Open Mic (5 page)

I recognize that sympathetic look. I’ve seen it every time I have to turn down my friends because my parents won’t let me go all the way to the West Ward at night. I hate that he feels sorry for me.

“Louis, help me out here, will you?” a girl calls from the front door. Oh, great. It’s Waverly Webber from my history class. She’s struggling to get an elderly man’s wheelchair through the narrow entrance.

“Excuse me,” Louis says to me before jogging over and pinning the heavy door wide open. Once Waverly and her senior are safely inside, Louis slips out.

“Gotcha here in one piece, Mr. P.,” Waverly announces proudly.

Perhaps it’s the piercing voice or the shift in the air brought on by Waverly’s mere presence, but Ma Tante opens her heavy eyes wide and looks my classmate up and down.

“Sal’ yé?”
Ma Tante sings out under her breath, basically asking WTF (minus the F) in Creole.

Funny how Ma Tante picks up in Waverly what I do. The girl’s actually never been mean to me or anyone else I know. It’s just that her “Me first!” vibe can be off-putting.

This office never looked terribly low-budget to me before. But now, seeing Waverly here — her velvet red ballet flats stepping on aged, peeling linoleum floors — it’s hard not to view things through her eyes. I suddenly feel exposed, as if Waverly just walked in on me getting my hair braided.

Good thing she doesn’t notice me. Waverly’s busying herself to our left, rearranging chairs to make room for her elderly companion’s wheelchair. As she jams it into a narrow spot, the rush of the empty row of chairs slams Ma Tante’s seat into mine.

Ma Tante reacts quietly. “Oh-oh?”

Mr. P. checks his neck for whiplash.

“There you
go,
” Waverly tells him, smiling. She wipes her palms against each other and reports to the front desk in three quick strides. “I’ve brought Charles Pemberton for his three o’clock appointment.”

If only Waverly knew that to Dr. Bighead, three p.m. means seven or eight p.m.

“Oh, and here’s a list of medications that Mr. P. is currently taking,” she says, not missing a beat.

“Okay, baby,” Tina, the younger lookalike, says, taking the sheet from Waverly. “When the doctor comes in, we’ll give this list to him.”

The astonished look that takes hold of Waverly’s face is priceless. “You mean he isn’t here yet?”

Ma Tante pauses her humming to give a quiet chuckle.

“He’ll be here soon enough,” Tina says dismissively before heading toward the break room.

Perplexed, Waverly stops short of scratching her head when she spots me. “What’re
you
doing here, Simone?”

“Hey, Waverly.” I don’t answer her question. This is my second chance to introduce Ma Tante, but I don’t take it. I feel bad about that, but my embarrassment at being seen in the ghetto doctor’s office outweighs the guilt.

But Waverly can’t be shaken off the trail that easily. “Is this your grandmother?” she asks. Then to Ma Tante: “Hello, I’m Waverly — I go to school with your granddaughter.”

“Mhmm. Tank hyu.” Ma Tante smiles politely.

“She speaks Haitian?” Waverly asks, obviously tickled by Ma Tante’s accent.

“Creole,” I correct her. “And French.”

Waverly finally asks her burning question. “So, you’re here . . . even though you don’t get any school credit for it?”

I nod. “I think they have new patient forms for the man you came in with,” I say, counting on the fact that Waverly hates to miss a step.

It works. Her lips form an O, and she pads over to grab a clipboard.

Louis comes back, escorting a woman who walks with a cane. He looks so gentlemanly with his elbow extended for her to hold. A celebrated football player at school, Louis is taller and bigger than the average guy his age — so I’m mesmerized by how much he outsizes his companion.

The elderly woman lets go of Louis’s arm and excitedly waves at Ma Tante.
“Koman ou ye?”

“Oh!” Ma Tante sits up as best she can.
“Madame Bertrand, koman ou ye?”

Louis seems touched by the women’s gleeful greetings. His round face lights up like a stadium scoreboard at one of his home games. Despite his bulk, Louis is delicate with Madame Bertrand as he helps her into the seat next to Ma Tante’s.

I get up to kiss Ma Tante’s friend on the cheek. Even though I’ve never met her, doing so is customary. I stay standing. Here’s my chance to redeem myself.

“Uh, Louis, this is my great-aunt, Ma Tante,” I say.

Louis respectfully takes off his baseball cap and shakes Ma Tante’s hand. He doesn’t know about the cheek kiss custom, so he gets a pass.

“Janti ti gason.”
Ma Tante is impressed with him.

“Eh-heh.” Madame Bertrand accepts the compliment as if Louis is her grandson.

“He would make a nice friend for my Simone,” Ma Tante continues in Creole.

“I think so, too,” replies Madame Bertrand.

“It’s cute how they steal glances at each other,
non
?”

I can’t hide my surprise, and Louis takes notice.

“What are they saying?” he asks me.

“Uh,” I pause. “Just that . . . you’re a well-mannered young man.”

“Did he just ask you on a date, Simone?” Ma Tante is really trying to mess with me now.

“I’m going to have to separate you two,” I answer, sassy in Creole.

The women giggle over Louis’s confusion.

“I think they’re saying more than that,” he says, laughing and scanning all of our faces for clues. “C’mon, Simone, you’re holding back.”

“Simone, are you translating for Louis?” Waverly’s finished Mr. P.’s paperwork and is drawn in by our laughter.

“Something like that,” I answer, still blushing.

Waverly has an epiphany. “You can totally get credit for translating for Care-A-Van,” she says earnestly. “Some Haitian seniors in the program need translators.”

You know what? That could be cool.
“That would be cool,” I say.

“I’ll introduce you to the program director, and you can get started right away,” Waverly offers.

Funny that her persistence feels a lot more bearable when it benefits me.

“April Johnson?” Tara calls a patient to the back. Finally.

The large woman using two seats gets up, sighs heavily, and waddles to the exam room.

Immediately, Mr. P. rises effortlessly from the wheelchair and strides to nab the now vacant best seat in the house for TV viewing. We all look on in stunned silence.

“I told that chile I ain’t need to be
wheeled
in,” Mr. P. grumbles.

Ma Tante and I look at each other and burst out laughing. Louis, Madame Bertrand, and eventually even Waverly and Mr. P., cackle heartily with us.

“Voilà.”
Ma Tante winks at me.

I wink back.

I have two gorgeous older sisters, but let the record stand: I was the first Bose daughter to score a point in the Game of Guys.

His name? Dwayne.

The place? A playground across the street from our Flushing, Queens, apartment, where I’d swing, slide, and ride my bike along with hordes of other immigrant kids.

The technique? Dwayne screeched his two-wheeler to a halt in front of mine, patted his Jackson Five Afro, and said, “Going to White Castle for lunch. Want to come along?”

Dumbstruck, I shook my head shyly and biked away.

I was nine.

Looking back, I should have eagerly accepted: “Yes, Dwayne, I’ll go to White Castle with you. And then you’re taking me to the prom in a decade or so, got that?”

It would be the only romantic invitation I’d get for years.

Soon after Dwayne made his move, our family left New York and settled in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb. I was in middle school, and my sisters were almost done with high school. Sonali, the oldest (her name means “gold” in Bangla), was a numbers geek, and Rupali (“silver”) was an outgoing, leader-of-the-pack type. I came third (“friendly” — more valuable than precious metals in the long run, mind you), and my face was constantly planted in fiction. We Bose girls were nothing alike, but here’s what we had in common: all of us liked guys. It was so much fun to watch, crush on, and, we hoped, date them.

The only problem was that we were the first Indians to move into this California neighborhood. In fact, we were the only folk of Asian descent for miles around. Also, there were no signs of any Afros like Dwayne’s. The sea of whiteness didn’t hinder my sisters — turned out plenty of Bay Area college dudes wanted tropical teen arm candy to complement their hippie lifestyles. Sonali and Rupali quickly ascended to expert level in the Guy Game.

Our parents knew nothing about this pursuit — they planned to arrange our marriages to suitable Indian men once we graduated with appropriate degrees in engineering or biology. Their ignorance was our bliss, we decided, especially when it came to dating. I kept my sisters’ secrets, but I also secretly kept score. A sibling got one point if someone asked her out. A second if he gave her a compliment. A quick kiss won her a third. That’s as far as I counted — going after a fourth point with the same guy would put my sisters in territory too dangerous to fathom. Heck, I figured if Baba caught them winning even one point, they’d be shipped to Kolkata and paraded before a bunch of parentally approved prospective grooms. Thankfully, Ma and Baba stayed out of the loop, and my sisters continued to accrue points right and left.

Sadly, when it came to me, Dwayne’s invitation was still my only score. And it didn’t seem like that was going to change too soon. At first, the other middle-schoolers in this born-in-the-USA neighborhood didn’t know what to do with me. A few mumbled “hey” from a safe distance; most totally ignored my existence.

I didn’t get why I immediately ranked so low on the social ladder, but in retrospect it’s not hard to figure out. I would have crushed the competition in a Fresh Off the Boat poster contest. I was the whole FOB package — parents with lilting accents, super-strict father who didn’t accept grades less than an A, house that perpetually smelled like turmeric and cardamom, ultra-traditional mother whose idea of party garb was six-and-a-half yards of silk
saree
and a forehead dot that mesmerized our neighbors. Plus, my skin was a color writers usually describe with food products like chocolate and coffee. At least
my
metaphors were addictive and tasty, right? I found it harder to define my classmates’ hues in my diary. They certainly weren’t milky white, but “skin like deli-sliced turkey” didn’t sound too appealing.

Surprisingly, the second time I gave myself a point in the game came after a few long weeks of peer-group silence. At lunch one day, a group of five geeks approached me. (You know the kind — precursors to today’s
Lord of the Rings
fans who still collect Pokémon cards by the time they get to college.) My ’70s geeks stood silently for a few minutes, elbowing one another to speak. One finally gathered his courage. “We need an Uhura,” he told me. “We’re heading to our usual spot over there. Want to come along?” The others nodded and waited eagerly for my answer.

I had no idea what they were talking about. After some questioning, I discovered these were Trekkies of a most intense type. They reenacted episodes of
Star Trek
every day in their corner of the cafeteria, each taking the role of a male character in the six-person cast. The sixth character in the show was a brown girl named Uhura, and it was clear (to them) that I’d been beamed down to repeat her few but important lines. I considered the invitation briefly — Spock was hot — before crushing their hopes.

The remainder of middle school involved episodes like a painful social dance class in PE, where I overheard a popular guy muttering about “fox-trotting with the Unibrow.”

Mortified, I ran home to the bathroom mirror. Sure enough, my eyebrows were as impermeable as the fence between California and Mexico. My forehead was in San Diego, and my eyes were in Tijuana. My sisters found me in the bathroom crying over my hirsutism (look it up: excessive hairiness is a real diagnosis) and decided I needed help.

Rupali introduced me to eyeliner, tweezers, and a range of facial-hair removal strategies. Turned out American beauty products can take the South Asian right out of a girl.

Sonali excelled in science, so she told me about sex.

“You mean I won’t get pregnant while using a public toilet?” I asked. That had been one of Ma’s no-sex tips, filed under the broader category of “Avoid all contact with boys.” “What about swimming at the Y?”

“Nope,” my sister said. “The Y pool is pretty much baby-free. That is, if a girl keeps her suit on. Here, let me draw some pictures.”

After digesting the facts of life as explained by my A+-in-biology sister, I pondered the miracle of our existence. Ma and Baba never touched in public or in front of us. The thought of either of them taking off any clothing was unimaginable. How in the world had the three of us been conceived through yards and yards of
saree
fabric?

My sisters’ point totals were climbing, and I spied constantly on their dates (which usually started once the three of us were at the mall). I noticed two nonverbals that could come in handy if opportunity ever came my way: the Smoldering Look and the Hair Twiddle. Apparently, combining the two at the right time could seal the deal. I practiced for hours in front of the bathroom mirror.