Fresh Off the Boat Page 5

  We walked out to the terminal and found Dad standing past the security checkpoint. He was grinning. “Ano?”

  “Six months!” Mom cried. “We got our six months!”

  Six months was the longest time tourists were allowed to stay in the country. Dad was counting on our tourist visas lasting that long, until our immigration lawyer was able to petition his company for a business visa and eventually get us resident visas, otherwise known as green cards, so we would be able to stay in America forever.

  Mom drove a ten-year-old Toyota, instead of a new Lexus. She had on her Christian Dior sunglasses, but she never wore her old shoes anymore. In Manila, she had worn only four-inch heels, delicate kidskin mules, buttery cream-colored slingbacks, or else gold leather or snakeskin or crocodile stilettos that tied around her ankles. It was a shock to see her in pink canvas sneakers from Payless for the first time. I didn’t even recognize her. For one thing, I had never realized she was so short.

  “Let’s go shopping!” she said gaily, as she put the car in reverse and backed out of the Sears parking lot. “Want to?” she asked, peering at me in the rearview mirror.

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  We drove out of the mall and made our way across town, to the nearest Salvation Army store. A friend from church had advised us it was a good place to shop on a limited budget. Except for our televisions, everything we owned was secondhand. The Dalugdugans had given us a folding table and several plastic chairs for the dining room. Our brown plaid couch was from Goodwill, as were the matching chipboard bureaus in each bedroom. We couldn’t afford bed frames, so we placed bricks and wooden planks under the mattresses to keep them off the floor.

  When we arrived, Mom rifled through the racks as expertly and as enthusiastically as if she were still shopping at Rustan’s, the high-priced department store she had favored in Manila. At Rustan’s, white-gloved attendants presented her with Chanel suits and Dolce & Gabbana gowns. A man in a military uniform used a public address system to call in your car and driver when you were done shopping. (“Driver Arambullo…to the front, please.”) We’d stand inside the frosted doors, in the airconditioned foyer, until Mang Remus drove up with the Lexus. Three salesclerks would load up the trunk with our packages.

  “Look at this! A fur coat!” Mom said, holding up a black, knee-length jacket made of fur of an indeterminate origin. The price tag was stapled to the front collar. It was one of the little details about thrift stores I found so depressing. Why did the prices have to be stapled? Were the clothes so unworthy of care that they couldn’t even make an effort to create proper tags?

  “Forty dollars.” Mom sighed, patting the luxurious pelt.

  “Try it on,” I urged. The weather was the hardest on my mother. Like me, she was always cold. She took off her puffy 49ers jacket and hung it on a nearby hook. She struggled into the fur coat, placing it over her khaki pants and thin cotton sweater, and surveyed herself in the mirror. Her eyes shone. “It’s beautiful,” she said, turning around to see the side and back.

  “What do you think?” she asked me. “Okay ba?”

  “Get it.” I nodded. I missed the days when Mom bought the same heels in three different colors.

  “It’s not too big?” she asked, fluffing her hair.

  “No, it looks great, Mom.”

  It really did. Mom had a good eye for fashion. She could find vintage Oleg Cassini in a rack of polyester or unearth an Art Deco brooch in a pile of cheap goldplated trinkets. Unlike the other coats and jackets that were hanging in the fur rack, the coat Mom had picked wasn’t threadbare, moth-eaten, or smelly. It had the sweep and grandeur appropriate for a 1930s movie star. You could imagine Marlene Dietrich in it.

  I left my mother at the mirror to do a little shopping of my own. The store was divided into departments, just like an ordinary shop. On the right were men’s clothes—stained T-shirts, yellowing button-downs, the occasional Charter Club three-piece wool suit. Next were the “ladies” garments, printed cotton housedresses and muumuus, acid-washed jeans, dowdy tartan skirts, a vat of acrylic sweaters, decrepit Easter bonnets, and two shelves of rotten shoes. There was even a table of underwear—but Mom and I had always tacitly agreed we would never stoop so low as to select from it.

  A rack of “evening wear” contained old sixties prom dresses in garish pastel colors, and for a while there, I had a Pretty in Pink fantasy. Claude, playing the part of Andrew McCarthy, the rich popular boy, would ask me, the Filipino Molly Ringwald, to the Soirée, and I would sew myself a dress from an old taffeta one…except mine wouldn’t look shapeless and weird like Molly’s. I’d wear something black, with lace, and I’d fashion an asymmetrical hem that dipped low in the back but high in the front.

  One thing I grudgingly admired about the Salvation Army was that everything was so very affordable. I bought two T-shirts (twenty-five cents each), one that said BENETTON in capital letters and another that still had its bedraggled Esprit label. I found an oversized black blazer and a few flannel shirts that reminded me of the one Pink wore on the cover of Teen People. I tried on a pair of jeans priced at three dollars. They weren’t boot-leg cut, but at least they were Levi’s. I even found an old cashmere sweater with only one tiny hole on the shoulder.

  Dad was embarrassed that we had to shop at the Salvation Army, so Mom and I always went after work, in secret. He never set foot in it, and Mom never bought him any clothes from there. “Used clothes?” he’d say, making a face. “Yecch. Who knows who died in them?”

  “It’s called vintage,” I would argue, defending our purchases.

  It embarrassed me as well, since most of the people who shopped at the Salvation Army were either elderly or painfully indigent. Once in a while, I would notice cool-looking older kids trying on beaded cardigans or gas station attendant shirts that had “Gus” or “Johnny” on the front pockets, but they would pay for them with platinum credit cards. It was all a lark, a bit of fun, slumming, for them and it always made me angry. We were here because we couldn’t afford to shop anywhere else. They had a choice. I wished they would go back to Urban Outfitters where they belonged.

  “Are you ready?” Mom asked, her face flushed.

  “Yes. Are you getting it?”

  “I don’t know—do you think I should?” she asked, clasping it tightly in her arms.

  “It’s really nice, Mom. Get it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I will!”

  We walked to the cashier line, where an old man in a fedora and plaid golf pants was counting out eighty-five cents for a green cardigan. The cashier threw it into a crumpled plastic bag and handed it to him.

  “Can I just hold it?” Mom asked, taking the coat away from the indifferent saleslady when it was our turn. She paid for her coat with cash from the red tin can.

  I placed my choices on the table and handed over my ten dollars. Mom snatched the money out of my hand and pressed it back into my palm. “No, no—today, my treat,” she said. I was only too happy to oblige.

  We walked back to the Corolla. I swung my plastic bag filled with second-hand treasures while Mom cradled her new fur coat in her arms.

  “Put it on,” I said.

  “Okay,” she agreed, stuffing her football jacket in the backseat and slipping her new fur over her shoulders.

  Outside the Salvation Army store, away from the racks of old, soiled, and discarded goods, it didn’t look like a used coat. She put on her designer sunglasses even if it was starting to get dark outside. When she climbed into the car, she sat up a little straighter and I saw her smile at me in the rearview mirror. The setting sun shone through the auburn highlights of her hair. The dark, liquid softness of her coat matched her gold-tinted designer frames. For a moment, she looked like herself again.

  FROM: queen_vee@aol.com

  TO: amparo.dellarosa@info.ph.com

  SENT: Sunday, October 18, 6:11 PM

  SUBJECT: Shopping Spree

  Hi, Peaches,

  Whitney and I w
ere so bad! We spent so much money! Mom is totally going to take away my allowance when she finds out. Here’s what I bought at the mall yesterday:

  really cute flannel shirts from Abercrombie & Fitch

  T-shirts from Esprit and Benetton

  boot-cut jeans from the Gap

  black blazer and cashmere sweater from Bloomingdale’s

  Spending like a fiend,

  V

  6

  Mathematical Miracles

  CLAUDE CALIGARI IS my geometry partner!!

  How did this happen???

  Am I the luckiest girl alive???

  Maybe!

  It’s so weird. One day, he almost runs me over with his car—a few weeks later, I have to help him graph linear equations. This is so cool.

  And I owe it all to a chair.

  Let me explain.

  I’m in the higher math class since I’d already taken algebra in Manila so now I was in geometry with the sophomores. It’s not like I’m some Asian math whiz or anything. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. I abhor math. I slept through fractions in second grade and I feel like I haven’t caught up since.

  My geometry class is a trip, though. The sophomores—led by Stacey Bennett, Alice O’Hara, and Rebecca Wallace—went berserk a week ago Monday pretending to do yoga on their desks and totally ignoring our beleaguered geometry teacher, Miss Watkins, who completely lost it. She even threatened to beat them with her chair, which is so not cool, especially since Grosvernor is a snooty private school and Stacy’s parents are on the Board of Trustees. She was fired the next day, and to make a long story short, we lost a teacher but gained a classroom full of boys.

  It was too late in the semester to find a decent substitute (one who’d majored in math at Harvard and somehow couldn’t get a job in Silicon Valley), so last week they decided to let us take geometry at Montclair, our “brother” school, taught by Miss Tresoro. There’s been a rumor that the two schools are going to merge into one coed institution, but it’s just wishful thinking. I overheard someone saying that the docents of Gros will never let it happen. Apparently, when schools go coed the girls’ school always gets shafted.

  Anyway, the important thing is that

  CLAUDE CALIGARI IS NOW MY GEOMETRY PARTNER!

  Geometry meets three times a week during A period. Grosvernor and Montclair are on this wacky college prep schedule, where classes are assigned “periods”—A, B, C, D, and so forth. And all the periods get shuffled every day, (although it’s the same every week) so that sometimes geometry is the last class of the day, sometimes it’s in the middle, and sometimes it’s after lunch. Even lunch is on a “period” schedule, anywhere from eleven A.M. to one P.M., so that not everyone has lunch at the same time—unfortunately, I seem to have drawn the same lunch period as Whitney, Georgia, and Trish. Someone told me they plan it this way because the cafeteria is too small to have all the students in it at the same time.

  Three times a week, I’m going to be sitting next to the cutest boy at Montclair. He’s so popular there’s even an unofficial online fan club created by an anonymous Grosvernor student devoted to chronicling his every move. We were paired up alphabetically, so it was pure luck that I got to sit next to him.

  I couldn’t breathe when he took the chair next to mine on Monday. I couldn’t even look him in the eye. It was like being blinded by the sun. There was no way I could concentrate. All I saw was the downy blond hair on his tanned arm. I’ve even memorized the mole on his wrist and how the dimples creased on his left cheek. Like Tobey Maguire, he has this way of squinting which is just plain adorable.

  On Wednesday afternoon he waltzed in late, blaming “practice.” Apparently, he failed geometry I last semester for the second time, which explains why he’s a junior in a sophomore class. He’s a totally useless study partner since he understands even less than I do. And he never has his homework done.

  When we sit together, I like to pretend that he’s, like, my boyfriend or something—that’s how close we are. It’s just a matter of time before he notices me—and who knows, he might even ask for a study date, just to cover up the fact that he really wants to hang out and get to know me better. Then he’ll start picking me up after school and we’ll drive off in his car and everyone will be so jealous and then girls in class will start to want to talk to me and invite me to their parties or maybe even let me sit with them in the cafeteria and not get all quiet when I walk into a room, like they were just talking about me but they weren’t saying anything nice.

  I spent most of the class daydreaming about how romantic it would be if he suddenly discovered he was in love with me after all this time.

  “Vicenza, I adore you,” Claude would say. “I never noticed how well suited we are.”

  “Especially since we both know nothing about geometry!” I would breathe.

  Then we would kiss, and the lights would go all fuzzy like they do in the movies.

  Or maybe he’ll simply ask me what I think of the class and how my day is and where I’m from and how come I have such an interesting name and what did I think of America. And we would embark on a twenty-first-century Pocahontas kind of romance. Riiiight.

  It’s going to be difficult for him to get to know me, though, because he sits with his back to me—to chat and trade notes with Rebecca and Stacey. The three of them gossiped about Lake Tahoe ski trips and black diamond lanes and which mountain rocks and how badly “Becks” took a spill last time.

  “Claude!” Miss Tresoro called.

  He paid no attention. “Omigod, you were, like, a cyclone down that hill!” He laughed, whooping loudly.

  “Shhh! You’re so mean to me!” Rebecca pouted.

  “He’s right, though—you were like a snowball. It was so funny!” Stacey added, leaning in so that her long russet-colored hair brushed Claude’s shoulder.

  “Claude!” the geometry teacher warned again.

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “Would you like to share what you’re discussing with Rebecca with the rest of the class?”

  “Sure!” he said with a huge, goofy grin. “I was just telling Becks that she really should get a Burton board this year. Especially if she’s going to kick my ass when we get to Timberline, which is highly unlikely.”

  Miss Tresoro frowned but you could tell she didn’t really mean it. Claude had that effect on everyone. He zigzagged and tap-danced lightly through life. It was just too bad he couldn’t schmooze his way to an A.

  “I really think she should think about a Lib Tech Dark instead,” Miss Tresoro replied. “It’s all about freestylin’, right, Rebecca?” It was all snowbabble as far as I was concerned. But Miss Tresoro was hip. She was down. She wore low-waisted slacks and leather jackets. She was a Gros alumna and she knew her way around. She could let Claude walk in late, let Alice and Stacey whisper between lessons all they wanted, but unlike our old geometry teacher, the class respected and admired her. She would never walk into a classroom with the lights off only to find her students sitting Indian-style on their desks, meditating.

  “Good call!” Claude agreed.

  “All right, can we please get back to isosceles triangles now?” She turned to the blackboard and class resumed uninterrupted for the next half hour. As the final bell rang, Miss Tresoro handed out the results of Monday’s exam.

  I frowned when I saw I had gotten 72 out of 100. I couldn’t afford a C minus in geometry if I wanted to keep my scholarship.

  “Damn,” Claude said when he saw his test result. “Do you know this stuff?”

  “Me?” I squeaked.

  He had never paid any attention to me before. He had said exactly two words to me since our classes had been merged: “Move over.” It seemed I was taking too much room on our shared study table.

  “Um, not really,” I said, showing him my paper.

  “That’s a lot better than what I got,” he said, crunching his test into a ball and morosely chucking it into the trash. �
�If I don’t pass geometry this semester, I’ll get kicked off the lacrosse team. I’m already on academic probation.”

  I nodded in sympathy. But I didn’t really know what to do, since I was barely passing the subject myself. But I wanted to help—he looked so glum.

  “That’s too bad,” I ventured.

  “You said it,” he said. “I’m screwed.”

  He picked up his backpack and we started walking out of class together—TOGETHER—as if we do this all the time. As if this is a normal occurrence in my life, that boys, like, talk to me. As if we were, like, friends or something.

  Geometry is my last class of the day on Wednesdays, and suddenly I had an irresistible, irrational impulse to ask him out or something—want to go get a smoothie on Union Street? I could just imagine it, the two of us, sipping from the same biggie cup. He was still chatting about his geometry problems, when I opened my mouth. “Claude?”

  But I realized he had already gone. He was running up the block to walk with Rebecca and Stacey.

  “Hey, Becks, wait up,” I heard him call to them. “We bowling tonight? Wanna come out with Tuna and the guys?” He made plans to meet them at Rock and Bowl, the bowling alley in the Haight.

  I blushed a lot, and hoped to God he hadn’t heard me call his name. And I felt a little depressed about being left behind, and it was then I understood that it wasn’t ever going to happen with me and Claude. I was just living in my head, like I always do. Claude would never in a million years ever think of inviting me to go anywhere. He’s a popular boy; I’m nobody. He has an online fan club. (With five-dollar membership dues—I had to use my mom’s Visa and tell her it was for a school project. True enough!) People barely remember who I am.

  I followed them out of the main doors, feeling completely alone, when I noticed Isobel waiting for me outside.