"Lessons" by Vinay Espinosa-Ravi
It started with the puzzle, remember? A thousand pieces to recreate the Taj Mahal on the living room floor, but you self-destructed after five. Crying—unable to make the pieces fit, to find where the protrusion of one could make a home in the emptiness of another—you brought out the scissors. It would be better, you thought, if the pieces were less discerning, if they welcomed all of their neighbors. There was an odd sense of justice in it, in your fear of failure.
But Dad stepped in before the scissors could eat—No Love, the pieces need their limbs, to hold each other close! He drew you into his paunch, wrapping his hairy forearms around your shoulders, his elbows cradling your ears, and squeezed until you were laughing. See—how everything fits? He then sat down on the beige carpet and helped you find nine-hundred and ninety-nine other hugs, until the Taj Mahal gleamed up, a spotlight on your smile.
Cute trick, a parental sleight of hand—you went along with it, but Dad was working up something bigger, a set of lessons, an entire world, one where the imagination turned problems turned into games, as if predicting your next disappointment.
Your first trip to India, you hated it so much, all of it: the way you couldn’t grasp the language, the humidity that drew torrents of sweat from your forehead and armpits, the ten people sharing one bathroom. You demanded home, but would settle for doughnuts—something American, to repatriate your senses.
Relatives humored you with gulab jamuns, jalebis, all things sweet and fried. But they were not doughnuts, so Dad, sensing a new game, borrowed a scooter and threw you on the back of it, yelling, This is a search party! You held on tight to his belly, your white-frocked body a waxing crescent moon around his torso as he careened through half-paved streets. He knew there were no doughnuts in India, not yet. He also knew that blocking one sense made the others work better, and asked you to close your eyes, to picture the most perfect doughnut in the world—golden brown and bulging at its circumference—and to breathe. He said your nose would lead you to it. But all you smelled was open drainage and exhaust.
It won’t work if you keep peeking!, he shouted, over the din of traffic. So you gave in and closed your eyes, dissolving yourself in the darkness behind your eyelids.
Then it came to you. A doughnut, the size of a flying saucer, large enough to transport you and Dad back, back across the Atlantic Ocean. Your nose flooded with the smell of fried dough, powdered sugar, hints of cinnamon—and your hunger became less interesting. Home had been there waiting, right inside of you.
This was how you grew up. You did not know what psychology was, the degree Dad had earned in India, or that he’d kicked it to the side because too many clients found his accent to be a distraction. In his closet, tucked between the smell of cedar and mothballs, he kept a stack of his framed certificates. Once, you asked him what they were for, but he just shrugged and said Treasure chests, my Love—but I lost the keys, crossing the Atlantic. Perhaps you remember this because when you suggested forming another search party, venturing to the depths of the Atlantic, he said the pressure underwater would crush you, closed the closet door, and walked away.
A little after your ninth birthday you came home crying; three white girls at school had called you a monkey, held you down, and cut out tufts of your hair. You had bested them at four-square but they still found a way to win. When you told your teacher, she sent everyone to the principal’s office. He interviewed the other girls together and you alone. You presented him with a palm-full of your shorn hair and he still decided you were the liar. You said all of this to Dad as he dabbed tears from your cheeks with his handkerchief.
That was when you stumped him. He tried, he really did—Well let’s find a name to throw back at them, give everyone a place in the zoo!—pulling the red encyclopedia of animals off the shelf, sitting beside you on our arabesque-patterned couch, one arm across your shoulder, the other slowly turning the pages. But nothing mammalian, reptilian, or avian seemed to work—there was nothing to hurl back. No new game would extend the world he had been building for you.
So he took you to the mall, to purchase a set of butterfly hair clips, the ones you had been begging for. Dad knew the consolation wouldn’t last. Suspicions were vining up your trellises. Fit in. Belong. Were they not the same thing? As you faced the bathroom mirror, clasping plastic pastel butterflies into your hair, arranging them in the shape of a headband, covering over missing parts, you closed your eyes and tried to find home again. Instead you met a new darkness, an emptiness that condensed gravity and inhaled light. Sinking, you wondered if you would soon find out how it felt—at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Dad’s knock on the door, the crack of his knuckles on wood, pulled you back to the surface. You opened your eyes. On the other side, he was no longer there. You looked down and saw what was left in his place—three puzzle pieces, cut down, equal in size, their limbs shorn off. Placed next to them, a pair of scissors, its jaws open wide, ready to eat.
Vinay Espinosa-Ravi is an emerging writer based in Chicago, IL. A former union organizer, he is currently in graduate school for public health and working on his first short story collection.
