Taneesha Never Disparaging Read online

  How about, I haven’t even written it yet?

  “Okay.”

  She sounded a little disappointed.

  So. I didn’t ask her to nominate me.

  Still, I felt a little uncomfortable about the whole conversation.

  “Well,” she sighed, “just let me know. You can call me. You can read it over the phone.”

  “Sure. Maybe I’ll do that. Thanks, Carli.”

  Thanks for everything.

  “Taneesha, I’ve got news for you!” Mama called from outside the kitchen.

  “Yeah?” I was glad for the chance to talk about something besides the dang election. “What is it?” My words were garbled because I had a mouth full of popcorn.

  Mama walked into the kitchen and sat at the table.

  “What’s the news?” I asked.

  “Well, I was thinking about how much you really liked meeting the children with diabetes, and how much they liked you, too.”

  More praise? I like it!

  “So, you know my supervisor, Marsha, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I asked her if you could come by the hospital after school sometimes to read with the kids. And she said okay. Do you want to do it?”

  “Sure! That sounds fun!”

  “Yeah, it does,” said Carli.

  My thrill faded as soon as I saw her face. I could never stand to see that girl looking droopy. I liked the idea of working at the hospital, but it wouldn’t have been fun knowing she missed out.

  “Mama? Could Carli come, too? I mean, if Mr. Flanagan says it’s okay?” I noticed a little smile curling Carli’s lips. That made me smile, too.

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that. I bet it’ll be fine. I just have to ask Marsha to make sure. How’s that?”

  “Fine with me!”

  “Me too!” said Carli.

  One week and four days ago, who would have believed it? I, Taneesha Bey-Ross, could hardly wait to get back to those little kids at Ontario Hospital—and with Carli at that.

  Too bad life couldn’t have stayed as sweet as it was right then.

  CHAPTER 8

  THEY HAD BEEN TO HELL

  Snack time’s over, everybody. Please toss your trash in the can.”

  Gail made that pleasant little request in her pleasant little way. She was the leader of the Elementary School Group, “ESG” for short. Her feathery, blond hair went just past her plump shoulders. And, like me, and a lot of the kids in the ESG room at the Buddhist center my family went to on the southwest side of Cleveland, she had on a sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. It was Sunday, and it had taken my father about forty minutes to drive to the center from the northeast side of town where we lived.

  The ESG room wasn’t exactly my favorite spot. But since every first Sunday of the month I had to come to the center with my parents for this World Peace meeting, ESG beat sitting with Mama and Daddy in the Gohonzon room listening to boring speeches and lame music for over an hour. Every once in a while, something fun went on in there, like the African drum and dance group that had played last month, or people would put on a skit or something. But mostly, it was boring.

  If it weren’t for the snacks I got in the ESG room, I wouldn’t have been hanging out there this morning either. I would have hidden in the hallway and ducked into a spare room or the bathroom to stay clear of nosy grown-ups who asked, “Where are your parents, Taneesha?” and, “Why aren’t you with the other children, Taneesha?”

  Snacks and freedom from big noses was what brought me to those baby meetings where we had to do morning Gongyo, our prayers, superslow for new kids. When we went that slowly, it was snooze time for me. Sometimes I snored so loudly I woke my own self up.

  “Who knows the story of Bodhisattva Never Disparaging from the Lotus Sutra?”

  Gail had a way of sounding so chipper it grated on my nerves. My parents said they’d known her since before I was born. All I knew was she could be too much sometimes.

  “Ahmed? Can you tell us anything about him?”

  “Nichiren wrote about Bodhisattva Never Disparaging in this letter called—”

  That was Ahmed for you. I just knew that one day he’d be a professor of Buddhism or something, with his short, football-player-looking self. But right then, he was just annoying, as usual.

  Us kids sat on the floor in a circle. The rug we were on was just like the blue-grey indoor-outdoor carpet we had in Room 509 at Hunter. Except it wasn’t as new. The ESG room was like 509 in others ways, too. Actually, it was a classroom once. Daddy had told me that the center used to be a one-floor elementary school.

  So anyway, there we were, sitting on the floor, all sugared up from granola bars and Hi-C, and Gail and teacher’s-pet Ahmed told us about this ancient guy named Bodhisattva Never Disparaging. Gail said people called Never Disparaging names and tried to whop him but he’d run away from their sticks and stones. She said that nutcase would bow and holler back at the people trying to kill him: “I deeply respect you. I won’t get mad at you because you have the Buddha nature!”

  “They called him Never Disparaging because he never dissed anybody,” Gail said.

  It hurt my ears to hear her trying to sound cool.

  She went on and on about how great Never Disparaging was for not getting mad while people were hurling rocks at his block head.

  Meanwhile, D’Aja, my best bud at Buddhist meetings, who was about my height but a little heavier, leaned her face so close to mine that I almost sneezed from the shampoo smell of the one fluffy afro puff that stuck up on her head like a black dandelion. She whispered: “If those people were so Buddha’d up, why were they trying to beat the mess out of Never Disparaging?”

  “Maybe he got a Buddhaful butt-kickin’!” I whispered back.

  D’Aja and I both almost lost it. We managed to keep our giggles to ourselves, though.

  I was with her: the Never Disparaging story was stupid. But none of the other kids seemed to mind. Brain-dead, it seemed, from granola bars and Hi-C—too much high-fructose corn syrup.

  Hey, Officer HP would be proud of me for saying that, I thought.

  Too bad that instead of cracking jokes about Never Disparaging, I didn’t take pointers from him on how to duck and run when someone’s trying to knock the living daylights out of you.

  “Now, guess what?” said Gail. “I’ve got two surprises! The first one is: We’re going to do a skit about Bodhisattva Never Disparaging!” She bubbled like she was doing a commercial for Bodhisattva Never Disparaging running shoes or something. “We’ll present it in the large meeting in about an hour!”

  “Oh brother,” I whispered, rolling my eyes at D’Aja. She rolled hers back.

  “Who wants to be Bodhisattva Never Disparaging?” Gail’s eyes beamed over the room like blue searchlights.

  “I do!” Ahmed jack-in-the-boxed to his feet and shot his hand up past his face, waving it over his slick, black curls.

  You’d have thought somebody was going to pay him to be Never Disparaging.

  “Eager, are we?” I said, and D’Aja and I fell into another secret giggle-fest.

  Soon, Gail had divvied up all the roles for the skit. I joined the stick-and-stone throwers. A bit part. That was just fine with me.

  “Okay, kids. Before we start practicing our skit, I’ve got a second surprise: we have a special guest!”

  She’d actually clapped her hands when she said that. I felt like I was trapped on Barney.

  In walked one of my favorite people: Natsuko Hemmings.

  “Girls and boys, please say good morning to Natsuko.”

  We all did. And Natsuko bowed her whole body real low to us and said “Good morning” back.

  I sat there looking at Natsuko. She’s slim and pretty short. So’s her orangey hair. But I figure she dyes it because near her scalp it’s black and white. I’ve noticed that she always wears ankle socks even when she has on a skirt, like the reddish plaid one she was wearing right then. Her skirt didn’t r
eally match her black-and-white polka dot sweater or her green rubber snow shoes, but for as long as I’ve known Natsuko, she’s never seemed to care about fashion.

  I was taller than Natsuko by the time I was eight, even though she’s way older than me—probably as old as my grandparents. But when she smiles, and she smiles a lot, like she was doing right then, she looks just like a little girl.

  Natsuko is all right. When she catches me hiding out in the hallways at the center, she sneaks me these little hard candies and leaves me alone. She’s been doing that since forever. The candies have Japanese writing on the wrappers. They’re good.

  And she likes to bow. She’ll do it when she first sees you, just the way she’d done it when she came in the ESG room. Then she’ll do it again to say good-bye.

  Thinking about bowing and everything got me onto how I’ve noticed that a lot of Japanese people like to do it. Take Daisaku Ikeda, for instance, our Buddhist leader, the one my parents call Sensei for “teacher.” He bows the same as Natsuko. There he was, right there in a picture on the ESG wall—kind of chubby, in a blue baseball cap, yellow polo shirt, navy blue slacks, and gold-wire-framed glasses—bowing to a bunch of little kids.

  I’ve seen him do it live, too. Well, sort of, on videos in the Gohonzon room, where the altar is huge. I end up there when some nosey grown-up catches me hiding and makes me go sit with my parents. In the videos, Daisaku Ikeda bows at the audience when he walks fast into this auditorium—a Gohonzon room that’s way bigger than the one at the community center, a packed house. He’s all dressed up then, in a business suit and tie. You can see the grey hairs combed back on his balding head. And he takes off his suit jacket when he sits down at a table to give a speech.

  “Natsuko’s going to tell us a real story, everybody.” Gail was sitting on the carpet with us kids, facing Natsuko.

  Sitting cross-legged, lotus-style, I shifted my weight on that flat carpet. My butt hurt but I paid attention anyway. I didn’t want to be rude to Natsuko by fidgeting too much.

  “Her story’s about one of the cruelest things that can happen when we forget to be like Bodhisattva Never Disparaging. It takes place during World War Two.”

  “I was fourteen when the atomic bomb fell on Japan,” said Natsuko, sitting in a chair in front of us kids.

  “I lived in a little fishing village not far from Nagasaki. My family caught fish from the ocean. We also had a small rice farm. Because of the war, all the children in our village had to learn how to use spears to stick soldiers if they attacked us. We had to do like this.”

  Natsuko stood and made her hands hold an invisible spear in front of her chest. She stooped and pushed that spear toward us as if she were sticking a soldier.

  She laughed. I laughed. So did D’Aja and some other kids.

  “We also had to learn where to run and hide if bombs fall,” Natsuko said, sitting again.

  “The day the atomic bomb fall on Nagasaki it was very sunny. Sky so clear and blue. No clouds. Salty ocean smell in the air. Like many other days.

  “Then everything turned dark. The way it looks just before the sun goes down at night. The dark came from the direction of Nagasaki. Heavy, sticky black rain starts to fall on us. It falls for hours. The rain smells stinky. Like something burning. Turned our clothes and everything it touch black—but my skin did not burn.

  “My uncles and aunts and other people from our village left for Nagasaki. To see what happen there. To help. When they got to Nagasaki they saw dead bodies everywhere, burned people everywhere, with peeling skin. People alive in the river. Dead bodies in there, too. My uncles and aunts said those people must have jumped in river to cool off from the burning.

  “The people in the river reach out to the ones from my village. They reach out their burned hands and arms. They beg, ‘Water! Water!’ They cry for help. Their arms looking like they will break if somebody to touch them. The people from my village did not know how to help all those burned ones. They go back home. They tell us what they saw. They say they had been to hell.”

  After that, everybody stayed real quiet for a long time. Gail, too.

  I saw her wipe a tear away.

  Then she asked us to say thank you to Natsuko, and we did.

  “Natsuko is very fortunate that the black rain that fell on her didn’t make her sick,” Gail said. “After World War Two ended, many Japanese children and adults, including people who weren’t hit by the two atomic bombs that fell on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, died from the bombs’ poison. It gave them cancer.

  “Daisaku Ikeda’s oldest brother was a soldier in World War Two.”

  Gail said that when Daisaku Ikeda was a teenager, his brother died in the war. And when a soldier came to tell Daisaku Ikeda’s mother what had happened, she turned her back and shook with tears and died a little, too.

  Kids started asking Natsuko questions. She answered all of them.

  But I had so many questions I couldn’t figure out which one to ask first. So I didn’t ask any.

  CHAPTER 9

  SONG OF AN OLD FRIEND

  Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” I climbed our back porch stairs behind Daddy. “I’m cold!” “You should be used to it, girl,” said Daddy. He wore his black overcoat and stood at the back door, unlocking it. “The north wind’s just blowing off Lake Erie like it does every winter. It makes the air feel colder than the temperature. They call that the ‘wind-chill factor’.”

  “Well, I just call it too dang cold! And dark. I think the sun’s bulb blew out. It never shines anymore.”

  “But it will, honey.” Daddy opened the door. “It will.”

  I didn’t know about that. Seemed to me, Mr. Sun was on a permanent vacation.

  After the World Peace meeting, Daddy and I had spent the day hanging out. We’d gone to Pizza Hut for lunch, the Homestead Buffet for dinner, and watched a movie and walked all over Goldfield mall in between. Mama had been home having what she called “me time.”

  Daddy and I bustled through the kitchen doorway. Right away we heard Mama:

  “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…”

  I could never figure my mother out. She got a whole afternoon to do whatever she wanted and she used it up chanting.

  I smelled wood burning and knew she must have had the fireplace going in the living room. I remembered Carli’s question on Friday about candles and incense and thought about how Mama was funny like that. Burning that stuff was a no-no but the fireplace was okay. She’d said before that it was because we only use the fireplace sometimes, not every day. But I knew that really it was just Mama not making sense.

  I laughed to myself.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing. Just something I remembered.”

  I stomped snow off my boots while the altar bell bonged three times.

  “Hey, Miles? Taneesha? I was waiting for you before doing evening Gongyo. You joining me?”

  No, thank you.

  I didn’t want to join anything but my head to my pillow.

  “I’ll be right in, dear! Thanks for waiting!”

  “I’ll pass, Mama!” I hoped my parents wouldn’t push it. “It’s been a long day! I just want to sleep!”

  “That’s all right, Taneesha,” said Daddy.

  Thank goodness.

  “Your mother and I can do Gongyo and chant for you. But before you turn in, come read a passage from the Gosho and do Sansho with us.”

  “Okay.”

  I figured I could do that with no problem. I wasn’t up to doing Gongyo, the whole evening prayer. But I could read a little from the Gosho, Nichiren’s writings, and do Sansho, chant three times.

  I placed my boots on the shoe shelf in the hallway, hung my coat, hat, and scarf in the closet, and walked into the living room.

  A pretty, orange fire blazed in the fireplace, warming the room. Mama sat in the center chair, in front of the altar, in jeans and a blue sweater, and Daddy sat next to her wearing a grey one a
nd black slacks.

  “Mama, I’ll read something from the Gosho, okay?” I said, ready to throw in “Daddy said I could,” if I had to. “And I’ll do Sansho. Then I want to go to bed.”

  “All right, sweetie.”

  Hey. That was easy.

  Mama reached underneath the altar table and, from inside the cubby, she pulled the first book from the row of them—The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, the Gosho.

  I took the Gosho from Mama, sat next to her, and flipped to a letter I picked a lot to read because it was the first one in the book and short.

  “‘The Lotus Sutra,” I read out loud, “explains that the entity of our life, which manifests either good or evil at each moment, is in fact the entity of the Mystic Law.’”

  “Now, what does that mean?” Daddy asked, raising his left eyebrow. Whenever he did that, he reminded me of Mr. Alvarez, only nicer. Mr. Alvarez’s raised eyebrow usually meant he was mad about something.

  I read the passage again, slowly, to myself.

  Sometimes my parents’ little quizzes annoyed me. But I knew that if I didn’t just go with the script, I’d probably hear my mother nag: “Come on, Taneesha, just read a little. It’s for your own life.” I knew that the easiest thing for me to do was just read the book and get it over with. Plus, that evening I thought I understood the passage.

  “It means we’re always Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, we’re Buddhas, no matter if we’re acting good or bad.”

  I hoped that was good enough. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I stretched my arms wide and yawned loud as an elephant.

  Daddy laughed a little. “That pretty much says it all.”

  “Girl, let’s do Sansho so you can get to bed.”

  Who’d a thunk it? Mama was setting me free without even saying, “Just one page of Gongyo.”

  She struck the altar bell. “Sit up, Taneesha.”

  Can’t help it, can she?

  I huffed, but I sat straighter anyway.

  Mama bonged the bell again and we all chanted together three times.

  I stood and kissed her on her forehead. “’Night, Mama.”

  She kissed my cheek. “’Night sweetie.”