Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Space Page 10
“Back to your seat, Juan Carlos. One more outbreak and you’ll be writing standards instead of doing this lab.”
Juan responded by brushing her hand off his arm, hostile and threatening. “Hey, man, you can’t touch me! I know my rights—I’ll sue your ass!”
“Yeah, sure,” Gena told him, “you go get one —tell him he can sue this.”
Everyone laughed.
“Say what, teach?!” Juan said, chin and chest pushed out towards her.
Gena held up her frog. “I said he can sue this! The frog’s worth more than I am…and what did you say the triangular shaped organ in his chest is?”
“Shit,” Juan sneered.
“Good guess, but that’s in another organ.” Smiled Gena.“No, actually boys and girls, this is the lower chamber of the heart. It’s called the ventricle, and in the frog there’s only one. Who remembers how many there are in a human heart?”
“Eight?” replied a chubby girl up in front. Gena feared she might be serious.
“Fifteen?” called out another, obviously now just playing.
A boy at the back of the room, way too tough and street wise for a child only three years older than Andy, spoke up next. “Nah, it’s trick question. Humans don’t have no hearts. Check
it.”
The boy opened his shirt to bare his thin hairless chest. Juan immediately rose to the bait. “Hey, let me get my knife here and see.”
He picked up a dissection scalpel from the nearest table and made a jab at the other boy. Gena reacted instantly, grabbing the scalpel from Juan, but as she was distracted by that problem a girl behind her suddenly screamed and jumped out of her seat, brushing at her face and neck frantically. Gena whirled, scalpel in hand and eyes now a little wild.
“Su Lin! What is going on!” she demanded.
The slight Asian girl had already stopped brushing at herself and begun ripping out the innards of her frog with her bare hands in a fury.
“Su Lin!” Gena cried in alarm.
But Su Lin had eyes only for Tyrone, the boy seated one group behind hers. “Bastard! I’ll teach you respect!”
She ran after the grinning offender, trying to shove a handful of frog guts in his face.
Gena grabbed at her, but missed. “Stop that! What are you doing! Stop this instant!” Her orders fell on deaf ears, and Su Lin completed her mission.
“He started it!” the girl cried in her own defense. “He threw his frog heart in my face!”
“I’ll get him for you, Su Lin,” yelled one of the girls from Su Lin’s table.
So saying, she threw her entire frog at the boy. Immediately there erupted a free-for-all of flying frogs and frog body parts.
“Stop it!” Gena screamed, to no avail. “All of you, stop it right now! Stop or you’ll all be suspended!”
No one was listening; every student was up and armed, tearing off pieces of frogs and throwing them at one another with loud shrieks.
“Stop! Okay, I’m calling the school police!”
As she turned to grab the wall phone a frog hit her square in the face.
Alex shook his head at the scene being played out on the stage below, at once amazed, amused and sorry as he witnessed Gena lean her head up against the wall beside the phone, tears of frustration coursing down her cheeks.
He turned to Uriel. “Jesus! No wonder she came home so bitchy sometimes. I had no idea.”
“Then again, this is but one version of reality,” Uriel shrugged.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe it could have gone a different way. Take a look.”
The classroom scene reappeared on the stage below. Gena stood in the middle of the room, holding up a specimen frog which had already been partially dissected to expose the internal organs of the chest and abdomen. She was attempting to discourse on the internal structures over the loud and continuous uproar of loud chatter, screams and laughter from the ill-behaved and overly excited students.
“All right, all right, settle down class. Please!” Gena ordered, her voice loud and firm, and a little desperate. Finally they sputtered into a tenuous calm. “Okay, so this little white triangle in the center of the chest is the what?”
Just then a boy got up with his frog in hand and chased a shrieking girl right past Gena, both of them rudely pushing the teacher aside in their play. Gena grabbed the boy by his upper
arm as he shoved past.
“Back to your seat, Juan Carlos. One more outbreak and you’ll be writing standards instead of doing this lab.”
Juan responded by brushing her hand off his arm, hostile and threatening. “Hey, man, you can’t touch me! I know my rights—I’ll sue your ass!”
Gena whirled and grabbed him up by the shirt collar, lifting him close to her face. “You wanna fuck with me? Try it! I’ll have your scrawny little wetback ass deported back to El Salvador faster that you can count to five using all your little webbed fingers!”
The students gasped as one; the room went dead silent.
She turned to face them all, her expression dangerous.
“What? You think I don’t know? I have friends in the INS. First week of school all I do is check your records, find out who’s got the green cards and who doesn’t—and most of you don’t. So you’d better shut your little yaps, sit down and behave now that you know what’s up.”
They continued to stare, open-mouthed. Juan Carlos slipped cautiously back into his seat and folded his hands on the desk in front of him.
Gena continued the lesson as if nothing had happened.
“Okay, so who can tell me what this triangular thing in the center of Rana pipiens little hairless chest is?” she asked.
Hands shot up all over the room.
* * *
In the auditorium, Alex laughed and shook his head.
“So, which one was the real past?” Uriel asked him.
“I don’t know, probably the first one. She wouldn’t have the nerve to say what she said in scene two…although I’m pretty sure she’d think it. Then again,” he reconsidered, “it could have gone either way; she was pretty conflicted about the respect thing.”
“Want to see why?” Uriel asked, reactivating the movie screen.
* * *
23. Gena and The Prom Queen
GENA, TEN-YEARS-OLD AND knobby-kneed thin, skipped down the steps of the old brick elementary school, and through the light and shadows of the tree-lined street in the late afternoon sun. The old green Toyota was parked just up the block where it always was, Lucy inside, engine running. And, as always, she gave the horn a sharp blast just as Gena got to the door, making the little girl jump and squeal. She yanked open the door, laughing and scolding her seventeen year-old sister.
“Why do you always do that?!”
“Why do you always jump?” Lucy grinned. “Buckle up.”
After they’d moved out into traffic where the teenager didn’t have to concentrate quite so hard, she turned to her little sister with barely restrained excitement.
“I was invited to the prom!” she bragged.
“So?” Gena shrugged.
“Do you even know what a prom is?”
“No, what?”
“It’s a dance, a really special dance.”
“Like hip-hop or something?”
“No, I mean a dance dance—like the ball in Cinderella, or Beauty and the Beast.”
“Oh. Okay, so?”
“So there’s this big dance called the Senior Prom coming up next month and this boy in my class asked me to go with him.”
“With him? Cool.” Gena nodded.
“But I don’t know if Papa will let me.”
“Why not?”
“He’s…you know.”
“Mean?”
Lucy looked over at her and made a face. “Yeah…but I was gonna say old fashioned. He doesn’t think girls should be seen or heard. We’re not supposed to grow up, definitely not supposed to date; but somehow, despite all t
hat, we’re supposed to magically find a mate so we can get out of their hair…”
“What’s a mate?”
“Something you have sex with.” Lucy grinned.
“Ewwww! You’re not going to do that, are you?”
“Just dance, Gena, just dance. Anyway, I’m going to ask Mama to talk to Papa for me.”
“Did Johnny or Takeo ever go to a prom?”
“I know Johnny did last year—I don’t remember if Takeo did or not; I would have been your age back then.”
“So what’s Mama going to do to make Papa say yes?”
They were just pulling into the rear parking lot of the family business, a little restaurant called “A Taste of Tokyo.” Lucy turned off the engine, then turned to look straight at her younger sister seriously.
“I don’t know, Gen-Gen. I’m sure she’ll be on my side, but I don’t know how much she’ll be able to stand up to Papa.”
“Guess it depends on how hard he says no, huh?”
Lucy laughed, pinching Gena’s cheeks. “You are so smart for a little twit! Anyway, I want you to spy for me when Mama asks, okay?”
“Oh sure, cool!” Gena happily agreed.
Later, as the young girl cut fresh vegetables for the dinner entrees and the other two women busily prepared ingredients for the various courses, Gena eavesdropped on Lucy’s conversation with her mother.
“So, who is this boy?” Mama asked, slicing chicken into paper-thin strips.
“He’s a very nice boy, Mama; a straight A student, and leader of the school debate team,” Lucy replied, stirring a large vat of boiling rice. “He’s in my AP chemistry class.”
“Asian?”
“No, Mama.”
“Caucasian, then?”
“No, Mama.”
“He’s black?!”
“No, Mama, he’s Latino…Mexican American.”
A period of silence greeted this news, as Mama finished cutting the chicken and began to cube a shank of pork. Finally she said, “Your father would be easier to convince if your date was an Asian boy…not Korean, though.”
“An Asian boy didn’t ask me, Mama. And Miguel is the one I want to go with anyway.”
“What about a dress?”
“I’ve saved all my tips; it won’t cost you or Papa a cent. It’s really important to me, Mom!” She turned her mother gently to face her, wanting her to see how much this meant. “This is my senior year, my senior prom. You’ve got to make Papa let me go!”
The tired and rather sad-looking little Asian woman smiled sweetly at her elder daughter and, taking Lucy’s hands in her own, kissed her on one cheek and then the other.
“I remember how it felt, to be young, to be alive. You think I don’t, but I do. I will do my best to convince your father to let you go,” she promised.
Then they all returned to their tasks; preparing for the dinner rush superseded further discussion.
Hitoshi Nishimoto and his eldest son Takeo acted as hosts in the exclusive little restaurant, taking reservations, seating guests and managing the cash register. Lucy and Johnny waited tables, while Gena bussed dirty dishes back to the hired help and assisted with water, drinks and condiments.
Kazuko, the mother, supervised the kitchen help as they prepared and filled the orders. Then, after the restaurant closed and the rest of the family went home—the girls to their homework, the boys to their nightlife, the father to his TV—Kazuko would stay and total all the day’s receipts, making sure the customer checks balanced with the cash register tape. The next day, while the children went to school she would return to the restaurant to check inventories and reorder supplies, pay the creditors whose bills were due, update the payroll records and balance the books. Hitoshi would arrive midday to do maintenance work and clean.
Tonight, however, after the restaurant closed but before Papa had time to escape to his television shows, Gena knew Mama would find a way to bring up Lucy’s request. She was anxious to be there and fulfill her espionage task—so much so that, toward closing time, Gena began to dog her mother’s every step. The woman nearly tripped over her a couple of times, before losing patience.
“Gena! What is wrong with you? Please stay out from under my feet!” Kazuko admonished the girl. Lucy, in the background, shook her head, suppressing a smile.
At last, just after the doors were locked behind the final customers of the evening, Mama found the opportunity to bring the subject of the prom up to her husband. She was sitting at the scarred wooden desk in the little office space between the kitchen and the pantry, beginning to sort through the customer checks to separate the credit card charges from cash sales. Hitoshi had just brought her the cash register tape, and was preparing to leave. Gena listened from her hidden vantage point, seated on a little stool deep inside the pantry among the bags of rice and dried seaweed wrappers.
“Lucy has been invited to her senior prom,” Mama said, keeping her eyes on the receipts in front of her.
Papa, as expected, said nothing.
After allowing a sufficient period of respectful silence to be sure she was not interrupting either his thoughts or any pending verbal response on the matter, Mama tried again.
“She says the boy is very nice, very smart; a straight ‘A’ student.”
“Is he Asian then?” Papa asked. (Gena in the back room rolled her eyes and stifled a snicker. She couldn’t wait to tell Lucy that one.)
This time it was Mama’s turn to hesitate. Gena could picture her lips drawing into a thin worried line. She always made that face when she was about to say something she knew papa wouldn’t like.
“No,” she admitted cautiously. “He’s Mexican, but very bright nonetheless. He’s in Lucy’s AP chemistry class.”
“She can’t go,” Papa said with finality.
Gena’s mouth dropped open. She knew Papa was biased, but she didn’t think he was this bad. Mama must have been just as surprised, for she foolishly and immediately protested.
“But Hitoshi, he is a very nice boy, and Lucy is a very nice, hard-working girl. She deserves—”
“I said no.” His voice cracked like a whip.
“You allowed Johnny to go last year!”
Gena felt the first inkling of alarm. She’d never heard her mother talk back to her father like this, and it was making her own heart beat a little faster, in admiration as well as in fear.
“Johnny is a man. And he took a Nipponese girl.”
“The Prom Queen?! Nipponese or not, that girl was dressed like a tramp!”
Gena remembered now the very low cut front and even lower back of the thin silk dress that had them all gawking when Johnny’s prom date arrived for him in her sporty little Camry last spring. But Papa’s memory apparently remembered her differently. Now his voice grew even more vicious and dangerous in its barely suppressed rage.
“I won’t have you disparage our son like this, nor will I permit you to argue with me further. You are a stupid, ugly and useless woman, and have no right to speak to me at all unless I allow it, do you understand?”
Perhaps it was because she knew Gena was listening, perhaps it was simply that she had finally reached her limit, but Kazuko would not let that pass.
“This is not right!” she protested angrily. Gena could hear the tears of frustration in her
voice.
Then she heard the loud crack of a hand slapping flesh, and the inadvertent cry of pain.
Gena leapt out of her hiding place. “Don’t hit Mama! And don’t talk to her that way! She’s not stupid, you are!”
Papa’s hand was so fast and so hard Gena never saw it coming. It connected with the side of her head and slammed her back against the pantry shelves, bringing an instant flow of blood from her mouth. Her face on that side would remain swollen and bruised for more than two weeks, and the ringing in her left ear would bother her for months. But at the moment she was too dizzy and stunned to even cry out. She watched in a surreal daze as Lucy came running into the room, screa
ming at her father in rage, spitting her disgust for him in a wad of yellow sputum at his feet.
She and Mama took Gena into their arms, and the three women looked up at him with cold hatred in their eyes. He stared back at the girls with ice in his, then turned directly to his wife.
“Is this how you raise your daughters, to be disrespectful little whores just like you?” He whirled and left the room, his two sons flanking him.
Later Mama had insisted they all apologize, and when the girls protested, she said they must, or she would never speak to them again.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “He is an honorable man, and we must show him respect. That is our way, our culture. Now come.”