Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  When Naveed tries to open the front door for me, it sticks and he has to turn the knob just so and then give it a little kick. But I’m instantly more comfortable than I ever was in Quentin’s Lake Minnetonka chateau with his majestic double doors with their leaded glass windows, satin-nickel handle set, and electronic entry. Naveed is clearly happy to see me—he tries to lay me down on the couch for a long kiss, but I stiffen. I want to see my presents.

  My souvenirs turn out to be:

  a voodoo rag doll with pins

  a jasmine-filled pillow

  a mechanical shark-shaped back scratcher

  Dinner is some sort of tomato-based split pea stew called gheimeh that has homemade french fries on it and is served on top of rice. It’s Persian food, but not the kind of food they serve at the Dinky Kebab. It’s great, and I’m impressed that he made it himself and has even lit candles.

  The movie Naveed has rented, The Firm, is suspenseful and engrossing. But he’s made a fire and positioned us against backrests on the floor in front of it, and by the time Tom Cruise’s character accepts the too-good-to-be-true lawyer job, we’re talking more than watching. By the time it dawns on Tom Cruise that his wife Jeanne Tipplethorn was right to suspect his new employers, we’re kissing on the floor, backrests cast aside. We stay on the floor in front of the fire. I’m the one to remove the clothing, mine and his, deciding not to take the slow route or pretend to be a virgin as Melinda had advised I do if I want any chance at this being more than an affair, which she still insisted was a bad idea.

  Afterward, he moves to my side and holds me in his arms. “So this is what making love means,” he says.

  “Haven’t you made love before? You had girlfriends.”

  “I’m sure I have, but you’ve made me forget,” he says. I know this answer is extremely corny, but I fall for it anyway, laying my head on his broad chest and breathing in sync with him.

  We lie in front of the slow-burning fire and talk until the middle of the night. I already know he had a serious girlfriend once for three years and was once “almost engaged” to an Iranian woman he was set up with by his mother and someone else. But now he tells me the rest: the recent girlfriends and the wild 80s. I tell him about my own wild 80s and early 90s. Well, not all, but I don’t pretend to be a twenty-four-year-old virgin.

  We make love again, and then we take a long shower and go to sleep in his bedroom. His bedroom is very 80s bacheloresque and I imagine him on the black lacquered waterbed with an unknown number of women who preceded me. There’s a black onyx panther staring at me from its perch on the headboard shelf—maybe it’s kept track.

  In the morning Naveed lends me an extra toothbrush. I wonder if he keeps them in stock for one-nighters. But looking at him now, that’s sort of hard to imagine. He stands in front of the bathroom sink in a striped robe and bunny slippers that seem incongruent with the style of his black lacquered water bedroom set.

  After he brushes his teeth, he kicks off the bunny slippers and changes into a fishing resort T-shirt. Then he’s off to the Byerly’s in Edina for apple fritters and orange juice to bring back to his house. I wait here, alone.

  Snooping is a part of my nature, inherited from my diary-reading mother. It was the best part of babysitting. After kids went to sleep, drawers would be opened, master suites would be explored, and I would scrutinize everything: Some husbands used condoms, which I had never thought of as birth control for married people, and some families seemed to drink a lot, while others had not a drop of alcohol anywhere. I sometimes found porn in my conservative middle-class neighborhood, and once found some cocaine in the desk of a Wayzata car dealership owner.

  The challenge with gathering information in an Iranian immigrant’s house is that much of the writing is in Persian, and I can’t read that, so I don’t know if anything I see is incriminating or not.

  What is somewhat disturbing is the mess of strange collections in two of the rooms. One room is a second bedroom, and it’s a quarter full of gadgets: tools, picture frames, things that look like they’re from the reject pile at Brookstone. There’s a bed in there, but it’s covered with paperwork—copies of bills and photocopies of articles that, at my childhood home, my father would have filed in neat folders in his big mahogany desk.

  The other room, I realize, should be a dining room. It’s right outside of the kitchen, but it has a pocket door that matches the kitchen’s pocket door, instead of a regular bedroom door. Naveed served our dinner in the kitchen last night, so it hadn’t occurred to me that he had a dining room.

  There’s no dining set in here, just a brass chandelier above a bed where there should be a dining table, and there’s open shelving for dishes rather than a regular closet. This room has stranger collections yet: clothes, fabric, and a sewing table. There’s a vanity table with a mirror and brush next to an old calendar notebook. I open the drawer and find special soaps and lotions.

  At first I think: Could he be married? Is his wife out of town? But then I look at the vanity table again, and something—or someone—sort of registers.

  His mother.

  He’s told me about her. The mirror and brush are sitting on something very pretty and white. It’s a delicate lace doily, crocheted with complicated tiny shells and popcorn stitches.

  Gruff

  When next I see Naveed at the Dinky Kebab, I boldly ask Niloofar, “Could you wait on this customer? I don’t want to wait on my dates.”

  She’s confused for a second, thinking I’m saying something about the giant sweet Medjool dates we sell at the counter. But then she gets it. Niloofar’s other cousin, Jamsheed, is standing by, but he leaves this conversation to her. He knows he has no right to comment. Still, he stands close enough to listen to me tell Niloofar that Naveed and I are dating. There’s just a hint of a blush on his face. Jamsheed and Kaveh treat me with a great deal of kindness and concern all of the time. They’re proud of all of their college-girl waitresses, whom they treat like their own little sisters.

  Niloofar, like a bossy older sister, comes straight out with her concern. She’s always the first to say if one of the waitresses could use a little lipstick, or has some on her teeth. From what she’s seen, she thinks this Naveed is a little “gruff.” He isn’t very charming. And no, she does not see the warmth in his eyes that I see. I don’t know how she could not, but I’m glad that his eyes don’t smolder like that for everyone.

  She doesn’t mention my reputation, but there’s that too.

  “He’s hardly even polite,” she whispers. “Certainly not the example of a refined Persian gentleman.” I glance at him. He’s pretending he doesn’t know me to try to keep me from getting in trouble with my bosses.

  “He’s not gruff,” I say. “I don’t know where you get that. Maybe just a little clueless.”

  “Ah, just like you.” Niloofar turns to go seat him and his work colleague without menus. She knows what they each always order.

  I have to take the next three tables. Niloofar is leaving after lunch and still needs to work on the schedule for next week. When I go to look at the schedule hanging up in the kitchen later, I see she’s only given me two shifts.

  Less money, I think, with concern because one of my sisters’ birthday and my mom’s birthday are coming up and it’s hard enough to pay rent and buy good birthday presents.

  But also, I think: More time to do other things.

  Naveed and I feel bold. We need some things from the Dinky Kebab’s market the next weekend. Already we’re together so much that we have to tend to housekeeping chores together, like grocery shopping. One of us could just go alone, but it’s almost summer and I haven’t yet taken a ride on Naveed’s rarely driven motorcycle. I’ve only ridden on one a couple of times before, with my motorcycle-cop Uncle Andy, in Atlanta.

  The roads are clear and the air is exhilarating. I wear the only helmet and put my arms around Naveed while we ride into Dinkytown. We pull up in the lot and I take off my helmet. Kaveh is on the l
oading dock, and when he sees me, he goes back inside. We don’t see him again. Jamsheed rings up our olives, bread, saffron, and feta cheese with polite small talk and a blush on his princely sculpted cheeks.

  Intersections

  I don’t want to be all dramatic about my parents’ divorce. I didn’t even cry a lot when it happened, only when we had to sell our house and I said goodbye to my childhood bedroom I shared with Laura. But to me right now, it seems like my dad, Neil, has spent most of his free time for the last twenty-plus years on the golf course, and that he didn’t seem to mind an awful lot of traveling for work. It didn’t seem to me like it was such a big loss for either of them.

  So, there isn’t much to dramatize, but still I decide to put Mom and Dad, with made-up names instead of Eugenia and Neil, in my Shoedog story, maybe just for filler because I’m a little stuck on some of the retail team members’ lives.

  Melinda is playing her CDs loudly, but I want to read some of my story to her, so I turn it down a little and then I read:

  “Linda wanted more affection, but Carl thought she was content with her ladies bridge group and her drinking and all she did to take care of Megan. Of course, she was sober for years before they separated, but sobriety didn’t bring them any closer.

  Megan wouldn’t want a marriage like that. But still. She picked up her squirming terrier mutt. She asked herself, ‘Oh, why, after this long, can’t they just stick it out?’”

  “Stop right there,” says Melinda. “That’s over-the-top. And what does Megan want them to stick out?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I ask. “When my mom asked for the divorce, my dad said, ‘I thought we were going to stick it out.’ And my mom said, ‘You go stick it out.’”

  “Your mom has a weird sense of humor,” Melinda says. And again, like the term shoedog, I have to explain to her why “stick it out” belongs in the story. I have to remind Melinda how after my dad gave up on the counseling, Mom started flirting with other men at the YMCA, and noticing that they flirted back. When one recently separated man with a very un-Neil-like hairy chest and a very un-Neil-like tight ass played footsie with her in the Jacuzzi, she thought maybe she didn’t want to stick it out with Neil.

  “Okay, fine, keep reading,” Melinda says. So I read:

  “Myrtle Beach was going to be golf heaven. Carl’s two best buddies since high school were living there. Linda was getting an apartment in Minneapolis.”

  “Your dad didn’t move to South Carolina!” Melinda calls me on the fact that my dad is moving a half-hour east to St. Paul with his new wife, Wanda. And that my mom moved to a suburb near Wayzata with lower home values.

  “It’s fiction—I’m just using some things from my life. Megan isn’t me,” I insist. I read some more:

  “The new family would be moving into the house in three weeks. Megan needed to get an apartment again instead of what she had been doing, sponging off of her parents since she returned from her study-abroad program. Taghato’s was hiring in Women’s Shoes.”

  “Taghato’s? Is that what you are calling the department store now?” Melinda asks. “I thought it was just good old Dayton’s in your last draft.”

  “I renamed it for the story. I learned that taghato means crossroads in Persian. Working in Dayton’s Women’s Shoes in downtown Minneapolis was like being at the crossroads of my life.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you’ve crossed the road yet.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” I say. Melinda is very seriously building her “network” and scrambling to get a salaried position. She paid two thousand dollars to work with a career specialist, and she’s joined Toastmasters. It’s true that she’s crossing an intersection I haven’t yet reached. I didn’t even send in my tax form on time.

  “Isn’t Megan going to have two sisters, so you can explore your problems as a middle child?” Melinda asks. Melinda is an only child. She likes to explore what birth order means for people with siblings, and imagine how she would be different if she had a younger or older sibling or both.

  “No, Megan isn’t going to have any sisters,” I say. “That would make the story too complicated.”

  “Well, think about it,” Melinda says. “According to what I’ve read, the oldest girl always attaches to the father and the youngest to the mother. The middle child is neither here nor there, never attaching or taking much of an interest in people.”

  “That’s so untrue. And how does that make for a good story?” I ask.

  Melinda twists her amethyst beaded necklace around her index finger. “The middle child is most likely to become a sociopath, basically. Think of Jan Brady all grown up. Doesn’t that give you any ideas for character development?”

  “Thanks,” I say, looking at her necklace, imagining the string of beads wrapping itself tighter and tighter around her neck. “But my main character doesn’t need any sisters.”

  “Just like that Brady Bunch episode when Jan wished she didn’t have any,” she says as she rises to turn the music up again.

  Then I think, but I don’t say, Maybe she won’t have a best friend either.

  Golf

  My mom has lent me her Lady Callaway golf clubs, which are two decades old, but she swears they are the best brand, and always calls them “My Lady Callaways.” Laura and Courtney have new Lynx clubs.

  We’ve come to play this nine-hole course after Courtney and I just got fitted with paper dresses at the seamstress’s house. Laura and Ty are getting married in a few weeks. Laura isn’t too concerned about the lack of progress on the dresses, though. She’s more worried about our mom. We went out to dinner with Mom last night for her and Laura’s birthdays.

  Bruce just broke up with her and took the woman he’d been jogging with to Hilton Head. I could say I know how she feels, since Quentin dumped me, but it’s different for Mom because she’s still hurting from the divorce. Bruce was numbing the pain, and now he has just doubled it.

  “I know,” I say. “I actually called the suicide hotline because she was dropping hints. They said she has to call them herself, and that we can’t do anything unless she’s in the middle of attempting. Then they can arrest her because it’s illegal.”

  “It’s illegal?” Courtney asks. “That’s absurd.”

  It’s Courtney who looks slightly absurd, wearing pajama pants with a polo shirt on the golf course. The girls just a few years younger than my high school class started this trend. Pajamas in public—the ultimate win for the id over the superego and the ego. It’s a good thing we play at a public course. This would not be allowed at Wayzata Country Club.

  Laura disagrees. “Suicide is basically murder—just of your own self.”

  Still, Laura thinks I’m overreacting. She was away at college during Mom’s worst alcohol years, and she’s never quite believed that our high-achieving mother even had a problem. Mom seems pretty together to her, running races and settling into her new house. But Laura knows Mom is beyond blue.

  Courtney, as usual, switches from agreeing with me to agreeing with Laura. “Yeah, I mean—I doubt mom would kill herself over a male nurse.”

  Bruce doesn’t really match anybody’s stereotype of a male nurse, but I laugh anyway. This is still a time before so many men go into nursing, so it’s still funny. Most of our mom’s nursing colleagues have been women, so when she met Bruce and found out he was a nurse she was a little hesitant. It didn’t take long for her to realize there was nothing feminine about him. I still can’t imagine him having any bedside manner.

  “I hope Mom and Dad get along okay at the wedding,” I say. Laura drives the ball from the tee and it lands a few feet from the green. My ball goes into a thicket of ornamental shrubs that I’m sure weren’t there a second ago. I go into the thicket to get my ball, and come back out with a rip in my shirt from a thorny branch. Laura looks at me with sympathy, but I know she’s getting impatient.

  “Ty is making a fabulous dinner tonight. I can’t wait,” says Laura. “He’s been cooking
with porcini mushrooms a lot lately.” Courtney rolls her eyes, probably because she doesn’t think porcini mushrooms and Italian lamb sound any better than McDonald’s burgers.

  I can’t hit the ball again. I whiff it and hit it ten feet to the right until the group behind us asks to play through. I decide to quit and just walk the rest of their game.

  When I get to Naveed’s house, he sees my ripped shirt and brings me inside to that extra bedroom/dining room where all the sewing stuff is. He gets out a thin needle and some thread that matches my pink shirt.

  I tell him about my golf game and my sisters, but he says, “I can’t sew when you talk, so please be quiet for just a minute.”

  I sit on the bed in just my bra and jeans while he stitches. His big arm makes light, graceful swooping motions as he sews.

  When he’s done, it’s impossible to see where the shirt was ripped. Like a wound that has healed without a scar.

  “You are full of surprises,” I say. “Do all Iranian men know how to sew?”

  “Maybe more than you think,” he says, and tells me how his mother had her own sewing school. He grew up helping thread needles and rip the seams of all the students’ projects that didn’t meet her teacherly expectations.

  When he’s done, he starts handing my shirt back to me, but then pulls it away and I have to fight for it. “You have a rip in your jeans, too,” he says. “Hand them over.”

  He pulls them off of me, and I don’t get back any of my clothes until well after the sun has gone down and we realize that we’ve made no plans to eat dinner at all.

  Moving On

  After two weeks with no shifts, I consider myself an ex-employee of Dinky Kebab. A waitress did ask me to take a shift she couldn’t work, but I didn’t feel like it. The place where I once felt such belonging now gives me a feeling of shame. The owners never said dating customers was against the rules, but all of us waitresses knew that it was.