Laugh with the Moon (8 page)

She stirs the beans. “Mrs. Bwanali can talk,” she says. “Yes, but Mrs. Bwanali do listen even more good. You know, Clare, I have five daughters of my own. These ears listen better than a dog.”

I think about it then. Here she is, cooking for Dad and me, cleaning our house. Who is cooking and cleaning for her family? I wonder what daydreams whisper to her while her pot sizzles, what pictures glitter in her mind.

“It was yummy,” I say. I set the tray on the counter and leave to go back to my room.

“Clare, before you exit, I must tell you what we say here in Malawi.”

I turn in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

“We say
mwana wa m’zako ndiwako yemwe
.” She tosses the dishrag over her shoulder and walks toward me. “What does this mean?” she asks, and takes my hands in hers. “It mean ‘the child that belong to my neighbor also belong to me.’ ”

I swallow. I want to stay in the kitchen with Mrs. Bwanali, but even though she likes to listen, I don’t know what I’d say. I mean, how do you explain to someone that a part of you has died? How do you tell someone that you feel like a ghost without a soul?

You don’t.

Which is why I mutter “Bye” to Mrs. Bwanali. Then I wander back to my bedroom, stretch out on my bed, and fade into the indigo night.

D
ad shakes me awake. “Feeling better?”

For a second I am, until I blink a few times and realize that it’s already the next morning. I fell asleep in my uniform, and now it’s a wrinkled mess.

“Good news,” Dad says. I can’t imagine what it could be. “While you were sleeping, I tightened the pipes. Shower’s working better. But keep it short or we’re going to run out by the end of the day.”

I walk to the bathroom and turn the shower on. Lo and behold, it is good news. Now there are eight strands of water coming out instead of five. I scrub myself with a washcloth, but even with the increased water pressure, no matter how hard I rub my skin, I’m covered with dirt. It’s under my fingernails, in the cracks between my toes. I haven’t even put the shampoo in my hair when the
showerhead sputters and half the water strands disappear. At this rate, I’ll run out of water with a headful of soapsuds. I cut my losses and get out.

I put on my rumpled uniform again, since I have to wear the same thing to school every day except for Wednesday, uniform wash day. When I tromp into the kitchen, Mrs. Bwanali says, “Do this dress wrinkle in the sun like a dried fish?”

“I slept in it,” I say, embarrassed that I didn’t even have the energy to change out of my clothes last night.

Mrs. Bwanali sets breakfast on the table—boiled cassava, avocado, and eggs. As I swallow it down like a python swallowing a pig, Mrs. Bwanali says, “I shall find some hot rocks.”

“Hot rocks?”

“To press the uniform,” she says.

Dad stands in the kitchen doorway and checks his watch. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for ironing right now,” he says. “Today Clare’s going to get to school on time.”

I bug out my eyes and silently plead with Mrs. Bwanali for help.

“The hot rock special iron do not take long, Dr. Silver,” she says. “I fear that I cannot let this beautiful girl attend school in a dried fish uniform. You shall sit and drink Mrs. Bwanali’s sugared tea and read your report and get smart. It shall take only a minute.”

“But—” Dad begins.

“But you shall sit like a king in his throne,” Mrs. Bwanali says, pulling out the kitchen chair. She waits for
Dad to sit before she takes the pot off the stove and pours him a cup of tea.

As I traipse down the hill to school in my perfectly ironed uniform, I scour the field for anyone who looks familiar. There are hundreds of students milling around, but no one I recognize.

I plant myself on the sidelines and watch the barefoot boys kick a soccer ball made out of garbage bags and rubber bands. At each end of the red dirt is a goalpost made from three tree limbs nailed together. It looks like the boys are disputing whether the ball has gone offsides, but there are no borders to the field. Everything is imaginary.

Well, I can play that game too. I can imagine. So I imagine that Marcella is on one side of me and our friend Sydni on the other.
Are you ready for the date?
Marcella asks.

What are you going to wear?
Sydni inquires.

Have you told your father?
Marcella asks.

I’m smiling, thinking about going out with Isaiah, but they’re so excited for me that I don’t even have a chance to answer their questions.
I bet he’s going to plant a big kiss right there
. Sydni points to my lips, when I feel a tug on my wrist.

“Hello!” Innocent says. He smiles and
pop
, a dimple puckers on each cheek. I snap out of my daydream. I’m here at Mzanga Full Primary, but at least I’m not alone.

Two of Innocent’s little friends are at his side. Innocent points to the boy with cheeks as big as apples. “Silvester,” he says. Then he points to the boy with almond-shaped eyes and says, “Abel.”

“Hi,” I say. “I’m Clare.”

Silvester and Abel point at my face. I bend down. “What is it?” I ask.

The boys jab dots in the air with their fingers—poke, poke, poke. Soon the three of them go wiggly with laughter.
Did I leave some breakfast on my face? Do I have a zit?
I reach up and feel my nose. But it’s smooth as satin.

“Oh,” I say, and chuckle. While Dad is tall, dark, and Jewish, Mom was a redheaded, freckle-faced Catholic. I get my spray of freckles from her. She always said they give me personality. “Blood of the Irish!” I tell the boys, but they just look at me cross-eyed. So I stand up straight and proud, point to my nose, and try not to think about Mom anymore. I try not to think about how her skin was the color of peaches and cream, how she’d smell like rain after her bath. Instead, I point to the dots on my own nose and say, “Freckles.”

“Ooh!” they say, fascinated by the extraordinary information. “Frrrreeeckles.”

Mr. Special Kingsley walks past us and shakes the bell in his hand. Immediately, the soccer game stops. Hundreds of kids scatter to class, kicking up dry red dirt like a hurricane. Suddenly, my blood swooshes in my ears, and the hustle and shuffle fades farther away.

I forget where I am. Forget where to go.

My heart’s pounding when a little hand grabs mine and drags me from the field to the school building. We reach the standard eight door. A brown and white chicken struts inside, where my classmates are busy unpacking school supplies from their plastic grocery bags: notebooks torn in half across the middle and tiny pencil stubs.
“Zikomo,”
I
tell Innocent. “
Zikomo
very much.” Mrs. Tomasi isn’t in the classroom yet, but Memory and Agnes are.

“Good morning!” Memory says as she moves off the wooden bench to let me in. Agnes is busy talking to the boy with the Florida-shaped scar on his hand, who sits at the table in front of us.

“Agnes comes to school exclusively to find husband,” Memory explains. “Husband who own fancy shop in city.”

The chicken pecks at my feet.

“I come to school to beat you,” Agnes says to Memory. “Next term I shall be number one.”

A girl sitting in the front of the classroom turns in her seat. She’s stocky like a locust. She yells out something in Chichewa, her eyes full of horror.

“Patuma, you read,” Agnes calls to her. “Maybe you shall be number three student someday. But not yet. Please do not worry about the American girl. We need not impress her.”

“All you girls fight for me. I shall declare a winner soon,” says the boy with the scarred hand. His fingers are extra-long and thin, and his eyes sparkle like he just stepped out of a swimming pool. “Winnie and Sickness shall fight for me as well.”

Two girls, one with bulbous cheeks and another with silver hoop earrings, turn at the sound of their names. Both of them look healthy to me.

“Yes, let it be known. I shall be a very rich man,” the boy tells me. “Do you know I sell reeds in the trading center on the weekend days? You may like to buy some for your roof.”

“This boy is called Saidi,” Memory explains.

Agnes holds her hands over her heart and bats her eyelashes. “Memory adore Saidi, but Saidi love only Agnes. It is what you call the love web.”

“Love triangle?” I say.

“Love triangle,” Memory says, and laughs. “What do I tell you? Agnes is not here to learn language of English.”

“Only language of love,” Agnes says.

Mrs. Tomasi wanders in. Today she’s wearing a light purple print dress. She looks exactly like a lilac in spring. Since I have hay fever plus a really good imagination, the power of suggestion is pretty strong. The second I see her, I sneeze.

Mrs. Tomasi walks over to our table and hands me a piece of paper with Chichewa vocabulary words and English translations. The words are written out by hand. “Clare, you must copy each word five times. I shall quiz you tomorrow,” she says. She heads to the front of the room, sits down at her metal folding table, and summons my classmates. One at a time, they kneel in front of our teacher as she quizzes them on their English vocabulary words.

Meanwhile, back at my bench, I copy over
sukulu
, which means “school,” and
mbandakucha
, which means “early morning before sunrise, between first and third rooster.” When Agnes returns from being quizzed, she stares at my paper. I lift it to my face so she can’t see what I’ve written, but she inches even closer. “I see you have a magic pencil,” she says. “A pencil that draws letters in color.”

It’s nice, I guess, but I certainly have better. “It’s just a red Pilot pen,” I say.

I set down my paper and try to keep copying my words, but it’s totally impossible to focus. Agnes won’t stop talking. “Most certainly a student in Malawi does not need a magic pencil unless she is at secondary school,” she says, and holds out her hand, palm up. “I shall score highest on the Primary School Leaving Exam of the entire district. It is most certain I shall go to best secondary school in all Malawi. Therefore, you may give this magic pencil to me.”

I try to ignore her as well as I can ignore someone who is superglued to my side. But when she keeps chattering, I decide that maybe this gift will make her leave me alone. Besides, I have plenty of pens in my bag. “Here,” I say, and hand it over.

Agnes’s eyes go wide and she smiles. “Saidi,” she calls as he strolls back from Mrs. Tomasi’s desk. “A magic pencil! Look!” Agnes grabs my vocabulary sheet and writes her name on the bottom of the paper in big red letters. “Put my name!” Saidi says. Without even asking, Agnes tears off the bottom of my worksheet to write Saidi’s name too.

After quizzes, it’s time for chores. Mrs. Tomasi orders Memory and Gloria to distribute the schoolbooks to the classrooms, she tells Winnie and Stella to chase the frazzled chicken outside, and she says that Agnes and Patuma must sweep the floor. As for Norman, Handlebar, Saidi, and the rest of the boys, they’re sent to chop grass. But what about me? I’m full of dread. I wonder what on earth my sentence will be. Scrubbing? Chopping? Sweeping? As it turns out, though, I’m not ready for a complete sentence. “Right now, you must study words for the quiz tomorrow,” my teacher says.

“Words? What about chores?” I ask.

Even though there’s no such thing as a stupid question back at my school in Massachusetts, apparently here at Mzanga Full Primary School there is. Mrs. Tomasi cups her hand over her mouth and giggles. “You are an American girl, Clare. American girls need not do chores.”

At that news, I breathe a sigh of relief louder than the first, second, and third roosters combined. But my good feeling only lasts as long as a blink, because then Mrs. Tomasi steps out of the classroom, and a blink after that, Agnes sweeps a cloud of red dust into my face.