Laugh with the Moon (4 page)

I point to the tiny boy hiding behind the girl’s legs. “Why’s he crying?” I ask.

“My brother, Innocent, did only see a few
azungu
in all his life.” Her eyes are dark and serious. “He think you are ghost.”

“Me, a ghost?” I chuckle. I guess Dad thinks I’m okay, so he takes his arm off my shoulder. But I’m not okay. Not yet. Doesn’t he know anything?

Well, I can make people feel better even if my father, the doctor, can’t. The boy with the strange name is trembling, so I puff out my cheeks and bang on them. Then I suck the air into my cheeks all over again and curl my index finger, motioning to the boy called Innocent that it’s his turn.

Innocent hesitates, but he finally comes close enough for me to take his shaking hands, touch them to my cheeks, and make a noise that sounds exactly like someone who has eaten way too many baked beans. Immediately, his mouth drops open and a giggle flutters out, like a butterfly escaping its cocoon.

“Nice work, Miss Manners,” Dad says.

Innocent dashes away, the tall grass swooshing behind him. But I still hear giggles. I look up. The boys in the trees cover their mouths with their hands. Their shoulders shake. One gives me a thumbs-up.

When I look back at Innocent, he is halfway to the
huts. He passes a short man in khaki pants and red polo shirt who is running toward Dad and me. “Not again!” I shout to Dad.

“It’s Stallard!” Dad tells me. “
Moni
, Stallard!” he calls as I sag with relief.

When we meet, Stallard hugs my father and shakes my hand very formally while holding his own forearm. Then he looks at the girl with the serious eyes. “I see you have met Memory, the daughter of my sister.”

“Ahh! Edith’s daughter,” Dad says, and smiles.

Memory looks shyly at the ground.

“Your mother was a terrific woman,” he says.

Memory smiles. But my pulse pounds.
Her mother
was
a terrific woman? What happened to her mother? Did she die like mine? How did she die? When?

“So where’s Joseph?” Dad asks. “I’ve got to kick a ball with him.”

“The previous hungry season,” Stallard says, and sighs. “My brother was weak.”

Dad rubs the stubble on his chin. “The …? Oh,” he says, and winces. “I’m very sorry to hear that. Very sorry! How is everyone else?”

“Fine, fine.” Stallard smiles. “They are most eager to visit with you and your beautiful daughter.”

I feel my face turn redder than a theater curtain. Then Stallard and Dad stare in the direction of the huts while I look at this girl named Memory and she looks at me. The hair on my arms stands up and I get a psychic premonition. I know right here and now, way deep inside my bones, that the girl standing beside me is going to become my friend.

I’ve been getting premonitions for as long as I can remember. When my cat Sunny drowned back when I was in third grade, I had a really bad feeling the whole day in school—and that was before I even got home and found out what had happened. And when Mom bought a ticket for the state lottery, she let me pick the numbers. I got one out of four right, and we won five dollars. We would have won five thousand forty-eight dollars, but I put the numbers in the wrong order.

Memory and I follow my father and Stallard toward the drumbeat in the distance, where hundreds of villagers gather, and I quickly lose her in the crowd. “Our new chief,” Stallard says. He looks at a thin man with oversized dark glasses and a lavender shirt that says
ROCK THE VOTE
. I can’t believe the chief doesn’t wear a headdress. The only cool thing he has is a leather holster tied around his waist. I think there might be a knife in it—probably the knife he uses to defend the village from attack by enemy tribes.

The crowd parts and the new chief reaches us and shakes our hands. Then he claps three times, and men in white robes start to play the most bizarre instruments I’ve ever seen. One looks like a guitar made from an old gas tank. Two of the men face each other, carrying a pole between them. A drum hangs from the pole. The men bang the drum at the same time while the villagers dance and sing, and the women make high-pitched noises that sound like “la la la la la la la.”

When I turn around, I feel a fist right inside me. It’s a betrayal of the worst kind: my father’s shimmying too. And even though I feel selfish, part of me wants Dad to
wait to be happy again. Wait until I’m ready. And I’m not ready. I don’t know if I ever will be.

Two village ladies lift my hands and try to dance with me, but I tell them “No thanks.” I bite my lip to keep the tears inside. I want the music to stop. I want the dancing to stop.

A few minutes later, my wishes come true. Well, most of them. The music finally stops, and the dancing does too, but my father’s still grinning like he’s having the time of his life.

A teenage boy leads a goat to the center of the circle. Villagers whoop and howl. The chief pulls out his knife.

I cover my eyes, but I can still hear the goat bleat out its final prayer. Even though the slaughter is over fast, the goat’s cries echo in my ears, sending a flurry of shivers up my spine.

Soon a fire rages in the middle of the circle. Flames lick the pastel sky and the smell of cooking meat wafts over me. I am hungry and sickened at the same time. Dad chats with a group of men while the women and girls move to another area.

I slink to the edge of the field. If I could climb the giant tree beside me, I wouldn’t play tag. I’d hide in the leaves and never get found.

“Beautiful, the baobab tree,” someone says. “Like the African elephant.”

I whip my head around.

“My village likes to … how do you call …?” Memory purses her lips together and scours the sky. “Party,” she says, and smiles. “My village desire to party.”

I nod.

“Yet you do not appear as if you desire to party,” she says. “Perhaps you like to visit my house.”

Across the field, I see Dad. I consider telling him that I’m about to disappear. But then again, he was hardly upset last month when I stayed at Marcella’s until ten o’clock on a school night, so I figure why bother. It might be good for him to get a little fright.

“Tiye tonse,”
Memory says. She takes my wrist and leads me away from the clearing. “Home of my family.” She points to a hut near the river that looks like all the other huts in Mkumba village. As we walk toward it in the late-afternoon light, field grass whispers across my knees and that word—
family
—lashes my heart like a whip.

I
t’s like someone has taken a hunk of clay and molded an entire village from it. The red dirt rises from the ground to form the hut walls. The roof is covered with dried grass and reeds that droop over the edges. There’s no actual door, only a piece of bright orange cloth hanging across the doorway.

Memory kicks off her flip-flops, so I pull off my sandals and leave them beside her shoes on the ground. She pushes the cloth aside, and I follow her in. A second later, I feel like someone’s batted a line drive right into my stomach.

The place is half the size of my bedroom in Brookline. How can Memory’s whole family fit in here? There isn’t any furniture. Not even a bed with an ugly mosquito net. There are a couple of woven mats stretched across the floor, a few pots and spoons huddled in the corner, and some cloths draped over a nail.

And it’s snowing.

Well, it’s not snowing real snow, of course, but it’s snowing the kind of snowflakes you make by folding paper in quarters and cutting out all sorts of geometric designs. These kinds of snowflakes—no two alike—hang from six-inch pieces of yarn all over the ceiling.

I let out my breath. I’ve escaped the laughter and the music in the field. Maybe Dad’s looking for me now. But I’m hidden away here, where it’s dark and quiet like a cave.

“The snow is cool,” I say.

“Snow?” Memory asks.

I point to the ceiling.

“Ahhh … yes, very cold.” She wraps her arms around her chest and pretends to shiver.

“I mean it’s cool, as in I really like it,” I say.

“Zikomo,”
Memory says. “I made it in the school the year we own sufficient paper. Are you hungry? Perhaps you desire
nsima?
”

“Is it goat?” My voice is groggy, weak. I’ve barely used it in days.

Memory laughs. “
Nsima
is not goat. It is grain. The goat shall take hours to cook.”

“Grain I can deal with,” I say.

“
Nsima
made from maize. I think you shall like. I hope you shall like, as here in Malawi, we eat
nsima
morning, noon, and night. In the case you do not like our
nsima
, you have troubles,” she says, and laughs. “Large troubles.”

Memory pushes aside a piece of cloth at the other end of the hut. Behind it is a tiny sort of closet. On the floor of the closet is a small pile of corncobs that look like they’ve
been there forever, because the kernels are withered and dried. “The hungry season will end soon,” she says as she lifts the edge of her skirt and places eight cobs inside. “The harvest will come and our maize silo will be full again.” She carries the corncobs over to a clay bowl and drops them in.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“A visitor for one minute shall hold the hoe in two minutes’ time,” she says, and hands me the bowl full of corncobs that’s much heavier than it looks. When I take it, my bicep throbs where I got all those shots for the trip.

I rub my arm while Memory rolls open a mat on the dried-mud floor. I plop down on it. She squats beside me and shows me how to tear off the kernels. Our fingers look strange beside each other’s. Hers are callused and rough, used to the job. I still have specks of red nail polish on mine.

“You do this,” Memory says. “I make the
ndiwo
.” She stands and walks two steps back to the hidden closet and pulls out an onion. She carries it to the mat with a knife and chops the onion into another bowl. “You will like
ndiwo
. You will see.” Memory presses the sleeve of her dress into the corner of her tearing eyes.

“I hope I can learn Chichewa half as
bwino
as your English,” I say, and squint. My eyes are burning from the onion too. But thanks to Marcella, I know how to solve this problem. Since kindergarten, Marcella’s taught me plenty of tricks. How to get rid of hiccups? Stand on your head and drink water from a straw. How to pop a zit? Steam your face over a pot of boiling water first. And how
to cut an onion without feeling like your eyeballs are on fire?

“I’ve got just the thing,” I say. I reach into my knapsack and pull out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum that’s left over from the flight. “Here.” I hand Memory a piece. “It’s a trick. Chew.”

She unwraps the gum from the silver foil.

“Mmmm!” She smiles and pops it into her mouth. We both chew our gum, and our eyes don’t tear up anymore. “This magic gum from America work real good,” she says, and we go back to work.

Once I’ve got all the kernels in the bowl, Memory uses a rock to grind them into a fine powder that looks like flour. She cuts up a tomato and some greens. Then she gathers supplies from the dark corner of the hut and tells me to follow her outside. Of course, I don’t want to go. It feels good inside the small, damp hut, but I can’t say that I’m staying put. I’m a guest, after all. And even though I’ve had a premonition, we’re not friends
yet
.

So I leave the hut through the curtain. While Memory lights her own fire, I watch the villagers across the field still celebrating our arrival. They are dancing and eating and singing, so happy that my father is back in the neighborhood.

Memory sets a pot on top of three stones, sticks the firewood underneath, and strikes a match. Once the fire’s lit, she picks up a bottle and pours the yellow Kazinga oil into the pot and fries the onion until it sizzles.

Something about that sizzling sound makes me realize that my bladder’s about to explode. I touch my tongue to
the top of my mouth, roll my eyes to the sky, and bite the inside of my cheek. But this time Marcella’s trick doesn’t work. I still have to go to the bathroom. And I guess crossing your legs is an international sign for “When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go,” because Memory points to a small hut nearby and says, “The ladies’ is there.” So I buckle on my sandals and bolt across the dirt to a hut that actually has a door made of bamboo poles. I pinch my nose and push it open.

Inside, it’s completely dark except for a narrow rectangle of light at the top of the wall. My eyeballs reach, reach, reach for the light, and the light reach, reach, reaches for my eyeballs, and when the two finally connect, I figure out there isn’t a toilet in sight.

I pace in a little circle, trying to figure out what to do. My foot slams into something hard. Some kind of lid. I trace a metal square with my toe. I bend down and thread my finger through a loop on the top of the lid and try to heave it aside. It’s so heavy, though, I need two hands. Even though I quickly hold my nose again, it’s too late—the odor quivers inside my nostrils like a sour mist. But at least I think I understand how this “bathroom” works. Finally, I get down to business. And for a split second, I’m not worried about the dark, or the snakes, or the smell.