marmalade and cheese

It was a Thursday in December, 1982. I was six years old. My mother, younger brother, and I had flown from India on Sat. I imagine that not being able to start me at school for four whole days must have killed my father. Because you know, a day without knowledge is a total waste of everyone's time. (I think this was the same reasoning that had my parents sending us to school from our death beds all throughout childhood. In high school, I'd sometimes fake a sick note and go find a corner desk at the library to catch a few z's and avoid infecting my classmates. In the 2nd grade, I was given rare permission to miss the last few days of the school year because my cousins were visiting from South Carolina and we were all going to Disneyland. We ended up postponing the trip by a day or two, and I had to go to school anyway. I tried to fake a deep deep, almost dead, sleep when my parents tried to wake me up that morning. In my mind, the plan was perfect; they couldn't send me to school if they couldn't wake me up, right? Somewhat shockingly, it didn't work. Although my parents wondered if I had some sort of sleep condition, they sent me to school while they pondered the possibility.)

The first day is mostly a haze. But I remember that the teacher assigned a girl in the class named Julie to hang out with me and help out as needed. My dad will probably still remember that "nice Julie from your class." I just remember that she used to sit next me those first few weeks and pinch me, and I didn't know how to tell anyone that she was doing it. (I also remember seeing lice crawling around in her hair in the 2nd grade, but that's a different story).

That first afternoon, I unwittingly followed the class to the cafeteria without the bagged lunch my parents had sent me to school with. My father, as unfamiliar with the American school system as I was, had also given me a dollar in quarters to buy milk. At the end of the line, with a tray of food in my hand, I had no choice but to hand over my quarters, one at a time, until they took them all. Speaking no English, it was some time before I managed to convince a teacher that I needed to go back to the classroom to get my marmalade and cheese sandwich. Returning the school lunch was easy. Getting my dollar back was impossible. Trying to explain to my dad that night how my milk had cost a whole dollar was even harder.

My English skills developed rapidly, so it wasn't long before I mastered the art of buying milk in a school cafeteria. Actually, by the end of the school year, I was regularly getting my name on the board for talking in class. But assimiltion to an American way of life too much longer, mostly due to my parents having no clue. I wondered for a long time why no one wanted to switch lunches with me, but to this day, my parents think that orange marmalade and American cheese is a perfectly acceptable combinaiton for a sandwich. In the winter, they sent me to school in a Sesame Street raincoat (all right for a first grader, but oh the shame for a 6th grader! But they saw no reason to buy a new raincoat when that one still fit and wasn't completely ripped to pieces). In the summer, they would sometimes find cute little dresses on sale at the local KMart, and goodness, they looked adorable with my white knee high tube socks and tennis shoes. By the second grade, my eyesight was so terrible that I needed glasses to see more than 2 inches in front of me. Luckily for me, my father specialized in picking out thick old-lady frames. My mother refused to let me cut my hair, so by the time I was in 3rd grade, it probably reached down to the middle of my back. My mother would oil and braid it into two long braids, a style that was very popular among third graders in the 80s, I'm sure. Once, as a surprising splurge, they saw a lovely pearl necklace that they thought would look just perfect on their 8-year-old daughter.
 
At school, it was a wonder that I had any friends at all. At home, I fought with my parents constantly, rebelling against their traditional Indian regime. It seems now that my entire childhood was a balancing act with me never quite getting it right. I think about those moments now, and I often wonder what it must have been like for my parents, traveling across the Atlantic, leaving their friends and families behind. Watching their children slowly slip away from them to a world they've never quite understood. I struggled to assimilate, to adapt and fit in. They've struggled all their lives to desperately hold on to the things they know and miss. To this day, they live in an Indian microcosm, and very little of what my brothers and I do fit just right in that world they've built in their heads.  And I'll be the first to admit that I've pushed my parents' comfort zone to the limits, from traveling alone through South America to marrying a white guy.  I'm not close to my parents, but when I think about this, I feel a little sad for them. When they came to the United States, I think they had this idea that they would be able to provide a better life for us but within their own familiar boundaries.  I wonder if they constantly feel a little lost and in an effort to compensate, they hold on a little more desperately to what they know.
 
This post is linked up with the memoir prompt over at The Red Dress Club.  This week's prompt was to write about a memory from childhood and explore what it means to us.