#School of magic logic grid skin

Her favorite clues are grouped, the family together and separated at the same time: Out of the mother, the daughter, and the father, one likes striped socks, one goes to bed last, and one is not a parent.Īnd if, the next day, her mother goes to bed before her and wears striped socks around the house, the daughter thinks nothing of it. She writes clues, painstakingly spelling out, The daughter preferred the black socks, or, The daughter went to bed after the mother.

She usually hates going there, watching her mother socialize while she waits impatiently by the cart, but now she brings paper and pencil and hopes her mother runs into another friend. 3 pencil onto wide-ruled notebook paper, all bought on discount at the local dollar store, a haven for the Indian community. She spends her evenings sitting in a hot pink plastic chair and drawing puzzles of her own with a thick No. Or perhaps, unmoored from the people that look and sound like her, the daughter will waste away into nothing at all, a soft sigh in the ripping wind of progress.īut the daughter is not unmoored. Perhaps it will buy her an American job, a Caucasian husband, a white-picket fence. Perhaps, as the teacher believes, it will help the daughter. The teacher’s pride in her own tutelage drips from every word, an ode to her ability to scrub color from voices and culture from minds. What she means, of course, is, Assimilating well. Her teacher praises her growth on the second trimester report card, writing, Integrating nicely with other students and, Great progress towards normalizing speech patterns. As she pencils in the answers to each puzzle, power washes through the page and she begins to understand the logic that governs her new world. Tulips are pushing out in the small front yard of the townhouse by the time the daughter finishes the book.

$school of magic logic grid$

She immediately senses magic in these pages, a different sort of magic than that of her childhood, but magic nonetheless. These are the first things to make sense in this godforsaken country. Inside lie beautiful puzzles, the clean black grids printed against stark white paper, each puzzle a self-contained story far more interesting than her sixth-grade reading materials, with clearly spelled out rules and right answers. The cover has a glossy finish, and the pages are thick with the dreamlike scent of new books. Her mother has brought back a paper grocery bag filled with books from the library’s bag sale, tattered copies of trade novels published decades ago with perfect white children on the cover, and cookbooks yellowed and warped with age worshipping someone named Betty Crocker.īut near the bottom, the daughter’s hand brushes against something soft and unmarred, and her fingers close instinctively around the prize. Her daughter discovers real treasure in the dead of a Midwestern winter, when the snow has lost all novelty and the memory of warmth is failing. You never know where you might find treasure. She tells her daughter, When I die, check the whole house. But here she buys as much gold as she can and slips them into boxes filled with packing peanuts in the crawlspace and clothbound covers of books of Hindi poetry.

In India, gold could turn to silver turn to iron turn back to gold, a strange alchemy of the air that twisted plans as they were made. The mother hordes gold, hiding every piece of jewelry she received as a wedding gift and converting her family’s meagre savings to bars. I may not see our daughter, but at least she will have a good life. He tells his wife, This is all for a better future.

#School of magic logic grid skin

He drives two hours every morning to a small factory, where he crawls inside devices that churn out plastic bags while his fellow workers taunt him for the color of his skin and leave him in the maw of the machinery if he complains. The father barely hears her plea through the fog of exhaustion that has settled over him like a shroud. She tells her father, I would rather die than stay here one more day. America is devoid of the chaotic magic of her homeland, devoid of any kind of magic. The daughter hates this new country with its methodical streets and packed supermarkets, hates the way every inch of space has been scrubbed clean of character, hates her teacher who speaks to her slowly and loudly as if she is deaf instead of merely unfamiliar with a language that follows no logic.