Aerogrammes and Other Stories

Ethnic Ken




• • •




My grandfather believed that the guest bathroom drain was a portal for time travel. I didn’t mind his beliefs until they intruded on my social life, what little I had. My friend Newt and I were playing slapball against the side of my house—I was up to a record sixty-seven slaps—when my grandfather came outside and yelled at me in Malayalam for leaving a clot of my long hair in the bathtub drain, thereby blocking his route. His mundu was tied up like a miniskirt, wet scribbles of hair against his spindly calves. After calling me a “twit,” my grandfather stormed back inside, leaving Newt to stare at me with a dispiriting combination of pity and shock.

“Did he call you a tit?” Newt asked.

“A twit. He’s my grandfather,” I added, as if that would explain things.

“He kinda seems like a jerk.”

My grandfather wore house slippers with pom-poms at the toes. He could slice and deseed an apple in the palm of his hand. He believed that he was trapped somewhere in 1929, with the nine-year-old version of his wife, Ammu. He believed, without a doubt, that I was Ammu.

I could explain to Newt the firm but illogical architecture of my grandfather’s delusions or I could stop inviting him to my house. So that was it for Newt and me.

In his absence, I played Barbie by myself, which wasn’t as much fun without Newt and his Peaches n’ Cream Barbie or Winter Wonderland Barbie, both of which he had borrowed from his older sister. My Barbie wore a gingham skirt and a saggy swimsuit that kept slipping down her chest in the middle of a conversation. My mom reminded me, often, that I was getting too old to play with dolls, being two months away from ten, but Newt was ten and he disagreed. He had even offered to steal one from his sister for me, a Ken. That was before he called my grandfather a jerk.

My mom would never buy me a Ken. I didn’t even ask; it would’ve been too embarrassing to confess that I wanted my dolls to get romantic when I myself wasn’t supposed to get romantic for another fifteen years. All I had left was a mannish knockoff of Barbie named Madge. Madge had big, flat feet and a chest like an afterthought, small and undefined. I chopped off her hair and knocked their heads together, but there were certain leaps that even my imagination just refused to make.

Two days after he chewed me out, my grandfather tried to make peace. We’d been through this before. I would be sitting in my room, racing through my homework to watch the TV shows everyone at school would be quoting the next day. My grandfather would wander in without a greeting, surveying my walls—the church calendar my mom had taped up, the poster of Jordan dunking with his tongue out. My grandfather had a quiet way of moving from room to room of our house, his hands behind his back, like a tourist observing the natives from a clinical distance.

This time, though, I was more than usually peeved and didn’t look up from my vocab list when he stood beside me. He was wearing a fresh mundu, which now fell to his ankles, and over this, my mother’s satin lavender robe, because satin, he said, made him feel expensive.

“Ammu,” he said, “I cleaned the drain.”

“Good.”

“It’s still not working.” Sighing heavily, he seated himself on the edge of my desk, his lavender rump on the corner of my vocab sheet. “I didn’t mean to yell at you, but my knees get tired, squatting in that tub.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, and I nodded. Malayalam didn’t come easily to me, but it was all he knew. By the time I’d piece together a complex sentence, he’d be rambling on to his next.

“What happened to your friend?” my grandfather asked. “The little one. He never comes around anymore.”

“He moved.”

“For good?” My grandfather perked up at the thought. He’d always been a little jealous of Newt and all the time I spent with him. “Sarilla, Ammu. We’ll play our own games. We can play marbles—you love marbles.”

He reminded me of the glass marbles I used to play with as a little girl, how I had my very own pouch of them in swirled reds and cloudy blues, how I used to play with my boy cousins by the tamarind tree. My grandfather got up and peered out the window by my desk. “Where is that tree …”

“I don’t want to play marbles.”

He seemed surprised, and slightly hurt. “Then what do you want to play?” He followed my gaze to the Barbie and Madge dolls, which were sitting upright on the corner of my desk. He took crew-cut Madge by the ankles and gave me a sidelong look. “Dolls? Still?”

“I have to do my homework.”

I covered up the definitions column and tried to remember the difference between imply and infer. I did a few more words before realizing that my grandfather was still standing there, looking deep into Madge’s tiny eyes. I could see his mind sliding in a wayward direction, as often happened at dusk. Something about the end of each day rattled him, made him jostle his dentures around for relief.

“Hey,” I said gently.

He returned Madge to my desk and started cracking his knuckles, another tic. “But the tree … where is it?”

Here is where my mom would have insisted that there was no tamarind tree, that we were in Louisville, Kentucky, where tamarind trees didn’t grow.

“We cut it down,” I said.

My grandfather pursed his lips, his eyes still out the window, as if he couldn’t trust the scenery to stay in place. These were the hardest times to witness, when it seemed as though he were teetering at the edge of his fantasies. I hated the thought of him looking down, tumbling headlong into grief.

“The tree is gone,” I said, taking his hand and squeezing it until his eyes found mine. “We had to cut it down. It’s gone.”

Ammu was my mom’s mother. I’d never seen a picture of her as a young girl, but I assumed that she and I must have looked something alike. Before she fell sick, I’d sink kisses into her soft, downy cheeks, and afterward she would wipe my mouth, joking that her darker pigment would rub off on my skin like cheap newsprint. It was the sort of endearment that irritated my mom.

The month before, my grandmother had died of a cancer that began in her thyroid. At the time, she and my grandfather were living with my uncle in Chicago, where her doctor administered modest doses of drugs that left her weak but alive. The disease simmered for a few years, then flared through her lungs. She was buried in Calvary Cross cemetery, surrounded by gravestones bearing American names, the first among our family to be buried far from home.

My grandfather had no opinions on the matter. His Ammu wasn’t dead, as far as he was concerned. Adult Ammu was waiting for him to return to her, somewhere in the future, if only he could find his way back there.

My mom thought that if we kept denying my grandfather’s claims about time travel, he would regain his good sense. My dad and I weren’t so sure. I liked that my grandfather preferred me over everyone else in the house. I thought it funny that he was shy and polite around my parents, whom he considered his in-laws. And for the most part, he took care of me just fine while my parents were off at work. He walked me to and from the schoolbus stop and made cucumber sandwiches, sliced into tiny triangles, because Ammu took pleasure in delicate, Anglophilic things, like tea bags and butter cookies in fluted paper cups. I hated those crumbly cookies, but I ate them just to please him, and when they were finished, I got to keep the royal blue cookie tin.

•

One thing my parents and I could agree on was The Cosby Show. Every Thursday at 7:55 p.m., I bellowed through the halls, “Cosby Show, Cosby Show!” and took up my cross-legged post before the television. In the old days, my dad would plop onto the sheet-covered couch and my mom would put her feet up on his lap, just like Clair Huxtable home from a hard day’s work. We’d chuckle at Theo’s high-pitched distress, groan when Clair and Cliff got frisky. I enjoyed the show as much for the Huxtable clan as for the sound of my parents’ laughter, though that gasping and giggling never echoed through our house anymore. Sometimes I laughed extra loud to encourage my mother’s laughter, but she remained silent, her feet on the floor, her chin in her hand, as if the show were something to endure.

My grandfather never joined us for The Cosby Show. He mostly ignored the television because he hated sitting in any one place for too long. But one evening, just as the show began, he hovered over me and dangled a plastic bag in front of my face. I tried to peer around it. I wanted to study the opening dance sequence and learn Rudy’s move.

“Ammu.” My grandfather gave the bag a shake.

“Amy,” my mom said sharply, for my grandfather’s benefit as much as mine. “Appachen is talking to you.”

I gave up and looked at him. Beaming, he dropped the bag into my lap and clasped his hands, waiting for me to open it.

Inside the bag was the pink top of a box, a bubblegum pink that seized at my heart, the pink of mini-pumps and mini-hairbrushes and all things palm-sized and perfect.

“What is that?” my dad asked.

My grandfather answered but didn’t take his eyes off me. “Just a gift for Ammu. An early birthday gift.”

“Amy’s birthday was three months ago,” said my mother, in her patient but firm voice. I wasn’t listening. I was staring at my gift, a brown-skinned Dream Glow Ken, set against a purple backdrop studded with stars. His skin was the smooth hue of Ovaltined milk. His hair was a thick, stippled helmet of black. Painted bushy eyebrows. An oyster-gray tuxedo. A pink bow tie. A sparkly vest and corsage, both of which allegedly glowed in the dark. I felt the urge to run away with him to the nearest, darkest closet.

“Is he black?” my dad asked.

“He’s brown,” my grandfather said while I plucked at the lid. “There were so many of the brown ones left, and they were half the price of all the others. Is this the one you wanted, Ammu?”

“Don’t open that, Amy.” In seconds, my mom was towering over me. “You told Appachen to spend his money on this?”

I looked to my dad for help, but he was frowning. I concentrated on the ancient scar beneath my mom’s thumbnail, from where a boy once slammed a door on her hand, a mark that spoke of wild, reckless times, a life long left behind.

“I didn’t tell him,” I said. “I implied.”

She snatched up the Ken and asked my grandfather for the receipt.

He smiled weakly, sheepish, as if he’d been scolded. “I can’t buy Ammu a gift? It’s my money.”

“You shouldn’t waste it on things like this, Pappa. The taxi alone must’ve been a fortune.”

“I didn’t take a taxi.”

“Then how did you get to the store?”

He had walked. He’d remembered the route to Toys “R” Us, having seen it on our car rides to the mall. It was really no trouble. Just seven miles of padding along the highway in his lavender robe, and seven miles back, bag in hand.

•

On Monday morning, I wanted to tell Newt what had happened with Brown Ken, but he wasn’t sitting in front of me. Usually I spent all ten minutes of homeroom talking with Newt, who would twist around in his seat to complain about the psoriasis on his elbows or his sister’s retainer, which she’d leave on his pillow just to torture him. No one took any notice of our conversations. The girls found him too slight and pale to be cute, and the boys found him irrelevant because he couldn’t catch a football. Newt had no use for them either.

Since last Thursday, times had changed. Newt had called my grandfather a jerk, and Cotillion was shaking up our social order.

From what I’d gathered, Cotillion was a cult where girls wore floral Laura Ashley dresses and learned how to curtsy and dance with boys in neckties. Newt had sworn to me that he’d never join Cotillion. He called it White People 101, which wasn’t altogether accurate since Eric Madembo had joined, but Mrs. Madembo made him join everything.

That day, in homeroom, I learned that Newt had attended a Cotillion class over the weekend.

Somehow, in that one class, Newt had gained not only friends but female fans. In the hallway, a small flock of them watched as he went over the fox-trot with Betsy Warren, and I pretended not to watch from my desk. He cupped her narrow waist and steered her around, looking her right in the eye as he counted out the beats. “God, Daniel,” said Lydia Coe, accompanied by a groan of such admiration and ardor, it was almost obscene. “How do you make it look so easy?” Only our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Main, called him “Daniel” or, when she was feeling chipper, “Sir Newton.”

The bell rang. Newt let go of Betsy and said something that made the girls laugh, which came as a surprise to me since Newt wasn’t all that funny in public settings. They trickled into the classroom. At the doorway, Lydia Coe stole the glasses right off Newt’s face and slipped them into her pocket. She insisted it was for his own good; he looked so much better without glasses. Betsy Warren totally agreed.

Without even glancing at me, he sank into his chair. I thought he looked weird and planned to tell him so. “Hey,” I said. He brushed his ear with his shoulder, as if warding off a gnat. “Hey, Newt.”

He whipped around and told me it was Daniel. Just Daniel. There was a pink, bean-shaped welt on the side of his nose.

“Sure, Newt,” I said.

“Ew,” Lydia said to Betsy, who was sitting to my right. “Amy’s trying to flirt.”

Betsy made a gagging face. Some of the surrounding kids turned to smirk. Amy Abraham: flirting! My face burned.

Fortunately, Mrs. Main clapped twice and directed our attention to the large cardboard box in the front of the room, beneath the chalkboard, on which was written GUATEMALAN TOY DRIVE. Pinned to the box was a foldout poster of children in tattered dresses and onionskin T-shirts, all dust-tousled hair and round, raw eyes. Chris Sarmiento asked to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Main told him that he should’ve gone before the bell rang. She went on to read from a brochure and pointed from face to face: “Carlo, Cristián, José, Juan, and María.” She circled the whole gang with her forefinger. “These are our friends from Guatemala.”

We listened to her list several facts about running water, toilets, and nutrition, each of which began with a number out of every ten homes. I zoned out, distracted by Mrs. Main’s necklace of faded brass and wooden beads; a small gong hung from each of her ears. She was always wearing oversized necklaces from other countries and twisting them thoughtfully between her fingers as she explained where each was from. She’d once claimed that she got her earrings in Mozambique, but I saw the same pair at Dillard’s, and after that I felt a little sorry for her.

“So as I understand it,” she told us, “we have to fill this box with toys. Dolls, games, books with not too many words. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you want?”

I tore off a corner of notebook paper and wrote, Hey Newt. You have a weird new mole on the back of your neck. Maybe cancer. We had learned about lethal moles in health class; I was only trying to help him out. I folded up the note and tossed it onto his desk. Lydia Coe was watching me. I bugged my eyes at her until she faced forward.

As soon as he read the note, Newt’s hand shot up in the air. “Can we bring our old stuff? My sister has some Barbies …”

I prodded him in the back with the eraser end of my pencil.

“And a Ken,” he added.

I sat back in my seat. When Mrs. Main was done with her presentation, I noisily scooted my desk and chair a few inches away from Newt’s, until Madeleine Peelle, behind me, complained that my braid was getting all over her desk.

At dinner, I distilled the necessary information for my mom—the Guatemalans, the dirty water, the infant deaths, the toys. “Toys?” she said, grimacing as she poured a pot of boiled rice into the colander. “They don’t have proper food and clothes, and you want to give them toys?”

I was still mad at my mom for kidnapping Brown Ken, but she didn’t seem to notice. After last week’s Cosby episode, my dad had stopped by my bedroom with a bowl of strawberry ice cream and told me to be nice to Mom because she was having a hard time. She had, in a way, lost both her parents at once. But it was tough being around my mom and the toxic sadness that trailed her all day. Whole hours went by with her supine on the bed, listening to a bland channel on talk radio. When I wandered in and asked what she was listening to, she always said, “I don’t know, some trash.” She continued to lay there, her forearm over her eyes, as if her brain were receiving a necessary transfusion of thought.

After that conversation with my dad, I resolved to be nicer to her. But sometimes she made it impossible, like now, by suggesting that I donate Brown Ken to the Guatemalan Toy Drive. “Appachen can’t find the receipt,” she said.

“My Ken? Why can’t I have him?”

My mom handed me four plates to put on the table. I stood there, glowering, panicky, plates in hand. Steam curled up around her as if she were casting an evil spell in the sink.

I went to the table, where my grandfather was already seated, and plopped down three plates. “Easy, easy,” he said, even though the dishes were plastic.

When my mom came over with the pot of rice, my grandfather raised a finger to speak. “I could buy a different doll for her to give the school.”

“Don’t waste more of your money, Pappa. Amy is too old for these toys.”

I reasoned, as I had many times before, that the Barbie box said “5 & Up,” a limitless upper limit she refused to understand. Getting no reply, I said, “You just want everyone to be in a bad mood because you’re always in a bad mood.”

My mom paused before ladling rice onto my grandfather’s plate. I wondered if I had hit upon something true, but rather than waste time trying to pick it apart, I focused on what I understood: I wanted my Ken.

I slid down in my seat until I was eye level with the table.

“Ammu,” my grandfather said quietly.

“Sit up,” my mom ordered.

“I hate rice,” I said. “Every day: rice, rice, rice.”

“Shut your mouth.” My mom grabbed my shoulder and yanked me into a sitting position.

“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.

“Newt,” I hyperventilated, pointing. “Fell down the stairs.”

She uttered one word with total control—“Where”—and sprinted toward the crowd of girls, pumping her arms, as unaccustomed to running as I was to merengue.

I watched from a careful distance. By the time Mrs. Main knelt down beside Newt, Lydia Coe was helping him sit up. His mouth was moving. He was telling them what had happened, how I’d raged at him like a rabid animal. Or maybe he wasn’t. No one looked my way.

I went inside and put my head down on my desk, exhaling frothy rings of vapor onto the Formica. My head felt tight and clogged. Through the window I could see Newt limping along, flanked by two boys, Mrs. Main, and several more girls helping shepherd him across the grass. It wouldn’t be long before Lydia Coe would come bursting through the double doors in search of ice packs. For now, it was just me and Ethnic Ken, stuck straight up in the pile of toys. The possibility of theft flashed and faded. It had never occurred to me that I could grow out of Ken in a matter of minutes, that “5 & Up” had a ceiling after all, and running straight into it left a lasting bruise.

That night, I hovered in the doorway of the bathroom. My grandfather was squatting over the drain, probing each hole with a toothbrush whose bristles were splayed and gray. “I can’t get it clean,” he said. He dropped the toothbrush and folded his arms over his knees, shaking his head. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

I sat on the ledge of the tub. Before he came to live with us, the tub was always speckled and laced with grime. Now it was a spotless, astonishing white, even the veins between the tiles scraped clean.

He put his face on his forearms.

“Look.” I dangled a red mesh bag of marbles in front of him. I’d felt a little guilty about lifting the little bag from the Toy Drive box, but those kids weren’t the only needy ones.

He drew a quick, ecstatic breath. “Where did you find them, Ammu?”

“Somewhere under my bed.”

I expected him to question the label, which read, “Classic Marbles, $2.” Instead, his hand closed around the bag, clenched as tightly as every tale my grandmother had told him. “See, I remembered,” he said. “I remember everything.”

I tore open the bag and emptied them into his palm. He fingered the different marbles—blues, yellows, reds, and clear ones ribboned with white—each a precious, painted planet. I rested my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s hard, Ammu.” His chin trembled. “It’s hard being here.”

I nodded and took the big cloudy blue from his hand, rolled it between my fingertips. I asked him to show me how to play.