Blue Boy (11 page)

Or, one particularly odd time, when heading out the front door to go shopping, she said, “I never vore such beautiful saris as I did vhen I danced.” It was as if she knew the promise of luxurious fabric would perk my ears up. But I was too deep in concentration to think about her words carefully; I was waiting for her to go shopping so that I could play with her makeup again.

In the end, it was inevitable that I would choose ballet.

It was in third grade that they began to offer the ballet class at my school. Mrs. Fisher gave us all a sheet that specified the after-school programs available to us. There were karate, basketball, ceramics, Tee Ball, and ballet. Most of the boys went for the basketball class, which made no sense—most of them played basketball after school on the blacktop anyway, even when it was chilly outside, so why they chose an indoor league was beyond me. To the girls, ballet was the best option, of course. And I wanted to be near the girls. I wanted to be in the world of tights and pastels and fleet feet.

I was the only boy. Even when I turned in my sign-up sheet—which had been encouragingly signed by my mother, who thought ballet “a graceful dance that can prepare you for
khatak
”—Mrs. Fisher, her forehead crinkling under a poof of Clairol-hued bangs, asked if I was sure.

“Keern, honey, I think you checked the wrong box.” She leaned over her desk, covering the tests she was grading as if afraid my balletic cooties would get all over them. “Why don’t you join the basketball league, honey?” she whispered. “Or at least ceramics. You could make a nice pot.”

“But I like ballet!” I said—too loudly, it turned out, because the boys in the classroom started calling me “Ballerina.”

Shuddering off the name-calling, I went with my mother that afternoon to buy the supplies listed on a sheet that Mrs. Fisher finally handed over to me. The store of choice was a tiny place called Pansy’s, a small wooden box—knobby hardwood floors, wood-paneled walls speckled with the silver heads of tiny nails, wood benches and wooden cubbies full of salmon-colored boxes that contained different styles and sizes of ballet slippers. The owner, Pansy, was an overweight woman in her mid-forties who wore zebra-print spandex pants and a faded black KISS T-shirt that could have clothed all four members of that band. Her hair looked like orange yarn, and she took a hit of a Virginia Slim every ten seconds.

“This is a ballet store, hon,” she puffed at my mother, who was an odd blast of color in the middle of the store—she was wearing a pool-bottom-blue
salwaar kameez
topped with her white cardigan, and her hair fell in one fat black braid, cinched by a silver scrunchie.

“Oh, this is a
ballet store
? Oh, dear, forgive me, ma’am. I thought it vas a bar,” said my mother, in one of those wacky moments when I looked up at her and wondered who she really was. “My son is starting ballet class and needs to buy a pair of shoes.”

“Yer
son
?”

“Yes, my son,” my mother said, cradling my head in her hand instead of pushing me forward. Her hand felt cold but comforting, the nails long and manicured and scraping softly against my cheek. “Can you help us?”

“Well, of course I can help ya, honey,” Pansy said. She took a deep hit from her cigarette, dropped it onto the dusty wooden floor, and put it out with her shoe, which was a cross between a bathroom slipper and a ballet slipper. “Come over here, kid.” She gave an exasperated glance at the cashier, who looked like a less-pretty Geena Davis and whose register looked like it had come out of Frosty’s, the closed-down ’50s diner on Route 4. My mother must have noticed the glance between the two ladies, but she had apparently decided to ignore it. She crossed her hands in front of her—her gold bangles jingled—and I sat down on a bench as Pansy motioned for me to do.

“What size shoe are ya, hon?” Pansy asked, her arms akimbo on fleshy hips.

“He’s a size five,” my mother said.

“Wow—tiny little guy. Okay, hon, take off your shoes and socks so we can try these babies on. I gotta go into the back room for those teensy-weensy feet.”

I unstuck the two Velcro strips holding each sneaker together and slid the shoes onto the floor. I had to wear the Velcro kind because I still wasn’t particularly good at tying my shoes; it should have been easy enough for a smart kid like me, but I had just never gotten the rhythm of it down right. I always ended up tying a huge, garbled knot that would take me twenty minutes to untie or that would lead me to slide the constricted shoes off my feet with a grimace on my face. One time, I had to throw out a pair of sneakers because I had knotted them so tightly that not even my father could untie them, try as he may have to undo the knot with a Phillips screwdriver. Whose handle, now that I think of my eating fad, looked like butterscotch.

Pansy emerged from behind a black velvet curtain. She had a stack of slim boxes in her hands, and although it didn’t look like her load was particularly heavy, she was grunting as if she were carrying an elephant.

“It’s been ages since I had a boy in here,” she said, attempting to set the entire stack onto the bench but dropping the top three boxes. “Had to blow dust off these black slippers.”

“
Black
slippers?” I said.

“Yeah, black slippers, toots. Unless ya wanted pink ones like the girls!” She laughed an emphysemic laugh, happy enough to make me want to slug her.

“Well, I…”

“Oh, ya want the pink ones, hon?” She laughed again, and the movement of the snot in her throat sounded like a car wash.

“No,” I said quickly, and I looked behind me to see my mom’s reaction to this exchange. Not surprisingly, she was too busy examining a tableful of fancy, satin-covered shoes, tongue pinched between her lips.

My heart did a bungee jump in my torso, plummeting almost through my butt, then retracted, ending up somewhere just below where it had been previously. To think that I would not be able to wear pink slippers! The cheekiness in Pansy’s stare, the smirk in her fat lips, told me that choosing pink was forbidden, an instant path to ridicule. And so, although sad I couldn’t get the type of pink slippers that would match SS’s hat, I said nothing as Pansy opened one of the boxes on the bench and pulled out a pair of nice-smelling black slippers that were crinkled at the toe, a tiny bow protruding from the crinkle. She slid the slipper onto my right foot. A thin elastic black band crossed over the delicate bones of my foot. The leather was cold and comforting, but it was also the charred version of my pink dreams.

All the same, it seemed like kismet when Pansy told me, in a bedtime story tone, that the first pair I tried on was
juuuuust riiiiight
. My mother looked on with a cheerful expression. I hopped over to her and placed my arms around her waist, then buried my head just a bit into her stomach. She cradled me, and we stood like this as Ugly Geena Davis rang up our order.

“You have a pretty boy,” Pansy said to my mother as we turned to leave the store.

“Thank you, Ms. Pansy,” my mother said, pulling me closer to her side as we left. It was only just before the door to the store squeezed shut and I heard Pansy and Ugly Geena Davis cackling that I realized “Ms. Pansy” was being ironic.

When I arrived at the first ballet class, the girls all giggled. I was too busy being excited to pay much attention to their reactions. (Had I paid attention, I might have seen a younger Sarah and Melissa making fun of me, which would have precluded the splinter situation from ever happening.) I was now in love with my slippers, regardless of their color; I had held them in my hands before going to bed every night, and when I finally had occasion to put them on in class, I felt like a legitimate dancer. I wanted to run up and down the room, wanted to tumble, wanted to flail my arms about and leap. I had once caught a quick glimpse of
Flashdance
(before my mother walked into the room and turned the TV off), and I wanted to be like Jennifer Beals, dancing like a maniac up and down shiny hardwood.

I thought we would be wild in action from the get-go, but everything was so slow, so measured. Learn this position, start from the toes up, position your leg this way, bend your wrist like this, focus on your hips, align your body like building blocks. We practiced the five fundamental ballet positions so many times that I thought my body would forget how to perform any other action. The more that Marcy walked past, correcting our poses, the woozier I became from the grape fog of her lacquered hair; there were several times when I thought I might pass out. The only thing that prevented me from doing so was knowing that I would never hear the end of it.

But I slowly came to understand the graceful wisdom of Marcy’s teachings. I worked hard in her class, and it seemed like ballet was the first physical activity that used my energy effectively. Once I learned arabesques,
jettés
,
attitudes,
and pirouettes, I felt that I had a physical vocabulary for myself. There were, of course, increased jeers when the school found out that I was a
danseur
—or a “ballerina,” they still called me, not knowing the proper term for a male ballet dancer—but for the first time, I felt that I had the upper hand. When Timmy Justice asked me for the millionth time why I hadn’t worn my tutu to math class, I about-faced from him with the grace of a piqué turn. When Gary Martin leaped past me flapping his hands like wings while I tried to read on the playground, I jettéd away and finished with a pirouette on another bench. My backtalk became more physical than verbal. It was as if I could stop the nervous stammers when I spoke by finding another form of communication. Through dance, I could craft sentences that didn’t falter, ideas that moved swiftly instead of bumping into the rickety machine of my mouth. And over time, I felt that when I did have to speak, my dancing informed my speech. In time, I learned to make words dance.

I want you to see the world the way that I see it. I want you to feel the lift of my body when I see the beauty of a pirouette or the ecstatic fact of a swishing sari. I want you to see the beauty in locking your face in colorful makeup and the beauty in twirling around and puckering your lips. I want you to know the meaning of dance, the things you do when no one is home, when you grab your ballet slippers and slap them on your feet and fly around the house, leaping over footrests and spinning around the island in the kitchen. I want you to understand the joy of pulling out several sheets from a paper towel roll and running around the empty house with it trailing behind you, then letting it go, letting yourself fall to the ground, and then letting the white streamer float onto you. I want you to understand how fluent my feet are, how they kiss the linoleum, the carpet, the kitchen table, armchairs, desks, beds. I want you to understand that this is the world, this is the acceptance, this is the big bear hug and the gold-star sticker. There is such beauty in the world, despite all of the harsh realities about it, and they are contained here for me. They are contained in a
plié
, in a
rond de jambe
. I have my own language. I
am
my own language.

In crafting my talent show act, I need to be as fluent as possible in Dance, and so I ignore Sarah and Melissa for the rest of today’s lesson and focus on the picture of a graceful Krishna that I have in my mind. I imagine Him drawing His blue left foot through the dust of a sylvan pathway, and I know that I need to create an act that melds His mind and His body with my mind and my body. With that goal at the forefront of my thoughts, I decide to learn as much as I can about my past incarnation and fashion a ballet based on Him.

I think the reason I’ve always read at a higher level is because I recognized my true friends from the get-go. Subconsciously, I always knew that I belonged with Frances Hodgson Burnett more than I belonged with pigtailed harlots. Therefore, just as my bed and the dance studio became sanctuaries, the local library became a safe haven.

It’s an austere building to most people. It is as if the city officials want to scare the citizens into illiteracy (a tactic that seems to have worked, considering the number of kids in my school who have trouble reading). It is composed of three domed, brown brick edifices of different heights that have mildewy stripes of green growth wedged into the seams, and although the library was never a church, its windows are stained glass. Inside, stacks of books lie covered in dust and rainbow patches that the sunlight throws through the colored panes. The floor is wooden, knotted, and the sounds of feet, coughs, and turning pages echo easily. The librarians are so stereotypically librarian that they may have singlehandedly given rise to the stereotype: they are all female; they wear cardigans in earth tones; they wear spectacles; their hair is curly and gray; their long fingers are entwined in pulsing veins as they grasp a black stamp and press the due date in the back of the books.

The library is drafty, and when you pull a book from a shelf, an exhalation of wind greets you. There is a children’s section located on the second floor, in a small corner in which the librarians have plastered various READ posters that feature random celebrities—Tom Selleck, Oprah Winfrey, LeVar Burton—but there are never any children there. In fact, the only people under eighteen who seem to enter this library are high school students. And me.

The fact that other children my age do not come here is comforting. The library is the only place in this city where I feel completely free from the usual classroom calumny. Books are much better companions to me than people. A book’s content never changes, and yet it is always intriguing; something you read can mean something completely different to you at a different time. This is not the case with my classmates. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people can be devastating at any moment.

The Eastern Religions section of the library is, not surprisingly, rather small, and it is tucked away in one of the dankest corners of the building, right next to a forbidding stone doorway that leads to the bathrooms (which emit a mixed odor of must, urinal cakes, and soap). Doreen, one of the librarians, walks me to the section with extra-defiant, annoyed steps. Her beige pantyhose wrinkles at the ankles, and her olive, school-marmish skirt is loud in its polyester swishing. Doreen motions to the three shelves that house the “extensive” collection and turns on her cushioned heel without a word.

The books, unlike those in most other sections of the library, are not categorized alphabetically or even by subject, although most of them seem to be about Buddhism. I flip through books by Thich Naht Hahn, the Dalai Lama, and, terrifyingly enough, that guy from
Highlander
. On the bottom shelf, squeezed between
The Tao of Pooh
and
The Te of Piglet
, I find three fat books on Hinduism that, contrary to their A. A. Milne knockoff counterparts, are in pristine condition. I pull this trio of books off the shelf and tote the small stack to the nearest table, which is round and wide and looks like it might have come from the court of King Arthur. I open the first one, A
Journey Through Hinduism
, which is about five hundred pages long and bears a picture of the “Om symbol”—in essence, the number 30 with a swish over it. I flip to the index and look up “Krishna.” There are several entries. I hum excitedly and flip to the section that seems the longest. A beautiful portrait of Krishna playing the flute greets me. Instinctively, my hand reaches up to my hair to fix it, as if this picture is the master bathroom mirror. The image on the page may not mimic my movement, but all the same, I sense a slight wink of a blue-lidded eye as I begin to pore over the information inside.

As I amass more and more information from the library, the desk in my bedroom becomes a maelstrom of papers. I have taken to drawing pictures of myself, which acts as an ample substitute for putting on makeup when I can’t sneak into the master bathroom. I have spent so much time looking at my face in the mirror that I have learned every last detail: The roundness of my eyes, the whites so visible all around that the only reason one can tell I have eyelids at all is because my lashes are so long. My cute button of a nose, the tip of it rounded in a very un-Indian way. My high cheekbones. Every time I start a new drawing, I place my face on the page first, then use my markers to create a new outfit for myself. In one picture, I wear nothing but a headdress and a gown made of peacock feathers. In another, I wear a garment made out of sari-like material—bright red and magenta with frayed gold embroidery—but make certain that it does not look like a sari; as lost as I am in my art, I do not forget the fact that my parents might see my handiwork. In yet another picture, I am naked, although I stop the drawing at my waist, giving the impression that I am merely bare-chested.

In this picture, as in all the others, my skin is blue. My blue Crayola marker runs out of ink because I use it so much. After a while, instead of starting my drawings in black marker, using that dark color as the outline—a
kajol
of the body—I use only dark blue to do the outlines. I have an epiphany and excavate my pastel markers from the bottom of my large crafts bin. I pull out the sky blue marker and from then on use this marker to shade my skin. I do the outlines in dark blue, then fill in the curve of a shoulder or the shield of a pectoral with the lighter, peaceful blue. In one hasty move, I tear up the drawings I have done before, for the earlier blue seems too blunt. I am blue, but I am not a tough, hard, dark, frightening blue. My blueness is melodic.

Only after I have created a thick stack of drawings do I realize what I have been doing. I lift my pen off of the page, sit back in my chair, and realize that all along I have been designing my costume for the talent show ballet. I haven’t started choreographing. I haven’t even thought of the plot. But here I am, drawing intricate costumes for myself.

I put my pen down.
You should move in order
, I tell myself. I should be thinking of what the story is going to be, which particular episode or episodes of my past life I want to reenact, not crafting clothes for scenes I haven’t even conceived. But no sooner have I put down my pen than I find myself drawing again, crafting my face, then surrounding it in a swath of orange flames. Never mind that I don’t know how to rig a flaming costume. Never mind that I don’t even know if this picture is supposed to be a costume. I draw what I feel.

I begin to tape my pictures on the wall in front of my desk. The prime spot is a few inches above the desk, center, and I have a featured drawing there every day. Meanwhile, I have the books I’ve checked out from the library stacked on one end of the desk, various pages sticking out where I have made Xeroxes and bookmarked their original pages with the copies.

My drawing habit follows me out of my bedroom into the classroom, as I find myself doodling all of the time. When we do problems in math class, I print my name and Mrs. Nevins’s name neatly in the top right corner as instructed, then, once she begins talking into the blackboard, I lose myself. My thoughts become so ornate that even my numbers have curlicues. The curlicues evolve into peacock feathers, jars of butter, and when I am writing a “6” as part of a math problem, it will become one of my round eyes, wrapped in lashes. An equation is a body, the equal sign the stretch of its tummy.

One day, Mrs. Nevins teaches us a very grown-up word, especially for sixth graders; she learned the word, she says, from reading her “favorite book ever,”
Jurassic Park
. The word is “iteration”—when something mutates into something else but retains something of its original form. In the same vein—in the same
blue
vein—my world becomes a series of iterated bodies. Or, to be more exact, one body. Mine is one body, iterated, like a god’s.

From my studies, I discover that Vishnu has ten incarnations—from a bull to a tortoise to a lion to even a powerful midget. But it is Krishna who is the most memorable of these figures, even more memorable than Rama, the hero of the
Ramayana
. Krishna beats Rama because of all of his talents—his flute-playing, his ability to charm cowherdesses, and of course his skin. The most important thing I discover is that Krishna has an incarnation that has yet to appear. The tenth one is still waiting to happen.
Not anymore
, I think.
I
am the tenth incarnation.

I read about myself in the
Mahabharata
. As Doreen walks by my table in the library, she gives a worried glance at the huge tome before me, and I huddle over it and give her a dirty look. Her shoes scuffle away, and as I lean over the table again, I feel like they are the musical overture to the story happening on the pages before me, like the lion roaring before a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie. I pull out a Butterfinger from my bookbag and unwrap it quietly, seeing as eating is not allowed in here. I nibble it in secretive bites as I lean back over the book.

I tell Cody the findings of my studies during lunch, but as usual he’s full of criticism.

“Keern, yer rippin’ that story off of the Bible.” He’s eating cafeteria food again, a hamburger with orange cheese oozing from under the bun, which looks like a baseball mitt.

“I am not ripping anything off. The stories are there, in the Upanishads.”

“I’m punishing you?”

“The
Upanishads
. The ancient Indian texts. The Indian Bible, basically.”

“See—there! Ya just admitted it.
The Indian Bible
.”

“No, I mean—how else am I supposed to explain things to you? I have to use the words of your religion to explain mine to you.”

“Why do ya have to explain it to me in the first place?”

“Will you just listen to me? It’s a cool story. He escaped the hand of a king who wanted to kill him. The child could do anything.”

“But that’s the story of Moses.”

“Well, I don’t remember the story of Moses, but I know this isn’t made up.”

Cody proceeds to tell me the story of Moses, how he survived the wrath of Ramses, how he was sent out from Israel to escape the Pharaoh’s blood-seeking soldiers. I smile during the whole story.

“What are you smilin’ about?” Cody asks.

“Cody, Hinduism is much older than Christianity. We got there first. It’s the Bible that ripped off the Hindus.”

“It was not! Ya don’ know what yer talkin’ about. And listen to what yer sayin’. Snakes? Demons? Weirdos with blue skin? It sounds like a cartoon.”

“Oh, but a man who walks on water—before turning it into
wine
—and heals the blind and dies only to come back to life is believable? It sounds more like an episode of Captain Planet.”

With this, Cody picks up his tray, slides out of the cafeteria table bench, and harrumphs away, my fingers still frozen in the act of counting Jesus’ achievements. He almost bumps into Sarah and Melissa, who giggle meanly at him as he lurches away.

For the rest of the day, I regret what I have said to Cody. I don’t have anything against Jesus. In fact, Jesus is cool, as so many bumper stickers in this town would attest. He is a loving figure, a man of billowing white robes and white skin. In my studies, I have discovered that certain warriors, like Bharat, Rama’s brother, had very white skin, a sign of purity and loyalty. So Jesus is pure and loyal. What is more, the feats that I numbered off to Cody are more Hindu than anything else; what could be more Hindu than controlling the elements, performing magical actions, transforming a normal human setting into a carnival of wonder and awe? Hinduism did come before Christianity, but why separate the two, anyway? In terms of vitality and spirit, isn’t Hinduism Christianity and Christianity Hinduism? Our houses of worship may be vastly different, but there is a shared movement toward life, light, jubilance.