Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Aminah Mae Safi

  “Forgive her?”

  Sana felt a smile pulling at her lips. Felt some sense of solidarity with Rachel, though Sana couldn’t quite say how. She just stared into those warm brown eyes again. She didn’t know when she’d get another chance to memorize their color. They really were like the color of tea—nearly black one moment, with a flash of red the next. “My mamani was online and she saw a photo of me that my mom had posted. And that was it for her. She needed to know me. Needed to forgive my mom.”

  “That’s it?” Rachel looked like she usually did before she exploded. Her eyebrows were raised, her cheeks pinched in. Like she drew in as much potential energy as she could before releasing it all into the world in some spectacular fashion. “They f—sorry. They cut her off. Told her to leave, and then suddenly they see a photo and all is forgiven?”

  Sana tugged at the end of her ponytail, then released it. “They didn’t really forgive my mom. But she didn’t really forgive them either. It’s a mess. But at least they’re talking.”

  “Still doesn’t explain your mom’s career path, or even the fancy prep school.” Rachel watched Sana. Studied her. Looked at her.

  People looked at Sana’s face all the time. Her body, too. Sana knew that gaze well. But few people ever looked at her. In that moment, Sana forgot she was standing in line in a crowded space. Forgot anyone could overhear. She could have divulged every secret she’d ever had. “In those couple of years, my mom had to stand on her own. She took me and everything she felt was really hers, packed it in her old Mitsubishi, and drove up to LA. Decided that there were jobs in the film industry besides just making the movie or writing the movie or acting in the movie.

  “She said she wasn’t qualified for much at that point—prep-school educated, college dropout, single mom, no work experience except some time filing in her father’s office. But she decided it didn’t matter. Said she wouldn’t leave the lot until she got work. I think it was the Warner lot, though honestly it could have been Sony. She dropped me off at the childcare there and wouldn’t let up. So finally some grizzly old carpenter felt bad for her, took her under his wing, taught her everything he knew. And he never regretted it. My mother hardly slept, she worked so hard in those days. Even then, she knew it wasn’t a guarantee. But she decided she was going to make it. Through sheer willpower, I think. It’s kind of amazing what you can do when you decide you can’t fail.”

  Rachel was too dumbstruck to respond to this. Sana could see it. She lowered her voice a little bit, made Rachel lean in to hear her. Sana needed to know she could make Rachel lean in toward her. “And even after they started talking again—my grandparents and my mom—Mom wouldn’t take anything from them.”

  And then, against all odds, Rachel did lean closer.

  Sana took a deep breath. “Only took the money when it was for my education. Because she said she’d be crazy to turn down that kind of opportunity, not when it was my future on the line.”

  Rachel bit the inside of her cheek, like she was suppressing a smile. “Your mom sounds kind of ruthless.”

  Sana smiled. Not the sly one she usually tried out on people. No, this was her real, honest-to-God grin, and she watched as it hit Rachel like a well-executed sucker punch to the gut. “There is something particularly ruthless about my mom. I’ve always admired that about her. She’s so single-minded. Nothing stops her.”

  Rachel stared for a long moment. “My mom left. A few years ago.”

  “She left?”

  “Yeah. Up and gone. Out of our lives. Guess she couldn’t take us anymore.”

  “But your dad’s still around? Or do you have other family?”

  “Don’t really have other family. My dad was an only child and his parents died before I was born. But yeah, Papa’s still around,” said Rachel. “He was kind of touch and go for a minute there, but he pulled through. And my mom was an orphan. Is an orphan, I guess. But my dad and I, we’ve got each other.”

  Sana reached out and touched Rachel’s wrist. “I’m really sorry.”

  Rachel stared at her wrist for a long moment. Sana lifted her hand. It was tingling and strange and somehow seemed like it didn’t belong to her anymore at all. But she knew it did. Knew she’d reached out for Rachel.

  Oh no. Sana felt her face flush.

  “That’ll be seventeen each,” said a voice right in front of them.

  Sana startled. Even Rachel looked a little bit stunned to have finally reached the front of the line. Sana reached into her back pocket and paid for them both before she’d realized what they had done. Rachel looked ready to protest.

  But Sana shook her head. “Just pay for my dinner?”

  Rachel snorted but didn’t put up any further protest. She just made her way through the crowd of people, trying to find an open spot. When she finally found one, she got a blanket out of her backpack and, still maintaining her grip on one end, threw it out in the air. The blanket landed flat and relatively smooth on the grass.

  “Do you mind sharing?” Rachel looked at Sana, but wasn’t making eye contact.

  Sana shrugged, as casual as she could manage. “Sure.”

  Rachel sat on one side of the blanket and Sana did her best to sit as far on the other side of the blanket as possible. She needed to make space, to make distance between them. Sana stretched out her legs. She could feel the warmth of the setting sun through her jeans. She leaned back on her hands, tilting her face up toward the sun. She closed her eyes even though she was wearing sunglasses. Spring in Los Angeles was such a fickle thing. One minute it was fifty degrees and too cold for shorts, the next it was eighty-five and required a sundress and a slushie to survive.

  Today, this evening, right now—however—was perfect. It was warm, with a night breeze just starting to kick up the dust in the park and the haze in the last of the light. Sana had actually worn the right amount of clothing for the rapidly cooling weather.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “I need to ask you something.”

  Sana leaned over toward Rachel’s voice but kept her eyes closed. “Yes?”

  “What did you mean—Helen of Troy isn’t an object, everyone just thinks she is?”

  Sana let her back fall against the blanket. Felt her T-shirt grow slightly cold and damp from the dew that was bleeding through the cloth. “She’s the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s the face that launched a thousand ships.”

  “I know that.”

  Sana turned, looked at Rachel. She needed Rachel to understand. To get this. To really, honest-to-goodness understand. “She isn’t just a face. Isn’t just the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s got thoughts and feelings and ambitions and drive. She’s got her own hopes, her own fears. The storytellers take away a lot of her agency, saying she ran off because a goddess cursed her with love. But she could have stayed. You always have a choice, no matter what you feel. She made the choice to leave it all behind. To do what was unsafe and unexpected. She decided to be selfish.”

  “Aren’t all beautiful women selfish?”

  The words were so quiet, but they still felt like a slap across the face. Sana rolled back, looking at the sky and the trees that seemed to float on the edges of her vision. “I can’t answer that for you. That’s a belief you’ve got. But it’s equally selfish to choose home and safety and the familiar as it is to choose love over duty. My mom chose duty and it almost destroyed her.”

  “She left her children. Helen had a little girl.”

  The air tensed, charged with something Sana was only beginning to understand. “You can think that’s bad or wicked. Immoral, if you want. But there’s drama in that choice. You’re a filmmaker. You’re supposed to see your characters, even the ones you don’t like. You don’t just take away Helen’s agency because you don’t like her or don’t agree with her. I’ve seen your other films. I don’t think you want to make a movie where you take away Helen’s free will. Her ability to change the plot herself.”

  Rachel stared at Sana with a str
ange combination of hurt and anger and wonder.

  Sana tried to find the right words. “Helen of Troy is more than a plot device. She’s more than a beautiful stolen object that needs to be retrieved.”

  “That doesn’t make her good.” Rachel hadn’t flinched, hadn’t looked away.

  “I never said she was good. I said she was human. Flawed and real and flesh and blood. Barely older than us and scared out of her mind. Don’t make Helen perfect. Make her real. I know you can make her real.” And that’s when Sana saw it—the moment when Rachel Recht heard exactly what Sana had said.

  The moment when Rachel honestly listened. Sana’s breath caught.

  “Fine,” said Rachel. “You can look over the whole project. But that doesn’t mean I’ll change anything.”

  “Is it so bad letting someone help?”

  Rachel’s mouth pulled to one side, like she couldn’t decide whether to frown or to smile. “Maybe not.”

  Sana returned the expression with an unwilling half grin of her own.

  “Come on,” said Rachel, with a shake of her head. “Let’s get in a food truck line before the movie starts. I still owe you dinner.”

  10

  Chew Like You Have a Secret

  Rachel

  Rachel preferred the city at night, at the edge of winter—the rainy season was over, mostly, but the weather would snap back and forth so nobody knew what to expect. The night air was cool, slightly more cleared of pollution. A metallic tang on the wind, plus the scent of ripening oranges and lemons and whatever other citrus fruit people were growing on their balconies. The jasmine wouldn’t bloom until summer—thank God—because at this point, Rachel wouldn’t be able to smell jasmine without thinking of Sana. But even the jasmine bushes had the best scent at night. They didn’t call it night-blooming jasmine for nothing, after all.

  Los Angeles at night was the thump of the car along potholes, the whoosh of the cold air as the passenger’s window rolled up, the distinctive woompa woompa pop of a chopper as it shone its spotlight on the latest criminal search mid-city. It was the Santa Ana winds blowing dust and debris and smog into your eyes.

  What took hours and hours of traffic during the day to get across West Hollywood a car could fly through at night in five minutes flat.

  Rachel took a left down Beverly Drive. She should have taken Beverwil, but she preferred to watch the way Beverly meandered through the upper-middle-class, posturing homes of South Beverly before she had to duck back under the 10 and head into Palms. She liked to turn the old heater on in her car, warming it up until it was stifling hot and she was sweating, then cracking her windows open, taking a relieving breath of cool night air.

  She took a deep inhale. Perfect. The air was perfect tonight.

  Of course, she’d gone and blown that perfect night all to hell by spending the evening lying next to Sana and trying to watch an eighties rom-com classic.

  Rachel should have definitively categorized taking Sana to see a movie as a mistake, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t bring herself to cancel the next movie night, either. But it hadn’t gone according to plan at all, and Rachel was instinctively uncomfortable with things that didn’t go according to plan.

  Rachel had to duck off of Beverly and meet back up with Beverwil, the inevitable dead end having forced her hand on the matter of routes. She could drive down Beverly the way some people could drive down Crescent. Forever on a loop, watching the same houses speed by over and over again. Slowing down for the same speed humps. Timing them perfectly so she never had to brake. Finding the rhythm of her foot lifting off the accelerator was definitely better than thinking about Sana as she explained her mom getting pregnant at nineteen and divorced by twenty. Who Rachel couldn’t help but for a moment compare to Rachel’s own mother, who had gotten pregnant—as though it were the thing to do—at thirty.

  But Rachel stopped herself before her thoughts could follow all the way down that path, like a tracking shot cut short. Cut short for good reason, too. Rachel did everything she could to avoid her mother. Thoughts, words, deeds, memories, mementos. Anything. Everything.

  The scenery grew less scenic. Still palm trees lining the roads. But more laundromats. Fewer homes, more apartment complexes. More fences, though some of the odd, new gentrification variety. Rachel was glad she would finish high school before she saw the rise of Palms as a neighborhood for young professionals to live in. Her dad wouldn’t have to worry about rent with her out of the home. He could get something smaller if it became unaffordable. He could move.

  Rachel pulled up to the apartment building she lived in. It had a covered, exposed parking garage, like it had been a motel once, back in better days. But Rachel wasn’t sure Palms had ever had better days. To her, it had always been one of those places where dreams and dreamers had gone to die.

  Just look at Papa.

  Rachel pulled her bag out of the car, sticking her key in the lock to lock it. It was a very manual kind of car, minus the extra-shitty automatic transmission.

  When she reached her room, she collapsed onto her bed, shoes and all. She wanted to live here forever in this bed and never get up, not after the day that she had had. But she had to finalize her shooting schedule. She had to get out a pen, get out the journal she kept all of her shooting notes in. She had to check off everything she’d accomplished that day.

  She had to make sure she could get through everything for her film by the end of the month. She had to stop thinking about Sana, her unexpected honesty, her unexpected life. She had to conquer this feeling that was welling up in her chest that felt suspiciously like empathy for the girl who had made Rachel tense up throughout the hallways for all of freshman year.

  Because this feeling, this one she’d been avoiding for her whole drive home, was almost like caring for a girl who Rachel was supposed to hate.

  Sana

  When Sana walked into her grandparents’ house the following evening, she felt a shiver zip down her spine. Mamani must have set the air-conditioning to full blast.

  Athena Mashi had answered the door and was already giving her older sister a once-over. “Can you ever dress like an actual human, didi?”

  Sana’s mom snorted. “If Mom’s not letting me sleep in on my day off, then I’m wearing my house clothes out.”

  Athena Mashi shrugged. “Your funeral.”

  Mom hadn’t changed out of her sweatpants and T-shirt. She’d called it athleisure on her way out the door, much to Sana’s frustration. Mom shrugged, leaned in to give her sister the glancing affection of a couple of kisses across her cheeks. “Did she fire her maid again?”

  “No, but she’s all worked up, so I sent Leni off on an errand away from her. Your ex is here, by the way. I thought I should warn you.”

  “You didn’t warn me soon enough.”

  “You think they told me ahead of time? I found out after you. Maman.” Athena rolled her eyes in a way she never would at her actual mother. She looked over at Sana. “You look perfect, as always.”

  But Athena Mashi didn’t say it like perfection was an ideal or a compliment. She was assessing, because Athena Mashi missed nothing. Sana went in for a couple of kisses on the cheek so her aunt couldn’t scrutinize her expression any further.

  Athena Mashi let them into the house.

  Mom scanned the crowd, catching sight of Massoud. “Hail the returning prodigal ex-son-in-law.”

  “I wish I could lie to you and tell you he’s a horrible slob, but he honestly looks better than he did at twenty.” Athena Mashi shook her head, like nobody was safe from the cruel humor of the universe.

  “I know.” Mom made a beeline for Dadu’s office. “I need refreshment.”

  “Kitchen’s the other way,” said Athena Mashi.

  “The good stuff’s in here,” said Mom, not missing a beat.

  “Get me something,” Athena Mashi shouted.

  “Get yourself something.” Mom disappeared into the office.

&
nbsp; Athena Mashi shook her head. “Your mother.”

  People gave that headshake and used those words a lot around Sana. Your mother the family reprobate. Your mother the wayward daughter. Your mother the hellion. Your mother your mother your mother.

  It was a subtle warning, an everyday kind of hint—Sana was supposed to do everything in her power to become nothing like her mother. Athena Mashi probably didn’t even realize she was doing it. Sana didn’t know which she resented more, the implication itself or the fact that it had worked so well on her.

  Because here Sana was, the potential to be Princeton class of 2023. Here she was in her perfect, knee-length skirt and blouse, her perfectly smoothed hair, her perfectly applied makeup. And there her mom was, getting drunk in her sweatpants in Dadu’s office.

  The contrast between her and her mother gave Sana the sensation that generations were pressing down on her, like the ghosts of her ancestors could sit on her chest and make her breathing difficult, make her inhales shaky and her exhales sharp.

  Mom had been the only one with the courage, or maybe the sheer need, to leave home. Everyone else had stayed, milling about the Orange County scene. Mom’s only sister, Athena, had gone into art dealership and done well for herself. She had a husband but she didn’t want children, much to Mamani’s consternation. Farhad Mama did retirement planning. Zain Mama—well, honestly, Sana wasn’t sure what Uncle Zain did other than fly around the world and make buckets of money and refuse to settle down like a proper adult the way Mamani wanted.

  Not that Mom had had much choice in the matter. It was either walk the line with her marriage and be the genteel kind of Orange County good girl that made Mom want to scream into the void (and probably played no small part in the decision-making process that led to her unplanned pregnancy) or run away.