Naveed and the woman looked at me blankly and went back to talking about their grandmothers’ various forms of kitchen magic. I was annoyed he found this pretty woman so interesting and also certain my grandma’s method was the only one with any scientific merit. And if they were really talking about cucumbers, they would have agreed. I told him so on the way home—the whole way home.
I’m also jealous because Naveed rents out a separate apartment in his basement to two young women, and both are pretty. He says he’s had many renters in the basement, and hadn’t noticed that the current ones were anything to look at. Uh huh.
So we’re both the same. I don’t like anything that seems like flirting, and he doesn’t like me having ex-boyfriend friends. Or smoking pot. “It is illegal,” he reminds me, “so it’s not like I’m just making up rules all by myself for no reason. You shouldn’t be doing it anyway.”
I nod and wave, as if to say yeah, yeah.
“You could be anything you want to be if you get a little more serious,” he says. “You’re smart. You could go to law school, or start a business. We could do something together. But if you would rather be a party girl for a while longer, let me know now. I need to know now.”
I guffaw at “party girl.” I have never been a party girl. I’m perfectly happy getting high all by myself at home. I hardly drink. I don’t even like parties.
Law school sounds dreadful, but maybe the idea of starting a business isn’t bad. I agree not to see Kurt again, not for any reason, and not to smoke pot or use any other drugs. I haven’t used other drugs for a long time anyway. Kurt and I snorted a lot of cocaine one summer, but quit because we hated the come-down. Plus, someone Kurt knew died from just one line of coke because he had a previously unknown heart defect. That made me give it up until I snorted some with Quentin a couple of times in West Palm Beach.
Still, I make it clear to Naveed that Kurt has been my friend for more years than he was my boyfriend, and that I’m only ending the friendship for his sake.
Then I ask, “Don’t you ever talk to any of your ex-girlfriends?” He says no, never. “But what about the one you told me you were almost engaged to?” I ask.
“Sure, I run into her, but she is so happily married now and I respect that.”
“But you care,” I goad. “Are you sure you don’t still love her?”
“I love you,” Naveed says, for the first time.
I’m sorry that the first time he says this to me is in response to my insecurity. But he repeats, “I love you. And I wonder why it’s always so damn hard for you to believe that you are loved.”
I say, “I love you” back to him. Because it’s true. I love him most.
So, here is this guy, who is a law-abiding and handsome engineer. Who is not a dope-selling failure, like Kurt. Who doesn’t seem to be commitment phobic, like Quentin. Who loves me—dope-smoking, emotionally and behaviorally disturbed, sloppy me. It’s hard to believe, but I have to try.
He recently asked me if I knew something horrifying. My last name, Kjos, (pronounced nothing like how it looks, but like choce) is the word for “fart” in Persian. Not just any fart, but a really smelly one.
I’m horrified because I worked at Dinky Kebab for two years and said my last name all the time. I’m mad at Kaveh and Jamsheed for not telling me. At least Niloofar could have said something, like when she told me I had lipstick on my teeth. She could have just whispered: Don’t tell people your last name—it’s embarrassing.
It’s been hard enough to have this last name which sounds nothing like how it looks my whole life. But now this!
I have to ask myself, would I date someone whose last name was Smellyfart? Something must be wrong with Naveed if he loves me. When will I find out what it is?
Wrinkle
Mom limps over to the stove to put green beans in a pot, a big frozen rectangle of them from the Green Giant box.
I may think that the world revolves around me, but my mom does not. She’s asked me to come to her little house for dinner. For a moment I imagine she’ll want to hear all about what I have been up to. My new temp job in the fraud department at St. Paul Companies Insurance, for example. I had to get something, even though I’m still trying for a communications position. My bosses are detectives who clandestinely shoot photos of disability clients riding their ATVs and chopping wood for their fire-pit leisure time.
Maybe she’ll ask me about my deepening relationship with Naveed. Or maybe she’ll want to know if I’ve talked to my dad lately so we can gossip about Wanda. But Eugenia Randolph—she’s gone back to her maiden name, and I sometimes now think about changing to Randolph too—is not in the mental state these days to mother her girls. She’s got her own train wreck going on, I can see. And not just because of her knee.
Since the divorce, she’s been serious with several men. Her prematurely white hair that she refuses to dye has not turned them away, perhaps because her face still looks so young.
There have been, in the past couple of years, for example:
scuba-diving Sam
some creep with a nice Porsche
a Jewish poet who was ‘too sensitive’
Bruce,male nurse
my internship boss, the Romani human rights guy
How I regret letting her meet that last one, because it’s hard to work with him now. She didn’t give him a second date, and he kept asking me about her, and I finally sort of quit working for him.
If there was ever any doubt, I know where I get it from if I’m too focused on men instead of getting my own act together. Mom could just put more enthusiasm into her job or one of her many interests and friends. But no. Bruce breaking up with her has undone her.
But actually, tonight, she seems okay. Her wheels are back on. And this is why I wonder what new man is in her life. Because I know that neither she nor I know how to put our wheels back on ourselves.
It turns out that someone else is homing in on her in her time of need. Someone has helped her with her wheels. Mom puts me on salad duty while she mashes potatoes and tells me about Charlie.
Charlie is an older man, she says. Mom is forty-six. I’m thinking “older” means fifty-five or so.
“He helped me remove all that 1960s metallic wallpaper in the dining room,” she says. “And those mirrors that covered that whole wall! Remember those mirrors? They’re gone!”
I peek into the dining room. It looks nice, walls smooth and painted.
He’s done some flooring work too, I see. And he’s advising Mom on what to do about the odd little stage in her tiny living room. “He thinks maybe it was a piano stage,” Mom says. “He wants to take it out so the whole floor in there will be even.”
“He sounds great,” I say. “You do need a lot of work done around here. You can’t do it all yourself.” But something isn’t right. I see she wants to talk to me about it.
“He wants to borrow six thousand dollars,” she says. She knows this isn’t a good sign. I don’t need to tell her that.
“That’s not a good sign,” I say.
But this is my mom, Eugenia. She isn’t stupid, but she’s generous to the point that she’s almost a vulnerable adult. The guy has done two house projects and wants to even out the wood floor in her living room. How can she turn him down when he needs the money?
I don’t even ask why he needs it. But I do ask, “Why can’t he borrow it from one of his kids?”
“He only has one daughter and she doesn’t talk to him,” she says.
“That’s not a good sign,” I say again. She says I sound like a broken record.
We sit down to eat Mom’s pork chops and Green Giant vegetables and the rest of this well-balanced meal. This is the kind of meal my dad loved, I think to myself, Good Seasons Italian salad dressing and all. It’s good to eat dinner at my mom’s, to feel cared for by her, even though I’m lecturing her as if I’m the parent.
Finally, exasperated from having to be the mother in this conversation, I greedily
turn the conversation from her new relationship to my own boyfriend.
“Haven’t you learned from any of Melinda’s experiences with Middle Eastern men?” Mom asks. I would be irked by this question, but frankly, I’m happy to have turned things back around to having Eugenia be the worried mother again.
I say, “Naveed is Iranian and Melinda hasn’t dated any Iranians. Only Arabs, Frenchmen, Turks, Liberians, Spaniards…”
“Well, have you read Not without My Daughter? That’s a true story, you know. Horrifying.” If we ever marry, she says, we should have a signed agreement that he would not take the kids out of the country.
“I want to go to Iran,” I say, “Maybe we should have a signed agreement that he will take me there.”
“Now isn’t a good time!” Mom says, not pausing before continuing the barrage of questions. “If you marry him, will he let you work?” she asks.
“His aunt runs the ancient family business making rosewater and other rose stuff,” I say. “His sister is an entrepreneur. His female cousin in Chicago is a prominent cardiologist, and the one in Houston is a computer programmer for NASA.”
“Well, that is surprising,” Mom says.
“I know,” I answer. “They’re more successful than any women we know.”
Will he let me not work, I wonder, as I perhaps could have not worked if I had married Quentin?
“Did his mother work?” my mom asks.
“Yes, she had her own sewing school.”
I know Yasmin Noury and her husband have two daughters who go to a daycare center while they both go to work every day. I’ve seen this only because of my increasingly frequent sleepovers at Naveed’s house, so I don’t tell my mom about them. Yasmin is always dressed in a suit and carries a briefcase. I don’t know what she does, but she sure looks serious about her career.
I could give her other examples of successful Iranian women, but Mom has given up. She’s like the mother, Katharine Hepburn, in the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner movie when Sidney Poitier has to be an international doctor to be good enough for her daughter. The women in Naveed’s Iranian family have to be rocket scientists to satisfy my mother, a pediatric nurse, but at least she is now satisfied.
“I always hoped you and Kurt would get married,” she says. When I’d been with Quentin, she’d suggested that we get married too, but she doesn’t mention him now, knowing that it was Quentin who broke up with me. I too had hoped that maybe I would get married to Quentin and that would be that. I’d have stayed home, volunteered for the Girl Scouts, and played tennis while a babysitter would come twice a week to watch our three children. Just like Mom did until I was twelve. Of course, she says all of that time with kids drove her to drink.
Mom went back to school, and work, at a time when the triangular orange signs that read “Women at Work” were losing their novelty because so many women had gone to work. The novelty never appealed to me. Why would you work if you don’t have to? Unless you could write for money, but I’ve always been told it usually doesn’t pay and most writers are poor so I shouldn’t even consider it. That’s why my major was mass communications instead of journalism. I heard it would provide more job opportunities, like Laura’s PR job, but I could still possibly write. Except that in mass communications, I mostly learned how to write in bullet points—levels under levels of bullet points, from solid black to a hollow circle to thin introductory dashes.
Mom’s hair is pulled back from her face and I can read that she seems to be thinking: Well, time will tell. I know she’s thinking something like this because of the crevice between her two perfectly curved eyebrows. It’s a sharp vertical wrinkle that in about ten years from now will be a wonderful candidate for Botox.
But we don’t know about Botox and other miracle wrinkle fixes yet, and I’m getting the same vertical axe-in-the-head wrinkle now too, partly from all of the worrying I have to do about my vulnerable-adult mother. She just seems so desperate, so in need of being loved and cared for.
And if Charlie doesn’t work out (and I’m sure Charlie isn’t going to work out), she could be on the verge of starting to drink again. She already doesn’t go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings anymore. I’m afraid for her.
So I have to turn the conversation back to her and tell her this.
“I’m worried that you need a man so much, even when it’s not good for you. And I’m scared that if you have your heart broken again you might drink yourself to death.”
There, I’ve said it.
“You’re overdramatizing things again, but that’s one thing I love about you. You’re my most creative daughter. You have such a knack for details and drama,” she tells me, as if this very realistic scenario is just my artistic fantasy. But she makes a promise not to get her heart broken and start drinking, and I trust her to keep it.
Aryans
My father isn’t calling me back. This could simply be because he’s seasonally unavailable due to golf. I let go of worry because frankly I’m too busy being in love. That and doing my temp job at the insurance company. (I’m thinking maybe I should have become an insurance detective—they just sit in cars for hours waiting to get that one “gotcha” photo of a supposedly disabled client outside dividing her hostas.) I don’t keep calling my dad.
Finally he calls, and everything is normal. He says Ty, who has taken up golf and been hitting the course with my father, told him how Naveed is such a great guy. Mom and Dad have also somehow learned that Iranians are Caucasians, even when they’re brownish like Naveed. This is somehow an important point, that they’re the original Aryans, that the word “Iran” even means “Aryan.” The pertinence of this is uncertain to me, but I’m trying not to be cynical about it.
Mainly, I’m just happy that my mom has stopped referencing Not without My Daughter. And that she seems happy to have something interesting to tell the bridge ladies about. Now, she’s thinking of how that will be to add Persian to the family lineage if we get married and have children.
My two sisters and I have always known this list of what we are by heart: Scottish, Irish, English, German (or Prussian—whatever that is), French, Norwegian, and Cherokee Indian. We can say it so fast that it blurs together like Mary Poppins singing Super-cali-fragilistic-expiali-docious.
Like all white people who are a tiny bit Indian, we’re supposedly related to Pocahontas. I didn’t learn until college that Pocahontas was not a Cherokee Indian, so this is something I’ve tried to clear up with some older relatives, but they don’t know. They just know “for certain” we really are related to her, and that’s that.
It might be my own lack of a singular ethnic identity, but in Melinda-fashion I seem to be getting interested in all things Iranian since I’ve been seeing Naveed. I liked these ornate Persian things when I was working at Dinky Kebab, but now I’m starting to notice all the Persian carpet shops around town. Naveed doesn’t even have a good Persian carpet—just a fake one made in China.
Savi teases that, before you know it, I’m going to be buying those Middle Eastern slipper shoes that curl up at the toe. She says she doesn’t blame me for gravitating to shinier things, because my own white American family’s culture is limited to drab department store goods, potluck picnics, and green Jell-O salad.
Of course I thought Savi had a lot of nerve to say that. She was probably just in a bad mood that day because, really, who doesn’t like a potluck picnic? And I’m totally offended about the green Jello-O salad. My family has never once in my entire life made green Jell-O.
If she knew us at all, she’d know we always make the red.
Reveal
We’ve been looking through two old photo albums that sit on the corner table in the living room. I’m going to bring my album over and show Naveed my pictures too—not all the old boyfriend pictures, but the ones of me as a kid, the ones of me canoeing in the Boundary Waters, for example. I look strong in those. And tan.
Pictures of Naveed in the 70s show him as a different perso
n, a skinny teen with a pointy face and an afro, whereas now he has round cheeks and a tiny bald spot that he takes pictures of so he can see if it’s getting bigger.
He has his shirt off in one old photo and his ribcage bends over a big brown guitar. In another photo he’s camping in the desert of southern Iran with his buddies, cooking a pathetic little bird over a small fire. “Is that a wild desert chicken?” I ask. He doesn’t remember.
I flip past some shots of Naveed with the next-door neighbor, Milad Zand, seeing how they used to be so close. In one photo, Yasmin Noury serves Naveed tea from a silver tray. Then, Naveed points to several photos of his mom—some from the 70s, some more recent. Her name is Goli, pronounced like Goal-ie. Gol means rose (and also any flower, but especially rose). I guess Goli is like the name Rosie.
That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet…I automatically recite in my head, a result of having to memorize lots of Shakespeare in eighth grade.
In some of the photos, I can see Goli is in Minnesota. She’s sitting on the ivory polyester satin couch we’re sitting on right now. “So your mom has visited you here,” I say, even though I have already surmised that by the things I’ve seen in the guest room, like the crocheted doily and brush and mirror set. There was a woman’s winter coat too, hanging in the foyer closet. I hadn’t been sure it wasn’t a younger woman’s, but I didn’t think so.
“She was here for a long time,” he says, “because she had two open-heart surgeries at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.” Then Naveed tells me a story about how she came all the way to the U.S. to have heart valves replaced because she thought American doctors were the best. She walked into her first appointment with the surgeon and almost fell over when the Nigerian man walked into the room. But she went back to him for the second surgery.
In the photo, her blouse is black and pine green. The low neckline reveals the scar, a pink track climbing up her golden olive flat chest. If I had my chest ripped open, I wouldn’t even wear low-cut shirts, and I admire her for showing her scar as much as I’m relieved to know that she won’t be prudishly judging me for some of my shirts.
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