Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  As I’m ringing up the sale, I see my Dinky Kebab customer Naveed Shushtari walking by with a gigantic rectangular shopping bag. The Sunglasses Spa is a kiosk in the middle of the mall, so there are no walls and Naveed sees me. He heads my way as I begin ringing up another customer.

  Naveed looks at the Ray-Bans until I’m free, and then he tells me he was here to pick up a poster he had framed at Prints Plus. I might vaguely remember telling him that I work here, although I’m not sure, and the framed art is a pretty good cover if he did come here looking for me.

  “Did you get your car fixed?” I ask, wondering if I’m going to have to pay anything or if my insurance rate is going to go up.

  “I have a buddy who has a body shop,” he says. “It’s all taken care of.”

  “Cool,” I say. Good for me, too. I don’t know what else to say because I’m not too clever with small talk, so I suggest he try on the Ray-Bans he was admiring.

  Naveed refuses to try on any sunglasses. “I don’t want to be your customer,” he says, “because you said you don’t date customers. I was hoping you would go out for dinner with me tonight.”

  It’s not entirely true that I don’t date customers. I mean, I don’t date customers at the Dinky Kebab, but the Sunglasses Spa is where I met Quentin. He bought Persols.

  “Well, you’re still my restaurant customer,” I say, looking up at those gorgeous eyes with pretend innocence through my wispy bangs. “But we can go out as friends. I get off work at six.”

  Date

  Christos is a Greek restaurant in South Minneapolis that is better than the Greek place near Uptown where Melinda and I sometimes eat. I’ve only been to Christos a couple of times, back when I was seeing Kurt and he was raking in the money with his business selling large amounts of pot and small amounts of cocaine. It feels different here with a parking ramp engineer, but comfortable. We share almond-garlic dip, peasant salad, mousakka, and lamb shanks with artichoke sauce. Naveed also orders souvlaki, which is really similar to Persian kebabs. I try to eat all lady-like, but the food is so good and I just keep eating and eating. I don’t worry about the quantity I’m tossing down because I’m very thin. People always tell me I can afford to eat a lot.

  I learn that Naveed came to the U.S. right at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, and got his student visa from the American embassy in Tehran just weeks before it was taken over by the revolutionaries.

  When Naveed was starting college here, I was a sixth-grader at Widsten Elementary, counting the days that Iran held American hostages. We kept track on a small paper-covered bulletin board, framed in a yellow card-stock border with a yellow bow at the top. Each day, a student would be selected to change the number card pinned to the board. There were yellow ribbons everywhere. Naveed’s mother in Iran, he tells me, was worried about what people would do to her son here.

  Naveed tells me about his childhood, and asks me about mine. As we talk I notice how he looks kind of baby-faced, and also how he’s wearing too much cologne. I have a headache coming on. After a dessert of sweet cheese in filo dough, we leave in our own cars. I barely make it home before my headache becomes a migraine and I start throwing up my dinner.

  By the next day I’ve associated Naveed directly with my headache, but I tell myself that’s not fair. It’s just that he would have been plenty attractive without the cologne. When he shows up at the Dinky Kebab that night and asks when we can see each other again, I whisper that I’m still thinking of us as friends, and that if we go out again he can’t wear so much fragrance. Although I really emphasize the if, I quickly make sure Kaveh and Niloofar aren’t looking, and then I write down my phone number on an order slip and slide it to Naveed with his bill.

  Gyp

  For our second date, Naveed picks me up at my apartment. He compliments all Melinda’s gilded gold Catholic iconography, my marbleized silk pillows, the trinkets and the art, and the antique armoire that holds Melinda’s killer stereo system and my T.V. None of this is mine, I confess, except for the pillows and the T.V. I don’t really have a decorating style, and I’m unlikely to ever develop one with so much of Melinda’s global-bazaar style dominating my living space.

  We have a small glass of wine and sit on the scratchy loveseat, which is also mine—or rather I’m borrowing it for the long term from Savi. Unlike me, Savi is a real writer. Sometimes I sit on her couch when I’m writing. I pretend I’m her and have both unique ideas and the focus needed to write all kinds of good stories for both my own creative satisfaction and paying clients.

  I’m not sure what I should think of this guy. Although I’ve liked looking at him and talking to him at the restaurant, I’m not sure I should be sitting on the loveseat drinking wine with him in my apartment. He’s eight years older. And he’s an engineer. My father is an engineer and I never thought I would date one.

  I never thought I would date anyone with a mustache either. At least he has cut out the cologne, which I later learn was Bijan!, the brand worn by many proud Iranian men because the designer Bijan is Iranian himself. Bijan! smells horrible in the large doses it is usually applied.

  The restaurant we choose is an Afghani one that serves food that’s a lot like the food at the Dinky Kebab. I’m partial to the Dinky Kebab and notice how the Afghani place’s rice and kebab portions would never do for most of my customers at the Dinky Kebab. The prices are about two dollars higher on each dish too.

  Naveed notices the price and portion differences too, and says, “What a gyp.”

  “Oh please say ‘what a rip’ instead,” I beg him. “Gyp is so racist, although I’m sure you didn’t know that. It comes from Gypsy, and is an unfair stereotype. It’s no better than saying Jewed.”

  “Okay,” he says, and he quietly lets me tell him about another job I have, writing for the only Gypsy serving on the council of a major human rights organization in Washington D.C. The guy lives here in Minneapolis, and I met him when I wrote a paper about Gypsy stereotypes in literature, movies, and T.V.

  Part of my job (my third job, although this one I call an “internship” since I don’t get paid) is to be vigilant for these slurs and stereotypes, and to write letters to the perpetrators and letters to editors, which occasionally get published. I use these opportunities to tell who the Gypsies really are, that they call themselves Romani, that they have been both contributors to society and victims for thousands of years. During the Holocaust, for example.

  My family is only interested in this work I do because of its amusement potential. They like to quiz me on if it’s bad press for Norwegians when the Minnesota Vikings pillage another team. They ask me if the Pope has asked me to write a letter to the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals.

  But Naveed admires my sincerity about the persecution of the Romani people. He looks at me inquisitively, seeing how I’m more than a waitress and sunglasses sales chick.

  The lighting is low and romantic, and as I sip my wine I start to see Naveed’s thick, long eyelashes. When he takes me back to my apartment, we kiss in the car and he holds me by the elbow again like the day of the car accident. He’s going to New Orleans with his friends, and tells me he wants to see me when he gets back.

  I have the rest of that bottle of wine, and because I have rented Under Siege for myself but it seems like a good guy movie, I invite him in.

  We keep to our own sides of the scratchy loveseat for the opening scenes. Sometime between the scene when Tommy Lee Jones’s helicopter lands on the ship and the scene of his mercenaries trying to kill Steven Seagal in the ship’s kitchen, we start kissing. I still have Melinda’s voice in my head, asking me why I think he would ask out a young and lowly waitress except to get laid. “You have to go home now,” I say. “But bring me something from New Orleans, some little souvenir.”

  “Some Voodoo potion?” he asks.

  “Sure, something Voodoo-y.” I walk him out of my apartment.

  It’s late, but my mom never goes to bed before midnight on a weekend, esp
ecially now that she’s sober and divorced and can do whatever she wants to do—except for drink. I call her.

  Mom is in bed reading and eating Whoppers malted milk balls. She’s supposed to be taking it easy for a few more weeks while her knee heals, but she tells me about her long walk today. She crutched all over a big park while Bruce ran ahead and back to her over and over until he’d gone ten miles and she’d crutched almost two. I never even walk two miles.

  I don’t tell her about Naveed, even though it’s probably why I called her right after he left. Although she hasn’t had a drink in years now, I notice that she sounds a bit drunk. She slurs her words sometimes when she’s feeling depressed, and I know that she’s depressed because Bruce has also been going jogging with another woman.

  Like me, my mom lets men be too much a part of what makes her happy. I must get this from her, although my sisters are much more independent. Her voice clears up and she sounds better when I ask her what she’s going to plant in her garden this year.

  She says she already has pansies in pots and all her spring bulbs are up and in bud. “I’ll get tomatoes and cucumbers in the ground as soon as we’ve had our last frost,” she says. Then she starts slurring again and adds, “If I’m still alive by then.”

  Roux

  I’m trying to make that spicy corn chowder that Melinda made. Since she started dating Roger, she’s been cooking a lot of southwestern cuisine. She has a cookbook called Hot Spots, and the chowder is one of its chili pepper-inspired recipes. But the book says “make a roux,” and since Melinda isn’t here and I don’t know what that is, I call my mom.

  She makes shrimp and crawfish bisques, sometimes even lobster. “It’s what I do when I make the bisque,” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about and then she moves on to start talking (and talking and talking) about something else instead of giving me the directions. She’s never actually taught me how to make her bisque. Maybe she’s changing the subject because she remembered she’s keeping it a secret. But now at least I know one part: it has a roux.

  I call Laura’s fiancé, Ty, who tells me, “Stir a smidgeon of flour into butter on the stove until it takes on the color and aroma of roasted chestnuts.” Ty loves to cook, which is good because Laura does not. I don’t know why my mom couldn’t have just told me how to make the roux.

  Mom is from Georgia, but she’s now spent more years in Minnesota than there. She has the gift of gab like Grandma Vivian. Still, her cooking is mostly Minnesotan, since she was married to my Norwegian-American dad until two years ago. The only southern things she makes are fried chicken (the best), spicy sweet potatoes, chicken curry salad with apples (which Savi says is not how you should treat curry), and pecan pie. And the bisque, of course. I love all of those things, but that’s all she will do for me. The rest of her cooking is what my dad likes, or now what Bruce likes.

  Sometimes I craved the southern flavors so much that I poured Tabasco sauce on pieces of bologna and stuck them under the broiler for a snack before Mom’s meals of boiled potatoes and baked fish.

  I wish Mom cooked all kinds of Georgia low-country food, and could teach me. But she never even taught me how to make the bisque. I’d spent years trying to figure it out and didn’t even know about sautéing the onions first until Melinda told me how sautéing brings out the flavor in everything.

  I’m always telling Melinda she should write a cookbook. She cooks a lot, usually the cuisine of the guy she’s dating at any given time. Since her college career was like one long Festival of Nations, I’ve learned some things from her about international cooking. But the relationships never lasted long enough for Melinda to master the cuisine, so I never picked up much.

  Brain Surgery

  The Sunglasses Spa at Southdale inconspicuously occupies the lower level rotunda, so when two dozen red roses arrive for me there I hear a lot of hooting and hollering about it from fellow mall workers. They like to tease.

  Quentin sent me flowers all of the time, but never red roses like these. “Pink, for excitement,” Quentin once had the little card inscribed to read when he’d sent a dozen perfect pink roses.

  “Pink for pussy is more like it,” Melinda had said when I showed her the card. “You know how guys think.”

  I don’t know how old Dori is, but even though Quentin is in his thirties, he never dates “anyone whose biological clock is ticking.” That should have been my first clue. I guess I just get blinded when I’m in a relationship. I hope that isn’t what’s happening to me again now.

  My coworkers see the red roses, and guess that Quentin and I have moved to the next level instead of that he has moved to the next level with his old girlfriend. In hindsight, I see his lack of commitment. I see that he is not going to call. And, as if the big glass sunglasses case is my crystal ball, I suddenly see that Dori is probably not going to get his commitment in the end either.

  Naveed sent these red roses, probably by making a simple phone call from New Orleans. There’s a typed card that reads, “I got your souvenir. A hint—it’s something Voodoo-y.” I imagine him telling the florist to put “Voodoo-y” on the card, and it makes me smile and think about him for the rest of my shift.

  When I get home at night, Melinda shakes her head about Naveed and the roses, but she overcomes her desire to tell me again how good it is when cultures don’t collide.

  Instead, she says, “I’m going to show you how to hang your roses upside down to dry. I was tired of how you always left your roses from Quentin in my antique vases until they rotted.” I remember. She’d left me a Post-it note on that once: “Valerie, Remove dead roses and clean vase.”

  “I know how to hang roses upside down. It isn’t brain surgery,” I tell her.

  “I’m going to show you how to do it properly,” she says, like Martha Stewart although Martha’s television show isn’t on the air yet, “so they will last a long time and look beautiful in our apartment.” Martha does not exist to us. We’re still that untapped market of status-hungry young women for whom Martha has launched a business that just hasn’t reached us yet.

  I nod, pleased that I can contribute something to the decor, and grateful that there’s only one Post-it note today. It’s a recurring one on the bathroom mirror asking me to wipe down the vanity after using the sink.

  I have a little bit of pot, and we smoke it together from my marble pipe while Melinda, her blonde hair pulled up in a Southwestern-looking beaded barrette, shows me how it’s done. She wraps a rubber band around the stems to hang the roses from a banana hook sitting atop three phone books into a bowl of white powder on the table. The white powder will absorb the moisture from the petals quickly, so they can dry before turning black.

  I don’t know where she learned this. “This actually is like brain surgery,” I say. “What’s the powder?”

  “Silica.” She folds over the top of the bag of white powder and puts a paper clip on it. “It acts as a desiccant.” She pronounces desiccant so casually, like it’s a word she uses frequently, although this is probably the first time she’s ever said it.

  I think we’re done, so I decide to watch a rerun of Cheers while I glance over an article about Iran in my New York Times. Since I met Naveed, Iranian stories catch my eye more than they did before, even though I’ve worked in the restaurant for two years. So I can see how it happens to Melinda—how she gets into things as they relate to her newest boyfriend every time.

  Melinda goes to work on another necklace and tells me she might try selling jewelry again. In college we made neon clay jewelry together and sold it at a gallery in Butler Square. One morning when I was still asleep my mom called and told me to run and get a Star Tribune. One of our pins was on the cover of the Variety section for a story about artsy jewelry by female designers. After that we had a flurry of business, but we let it slide.

  Now she has the bug again. I just don’t know how she can work with those little beads if she’s as stoned as I am. I like to marbleize silk fabric with
paint, but I don’t make jewelry anymore.

  I will never understand Iranian politics, I decide, so I toss the newspaper to the floor and laugh along with the laugh track on Cheers, just briefly acknowledging to myself the privilege of being able to abandon the “story” on another country.

  Melinda and I hang out a lot for the next few days, like old times. Roger is in New Mexico. Melinda turned down a dinner date with her old boyfriend, Omar, who is promising her that he got out of his arranged marriage in Palestine, and that he is madly in love with only her. But Melinda tells him she’s happy now, being with an American. She recommends he marry the woman his family has chosen for him.

  Voodoo

  By the time the red roses have dehydrated in the silica and been arranged in Melinda’s greenish-gold vase, Naveed is back from his trip and inviting me to dinner at his house. I’m excited to see Naveed for our third date. He’s reminded me over the phone that he has souvenirs for me and I can’t wait to see what they are. I hope for something really good.

  I get my highlights touched up and it feels great to be blonde again, as always, even though it makes my long hair frizzy and fly-away. My skin has broken out and I work hard on popping pimples and applying my prescription adult acne lotion.

  I put on jeans that show my flat belly and a short T-shirt, feeling confident as long as I can sneak into a bathroom to touch up my concealer every hour. I drive over to his house, following the directions he’s given me over the phone.

  The house is a 1950s brick rambler in South Minneapolis, near the border to the affluent suburb of Edina. When I pull up, Naveed is outside helping his neighbor across the street unload bricks from his car and bring them around to the side of his house. He introduces me to the guy, who is also Iranian, and I go sit on the front steps. It’s cold this May evening, but mainly because of the wind.