Read Online Not a Fairytale by Shaida Kazie Ali - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Shaida Kazie Ali
Tags: Not a Fairytale
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mad? No, just American.
There’s a cop car ahead. I must try to look like I know what I’m doing. I do know what I’m doing; I just don’t know how to drive on the wrong side of the road. The air conditioner is on high, but I am drenched in sweat. Why am I afraid? This is simply a drive around the area, a practice run.
We live in a neighbourhood of forty houses, all curved around a man-made lake so that the back yard of each opens up onto the water. Ours is a single-storey; Ma would be unimpressed. She thinks you’ve only arrived if you live in a house with stairs. Our houses are perfect and clean, with only slight variations in the colour schemes. We have identical mail boxes, at a cost of $350 each. In our front gardens there are pretty mini-palm trees. They arrive fully grown, automatic additions like the grass and the garage doors. We subscribe to the same gardening service and the same pool-cleaning service.
Our neighbours are all white; I’m the only brown-skinned person around who isn’t an employee. I’m thinking of learning Spanish, because it’s becoming more and more embarrassing for me not to know it. Everyone thinks I’m playing white when I say, “No Spanish, just English. Inglés.” I’ve learnt to nod knowingly as the woman at the bakery chats to me in Spanish. I just point out the cookies I want and smile. She could be discussing her last operation – the blood, the gallstones in a jar – or her indulgence in bestiality, and all I do is smile and point and nod.
Sometimes I walk around the neighbourhood, wave to the black security guard at the entrance to the neighbourhood. No one can get in or out without signing in, without going past him, but I can’t remember his name. There are security cameras lining the roads, for our protection. In the summer mornings, everything is still, quiet. It feels like I am on the set of a movie, without any dialogue.
Pregnancy Cravings
V ISITING THE M AGIC K INGDOM , I BECOME A CHILD AGAIN , stepping into the life-size covers of my fairytale books. But something is missing. I find myself wishing I could share these Disney visits with a child. My child.
I try to ignore the cliché of the ticking biological clock and redirect my energies into a postgraduate degree (the working title for my dissertation is “Gold is the Fairest of All: Colour and Materialism in Fairytales”), but nothing will curb my yearning for a baby. The problem is that I can’t get pregnant. The white-coated doctors in my adopted land of sour milk and stolen honey are still trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Jimmy says we could always adopt, and tells me, “Don’t worry babe, I’ll be your baby forever.” Are all men idiots? I don’t want Jimmy to be my baby, I don’t want to call him my precious pumpkin pie, my snoopy, my cookie or, worse, Daddy, like those creepy middle-aged women with stiff hair who talk to their child-substitute poodles in little-girl voices and ask them to bring Daddy’s slippers.
My life has become a battle, an internal struggle. I’m helping Jimmy with his tax – I have a flair for numbers; I think it’s got to do with having grown up in a babbie shop. (In fact, I strongly recommend that school-going children should be sent to work in a babbie shop: they’d never have problems with their multiplication timetables or general arithmetic, especially if they had a father like mine, who, if you messed up the change, would give you a fast klap to the head.) But all I can think about while I’m calculating Jimmy’s returns is being pregnant. Wearing multicoloured tents and gaining a hundred kilos. I want a baby!
Jimmy does his best. He indulges in solitary pleasure in the bathroom, fantasising about me, he says, and I keep his tadpoles warm between my thighs while we drive to the hospital. They count his offerings and tell us Jimmy’s boys are too damned slow, and that there are too few of them.
This starts us off on a round of endless hospital
There’s a cop car ahead. I must try to look like I know what I’m doing. I do know what I’m doing; I just don’t know how to drive on the wrong side of the road. The air conditioner is on high, but I am drenched in sweat. Why am I afraid? This is simply a drive around the area, a practice run.
We live in a neighbourhood of forty houses, all curved around a man-made lake so that the back yard of each opens up onto the water. Ours is a single-storey; Ma would be unimpressed. She thinks you’ve only arrived if you live in a house with stairs. Our houses are perfect and clean, with only slight variations in the colour schemes. We have identical mail boxes, at a cost of $350 each. In our front gardens there are pretty mini-palm trees. They arrive fully grown, automatic additions like the grass and the garage doors. We subscribe to the same gardening service and the same pool-cleaning service.
Our neighbours are all white; I’m the only brown-skinned person around who isn’t an employee. I’m thinking of learning Spanish, because it’s becoming more and more embarrassing for me not to know it. Everyone thinks I’m playing white when I say, “No Spanish, just English. Inglés.” I’ve learnt to nod knowingly as the woman at the bakery chats to me in Spanish. I just point out the cookies I want and smile. She could be discussing her last operation – the blood, the gallstones in a jar – or her indulgence in bestiality, and all I do is smile and point and nod.
Sometimes I walk around the neighbourhood, wave to the black security guard at the entrance to the neighbourhood. No one can get in or out without signing in, without going past him, but I can’t remember his name. There are security cameras lining the roads, for our protection. In the summer mornings, everything is still, quiet. It feels like I am on the set of a movie, without any dialogue.
Pregnancy Cravings
V ISITING THE M AGIC K INGDOM , I BECOME A CHILD AGAIN , stepping into the life-size covers of my fairytale books. But something is missing. I find myself wishing I could share these Disney visits with a child. My child.
I try to ignore the cliché of the ticking biological clock and redirect my energies into a postgraduate degree (the working title for my dissertation is “Gold is the Fairest of All: Colour and Materialism in Fairytales”), but nothing will curb my yearning for a baby. The problem is that I can’t get pregnant. The white-coated doctors in my adopted land of sour milk and stolen honey are still trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Jimmy says we could always adopt, and tells me, “Don’t worry babe, I’ll be your baby forever.” Are all men idiots? I don’t want Jimmy to be my baby, I don’t want to call him my precious pumpkin pie, my snoopy, my cookie or, worse, Daddy, like those creepy middle-aged women with stiff hair who talk to their child-substitute poodles in little-girl voices and ask them to bring Daddy’s slippers.
My life has become a battle, an internal struggle. I’m helping Jimmy with his tax – I have a flair for numbers; I think it’s got to do with having grown up in a babbie shop. (In fact, I strongly recommend that school-going children should be sent to work in a babbie shop: they’d never have problems with their multiplication timetables or general arithmetic, especially if they had a father like mine, who, if you messed up the change, would give you a fast klap to the head.) But all I can think about while I’m calculating Jimmy’s returns is being pregnant. Wearing multicoloured tents and gaining a hundred kilos. I want a baby!
Jimmy does his best. He indulges in solitary pleasure in the bathroom, fantasising about me, he says, and I keep his tadpoles warm between my thighs while we drive to the hospital. They count his offerings and tell us Jimmy’s boys are too damned slow, and that there are too few of them.
This starts us off on a round of endless hospital
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