Glorious Glorious, Ham and Chocolate

"Gloria, you are totally stereotyping," Marsha tells me. We're at Study Team Circle in World Cultures class designing research projects supposedly, our team being the JudeoFeminist Coven of me and Marsha and Ruthie. Everybody named their study teams after their sociocultural commonalities. We picked team positions too, reflecting social constructs on academic and interpersonal and community norms. I'm Coven Gossip, Ruthie is Coven Slut, and Marsha is Coven Nag.

Marsha says to me, "You're just idealizing a projected Other."

Other my butthole, ex-friend, I think but I just tell her she overprivileges verbal communication. Plus I'm getting an A in Conversational Mandarin.

Marsha says, "Chinese men are sexist." I thank her for reminding me racism is in the air we breathe.

Then Mr. McCormick is coming over. We open our books. Ruthie says, "These creation myths are so down on women." Which is what's in the book, but he says that's a good observation and she just about like has an orgasm, our Coven Slut. God. I mean I respect him as a teacher, and he has this little red beard which is cute, but God. "What about folktales?" he says. "How about discussing a tale like Cinderella with someone unfamiliar with our cultural mores?"

I'm like your mores, dude, but out loud I say, "A translation." Knowing he'll ask what's my foreign language? Marsha rolls her eyes. "Ah, Mandarin," he says, "Let's propose a collaboration with the Dragon Study Team."

Propose a collaboration. Omigod omigod. The Dragon Team. It's called a team because Mr. McC has this thing about a noncoercive classroom environment but there's only one person in it-- Rong Wu. The only Chinese kid to make college-track Cultural Studies in the history of Jonathan Livingston High (not counting a couple bananas from San Joaquin). Omigod I promise promise promise I will not eat ham for three weeks. Mr. McC goes over and pats Rong on the back all supportively. My toenails are breaking a sweat.

Ruthie asks does he know any fairy tales. The Jock Pride Study Team snickers fairy tales and shut up, you fairy tail. "What is it?" Rong asks them.

"Forget it," Ruthie says, but Mr. McC has this hair up his butt about the linguistics of intolerance, so Jock Pride spends the rest of the mod discussing the metaphoric ramifications of tails and fairies leaving the JudeoFeminist Coven and the Dragon Study Team to collaborate.

Women are always at the beck of circumstance and it disadvantages us. If we had known this would happen we could call each other before school and coordinate outfits, to show we understand we're making him represent a whole culture and that's like an academically racist approach? We could dress to represent the breadth of perspective within a cultural group. I could have on my long sleeves and long skirt from my Gothic phase and a kerchief and look neoOrthodox, and Marsha could have on Conservative blue and Ruthie could be in tight bright. Rong is wearing black pants and a grey shirt he always wears open just enough at the collar to show a little bit of throat. The muscles of his chest shift under the fabric as he walks over to us and sets down his notebook open to a blank page. His palm is touching the paper.

I am paper, I want to scream.

Marcia says, "Talk to him in Chinese."

Usually I can't stand to watch him in Mandarin class, he holds himself so perfectly still. He and the teacher talk back and forth, up and down, all the tones that mean something. The words are like sung, the way a cantor sings in temple, and only his fingers are moving a little, those smooth little hands, short, muscular, no I can't stand to look at those hands. I do "how-are-you." Ni hao ma?

Nothing happens. Maybe I said the wrong tone. You'd think in eight weeks of class they'd have taught us how to say that. I mean, eight weeks and we're still on hello how are you and the members of the family.

Then he smiles. He says, "Wo hen hao, ni ne? " Omigod I promise promise promise I will not eat ham or chocolate for a month. It means "fine, and you."

I introduce, "Zhe shi wo pengyou Ruthie ye Marsha." These are my friends ha-ha.

He goes, "Nimen hao, which is hello.

Marsha goes, "Shalom."

Ruthie asks what does his name mean? She wants to tell about hers. She's going get Bat Mitzvahed even though she's sixteen, so she can take the discourse hostage and get up in Temple and read the verse where Ruth lay down at Boaz's feet. We learned in Hebrew Discussion that the feet of Noah means penis, ^[1] so Ruthie went home and searched TorahNet for feet in all five books. Our coven slut is going through a phase. She got all into this Kabalistic web page because she gets same-gender crushes as part of her delayed prepubescence, and Kabala gave her an excuse to send fan mail to the broad on Star Trek Explorer that plays Seven of Nine.

He tells her Rong means Glorious.

Marsha points at me. "Gloria!" My fingers leave little sweatmarks when I open the book to the appendix with Cinderella.

He can't find cinder in his dictionary. I write down Ash. He looks it up. Grey. "Old lady?" he says.

No, we tell him. "Remains of fire."

He says, "That which fire cannot burn." He says it low. He's looking at me. Tones are very important in Mandarin.

Marsha says, "Write that which fire cannot burn." Marsha says, "Write once upon a time." We can't translate that, I tell her. It's idiom. He writes once and time.

"Upon time is removed from time?" he says.

Ruthie says, "On top of it."

He says, "On time, that is common synonym? Means at the right time."

" Not exactly," I say.

Marsha says, "Way! The story happens when the time is right. This is women's cultural heritage." She makes a fist. "Power."

He looks at Marsha's fist.

Ruthie says, "Cinderella had to fight off a wicked stepmother."

Marsha says, "They like beat Cinderella."

He looks up beat. "Music?"

Ruthie says, "No, the verb."

He reads his dictionary. "What does the heart beat?"

Ruthie says, "Not the intransitive. They beat Cinderella, that's transitive. The heart beats itself."

"Why?"

Marsha makes a fist with both hands and squeezes it in and out. "You know, lub dub, lub dub."

He says, "In America, heart is center of a person. Violence of beating heart."

Marsha looks at him. Ruthie looks at him. I look at him. Marsha says, write that down. I write violent heart central to Western identity.

Rong writes wicked stepmother. He says, "Wicked, past tense of wick. To wick, to absorb. Full of the evils of the past?"

Ruthie says, "Kind of."

I say to him, "Cinderella's mother is dead. Her father has a new wife. She's wicked."

He says, "New wife absorbed into the house."

I am staring at the space where his collar is open. "When Cinderella's mother was alive, they were happy."

"Work together," he says.

"Does your mother work?" I ask him.

He shrugs. "Garment factory."

Marsha says, "So like when Cinderella's mother was alive, they sewed together all day and they always got finished before the jobber came back."

Ruthie says, "The who?"

Marsha says, "When you get near a book, do you like have panic attacks? The jobber is this goniff that brings sewing jobs around to all the Chinese that work at home and speed their brains out on diet pills to get it done before he comes back."

Ruthie says, "Excuse me queen academabitch of the world."

Rong is watching Ruthie's lips. I tell him, "Never mind. Cinderella works in the kitchen now, taking care of the family fire."

"Family fire," he says. "Fire that makes family?"

He looks at me. I look at him. We have entered a dimension in which neither ham nor chocolate exist. He says, "Wick is the burning core of a candle." All I can answer is yes. In his neck the carotid and jugular are throbbing.

I turn the page in the book. "One day Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters received an invitation to a royal ball." I write down Handsome Prince. "Son of the king," I say.

"With hands?"

Ruthie and Marsha start laughing. Russian hands. Roman hands. Hands like a roomful of clocks. Hands on the royal ball. Marsha says, "We read about all those wars of succession in Shakespeare. The prince's balls are affairs of state."

Way like not amused, I take Rong's dictionary and point where he is still looking up handsome. "Here," I say, and he's looking into my eyes and I read, "Beautiful, of a male. "

Rong says, "Hands of a man are his greatest beauty."

I say "Women who see him want to touch." My palms are like moving on their own.

Marsha says, "That's where the fairy godmother comes in."

Rong says, "Fairy is a lesser god."

"-ess," Ruthie corrects him. "And the goyim have a Mother of God."

He says, "Mother of God is virgin."

The word virgin makes Ruthie emotional. When we were twelve years old in Bat-Mitzvah prep, somebody showed us the part in Torah where a guy said if he could win a battle and murder some kids he'd sacrifice the first thing he saw when he got back home, and that turned out to be his daughter. She asked for time to bewail her virginity. ^[2] Ruthie ran out of the temple and didn't come back for three years, even though she hadn't had anything to bewail since for like ever. This time, though, she just lifts up her pug little nose and says, "Jews know better than to talk about virgin birth."

"You are so centric," Marsha tells her. "The Virgin Mother is about having children outside marriage. She subverts the patriarchy. Cinderella's Fairy Godmother subverts the aristocratic disposition of the prince's sexuality."

Rong turns red.

They try to make him turn redder. Ruthie says, "Fairy is a man who has sex with men."

Marsha says, "Yeah, Virgin Mother is their goddess, and fairies pray their wives can conceive without sex."

Ruthie says, "Want to know how? The stroke of midnight."

Rong looks in his dictionary. My so-called friends are laughing so hard Mr. McC looks over and Marsha and Ruthie have to go over to another table. Marsha whispers going past that my hair is a mess.

"Stroke is apoplexy," Rong says. "Explosion of blood in the brain."

Digging to my hairbrush in the furthest nether reaches of my purse I hear my voice go, "Stroke is the motion of a brush on paper."

Rong says, "What is written may explode in the brain."

I tell him, "Stroke is a motion of the hand. Stroke is the motion of a brush through the hair." I show him. "A woman brushing her hair can make the heart explode."

He says, "A motion of love can shake down a family. Cinderella has a shoe of glass."

I say, "Women cut off their toes or their heel to fit the shoe. The streets of the kingdom fill with hobbled women. Like when they bound our feet." I tell him, "At a Jewish wedding, the groom crushes a glass with his foot."

He looks up a phrase, but he can't find it. He wants to say come my beloved, but the bell is going to ring, you can hear the clocks gearing up for it, and besides the words aren't there.