The fleece-lined sweatshirt and its matching pants are a beautiful pale green color. A baby pink stripe hugs the wider white stripe that runs down both the sleeves and the legs. There is a small flower embroidered on the chest, in the place where I imagine my heart beating.
It is cold in this country, so much colder than home. Old home, I have to remind myself. New home is where wind has been stinging through what I thought were my warm shirts, even though it is not yet October. New home is where we live in a single-family house that the owner pretends is for two families so he can rent us the floor that is on the bottom if you enter from the main road instead of the steep side street. New home is where we buy cardboard trays of squishy croissants that we eat for breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner, alongside what my mother calls regular salad, which is tomatoes, cucumber, onions and sour cream. New home is where my increasingly rare after-school treat is not a pita with Nutella but a donut with violently pink frosting. New home is where my grandmother can no longer take me to the beach to bob in warm, gentle waves.
I hate our new home for many reasons, but the most pressing one in the last two weeks has been the cold. The radiators at our house warm up only slightly and only after dinner. Before breakfast, they revert to frigid metal sculptures. I touch them repeatedly, even though they draw the heat from my fingers, because some part of me hopes that I am wrong, that maybe they are getting warm again after all. When both my parents are at work, my grandmother lets me turn on the oven and we kneel in front of it on our thin pillows so we can press our palms against the grimy glass.
My mother keeps me thickly padded even when we are inside. I have to wear one of my three inadequate sweaters, under which must be layered two thinner long-sleeve shirts, which are to be worn over a sleeveless undershirt. When I watch grainy afternoon cartoons on our bulbous television, I drag my comforter from my bed so I can ensconce myself in the sagging sofa. To trudge into the gray morning, I don what used to be my winter coat, a crinkly garment at which the chill fog laughs daily. My mismatched gloves and hat belong to my grandmother so they smell like her (imitation French perfume, menthol cigarettes and medicated cough drops) and I stuff them into my pockets before I enter the school building because the other students have enough reasons to make fun of me.
My classmates’ ceaseless taunts, invigorated by the cold, are what has brought my mother and me here, to the pale green sweatshirt with the matching pants. My bulky cloth armor had already provided a source of, first, amusement and, quickly, ridicule since summer’s last tendrils faded into a torpid cold. The crinkly jacket, a rubber ducky yellow that screamed the jacket’s water repelling function, had been also disparaged but less thoroughly, since I shed it as soon as I was inside.
Then, two days ago, I had to remove my outermost sweater during first period because the school is less stingy with its heaters than our landlord. As I pulled it off, I revealed the bottom layer, a dingy, red-and-white polka dotted tank top. Mocking side eyes and barely suppressed snickers rippled outward through the class. At first, I did not understand what I had done wrong this time. I had not even spoken, so how could I have accidentally confused the words “burp” and “barf” in describing what a can of soda had made me do, or revealed my ignorance of what was apparently the national pastime? A particularly brash boy two seats over enlightened me.
“Nasty wears dirty old lady wife beaters!” He crowed. My undershirt was so shockingly shameful that he could not restrain the broadcasting of this revelation, even if it meant he would be sent out into the hallway for the rest of the period again.
Everyone laughed. Even I feigned laughter, as though laughing with them made the insult hurt less.
At home I unleashed all the tears I had been storing, telling my mother that I would not go back to school until I had some new clothes. It was bad enough being a foreigner with a weird name and no grasp of slang. I could not change those facts, but I could change my wardrobe. My mother looked at me with pained eyes but she did not tell me that we did not have the money, even though we do not. She did not remind me that they brought me to this country to give me a better future, even though they did. She just pursed her lips sadly and said, “Okay, Nastya.”
Now, we are standing in the cavernous cement warehouse where we buy our croissants, except we are stopped in the clothing section for the first time ever. The girls’ section is awash in pink and purple and cyan, but there is one pale green sweatshirt, with matching pants, that cries out for me. The color is happy but gentle and it reminds me of early spring in our old home, when the baby leaves have just started to peep their heads out from the ends of the gray branches. The stripes make the sweatshirt look vaguely athletic, like the person wearing it might not be the last one picked every time there is a team activity in gym class.
By a stroke of fate, the sweatshirt and its matching pants are my size and on sale. My mother performs some quick mental calculations and nods. I spend the rest of our time in the store admiring how the beautiful pale green enlivens the other items in our cart: the croissants, the ground beef that was on sale this week, the store brand laundry detergent.
When we get home, I insist on trying on my new outfit. The pale green sweatshirt feels like a gentle hug, its fleece lining as soft as the inside of a puppy’s ear. The matching pants are equally welcoming. My mother stacks three books on top of one another so I can see my full body reflected in the hall cabinet mirror, the only one in the house other than the medicine cabinet. I am overjoyed because I finally look normal.
I imagine how my life will be now that I have clothes that I bought in this country. When the other kids see me in my new outfit tomorrow, they will realize that they were wrong about me, that I am really not that different from them. The popular girls with tightly-pulled ponytails will let me sit at their lunch table, where they tell me about their older brother’s hockey game this weekend or about the girl who farted in gymnastics class. The cute boy with the silky mushroom cut who sits next to me in homeroom, the one who has not even made fun of me unless everyone else in the class was already laughing anyway, will feel comfortable revealing that he has had a crush on me this whole time, too. I will be invited over to people’s houses for weeknight dinners and weekend playdates.
In the evening, I wash my hair in preparation for my re-debut. My mother helps me use the blow dryer on it so my hair is warm and straight when I get into bed. She even lets me use it to heat my toes before I put on my sleep socks. Fantastic scenes rush through my brain, electrifying my body. I keep peeking at the clock on my grandmother’s side of the bedside table and my heart spasms each time I realize only a handful of minutes have elapsed since I last looked. Despite my anticipatory alertness, I fall asleep. Eventually, morning breaks.
I get ready to show off the new, American version of me. I refuse to wear the polka dotted undershirt (today or ever again), but I deign to put on the long sleeve shirt that I deem the least humiliating before I cover it up with the pale green sweatshirt. The clean cuffs of the pants age my scuffed and graying sneakers, but I am so happy about the rest of my clothes that I barely feel the squeeze of disappointment.
My grandmother asks me to slow down three times during the half-mile walk to school. I scoff with frustration each time, failing to impress upon her the importance of today. When she stops at the corner store for cigarettes, I am livid and she has to buy me a bag of my favorite chips to pacify me.
When I arrive at school, I immediately take off the yellow jacket so everyone can see my new clothes. I hold my head high, beaming at every cluster of students. I see one of my ponytailed classmates and she smiles back at me, raising her eyebrows in surprise at the reversal of my fate; she even waves. I return her wave proudly. The cute mushroom cut boy is already in his seat. He greets me and compliments my new outfit. As my classmates trickle into the room, they all nod or grin in greeting.
The sweatshirt, my pale green talisman with its matching pants, has given me the confidence I needed to seamlessly assimilate. It turns out it is not my foreignness, but my fear, that has been creating distance between me and the rest of my class. All I needed to overcome it was some pale green, fleece-lined fabric.
“Nasty is wearing an old lady tracksuit!” The brash boy calls out. Everyone laughs, even the cute boy.
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Dar Chestin practices law and mindfulness, the former grudgingly and the latter sporadically. During the precious few hours when her face is not fixed on a screen, she indulges in hikes, bike rides and crunchy peanut butter. She still fondly remembers a months-long correspondence she maintained with the diminutive alien who resided in the paint cupboard of her third-grade classroom.
© 2023, Dar Chestin
Halfway Down the Stairs 