Laughing Without an Accent

by Firoozeh Dumas

  Debra was a worthy ambassador for her state. “Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution,” she’d always say. “The state motto is ‘Liberty and Independence,’” she would add. But no matter how many people Debra enlightened, the masses remained oblivious to the significance or location of Delaware. This, of course, brought me much satisfaction, since for the first time since living in America I was not the one having to explain my birthplace.

  Two weeks after I moved in, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria with a group of fellow residents. Among them was Walter, an American I later renamed Noorallah (Light of God) due to his affinity for Middle Easterners. Walter noticed another International House student eating lunch by himself and, in typical I-House fashion, invited him to join us. There was only one empty seat and it was next to me.

  After François from France introduced himself, I told him that I had just finished a course on contemporary French writers and asked him if he was familiar with the topic. “Yes,” he said, rather enthusiastically. “So, which authors are you familiar with?” I asked. He stared at me with a blank look and said, “Uh…uh…”

  Then, in an attempt to overcompensate, he started telling me about a short story written by Boris Vian that he had particularly liked, giving too much detail, a sure sign that this was the only story he had ever read. I figured François was a typical engineering major who had once read a piece of fiction in the dentist’s office. I finished my lunch and left.

  The next evening, during coffee hour, I once again ran into François, who did his best to engage me in conversation. We talked a bit, but then I decided that I did not want to spend my entire evening talking to just one person, since, according to my calculations, eight other males awaited me. I ended the conversation rather ungraciously. Later, François once again found me and made an attempt at conversation, and once again I found an excuse to leave quickly.

  The next day, I felt really bad. As someone who understood how hard it was to meet people at a huge university, I was ashamed that I had acted so unlike myself. I decided to apologize to François by leaving him a note and inviting him out for coffee, but I wanted to make sure he knew it wasn’t a date. After writing several versions of my note, I read the final one to Debra, who assured me it gave the right friendly vibe and nothing more. I told her that I would also bring up the topic of Delaware, which would make it clear that it wasn’t a date, since with the exception of the governor of Delaware, no one talks about Delaware on a date. Debra agreed.

  I left the note on François’s door and waited for him to call. It was Thursday.

  He didn’t call on Friday. On Saturday morning, I told Debra, “He thought it was a date, and now he’s snubbing me.” On Saturday, I told Debra, “I hate him.” Debra agreed to hate him with me. On Sunday, I told her, “I have to move out of International House now.”

  Late Sunday night, François called to say that he had been out of town and hadn’t received my note. He said he would love to go out for coffee.

  The following evening, after dinner, we went to Café Roma, an outdoor café a block from the dorm. We talked and talked. Next thing I knew, it was almost midnight. François walked me back to my room, hugged me good night, and told me that he couldn’t remember the last time he had enjoyed talking to someone so much. He also invited me for coffee the following night.

  The following evening, we talked and talked. This guy was the best storyteller I had ever met and a real gentleman to boot. And he was cute.

  The next night, he invited me to his room to show me his books. I’d seen enough episodes of The Love Boat to know what was coming my way. So I went to his room and, wouldn’t you know it, he showed me his books. He had more books than I could imagine anybody lugging from France—paperbacks, entire series in hardcover, even big coffee-table books. He had books on Hiroshige, Hafez, and Hemingway, not to mention an entire shelf of contemporary French writers. I asked him why he couldn’t name any contemporary authors the first time we met, since he clearly had read dozens of them. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I didn’t get housing when I came from France so I was advised to join a fraternity, which would guarantee me a room near campus. It’s a crazy place, these American fraternities,” he said. I nodded. He continued, “Every weekend, everyone gets drunk. There are no conversations, so when you asked me about contemporary writers, I was so happy at the idea of having an intelligent conversation, that my mind went blank. So anytime you want to go out for coffee and talk, I am available.”

  We sat in his tiny room as he told me about his family and his life in France and Greece. He described Platania, where he spent every summer of his life. He described the foods he ate there and the difference in the sea in the morning and night.

  I knew I had found someone special, someone with depth and soul.

  As I was sharing a personal story about my past, François smiled, looked at me, and said, “You know something? You’ve quite a chest there.”

  I was stunned. It was such an out-of-place comment, so creepy.

  Noticing my expression, François quickly added, “I mean that as a compliment! I really like this about you.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say. All of a sudden, the room seemed really small and the books seemed like bait—perhaps more intelligent bait than a Free Margaritas for All the Ladies sign, but bait nonetheless. (At least the signs were more honest.)

  “Maybe you have more in common with your fraternity brothers than you realize,” I told him.

  He feigned surprise. “Why do you say that?”

  “When you said you were happy to have found someone to talk to, I guess what you meant is you are happy to have found someone with breasts,” I said, emphasizing the word “breasts” to indicate that I had seen right through his little gentleman act. “Next time you lure a girl, I mean breasts, to your room, you might try some subtlety, Mr. Senseeteev Literature Man.”

  Even though François had no accent, I faked a French accent because it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  He looked all flustered. “I don’t understand,” he said. “All I said was ‘You’re quite a jester.’”

  “Oh,” I said.

  There was a long, awkward pause.

  “You shouldn’t use the word ‘jester.’ I told him. “It’s confusing. It is technically a word, but nobody uses it in America.”

  François looked perplexed.

  “It’s like ‘nosegay,’” I explained. “No one uses that word, either. It would only lead to confusion, maybe a fight.”

  François looked alarmed, so I continued.

  “‘Codpiece,’ ‘hurdy-gurdy.’” I could have gone on and on. But instead, François leaned over in that cramped, book-filled room and kissed me. Perhaps it was his way of changing the conversation.

  He has not used the word “jester” since.

  A Moveable Feast

  People always ask me how I remember the details of my past. “Did you keep a journal your whole life?” “Do you make things up?”

  Truth is, I have a memory for certain things and not for others. For me, watching any movie is like watching it for the first time, every time. I cannot remember plots, character names, or pretty much any other detail that may prove that I actually saw the movie. I can, however, recall, in perfect detail, the meal I had prior to seeing the movie.

  My keys are another story. Every day, I spend a good part of my life looking for my key chain. I even bought a key hanger at a street fair and hung it by my front door, but that is the last place I look. The places my keys have actually turned up include in the refrigerator, the dirty laundry, and the pocket of whatever I was wearing the day before, that jacket that I didn’t remember wearing.

  The one thing, however, that I never, ever forget is a face.

  When I was seventeen, I spent a long, lonely summer in Paris. The French family I was staying with decided to spend the summer in the country, sans moi. I was left in the apartment in Paris. Faced with more f
ree time than I knew what do with, I bought a guidebook and set out to attempt to see every museum in Paris. The problem is, going to museums is like riding a seesaw: fifteen minutes alone and you realize something is missing. Half the fun of going to museums is discussing the artwork.

  “How do they know they didn’t hang that one upside down?”

  “I could do that.”

  After several weeks of viewing mummies, Impressionists, Fauvists, Cubists, bronzes, relics of the Ming dynasty, restored mansions, and Edith Piaf’s stuffed cat, I wanted to see something outside of Paris. I read a few more guidebooks and decided to buy a bus ticket to see Mont St. Michel, a place that God must have created with the help of Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allen Poe. Mont St. Michel, a quasi-island in Normandy, is the site of a magnificent chapel built in the tenth century. During low tide, visitors can walk to the site, but during high tide, Mont St. Michel becomes an island. The tide comes in at one meter per second, or as Victor Hugo described it, “à la vitesse d’un cheval au galop,” which sounds so nice in French and not so bad in English, either, “as swiftly as a galloping horse.” But that’s not all! The tide comes with thick fog, creating constantly shifting quicksand. In other words, sayonara. I had read many descriptions of poor souls getting lost and finding themselves caught, not just in the rushing tide but in the troika of tide, fog, and quicksand. The only thing that could possibly make this scenario any more frightening would be the addition of dragons. I had to see this place.

  A couple of days later, I found myself on a bus filled with camera-toting tourists, all of us ready for the four-hour drive. I found an empty seat, and a few minutes later a young couple sat in front of me. Immediately, they formed what I can best describe from my Girl Scout handbook as a sailor’s knot. His knee on her knee, her knee on his knee, her arms twisted around him, his arms wrapped around her face. A few seconds later, she started nibbling on his earlobe; he kissed her neck. We were barely out of the parking lot. She licked his cheek: he chewed on her ear cartilage. They were either in love or very hungry.

  I didn’t want to stare at them and yet they were seated directly in front of me and there were no other empty seats on the bus. I looked out the window, then back at The Knot. Now they had seemingly velcroed the top of their foreheads together as they stared at each other, in what I imagined must have been a somewhat blurry gaze at that distance. Their love was in focus even if their eyes were starting to cross. Then the nibbling started again, and I once more gazed out my window, pretending to be interested in the patterns in French traffic.

  This went on for the duration of the ride. They stopped only when we stopped at a sandwich shop for lunch. I’m not even sure they took a break during lunch; I just made sure I was nowhere near them.

  When we arrived at the Mont St. Michel, we all went our separate ways.

  Having read Henry James’s description of Mont St. Michel, and having seen it in the Bayeaux Tapestry during one of my many museum excursions, I was impressed. The only downside was the herds of tourists. There were no tourists in Henry James’s descriptions, just Henry and his deep thoughts. Now there were gift shops and people from all over the world who, granted, had as much right to be there as I did. I would have preferred the company of just Henry James.

  I returned to Paris that night, spent a couple more weeks visiting museums, then packed my bags and returned to Newport Beach. As soon as I saw my parents at the airport, I confessed to them that I had actually been alone for the summer.

  “But what about the letters you wrote us describing the family and your host mom’s great cooking?” they asked. “I made it up, “ I told them. They were not amused. I told them that had they known the truth, I would have had to come home, thus guaranteeing a depressing summer. This way, I had a lonely and somewhat depressing summer but learned a foreign language along the way. “Plus,” I continued, “being depressed in Paris is so noble, so normal. It’s the perky ones that worry the French. I fit right in.”

  With the summer behind me, I was now a senior in high school and had to apply to colleges. My father decided that I should attend UC Berkeley. “Best deal in the country!” he kept saying. “Nobel laureates everywhere!”

  My father was right about that. I did attend several large lectures given by Nobel laureates. Oddly enough, they all started out with the same joke: “The best part of winning the Nobel Prize was receiving my own parking space at UC Berkeley.”

  During my junior year, while walking in Sproul Plaza, the main entrance to the university, a young woman walking in front of me turned to speak to her companion. When I saw her profile, I knew I had seen that face before. I just could not remember where.

  These kinds of things keep me up at night. Whenever I see someone I think I know, I have to figure out how I know him. This has at times led to embarrassing circumstances, such as when I mistook a woman in the grocery store for a college classmate when it turned out I “knew” her because she was a world-renowned athlete. If curiosity killed the cat, my days are certainly numbered.

  A week later, while walking in Sproul Plaza, I saw the same woman again. This time, I caught up with her, tapped her on the shoulder, and told her that I knew her from somewhere but couldn’t remember where. She looked at me and said she didn’t know me.

  “I know I know you,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  This being Berkeley, she probably thought I was recruiting her for something. This was also the period when I wore only black.

  All of a sudden, I remembered. “Were you by any chance in Paris in the summer of 1982?” I asked. She hesitated and said yes.

  I continued: “Did you take a bus to Mont St. Michel with your boyfriend?”

  She paused for a moment, and gazed at me with a look that combined both fear and bewilderment. “Yes,” she said again, even more hesitantly.

  “I was sitting behind you!” I declared enthusiastically.

  She was rather stunned. “I can’t believe you remember me,” she said.

  “I remember your boyfriend, too,” I added. I immediately regretted saying that, but it was too late. But then I thought, I’ve gone too far, why not go farther. “Is he still your boyfriend?” I asked. I was interested for a couple of reasons. The first being nosiness and the second being nosiness.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, he is coming to visit me next week. He’s at graduate school at Brown,” she added.

  I made a mental note not to sit behind them.

  Oddly enough, The Nibbler and I ended up becoming friends. She was a teacher’s assistant in the French department at Berkeley studying for her Ph.D. in French history. She told me that her trip to Mont St. Michel had been part of her studies, a valid reason for anyone to major in the humanities.

  Since I was an undergrad and she a graduate student, people always asked us how we knew each other. “It’s a long story involving a monastery and an earlobe,” I always replied.

  Me and Mylanta

  My first year in college, I managed to get an ulcer. This was not hard to do since I spent my days and nights worrying.

  A few years before I entered college, the Iranian Revolution had left my father with almost nothing, including no job. My going away to college was a huge financial burden, one that had been alleviated somewhat with scholarships. But any cash-strapped student will agree that the expenses in college are endless. Textbooks cost as much as Italian shoes, tickets to fly home once in a while don’t come cheap, and there’s always food.

  To add to my worries, there was my mother. My poor mother did not want me to go away to college. I was the first woman on either side of my family to leave home for an undergraduate education, and this did not sit well with her. “Live at home and go to UC Irvine,” she kept repeating. “We’ll buy you a car,” she always added, upping the ante.

  Unfortunately for her, I had chosen to attend UC Berkeley, a school that has a rather unfair reputation as the vortex of all things strange. The thousand
s of “normal” students who attend UC Berkeley seem to be a well-kept secret. As soon as one odd duck is found—say, a nudist or someone who thinks paying taxes is illegal—the media has a field day, thus cementing the school’s reputation as “Berserkley.” When the Unabomber was caught, all the newspapers trumpeted the fact that he had taught at UC Berkeley. They barely mentioned that he had graduated from Harvard.

  To strengthen the anti-Berkeley campaign, there was the friend of one of my father’s co-workers from Abadan, whose nephew had attended UC Berkeley as a premed and who had switched to…art. This may seem like nothing to a Westerner, but to Iranian parents, a son majoring in art is a permanent bachelor who will be occupying the guest room, forever. According to my father’s friend, this boy, nicknamed Dr. Koochooloo (Little Doc), had always enjoyed playing doctor with the neighborhood kids, and now he spent his days sculpting nude statues that, according to this co-worker, were not even good. Not to mention that the market for naked statues in my Muslim culture is right up there with the market for pork products.

  My father was thrilled that I had been accepted to UC Berkeley. He could not wait to have another engineer in the family.

  I had my own reasons for wanting to move away. As wonderful as it is to have a large extended family nearby, there are downsides. Not sure if your haircut is flattering? Don’t worry. The relatives will tell you…the minute they see you.

  “All I see now is your chins.”

  “Did you go to one of those discount salons?”

  “It’ll grow back, thank goodness.”

  I needed distance.

  During our drive to Berkeley, none of us had much to say. My father tried to lighten the mood by reading the signs on the freeway and making really stupid jokes.

  “Coalinga! What kind of name is that? Why don’t they call their town Coca-Cola? It would be so much more popular!”

  “Why are there so many signs for ‘Anderson’s Pea Soup’?” “Hey, I’m going to open my own restaurant: Kazem’s Kaleh Pacheh!”