OPERATION SEA ANGEL

by Ruth McKee

My windows leaked the night of the cyclone. The rain was heavier than usual, but it was only really scary because we knew what kind of storm it was. But then I was sitting in a cement fortress with bars holding in the glass in the windows, my dad and my stepmom calmly reading books in the candlelight. I can't say what it might have felt like for the people out on the street, pulling their children and their cows into the stairways of the shopping centers and the abandoned building sites around DIT 2. Dhaka is pretty far inland, and the real damage was down along the coast. By the end of the week they estimated 100,000 people had been killed. My grandparents called from Canada, because they'd heard about it on the news there. Bangladesh only ever makes headlines when there's been a natural disaster. At school everyone was talking about it. This 11th-grader called Pierre got t- shirts made that said all the statistics on them: 100,000 killed, 53,000 homes destroyed, 67,000 children orphaned. We thought that somehow making each other look at these numbers would help us to feel something for the dead. Pierre was selling the t-shirts for 500 taka each and most of the kids, all of them who weren't in ESL, bought them. My mother gave me the 500 taka to get one but Pierre had run out by the time I asked him. His sister Denise who was in the 8th grade with me started telling everyone that I didn't care about the people who had died and that I hated Bengalis, even though I'm sure she knew that wasn't true at all. Bengalis hated me. Bengalis were afraid of me. I would walk down the street in my own neighborhood and I could feel their eyes on my skin. The women and children breaking

1 bricks, the men with their rickshaws, and the young boys grazing their cows in the middle of Gulshan Avenue were all watching me. When I was in a crowd, which was most of the time I left my gates, people always made room for me to get through. At first I thought it was just cause I looked different, I was wearing western clothes. But then I went out with my stepmom Chantal, who is French with the clearest white skin, and I could see the way the eyes devoured her, the way the hands reached for her. They believed, our neighbor told us, that it was bad luck even to set eyes on a black person. This was crazy since it's not like I was some Sudanese purple-black girl, just a regular shade of brown, only a touch darker than they were. People were better at school. AIS/D was a place for diplomat's kids and the children of Bengali politicians. They were used to the occasional Ethiopian or African- American or whatever else passing through, and racist was the dirtiest word they knew. So they were mean to me for different reasons. They didn't like me because of the way that I dressed, my clothes from the Eaton's Center in Toronto rather than the Beneton in Singapore. They didn't like me because I was scared of them, but mostly I think they didn't like me because I never fought back.

It was about two weeks after the cyclone when the Marines arrived on a mission. They were on their way down to Chittagong where they would spread out to rebuild the houses that had been destroyed, find homes for the children who'd lost their parents, and take food to the people whose rice paddies had been swept into the ocean. The Americans had responded to the call, and come running from the Middle East where they had just fought the Desert Storm, ready to wage war against the weather once again in Operation Sea Angel. There were thirty-five of them. The Marines stopped for a few days in Dhaka to get over their jet lag. They camped out in our school gym, and the music teacher had to cancel rehearsals for Bye Bye Birdie.

2 I had an uncle who was a Marine. My mother's youngest brother Geoff who was only 14 years older than me. I'd only met him once, and he'd taken me to Canada's Wonderland. My parents had just gotten divorced then and I was living with my mother in Toronto who was still hysterical. She'd just spent a week breaking all of the dishes that my dad's friend Bob had made, then another week super-gluing them back together. So Geoff had taken me out of the house and we'd spent a whole day at the theme park. He'd won me this rubber unicorn at one of those shooting games, and held my hand through the haunted house. I still had the unicorn on my dresser.

Geoff went all around the world with the Marines. When I was with my dad in Ankara he'd come to town once and my mother said she'd given him my number but never called. He must have been afraid Chantal would answer and he wouldn't have known what to say to her. What do you say to your sister's husband's new wife when you know your sister's in therapy back home? Geoff had kept traveling, though, he'd gone to Panama and to the Gulf. I knew sooner or later we would meet up again. We were having gym class outside, playing soccer in the yard, when I first saw them. Men playing basketball on our court in the gym, their duffel bags all piled up on the sidelines. From out on the field I saw a man who looked like Geoff, a short black guy with a bald head and plenty of muscles. For a moment or two I convinced myself that it was him. But then I saw another silhouette that was just as black and just as built that I didn't know if maybe he was Geoff as well. Someone passed the ball to me because I'm a fast runner and normally a good person to take the ball down the field, but this time I missed it. Mr. Brown the P.E. teacher from Ohio told me to stop ogling the Marines and pay attention. The girls laughed and the boys looked embarrassed, their young bodies dressed for soccer not nearly as impressive as those of the silhouettes in the gym. In the changing room after class I was waiting for a stall to be free when Denise, the most developed and therefore the most powerful girl in the class, asked me about

3 what had happened. "Melon," that's what they called me - my name's really Melan and I usually go by my middle name Natasha - "Melon," she said, "You like the Marines, don't you?" I laughed nervously, thinking that would be the end of it. "Are you going to come hang out at the pool tonight to try to hook up with one of them?" she continued. "They're pretty hot, aren't they? I bet you'd like to have sex with one of them." "No." "Why not? I would." said Denise, lining her lips in red. "You would?" said Janet, an American girl who was new to the school.

"I would." said Raana, a Pakistani girl who would try anything once. "Did you see the muscles on them? Melon knows what I'm talking about" said Denise. I tried to get myself out of the conversation by not answering or looking at any of them. A stall opened and I dashed for it but Suenia, an ESL girl who only spoke German, came out of the woodwork to get to it first. "So come on, Melon, why don't we both come by school tonight and find some Marines to have sex with. Janet and Raana will come too if they're not chicken." And like little dolls, Denise's two friends nodded their heads and put on their cyclone shirts over their designer bras, telling me that I'd better meet them at seven that night by the swimming pool.

On the bus home from school I tried to ask Janet about the plan, still not sure if it was real. Janet and I had been new together that fall, and we'd talked on the bus every day, she'd even invited me over to her house once. But when they'd started calling me Melon and started inviting her to their parties she'd moved to the other side of the bus. Whenever she had a chance to put me down, to prove to the world that she had never been my friend in the first place, she took it. "Just be there, Melon," she whispered from the other side of the aisle.

4 I went back to school that night after dinner. I didn't know what would be worse, to not go and hear about it for the rest of my life, or to show up and have to go through with it. So I went. The sun had set so I wasn't allowed to take a rickshaw, since people said young girls who went out by themselves after dark were asking for it. But I told my dad that there was a movie night at school that I wanted to go to, and he was so excited that I was getting out of the house that he gave me a ride to Baridhara. I told him I could get a ride home with someone, I was sure, he didn't have to worry about picking me up.

"Who are you going to get a ride from?" he asked. "Denise." I lied. "As long as you don't take a rickshaw," he said, and drove away. The swimming pool was always open until 9 o'clock at night so my path across the school grounds was lit. I figured that Jalal, the nighttime lifeguard would be there as usual, and that other kids would be swimming, too, the Marines still in their gym or out on the town. The sight of a whole pool of young men was stunning. I sat in the shadows of the villa, a house which had been converted into a high school building, and watched the Sea Angels move through the water. Some of them dove off the diving boards, some played a makeshift game of water polo. They dunked each other's heads and splashed. Every time a face came into the light, every time a voice spoke in the darkness, I studied hard and compared it to my memory of Geoff. It was a chilly night for swimming. I still didn't know whether it was a joke that was being played on me or a real plan that I was a part of until the moment I saw the other girls. They had taken off their cyclone shirts and gotten dressed up in tight skirts and skimpy tops with their hair flowing over their shoulders. I was wearing the same jeans and t-shirt I'd been wearing all day. From the shadows I watched as the pretty girls looked around to see if I had actually shown my face, before they walked over to the pool. They draped themselves on the gate and posed there for a few minutes until someone noticed them and

5 whistled. Then they strode through the gate in their mother's high heels, accompanied by more shouts and catcalls from the men. I could barely hear their voices. "This is our pool where we always swim on Thursday nights." Denise was saying. "Well, don't let us stop you, come on in." one Marine said. His voice was white. Denise started to peel off her clothes, right there on the side of the pool. Underneath was a black string bikini that she must have bought just for this kind of occasion. The other girls took off their clothes with a little less grace, and a little less style underneath. One of the men asked what grade they were in and Denise said that they were seniors. Janet and Raana didn't object. The girls slid into the pool and circled around. All of the men had stopped by this point to watch the three sexy young girls work their magic. There was silence for a moment, just the sound of the florescent water lapping. I was glad I hadn't joined them. I knew my clumsy body would have disrupted their synchronized swimming. I could never have looked sexy like that, even in the glow of the pool. One of the men broke the silence, "Shit, I can't believe this is a Muslim country!" The girls giggled and said that Raana was the only Muslim. A voice that wasn't Geoff's asked her why she wasn't wearing a burka and she began to explain to him with extreme urgency how she believed in Allah but that didn't stop her from loving her body. The man listened intently and the two went to the side, touching and splashing in the water. A few minutes later they got out, still all smiles, and walked off with their towels into the soccer field. Denise was the next to find her prey. She sat on the end of the springboard with her legs dangling in the water, and told the Marines she was the queen of the pool. She demanded that they, one by one, come up and kiss her feet, as this was the custom of her land. The men lined up timidly, some declaring disgust and moving to the other end to watch. The first few Marines gave her little pecks on the tops of her feet, and

6 they pounded each other on their backs after they had done so. Then a black man at the back of the line gave her foot the longest kiss. He kissed all the way up from her toes to her ankles and her knees. Denise slid slowly off the edge off the springboard and was gone. Then Janet was left all alone in a pool full of sexually charged men. I couldn't see her from where I was sitting. I waited a few minutes to make sure that Denise was gone before I walked over to the pool. Janet was hiding under the diving board with the men in a semi-circle around her. She looked petrified, pressed up against the wall, her face near tears. "You have to pick," one of the Sea Angels was saying, "Unless you want to do all of us." Janet forced a smile and just said, "I can't." I opened the gate and walked quickly down the deck. No one noticed me coming until I was already there. "Melon!" Janet screamed. "What are you doing here?" "I'm. I'm sorry I'm late," was all I could stutter out. "You weren't really supposed to come, Melon." Janet said, "It was a joke. Go home." "She doesn't have to go home," said one of the men, "She can play with us, too, can't she?" "No." said Janet, "Melon is disgusting. You don't want her, you want me. Go home, Melon!" "You don't have to do this," I said, "You can come home too." "What's the big deal?" said one of the guys, "You don't have to fight, there are plenty of us to go around." And there were. Plenty. "She's thirteen years old," I said. Janet's face flashed a panicked look: half horror, half relief. A ripple passed through the men in the pool, the sexual tension shifting its form. As the men drifted away from Janet she screamed, “She’s a liar! Don’t listen to Melon, she’s lying!” But the moment had passed. One of the marines lifted himself up on the side of the pool, spilling a gallon of water over the side. A few others resumed

7 their game of water polo. I just turned and walked away, leaving Janet's cries in my wake.

I took a rickshaw home from school like I had promised I wouldn't. It wasn't hard to find one, the rickshaw drivers aren't afraid of black people. They know that foreigners of all colors have money. I told him Gulshan, road 84, and without a word he took me over the bridge, past the International Club and the house where President Ershad was under arrest, to my house at the end of the road. My father didn't say anything about the fact that he hadn't heard a car come and go from the gate. He didn't even ask about the movie. He watched me pass through the hallway and straight to my room before he could even think to say a word. The Sea Angels left the next day, went down to Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar, to hand out candy bars to the kids who'd lost their parents and rice to the parents who'd lost their kids. A few more Marines came out of the Gulf when they realized how much work there was to be done, but Geoff never came to Dhaka. My mom wrote a few weeks later and mentioned that he was in Nebraska getting married. Janet and I never talked about that night. That Sunday morning on the bus she wouldn't even look at me. But I started attempting conversation with the ESL girls, and discovered that their English was much better than we gave them credit for. Time passed at school and people stopped calling me Melon. Two years later we moved to Beijing, my dad and I, leaving Chantal behind with a new man. I hear now that Raana got herself pregnant by an Air Force pilot and her parents married her off to a rich Pakistani. Denise was killed in a car accident two summers ago. Before monsoon season that year of the cyclone there was a dust storm. The ground so anxious for rain that it jumped up into the air and swarmed around my house. The bougainvilleas and banana trees cracked and fell and the sky turned pitch black in the middle of the afternoon. I stood out on my porch and let the sand and rocks

8 whip my body, stinging little cuts into my skin. I stood there for an hour, waiting for rain that never came. I remember that storm much better than I do the cyclone.

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