Laugh with the Moon (6 page)

“We are from Tanzania, then Zambia,” Mrs. Bwanali says.

But I have no idea where either of those places is. And does it really matter? This woman won’t be here long. I won’t let her.

“You are a precious girl,” Mrs. Bwanali tells me. “I do hope you enjoy boiled pumpkin. Dr. Heath looooved boiled pumpkin.”

Dad told me that Dr. Heath is the woman who lived in this house before us. She also worked for the Global Health Project. When she returned to England, she left a pair of gold hoop earrings on the living room table and a red umbrella next to the front door.

“I cook treats for Dr. Heath and I cook treats for you,” Mrs. Bwanali says. “You need good food, good story, Mrs. Bwanali is here.”

She sets a plate and a fork down in front of me. I stab the fork into a slice and flop it onto my plate. When I shove a small piece into my mouth, a shocking burst of sweetness cascades over my tongue. Before I can stop myself, I make a huge mistake by uttering one itty-bitty three-letter word: “Yum!”

“Yum?” Mrs. Bwanali leans over me. “Is this good?”

“Very good,” Dad says.

The damage has been done. Mrs. Bwanali stands up straight and grins until her eyes disappear into the folds on her face again. “A real Malawi girl, Clare. You and me, we are friends.”

Suddenly, my stomach is in more knots than my macramé handbag—the one in my closet back in Brookline.

“Do I need to bring a lunch to school?” I ask. I doubt I’ll be in the mood to eat later, but better safe than sorry.

“It is not necessary,” Mrs. Bwanali says. “This is the purpose of the big-size breakfast.” She turns on the faucet and sings as she rinses a pot.

“I don’t think you’ll need to pay,” Dad says. “I think they’ve got porridge for free. But take this just in case.” He opens his wallet and hands me a hundred
kwacha
. “It’s about sixty-five cents,” Dad whispers. I guess he doesn’t want Mrs. Bwanali to hear him talking about money. Maybe it would make her feel bad. I’m not really sure. “Should be plenty,” he says, and of course, I take it because I don’t have any Malawian money of my own.

When Mrs. Bwanali finishes washing the pot, she turns to me and says, “Miss Clare, do you enjoy the egg fried or mixed or with the sunshine side up?”

“No thanks,” I tell her, and pop another little piece of pumpkin into my mouth. “No egg for me.”

“You are a growing girl. It is a long day at the school. I must suggest you eat.”

I’ve had enough. I stand to head back to my room, but Mrs. Bwanali wedges herself in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. There’s no way around her.

“Yoo-hoo!” she calls, waving her hand to get my attention, never mind that I’m only one foot away. “Yoo-hoo, Clare!” she says again. She throws her head back and laughs. “I do like this word,
yoo-hoo
. Dr. Heath teach me
this word. I have something for you. Stop there.” She takes two steps away from me, turns again. “No moving your muscle!”

I hold my hands up and freeze while she disappears through the kitchen to the veranda. A second later, Mrs. Bwanali’s standing in front of me, proudly holding a school uniform like the one Memory showed me last night. Except the bad news is that I can see it better in daylight, and it’s even uglier than I thought. Plus, it’s aquamarine blue.

“For you!” she says, and beams. “A gift from the fourth-born daughter of my sister Betty. This girl graduated Mzanga Full Primary last year. She is called Sakina. She said it her large honor to give you this dress.”

Not only is Sakina’s honor large, but her dress is too. It looks about six sizes too big for me, and it has at least four holes around the hem.

“I … I don’t know what to say,” I tell Mrs. Bwanali.

Dad’s eyebrows fly up and down, up and down super-fast. I get the text. “Thank you,” I mutter.

“You must hurry,” Mrs. Bwanali says. “Put it on. You shall look like every schoolgirl then, ready to learn your lessons.”

“Hurry up and change,” Dad says.

I bug out my eyes in protest.

“Now!” he growls.

So I take the dress from Mrs. Bwanali and run to my bedroom, where I throw off my awesome outfit, pull on the atrocious dress, and glimpse at thirty-six square inches of me at a time in the bathroom mirror. Then I sit on my bed under the netting and burst into tears.

“Come, Miss Clare,” Mrs. Bwanali calls from the kitchen. “Let us have a look-see, shall we?”

I wipe the tears on the back of my hand, blow my nose in the bathroom, and trudge back in there. As soon as she sees me, Mrs. Bwanali claps her hands together and says, “You are real Malawi schoolgirl. Gorgeous like a guinea fowl!”

My jaw drops.
A guinea fowl!

Dad hands me a bottle of water and a tube of sunscreen. “Put it on in the car,” he says. He lifts the strap of his briefcase over his shoulder, and I follow him outside.

While we back out of the driveway in the Land Rover, Mrs. Bwanali stands in the doorway and shouts “Toodle-oo!” at the top of her lungs. She would wake the whole neighborhood, if only we had one.

D
ad pulls onto a patch of dirt at the top of a hill. Below us, a bunch of long, skinny buildings with tin roofs stretch across the dirt like silver vipers. I’d be excited to leave this Land Rover, to escape from my father, except that now we’re at my new school. Dad gets out, walks around, and opens the door on my side. “Honey,” he says. “I know you’re scared, but I want you to trust me.” I look away, down the hill at the school. A chill runs through me. “I love you very much,” he says. “Your mother would be proud.”

I grab my backpack off the seat and step out. Then I walk behind my father, who lopes down the hill in his plastic clogs like a marionette whose puppeteer is busy scratching an itch with the other hand. If I was speaking to Dad, I would tell him that it may be my first day of school in a new country in the middle of nowhere, but
that doesn’t mean I need him. I can make my grand entrance alone. But since I can’t talk and there’s no way to communicate such an important message through body language, I let Dad accompany me all the way there, like I’m a kid going to her first day of kindergarten.

We’re a few yards away from a small brick structure set off from the other buildings when a short man in a three-piece suit limps out of the door. A bead of sweat inches down the side of my face. I twist my hair into a short ponytail and let the air dry my neck.

“Welcome to Mzanga Full Primary!” the man calls out, and smiles. He pulls a red handkerchief out of his pocket. “Pardon,” he says, and pats it against the glistening skin of his forehead. “We are most pleased with your arrival. I am the headmaster, Mr. Kingsley.” He turns to Dad. “You may refer to me by my given name, Special.”

“Thank you, Special,” my father says without even cracking a smile.

No sooner has Mr. Special Kingsley shaken hands with us than a husky voice calls out, “Hello!”

I peek around Dad and Mr. Special Kingsley, only to discover Memory standing in the doorway of the headmaster’s office. She’s waiting for me.
“Moni,”
I say, using one of the words from the vocabulary list I studied.

“Memory tells me you visited with her in the village last night,” the headmaster says. “I asked her to greet you and escort you to class this morning.”

Dad checks his watch yet again. “We’re very sorry we’re late,” he says.

Mr. Special Kingsley looks at me. “School begins at seven-thirty a.m. unless there are quizzes. Then six-thirty
a.m. Shall we say we will excuse it on this, your very first day at Mzanga? However, Clare, let us not make it a habit.”

“No,” I say. “No habit. No, sir.”

Mr. Special Kingsley chuckles and follows a rooster with frayed feathers into his office. The rooster pecks at our feet while Mr. Special Kingsley removes a black notebook from the drawer of a beaten-up wooden desk and asks Dad to sign me in on the school register. As Dad completes the information, I explain to Memory about Mrs. Bwanali’s sister Betty’s fourth-born daughter, Sakina, who gave me the uniform.

“Fantastic!” she says.

After Dad writes our name and address in the notebook, he actually rubs my head. “Pick you up after school,” he says. Then he shakes my new headmaster’s hand, completely forgetting to hold his forearm.

“I shall watch your daughter with care and kind wishes,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. After Dad leaves the office, my headmaster turns to me. “I would like you to know, Clare, that your friend Memory is a most shining scholar.”

But I don’t care if she’s smart, dumb, serious, or funny. I’m just happy she’s here.

“This girl also tends to the books for the entire school,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. “Each day, she carries all fifty-three books five kilometers to the village for safekeeping from rains and thieves.”

Memory stares at the floor. “It is nothing, sir,” she says.

But it is not nothing. It is something. It is something that she is standing beside me, the new girl, without caring what the other kids might say. It is something that she
helped me survive the night and cooked me grain instead of goat, when she probably would have had fun at the village celebration with her other friends.

“Memory shall take you to class now,” my new headmaster says.

And even though being here with Memory is something, it is not enough. Not enough for me to want to stay at this school for another minute, let alone a whole day. I want to go back to Brookline, where I belong. Back to Brookline, where my best friend has known me since kindergarten, not less than twenty-four hours. Back to Brookline, where the principal’s office doesn’t have roosters prancing inside it.

But things only go from bad to worse, because as Memory leads me alongside the mud-brick school building, I make the unfortunate mistake of looking into one of the classrooms. It’s not like I expect to see recessed lighting and swivel chairs with a SMART Board. That said, what on earth can prepare a girl like me to see birds’ nests in the classroom ceilings?

“This is where my brother learns,” she says. “Standard one.”

“Standard one?” I croak. “Is that first grade?”

“The infant class.
Inde
, you can call this the first grade.”

I can only see a bit into the classroom. The teacher, a pregnant woman with a high head of hair, stands up front. The children are crowded together on the floor. All the girls have on the same sorry dress I do, and the boys wear khaki shorts and short-sleeved aquamarine button-down shirts. Their skinny legs stick out straight in front of them.

Now Memory speaks and walks faster. She’s heading
for a classroom at the very end of the school building. “I shall now tell you again of the standard eight students. Saidi, bright spirit. Nice to see.” She smiles. “Winnie, small and surprising.” She takes a breath. “Most significant information is this: Agnes. Do you remember what I tell you about Agnes?”

I shake my head no.

“She is not satisfactory. She is number two student. Bony girl, and very, very
satana
.”

It hits me right then that the word
satana
sounds an awful lot like Satan.

“Ancestors curse me. I share table with this girl,” she says. “Our teacher request for you to sit between Agnes and me.” We reach the doorway. But I’d rather get my braces back on and eat taffy than go in there.

F
or a second, I’m relieved to see that there aren’t a million kids stuck all over the floor like pins crammed into a pincushion. Instead, there are about twenty students crowded onto wooden benches behind rectangular tables. The teacher is standing at the front of the room in a white, yellow, and gold dress. She looks like a piece of popcorn. When she sees me, she closes the book in her hands and lays it on the metal table. “Glorious! Glorious!” she says, and everyone in the entire room turns to stare.

All of a sudden, my whole body freezes. I’m not making up some sort of dramatic, hyperbole type of thing. What I’m saying is a serious fact: my heart actually stops beating, and my blood completely stops pumping, and my lungs totally stop breathing. I know, because as hard as I try to take a step, I can’t. Meanwhile, Memory holds out her hand like she’s the hostess at Zaftigs Delicatessen showing
me to a seat. I know it’s Agnes sitting on the bench there, because she’s bony, like a lamb chop after someone’s eaten off all the meat.