Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,34

up like a miniskirt, wet scribbles of hair against his spindly calves. After calling me a “twit,” my grandfather stormed back inside, leaving Newt to stare at me with a dispiriting combination of pity and shock.

“Did he call you a tit?” Newt asked.

“A twit. He’s my grandfather,” I added, as if that would explain things.

“He kinda seems like a jerk.”

My grandfather wore house slippers with pom-poms at the toes. He could slice and deseed an apple in the palm of his hand. He believed that he was trapped somewhere in 1929, with the nine-year-old version of his wife, Ammu. He believed, without a doubt, that I was Ammu.

I could explain to Newt the firm but illogical architecture of my grandfather’s delusions or I could stop inviting him to my house. So that was it for Newt and me.

In his absence, I played Barbie by myself, which wasn’t as much fun without Newt and his Peaches n’ Cream Barbie or Winter Wonderland Barbie, both of which he had borrowed from his older sister. My Barbie wore a gingham skirt and a saggy swimsuit that kept slipping down her chest in the middle of a conversation. My mom reminded me, often, that I was getting too old to play with dolls, being two months away from ten, but Newt was ten and he disagreed. He had even offered to steal one from his sister for me, a Ken. That was before he called my grandfather a jerk.

My mom would never buy me a Ken. I didn’t even ask; it would’ve been too embarrassing to confess that I wanted my dolls to get romantic when I myself wasn’t supposed to get romantic for another fifteen years. All I had left was a mannish knockoff of Barbie named Madge. Madge had big, flat feet and a chest like an afterthought, small and undefined. I chopped off her hair and knocked their heads together, but there were certain leaps that even my imagination just refused to make.

Two days after he chewed me out, my grandfather tried to make peace. We’d been through this before. I would be sitting in my room, racing through my homework to watch the TV shows everyone at school would be quoting the next day. My grandfather would wander in without a greeting, surveying my walls—the church calendar my mom had taped up, the poster of Jordan dunking with his tongue out. My grandfather had a quiet way of moving from room to room of our house, his hands behind his back, like a tourist observing the natives from a clinical distance.

This time, though, I was more than usually peeved and didn’t look up from my vocab list when he stood beside me. He was wearing a fresh mundu, which now fell to his ankles, and over this, my mother’s satin lavender robe, because satin, he said, made him feel expensive.

“Ammu,” he said, “I cleaned the drain.”

“Good.”

“It’s still not working.” Sighing heavily, he seated himself on the edge of my desk, his lavender rump on the corner of my vocab sheet. “I didn’t mean to yell at you, but my knees get tired, squatting in that tub.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, and I nodded. Malayalam didn’t come easily to me, but it was all he knew. By the time I’d piece together a complex sentence, he’d be rambling on to his next.

“What happened to your friend?” my grandfather asked. “The little one. He never comes around anymore.”

“He moved.”

“For good?” My grandfather perked up at the thought. He’d always been a little jealous of Newt and all the time I spent with him. “Sarilla, Ammu. We’ll play our own games. We can play marbles—you love marbles.”

He reminded me of the glass marbles I used to play with as a little girl, how I had my very own pouch of them in swirled reds and cloudy blues, how I used to play with my boy cousins by the tamarind tree. My grandfather got up and peered out the window by my desk. “Where is that tree …”

“I don’t want to play marbles.”

He seemed surprised, and slightly hurt. “Then what do you want to play?” He followed my gaze to the Barbie and Madge dolls, which were sitting upright on the corner of my desk. He took crew-cut Madge by the ankles and gave me a sidelong look. “Dolls? Still?”

“I have to do my homework.”

I covered up the definitions column and tried to remember the difference between imply and infer. I did