Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Twenty-Four: The Inoculation of Mateen Mundrawala

285 I hadn’t seen or heard from Mateen in a week, not since I’d followed the feet of the fox-trot into his bedroom, and when I arrived for my final dance lesson, I passed my eyes over the cars in the lot but spotted no battered beetle among them. Then a yellow smear, bright as a flashbulb, across the brick wall of the dance studio stopped my eyes dead in their stumble: Paki-derms Go Home! spat the paint. Such an efficient slur, slaying two threats with one stone. Mateen was not in the classroom either. A buoyant redhead wearing a cinched dress whose skirt billowed when she whirled, which she did randomly while chattering, glided and pirouetted whoosh-whoosh across the dance floor and clapped her hands twice when she reached the other side. “All right, class,” she sang, “partner up. Tonight we’re going to learn the thrilling steps of…the tango!” She threw her hands twenty-four The Inoculation of Mateen Mundrawala 286 into the air and grinned in a way that made my jaws ache. “Olé,” said a voice beside me, Lucky Teeter’s dancing doppelgänger. “I hear it takes two,” he said and held up his hands unsteadily, as though he were trying to catch a giant baby thrown from a burning building. He smiled and revealed a front tooth capped in silver. “Where is Mr. Mundrawala?” I asked, and he wouldn’t drop his paws, so I reached down and clasped his reaching hands in mine. “Search me,” said the man, and he shrugged his shoulders . I resisted the urge to pull him up into the air and dangle him by his arms until he produced some useful information. “Maybe his being at large has something to do with that love note someone left him out front?” He raised his eyebrows, and if I’d had some electrical tape on hand, I would have slapped it on his forehead and stripped his prominent brow bald. I gave a windy sigh like a furnace, dudgeon aswell, in no mood to gambol with a high school ruffian turned weekend rug-cutter. Bullies, like giants, do not improve with age. “I ain’t lucky,” he said, and I thought he offered this as explanation for why he was willing to tango with a woman who was halfway to heaven, a woman he could look in the eye only by way of catapult or trampoline. “Yeah, well, clearly good fortune frowns and flees to the nearest exit whenever I enter the room.” I suddenly felt like an out-of-work pugilist long spoiling for a prize fracas and thought my fist might just fly forward unprompted and pop him in the beak. “Lucky Teeter? I ain’t him. I’m his older brother Leon.” I looked at that glinting tooth and had the vaguest recollection of Lucky getting into a souped-up Chevelle one 287 afternoon after being suspended for scrapping in the hall between classes, pummeling some pimpled freshman in need of initiation. Leon took his right hand from my left and lifted it in the air as though he were trying to entice a bird from a limb then grabbed my hand and shook it mid-flight, howdydo , howdy-do, shake-shake-shake. “You’re Leon…Teeter?” I asked, relaxing my arm, reducing the height of the handshake. “In the flesh. And you’re Wallis Armstrong, am I right? Lucky always had it in for you.” Lucky, that is Leon, nodded his head that was balding in a way I suddenly found touching, a pink skullcap, a slice of grapefruit, a plot of recent desert encroaching on a forest struggling to remain lush. “He mentioned me?” “Your ears must’ve been on fire a lot when you were a kid. I bet you come up as a topic of conversation often enough to keep your bean toasty in any season.” Leon smiled again and that tooth made me think of the disco ball revolving above us, scattering doubloons across the floor. Oh, I felt enervated, so tired of tracking the disappeared only to find unbidden memories I’d just as soon remain dim stepping out of the shadows again and again. Yesterday’s heartache is a tireless stalker. “I’m just ribbing you,” he said and he chucked me on the arm. “Like I said, I ain’t Lucky. I...