Blue Boy Page 8

  As we sit at lunch, my father extols the benefits of playing the butter assassin.

  “Vhat you eat now vill affect your whole life,” he says, tearing a dry roti and popping a paperlike sliver into his mouth. “All these people think, ‘Oh, I am young and strong. Nothing can hurt me.’ But they are all idiots. You guys have to cut out all of this rubbish.” He gestures at our oily roti, the small, stainless steel dishes full of plain yogurt, the tall glasses of buttermilk infused with pepper and lemon juice that we concoct to simulate lassi. “Or you vill be noplace.”

  But he doesn’t take all of our oily food away. Despite his personal nutritional battle, I think he sees the food before me and my mom as a necessary part of our Indianness, as if somewhere amidst the sour dairy swirls there is a secret potion that keeps us as Eastern as possible. All the same, he keeps tabs on whatever we eat, switching our boxes of Corn Pops and Apple Jacks with Shredded Wheat and Fiber One—unaware that he’s merely exchanging loads of crap with cereals that make your crap plentiful. He banished the cookie jar he got for my mother one Valentine’s Day—one of those mail-order affairs where you can choose what is written on the side of the jar. The ad displayed a sample jar whose side read “Mary’s Homemade Cookies,” but my father changed it to “Shashi’s Homemade Chum Chum,” overlooking the fact that chum chum (aka Indian desserts) have to be kept in the refrigerator—or as my parents call it, “REFrigerator”—or they’ll be as crumbly as a mummy. Now, via a stepstool, my father has consigned the jar to the highest shelf in the pantry, along with a candy dish of rainbow-colored, sugar-coated fennel seeds.

  But I will not be deterred, despite my fright. The Sunday after my fainting spell, I go grocery shopping with my mother. I wait until she is busy selecting the perfect bouquet of coriander before I disappear into the refrigerated strip of dairy goods. Skipping the small armada of blue-, red-, and purple-capped milk cartons, I survey the vast stacks of butter products: the tubs of margarine; the little brick boxes of butter, each containing four wax-papered bars; the new, circus-like product exclaiming its incredulity that the substance inside is really butter. I grab the biggest contestant, a tub of Country Crock, and head for the cashiers. I plan to pay this time. I don’t want to risk shoplifting again, considering the bad karma that happened with Mrs. Nevins right after I stole that magazine. I must make a truly weird sight: a small Indian boy hoisting a tub of processed butter product onto the checkout line, puffing my exertion into the heavily rouged face of THELMA, as her matte black name tag announces. I pay in change, the guts of my piggy bank clattering a chorus as I dump them onto the steel counter, like they did when I bought my SS dolls. Thelma groans, then counts the coins one by one, holding them in one hand and sliding them into the other as she registers the amount in her head. It is a process not unlike the way my mother screens uncooked lentil seeds when cooking, dropping deformed shapes into the receptacle of her left palm. Once I’ve purchased the product, I wrap the plastic bag tightly around the butter and retreat back into the store. Thelma sends another puzzled groan my way.

  I find my mother nose-deep in produce. I slide my load of Crock onto the little shelf under the shopping cart, a place my mother would never think to look, no matter how low to the ground her five-foot-tall body is. I’m the one who pushes the cart anyway, an activity I do with gusto, adding a few pas de bourrée as I move along.

  When we check out, Thelma thankfully does not say anything about the butter because she is too nonplussed by the mammoth cornucopia my mother has set on the conveyer belt: an Amazon of greenery: coriander, lettuce, green beans, lentils, peppers; three large cartons of plain yogurt, proof that my mother is single-handedly keeping Dannon in business; bottles of Wesson cooking oil standing as rigidly and gravely as bishops; cylinders of Morton salt, bottles of crushed black and red pepper, bags of sugar the size of infants. And this is only the American stop; after this, we have to take a twenty-minute drive to Asian Bazaar, a small store that feels like a speakeasy, where smelly Indian men, their mustaches like ink blots, sell my mother enormous bags of durum flour, corn flour, masala, and turmeric. Sam Walton would shit his linen pants if he knew that two tiny Punjabi men had innovated bulk food purchases this adeptly.

  Come to think of it, I guess I could have just asked my mother to buy the Country Crock, but I am so used to sneaking around these days that such a thought never even crosses my mind until this instant.

  When we get home from Asian Bazaar—my body aching from carrying everything into the house and my mother’s hands covered in coupon paper cuts—I tuck the Country Crock under my arm and dash to my room. I yell “Homework!”, shut and lock the door, and sit on the floor in hasty tribute to my blue-skinned past incarnation.

  At first, when I open the lid and peel back the wrapper, the butter, swirled so that one point sticks straight up in the center, intimidates me. But there it is again—that disarming, light yellow, the type of color that mothers paint nurseries when they are trying to be different from the usual blue and pink. I scoop a fingerful of butter out and roll it into the skin of my fingers, then smear a smidge into my cheek to see if it makes an adequate moisturizer. Oily, but it seems to do the trick.

  I’m stalling. I know that it’s going to be gross, but I have to do it. It’s in my blood. Actually, it’s in my soul. I take a deep breath and then gobble up a teaspoon’s worth.

  Surprise of surprises—well, I guess the surprise of surprises would be if my current behavior were considered sane—but surprise of surprises, it tastes good. It tastes mildly sweet; I feel like I’ve discovered an albino fudge. As I scoop more and more butter into my mouth, I come to a fuller realization of just what is happening here: I am a genius rediscovering the roots of his genius. It’s like picking up a piece of writing that you wrote years ago; you have forgotten everything you wrote down—be it a book report from school or those first song lyrics you composed at the age of eight—because you were in that moment and the art was merely using you as a vessel, passing through you and leaving little of itself on your memory. You feel the tiniest stab of recollection when you rediscover it, but mostly you are in awe of how it was you who wrote down these words and felt something so creative in that moment. Or it’s like picking up an old, lost photo and remembering faintly the joy or apprehension you felt at that moment, but also remarking that this was you, this was a person, this was someone doing something and it escaped you. This butter, though processed and preserved and probably not even yellow until a high-tech food coloring is thrown into its folds, joins my present self to my past self. As I cap the butter and put it back in the plastic bag, as I tiptoe downstairs to the basement, to the old fridge whose freezer my mom stuffs full of tomato puree she’s made in our blender, as I open the “Crisp” drawer and stash the tub, as I rush back up the stairs and pant heavily in the kitchen, I feel like a crown of peacock feathers has grown from my temples, which are again, after centuries, as blue as vein.

  I must wear this crown tentatively, though. My father has set himself the task of eradicating all butter from his diet, while I have set myself the task of slurping fistfuls of Country Crock. This is a problem.

  Somehow I think he knows what I am up to. I worry that he can smell the butter on my breath. My lips start to chap because I instinctively wipe my mouth again and again to make sure there is no more greasy shine left. Krishna certainly never had chapped lips. In every picture I’ve seen of Him, His lips are plump, as well as shiny with lipstick. So I start to take extra-special care of my lips, pilfering one of my mother’s many tubes of ChapStick and using it often.

  Once I have managed to eat the butter without any detection from my father, I feel like I have triumphed over him in the same way that I have over my mother. Just as I have managed to put on her makeup, I have managed to eat my father’s nutritional enemy. Something I have never felt before becomes clear to me: I am taking a sort of hurtful pride in being devious to them. I am transforming my weaknesses into ruses, and in doing so
, I am becoming surer of myself. I am the calm in the middle of the battle.

  On Saturday, I practice my ballet exercises in the kitchen. I am listening to a tape of ballet commands that Marcy, my teacher, gave each of us students. The instructions are enunciated by a nasal-voiced man who sounds like Richard Simmons. I assent, gripping the counter with my left hand and moving my right arm according to the position I am in. In third position, I curve it in front of me as if I’m Snow White catching a dove on her forearm. In fifth position, I curve it over my head and feel taller. I do every step perfectly until my father walks into the kitchen—dripping with sweat and smelling of grass. He has just mowed the lawn. The remnants of grass give off a pungent smell, but at least it’s not the type of grass that Tiffany Myers smells like when she comes to school. Her father works in “produce,” but his best goods are not on display under a miniature sprinkler system.

  “Press, point, toe-ball-heel,” says the faux Richard, and I press my foot into the floor, lift it, and melt it back onto the ground, staring over my father’s head.

  “Beta, could you stop for von minute.” My father reaches down and takes off his sneakers, and I’m surprised not to see a cloud of odor rising from them.

  “I can’t stop,” I say quickly, afraid that I’ll miss one of faux Richard’s words, which I take as Gospel. My biggest goal in life right now is to dance my God-driven way across the school stage in November, so my practice time is precious. Only two months left.

  “Beta, please stop, we have to talk.”

  This is a first. My father never asks to talk to me. Sure, we have our brief, in-passing chats—he once stopped to tell me to make sure I use shampoo only three times a week or I’ll end up as bald as Gandhi—but he’s never asked me to sit down. Especially after lawn mowing, which he usually follows up with a hot cup of tea and the Indian news that comes to our TV courtesy of a dish satellite, an alien insect crawling up our house.

  I cease posing and flick faux Richard off, stopping him in the middle of a “Relevé!” I walk over to the kitchen table, pull out a chair, and sit on it attentively, nervously, digging my toes into the ground and causing a muffled, tough sound of leather against linoleum.

  “Arre, don’t do that, beta! You’ll ruin the ground!” my father says. He takes off his baseball cap and reveals a mess of sweat-drenched hair that looks like a pile of steamed spinach.

  “Sorry,” I say, and I resume my attempt at stock-still composure. I am certain he can see the buttery sheen on my lips again, and I lick them to remove it, feeling chapped crackles under the buds of my tongue.

  “Beta, something has been bothering me.”

  I almost pee myself. I mean that, literally, a drop or two of urine slithers out of me and into my shorts. It’s not the fact that my father has figured out that I’m eating butter—as terrifying a thought as that may be—it’s that he’s figured out I’ve been hiding something from him. I know from the way his mouth purses into a wrinkle when my mother shows up with a cluster of shopping bags—and the inevitable muffled “discussion” that ensues from the master bedroom—that hiding things from him is not the way to go.

  “Now, vhere is your hiding place?” he says.

  Oh, no—the Country Crock.

  The strange thing is how calm his face seems but how tough the reprobation in his eyes is. I think back to two minutes ago—how happy I was dancing away without a care in the world, hearing the chuck of his lawn mower—and now I’m sitting at a table, terrified. This house is full of such surprises. No zone is safe—none—and no matter how secretive my binges have been in my bedroom all this time, he will find out what I’ve been up to. There is no getting anything past my father.

  “Vhere is your hiding place?” he asks again, and I know he knows I’m scared. This is his technique, to question me until I crack. And why question such a technique when it makes me confess? A confession that goes something like this:

  “In the refrigerator downstairs. And I know it’s wrong! I know I shouldn’t be eating it but it tastes really good and I’m in good shape—I’m doing really well in ballet class—and I’m not fat or anything so I think it’s fine! I mean you only started cutting butter out of your diet now and you’re so much older than I am. So I don’t understand why I can’t have some from time to time—”

  “Vait a second, vait a second,” my father says, shaking his head from side to side and rubbing his forehead as if to rouse his mind to wake. “Vhat are you talking about? Vhat’s in the refrigerator downstairs?”

  I don’t know how to respond. I am baffled. My father slides out from the table, opens the basement door that leads into our kitchen, and descends swiftly, his now-bare feet plopping with purpose, his fingers pulling on the string attached to a bulb that lights the cellar netherworld, his fingers now encircling the downstairs refrigerator’s door, the sound of the padded door unsmushing, and then the fumbling, fumbling, fumbling, opening the “Crisp” drawer, the tough exhalation of recognition. He emerges with a gaping mouth that mimics the black hole of the basement doorway. The tub of Country Crock sits on his palm like a caricature of itself, overly yellow and swollen.

  “Is this vhat you’re talking about?” He seethes. He examines the surface of the margarine closer, then tilts it toward me so that I can see the deep grooves my fingers have cut into the goo.

  I’ve lost so much at this point that I might as well just retort back. “Well, what were you talking about?”

  “Vhat am I talking about? Vhat am I talking about? I’m talking about vhat I found on the lawn!” And somehow, from his back pocket, even though the back pocket belongs to his pair of too-tight sky blue lawn-mowing shorts, he produces Blueberry Muffin—SS’s best friend and confidante. Her painted eyes seem to be pleading with me, and they are all the more affecting due to their smallness—tiny pinpoints of worry. Her blue rubber hat is askew, and on its summit are the initials KS, which I scrawled upon it with a black felt tip marker.

  This is going to be so much worse than him finding out that I am eating butter. Why did I think that eating butter, of all my actions, would be the worst one for him to discover? I have been too, too frivolous. In my attempt to hide things from him, I’ve forgotten just how many deviant behaviors I’m engaged in. A pang hits me as I think of the makeup, the porn, the butter, the dolls. Which is the most incriminating? Which one would I want least for him to find?

  “Kiran Beta, vhy vould you have a doll like this? I know that you are getting older and that you are getting interested in girls, but this is not the time for hanky-panky. You must focus on your studies and that is it. There vill be time for girls later.”

  Somehow, it seems that my father has been able to pick up on my other closed-door behavior, too. I shudder thinking how he might have espied me taking off Blueberry’s clothing one day so that I could see what she looked like underneath—a shiny body of peach plastic, with a cinched chest and wider waist, the opposite of Barbie’s top-heavy physique. I would never have done such a thing to SS; I turned her away from us, hid her head in my comforter while I examined Blueberry. I even felt a blush of shame when I buttoned Blueberry’s clothes back on. Here, in the kitchen, I feel truly violated that my father has deduced this behavior, that he has breached the sacredness of the subtle furrow in Blueberry’s peach plastic back, the thin tenderness of her peach plastic legs, the vacant, smooth peach plastic nothing of her sex.

  But I say nothing more. I look straight into my father’s angry eyes.

  “Kiran.” He adopts an ever harsher tone of warning. “Beta, do you know vhen I vas growing up in India, my dad used to slap me if I looked right into his eyes? Here they tell you, ‘Look at me vhen I’m talking to you,’ but there you keep your eyes down.”

  I obey, looking at the shiny wood of the kitchen table.

  “Beta, you have to stop doing things like this. Do you know vhat people vill think? Vhy vould you ruin your life by doing all of this nonsense? You are a strange boy, Kiran, and you need t
o change your habits or you are going to be noplace.”

  He walks out of the kitchen and into the laundry room with Blueberry and the Country Crock in his hands, and then I hear the door to the garage open. There is another series of sounds, and this time it is more tear-inducing than fear-inducing: the flapping of his bare soles against the smooth, oil-stained cement floor, the opening of the big black plastic trash can, and then the solid thud of Blueberry’s own plastic hitting the bottom. The solidness of the thud means there is no Glad bag, no other trash aside from the accumulated sludge at the bottom. Then there is a larger sound: the Country Crock, devastatingly heavy, hitting with a ferocious crush, a splash of butter escaping from its cracked-open lid. When my father comes back in, I avoid his eyes. I wait until he has gone upstairs before I walk over to the counter, shaking, and flick the portable stereo back on.

  “-levé!” faux Richard bellows, and I stand on tiptoe. It is when I think of Blueberry’s azure tresses stained through with greasy grime, her beautiful body slathered in butter, that I feel the heat inside of me, turn off the stereo, go to my room, and release another potential headache by way of tears. At one point, I think to hold SS near me but fear that I might see in her eyes what I have just seen in my father’s.

  You’ll Go Down in Hi-sto-ry (Like Lincoln!)

  The talent show is a big deal. An enormous deal. And not just because it allows me the opportunity to show my worth to the rest of the school. It also allows me the opportunity to erase all of my past wrongs.

  I am the reigning king of the fall talent show, having successfully executed three routines, in third, fourth, and fifth grades. None from kindergarten through second grade, because the teachers think those grades are too early to perform anything of real worth, although let me remind you of Kevin Bartlett’s Bon Jovi performance to underline that age is not an indication of having any artistic relevance. My past routines, in chronological order, were as follows: