Chapter 15 The Chins #4
Baba shook his head and sat down on the lounge chair.
“Kids at school know about this? All the kids at school know you sit around all day, you don’t have friends—”
“Macon.”
“You don’t have friends, they gonna say you’re a queer.” His father twisted in his chair and looked pointedly at Jason. “You know what that means?”
Someone had once called Macon a queer. Any soft, kind boy, they’d call a queer.
“A faggot,” his father said, almost relishing the opportunity to say the word, it seemed to Jason.
Jason waited for his father to leave him alone. Then Jennifer, Julie, and his mother appeared in the kitchen, and his father brought his complaints to them.
“Ni ga doi hou lazy,” he said to their mother. “Kui just sit around all day playing with the typewriter. Kui no social skills.”
“Ni bong ni baba,” his mother called tiredly into the living room.
“He didn’t ask me for help!” Jason cried. “He doesn’t need me to do anything.”
“Well, come wash dishes, then,” Julie yelled back.
Jason debated whether he ought to assist in the kitchen or run upstairs to escape.
His mother appeared in the doorway of the living room and, saying nothing, sat down beside him with a bowl of snow peas in her lap.
Pod by pod, she peeled the strings. Swallowing, he set aside the typewriter and gathered a handful from the bowl.
Together, they cracked the pod tips, tugging the threads across the pods like jacket zippers, piling the strings on the coffee table.
“What you do today?” she finally asked in English.
“Write.”
“Why you write?”
“I’m a writer,” he said.
The answer came unexpectedly. Never before had he claimed the title. He wondered if he was allowed to say this. If he was good enough.
But he had loved saying the word, and he would not take it back.
He looked up at her. His mother remained quiet, which made his heart thump. She gave him another handful of snow peas, and when they’d finished, she put the bowl on the table and took Jason’s hands in her own.
“You’re going to be a man soon,” she said softly in Toisanese.
“And then you are not a child anymore. It is okay to play when you are a child, but when you are grown up, you must think about your future. Think about a job. You are good with English, so you can use your writing to get a good job. You can be a lawyer. You can’t make money writing silly things.
Can you feed children on poems?” She laughed, pinching his cheek.
“One day Baba and Mama will be old! Can you take care of your parents writing poems?”
Jason held her cold, damp hands. He gestured with his chin toward his sisters in the kitchen.
“They’ll make money. Can’t they take care of you?”
He was being serious, but she laughed. “Aiya,” she cried, tousling his hair.
He winced, felt a blueness seep across his chest. Either they would smother him, or he would betray her. It was only a matter of time.
His English teacher made him Elaine’s desk partner, and when Valentine’s Day approached, he panicked. It was his chance to make his feelings known, but he didn’t know how. He’d never seen his father buy his mother a bouquet of flowers, had never heard them say “I love you.”
He decided he would give Elaine a collection of poems. He was in the midst of composing them when another blitz of stuffed animals battered his bedroom window.
Jason wished Macon would call ahead on the phone; it was frustrating to interrupt his process mid-thought.
“You don’t remember?” Macon eyed him when he reached the porch.
Then it hit him. He and Macon had made plans to see The Street Fighter at the Kings.
“You were supposed to meet me at the B8 an hour ago!”
“Sorry.” Jason crossed his arms, shivering. He’d left his jacket upstairs. “I was working on something.”
“On what?” Macon leaned his back on the porch rail.
“A present for someone.”
“Oh, come on. You’re still crushing on that Elaine Mcwhatever? You’re stupid as hell. She doesn’t like you. Everybody knows she’s crushing on Ronny Stein.”
Ice water seeped across Jason’s chest.
“Forget about her, man. She’s the same as the others. She doesn’t see you. Your problem is, you have a white-girl fetish.”
“What?” Jason scowled. He hadn’t expected so many assaults. “No I don’t!”
“Stella, Hannah. You’re so obvious. You liked white girls before you could add fractions. Maybe you watch a little too much Hollywood and it’s gone to your brain. Soon as a white girl passes you by, your eyes pop out of your head.”
The accusation angered him. He liked who he liked.
“Well, what about you?” Jason shot back. “Remember how you ignored Donna Harris? Who’s the self-hater now, huh?”
This time it was Macon who clammed up. Yet when he met Jason’s eyes, it was an expression Jason had never seen before, tight with repressed emotion.
“Jason, do you even know who I am?” His voice was different now, serious and low. “You think I’m your sidekick who shows up to give you relationship advice.”
He brushed past Jason and stepped down the stoop. “I’m going home.”
“Let’s see the film tomorrow.”
“Nah, you’ll be busy. I’ll see it by myself.”
They avoided each other in the hallways at school. When he awoke on Valentine’s Day, something was not right.
It was one of those brutal days in Brooklyn, the wind so cold it burned, the curbs slicked with black ice. The poetry collection was in his backpack. In the school lobby, the Cooking Club sold roses and cupcakes. He glanced at them in fright and continued walking.
In English, Elaine bit the tip of her pencil, her eyes on the door.
He could hear her breathing. He felt every blink of her eyelashes.
He had memorized each of the charms on her bracelet, could spend an hour just going around and around her wrist: trumpet, ballet shoes, tragedy mask, teapot, kitten…
He thought about what Macon had said.
To give her the poems, or not give her the poems. That was the question.
Halfway through the period, someone knocked on the classroom door and turned the handle, disrupting the lecture.
“Mrs. Palmer, may we interrupt for just a minute?” begged a Cooking Club member. “We’re making a delivery.”
When Mrs. Palmer relented, the two girls entered the classroom, their arms full of separately wrapped roses, and their elbows strung with shopping bags full of cupcakes.
“You got one for me?” someone shouted from the back of the classroom.
“Buy me a cupcake, Mrs. Palmer!” another student jested.
Jason held his breath. Birds pecked at the flesh of his rib cage. He had wrapped the poetry collection in red tissue paper and hid it in his desk cubby.
“One rose,” said the Cooking Club member, and she read a tag attached to the flower. “For a… Elaine McIntosh?”
Everyone turned to look at her, and Elaine’s cheeks flushed.
“Ooooooo,” the room cooed as the flowers made their way to her desk.
“Who’s it from?”
“Is it from Caleb?”
“Nah, it’s Ronny Stein, right?”
“Are you and Ronny going out?”
Elaine took the plastic-wrapped rose and read the label on the stem. A tender smile crept across her lips. She cradled the rose against her breast, her care for it reminding Jason of the way she’d held the limp, fake-dead hand of Caleb-as-Romeo. He could not see the label, but he didn’t need to.
Jason tucked the poetry collection back into his backpack. He would have liked to cry, but instead, he studied a dried splotch of gum in the cubby. It was a green brain, a tiny map of a fantasy island, a foreign planet.
Who cared if he was good or not. Turning inward, he was safe. He would retreat there—as he would for decades onward—to forget about what hurt him.