The Other Americans(6)

The other girls tittered, and for the rest of the day they called me a poop-eater. At story time, we all gathered around Mrs. Nielsen to hear her read from “Rapunzel,” but nobody wanted to sit next to me. Later, Mrs. Nielsen started playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the xylophone and asked us if we recognized the tune. I said, “It’s the purple and green song!” to which Mrs. Nielsen replied, “No, sweetie, the star twinkles, it’s not purple or green. You really need to learn your colors.” I didn’t know how to tell her that I already knew my colors, that I was talking about how the music looked, the shapes and shades the notes made. So when my father came to pick me up after school, I ran across the blacktop and into his arms as though he were a savior. He dried my tears, took me home, and let me have Oreos before dinner.

But the next day I still had to go to school. I learned the alphabet, learned the pledge of allegiance, learned to stay out of the way of bullies. In class, I was quiet. At lunch, I sat alone. The silence cloaked me with safety, but it betrayed me a few months later, when Mrs. Nielsen became convinced I had a learning disability. She called my mother into the classroom one sunny morning in May and used words like severe mutism, social anxiety, oppositional behavior. The terms failed to elicit a flicker of recognition from my mother. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s something wrong with your daughter,” she said. I sat on a yellow mat in the corner, playing, listening, waiting for my mother to say, “There’s nothing wrong with my daughter.” But she only nodded slowly, as if she agreed with the teacher.

When my father came home that night and found out what had happened, he said the teacher was a fool. “Hmara,” he called her, a word he reserved for the television anchors with whom he argued during the eight o’clock news. Then he reached into the fridge for a beer and started sorting through the bills on the kitchen counter. I watched my mother’s face for a reaction. It was immediate. “And you know more than the teacher?”

“I know more about my daughter.”

“Salma didn’t have this problem in kindergarten. She was first in class, always.”

“There is no problem, Maryam.”

“If she doesn’t speak, she has to repeat the year. That’s what the teacher said.”

“No, she doesn’t.” He ruffled my hair. “Nor-eini, try to speak in class, okay?”

But the teacher’s threat, relayed and amplified by my mother, was indelible in my mind. Not speaking meant that I would have to repeat, and repeating meant that I wouldn’t have to see Brittany Cutler or her acolytes every day. So I stayed in kindergarten another year. I learned the alphabet again and the pledge of allegiance again, though this time there was Sonya Mukherjee, a girl who was just as quiet as me, a girl who didn’t fit in with the others, either. By the time I started the first grade, I had one friend.

Still, it wasn’t until middle school that I fell in with my own tribe—music nerds. Two summers earlier, having noticed my talk of music and colors, my father had enrolled me in piano classes with Mrs. Winslow, a neighbor who had retired to the desert after years of teaching music at USC. She gave a name to how I saw the world. Synesthesia. And with that word came the realization that there was nothing wrong with me, that I shared this way of experiencing sound with many others, some of them musicians. At the audition for band class, I played Minuet in G, and was immediately given a spot. Sonya, too, earned a place, playing the flute. And there were other good kids in the band. Lily and Jeremy and Manuel and Jamie. Kids whose first instinct wasn’t to ask “What are you?” but “What do you play?” Pinned to the wall above the teacher’s desk was a poster that asked: DID YOU PRACTICE YESTERDAY? ARE YOU PRACTICING TODAY? WILL YOU PRACTICE TOMORROW? The strict discipline and long rehearsals he imposed on us bound us together. And I didn’t even have to talk much—I only had to play.

One day the jazz band was invited to perform at the Summer Festival in Palm Springs. Walking across the stage to the piano, I did what my teacher had advised. Pretend you’re only playing for one person. That way you won’t be so nervous. I glanced at my father, who sat in the front row, leaning his head just so, waiting. Then I closed my eyes, and began to play. As my fingers moved on the keys, I felt as if I were speaking to my bandmates, calling to Manuel on the drums or answering a question from Lily on the bass. The talk between us deepened, and I became so immersed in our many-colored conversation that when it was over I was nearly startled by the rousing applause from the audience. I remember feeling happy that night, and whole.

Yet the sense of being different never completely went away. The fault lines usually appeared when I was asked what church I went to, or when my mother spoke to me in the school parking lot, or when the history teacher asked a random question about the Middle East and all eyes turned to me for an answer. It didn’t help that my parents weren’t getting along and that there was constant squabbling at home. Every time a door was slammed or a dish was smashed, I locked myself in my room and listened to music. I dreamed of growing up, going to college, escaping the desert. “Why do you always have your head in the clouds?” my mother would ask.

All at once I felt alert to the smell of the coffee brewing in the pot, the starch of the napkin in my hand, the weight of my body against the kitchen counter. “I don’t have my head in the clouds,” I said. “I just think that today isn’t a good day to be talking about money.”