A Ballad for Maryam

Gifts

The greatest gift I've ever gotten was the Yamaha PSR-E253 keyboard my parents got me for Christmas. I have it set up in her walk-in closet -- the one that Janie vacated when she married and moved away. Janie's old room is the second best gift I've ever received. I think Mummy let me have it in the hopes that it would inspire some kind of feminine revelation in me. But no amount of gauzy pink curtains and pastel furniture is going to make me less drab. Willowy, dreamy Janie is perfect in ways that I'll never be.

The worst thing my parents ever did for me is cancel my piano lessons after Janie and Ellie decided that they were done with piano. Apparently if the oldest two girls can't play piano, the rest of us aren't allowed to learn. But at least I have a piano. Keyboard. But it's a pretty good one, and I can play it with headphones plugged in. No one can hear how awful I am, and I can't hear Mummy shrieking nonsense at Kitty or Papa.

We're the biggest Indian family in the Greater Des Moines Metro Area. Mummy and Papa came to the United States from India with two sweet daughters, seven and five, both of whom were fluent in Malayalam and raised to be quiet, demure, and as Indian as possible. Mummy and Papa knew from the start that they were going to move to the US to raise their family, so they gave their daughters classic English Christian names: Jane and Elizabeth.

And then, two years after they'd settled into immigrant life in Des Moines, Iowa, I came around. Even as a baby I was different. My big sisters were fair-skinned and already tall for their age. I came out chubby and dark, and about as hairy as Papa. They named me Maryam.

Katherine and Lydia were born two years after me, and then Mummy got her tubes tied. They take after Janie and Ellie in looks, thin and tall and fair, but they're not quite as "respectable" as Mummy and Papa would like. Unlike Janie and Ellie, Kitty and Lydia are...exuberant. And now Lydia is pregnant.

At fifteen. Yup.

Her baby daddy deserted her, so now she's wilting away in her bedroom, the shame of our family. She's taken my place as the family pariah. Mummy now calls me her "least problematic daughter," and Papa has thanked me twice for not ending up like my "other American sisters." Now Kitty gets the brunt of their attentions, to make sure she doesn't end up like her twin. And I'm mostly forgotten, but that's mostly okay. I get to sit here, in Janie's old closet, with my keyboard. Banging out my terrible songs.

***

Ellie's coming home from Georgetown for the first week of her summer break, before she has to head back and start her internship. Papa's gone to pick her up from the airport, and Mummy's forgotten about how terrible Lydia has made her life in the face of her second favorite daughter's visit. She's actually humming, and the smell of Ellie's favorite tuna-fish cutlets permeates the house. I don't have my headphones in now, so the keyboard's volume is turned down low; I have to hunch down towards the speakers to hear it. Still, I want to hear when Ellie walks through the door. If I don't have my ears pricked for her voice, if I'm lost in my songs, I'll look up and it'll be the middle of the night, and no one will have called me down to see my sister.

Ellie's actually my favorite. Janie was always so sweet to me, but she had her own burdens to bear. She had to figure out who she was outside of our parents' expectations, and she was always so giving of her time to whoever needed it the most, that most of her sisters fell by the wayside...except for Ellie, of course. Her best friend.

Ellie is the firecracker. She's whip smart and vicious to anyone who makes a bad first impression on her. Still, she's also kind and loyal and a good daughter. Still someone our parents are proud of. She always stuck up for me, kept me from being invisible. The number of times I'd heard her say, "Wait, what about Mary?" Just for that, she's my favorite.