The Blackberry Bush (9 page)

Checking the watch on my skinny wrist (I rotate using about twelve of my favorite classic timepieces from the sea chest, and today it’s the Patek Philippe), I see I’m already fifteen minutes late for supper. I’ll just tell Mutti that a classmate and I got carried away shopping. I’ll have to make up a name. I hate that. I’m running out of names for imaginary friends.

Wearing these watches is like taking Opa with me during the day. He’s having a lot of trouble with his eyes and listens to music for hours a day. Funny…I guess. The one person who likes how I look, and now he can’t see me very well. He’s had two eye surgeries, but I think the doctors are merely guessing about what to do for his vision. We went to the best eye doctors in the world at UCLA, but even that isn’t helping.

Opa and I take the Wilshire bus together down to Santa Monica several times a month. I describe things to him en route. While walking the 3rd Street Promenade and the Pier, I put my arm in his and guide him—in such a way that no one else would ever guess he has eye problems. (He has a lot of trouble with curbs.) A couple of my classmates have seen us walking arm in arm. Those are a few of the times since we moved here that I feel truly happy. They saw me with someone who loves me. I blush—but in a good way that feels wonderful.

Opa and I can talk for hours about the secrets we found in the attic back home in Germany. I continue to think about how I am a product of those dramas from generations past.

Papa looks more nervous than ever. The move here to the Los Angeles German Consulate was supposed to be a promotion. I suppose it was, but it seems like too much responsibility for him. Is it wrong not to want to be much like either of your parents?

I’ve noticed that my parents drink more than anyone else here. Is it just because they’re Germans—or because they’re unhappy with the way life turned out for them? I’m not sure, but I sure don’t want to grow up to be like them. Mutti often has a Bloody Mary first thing in the morning. And Papa is drinking way more than he used to. He still seems so self-conscious around me. We’ve never had a truly smooth conversation. It always feels a little embarrassing, even when we’re not talking about embarrassing things. I don’t think it’s me. He just has an even more agitated temperament than I do.

I know about their drinking volume, because I raid their liquor cabinet at night when I can’t sleep and during the evenings when they’re out. I’ve sampled almost everything they have there—adding water here and there to the bottles. Sometimes I wake up with a throbbing headache, but they haven’t caught me yet. They have so many extra bottles that I occasionally sell one to my friends (who are too young to buy it at a liquor store) for extra shopping money.

Californian students are friendly enough. They talk to me when I sit with them, and they seem welcoming. But they never come and sit with me. They only come looking for me if they want access to alcohol. I sometimes pretend I’m low on supply just to keep them coming back more than once so they’ll talk to me.

In the middle of the night, with a stolen drink, I often look through the photos of our life in Germany. I miss Opa’s shed the most, and the tools. I’m going to start working on movie and TV sets as soon as I’m old enough. I can’t wait to work a band saw again. When I’m working with tools, and the fresh sawdust billows up from the sander, my sense of balance comes back and my agitation calms down. I ride my bike past the studios all the time. They’re getting used to me, and the security people have started letting me in. I live for those days, and when I’m there, surrounded by the folks making sets, I don’t feel off balance anymore. Even though I’m a kid, they even let me help sometimes. I could live on that high for days.

It’s a whole ’nother world. I especially love the Paramount lot. They shot
Star Trek
and
I Love Lucy
at these studios, and I’m more at home there than anywhere else, except maybe for church with Opa. Mutti asks me if I’m going to try out for a part some day. She so doesn’t get me. I want to build sets and backdrops. If I can’t be beautiful, at least I can create beautiful images. Opa merely smiles and states again that I have a superior gift of craftsmanship and an eye for detail. I get excited when I think about doing things like that.

When they are entertaining at home, and diplomats do that a lot, Mutti always introduces me as a “future actress, if she would just cut her hair.” She’s said it like a bazillion times. Why do parents pick one phrase that bugs their kids and say it over and over to their friends? And besides, my hair’s not that long. It’s only been over a year since I refused to cut it short anymore.

I’ve been rehearsing imaginary dialogues all day, trying to figure out how I’m going to react when Mutti turns livid because my hair is not cut. I rehearse these pretend conversations all the time with people who make me nervous. It makes it hard for me to sleep sometimes. That’s when I drink. And when I drink, my imagination runs wild. But usually drinking makes me feel worse…darker on the inside somehow.

Wait till the folks at the Paramount lot see what I can do with my hands. They said that in a year or so, maybe, if I’m still interested, I could work a few hours there. Interested? Are they kidding? I’d love that job. And then I’d get to be around people who notice me…and maybe even like me.

Opa says I shouldn’t worry about it, but I do. He says we are all worth the same, no matter what anyone thinks. He says the awful war he saw as a child was caused by people who didn’t believe this simple truth.

Our school, Bancroft Middle School, is always in mural-painting competitions with other schools throughout LA. That’s where I met Zara, my Pakistani friend. She missed our last project. Happens a lot. She’s always expected to be there for every family event—no matter what. Opa loves to ask her about her family and sometimes attends the events at her home with me. He and Zara’s father seem to have a lot to talk about. “Old school” stuff, I guess.

Our art class had to spend the first hour clearing the wild blackberry bush from the face of the concrete beneath the overpass where we painted the mural that day. I cut the back of my right wrist on one of the thorns. The long, thin scab is still there, and it stings occasionally. I got back at the vine by painting sharp, menacing blackberry vines winding through the mural. But I suppose the plant will grow back and outlive the mural....

Opa kisses me on the forehead every day before I leave for school on my bike. Even as he’s gotten older, he always stands up whenever I enter the room. He holds my head in both hands, tells me in English that I’m his darling princess, and then seals it with the kiss where he tells me the tiara should be.

He also says I have a perfect smile, and I should smile more. He calls it my “high beams.” At night I practice smiling, because I know he’s right. Someday it will come in handy.

Opa and I go to Hope Lutheran Church on Melrose every Sunday morning. I’m mentioning that because I’m riding by it now on my bike—almost home. Papa drives us there on Sundays and picks us up but never comes in with us.

He’s missing the best part of the week, as far as I’m concerned. I love my Sunday school class, because I get to help out with the little kids. There’s nothing like feeling the arms of a happy two-year-old flung around your neck, or getting kissed on the cheek by a four-year-old who’s just eaten a graham cracker. It doesn’t get any better than that. I wish everybody was like them…loving with no strings. If I could pick anybody to be like and to hang out with when I grow up, it would be those little kids.

When it’s time for worship, lots of studio musicians volunteer to lead worship, and the gospel soloist who leads the service (it’s like an amazing concert in which you participate) is spellbinding. She sings out of a place inside her that isn’t awkward. Opa says that’s called having “soul.” Someday I’m going to find that place inside me.

When she sings, my breathing changes and I sometimes have to wipe my eyes. That’s when Opa, who always notices such things, pulls me closer with his arm that’s often around my shoulder when we sit together.

When this happened last week, he whispered into my ear, “She is so beautiful. Like you.”

The simple, modern, white room with a very high ceiling is so different than church back in Germany. At Hope Lutheran we sit in a semicircle, 150 of us, in chairs. Zara might come with us sometime, but she would have to keep it a secret from her Muslim parents. Opa says there are fun adventure secrets and bad secrets. I’m not sure what he means by that.

Zara’s home smells like curry. She says ours smells like butter. I’m sometimes so afraid to use the word
friend
out loud with her, because that might ruin everything. When something goes well for me, I start wondering when it’s going to unravel. Her mom doesn’t speak English at all. She points at me and talks really loud and fast to Zara in Urdu. It makes me feel even more nervous than I usually am. I have no clue what would make her mom happy.

This past Saturday, Zara and I were riding our bikes past all the Orthodox Jews strung out along the sidewalks heading back from synagogues. I’m not sure what “an American” really is, but it sometimes feels like none of them have homes in our neighborhood. Everyone here in the Melrose District seems to have a foot in another country. Zara lives around the corner from our house with her big brother and parents. The family owns a gas station east of our district near the Hollywood Freeway.

There’s our white house up ahead on the right. Stucco. The tops of the outside walls have fake castle turrets. The driveway on the narrow lot goes up the left side of the home, along the fence, and into the back by the garage and the back porch where I always put my bike.

Angelo

K
ati walks through the open back door into the kitchen. There are raised voices.

More raised voices.

A slap.

Kati bursts back out the door, sobbing uncontrollably. She fumbles with her bike—it takes two tries to get her kickstand up—and races down the driveway, making a hard right turn on the sidewalk toward Zara’s house.

She won’t return home until late tonight.

K
ATI ISN
’
T THE ONLY ONE
who’s dealing with some issues. Her friend Zara has more than her share—even ones Kati doesn’t know about…at least not yet. Right now Zara is writing in her journal, stopping every now and then to chew on the cap of her pen. I can’t help it. I peek over her shoulder....

2003
Melrose District
Los Angeles, California

Zara’s Diary

D
EAR
D
IARY
,

This year I made my first real American friend. Well, she’s actually German, but whatever.

Her name is Kati.

I’ve been here since I was a little girl, and she just got here, but she looks more American than I do, and that gives her advantages I don’t have.

She’s kind of funny looking and wears big men’s watches. Her hair is a mess. But I really like her. We both love painting and complaining about our clueless parents.

I’m not a U.S. citizen, since I wasn’t born here. But I’m not Pakistani either, because I’ve never even been back there since I moved here when I was two. In fact, I have no memory of Pakistan at all. And my Urdu is awful. I usually answer my parents in English. Being Muslim has been so hard for my parents since 9-11.

My cousin Saahir is the smartest one in the family, and he says we’re going to be fine and that peaceful and generous people always prevail in history. Our parents are trying to get a chain of convenience stores going. Saahir was born a grown-up. They already are starting to ask him what they should do. His English is perfect, and he understands computers and money. He goes to the library to read the newest issues of
The Economist.
What a nerd.

Anyway, Kati and I were painting a mural on an underpass a few months ago with the school group, and we started laughing about our parents. But then she got sad after impersonating and making fun of her mom’s Dutch accent.