Chapter 3 Salma #2
I do not share what I hear with anyone other than my dear Mamoo.
He knows all about my students from my stories and, eventually, from working with them in the classroom.
For nine months, those kids are like our family.
We talk about them at the dinner table, and he is as vested in their progress and daily trials as I am.
I bring home the juicy morsels to share, anything to get his eyes to sparkle again.
Nothing shocks us anymore. Sometimes we laugh until we cry.
Sometimes we conduct a little private investigation work on our own to see what else we can learn from the internet.
Sometimes we are sad for the children who are forced to grow up too quickly.
In conversations with Mamoo, there are passing references to events in the past, but because of the minefield that is our emotional landscape, we tread carefully. Besides us, there is no one left who knew Asma. There is no one left with whom I can trade memories or assuage my guilt.
I have not told Mamoo about the call from my father.
He is precious to me and increasingly fragile after Aunty’s passing and his diagnosis.
Why burden him? He and Aunty have been the most important people in my life.
That is the constant and unabated truth.
There is no important memory that I can call up in which they are not present.
When we were little, they lightened the air through some kind of alchemy. Never appearing empty-handed, they brought a box of donuts, a book, a game, or as we got older, a new shirt for each of us, leg warmers, and small things to help us fit in.
Their visits were necessary for all of us.
For our parents, Mamoo and Aunty were the translators of all things American.
Mamoo helped Abu get his driver’s license, taught Ami how to drive and open a bank account, and helped us buy our house.
When we were with Aunty, we were a little more American.
She registered us for school with Ami. The school secretary’s eyes traveled from each of us to Aunty and back again, as though she was trying to figure out if we were together or we had just happened to walk into the office at the same time.
In response, Aunty took Asma’s hand in hers and placed her arm around my shoulder.
Once, Mamoo stood on the back patio and looked up at the sky as it slid from twilight to indigo.
The early stars emerged clear and sharp for their nightly vigil.
In my memory, Asma and I flank him and, as in so many things, copy him.
Legs wide, hands on hips, head tilted back.
Someone has just mown their lawn, the air sweet and sharp.
He says something like, “You don’t get this in the city. ”
By then, whatever few memories of Pakistan I had were already written over.
The smell of stale oil and spices in a dark stairwell and lone swing in a dusty field had been supplanted by the wide-open freshness of country air with a hint of animal dung, dew on grass, the sounds of crushed gravel and cacophonic birds, and the dark and woodsy mystery of the woods. This was all there had ever been.
Once, he asked, “Tell me. What’s your favorite thing?”
Asma said, “It’s like living in Little House on the Prairie.”
That was the highest compliment. We had received the full set of the books from the bug market, and Asma and I had read them over and over.
“People can play music on a piece of grass and shoot the heads off weeds so they go flying. And there’s a family of deer that come to the side of the house!”
Mamoo clapped his hands with enthusiasm. “Then you’re in the right place.”
Once, he asked, “What did you cook for me, Sadia?”
Ami said, “Your favorite, bhindi with lots of mirch and aloo parathas.”
Mamoo looked at Aunty and mouthed, “Sorry.” She just smiled and took his hand. My parents never touched each other, not a pat on the back, not a hand on the arm.
Late that night, Asma faced me in our makeshift bed, the whites of her huge eyes luminous in the near darkness, and asked if I had seen them holding hands. “Why do you think Mamoo said sorry to Aunty?”
Asma processed information quickly and intuitively, but sometimes she missed the most obvious things. I had to tell her it was because Aunty didn’t like spicy food and Ami had purposefully made it spicy.
Once, shortly after we arrived, there was a big event at the park across the street.
From our living room window, we could see the pavilion softly aglow with strings of light.
As the night stilled, the sounds of twangy, soulful country music and relaxed laughter, dampened by the humidity of the summer night, traveled back to us.
Aunty asked if anyone wanted to go over and check out the music at the fair.
No one moved. We did not understand that language of easy pleasure and relaxed joy. I still don’t.
The only thing that marred those visits, which became rarer over time, was the low-level animosity Abu felt toward them.
When Mamoo and Aunty were there, Asma and I slept upstairs on the living room floor so that they could sleep in our bed.
On those nights, we fell asleep to Ami and Abu talking through the open door of their bedroom.
Ami’s full softness and hushed consonants of Urdu responding to Abu’s harder, more guttural Punjabi, irascible and complaining about Mamoo and Aunty.
In the beginning, the thing Abu seemed to hold against Mamoo was that he had married Aunty Priya, who had two strikes against her.
One that she was American and the other that she was Indian.
He judged them for their travel, for their money, for their weight.
But over time, there were other fissures.
Maybe Abu could tell that Asma and I secretly wished Mamoo was our father.
Maybe he envied Mamoo’s success and good-naturedness and ability to navigate the world.
Maybe he resented how easy Mamoo made things look.
Mamoo’s and Abu’s personalities were as different as their physical appearances.
Mamoo was short and round where Abu was tall and lanky.
His lack of hair, with a receding hairline, was all the more noticeable against Abu’s thatch of straight, thick hair, which Ami trimmed every three weeks.
Mamoo’s eyes were a sparkly light-brown with a naked curiosity, and in summer he became a dark tan, in contrast to Abu’s black-nugget eyes and pale skin.
Aunty had been born and raised in America by her Indian father and American mother.
Her mother had sought to encourage a culture of Indian-ness in Aunty’s family and wanted her children to feel proud of their heritage.
But these things have a habit of settling to the mean.
Like Abu and Ami learned too late, American culture was an invasive species that takes over.
Aunty was one of three and joked that if her parents had had one more child, it would have been albino, because each sibling got successively fairer with lighter hair and eyes.
Aunty’s oldest brother had black hair and was darker complexioned; her middle brother looked like a Spaniard.
And then there was Aunty, with her light-brown hair and green eyes and complexion that burned in the sun.
While other little girls dreamed of princes and fairy tales, I fantasized about being sick and taken care of by Mamoo and Aunty, to have their ministrations and love focused solely on me.
In my dreams, I lay in a hospital bed, the sheets tucked tightly around my body.
I never moved. I just watched the goings-on in the hospital in slow motion.
The only action in the dream was Mamoo, who looked at me sadly and lovingly while handing me presents and calling me Salamander the Great, and Aunty, who pressed her cool hands to my forehead.
Marlene is always late. Sometimes a minute, sometimes ten.
She carries Bear on her hip in the morning but rarely in the afternoon.
She is always cheerful, even when apologizing.
Although the more I get to know her, the more it feels like she’s putting on a brave face.
Usually, chronic tardiness annoys me to no end.
Not only because it inconveniences me, but because of the message it sends to the child.
You were not important enough for me to show up on time.
Say what you will about my parents, they were always early in picking us up, always striving to be the model American parents.
But with Marlene, curiously, I find myself tolerant.
I can’t tell who the real Marlene is; there is something about her that escapes easy description.
Like her accent that fades in and out, so, too, does her personality.
She is always full of warmth and charm, making me wonder if she is all veneer; I don’t trust anyone who tries to woo me.
Sometimes, she is dazzling. I notice the way people watch her.
The tall, muscular woman who wears an unabashedly wide smile and bold prints, striding down the sidewalk, greeting everyone like she’s running for mayor.
Other times, she looks wrecked, like life is simply too much.
She reminds me of my own mother in the way she stands apart from the small cliques, arms wrapped around her middle like she’s holding herself together.
She does not stand with the Southeast Asian moms or the grandmothers or nannies or the stay-home moms with twig legs in their uniform of exercise clothes who worry out loud about how bloated they feel.
No, Marlene is more javelin thrower than hot-yoga waif.