The Meagre Tarmac Read Online Free PDF Page B

is, as they say, fungible. I approach the sofa where His Lordship is seated. “Let me say one more thing. If you try to make me go back to India and if you stop me from going to Stanford and you try to arrange a marriage with some dusty little file clerk, I’ll kill myself.”
    Things have been frosty these past few days. The Beast is back in Santa Cruz. While I’m at work on my ap History, and my parents are watching a rented Bollywood musical, the phone rings and my father picks it up, frowns, then holds it out towards me. “It’s your teacher,” he says, and I expect a message from school, maybe an unearned day off, but it’s Borya. He says, “Madame is asking for you.”
    I tell him I have no way of getting there. And why would she be asking for me?
    â€œI am driving,” he says, an amazing concession. He is not a hopin- the-car Californian. He’s a skater, not a driver. I didn’t even know he has a license.
    Normally, I would never ask to leave the house after dark, but when I say, “Madame Skojewska is asking to see me. Mr. Borisov will pick me up,” my father barely lifts his eyes from the television.
    â€œWhere will you be?” he asks. I write down Madame’s address and phone number. They don’t know that Borya lives in her basement.
    I recognize the car as Madame’s, usually parked and dusty in her garage. She revs the engine once a week. It’s been over a year since she bought a gallon. “A gallon a year, if I need it or not,” she joked.
    Borya starts out in English, “We go to Stanford Hospital. Madame has ...” he strikes his chest, “heart.” Stanford Hospital is where I was born, but this doesn’t seem a commemorative moment. And then, it must have occurred to him that we are not at the ice rink and that no one is watching, and that my months of Russian instruction permits adult interaction; he grabs my hand, kisses it, and says, “you know how she loves her bananas. She walked down to Real Foods, bought two bunches, and on her walk back home she suddenly collapsed.”
    When we arrive at the hospital, he says “They said she was going, tonight.”
    She’s in the ICU , under a plastic tent. It reminds me of the flaps on baby-strollers, the plastic visors, the baby warm, secure and sleeping while rain is pelting. Just like that, sweet mystery of life and death. One day we were chatting like old friends, See, you just asked me that in Russian! and I felt I belonged in a time and place I’ll never see, I’ve never had a student like you, you sit so quietly, you don’t repeat words, you don’t ask why we say it the way we do — you just start speaking it like a native, like someone reborn.
    A student like me is accustomed to praise from her teachers. But that’s not the point; the point is, I impressed her and she’s the only teacher I’m likely to remember. I remember years of teachers’ meetings, standing alone at the edge of the classroom while a teacher pulls my parents aside. I see her gesturing, and my parents shaking their heads. What did she say about me? I ask when we’re back home and my mother says, Some nonsense, and my father says You have a good head, but you are prone to dreaming and you must work harder, or you will fail. I know it’s about the evil eye; I might accidentally hear some praise that will turn my head from proper feminine modesty.
    â€œYou know what she said about you, even today? Even this morning when she was headed out to buy her bananas? She said, ‘Borya, living long enough to teach that girl Russian is the greatest privilege of my life.’”
    We stand behind the glass and it seems that Madame’s eyes are open, and shining. I raise my hand and flutter my fingers; it’s all I can do. Do svidaniya, Madame .
    I think I know what it was, back in that rented house in Palo Alto when my father and Al