The whole class is ready and waiting on May 4, fifth hour, for Lillian Firestone’s current event. Actually, nobody could care less, except me. I’m nervous for twenty people. My blouse is soggy and my tongue is glued to my teeth. I just pray I can go first and get it over with. I look toward the door, calculate the steps to escape just as Mr. Howard shows up with his ladder. What?
He nods politely at Miss Arth and points at the ceiling light fixture—This will only take a minute. He positions his stepladder right by the door. The bell rings. I look at Miss Arth seated under the American flag framed by a giant pull-down map of the world. Mr. Howard lumbers up his ladder with a hunk of building keys on a ring and a canvas bag of lightbulbs hooked to his tool belt. I’ll bet he actually unscrewed some earlier so he could stage this moment. I stare at the gouged tornado on my desk until I hear my name.
My shoes and I walk to the front. I face my class. Miss Arth squints briefly at the drawings in black cardboard frames that I hold, one in each hand.
“I’ve got two current events to share. They go together.”
Miss Arth checks her watch and clucks, “Those look like artworks, Miss Firestone. Current events are to be gotten from the newspaper.”
Mr. Howard clears his throat.
Her tone is so infuriating it pushes me to say, “Oh, yes, you’re so right, political cartoons are definitely works of art. These are related to events that have just currently happened.” I show the class Elliot’s drawing. “This artwork was done by Elliot James, who is a good friend of mine. It won first place in the Fine Arts Showcase. It’s called Atalanta and Meleager, which is a marble sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.” Snickers. Sighs. The couple is so real it almost pops off the paper. They could have come from Michelangelo’s own sketchbook. Elliot has angled and shaded the figures so we see their arms and their sides and legs—nothing too controversial.
I step closer to the front row and point to Atalanta. “She’s been ruined.” I stop to let “ruined” soak in. “See the mustache drawn on the woman?” I point to her upper lip. “A Fu Manchu mustache like these guys have.” Kids crane forward, squint at the picture. I walk over to Neil’s cartoon on the bulletin board with the army tank of raging Chinese soldiers. “A chink mustache.”
I look out over the room. Shiver. Catty Piddle won’t look at me. Neither will Anita. I glance up at Mr. Howard—an angel in work boots hanging above us all.
“These are marks of prejudice. Things like this happen to me every day.” I tilt my head—ching-chong. I touch my eyebrow for slant eye. I demonstrate sidesteps in the hall. “Oh, and the buckteeth . . .”
There’s the faint squeak of Mr. Howard unscrewing a lightbulb in the ceiling. Otherwise there’s not a sound.
“Fear creates prejudice. Fear thwarts thinking.”
The guy sitting next to my empty desk looks confused. “ ‘Thwart’ means to stop something. Thwarted thinking is the opposite of using your brain. It’s letting your brain get washed.” I wait for someone to cough “thwart.” “During war we don’t usually know the enemy as distinct people who live in another country. We typecast whole races of people from a distance.” I know the word “typecast” is lost on everybody, but at least I know what it means. “The wars happening in this building are very quiet—an ink mark, a cough, a look, but they’re deadly too.”
Mr. Howard and I both know I am quoting him almost exactly. I hear my chest fill with air and exhale.
I hold up Elliot’s new cartoon. “I would pass this around, but since I have touched it, you might become infected with Communism.” Neil sits, arms folded, legs extended, ankles crossed. I lock eyes with him for half a second. He stretches and produces an elaborate yawn with a long huh . . . at the end. I know what he’s doing—waiting for the chorus of affirmative yawns from his classmates. But there aren’t any today. I feel unexpectedly sad for Neil, who is still acting so stupid. I guess he doesn’t know what to do. Maybe I wouldn’t either.
“That’s me in the crosswalk. The weapons pointed at me aren’t guns, they’re words.” I cover my mouth and cough the word “commie.” I sneeze “chink.” Anger buzzes through me thinking of Ralph feeling the slap of prejudice because of me. Infuriating. “Any one of us might be in this crosswalk mistaking the thoughtless insults of others for truth. We draw mustaches on each other all the time.”
I pause, my heart pounding. Mr. Howard hangs above the doorway—huge and immovable. Miss Arth is silent. She must know he will swoop down and eat her whole. My next remark, before I die, is just for her. “Witnessing slurs and doing nothing is silent encouragement.”
I pin my two current events to the bulletin board.
Miss Arth checks the clock, traces her chipped purple fingernail down her grade book, and announces the next presenter. Patty Kittle!
Patty’s report is about the fund drive the Red Cross Club is sponsoring. “Uh, Elliot James is, uh, or was, donating his award-winning artwork for our auction,” she says, slicing me with a look. “But . . . uh . . . now I don’t know what he’ll . . .”
Atalanta and Meleager. HA! I sit, feeling the flame jerking and fluttering inside. I can’t get my heart to slow down. I did the right thing, with help.
Just before the dismissal bell, maybe on purpose or maybe not, Mr. Howard drops a lightbulb on his way down the ladder. It pops off the floor and shatters. “Oops!” He gets busy, a buffalo with a whisk broom and dustpan blocking the doorway so everyone has to congregate in front of the bulletin board before heading out. They peer at my current events, wordless, and inch out of the room—an army of snails, tucked under their shells.
* * *
I leave school and walk all the way to The Thinker. Our class acted dull as a dry sponge. Mr. Howard was amazing though. Bodhisattvas can climb ladders when they need to.
“I did it,” I say to The Thinker. “I made a speech in front of my whole class. I will probably get a detention for insulting my teacher, which is fine by me. Detentions are doorways.” Squirrels skitter all over the sculpture. A lady with two dogs shuffles up. They sniff my shoes and go on. Hello, good-bye.
I sit back, a chilly mist on my face, fighting the nasty tide starting to roll inside me—the front edge of a familiar storm of old insults—wondering if I’ll be an even bigger target now, remembering how Neil tried to start an all-class yawn and how nobody did it. Funny how someone not yawning in your face can feel like a victory.
On Monday everybody will probably act like it never happened, the same way my parents act like Michael Benton never happened. They simply dropped the subject of him—a whole human poofed away—the Firestone way. All I notice is that Dad acts less joke-book and a little more man-of-the-house weird and Mother looks right through me. She’s made me invisible, which is much worse than her disappearing into the bedroom.
I head inside the museum, straight upstairs, and sink onto a bench in the temple. I cry a little from relief and from knowing that life, that I, will never be quite the same.
My heart finally slows down. I look around. If a room could be the perfect blanket, the Chinese Temple is that room—the lacy carved gates, the trace of sandalwood, the warm light, the honesty between Michael Benton and his wife that I witnessed in here.
If a statue could be a perfect person, the bodhisattva is that person. Its crystal gaze ignites the air. Michael Benton called it rasa—the feelings an object evokes in us. A wooden bodhisattva reminds us of our capacity for compassion and understanding.
The power is not in the statue, it’s in us—waiting to surface.
No wonder Gone Mom brought me here. She must have known the bodhisattva would eventually live here too. She and Michael Benton worked hard together. This is their room, their temple.
I look up at the statue. We’re all just people messing up and trying again. Right?
The bodhisattva is slow to answer. That’s right, which brings us back to the Elliot James issue, Lily. You need to thank him for the cartoon—in person.
Okay.
Think of something to give him.
And kiss him back.
Hmm . . . so strange and startling—these sparky ideas of mine.
Have a double date with Atalanta and Meleager.
“Ha!” I cover my mouth, my face hot. I swivel around, praying nobody heard my shriek.
I stop at the case in the Main Chinese Gallery with Dr. Benton’s single cloud slipper perched on a little platform in front. The empty space beside it is sad. Lien never got to live with the love of her life. She gave me up too. Just like that. I turn away, their whole love story stuck in a stale glass box. I shut my eyes and clench my fists, trying not to let the raw edge of that fact shred my heart.
* * *
When I walk downstairs Evangeline and Ralph are chatting at the information desk. I jiggle my head, sure I’m seeing a mirage. But before I can say a word he flashes Mother’s compact at me. Ralph points behind the desk—lost and found. “It’s been in the safe under there all this time.” He glances at Evangeline. “It’s where they keep the valuables.” Ralph stuffs it in his pocket.
“I was just trying to decide what type of art your brother might like, Lily.”
“Chinese!” Ralph says.
“Naturally,” Evangeline says. There’s wonder in her face, looking at the two of us. Wistfulness. She must be imagining her lost brother.
“Ralph is my favorite work of art,” I say. “But no label quite fits.”
“Do you want to go to Cooper’s?” I say on our way out.
“What do you want from me this time?” Ralph says.
“I want to tell you about current events today before I keel over and die from exhaustion.”
“Oh, I thought you were gonna say you were getting married.”
“God, get off of that, would you? He is not even speaking to me right now, not that I blame him. Plus I’ve never been on a real date with him, which would include meeting Mother, who would look down her nose and notice that his fingernails are inky and that his hair is everywhere and that he’s not in an ROTC uniform.” I hold up a finger. “But he does have one very positive feature—he’s not Chinese.”
I flash on another fantasy scene—my meeting his parents. I see their crestfallen expressions, veiled aversion to tea-colored persons. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re not prejudiced. Maybe they’re like Elliot.
We sit at the soda fountain. I tell Ralphie about the chink mustache on Elliot’s drawing and my current-event retaliation.
“Yeah, I heard about the mustache thing at Scouts. Jerry Newcomer told me. His older brother goes to your school,” Ralph says. “He thought it was pretty funny. And his Dad’s our leader!”
“So did you say anything back?”
“Yep.”
“What?”
“I called him Oodles, like everybody else does. I said he was a fat slob with no friends and BO.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t. But he is.”
On a napkin I sketch a messy version of Elliot’s cartoon of me in the crosswalk and explain everything that happened.
Ralph’s eyes light up. “Do you think he’d do one for me for Scouts? You know, something to punch ’em all in the face.”
“No. No. And no.” But just as I say this, somebody does pop into my mind—the perfect hero for Ralph’s troop. “How many guys in your patrol?”
Ralph looks suspicious. “Nine. Ten with Mr. Newcomer. Why?”
I tap the side of my head. “Just thinking.” I make Ralph promise not to give Mother her compact yet. We need a plan for that, but right now my mind is finished—too dead to even get brainwashed.