The Girl in the Middle by Anais Granofsky

Author:Anais Granofsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

IT WAS DURING THIS TIME THAT MY GRANDMOTHER, Shirley, called and asked if she could see me. Shirley eventually told me that when my dad left for India, she realized we were in trouble and tracked us down. This wasn’t an easy feat, as we had moved from our apartment and were still living in the rooming house, where we didn’t have our own phone. There was a telephone line in the entryway to the building and most people used that. One day someone shouted up the stairs: “Jean, call for you!”

I went out to our hallway, which overlooked the entrance, and watched through the banister spindles as my mother picked up the receiver. I could see her jaw tense and a look of anger pass over her features. I knew it was that lady again and it scared me. It reminded me of how my mom would get after my visits to the big house with my dad, and I knew it was going to upset her. But this time I wouldn’t have my dad as a buffer and I feared having to face the recriminations alone. I could see her finishing up the phone call below me, could hear her tightly agreeing to a time and place that she wrote on a flyer stuffed into one of the mailboxes. She hung up looking heavy, having made a Faustian bargain. She looked up and caught me sitting there so she came up and sat beside me.

I shook my head. “No way. I’m not going!”

“You gotta get to know them,” she insisted, which I just found more confusing.

“She doesn’t even know us, mama.”

“Listen here, Ma. This might be a way for you to know a life outside the broke-ass limited resources I grew up with. You’ve got a chance to see some of the things I couldn’t.”

“I don’t want to go up there without you again,” I pleaded. “It’s scary.”

My mother took my hand and looked at me sadly. “Puja, I don’t want you to go either, but we don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. There are some things you gotta do, I gotta do, and this is one of them.”

“You should come with me,” I said accusingly, and she let my hand go.

“This is your family, and I’m sorry, child, but you’re going to have to do this alone.”

The next morning she put me in a little flowered dress and I cleaned my scuffed running shoes. We danced to Aretha Franklin and ate Froot Loops in our room with the mattress on the floor. Then we left the rooming house and together we took the bus to the Ossington subway station, a dirty and drab metro stop that connected us to the rest of the city. We got on the graffitied subway car and took it fourteen stops, heading first east and then north, switching at the Yonge Street station and eventually arriving at York Mills. From there we got on another bus and rode another eight stops until we got off on the side of a wide road.

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