Read Aerogrammes Online

Authors: Tania James

Aerogrammes (7 page)

BOOK: Aerogrammes
6.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Then he’s probably not that good,” says Wes. “I’d never leave my violin just anywhere.”

I ask him if I can borrow his violin, just for a day, so my dad can play like he used to.

Wes bores into me with his big, blinking eyes. Then he says no, and goes back to drawing.

He doesn’t give a reason, just
no
, again and again. I begin to suspect that he enjoys saying no to me, that it feels like he’s saying no to everyone who has ever said no to him. All I can do is face forward, stuck with a view of a peeling pleather seat.

It is six p.m., and I am finished with my math homework. Sometimes my mother devises extra homework for no other reason than to keep me away from the television, but now that my father is here, she makes no comment when I tug a chair up next to his, just behind his line of sight. My feet don’t reach the coffee table, like his do.

We watch Lynne Russell on Headline News, sneezing every so often because my mother is frying chili-rubbed fish. I keep saying “Bless you” under my breath, until my father says, “
Bleshyew, bleshyew
—what does it mean?”

“Something about hell,” I fumble, embarrassed by the sudden beam of his attention. “So you won’t go to hell.”

I am relieved when he grunts and turns back to sensible Lynne Russell and her smooth, sculpted cheekbones. I look at the hair on the back of my father’s hand, a wild tuft above each knuckle, in the exact place where lately I have seen one or two hairs of my own. This is my dad, I think. Today I am going to call him Dad. After my mother goes to bed, I will show him what I obtained at great risk during recess, when I asked to use the bathroom and instead jimmied open Wes Lipkin’s locker. His violin case fit neatly into my drawstring gym bag. At the end of the day, I was the first one on the bus.

The opportunity doesn’t seem to present itself. My father appears more haggard than he did yesterday evening. His eyes are bloodshot. Every so often he takes small sips of orange juice from a big plastic cup. When I ask for a sip, he says no so quickly that tears spring to my eyes. “I’m sick,” he adds, without looking at me.

During the weather report, my mother comes in holding the violin case in both hands. She demands to know where I got it.

I say that my friend Wes Lipkin let me borrow it.

“Then why did Mrs. Lipkin call just now and say you stole it?” she asks. For this, I have no answer. I assumed that Wes Lipkin would figure it out, but I never guessed that he would tattle. “Lying and stealing—this is what you learn at school?”

She takes two long strides and I brace for the blow, but my father’s outstretched legs are blocking her path. He has been sitting between us, looking back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “You’re her father,” my mother reminds him. “Yell at her!”

My father sits up with the cup in his hand, spilling a bit of juice on his knee before setting it under the coffee table. He turns to me, dropping his voice low. “Why did you do it?” My
face goes hot and cold at once. I pinch my own thigh. “Huh? Why did you steal that thing?”

“I wanted to hear you play.”

My mother and father stare at me.

“So you can play like you did last night,” I say, a strange sense of panic filling my chest. “The way you used to play over there, in Dubai.”

My mother snorts. “Play what?”

My father listens to me, for the first time, without scorn, his face opening up with faint surprise. Then he glances up at my mother and waves me away. “What kind of nonsense. I don’t know what she’s saying.”

“Remember, with the radio?” I mimic his playing, but he won’t look at me anymore and my arms fall to my sides. I try to steady my voice. “Your friend, the girl who plays the violin?”

“Girl?” my mother says in a voice that is small and strained. It does sound strange when I say it aloud. His friend, a girl.

My mother turns to my father, and as his eyes search mine, I understand that he isn’t lying. He simply doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember saying,
You are the only one who gets me
, the loveliest compliment of all my eight years.

Quietly, my mother tells me to go to my room and get dressed. She says that she will drive me to the Lipkins’ so I can apologize and return the violin.

Before I have closed the door to my room, the fight has begun. Their voices are subdued and tense, nearly unintelligible until they start shouting, and I learn certain truths at terrible speeds: there is a woman in the Gulf, a woman he left behind for my mother’s visa, a woman who may be watching the road and waiting for him as we once did. And though none of us will ever again call up her presence, the woman will take
up space in our house, as ubiquitous as a vapor, a woman at my window with one hand on the sill, tapping on the glass with the bow of her violin.

My mother and father stop fighting only when the old man who lives below us bangs his broom against his ceiling. The old man usually delivers this complaint when I’m jumping rope indoors, and for once I am grateful for his intervention. My parents fall silent.

I hear the door to my mother’s bedroom slam shut. I am still sitting at the foot of my bed, gripping the bedpost, waiting to know what has changed and what will stay the same. Through the wall I hear the sound of soft, stifled weeping.

By the time I get up and pad quietly to my mother’s door, the weeping has stopped. I know how to comfort her, how to crawl into her bed and hang my leg over her hip the way we used to sleep when it was just the two of us. I slip into her unlit room, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out a hunched shape—my father. Alone, he is sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to me. When he wipes the corner of each eye with the heel of his hand, he seems no older than I am, and I will remember this gesture for years. I linger in the still pool of his sorrow. Quietly as I can, I slip back into the hall and close the door.

The Scriptological Review:
A Last Letter from the Editor
• • •

This is not a guide to good handwriting. You’ll find no dos and don’ts, no dotted lines here. If that’s what you’re looking for, try
Cursive First
, a workbook force-fed to me at the age of eight, when the nuns tried to mold my hand around the rubber pencil grip of conformity.

What you’re reading is the final copy of
The Scriptological Review
, a journal dedicated to the social analysis of handwriting. Our inaugural issue appeared two years ago, with a cover story titled “Slanty Signatures and Secret Turmoil: The Correlation Between High Cursive Slant and Low Self-Esteem.” In this, we analyzed a letter from John Wilkes Booth, whose cursive was brambled with signals that the lay reader would likely ignore, such as intraletter gaps and distended
a
’s and
o
’s.

If you’re still reading, then it’s likely that you are a subscriber and a scriptophile, but for the remaining fraction who have happened upon this issue on a bus seat or in a dentist’s
office (or propping open a window, as I found my mother’s copy of Volume IV), let me introduce myself.

My name is Vijay Pachikara, and I am presently the editor of
The Scriptological Review
. My mom is listed on the masthead as “publisher-at-large,” but all she provides is the funding and the office space. I set up shop in her basement a year ago, and the commute from my bedroom couldn’t be better.

As long as my mom handles the funding, I don’t mind if she wants to while away her time with her boyfriend, Kirk Bäumler. Kirk is reliable and handy, like a good garden tool, a man of patience and resolve who once felled a cedar tree on his property and fashioned it into a dugout canoe. There may be much to admire about men like Kirk, but his handwriting tells another story.

Exhibit A:
Inscription from Birthday Card to Vijay from Kirk

Consider the narrowness of the e-loops, so sharp that they verge on lowercase
i
’s, a recurring sign of neediness. Also note the castrated
y
.

I tried to persuade my mom to note as much while she was packing for their overnight trip to Nashville, but she was too busy fitting her belongings into her suitcase, as pleased as if she were assembling the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Kirk had urged her to come away with him to the Bahamas, but she refused to leave town for more than a night. I told Kirk
that this was for the best, since I’d need her to make a few purchases from the photocopy store, where my credit card had been repeatedly declined. Kirk bit his lower lip, as he often does when I mention the
Review
.

Kirk has been sore ever since I wedged copies of the
Review
under the fenders of his employees’ cars two weeks ago. Apparently, the boardroom drones of Steak Shack Inc. have no sense of imagination or innovation, save the daughter of one guy, who called the number on the back of the magazine and asked if she could “sign up for the writing club.” Caitlin lived with her parents, said “um” a lot, and had less than a rudimentary comprehension of scriptology. Maybe she was bored. I was about to give her directions to my house when we were interrupted by what sounded like her father in the background: “Who’re you talking to, Cait? It’s been forty-five minutes.”

I heard her say, “No one …” before she promptly hung up.

A few days later, Kirk and my mom returned from Nashville. For half an hour, we bleeped through their digital photos: jubilant smiles, sad khaki shorts, both of them flanking a painted guitar twice their height. Her, in a rare moment of unabashed laughter, her hand at her heart, a gaudy rock on her finger, a ring I didn’t recognize. Him, standing beneath a sign that read
GRAND OLE OPRY HOUSE
, his arms spread wide as if waiting for a huge hug. (See Exhibit A, Neediness.)

“Well,” I said finally. “Well, great. Now my news. Mom, I’ve been thinking about the next issue of the
Review
—” I looked at Kirk pointedly. “Kirk, could you …” I glanced at the door. Kirk. Door. He sat there like a dog that didn’t know its own name.

He told me that he and my mom had gotten engaged.

“Yeah, I get it. I’m not surprised per se, if that’s the response
you’re looking for. But congrats to you both.” My mom and Kirk traded glances, communicating in the not-so-secret parlance of married people. “Can we move on?”

Kirk moved on to trashing the
Review
. He recommended that I shut down operations, because he and my mom would be married soon. My mom would be the wife of the CEO of Steak Shack Inc., and the CEO could not afford phone calls like the one he’d received yesterday evening from a board member who had threatened to “take action” if he caught me communicating with his twelve-year-old daughter again.

Accordingly, my mom would be withdrawing all money from my budget, thus halting operations.

I stared at her. Wincing, she rubbed her chest, where her skin had lightly burned. “Did you know she was twelve?” my mom asked.

“Obviously not, Mom.”

“Why were you talking to her for forty-five minutes?”

“Because,” I said, looking only at her, “she was listening.”

This prompted a certain tone of voice my mom takes when she thinks I’ve lost the bread-crumb trail to normalcy. She asked if I needed to talk to Dr. Fountain, a heavily perfumed shrink I’d been seeing off and on throughout the year. It always made my face burn when she brought up Dr. Fountain in front of Kirk.

“As I was saying.” Maybe I repeated that phrase a few times while flipping the pages of my notebook, in which my scrawl was deeply, deliberately engraved. “The next issue will be dedicated to Dad.”

In our two years of circulation,
The Scriptological Review
has published a biannual personafile on historical or celebrity figures.
Each signature, each strand of unraveled scripts, has led to analyses of the type rarely recorded in the humdrum biography or rise/fall/rehab biopic. Some highlights include Benjamin Franklin (“If Left Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right”), the Marquis de Sade (“Outer Loops and Inner Demons”), and Martha Stewart (“White Space 101”). In light of such figures, one might question the relevance of a personafile concerning my father, Prateep.

But this personafile has been long in the making, a goal of mine ever since the inaugural issue of the
Review
. My mission is to enlarge what my dad was reduced to, the five lines of an obituary, because we are survived not by memories but by what we leave behind in print or picture, and how are five stunted lines to span the breadth of a man’s life?

Take Exhibit B, a telling excerpt lifted from a letter sent by my father to my mother in the first two weeks of their marriage, after he had flown ahead of her to the United States. She would be following shortly, her first time leaving her family in Bangalore.

Exhibit B:
Excerpt from Letter Sent by Prateep J. Pachikara to His Wife, Annamma

BOOK: Aerogrammes
6.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Just a Kiss by Denise Hunter
Naughty Spanking Games by Kerry Sutherland
Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne
Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Black, Benjamin
Don't Kill the Messenger by Eileen Rendahl
Plague Bomb by James Rouch
A Body at Bunco by Elizabeth Spann Craig