Ola Shakes It Up

hatib shut the car door as slowly as he could while Dad tried to start the engine. It made that
err-umph
sound, as if to say, “No way, Jose” (or Brewster, 'cause that's my dad's name), and I knew our old green station wagon felt the same way I did. Then Mama, sitting in the front seat with her thick hair twisted up in a bun so you could see her long, pretty neck the color of almonds, undid all my prayers by whispering, “Oh, Lord,” under her breath, and the car started up just like magic. Mama always has her way with God.

Dad turned his head to look at us and smiled his big-teeth smile through his mustache before saying, “We're off,” like we were at the races, and the car pulled away from the house that was the only place I'd lived in since I was born. The three of us tried our best to look as sad as possible, 'cause that was the plan. But before long Aeisha was reading one of her books and Khatib was listening to the basketball game on his Walkman and I was the only one left. I was thinking they should have listened to me in the first place,
even if I was only nine years old and the youngest, 'cause a good idea is a good idea, and if we'd snuck out the night before and taken the battery out of the car, then we wouldn't have been going to look at our new house in the stupid suburbs right now

I looked over past Aeisha and out the window to watch as we went up one long hill and down another. Route 128 was all brown hills and trees with no leaves on them, and overhead the sky was thick with gray clouds. Another sign. I looked suspiciously at Dad's freshly cut hair and Mama's new green paisley dress. Why did we have to go to so much trouble to look good just to move someplace, anyway? I was the only one in the car dressed normal, in my favorite jeans and a purple leotard. Seemed like I was the only one in this family who cared that we were leaving a perfectly good home to live in the middle of someplace where we had to dress up before we even moved in.

“Moving?” Khatib had been the first person to speak up when Mama and Dad told the three of us about their big surprise last month. Mama and Dad's news had made him stop thinking about himself for a little while. Ever since Khatib had gotten into high school this year, he thought he was too grown up to hang out with me or Aeisha or the rest of the family. He spent all of his time either at basketball practice or at home on the phone talking to some girl. At dinner or any of our regular family meetings he acted like he was too bored to care about anything we said or did. Mama said it was just a phase he was going through, but I think being in high school had made Khatib think he was God's gift to the world. “Why are we moving?”

“Because we finally got ourselves a chance at buying a house in a nice place—”

“What's wrong with this place?” Khatib asked, looking around the room like he was at the royal palace instead of in our little kitchen with Mamas sewing machine stuck in one corner and the washing machine in the other.

Dad looked real mad that Khatib had interrupted him. His brown eyes got all serious and he pushed his lips together and stayed quiet for a long time, 'cause rule number one in our house is that everybody gets to have their own say— in their own time.

Mama looked down at us from where she was braiding Aeisha's hair and took over. “You all knew that with your dad finishing school and me getting that grant from Walcott College that there were gonna be some changes.”

“I thought we were gonna be getting things like new bicycles — not moving,” I said. I gave Aeisha, who was humming the theme to an old TV show, a look that said, Help me out here.

Aeisha cleared her throat, finally lowering her book and joining in on this family meeting. “That wasn't made clear to me either.”

“You said you probably weren't going to take that grant,” Khatib added. His eyes were wide with panic. I knew he was just worried about losing his place on the basketball team. “You said you had better things to do than work for some uppity private college.”

“Yeah.” All three of us turned to look at Mama accusingly. Mama is a marketing specialist for public health projects. That means people pay her to design ways of getting important
medical information to different communities. Mama loves her work even though she's always grumping that it doesn't pay her enough. At Walcott, she wouldn't be working with any communities. She'd be teaching and, as she'd told us, “stuck behind a desk looking over everyone else's projects instead of doing my own.”

“This place is too small with all you kids and me and your dad. Moving to Walcott would mean you're all going to get your own rooms.” Mama hesitated when she saw that we weren't impressed. Then she looked at Dad, who was sitting with his elbows on his knees, studying the three of us. For a few seconds they stared at each other the way they do when they aren't sure they should tell us something or not. They both looked so different. Dad is tall and thin, with arms and legs that stretch out for miles. Mama isn't fat but she has soft round arms and legs. Khatib, Aeisha and I get our almond color from Mama, but we all have Dad's skinny legs, bushy eyebrows and dark brown eyes.

“Your dad heard back from his interview a few weeks back,” Mama said finally.

All of our heads swung toward Dad, surprised. Since Dad had finished taking all his engineering classes, he'd been looking for a job — with no luck. Mama had explained to us that there were very few new jobs open because of the economy, and Boston had even fewer jobs because a lot of companies were shutting down or laying off people. So even though Dad had graduated from night college four months before, he was still working as a mechanic at the ABC garage. He'd been to four interviews already and hadn't gotten
one job offer. We all felt bad for Dad, even though he tried to act like it didn't really matter.

“Really?” Khatib asked, for all of us.

Dad nodded, and we all smiled. But before we could hug him or even say congratulations, he spoke up. “But the job's in Earlington — a town over from Walcott.”

“Oh.” Khatib s face fell, disappointed. He quieted down like he needed to think this over, and I thought it was about time for me, Ola, to put my two cents in and straighten this thing out. “Well, what about Mrs. Gransby?”

“What about her?” Dad asked.

“Is she coming with us?” I asked, planting my elbows on the table. Mrs. Gransby is the Jamaican lady who lived upstairs and took care of Aeisha and me after school. She used to look after Khatib too, but now he has basketball practice after school. Aeisha needs looking after more than I do, even though she's twelve years old, 'cause when she's reading, the house could burn down around her and she wouldn't even notice.

“Mrs. Gransby has her own family, Ola.” Dad drummed his long fingers on the table. “You all are old enough to take care of yourselves after school now. But since your mama and I will probably be working more hours, we were thinking about hiring some live-in help.”

“A
maid?”
Aeisha asked, raising her eyebrows. “We're getting a
maid?”

“Not a maid.” Mama shook her head. “Some help. Maybe someone young who could use the room and board in exchange for a little housework.”

“Sounds like a maid to me.” Aeisha shrugged. She took
her glasses off and started cleaning them, which she always does when she's thinking hard about something. Then she looked up again. “Isn't Walcott a white town?”

Aeisha's question left a thick silence in the room.

“How do you know that?” I asked Aeisha finally.

“We had a debate competition there last year.” She put her glasses back on.

“Aeisha's right. Walcott is a mostly white area,” Mama finally said. She looked at each one of us seriously. “Should that keep us from moving there?”

Aeisha, Khatib and I looked at each other. None of us was sure what to say. It was just like Mama to get right to the heart of the matter. I looked at Aeisha and Khatib and could tell that they both felt the same way I did but didn't know how to explain it. It wasn't that there was something wrong with moving into a white town — exactly. But our neighborhood in Roxbury was all black and Hispanic. We'd never known anything else.

“N-No,” Aeisha said at last.

Mama looked at Khatib and me.

“Guess not.” Khatib shrugged.

“Well…,” I started, hesitating, “it'll just be different.” And as far as I was concerned, that was enough reason not to go. Who wanted different when we were perfectly happy right where we were?

Nobody said anything again for a while. Then Mama looked at all of us and smiled brightly. “Walcott is one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts. It was founded in 1712, before there even was a United States of America. Wait till you see it — the town streets have cobblestones, and there's …”

Mama droned on and on until she ran out of breath. Then Dad started going on and on about how the new house had two floors, an attic, a big yard and a big kitchen, and how we could get a dog if we wanted, and how Walcott was a town that was full of history. I stopped listening. The only thing I could think of was no Mrs. Gransby waiting for us every day with some plantains and curried goat and West Indian cola. No Mrs. Gransby to cornrow my hair while we watched the soaps together and Aeisha did her homework. And what about my room, which we'd painted white with purple borders for me last year and where we'd put up glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling so Aeisha and I could learn the constellations? What about the end-of-the-year recital that my dance class was gonna do at the community center? What about my best friends, Margarita and Karen? We were supposed to go to camp together next summer. We were supposed to learn how to ice-skate this year.