Earning Disapproval
“Earning Disapproval” appeared on the shortlist for the 2018 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence.
Arrive with a new look at the start of the school year (nose ring, half your head shaved), and people speculate about your summer evolution. Maybe she’s dating someone older. Maybe her parents got divorced. Maybe she spent the summer in Toronto.
Amy and I hop off Halifax transit at the bus stop by the school, the same as we’ve been doing for two years, but this time the driver doesn’t respond when I say thank you. It’s the first day of Grade 11, and we’re dressed in fishnet stockings, black dollar-store lipstick, and thrifted boots too hot for September. We split to search for our homerooms, and people in the hallway stare. I lift my fingertips, and a string of locker doors opens and recoils, spilling binders and backpacks, lunches and love notes—no, that doesn’t happen, but I imagine it. We rented The Craft last week. As I pass by the band room, a trumpet player smirks at me from the doorway, like he knows my fishnets are left over from my Grade 9 Halloween costume.
My mom took a picture of me before dropping me off at the bus stop. When I came down the stairs she started laughing and grabbed her camera and said she’s going to mail this one, along with my horoscope, to my prospective husbands. On weekends she invites aunties (not actual relatives) with sons my age around the house. I’m fifteen, but it’s never too early to start looking. A recent one small-talked with me as I watched Saved by the Bell reruns. “This is one of my favourite shows,” he said, but when I responded by discussing the origins of the show as a retooled version of the failed Good Morning, Miss Bliss, he looked blank and escaped to the kitchen. These boys are uniformly uninformed about pop culture. My mom brewed cardamom tea that we gulped from stainless steel cups in the living room, while my dad hid in the basement fixing the computer. I missed the part of the episode where Zach Morris gives an impassioned speech to the school board after the oil spill in the school duck pond.
Prashant is the current target. A couple of weeks ago, he and I were killing time during one of my parents’ weekly gatherings with the temple gang (not an actual gang), so we dialled up internet on the basement computer and made fake shaadi.com dating profiles. His included facts about robots. Mine quoted the Wu-Tang Clan. As I was trying to select a profile photo, Prashant flipped through Indian women aged nineteen to twenty-five for ideas. “So much teeth,” I said. The women smiled from Himalayan mountaintops. They smiled from desk jobs. They smiled from yoga poses, literally bent over backwards.
“There are no eligible women in Halifax,” he said. “Especially Indian women. And especially women that aren’t dressed like sluts.”
“I wouldn’t say they’re dressed like sluts,” I said. I evaluated how much cleavage was visible, how much panty-line. How much was too much? I tried to upload the Cookie Monster as my photo, but the site sent an all-caps message chastising me for misrepresenting my identity, so I deleted the account. Afterwards, it occurred to me I should have “expressed interest” in Prashant, to see if he would accept, and then we would be connected in this virtual and tenuous way. It would make my mom happy.
Prashant and my parents came out of the same box of animal crackers. They might be the same animal. Prashant’s family moved to Canada when he was four, and he’s fluent in two languages besides English. He volunteers at temple functions, takes the coats of aunties and uncles at dinner parties while greeting each one by name, sprinkles chutney pudi on his toast in the morning, and explains to me why LimeWire is the doorway to moral decrepitude.
At the school library during lunch, Amy and I sign out The Edge of Evil. We read it aloud perched on a concrete block the size of a shipping container outside the school’s east exit. We share the concrete with a couple of other students, one of whom leans over his guitar, pressing the hard chords of a Green Day song. “The Rise of Satanism in North America,” reads Amy. The guitar guy shifts his eyes at her and back to his guitar.
She continues, reading from the intro written by Geraldo Rivera. “Satanism is more than a hodgepodge of mysticism and fantasy...It’s a violent impulse that preys on the emotionally vulnerable, especially teenagers, who are often lonely and lost.”
“Harsh but true,” I say. I wonder what teenage Satanists have perused this book before us, and which librarian decided to order this book for the school library.
“It attracts the angry and the powerless, who often sink into secret lives—possessed by an obsessive fascination with sex, drugs, and heavy metal rock-and-roll.”
“Heavy metal, specifically?”
The inside cover has a 1-800 number for moms and dads of Satanists. (“Is your son or daughter evidencing signs of ritualistic deviate behaviour?”) Nearly every case study in the book features casual mention of animal mutilation. There’s a chart of occult symbols just ahead of the index. We copy them into my notebook after tearing out the first few pages of algebra problems. On the cover Amy draws an inverted pentagram in thick black Sharpie.
“Shall we skip fifth?” she asks, blinking her augmented lashes at me, so I tell my fifth period teacher I have a gynecological appointment and she tells hers she’s volunteered to tidy the school’s Japanese rock garden.
When the other kids in our grade skip class, they go eat crullers and make out in the Tim Hortons parking lot.
We take the bus to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up snacks. I’m walking behind Amy through the aisles, watching her white blonde hair. It’s like a sheet of ice. When we met in Grade 6 I wondered if it was bleached, but it wasn’t. She descends from Vikings. Amy’s mom has the same hair, except she curls it into shapes that are like the snow formations on the eavestroughs of our house. A month or so after her mom left this past spring, Amy found her hair products under their bathroom sink—sprays and pomades, serums and clips that she’d abandoned.
“If you dyed your hair black, you’d look like an evil queen,” I say.
“Let’s do it,” she says. She buys the cheapest box of colour. We smoke a joint behind the building then hike over to Value Village. Amy tackles dresses while I browse blouses, evaluating each pre-worn item for price, fit, and shock value. She holds up a soft black T-shirt that says “Don’t Touch” across the chest. I give her a thumbs up and she adds it to the pile I’m carrying. Wearing black all the time is harder and more expensive than I expected. It already feels like too much effort. When the other kids in our grade skip class, they go eat crullers and make out in the Tim Hortons parking lot.
Waiting in line, we discuss the case study from The Edge of Evil where a girl’s grandmother walks in on her slitting her cat’s throat. “The beloved family pet,” I say. “The Satanist’s blade.”
“Efficient and clean,” says Amy, nodding vigorously. “Too bad her grandmother walked in.”
We’re only having this conversation to scare the woman ahead of us in line. She doesn’t react, just empties a tangle of costume jewelry from her basket on to the counter. Our arms overflow with clothes that smell of other people’s perfume.
I have this idea that goths should smell like nature. I tell this to my mother after school in the kitchen as she’s making dinner, and she chases me around the house with curry leaves and rubs them into my hair. It is hard to run with your black stocking feet slipping everywhere, chased by an agile mother who never stops reminding you of the triple-jump competitions she used to enter and win at your age and living in a country where competitions included fifty times the number of competitors. My mother read about track and field tryouts in the school e-newsletter. I tell her that triple jumping will not help me to achieve my eventual life goals.
“A boy whose name starts with ‘P’ might be impressed by a champion triple jumper,” she says.
I decline to comment, but later I imagine leaping across a sandpit in black athletic wear, a cheering Prashant on the sidelines. Afterwards, he carries my trophy for me and we embrace in the parking lot of Tim Hortons.
I have nightmares—well, not actual nightmares, but horrifying scenarios that I imagine when I’m awake—where I have an arranged marriage to a man from India who’s in need of a PR card. He has a medical degree but works nights as a security guard while trying to get a license to practice in Canada, which is like heaving a rock up a mountain, except instead of a mountain it’s a Slip ’N Slide, and instead of a rock it’s your dreams. When he comes home to our ugly mushroom-coloured high-rise in the city outskirts, I put on the rice cooker and massage his scalp while he drinks whatever the cheapest label of Johnnie Walker is and laments this country’s unfairness. Weekends are spent at the temple in futile prayer. I tell my mom about this, and she says I am racist against my own race.
My parents bring me with them when they visit new immigrant families. They and the temple gang volunteer with immigrant settlement, finding new homes for old couches, and acquainting families with Nova Scotian rituals like eating fiddleheads and apologizing. The last time I went with them, the husband asked my dad where the rest of the Indians in Halifax were.
This weekend we bring Prashant’s family’s donated couch to an apartment in Dartmouth that has no furniture at all except an arborite table like the ones at ‘50s-style diners, and a couple mismatched chairs. The only thing on the wall is a tacked-up illustration of Ganesha. My dad and the uncle load the sofa—mustard and floral and sagging from the weight of decades of rear ends—into the elevator. We angle it this way and that to get it through the door. It scratches paint off their doorframe.
My mom is in the kitchen heating milk for tea, while the aunty brings out a plate of digestive biscuits. We sit on the sofa and put the plate on one of the chairs, because they don’t own a coffee table.
“How is school?” the aunty asks me. When I look closer at her face I realize that though I’ve been told to refer to her as aunty, she must be only five years older than me.
“It’s okay,” I say. I chew my digestive biscuit. “Umm…how do you like living in Halifax?”
“It’s okay,” she says. She chews her digestive biscuit. We digest.
After tea, I excuse myself to wash my hands. When I turn on the light, there are tiny roaches shimmying around the corners of the sink and around the bases of the walls. One heaves its body into the toothbrush holder.
I turn off the light and walk back out into the living room, where my mother is holding the aunty’s thin shoulders as she cries, wiping her nose on the edge of her cotton sari. The men are in the bedroom, filling out government paperwork. In a scatter of sobs, the aunty tells my mother about the home she left in India to come live here, about her parents and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins who lived together in a marble and terracotta house by the sea. She’s been trying to learn English by watching As the World Turns. “I want to go back home!” she says. She’s beginning to hyperventilate. “I want to go home! Please,” she says. “Please.”
I wait against the wall. My mom catches my eye, then looks away.
On the weekend, Prashant and I go along with my parents to a temple event. We’re in charge of handing out informative brochures at the door. The event provides networking opportunities for new immigrants from different countries. A handful of guest speakers deliver mortifying tips, like telling people to wear deodorant.
Prashant smells wonderful, but I don’t tell him that. I’m playing the long game, the kind that ends in a wedding attended by six hundred. He points at my large pentagram necklace, which I found on sale at a booth at the Halifax Shopping Centre. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asks.
“I’m experimenting with the occult,” I say, because I find the word occult intriguing. It means “secret knowledge,” which I wouldn’t mind having. He doesn’t say anything, so I also tell him dressing this way makes me feel protected—waterproof, if not bulletproof. “I feel brave. I have more ownership of my sexuality,” I say. Nobody’s pantsed me in the hallway since last year.
“Right,” he says. “Great.”
“It’s not just that,” I say, but he turns away to help a man fill in a registration form. The man has brought his children along, and they grip his legs and look up at me.
“It’s not just that,” I say again after the man finishes. “I’ve also been exploring other religions, like Wicca and Satanism –”
“Hello? You’re Hindu. We are at a Hindu temple right now.”
“I don’t mean that I’m becoming a Satanist, I mean I’m reading up on it. I’m expanding my knowledge. Did you know ‘occult’ means ‘secret knowledge’? And Wicca has numerous similarities to Hinduism, you know, with the polytheism and animism and everything.” Whatever animism is.
She thinks that I will never get married and will instead live contract-free with a white guy who never volunteers at community events and who illegally pirates not only music but movies and software as well.
After the meeting, they provide a lunch buffet, and everybody eats in the building’s cafeteria. I see Prashant and this new immigrant girl pick up their food and sit together. My mother comes over and she sees them too, and I can see her marriage-arranging mind twisting around this new possibility. She thinks that I will never get married and will instead live contract-free with a white guy who never volunteers at community events and who illegally pirates not only music but movies and software as well.
“Go sit with them,” she says.
“Mom, I don’t want to salt his game,” I say.
“What? Just go. They’re the only ones here your age. Otherwise you’ll be sitting with me and your dad and that uncle,” she gestures at a sweaty man gripping my father's shirtsleeve.
I take my food over to Prashant and the girl and ask if it’s okay if I join them. The girl says, “Of course, welcome!” and I sit. When she talks—about neutral topics such as her recent visit to Lunenberg—she has a slight accent, Indian but with a European twist. When I ask about it she says she attended an international school in Delhi and lived in London as a child. Her hair is loosely braided, and she wears this jade cotton salwar kameez with a chiffon shawl draped around her shoulders. I can tell she’s the kind of girl who takes Bharatanatyam lessons and remembers which god does what.
Clearly, Prashant is falling madly in love with her, or rather, sanely and rationally in love with her. She’s wonderful. When I rise to throw out my Styrofoam plate, he will ask for her number and then he will phone and they will speak of all the things that are important to them, like their Indian heritage and how great it is to be pious. For their first date, they will go to Udupi Palace and both will order idli sambar and comment on how their mothers make it better. Afterwards, they will wander romantically around the sari shops on Gerard Street. He will say her hair smells as fragrant as a jasmine. Together they will rent Bollywood movies and watch without subtitles and never feel the impulse to mock Shah Rukh Khan. She’ll stand up in the middle of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to dance along with the choreography, eyes downcast, demure, hips swinging in a way that is somehow both sensual and modest. They won’t have sex though. They will wait until they are married.
She is still talking about Lunenberg.
“You haven’t been to the Maritime Museum, though? You definitely must visit the Maritime Museum,” says Prashant. This seems like a bizarre recommendation from a teenager. The best thing about the Maritime Museum is the talking parrot that for some reason lives in the lobby. It’s otherwise mostly boats.
“I hadn’t heard about it,” she says.
“Well, we’ll go there,” he says, not including me in this invitation, not that I care. I have been to the Maritime Museum numerous times on school field trips, and once with Prashant and our families. There’s a photo of us in an album at home: I’m four and he’s six. We hold hands, unsmiling, in front of a cardboard cutout of the Titanic.
A couple days later, I go over to Amy’s house in the South End and we smoke a bowl and eat Dunkaroos on her back porch before her dad gets home. Her cat wanders out and we make him hats out of newspaper and take photos with Amy’s parents’ digital camera.
“…and then right in front of me he planned a date with her. To the Maritime Museum.” I chip at my black nail polish.
“What the fuck?”
The cat walks over me, purring. I hug him and he droops in my hands like Nickelodeon Gak. He yawns onto his back on the porch planks and curls sideways like he’s trying to spell cat with his body but there isn’t enough of him. Amy lights the pipe and then reaches down to hold the lighter flame up to the cat’s nipple.
“Amy!” I blow out the lighter as Amy laughs. The cat rolls lazily in the other direction.
“Relax,” she says, “he likes it. Too bad we have to sacrifice him to Satan.”
I roll my eyes at her and she grins. Amy isn’t a psychopath. I saw her cry back in Grade 8 listening to a Boys II Men album.
I hear her front door open and close downstairs. “Your dad?” I ask.
“Yeah he must be home from work.” She goes back in and tucks her weed supplies into her oboe case before returning. She sold the oboe over the summer to buy drugs, but her parents don’t know.
“Prashant thinks I’m not a very good Hindu,” I say.
“Wait, you’re Hindu?” She pretends to fall over laughing. The cat darts away. “I thought you were a proud coconut.” Coconut: brown on the outside and white on the inside.
Her dad fills the doorway. “Pasta for dinner,” he says. It’s unclear if I’m invited, but if I am, I will politely say no. Dinners in white households have a choreography I haven’t learned. People pass stuff around and balance a dish in one hand while serving themselves with the other and making conversation. I never ask people to pass me things, in case it seems greedy. I’m never sure how much I’m supposed to eat. To use the washroom, they must ask to excuse themselves, so I never use the washroom. They use fabric napkins and I feel guilty wiping my mouth. They finish dinner at 6:30pm and then by 10:30 my stomach gnaws. In Indian homes dinner is buffet style and happens an hour after everybody was supposed to be sleeping already. We don’t use utensils. My mom says food is more flavourful when you eat it from your hand. We sit on the living room sofa—or cross-legged on the floor if there are more people than seats—and an aunty makes you eat everything and then sends leftovers home in reused yogurt containers.
“Amy, is that makeup?” he asks. She has on a thin cat eye. “That outfit isn’t appropriate,” he says.
“It says, ‘Don’t Touch,’” she responds, puffing out her chest.
“Amy. Sweater,” he says, unsmiling in plaid. Amy gives me an apologetic dads-are-crazy look but goes to get her sweater from the kitchen.
Her dad starts cooking dinner while we go upstairs to dye her hair in the bathroom. We run out of dye so patches show at the roots and this one place in the back, but she says it’s fine. She tosses her head and her bangs land crooked, an asterisk on her forehead. She fixes them in the mirror as I rub her hair with a fluffy aubergine towel. “Remember the Phantom of the Opera towel?” she snickers.
On the first day of music class we’d been seated together because of the extremely unlikely coincidence of us both playing the oboe. The teacher gave a bitter speech about how the music program would be dead before our elementary school graduation, and then played a video biography of John Philip Sousa while glowering over his desk in the back corner under a massive Phantom of the Opera poster. During the video, Amy passed me a note that said, “The Phantom of the Opera poster is a bath towel.” I looked up at the poster/bath towel and realized it was true, and after class we discussed the possible reasons why a person would purchase such a bath towel, and that’s how we became friends.
I hear a throat clear before I realize her dad is in the hallway, watching us. “What the hell did you do?” he says. I flinch as though he yelled. I’ve never heard his voice raised before, although he always seemed like the type of dad that might yell, unlike my dad, who beseeches. Non-Indian dads are different creatures. You can’t call them uncle. “What the hell, Amy,” he says. “Tell your friend to go home.”
There’s a pounding in my chest. And then my hands are shaking, like when I’m getting up the nerve to speak in a class debate.
He stands there with his arms crossed while I gather up my belongings, as though we’ve been caught naked on a flaming pentagram. I hesitate for only a second, because maybe I should help clean up the bathroom, which is covered in plastic shower caps and gloves and paper towels, black dye and blonde hair. He steps out of the doorway to let me pass, and I think about how nobody this tall ever comes over to our house. He could pluck the winter clothes from the top of our coat closet without standing on a chair like my dad does.
It’s approaching evening and getting cooler, but I wait outside for my mom to pick me up. I lean against the brick archway that surrounds their front door. Two kids are playing street hockey just a few meters away, clacking the plastic puck back and forth until they lose it under a car. The house door opens, and Amy’s dad comes out. “I need to speak with you,” he says, and clears his throat. “Amy is a good kid. She’s going through a difficult time, and I would prefer that the two of you stopped spending time together.”
I don’t know what to say. I want to tell him it wasn’t my idea. Was it my idea? There’s a pounding in my chest. And then my hands are shaking, like when I’m getting up the nerve to speak in a class debate. I tuck them under the hem of my shirt. I watch one of the kids crawl out from below the car, triumphant, puck in hand. Has Amy has been sacrificing animals for real? Why didn’t she tell me her dad wouldn’t approve of her dying her hair?
“It would be best if you didn’t come by our house anymore, and Amy won’t be visiting your house either. I will be encouraging her to find other friends.”
I don’t say anything. I wonder what he might know about me that even Amy doesn’t know. Or that even I don’t know.
“Hey,” he says. “Did you hear me?”
The headlights of my mom’s car illuminate his plaid shirt. She parks, walks up, and greets him sweetly, deferentially. “Hi there, how are you?”
Amy’s dad repeats what he’s just said to me.
“How dare you,” my mom says. “You asshole. Your kid is the bad one. Not mine.” Amy’s dad withers like a dried-up spider and dies at our feet.
No, that doesn’t happen.
My mom nods her head. “Of course,” she says. “We understand.”
The hockey kids pause their game to let us drive away. We drive north, past Dalhousie, past the Hydrostone, to where everything looks less historic, less like it belongs in Halifax. My mom touches my shoulder.
“You can’t get so close to people,” she says. “The same thing happened to me when I first came here. You can only trust other Indians.” We drive through residential neighbourhoods. Every person we pass is a stranger. She continues, “Indira Aunty is coming for dinner tonight. She has a son the same age as you.”
“I’m busy,” I hiss.
“What does that mean? You’re busy? I’ve already invited them. His mom is bringing pulao rice.”
“Why don’t you go out with him then?”
“Don’t be angry,” she says, flipping up the sun visor as the sky turns fully dark.
At home, in my bedroom, I dip a cotton pad in Pond’s cream and wipe it across my eyelids until the cotton is black. Amy and I will be together as usual tomorrow on the concrete block behind the school. What’s Amy’s dad going to do, install cameras in the hallways? But I wish what he thought of me didn’t matter. It matters. I rearrange the clothing in my closet so colour—an aqua sweater, a denim jacket, a mustard blouse—is back within reach. In my bed, I read the scene from The Edge of Evil where a guy rips out a cow’s heart with his bare hands. “It was just standing there and they just ripped—while it was still alive—they just ripped its heart out,” says Danielle from Kansas City.
