by Kimia Eslah
As Jennifer listed the similarities between her and Ally Sheedy’s peculiar character, Taraneh had grasped that she had never seen her own experience depicted on screen. She had never seen an episode of Growing Pains where Maggie Seaver scolded her daughter for being “mouthy like white children.” Or an episode of Who’s the Boss? in which Tony Micelli threatened to throw Samantha’s stereo and cassette tapes out the window if she didn’t “shut off that foreign noise.” There were no examples, no blueprints to help her gauge the reasonableness of her expectations, the normalcy of her behaviour. Consequently, Taraneh’s counterpoints to the weighty assertions of her parents sounded just as trivial to her as they did to her parents.
It seemed that the intersection of her identity as a teenager and an immigrant didn’t exist on any map. It was a place where no one else lived, not even Danny and Avanti. When Taraneh heard from Avanti that her parents helped her select courses and from Danny that his father organized his university tours, she had been flabbergasted. For better or worse, Taraneh thought, their parents take action. They get involved. They don’t just yell at them from the sidelines.
Taraneh was tired of being both the child and the parent. Her impulsive father was consumed by work and drink. Her depressed mother was fixated on containing his recklessness. When they did notice her, it ended badly. She wanted desperately to be a teenager in a John Hughes movie. She wanted to be on the difficult road travelled by white teenagers. She imagined it to be a road without intersections. She wondered whether Danny also wanted to choose that road.
“You know, at church, mothers used to ask me to talk to their kids. You know, to make ’em do what I was doing. I wonder what they’d say now.” Danny had chuckled but it was a hollow laugh.
Taraneh had felt sad and embarrassed for him, as she did for herself. Good grades and good manners didn’t seem to account for much when the bar was set at unattainable. With a shrug, Danny had continued, “Anyways, I started dating this girl. My dad didn’t like her. He kept at me. We fought, and I moved out. End of story.”
Taraneh calculated that a decade had passed but Danny had remained the same young man. He seemed to be absorbed in a life of work, music, and drink. The relationship with Avanti had been the most change Danny had experienced in the previous decade. Taraneh was curious about the nature of their relationship. They sought out one another at breaks and after work, but touched only after many drinks, when they nestled into a private booth and whispered their conversations. Typically, at the end of a night of drinking, they left together for Danny’s shared apartment, just two blocks south of the bar. The next day at work, they returned to their platonic performance.
Taraneh was familiar with this peculiar pairing of sex and sovereignty. It depicted her notions of proper etiquette in relationships as well as her paltry expectations of others. It decried her appetite for love as needy. Having misinterpreted her pro-sex feminist idols, she diagnosed longing for intimacy as a function of her immaturity. Mistakenly, she believed that the feminists she revered most purported that sex without love was the pinnacle of equality. Once a week, she headed downtown to Harbord St. and scoured the shelves of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore to help make sense of her world.
During puberty, she had scrutinized every article and image in Seventeen magazine, mining for insight into the imminent abyss of adolescence. Similarly, in her transition to adulthood, she searched the pages of Ms. magazine to understand which of her desires were defensible and which of her feelings were admissible.
Reading articles about sex roles, abortions, unpaid work, and harassment, Taraneh pieced together a collage of normative expectations in the modern world, in a modern relationship. Pursuing her sexual satisfaction was righteous. Defending her bisexuality was imperative. Validating her re-emerging need to be loved and cherished was unfashionable and unsophisticated. Sex made sense, but love was confusing.
More difficult than demystifying love was deconstructing how her ethnicity set her apart from white women. At the Church St. bars in the gay village, she felt sexless, invisible next to her white friends. Her clique of young queer women who dressed, drank, and danced alike weren’t treated alike. Taraneh had grown accustomed to the discerning gaze of white dykes who panned for other white dykes. Uncertain about her intuition and concerned about being considered paranoid, she didn’t mention it to her white friends. To remedy herself from feeling repugnant and rejected, she distinguished herself intentionally and considerably. Taraneh dressed scantily, drank heavily, and darted hastily into the arms of the first woman to express an interest on any given night. Friends joked with Taraneh about her skill of getting laid without leaving the club; they suggested that it might be her “eastern charms.” Taraneh laughed and marvelled at the irony that her white friends claimed that her skin colour was an advantage.
Whereas white women were not interested in her, white men were overly keen. They complimented Taraneh on her dark complexion and hair. They guessed her ethnicity and asked about her birthplace. They extoled brown-skinned women for their curvaceous figures and inherent sex appeal. It didn’t take long to weary of these conversations.
To mitigate her angst, she injected humour into these well-intentioned and wholly offensive exchanges. After she answered a man’s questions about where she “came from” and after she accepted his compliments about her “good English,” she asked each man the same questions. Where were you born? When did you learn to speak English? Do you like living in Canada? The puzzled look on the men’s faces amused her until she realized that they didn’t notice or appreciate the irony in her roleplay. Taraneh reflected, They think I am dimwitted to ask. They think these questions don’t apply to them.
Young white men seemed less interested in her ethnicity and most interested in her open-minded attitudes toward sex. In these casual sexual encounters, Taraneh felt superior to her less mature male partners, who were typically more timid. She initiated sex, and she dominated the interplay. After the act, she became absorbed with the lives of these white boys: their rooms and homes, the contents of their refrigerators and medicine cabinets, even the books on the shelves and the jars on the counters. As satisfying as reading Patti Smith’s self-written liner notes for the Easter album, studying the material possessions of these white boys and their white families answered many questions and created many others.
Peter was one such white boy. Their first time was on a Friday in the middle of December, six months earlier. A few of her classmates had lounged on the landing of the school staircase, their jackets and backpacks strewn about, not yet ready to go home for the weekend. Amid the rowdy debate about whether the movie Hellraiser was in the same category of horror movies as the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Taraneh and Peter had exchanged several glances.
Taraneh had felt excited and nervous as she realized Peter was signaling an interest in her. She had been uncertain how she felt about him, but she enjoyed the flirtatious banter. Taraneh had perceived Peter as a cynical lone wolf who preferred books to people. In class, he rarely spoke, except to correct the teacher. In the mornings on her way to school, Taraneh spotted him sitting alone near the window of Coffee Time, with a paperback, a coffee, and a pack of smokes. During class breaks, he smoked with the others on the sidewalk but he didn’t say much.
That Friday on the landing, she had heard more from him than in the previous year and a half. He had looked and smiled directly at her while he jabbered on. Taraneh had felt caught up in anticipation and had begun to speak excitedly as well.
“Hellraiser is in a different category,” Taraneh had said teasingly while smiling directly at Peter. “A better one.”
“In what universe?” Peter had retorted in mock outrage.
“The universe where full frontal male nudity counts!” Taraneh had mimicked a drumroll and a cymbal crash.
Peter and the others had laughed, leaving Taraneh feeling elated. The conversation had veered
toward arcade games and record scores. From his seat on the second stair, Peter had walked over to where Taraneh leaned against the floor-to-ceiling windows. He hadn’t said anything but he leaned against the glass with his shoulder touching hers. Though Taraneh stared upwards with a contemplative expression, all of her attention had been focused on the sensation of having her right shoulder pressed against Peter’s left upper arm. He had removed a book from the inner pocket of his black trench coat and appeared to read intently. They had remained unmoving even after the others left for the arcade.
Feigning indifference as he replaced the paperback, Peter had said, “I’m going home. You can come along if you want.”
She remembered that the skies had darkened and Christmas lights lit up the postwar bungalows. They had walked silently side by side, each with arms pressed against torsos and hands dug deep into pockets to keep out the chilly wind. They had entered the small brick house from the side door. First, Peter had confirmed that his house was empty, and then they took the short flight of carpeted stairs to the basement.
When Peter turned on the track lighting, Taraneh had resisted the temptation to tease him about the decor. Having watched years of American sitcoms, Taraneh was familiar with the style of middle-class Canadians. It was considerably different from the way immigrant Iranians furnished and decorated their homes. Peter’s rec room looked like the set of Family Ties. An oversized brick fireplace dominated the wood-panelled room. Over the mantel hung a set of decorative plates that featured drawings of children in rain boots playing in puddles. A brown plaid couch sat along the opposite wall, flanked on each side with an end table and a lamp. The tables were covered in magazines, crossword digests, and stubby pencils.
In contrast to Peter’s dowdy, homey basement, Taraneh’s parents created a polished and ornate atmosphere. She was accustomed to sitting rooms outfitted with intricately decorated Persian rugs, dense sofas with elaborately carved feet, Safavid-style wall hangings depicting gardens and palaces, and an ever-present bowl overflowing with fruit and accompanied by gold-plated plates and knives. Her parents’ living room was a showroom that was returned to perfection by the children after they finished watching TV.
Taraneh was drawn to the practical, lived-in quality of Canadian homes, but she also judged the style as sloppy and slothful. The magazines strewn on the tabletop, the quilt balled up on the couch, and the house slippers tucked under the recliner had caused her to feel embarrassed for Peter. To flagrantly display the messy remnants of private lives was an affront to Taraneh’s upbringing. Another one of her mother’s fundamental truths: people will judge you by your looks, so look good. This same sentiment that led Taraneh to feel superior to Peter also led her to feel inferior to most other people. Though Taraneh felt righteous about her androgynous, unadorned appearance and her vehement quest to prove her mother wrong, Taraneh also felt certain that her appearance repulsed and angered others. She assumed that people who treated her kindly, like Roy, in fact pitied her, just as she pitied Peter and his unsophisticated lifestyle.
A coffee table that had been pushed against the wall housed a Helix boombox and several stacks of cassette tapes. Taraneh had thrown her jacket and bag into the corner, and then nestled in front of the stereo to appraise the tapes. While he headed upstairs to grab two cans of pop, she had considered what she was doing in Peter’s house. Within a half hour of arriving, the two were on the couch, entangled, topless, and sweating. Using few words, they had agreed to have sex. Peter had disappeared to the laundry room to put on a condom and Taraneh had turned off the lights. A few minutes later, they had finished and redressed. Standing on the driveway by the side door, they had faced the same direction and smoked cigarettes.
“I know you’re not Arab, ’cause Persians aren’t Arabs. But are you Muslim?” Peter had asked coolly, exhaling smoke.
“Uh, no,” Taraneh had answered, put off by the topic of religion. She rarely thought about religion, unless it was being discussed in school. She heard stories about her maternal grandmother, who had memorized parts of the Quran and prayed five times a day, but Taraneh had never set foot in a mosque, and the only Quran her parents owned served an esthetic purpose on the dining room buffet next to twin gold goblets and a white porcelain vase filled with cloth roses. She knew that Iran was headed by a religious government and that there were two types of Muslims who didn’t get along, but she couldn’t name the two groups and she didn’t know why they fought each other. She didn’t like to talk about religion because she felt uneducated about Islam and Iran; it seemed that people expected her to know much more than she did and they were flabbergasted when she admitted that she didn’t know anything about these topics.
Eager to change the topic, she asked playfully, “Are you Muslim?”
“Of course not,” Peter had scoffed before he returned to a professorial tone. “You’re probably Muslim and you just do not practice.”
“I am not Muslim,” Taraneh had insisted. “I’m agnostic.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking about your actual religion. Besides, agnostics are fence-sitters,” Peter had said brazenly. “I’m an atheist. If you’d read Nietzsche, you’d be an atheist, too.”
“Alright, Peter the Atheist, I’m gonna go now,” Taraneh had replied as mildly as she could manage. She tucked the crumpled butt back into her cigarette pack. “Thanks for the pop. See you Monday.”
Without waiting for his reply, Taraneh had walked down to the sidewalk toward home. Every Friday, for a couple of months, she and Peter had gone to his house to have sex and smoke cigarettes. When Taraneh began going to the Groundhog with Avanti on Friday nights, she had stopped hanging out with Peter. He seemed indifferent to the change, and Taraneh wondered if he had ever been attracted to her or if he had pitied her.
The attraction between Danny and Avanti, particularly after a few rounds at the bar, was obvious. Even as they stood apart and smoked cigarettes at the side of the building, Taraneh could recognize their intimacy. To alert them of her presence, she approached slowly.
“Hey girly, where have you been?” Avanti turned to Taraneh and motioned for her. “Break is almost over.”
“Getting a drink,” Taraneh held up the pop can.
She turned to face the traffic and craft an excuse to get out of joining them at the pub. Momentarily, Taraneh considered asking Avanti to disinvite the four teenagers. When she envisioned the most unlikely and the most dreadful response from Avanti, to snub Taraneh instead of the four new hires, she reconsidered her plan. Just as she turned to explain that she was too tired from exams to go out, she saw the boy with the dark windswept hair approach the three of them.
“Avanti, right?” he asked.
“You got it,” responded Avanti. “Danny, Terry, this is Sam. Where’re your friends?”
“Oh, they’re chilling in the staff room,” said Sam as he lit his own cigarette.
The four of them stood in a semicircle facing the traffic on Mt. Pleasant Avenue. Dusk arrived in the city, triggering street lamps, car lights, and business signs, transforming the mundane scenes of littered sidewalks and congested roads into a lively spectacle of flashing colours. On the roadway, a trickle of white headlights drove south to downtown and a steady surge of red tail lights headed north to the suburbs.
Taraneh imagined her father hunched over the steering wheel of his sparkling clean white semi-truck, driving home after a long day of deliveries between the Toronto Food Terminal down by Lake Ontario and the Dominion supermarkets scattered throughout the suburbs.
Once, at a red traffic light along the harbourfront, she had spotted him in his truck. Reflexively, she had turned into the nearest store and waited for him to drive by. She wasn’t sure why she hid or what she had left to hide. He knew that she spent most of her time downtown, and his impression of Taraneh was a sordid blend of disgust and mistrust; he explicitly disapproved of her friends, her haunts, and her lifestyle.
Taraneh remembered that morning when her father had referred to her as a freak; it had been just minutes before her parents ousted her. The previous night, Taraneh had slept at Jennifer’s house. They had pilfered a bottle of Scotch from the liquor cabinet in the family room and locked themselves in Jennifer’s bedroom. With the lights dimmed and the radio playing, they lounged, drank, and gossiped. After a couple of hours, they started a game of Truth or Dare.
Steadily, the dares had progressed to involve more touching. In the dimly lit room, Taraneh had felt confident. She had been thrilled to be touched by Jennifer, to touch Jennifer, and to have Jennifer moan in response to her touches. Privately, each girl had hoped that drinking would lead to sex. After a year of skirting around their feelings, it had been a cathartic release to press their bodies together. Taraneh had lost interest in the world outside of that bedroom, including her plan to catch the last bus home on Sunday evening.
When she returned home Monday morning at seven o’clock, she had planned to pack her textbooks and head out for first-period history class. The tableau of her parents in the living room had foreshadowed the grave consequences of her night out. Unfitting the prim elegance of the living room, her unshaven father had been wearing wrinkled nightclothes. On the couch, in her full-length white nightgown with her lips pursed, her hair tousled, and her legs tucked underneath, her mother had sat silent and stern. Within two minutes of entering the house, the argument with her parents had started.
Aggrieved and perturbed that her parents demanded an explanation of her absence, Taraneh had explained brusquely how she missed the last bus. In an insolent tone that infuriated her parents further, she had reminded them of the message she had left on the answering machine, with Jennifer’s phone number.
Spouting an adage that puzzled and enraged Taraneh, her mother had responded sagely, “You have a home. You don’t need to stay with a stranger.”