|
|
  |
||
 |
||
| Mariam Kazerian is the only Armenian kid in school
so she has to show everyone the greatness of her people, so her Father
says. He always said
things like that to her while looking pointedly at her brother, Haig. Straight
A’s line her report card every time like the contour of a pointed
fence keeping her safe, but she feels the edge of the cliff and the wind
in her hair, as if she is about to fall; the wind whips up from below and
whispers “B plus” and she half faints with terror and relief.
She is the smartest girl in the 4th grade, no contest, and that counts
for something, even if the rest are only Americans. Mariam’s black curls make a frizzy triangle surrounding her yellowy white round face. Later in life, when she is the CFO of a big corporation, she will grow a mustache suddenly, which she will both hate and stroke silkily with great esteem. At the beginning of 4th grade, she prayed desperately to get freckles like Melissa Benjamin had from her summer ‘on the boat,’ but then she knew that her looks were part of what it meant to be Armenian and she should have pride. Besides, she had a little mole on her jaw that her mother called a ‘beauty mark.’ Her mother was only half Armenian but had the same pitch black curls, the same dumpling body, the high round breasts Mariam would develop next year in 5th grade and have trouble hiding in her gym uniform. Today is Friday. Mariam is walking home from school as usual, alone, her heavy book bag bumping against her shoulders like the great finger of God tapping her on the back. She’ll be bent over her yellow flowered desk all weekend, doing regular homework as well as the vocabulary and history tests she does herself to get ahead. |
Father is a small man, but his compactness speaks
of a contained power, like looking into a well, the echoing stony dark
no less mighty for not being an ocean. |
|
She
doesn’t mind working hard; hard work is a part of life. Maybe
it is life, she has thought many times, watching her Father. Much better
to keep her eyes down and keep working than to risk meeting his. She
has terrible gas, the kind that travels through your whole torso and
pinches you in the shoulders. She has been holding it in all day. All
she can think of is getting home, to the downstairs hall bathroom,
locking herself in. It is the only door in the house with a lock, besides
the front door, and only her parents have keys to that. |
He grimaces to himself as if someone could hear these thoughts. Haig passes through the kitchen without greeting his mother to continue the experiments he has been making with bugs in the backyard. He takes up the stick he has left by the side of the house. It is a long, thin stick that he shaped into a point on a rock. He goes over to the tree and the brush at the back of the yard and starts turning the leaf mulch. A herd of tiny little grey bugs panics out. He squats down to look at them. They are like tiny armadillos, so Haig calls them ‘armies’ even though Mariam has told him over and over their common name is ‘sowbug.’ Haig hates that name, thinks it sounds like a big fat smelly woman. He stabs into the path of one of the armies with his stick and in its moment of hesitation, he is able to knock it over onto its back. He touches it with the stick, watches the bug body strain, curling back and forth, while its sea of feathery legs wriggles, grabbing nothing. He watches the struggle; if the bug does manage to right itself, he will push it over again. Haig loves this game. |
|
|
||