“Your heart line,” she said. “Also difficult.” I was swept up in what felt like grief, even though we’d been happy a moment before.
“And this one?” The last one, straight through the middle of my palm, branching off the lifeline. Crisper than the others at first—oh, hope!—but then it drooped, then thinned and split, like a twig.
“Wait,” she said, brightening. “This hand’s your left hand?” She was dyslexic and had gotten them mixed up.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay, good. The left tells me the circumstances you were given. Let me see your right one.”
I gave her my other hand and she held it carefully, tracing the lines, turning it to see. The residual grease from the chicken made the skin reflect. “This hand tells me what you’ll make of your life,” she said. “It’s much better on this side.”
How did she know? I wondered if she learned to read palms in India.
In India, people didn’t use their left hand in public, she said. In social situations, the right was used exclusively. This was because they didn’t use toilet paper, but used their left hand instead, washing it afterward. This horrified me.
“If I go to India,” I said, whenever India came up, “I’ll carry my own roll.”
She told a story about India, how she went to a festival in Allahabad called the Kumbha Mela that happened only once every twelve years, this one located at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers. There was a huge crowd. In the distance, a very holy man, sitting up on a parapet, was blessing oranges and throwing them into the crowd.
“He was so far that he seemed like he was only an inch tall,” she said.
The other oranges didn’t land close to her, she said, but then he threw this one orange and she could tell it was coming toward her and—bam—it hit her right in the chest, right in the heart, took the wind out of her.
It bounced off and a group of men jumped after it, she said, so she didn’t get to keep it. But I knew it meant something special about her, about us, that the holy orange thrown from so far away had hit her in the heart.
“You know,” she said, “when you were born you came shooting out like some sort of rocket.” She’d told me this many times before, but I let her say it again, as if I’d forgotten. “I went to these birth classes and all of them said I’d have to push and then there I was and you were coming out so fast I couldn’t stop you.” I loved this story—how, unlike other babies, I had not made her force me into the air and this had saved her something, and meant something about me.
All of this—the palm, the orange, the birth—meant I was going to be just fine, as an adult.
“When I’m an adult, you’ll be old,” I said. I imagined myself progressing down the lifeline; getting older would mean I was further down the line.
We walked to Peet’s Coffee around the corner, where the man gave her a free coffee, and then we sat on the bench outside, where it was warm in the sunlight. The double line of sycamore trees around the square across from the coffee shop had been pruned down to their stems almost and looked like playing jacks, short branches with fat balls at the ends. The air smelled like raw trees.
“Like this?” She pretended to walk like an old lady with a cane, slumped over with no teeth. She straightened. “But sweetie, I’m only twenty-four years older than you are. I’ll still be young when you’re grown up.”
I said, “Oh,” as if I agreed. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how she explained. I saw us as a seesaw: when one of us had power or happiness or substantiality, the other must fade. When I was still young, she’d be old. She would smell like old people, like used flower water. I would be new and green and smell of freshly cut branches.
Halfway through the school year I joined a kindergarten class in a public school in Palo Alto. Before this I’d gone to another school, but my mother thought the class there had too many boys, so I’d transferred here. On my first day, one of the teaching assistants led me out to the side of the building and took a Polaroid, which she tacked on the board near the photographs of other students, and wrote my name underneath. I had foolishly wrapped my hand around the top of my head because I thought it would look good, while the other students were seated in front of a blue backdrop. The image was light-saturated, makeshift. I felt it revealed not only that I had started late but also that I was insubstantial, washed out by light.
The teacher, Pat, tall and plump, had a singsong voice and wore jean skirts down to her ankles, sandals with socks, T-shirts that hung over her large bosom, and reading glasses on a string. During recess, we played behind the classroom on a wooden jungle gym with a series of planks connecting the parts. A rope net between two wooden platforms was called the humping pit. Humping, the way I imagined it, demanded an undulation and a catch, an undulation and a catch. There was something sickly about it. Soon after I started at the school, I fell inside the netted part, and others yelled, “Hump-ing! Hump-ing!” as I scrambled out.
This kindergarten put an emphasis on reading, but I couldn’t read. For each book completed, students received a small teddy bear.
I memorized a book to trick one of the teaching assistants into handing over a bear.
“I’m ready,” I said. We sat down on the floor with our backs against the bookshelf in the reading section, the book on my lap. I spoke the words I believed to be on each page, based on what I’d memorized and the corresponding pictures. Two pages in, her face hardened and her lips thinned.
“You turned the page at the wrong place,” she said. “And you missed a word.”
“Just one bear,” I said. “Please.”
“Not yet,” she said.
Daniela had amassed twenty-two; I asked her if I could have one.
“You have to read a book to get one,” Daniela said.
I began to feel there was something gross and shameful about me, and also to know that it was too late to change it, that nothing could be done. I was different from other girls my age, and anyone good and pure could immediately sense this and would be repulsed. One indication was the photograph. Another was that I could not read. The last was that I was meticulous and self-conscious in a way I could tell the other girls were not. My desires were too strong and furious. I was wormy inside, as if I’d caught whatever diseases or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough. I felt this quality in myself, and I was sure it must show when people saw me, so whenever I passed a mirror, caught my reflection by accident, and saw that I was not as dirty or repulsive as I pictured myself, it gave me a start.
During the free reading period, Shannon and I snuck around the back of the kindergarten classroom, past the jungle gym, to a hidden area paved with rocks between thick bushes and elementary school classrooms. Shannon had white blonde hair, white whiskery eyebrows and lashes; she also could not read. Her trousers were twisted so the seam did not line up with the middle of her legs. We threw rocks at the classroom windows and then clutched each other as though we were humping and writhed around on the rocks together.
Pat had told us that a new boy was coming to join our class.
“Let’s spit water on him,” I said.