Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  My dad thinks this is a good thing—that I no longer work there, that is—not that I’ve shamed myself by taking a customer as a lover. Not that we talk that often, but I did mention it to him when I called him last time. He said maybe now I’ll study for the LSAT and become a lawyer, or maybe I should become a public relations manager like Laura, and then I can quit working at the Sunglasses Spa too.

  Naveed, by the way, also thinks this is a good idea. Not that the two men have met, or discussed my future together, but they feel the same way—that it’s time for me to do better for myself, you know, and give up the burgundy apron.

  Speaking of the apron, my resignation (or firing perhaps) is so gradual and unofficial that I don’t even turn that thing in. I remember one waitress cried when she turned in her apron on her last day, so it’s just as well I don’t create such an opportunity for myself. I liked working there, and admired Niloofar and her cousins so much. I can’t be sure I wouldn’t cry.

  Soon, I quit the sunglasses job too, thanks to a cash gift from my father, given just for the purpose of paying rent while finding a job more congruent with the amount of money he has already paid in college tuition. The human rights org council member I intern for goes to Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, and Naveed goes to North Dakota on a parking ramp job. I ask him if there are even enough people in North Dakota to merit a whole ramp. Maybe a surface lot.

  Paris

  Quentin wants me back. I get my first letter from him the day Naveed leaves for North Dakota. I’m excited to receive it if for no other reason than getting personal mail. Girls and women of the future may never know what it’s like to get that envelope in the mailbox, to open it and see man-writing, to know that their lover had touched that paper. But we don’t even have email yet, so I don’t know what a shame that will be for the people of the future not to have real mail, how much more titillating it is to hold that paper in your hands than reading electronic type.

  Quentin says he can see us getting married, and that he is finally over Dori. He says it was a very unhealthy relationship, but we will have a healthy one. Now that he knows what he wants. He seems to assume that what I want is him. I don’t know what I want in life—maybe just to fit in somewhere and have my freedom at the same time—but I don’t think I want him. Not anymore.

  Notice that he doesn’t actually write, “Will you marry me?” but just, “I can picture us married.” I don’t write back or call like he has begged me to do. He then calls Laura and Ty and tells them he really has to talk to me. It’s important.

  So I call. Because I do still think about him sometimes. It creeps up on me to realize how much I liked him. Of course, I also think of him when I imagine being rich and living in his house on Lake Minnetonka with all those boats, and the maid doing my laundry. And doing his laundry, so I never have to complain about my husband leaving his socks on the floor like I always hear married women say.

  But although I imagine all the dinners and vacations, I also remember last Christmas when I spent two weeks embroidering a velvet pillow for him, and he gave me a VCR. He never let me forget how much more expensive his gift was than mine. It’s not generosity if it comes with reminders.

  On the phone, he tells me he wants me to go to Paris with him. For a month. Right away.

  I love Paris—I went there in college. And yet, maybe I’m not as shallow as it must seem I am by now. Because I say no. Definitely not. It’s somehow easy for me to say no to him right now, no to wealth and travel, no to a normal American boyfriend. No to a month in Paris!

  But then, I’ve been there.

  Diversity

  I finally go to turn in my apron at the Dinky Kebab, because I don’t want the owners to think I kept it on purpose—as if anybody would steal their stupid waitressing apron. Kaveh tells me to come back to visit, to eat, that I’m always welcome if I want to come back to work. His kind words make me feel more like I resigned than got fired, although I’m still not really sure. Probably, this is all just part of his usual politesse, but it’s unlikely I would come back begging for my apron and a pad of order tickets. It really is time for me to move on.

  Even though I’m job searching, I do have more time on my hands. I’ve been writing in my journal with this extra time, three pages every morning, just as I learned in a book Savi gave me called The Artist’s Way.

  Savi doesn’t work anymore because she had two babies and Matthew said he just wanted her to stay home with them and have lots of time to write since she’s so good at it. Except that staying home and taking care of two small kids—one boy and one girl—didn’t leave her with that much time for writing. But the boy is in preschool now, and she’s sending her daughter next year, so maybe she can start writing more again. She does freelance work for clients, and her own creative projects.

  And then she has her freelance “diversity column” in her local newspaper. She’s the only non-white person who had ever been published in the suburban paper, so they asked her if she could write once a week about her life as a non-white person, and about the lives of other non-white people. The white people of Eden Prairie love to read her column, except a few who write hate letters.

  She and Matthew have a good marriage, I think. He liked her more at first, I could tell. For her birthday the first year they were together, he built her a massage table and learned shiatsu. She’s crazy about him now too.

  I meet Savi in Dinkytown for coffee one day, and her son and daughter play with toy cars in a corner while we talk. I give her a full update, about looking for a “real job,” about Shoedog and my other story ideas, and about Naveed.

  I also tell her about Melinda. After all of her experience, Melinda has concluded that foreign men are a way to experience the world, but we are not supposed to marry them.

  Even though Savi hardly ever says a negative word about anybody, she’s incensed that Melinda would say such a thing. She even looks like she wants to slap me for having such an obnoxious—she even uses the word “racist”—friend.

  “She doesn’t have your best interest at heart,” Savi says, “if she even has a heart.”

  I look down and take a second to think about how I’m going to change the subject to avoid fighting with Savi when she’s just being a good friend. Because this last statement of hers has brought out the Melinda loyalist in me. You can call her a racist, neo-colonialist, orientalist, or just an obnoxious bitch. But never say she doesn’t have a heart.

  Positive Feedback

  Shoedog

  The closest Megan ever felt to Carl was when she was just big enough to go with him to the driving range. He would buy a bucket of balls and she would watch him hit each one so far that it went out of sight before falling to the ground. If Megan got bored, Carl would buy her a grape soda and a frozen Marathon bar and she would knock back and forth on a creaking glider bench on the clubhouse porch. Finally, the summer after third grade, Megan was big enough to try golfing herself. Most of her swings missed the ball, the club whiffing air. Or landing with a big chop too early, sending grass and dirt into the air. Carl said she could improve if she tried. He stood behind her, his arms around her arms, his hands adjusting her hands. He wasn’t the cuddly type of dad, but she felt secure like this with his arms around her, guiding her swing.

  “Okay Valerie, I didn’t interrupt,” says Melinda. “I liked that. It was really sad. Do you want any feedback?”

  I shrug.

  “What if you added just one of your sisters? Then you write about how Courtney became the youth champion at your dad’s favorite golf course and got all his attention for it. Then it could be even sadder.”

  “Thanks. But no. No sister stuff.”

  “Okay. So, anyway, what about the shoes? I thought this was going to be about selling shoes at Dayton’s…er, Taghato’s. Are you going to describe all those beautiful shoes, like the Robert Clergeries and the Stuart Weitzmans?”

  “It’s not really just about the shoes,” I say. “But I’m getting ther
e.”

  Chantilly Lace

  I’m always running late these days. Naveed and I are so in love we’re on fire. He has even said that to me in Persian—Asheket-am—I think it means, “I’m on fire.”

  We’re late for everything, even my sister’s wedding, and I’m a bridesmaid. Laura and Ty’s wedding is the first big family event Naveed attends, and I prep him to meet everybody. I even convince him to shave off the mustache, but I can’t stop him before he splashes on Bijan! aftershave lotion, which burns my face when we make out before we leave. My red face will be forever evident in the wedding photos.

  But everybody looks happy for this daytime wedding; even my mom has rallied for this. Maybe she doesn’t look ecstatic, but she’s managed a smile that at least looks pulled together, next to my dad’s smitten smile at Wanda. My dad seems proud to walk Laura down the aisle, while Wanda looks on with her smarmy cat face.

  And Naveed is smiling brighter than I’ve seen, although it could just be that his irresistible dimples stand out more now that the big mustache is gone. He looks so beautiful. And yet I’m getting a migraine headache, triggered by the Bijan! fragrance.

  It’s a perfect wedding at the church we went to when we were growing up. After Laura and Ty have said their vows, they light a single candle with two smaller candles and then they leave all three lit, to symbolize that they’re both still individuals as well as a united couple. The pastor says it’s to remind them that they don’t get extinguished when they form a bond as a married couple. I look at Laura and she’s following the script that she rehearsed yesterday. Even though I think the candle thing is really corny, I notice that in the candlelight with her lace dress and blonde hair swept up, she looks like supermodel Kim Alexis in the Chantilly Lace perfume ads from the 1980s. When it’s over, we step out of the dark sanctuary and into the sunny spring day, and my migraine throbs.

  Wanda keeps my dad’s attention at the reception and he doesn’t react much to the presence of Naveed. I’ve brought lots of guys around over the years, so maybe he thinks this is just another casual date. Not that he ever imagined his children would date someone who wasn’t a European-American. But he is surprisingly normal about it, and then Wanda takes his arm and leads him to the cash bar as soon as the men have said five words.

  At Naveed’s house after the wedding, his neighbor, Milad Zand, and Milad’s wife, Yasmin Noury, are outside with their daughters. Naveed asks Milad to take pictures of us because it’s the first time we’ve dressed up together. I’m still in my bridesmaid dress, which after all those measurements still doesn’t fit my chest or hips right, but Yasmin comes close enough to tell me she loves my dress.

  Yasmin’s youngest daughter trails directly behind her, her eyes stuck to me as she peeks out from behind her mother. She says, “My name is Parvaneh. It means butterfly. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Valerie,” I tell her, squatting down to be closer to her height. “It means strong.”

  “Then you look like a strong princess,” she says bashfully before she runs back to her older sister.

  I don’t feel strong with my head throbbing like this, but I run after her to give her my wrist corsage. Parvaneh wraps the elastic twice around her wrist and curtsies for me.

  Naveed is in a black suit, green shirt, and purple tie. We pose next to a fire hydrant in his front yard. In later years I will say those photos look so 90s, and I will remember both my migraine and that precious butterfly child curtsying to me. After we come inside, Naveed showers off the aftershave for me and disposes of the whole Bijan! fragrance collection in the garbage can outside.

  But not soon enough. While he’s in the shower I have to come into the bathroom and throw up right there in front of him because it’s the only bathroom in the house except for downstairs in the renters’ apartment. How humiliating and disgusting, I think. But Naveed quickly turns off the water and dries himself off so he can tend to me. He gives me Tylenol and massages my temples and my neck until the headache subsides. We stay in for the night, with nothing to do but talk and be close.

  “Is it just a coincidence that Milad Zand across the street is Iranian too?” I ask.

  “Nope,” he says. He and Milad were best friends when they bought the houses for cheap at auction right after college. They had a falling out and didn’t talk—except when they played soccer or basketball with all of their mutual buddies—until the day Milad asked Naveed to help unload materials off the truck for a gazebo in his backyard. Now they’re in a period of détente. Naveed asking Milad to take our photo was another building block toward a potential peace.

  “What was it about?” I ask.

  “Nothing that should have been anything,” he says. “We’re good now, so that’s all that matters.”

  We talk about a hundred other things as he massages away my headache and cooks me a Persian soup. By the time we’re ready to sleep, I confess to Naveed that I wasn’t so sure I liked him at first, but that I didn’t think it was that way for Laura and Ty either.

  Ty liked Laura first. I’m happy about this, how this guy liked my sister so much and how he cooks for her. And why wouldn’t any man cater to a woman who looks like Kim Alexis? Some of his smitten generosity extends to the rest of the family. He even had us all over to his house once for wild boar and stuffed mushrooms—and pear liqueur—and some card game that I didn’t know how to play. Of course Laura fell in love with him eventually.

  “How did you get me to become so crazy about you?” I ask Naveed.

  “I pouffed magic dust on you,” he says. “It was all I had.” The wedding, despite the migraine, has made me feel romantic. Although it’s maybe premature, I imagine myself up at the altar in a lace bridal dress, kissing the groom. Naveed and I are entwined for the rest of the night.

  Goodbye Kurt

  When I was in seventh grade, I couldn’t sit still. Previously an introverted kid who just liked to read and obeyed the teacher, I became the class clown. After months of disrupting class, I was diagnosed as “EBD”—Emotionally and Behaviorally Disturbed.

  After years of internalizing all of my feelings, it was as if I had suddenly turned myself inside out. This “externalizing disorder” got me a lot more attention than I’d ever gotten before, but eventually I learned that internalizing disorders are much more acceptable and I went back to holding everything in.

  That was the 80s. Nowadays, anybody would just give me some Ritalin. But nobody took me to a drug-prescribing psychiatrist (just a couple of counselors). I don’t like pills anyway. Smoking pot seemed to even me out fine.

  I can’t get the pot anymore though because Naveed and I agreed that we don’t see anybody else now, and that includes Kurt who always gives it to me. Too bad, because I love smoking pot. I like the way it smells and tastes, and how it makes everything seem funny. Except for all the sadness in the world, but I don’t think about all of that when I’m high.

  I guess I’ve been meaning to quit anyway because I don’t want to smoke pot for my whole life. Sometimes I get chest pains when I smoke it. And also, Melinda says we have to be careful because we could get smoker’s wrinkles—especially around the mouth from all the toking.

  But I don’t really like being told that I have to quit, or that I can’t see Kurt anymore.

  I’ve remained friends with him, and not just for the ganja, throughout my last three or four relationships. There’s nothing else there anymore; it’s not like Kurt and I are going to get high together and start doing it. Maybe we’d get high and get the munchies together and go to Figlio’s in Uptown for pizza and pasta. Maybe I still like seeing his deep blue eyes, and his big bicep through the rip in his Coca-Cola shirt. But that’s about it.

  Since we broke up, we’ve cared about each other more than we did in the five and a half years we were together in high school and college. Back then, we fought all the time. I used to lose my patience with him and hit him, sometimes in the car when he was driving. I would hit him so hard he would have to
put down the bong to steer.

  Breaking up with him was hard, but once he found his new girlfriend, Chantal, I knew we weren’t getting back together. I guess he sort of signaled that to me when he brought Chantal to Dayton’s Women’s Shoes to meet me. She was an eighteen-year-old girl-woman with a toddler on one hip. I tried to baby-talk the little girl, and she kicked me with her tiny white sandal.

  Chantal had put up with our palling around for a while, but she’s run out of patience with that, plus with Kurt’s habit of smoking and selling pot and getting arrested. She’s sort of a “personal responsibility” Republican type of single mother, and Kurt got an ultimatum to either grow up or get out. I don’t think he told her the truth the last time we hung out, but he didn’t feel good about that either.

  So the timing, at least, is right. Naveed’s jealousy and Chantal’s ultimatum coincide to mean that Kurt and I won’t be driving around getting stoned and going out for vindaloo and naan at Tandoori India together anymore.

  I’m also the jealous type. Naveed and I both watch for each other to check out another person for too long and then call each other on it every time. One time it even happened at a traffic intersection. The woman turning in front of us was really pretty.

  One night we went to a party at Laura and Ty’s and I was jealous because Naveed engaged in a conversation with a beautiful woman about how their grandmothers removed bitterness from cucumbers. Her grandmother was Russian and cut the tips off first, then rubbed them in a circular motion against the main part of the cucumber. This description seemed dangerously sensual and I went on guard. Naveed replied with his grandmother’s similar cucumber method, which seemed equally superstitious. I inserted that my Norwegian grandma soaked the slices in vinegar for fifteen minutes, and that it actually worked.