Finn (2 page)

Mr. Lynch was deeply offended, although I wasn’t sure whether it was more what I said about his being unaccomplished or what I said about his being fat. Of course it was both, but I take a sort of clinical interest in insults. I like to know exactly what works, and how well.

Mr. Lynch put his pictures away and got a little pompous, which didn’t surprise me. He said, “I assure you that’s not the case in our situation.” When I heard him use the word “situation,” I knew I had struck a nerve, because no one uses a word like “situation” unless they’re trying to hide something.

Mr. Lynch was a lot less friendly after that, which suited me fine, because I was trying to be friends with an interesting girl called Marian Williams, who absolutely hated him. She claimed it was an old grudge, but beyond that, Marian was very secretive about her hatred for Mr. Lynch. At first, she would only say that once upon a time Mr. Lynch had betrayed a sacred trust. Marian’s always using phrases like “betrayed a sacred trust,” which sound ridiculous when I say them, but which somehow sound normal coming from her.

Marian’s not very popular. She’s one of those people who doesn’t care at all what other people think. Unlike me. Personally, I can’t
not
care what other people think, no matter how hard I try, but Marian really doesn’t, and I mean
really.
Half the time she’s in her own little world, so she barely notices that other people even exist.

Marian reads a lot. Too much, judging from the way she lives life in terms of books. For instance, the business with Mr. Lynch. I finally got it out of her that the “sacred trust” Mr. Lynch betrayed was that he had voted, along with several other teachers at Field, to remove
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
from the summer reading list. Apparently, there’s a lot of offensive language in the book, and it’s racist. Marian almost took off my head when I mentioned that. She said that only people who hadn’t read the book at all—at least not the way Mark Twain intended it—could call it “racist.” I tried to point out that no one really knows how Mark Twain intended it, and we weren’t ever likely to, since he was dead, but that’s just the kind of argument you can’t win with Marian, because suddenly, instead of talking about Mark Twain, you’re talking about Genghis Kahn or the Holocaust, and how can you argue with that?

Anyway, after Mr. Lynch voted the way he did about
Huckleberry Finn,
Marian made a big show of avoiding him in the hallways, flattening herself against the lockers when he walked by, making the sign of the cross behind his back. She was like a bad vampire movie. Once, after a big snowstorm, she spent half an hour in the parking lot carving some crazy footprints in the snow by his car. It was classic Marian. She said she was sculpting the footprints of Huck Finn’s murderous father. “In the book, the left boot heel had a cross in it,” she said. “To ward off the devil.” She’s a real stickler for accuracy.

Mr. Lynch was supposed to recognize the footprints and interpret them as a threat. When I asked, “What kind of threat?” Marian rolled her eyes at me, the way she does whenever she thinks someone’s being hopelessly thick, which in my case is fairly often. “The Vengeful Cry of the Oppressed,” she said. “Duh!”

Carving the footprints was a lot harder than she originally thought, because it’s not exactly easy to avoid leaving your own footprints in the snow, not to mention the occasional handprint when you lose your balance. In the end, it looked to me as if a big hairy dog had jumped out of Mr. Lynch’s car and rolled around, but Marian was satisfied that the Oppressor was in for a real scare. I was glad to hear that because, by then, I thought I was going to chip a tooth from shivering so hard.

We watched Mr. Lynch get into his car that afternoon, and, in fact, he did pause for a while after he squeezed himself behind the wheel, but I had seen him do that before. He’s just extremely out of shape and he fiddles with the radio for a minute to catch his breath before he straps on his seatbelt, because reaching over his shoulder is a big workout for him. But in Marian’s mind, Mr. Lynch wasn’t catching his breath at all. “He’s contemplating the Harvest of his Cowardice!” she said.

The harvest of his cowardice? I mean, please.

M
y grandparents have decided to kick out the maid, a really nice Mexican woman called Silvia. Lots of their friends have Mexican maids. It’s what people do around here, but I always thought that if I had to be a Mexican maid, I’d want to work for my grandparents, since they aren’t particularly mean, or if they are sometimes, it’s so obviously because of how they were brought up that I wouldn’t take it too personally. I always thought that my grandparents were different, but that was before what they did to Silvia.

I had known for a long time that Silvia was pregnant. It was pretty obvious, unless, like my grandmother, you refused to have unpleasant thoughts. Actually, my grandmother did notice something. One day, while Silvia was putting away the groceries, my grandmother pointed out how Silvia’s shirt kept riding up. Silvia must have been five months along by then. Her belly button was already pooching out. But instead of thinking that Silvia could be pregnant, my grandmother called up the appliance repairman to come out and look at the dryer. She thought it might be running too hot and making Silvia’s shirts shrink.

Calling a repairman because you’re worried about ruining the maid’s wardrobe is actually pretty nice, and I admired my grandmother for it, even if it did showcase her stubborn mind. My grandfather, on the other hand, was noticing Silvia more and more, and not in a nice way. He was always complimenting her, pointing out how rosy her cheeks were, or what a fine figure she was developing. He asked her if she wasn’t eating too much pasta. For some reason, my grandfather thinks that “Silvia’s people” are crazy for pasta. That’s how much he knows about Mexicans.

Silvia was living in my grandparents’ basement when I came to live with them. I didn’t see much of her at first. I had a lot on my mind and kept pretty much to myself, but beyond that, Silvia really seemed to want to be invisible. You barely knew she was around, which was just how my grandparents liked it. I might not have gotten to know her at all if I hadn’t offended my grandfather at the Navy Gravy.

At the time, my grandparents were going out of their way to include me in lots of “family time.” At least, that’s the reason they gave for never leaving me alone. It sounds callous, my not wanting to spend time at home with them. I just couldn’t stand the way they floated around the house like jellyfish. I was constantly like:
hurry up!

Even going out with them was claustrophobic. They liked to get dressed up and take me out to eat. There was one seafood place they liked in particular, the Navy Gravy. It had tables with fake “pieces of eight” under the varnish. The manager wore a pirate patch. He was short and oily and acted like a funeral director, except that his hands were constantly on the waitresses, inspecting them, straightening a name tag, puffing up a frilly white collar. He liked to say things like, “Swab that deck, wench!” when a table needed clearing. The waitresses liked to mock him behind his back.

We went there for the crabs. My grandfather loved smashing crab claws with his wooden mallet and digging his thumbs into the crunchy bodies. He’d suck the juice out of the tiny side legs, then toss them in a revolting heap right on the table. My grandmother and I always finished eating about an hour before my grandfather. Then we had to just sit there, trapped in the booth like hostages, and watch the carnage. My grandfather would hammer away. Every once in a while, my grandmother would ask him if the crabs were sweet. The answer was always, “Not as good as last time.” He had a way of making everything sound like her fault.

One night, I finally reached my limit. While we were waiting for the umpteenth platter of crabs, I asked my grandfather if he knew what crabs ate. His hammer stopped in mid-air.

“Crabs, you mean the animal?” he said. “You’re asking, ‘What do they eat for food?’”

“Right,” I said.

“In the wild? I don’t know. Fish eggs. Tiny shrimp, maybe. Kelp.”

“Say, I know,” my grandmother said brightly. “Those itty bitty dots that whales eat. What’s that called? They’re like miniature snowflakes—”

“You mean plankton,” I said.

“Plankton. Good for you!” she said. “I think I read that somewhere.” She was so happy that we were having a family conversation. I almost hated to ruin it. “Nope,” I said.

“All right, Miss Smartypants,” my grandfather said. “Enlighten us.”

“Crabs,” I said, “are scavengers. Like the vulture. Or the common sewer rat.”

“Eskimo,” my grandmother said, darting her wet eyes at my grandfather. “Eskimo” was their code word for, “Time to change the subject.”

“They taught us that at Field,” I said. “Matter of fact, what the crab
really
likes, even more than fish eggs or the occasional miniature shrimp, is medical waste. It’s like a delicacy to them. Particularly used bandages. Crusty gauze.”

This was actually something I’d heard about lobsters, but I didn’t put that kind of behavior past a crab, either.

“Chloe!” my grandmother said.

“Well, it’s true!” I said. “We learned it in Ecosystems.”

My grandfather looked at my grandmother accusingly. “That would be our cue to leave,” he said. Then he took a long drink of water and started cleaning his gory fingers with a Wet-Nap.

After that, I didn’t have to go to the Navy Gravy with them, which was great, because they’d leave money for Silvia and me to order a pizza and have a “girl’s night in.”

That’s how I first got to know Silvia. She was nice enough, but pretty ignorant. She was easy to tease, especially about electronics. I guess Mexicans don’t own a lot of the things we take for granted. Or maybe they do, but the instructions all come in English.

Take the television, for instance. One night, I convinced Silvia that the TV was leaking radiation. I went to the bathroom and brushed my gums until they bled. Then I went behind the TV and put my hands on it and said, “Oh my God!” When Silvia asked me what I was doing, I told her I thought something was wrong with the TV. Then I made a big point of “discovering” my bloody gums. I could tell she was getting good and nervous. I think she was afraid that my grandparents would blame her for my bleeding gums. She came over to take a closer look, but I said, “My mouth can wait.” I held her hand to the back of the television. “You feel that?” I said.

“I don’t feel it,” she said, which was pretty funny because she didn’t even know what she was supposed to be feeling yet.

“Yes you do,” I said. “The heat. Televisions are supposed to be cold inside, like refrigerators.” Silvia nodded and tried to pull her hand away, but I kept it there. “It’s hot,” I said. “And that can only mean one thing. Radiation! Which would explain the bleeding gums.”

Silvia managed to stay fairly calm until I told her to call 9-1-1. I knew she wouldn’t. She’s an illegal alien and paranoid of the police. Instead, she ran to the kitchen and brought me some ice for my gums, which was very sweet of her. Then she told me to take off all my clothes and get in the shower to wash off the radiation. The shower idea was too much. I mean, a shower. What a simpleton!

When she found out I had fooled her, she was pissed—particularly about the 9-1-1 business—but it didn’t last long. Silvia couldn’t hold a grudge. Besides, I had seen her boyfriend Roberto sneaking into her room a bunch of times, and she knew I had seen him. With something like that on her, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted.

Truth was, I never would have ratted her out about Roberto, even if I didn’t approve of all the sneaking around, which I didn’t. It wasn’t as if he was repulsive. I suppose you could even call him handsome, in a South of the Border way, if you didn’t mind the odd gold tooth or the armfuls of cheap stuffed animals that came with the package. Silvia liked him plenty. They were always smooching and doing more than that when they thought I wasn’t looking. I’m the first to stand up for people’s privacy, but the way Silvia and Roberto went at it, sometimes I wondered if they wanted to get caught.

One morning, I saw that Silvia’s eyes were puffy and red, and her cheeks, which were plump to begin with, were all swollen. I asked her if she was okay and she gave me a long hug, squeezing much too hard, the way people do when they’re very upset, and she said, “Oh, Chica”—that’s what she called me when she was feeling particularly tender—“my Roberto is moving to California for his job. I am to be all alone.” Silvia could be very dramatic. I told her that she still had me, and not to worry, because she could save up her money and go out and visit him.

That’s when I learned something awful about my grandparents. They weren’t paying her! Silvia told me that my grandparents were giving her “room and food,” which meant a lousy basement apartment and a few bags of groceries each week. And they promised not to call Immigration on her. In exchange, Silvia worked twelve hours a day, six days a week.

I confronted my grandfather about it because he’s notoriously cheap. I figured the arrangement had to be his idea, but he surprised me by saying that my grandmother was the one who “handled the girl.” When I asked my grandmother about it, she got all testy and told me I shouldn’t poke around in Silvia’s business. I told her it wasn’t Silvia’s business I was interested in. I just wanted to know what made someone think they could make another person work so hard without paying her. That’s when my grandmother said, “Silvia’s situation is none of your business.”