Blue Boy Page 9

  1) Third grade—a rousing rendition of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?,” that old classic, which I sang in three variations: regular, staccato, and adagio.

  2) Fourth grade—a rousing rendition of Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” a touching ballad;

  3) Fifth grade—

  You know, fifth grade is too epic for me to tack onto a numbered list. Fifth grade was monumental, a defining artistic experience, the moment I really came into myself as an artist and realized my true creative potential. I decided that I would present a rousing rendition of “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid. Unless you’re totally mental and don’t know, “Kiss the Girl” is a really pivotal scene in the movie, in which Ariel, the mermaid who has been transformed into a human by the evil sea witch Ursula, and who has only three days to get Prince Eric to smooch her, has seduced the prince into a boat ride through a blue lagoon. During this, she is serenaded by her trusty sidekick Sebastian the Crab. In his song, Sebastian urges Eric to kiss his red-haired boat companion, thereby breaking the sea witch’s spell and letting everyone live happily ever after.

  For my theatrical rendering, I enlisted the help of two students in the class who shared my less-than-ideal oddball status. Despite all of my obvious social faults, I had one thing going for me: I was thin. My Eric and Ariel, on the other hand, were Eric Banner and Lindsay Bailey, the two fattest kids in our class. Round and bumbling, they were boobs in both senses of the word. Eric, a wisp of a mullet curling off the nape of his neck, was dressed in his cartoon namesake’s token white shirt, and he sweated so badly that twin circles of perspiration tainted the fabric under his arms. This sight was deflected somewhat by Lindsay’s getup: since she didn’t own a red wig, she took a fringed cheerleading skirt—an oddity, since I don’t think Lindsay ever cheerled in her life due to cellulite reasons—and put it on her nappy, dirty-blond tangles. Instead of Ariel’s stately navy blue dress, Lindsay put on what looked like a cassock, obviously a hand-me-down from her Frigidaire of a mother, who helped us out on classroom party days and whose actual gender was up for debate. Still, the way I placed Eric and Lindsay center stage, each perched on one knee, and told them to stare at each other unmoving and unflinching, was as masterly a situation as could be staged.

  As for me, in order to look like the crab-crimson Sebastian, I donned the best and smoothest of my red sweatsuits. But the kicker was the enormous red beanbag I used for a crab shell. As Eric and Lindsay took their places centerstage, I set up shop upstage right, prostrating myself stomach-down on the dusty floor, flipping the beanbag onto my back, and then taking up the microphone. Unfortunately, the stage had no curtain, so we had to do all of this while completely visible to the audience. There was no accompaniment—how else could the audience really hear me?—but this made for a dramatic effect, and the stunned looks on the parents’ faces after I finished singing told me—at least at the time—that they had just witnessed a piece of theater better and more moving than anything they had ever seen.

  Like all great artists, however, my genius was not justly greeted by my peers. The day after I urged Eric to kiss Lindsay, my classmates didn’t react with the adulation I had expected. John Griffin still sent spitballs my way when I walked down the hall, and just when I finished wiping them off my shiny black hair, Jeff Rollins and his goons crab-walked past me, then got up and started doing wayward arabesques, calling out, “I’m Key-ran!” I shrugged them off as best as I could and told myself that an even more rousing performance the next year—this year—would redeem me.

  All the same, I took another step backward later that year, when, in March, my school had History Day. All of us were supposed to dress up as an important historical figure and give a presentation two minutes long—an eternity to a little child, or even an adult. For some reason, my father’s rabid Indian patriotism failed to penetrate my young mind, and so instead of going as Gandhi, donning fake wire spectacles and one of those bald head rubber caps and extolling the virtues of nonviolence, or going as Nehru, sporting a collarless suit, I aimed for that most Indian of historical figures, a true paragon of Hinduism:

  Abraham Lincoln.

  Except I didn’t go as the Honest Abe you would naturally conjure up—tall stovetop hat, bushy muttonchops, long, black waistcoat. Instead, I chose to model myself after a picture of Abe I saw in a picture book in the school library, a slender little volume with crude illustrations that looked like paint-by-number drawings. In the picture I chose as my model, Abe was all of twelve years old, playing outside his family’s cabin in a yellow T-shirt and brown pants. And so that’s exactly what I wore—a yellow polo shirt and brown pants. I was a small Indian boy wearing a yellow shirt and brown pants and claiming to be Abraham Lincoln. It’s a miracle the teacher didn’t commit me to a loony bin on the spot.

  For my presentation, I told people about how Abraham Lincoln was called Honest Abe and how he was shot, at a theater, by a man named John Wilkes Booth—a real tongue-twister for a second grader, and it took me about five whole seconds to pronounce the name, so intent was I on capturing every last melodramatic inflection and insisted that everyone repeat after me, even insisting they replicate the slippery sibilance at the end of my “Wilkes.” I really wanted them all to have that name in-grained in their minds and in their pronunciation, and I’m sure I made many a mother’s eyebrow rise that evening when she witnessed her son or daughter roaming the house reciting a presidential assassin’s name in trance-like concentration.

  After making sure everyone knew that tidbit, I told a joke. A side-splitting joke, one that I hoped would make every kid in the class forget I had shown up for the first day of school with a bundle of pink things—a pink Trapper Keeper, a pink pencil, a pink ruler, a pink notebook, and pink sunglasses that I wore perched on top of my head like I was Poochie, that popular eighties cartoon dog who had hot-pink hair.

  In this presentation joke, a teacher is telling her classroom of young children about Abraham Lincoln’s arduous journey to and from school as a child.

  “Class,” she says, “Abraham Lincoln had to walk seven miles to and from school every day when he was little.”

  To which everyone in the class responds with utter disbelief and a nonplussed silence. Everyone, that is, except tiny Timmy in the back, who raises his hand.

  “Yes, Timmy?” says the teacher.

  “Why couldn’t he catch the bus like everyone else?”

  Ha ha, hee hee, it’s not like this joke is vintage Johnny Carson or David Letterman, it’s not like it’s so funny that people will die of laughter-induced convulsions. But to a roomful of elementary-schoolers, it was hysterical. It was so funny to Mrs. Nolan’s class that more than one classmate snarfed—that is, nose-vomited—the Mott’s Apple Juice that Joey Harmon had passed out as part of his Johnny Appleseed presentation. It was so funny that for a second, though dressed in my yellow and brown cryptic garments, I felt as important and righteous as the real, grave-faced Abe.

  Everyone finished their presentations, the class full on Stephanie Ralston’s Clara Barton cupcakes (white frosting with a red cross squeezed on) and Steven Young’s Daniel Boone donuts (a cop-out, first, because they were just regular Dunkin’ Donuts and second, because Daniel Boone never ate donuts in his life)—and then a life-changing event occurred: The local news showed up.

  The local news broadcasts reign supreme in Cincinnati, so much so that their set pieces seem to change every day. On Monday the whole color scheme might be blue and on Tuesday it could be red, a whole new lighting system rigged to better present the reporters, who sit behind their desks so uprightly that they are like gods pronouncing judgments from on high. More important than the regular reporters, though, are the weather people, for people in this town cannot live without knowing what the weather is going to be like this evening, in half an hour, or just seconds from now. Every week brings another satellite or radar, a different style to the weather graphics: sunglasses added to the orange-rimmed yellow sun
s or multicolored sparkling raindrops glowing underneath the storm clouds or a little booth set up for the weatherman away from all the other reporters, as if he is too gifted with foresight to be bothered by the physical proximity of anyone who might disrupt his prognostication. So focused are these Cincinnatians on the weather ahead that they never seem to notice that the weather at present is nothing like the noble weatherman predicted.

  On History Day, the most important of Channel 7’s reporters came to our school—Melinda Maines. She was the ultimate combo: a weatherwoman who covered special interest stories, as well. She could be hiding under a tarp while tracking a tornado one day, then offering crap-colored food pellets to lambs at a petting zoo the next. Blond bouffant, power-suited, earrings complementing whatever bright color of suit she chose to wear, she had electric blue eyes, as if just by staring at someone she could cause them to make their stories more interesting. After all, her interviewees knew that Melinda could always be on the other side of town interviewing a war veteran or examining caterpillar fur to see how rough the winter would be.

  The moment everyone heard Melinda Maines was in the building, we all went into a gleeful panic. Mrs. Nolan made us clean up the crumbs all over our desks and went hopping around the room fixing people’s costumes—Gretchen Lee’s Sacajawea feather headdress, Chris Henry’s pomegranate of a Pete Rose baseball helmet. Then she lined us all up like we were the von Trapp children, ready to serenade the news crew with “The Sound of Music.” I tried to stand confidently, as if unfazed by their arrival, but inside I was a human thunderstorm, raging more fervently than any monster nimbus that Melinda had confronted in the past. When you are young and you see that metal and plastic box come carried on a thick man’s shoulder, its lens shining like a deity, you feel a heightening of everything that is you, a literal exaltation that makes your eyebrows lift along with your rib cage.

  When Melinda Maines and her chrome-wielding entourage entered our classroom, it seemed like a movie set. And the way Melinda’s hips swung into the room, swaddled in green polyester, the way her Wind Song perfume wafted through like an Ohio Valley cold front, stiffened my spine and made me beam on the classroom’s fraying red carpet.

  Fate intervened in its most graceful, gracious way, and Mrs. Nolan, still playing Captain von Trapp, announced cheerfully, “I have just the person for your broadcast!” and was suddenly behind me, pushing me toward Melinda. Before I knew it, I was standing in the hallway, lit by more lights than Michelangelo’s David and telling my joke to the crew.

  After I recited the joke with more enunciation than my John Wilkes Booth essay, Melinda leaned down to me and said, “Now, make sure you tell your mom and dad that you’re going to be on the six o’clock news tonight.” The time was very important; there was the four o’clock news, the five o’clock news, the six o’clock news, the seven o’clock news. It was like Cincinnati had set up its own CNN Headline News channel, made complete by a token measly interview with a brown person.

  I ran the mile and a half home from school—Abe would’ve been proud—and gushed the news to my parents. We turned the TV on in anticipation. My dad set the VCR to recording, then set up his camcorder in front of the den’s TV to film the filming. When six o’clock finally rolled around, we all watched with bated breath, or breath occasionally interrupted by the dried masala peas my mom gave each of us in small stainless steel bowls. News story after news story—a fire in Hyde Park, triplets born in Bellevue, the unveiling of the fifth Doppler radar in Cincinnati—and then finally, there was Melinda, dressed in a new blue suit, her neon eyes sparkling.

  “Today was History Day at Crestview’s Martin Van Buren Elementary School. Ellen Nolan’s fifth grade class dressed up as historical figures from all walks of life…”

  That was a lie, actually. Even though there was no specification that History Day was American History Day, none of us dressed as anyone foreign—no Winston Churchills or Golda Meirs or, of course, Mahatma Gandhis.

  Melinda’s crew did panoramic shots of the classroom, and then showed little novelties like the salt-and-peppered hair of David Brewer’s Ronald Reagan and the fishbowl of a helmet that Christa Monroe wore as Christa McAuliffe. Where was I? Where could I be? Where was the cheerful pejorative aura I exuded? We all sat, rolling peas in our hands, and then—

  “But some kids were a little confused…” Melinda said.

  Immediately, there was a close-up of little Kiran, yellow shirt aglow, asking—almost pleading—“Why couldn’t he catch the bus like everyone else?”

  It turned out that Melinda Maines was diabolical. In one cleverly rendered sound bite, I had fallen farther down than I already was. She had some nerve, Judas-kissing Honest Abe with a bald-faced lie.

  Needless to say, History Day was transformed into a day of social crumbling. Every time I got on the bus to go to school, snickers would erupt like a chorus of cicadas, and any time Abe Lincoln came up in our social studies—you can’t believe the number of times he does—someone would inevitably deliver that line, “Why couldn’t he just catch the bus like everyone else?”

  This fall’s talent show is one big bus of acceptance, a bus that all the other kids are riding. Despite whatever successes I’ve had in the past, the last “performance” I’ve given is marred with shame, and the only solution is to do the best act of my career this year. Maybe, just maybe, if I perform my routine flawlessly, as electric blue as Melinda’s satanic eyes, I’ll finally be able to catch that bus of acceptance. Just like everyone else.

  Hold Me Closer, Tiny Danseur

  “Do ya have Ballerina Barbie, Keern? Because you could always wear her tutu.”

  Sarah and Melissa’s badgering of me has permeated not only my daily doings at school but one of my true safe havens: ballet class. Our school offers an hour-long class on Wednesday afternoons that makes this “hump” day the highlight of my week, and I usually rely on the swift movements of my body for a weekly burst of happiness. But as I slide my leg in a rond de jambe, I feel like I’m back at my desk in the classroom, peeling off more Barbie smiles.

  Our ballet class is not in a fancy dance studio. It takes place in the school’s multipurpose room, a smallish rectangle with mirrors on one side of it and a floor made of large, white tiles with black specks in them. A makeshift barre has been affixed to the mirrored wall with small, clear reinforcements that look like quartz. We stand at the barre, reflections of ourselves in our periphery. But since the girls are behind me, they can look at my reflection without me being able to look at theirs. Still, I know what they see: everyone else wearing leotards, a couple of the extra-chic girls like Sarah and Melissa wearing leg warmers, while I wear a black T-shirt, black tights, black slippers. Black hair, brown skin.

  Marcy, who gave me the Richard Simmons-esque practice tape, is our teacher—and a high schooler. She has become obsessed with Kenny G, so much so that she has plastered at least a quarter of the wall opposite the barre with magazine pictures of him. Right now, the stereo is switching from one glossy jazz tune to the next. Marcy has a mass of permed hair. The grape-like smell of her hairspray pervades the entire “studio,” and it is as if we kids are put under its spell as she instructs us. We oblige, entirely silent and expressionless. Well, aside from Sarah and Melissa, who continue to hiss at me when Marcy is busy instructing someone else.

  “Key-ran, is that a splinter sticking out of yer ass?” Melissa says. Sarah giggles, then reaches forward and pinches my butt cheek.

  I squeal. “Marcy! Sarah is touching me!”

  Marcy rolls her eyes and says, “Sarah, stop,” but her warning is so limp that I can tell she doesn’t believe me. This is probably why she gave me the lamest award at last year’s end-of-the-year ceremony. Instead of “Best Arabesque,” which I was dying to receive, she gave me “Best Attendance.” Attendance isn’t even a ballet technique.

  “What are ya doin’ for the talent show?” Sarah continues. “Dressin’ like Madonna?” I can hear her shaggy hair flopping
as she shakes her head in mockery.

  I stay silent.

  “We’re doin’ a dance to Janet Jackson,” Melissa brags. “To ‘Rhythm Nation.’”

  “I can’t wait to see that,” I say, “since you two have the worst rhythm in our entire class.”

  “Kye-run!” Marcy yells. “Please stop talking!”

  I frown and growl quietly. I wish I could give Marcy an award for “Best Awful Dance Teacher.”

  “Yeah, stop talking, Key-ran,” Sarah taunts. “Just keep doing yer ballet.”

  As I slide my left foot in another circle, I feel that it is making the retort I want to make. What those girls don’t understand is that dancing and talking are one and the same for me. If I were Kenny G, dancing would be my saxophone.

  I get my penchant for dancing from my mother. She once showed me an old photo album filled with black-and-white pictures of her as a little girl performing khatak, a form of classical Indian dance, a mixture of foot patterns and mysterious hand gestures—and ankle bells, always ankle bells—that conveys stories from the Ramayana and other Indian texts. Every good Indian girl studies dance, and my mother was no different: in each photo, she wore an intricate sari with shiny frazzles forming its hem; garlands of carnations crossed her torso; gold jewelry encircled her wrists, ankles, half her nose. All the while, my mother was dutifully fulfilling her role as an Indian girl, carrying on her face a look of enjoyment coupled with obligation. (Incidentally, her expression was the same in a separate album—a barely opened, dust-encased brick labeled “Wedding” that I excavated from the bottom of my father’s bookcase.) My mother became quite a success, charming onlookers all over Delhi with her foot-pounding and sharp features—the slightly hooked nose, the hairpin-wide gap between her straight front teeth, the almond-shaped eyes locked in kajol, the delicate hands painted with mendhi. When flipping through the plastic-covered pages of that photo album with me, a different smile crept across her face, the sort of distanced reaction that occurs when you look at photos of other people’s adorable offspring. It was as if my mother were admiring someone else’s child. Or someone else’s childhood.