The Importance of Wings (7 page)

“Oh, sorry,” he says, jumping out of her way.

My jaw falls open. Gayle and I follow Liat inside.

We head to the
Ms. Pac-Man
machine and plug in two quarters.

“Weren’t you afraid of those guys?” I ask Liat.

“What could they do to me?” she says. Liat is pretty good at
Ms. Pac-Man.
She gets all the way to the third level on her first life. I guess they have arcades in West Virginia and Texas and Alaska.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Punch you in the stomach.”

“All I said was ‘excuse me.’ They were blocking the entrance.”

“I know, but …”

“But what?” Liat turns to me. Pinky just ate her Ms. Pac-Man, so it’s my turn. “They’re scary.”

“Yeah, but they were blocking the entrance.” She cocks her head to the side. “What happened? You told off Joe.”

“Yeah, but …”

“But what?” Liat asks.

“Joe’s a little shrimp,” I reply.

“And …”

And I can’t think of anything else to say.

when we get back from the mall,
I see a red, white, and blue U.S. Mail truck at the end of our block. I race to our mailbox and feel my heart explode when I see a pale-blue aeromail envelope peeking out from under all the other mail.

“A letter from Ema!” Gayle screeches from behind me, grabbing the letter out of the mailbox before I can. She closes her fist around it and starts dancing on the lawn.

“Give me that!” I shriek, trying to snatch it out of her hands.

Gayle giggles and takes off. I run after her. We run around our whole house three times before we’re both completely beat. When I catch up to Gayle, I’m almost too tired to even take the letter from her, but I do anyway. She doesn’t put up a fight, and the envelope slides easily out of her grasp.

I rip it open, but I know even before I look inside that it will be a complete waste of time. As I expect, there are no vowels. It looks like a chicken dipped its feet into black ink and skated haphazardly across the blue sheet of paper.

I realize Liat has been watching us quietly all this time. I guess I kind of forgot about her in the excitement of finding
Ema’s
letter.

Liat looks upset. In fact, she looks like she’s about to cry.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

She nods once, but in a way that says she doesn’t want talk about it. She turns her face away from me and takes several deep swallows of air.

It hits me.

Her mom. Our mom being alive—and hers being dead. I feel terrible about this, but I don’t know what to do.

Aba
watches us quietly too. Because I don’t know what else to do, I walk up to him, give him the letter, and ask him to read it. So, he does, right there, right then, while all of us are standing on the lawn.

It says all the usual things:
Ema
misses us, she’ll come home soon, she thinks about us every minute of every day. And yet, it sounds rushed, and I wonder if it is rushed.

I wonder if maybe that’s why
Ema
doesn’t take the time to put in vowels anymore. I wonder if she’s dashing off these letters as fast as possible.

Why?

To get them over with? To get this troublesome chore over with as soon as possible?

It makes my stomach sink into my knees.

Is
Ema
… forgetting us? Is her sister more important to her than we are?

Aba
says he has to get ready for work. I know he’s already delayed past the time he’d normally go, but I wish, just for once, he’d stay home with us. Do some normal American thing with us like make popcorn and hot cocoa and play checkers.

My wish isn’t granted.
Aba
leaves for work.

Liat, Gayle, and I sit aimlessly on our stoop.
Ema
‘s letter is clutched in Gayle’s hands. She passes it to Liat.

“Can you read this to us?” she asks. “I need to hear it again.”

I guess Gayle assumes, like I do, that Liat is good at reading Hebrew.

But Liat says, “I don’t read well without vowels. My dad could read it for you, but he’s working, too, like your dad.” She seems really bummed out. Her voice is soft and her eyes are shiny—like she’s holding back tears.

I’m bummed out, too. I don’t even feel like watching TV.

The day stretches out before us in all its depressing splendor.

I don’t know how we’re going to get through it.

liat says, “hey, i know.
Let’s do a night of wings. That’ll cheer us up.” Her voice is still soft, but I can tell she’s trying to sound happy.

This is a perfect idea, and I’m all for it. Besides, Liat did promise she’d teach me how to make wings.

We set up shop in my room. Liat brings hot rollers, a curling iron, and beauty magazines from her house. I think they all belong to Rivka. Gayle lies on the floor, flipping through the magazines. I sit on a chair in front of my mirror and Liat stands behind me, like in a beauty salon.

I know what hot rollers and curling irons are, but I’ve never actually used them. Whenever I attempted to make wings, I used our blow dryer and my round brush. No wonder it didn’t work out.

“You’ve got to have the right tools,” Liat says when I tell her about my failed attempts. “That’s the secret.”

“My father always says that,” I say.

“About curling irons and hot rollers?”

“No,” I reply with a smile. “About doing stuff around the house. You know, hammers and saws and things like that.”

“Well, he’s right,” Liat says.

“Yeah,” I murmur. “I guess he is.”

Almost Mike-Brady-and-Pa-Ingalls-right.

Liat begins rolling my hair. She gives instructions as she goes. Soon we’ve stopped feeling so bummed out.

“You’re lucky you have Rivka,” I say. “To show you how to do your hair and stuff.”

Liat clips a curler into place. “I’d rather have my mother,” she says quietly.

I don’t know what to say. “I’m sorry about your mother,” I mumble. Then I add, “My mother’s been gone for three months.”

“At least you have a mother,” Liat says.

“Yeah, but she’s in Israel.”

“At least she’s not dead,” Liat responds.

This statement gives me chills. And it makes me suddenly worry about bombings in Israel. I’m eager to change the subject, so I ask, “Do people, like, live in igloos in Alaska?”

She laughs. “No, we lived in, like, a regular city. Anchorage.” She adds slyly, “It even has a mall.”

“So, are people the same in all the places you’ve lived?”

Liat carefully tucks another curler in place. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are there people who are … mean and nasty in Alaska?”

“Sure,” Liat says with a shrug. “There are mean and nasty people everywhere.”

“Even in Alaska?”

“Yup, even in Alaska.”

“So, every place is the same?”

Liat ponders this. “Well, yes and no. Alaska’s different from Florida. And Ohio’s different from Texas. But people are mostly the same.”

I ask, “How come you’re not scared to start a new school?”

Liat shrugs. “I guess I’ve done it a zillion times.”

“But what about starting all over, making new friends, not getting picked on …”

Liat shrugs. “Yeah, it’s hard.”

“Were you ever picked on?”

“Yeah, definitely,” she says.

“Really?” I ask, turning in my seat. I find this impossible.

Liat places her hands on my head to steady my curls. “Yeah, lots of times.” “What did you do?” “Tried to make them stop.” “How?”

“All different ways,” she says mysteriously. “Like what?” I ask desperately. Of all the questions I’ve asked, this one is the most important.

Liat stops what she’s doing. “It’s more of an attitude,” she says. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like—the way you think about yourself.”

I try to understand this as she begins unclipping the curlers. “We’re almost there,” she says, brushing out my hair and taking care of any loose spots with the curling iron.

“Ta-da!” she announces at last. “I give you: Wings.” I actually gasp. I have wings! Two perfect, glorious wings!

“Wow,” I whisper, fingering them delicately. “They’re beautiful.”

“Yeah, but look how long it took to make them, Roxanne,” Liat replies, checking her watch.

“It’s totally worth it,” I declare.

Liat looks into my eyes in the mirror’s reflection. “I don’t know…. Some things are more important than wings.”

“Nothing’s more important than wings,” I shoot back.

Liat eyes me intensely. “Really?” I shut up then.

halloween is a big deal on our block.

All the little kids wear costumes and go trick-or-treating. We do, too. Eighth grade is the unofficial cutoff point. Afterward, when it gets dark, everyone hikes to the woods to tell ghost stories.

Kathleen, Gayle, Liat, and I plan to go trick-or-treating together. We go to Liat’s house to pick her up.

Kathleen is dressed as a witch, in a sheer black dress and torn black stockings. Her pointed black hat keeps flopping over her forehead. It annoys her a lot, but at least she has a different costume from last year.

Gayle and I dress as black cats, same as last year. Black headbands with furry black ears, fuzzy black tails, and black noses with black whiskers.

Secretly, I wish I could go as Wonder Woman.

It’s hard to think of Liat’s house as Liat’s house and not the Cursed House. Especially since it’s Halloween. I find myself wondering if there are secret torture chambers behind the walls, dusty dungeons in the basement, crumbling skeletons under the floor, and bloody body parts in the attic. It makes me shudder—scared and excited at the same time.

Rivka answers the door. She’s wearing a long wine-colored dress with jagged sleeves. I wonder if this is a special outfit for Halloween or if it’s for everyday use. I decide it’s the latter.

Rivka screeches in delight.
“Eizeh yoffee!”
she cries, which means “How lovely!”

Liat’s father comes to the door. He’s wearing yet another polyester special. He must have a limitless supply. It looks appropriate today, though. It is, after all, Halloween.

Liat doesn’t have a costume. Rivka helps her throw together some clothes and says she’s going as a “weirdo.” I want to laugh at that one. Will the real weirdo please stand up?

In the end, Liat wears a sparkly blue wig, shiny black pants, a gold shirt with silver stripes, and red cowboy boots. Everything is borrowed from Rivka. Ha! No surprise there. Rivka makes up Liat’s eyes so heavily with silver eye shadow and black eyeliner that she looks like Cleopatra. She looks really pretty.

Every Halloween, the same rumor goes around the block that somebody is giving away green apples with razor blades wedged inside them. I have never once gotten a green apple from anyone on Halloween, but the rumor still goes around every year. The boys love telling the little kids on the block what will happen to their mouths and tongues and throats when they bite into it.

Rivka invites us inside and fills our bags with plastic-wrapped
baklava
that she informs us has just come out of the oven. I don’t think Rivka understands that Halloween is all about store-bought, sealed candy. Well, at least it isn’t green apples. You could expect something like that from the Cursed House.

In the living room, I notice a photo on the wall of a black-haired woman sitting on a flowered towel at the beach. Next to her is a little girl with the same black hair. I study the picture closely until it finally dawns on me. It’s Liat and her mom.

“That was our last vacation—the last time we were all together,” Liat says, coming up behind me. “We went to Elat.”

I nod solemnly. It’s hard to take Liat seriously with her sparkly blue hair and Cleopatra eyes, but there’s no mistaking the deep sorrow in her voice. I want to hug her, but I worry Liat won’t like it. It occurs to me that my parents went to Elat on their honeymoon. I don’t really know anything about Elat. I only know what my parents have told me—that it’s like Israel’s Miami Beach.

I pry my eyes away from the photo and look around the living room. The furniture Liat and her father have is shabby, which possibly means they’re poorer than us.

The longer I stand there, the more freaked-out I start to feel. If anything bad is going to happen in this house, it will surely be on Halloween. I’m relieved when Rivka tells us, “Have good time—don’t eat so much bad stuff,” and sends us off.

We go trick-or-treating for two and a half hours, stuffing ourselves as we go along with Snickers and Milky Ways and Tootsie Rolls and M&M’s and Butterfingers. I start to feel sick. I never want to look at another candy bar again. Then, holding our stomachs, we head to the woods as night falls.

No one has given us green apples, though someone did give chocolate chip cookies in sandwich baggies. It’s too bad, because I love chocolate chip cookies.

“How could they be so clueless?” Gayle complains, tossing her cookies into a trash can. “What a waste.”

“I wouldn’t get rid of them if I were you,” I say, feeling mischievous. “You might need them to feed the werewolves.”

“Werewolves?” she asks fearfully.

“Haven’t you heard? There were reports last week of three werewolves in the woods,” I say, then mimic a round of evil laughter like the villains on
Super Friends.

Gayle rolls her eyes.

I sound much, much more lighthearted than I actually feel. I do not like the woods, even during the day. I’m ready to head home, but Kathleen wants to go there. Last year, I was sure I was going to have a heart attack during the telling of the ghost stories. Nothing happened, but I was glad when it was over. Why does Halloween have to be about ghosts and witches and vampires? Why can’t it just be about free candy?

We reach the woods. Kathleen brought a flashlight from home, and we walk slowly behind the faint beam. In the dark, the trees strongly resemble murderers and kidnappers. Disturbing thoughts from every horror movie I’ve ever seen race through my mind as we crunch the dried leaves. I see brain-dead zombies in every shadow. A sudden breeze feels icy on my bare neck. Every time a branch snags me, I am convinced it is an escaped convict with a long, sharp knife.