bases, webs of purple varicose veins. She is drinking a glass of Crystal Light Pink Lemonade, the identity of which is obvious because both the pitcher of additional rose-colored liquid and the tin of powder sit next to her on a rickety end table. As if both the table and the instant mix are for sale.

  People in this neighborhood have a tendency to move things around more than they actually purchase anything. Mr. Young, whose name is misleading because he is upward of ninety, picks up a fork coated in the rainbow fog of tarnish and stares at it for a solid minute, then spots a small statue of a dolphin from Busch Gardens on the other side of the driveway, walks to it, and sets the fork down on top of a clock. Dinner plates, all broken in different ways, dot the refuse like buoys. The seascape paintings are picked up and observed, then laid down as people imagine them actually hanging in their living rooms. All the same, these same people feel no shame in picking up equally bizarre objects and buying them. Within fifteen minutes of being there, my mom and I have witnessed the acquisition of a set of kitchen knives, half of whose handles are splintered; a porcelain statue of Captain Hook; a footstool with a huge shamrock embroidered on its top; a hand mirror with ceramic roses crowning it (I scowl inside seeing it whisked away by a young girl and her mother who do not seem part of our neighborhood); and a pair of dumbbells coated in teal rubber that Hilda Hinderlong must have used in a Jazzercise class years ago.

  My mother approaches this sale as she would any store: she loads herself up with anything that strikes her as must-have. Which, as already noted, is not a scant number of objects. She shows her usual determination, as if on an Easter egg hunt. She slings a pink cardigan sweater over one shoulder, a gaudy sapphire sequin purse over the other, and places a baseball cap from Shell gas station on her head. At one point, she picks up a hula hoop and I cringe thinking that she is going to try to loop it around herself for safekeeping. Luckily, she sets it down, probably realizing that she would never use a hula hoop. At one point, she leafs through a Life magazine with a picture of Michael Jackson on the cover and begins reading it avidly. She tucks it under her arm and carries it around before seeing the Busch Gardens statue and placing the magazine on top of Mr. Young’s discarded fork.

  While my mother shops away, I scan the lot for a stash of toys. Unfortunately, since Hilda Hinderlong is a spinster, there doesn’t seem to be anything that tickles my fancy. There is one doll, but it is scary, made of wood and with painted eyes that look demonic. The stand on which she perches looks like a vise that some mad scientist constructed. I spot a faded blue velvet chair—really, is Hilda Hinderlong keeping anything?—and plop down on it, flipping through a deck of cards from a place called Ritz! and trying to find all the queens. The queen of diamonds is missing.

  It’s when I set the cards down with a sigh that I spot the flute. It sits in a box with a golf putter, a red thermos, and a series of pickle jars. It is not, in fact a flute; it is more aptly called a recorder, one of those fat rods that has two bulbous ends and openings that look like the work of a hole punch. This one is brown, and whoever once played it—could it have been Hilda herself?—must have once had a name tag on it because there is gobbed-over sticky residue along its side where a label once clung. Aside from this, however, it looks almost pristine, probably taken up as a hobby that was never fully realized. I walk over to the box and pick up the recorder, eyeing it and gripping it in my hand tightly. I’ve seen girls in my school carrying these around, usually taking the place of a pom-pom or cheerleading baton in their hands. I am instantly aware that I haven’t seen any boys carrying them around. But like many other things in my life, this enables instead of deters me.

  A recorder is a flute. In my head, I cross number 3—“Flute”—off my list of Krishna goals.

  While my mom heads over to Hilda Hinderlong to barter, I dawdle behind her with my newfound instrument the way underage riders dawdle in line for a big kids’ roller coaster at the amusement park. I watch as my mother coolly negotiates Hilda down to five dollars on the cardigan and ten on the sequined purse. She also buys the baseball cap, which is for my father, I’m sure. Normally, he greets anything she buys for him with a confused annoyance; since he never buys anything new for himself, he doesn’t understand what could compel someone to do it for him. But since my mother is able to get the hat for a mere pittance (two dollars, it turns out), she knows that my father’s reaction will melt into pride—pride that he owns something for so cheap a price. He will say, “Veeeery good,” and then put it on his head. My mother is also, unfortunately, buying the dolphin, which she had better show to my father befor
e the cap. He will know, as I do, why she has bought it—she has added it to her store of random gifts that she can give people. Instead of buying people specific gifts for particular occasions, my mother builds up a stash of stock gifts that she can dole out when necessary. It acts as part of her therapy shopping; if she’s buying things for others, then she is not feeding her addiction, obviously. My father will rub his forehead, trying to decide whether this current purchase warrants a scolding, then will probably discard his anger when he sees the cap. That’s the way it works.

  After my mother buys the cap, I chime in. “Mom, can I get this?” I hold out the recorder, which looks very large in my small hand. Her face crinkles at first, but when she realizes what it is, she motions with her head to Hilda, encouraging me to present it for purchase. I give it to Hilda, who smiles.

  “Ah, I had totally forgotten about this thing,” she said. She holds it up and eyes it tenderly. “It belonged to my niece.”

  “What happened to her?” I ask.

  “Oh, she got tired of it really quickly. It was like so many other things she bought. You know how kids are,” she says, looking at my mother for approval. My mom nods and smiles. “They pick something up every day, acting as if it’s the only thing in the world that they want, and then drop it when they spot something else. In her case, it was Hank Himmelfarb.” She grunts. “So listen to me, pumpkin: stick with it. Give it a chance. Oh, now, you’ve gone and forgotten the manual.”

  She rises from the chair—a painful process to watch, during which her legs look ready to pop—and goes over to the box in which I found the flute. She rummages through the pickle jars, which tinkle sadly in response, and extracts a yellowed songbook. She hands it to me with the flute, as if insisting they belong together. I flip through the manual; scales are printed on its pages in brown ink indicating various runs and songs. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is the first selection, followed by “Amazing Grace,” “America the Beautiful,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Holding the recorder and the book in my hands automatically makes me feel stronger, and I thank Hilda Hinderlong gratefully.

  “No prob, pumpkin. And remember what I said: stick with it.”

  As we walk home, my mother hands me the dolphin statue and the cardigan. She unzips her big white purse and places the sequined purse inside. Then, she takes the cardigan from me and pulls it over her salwaar kameez. It’s almost as if she planned the outfit, the pink cardigan complementing the light blue of her pajama. When we get home, she shows my father the statue, which elicits the frown I expected. Then, like a magician, she pulls out the baseball cap.

  I run the path to my bedroom so often these days that I now imagine it lined with roses and palm trees—the entrance to a tropical paradise. Or sometimes I imagine that a royal red carpet lines it, flashbulbs capturing my spritely figure as it rushes past. I enter my bedroom—or studio, as it is now, with my drawings growing in number—and attack the songbook.

  I practice as much as possible, carrying the flute and book in my backpack to school and using my recess time to go through the songs. There is a precision to the fingering that suits me. In a certain way, it surprises me that the instructions the book provides actually cause the correct music to spring forth. Making music on the recorder is not some mysterious, elusive process but something that occurs naturally if you learn the right sequence of movements.

  I find that the only place where no one will bother me on the playground is The Clearing. I haven’t been back here since the Sarah and Melissa incident, and I am not stupid enough to make my journey here conspicuous. If anyone were to see my return, they would regurgitate the stories of my embarrassment with renewed, evil glee. There should be a term for evil glee—glevil. Those bullies are one big Republic of Glevil, and I am exiled out of their country to this hideaway of gorse and broom. I stay clear of the balance beam that ravaged my tender butt-flesh and opt instead for the grass itself, which, though it is deep into autumn and the ground is somewhat chill, feels comfortable.

  I find after a few days of practicing that I no longer need the book to guide me. I can play all four tunes with equal grace, and I see a direct link between the way I memorize dances and how my fingers remember the notes.

  In the pauses between songs, I think how lucky I am to have found such a haven. Sure, I have to face the direction of the playground to make sure no one is sneaking up on me, and the impending end of recess weighs on me all the same, but here, where the giggling screams of heartless girls are staccato on the wind instead of pointed at my face—that wind blowing through the maple trees lightly—I feel more comfortable than usual. It pops into my head how little I’ve talked to Cody since our argument; I’ve seen him in class and briefly at lunch, but I haven’t hung out with him in days. Usually, this might bother me—especially because he has all that porn—but right now it makes me feel relieved. I have no one to answer to out here but myself and this flute.

  After practicing “America the Beautiful” for a third time, I set my flute down and take a minute to look at my school. It bears the slightly tacky façade of a building built in the sixties or seventies, with orange brick and windows framed in brown paneling. I think about how much time I spend in that place and how weird it is that so much drama should be contained in one edifice. Mrs. Buchanan is in there right now, probably sitting at her desk with a spell book that she hides in a drawer and uses to perform voodoo charms on me from afar. My anger has not abated whatsoever in the week since she rejected my drawings. Now that I think about it, even Mrs. Goldberg has kept her distance since that meeting. I imagine her in her room right now, holding the drawing she asked if she could keep when returning the stack to me (it is one with Krishna swaddled in orange robes). Just thinking of her and Mrs. Buchanan and Principal Taylor and that whole drama makes me want to stay out here forever. Sometimes, I think, my biggest wish on the face of the planet is to have no friends at all. I’d rather burrow into this grass and stay here for the next few months and hibernate like a bear, forgetting everything, even forget the talent show.

  No, wait—as soon as I have this thought, I snap out of my daze and return to the flute more determined than before. It may do to shun friends, to shun the school, to find refuge in myself, but I must never lose sight of my artistic goals. My plan, my happiness, depends on this performance.

  When I hear Mrs. Moehlman calling all the kids back into the school at the end of recess, I start to walk back from The Clearing like Dickon in The Secret Garden, although hugging the perimeter. But maybe it’s the image of Dickon, pan pipe in hand, that propels me forward; maybe it’s the revelation I’ve had about keeping to myself; but whatever it is, when I hit the blacktop, I keep on going. I go back into the school and walk down the hallway, lost in the throng of children. And, so easily that I am shocked when I reflect on it later, I pass out of the front of the building and keep on walking, leaving school and its people behind.

  It is noon on a Wednesday and the sun is out.

  Martin Van Buren Elementary School is situated in a residential neighborhood full of ranch-style homes in varying shades of brick. It is fall, and the leaves are beautiful on the trees and gathered in crispy piles on the ground. Dressed in my navy blue sweatpants and a brown flannel pullover, I feel equipped for the weather. I stroll down the sidewalk, not wanting to stare directly into people’s front windows but turning my head slowly as I walk past, getting as big an eyeful of the lives contained inside without drawing too much attention to myself. About half of the houses are empty, but the other half usually displays a turned-on TV and the darkened figure of an adult moving inside. It strikes me as some great secret—while we’re cooped up trying to learn fractions and endure the social jungle that is school, these adults are watching TV and eating popcorn and cookies and watching soap operas. The day I stayed home from school sick (only once in all these years, last winter, and that was because I had a 103-degree temperature), I got to watch Days of Our Lives and thought it was the
most transcendent show I’d ever seen, although there wasn’t nearly enough romance in it as I imagined, just a lot of people talking to themselves and this slick Mafioso-looking slab of a villain named Stefano. That the women in the houses I pass get to sit home and watch these shows during the day makes me fume with jealousy, although after the third lawn strewn with a variety of toys, I remember that there are real nightmares to deal with, after all.

  When I get to one of the main roads of the town, Yates Avenue, I panic for the first time since my departure. It hits me that right now, Mrs. Nevins is urging everyone to open their teal vocab books, which is usually when I get to read by myself at the back of the classroom, since I study with Mrs. Goldberg, and now is the most noticeable moment for me to be absent, since everyone in the class is always acutely aware of my special treatment. As cars pass me on Yates, it seems that the passengers in them are looking at me and criticizing me for my midday escape. I make a particularly strange sight, I’m sure, a lone child standing on a street corner caught between the residential and commercial areas of town and holding a recorder. If I put out my thumb to hitchhike, the probability of someone actually stopping to help me would be even lower than usual. Even a kidnapper would drive past the sight of me and accelerate.

  When the crosswalk lights up for me to pass, I cross the street swiftly. I have passed by this intersection so many times with my family (it is, in fact, one of the intersections we pass in silence on our way home from temple), but it looks so vastly different when experienced this way. Whereas the pavement usually appears as just a blur of gray, I can see from up close the individual pebbles flattened in its surface. Black holes of expectorated gum dot the surface, along with one particularly pronounced scuff of car wheels. When I get to the other side of the road, I look back just to make sure that no one is following me. I can see the top floor of the school through the trees and the top stripes of the American flag outside it billowing in the wind.