Someone shouted out my name. The mask dropped to my side, and with it my daydream, and I saw my grandparents
again standing there, waving almost frantically now. This time I waved back; and then, without thinking, I brought the
mask again up to my face, swaying my head in an odd little dance. My grandparents laughed and pointed at me and
waved some more until the customs official finally tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was an American. I
nodded and handed him my passport.
“Go ahead,” he said, and told the Chinese family to step to one side.
The sliding doors closed behind me. Toot gathered me into a hug and tossed candy-and-chewing-gum leis around my
neck. Gramps threw an arm over my shoulder and said that the mask was a definite improvement. They took me to the
new car they had bought, and Gramps showed me how to operate the air-conditioning. We drove along the highway,
past fast-food restaurants and economy motels and used-car lots strung with festoons. I told them about the trip and
everyone back in Djakarta. Gramps told me what they’d planned for my welcome-back dinner. Toot suggested that I’d
need new clothes for school.
Then, suddenly, the conversation stopped. I realized that I was to live with strangers.
The new arrangement hadn’t sounded so bad when my mother first explained it to me. It was time for me to attend an
American school, she had said; I’d run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and
Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon-a year, tops-and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas. She
reminded me of what a great time I’d had living with Gramps and Toot just the previous summer-the ice cream, the
cartoons, the days at the beach. “And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found
most compelling.
It was only now, as I began to adjust to an indefinite stay and watched my grandparents in the rhythm of their
schedules, that I realized how much the two of them had changed. After my mother and I left, they had sold the big,
rambling house near the university and now rented a small, two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise on Beretania Street.
Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent, but as he was unable to convince himself that
people needed what he was selling and was sensitive to rejection, the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I would
watch him grow more and more irritable as he gathered his briefcase and set up a TV tray in front of his chair,
following the lead of every possible distraction, until finally he would chase us out of the living room and try to
schedule appointments with prospective clients over the phone. Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda,
and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the
other end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh after he
had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a cardplayer who’s deep in the hole.
Eventually, a few people would relent, the pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to tell me
stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest. If his calls had gone especially well that night, he
might discuss with me some scheme he still harbored-the book of poems he had started to write, the sketch that would
soon bloom into a painting, the floor plans for his ideal house, complete with push-button conveniences and terraced
landscaping. I saw that the plans grew bolder the further they receded from possibility, but in them I recognized some
of his old enthusiasm, and I would usually try to think up encouraging questions that might sustain his good mood.
barré
(Barré)
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