I realize there aren’t many photos of Naveed’s dad, just one that must have been taken when Naveed was about five years old. He’s sitting on his dad’s lap, but instead of seat-belting him in with his arms like most parents would, his arms aren’t even touching him.
“You look like you’re going to fall off your dad’s lap,” I say. “That is your dad, right?”
“Yeah,” he answers.
“Did he come too, when your mom had the surgery?” I ask.
“No, they don’t…Hey, I’ve been thinking about telling you something very private,” he says.
I put down the album. “What?” I ask, suddenly on guard. Is now when I find out what is wrong with Naveed, I wonder.
“They don’t live together.”
“They?” I ask, and then I remember that we were talking about his mom and I’d asked about his dad.
“My parents—they don’t live together. But you’re not going to tell anybody that, are you?” He whispers it, as if the neighbors, or the girls who rent out the basement, might hear it and be shocked.
My parents’ divorce hasn’t been any secret, so I don’t understand what he means. “If they aren’t living together, don’t people know that already?” I ask. “Besides, who would I tell?”
“You tell Melinda everything. And you tell your mom a lot of things, I’ve noticed. And she tells everybody else everything you tell her.”
I didn’t realize Naveed had known my mom long enough to pick this up, but I can’t say it’s not an astute observation.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say, “to be divorced.” But he says they aren’t divorced. Then he shifts around a little and I don’t know if he’s going to say anything else about his dad.
Finally, he says, “I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell you this, but my dad left us when I was eight. He took another wife, and my mom was too ashamed to stay with him.”
“Oh,” I say. And then I remember about Muslims and multiple wives—and wonder why I’d never wondered if his dad had more than one wife. “But that’s pretty normal there, right?” I ask.
“No,” he answers defensively. “Families like ours—modern families—didn’t do that.” He says it like it might be a black mark against him personally.
“But her friends—the neighbors too—they must have all known. Right? So why didn’t she just get a divorce and move on?”
“His other wife lived in a different town. So my mom just told people her husband got throat cancer and died. That it was all very sudden. Only the family knew.”
That was a long time ago. The second wife has since died, and his parents are still legally married but they don’t see each other. I guess it would be odd for them to see each other now that the second wife is dead, since Goli tells people that he’s dead. Of course, they could just do it like in the soap operas and have him come back, saying he was living somewhere else as another person due to amnesia.
Now, Naveed’s brother takes care of their dad, which must be hard but he does it because the dad is suffering from some sort of paranoia. His brother has to make sure he takes his meds, and he’s forgiven him for what happened so long ago. Naveed says he just doesn’t consider him his father, and hasn’t for a long time.
His dad just wasn’t part of his life for long after he left. He’d even come to the U.S. for several years. It sounds weird, but this guy from a well-off family came all the way to the U.S.—to manage a shoe store.
A shoe store, I think. He was a shoedog. Are people who sell shoes always escaping something? Then he went back to Iran at around the time Naveed was coming here, like he was trying not to see his own son.
“So now you know,” Naveed says. And he doesn’t remind me again to not tell anybody, because he knows I’m going to tell my mom anyway.
Well, I don’t think I’m going to tell her that Naveed’s father died from throat cancer when it isn’t true. No way. My mom is a nurse—she would want to know the medical details.
Charlie
Mom has lent Charlie some money. Not the full six thousand dollars he asked for, but enough to get him by. And she’s bought herself a new car and given him her old one. He’s removed more wallpaper too, and told her how much he loves her and wants to be a part of her family.
So, although I don’t want to meet Charlie, I need to. Partly because I need to find out more about this con man. And partly because it’s an obligation—the family is invited to dinner with him at my mom’s.
He looks like Marlon Brando. Not the young Brando, of course, but the big fat Brando with the bad knees. Like the Marlon Brando who is about seventy years old. He limps over to hug me. I didn’t grow up with a big hugger for a dad, and I don’t need hugs from this older man, but I give him a chance. He has been good to my mom with all the handyman work, considering that he isn’t in such good shape to be doing that kind of stuff.
As soon as we sit down at the table, Charlie tells us three girls, “Eugenia has told me that your father is not very warm. I want you all to know that I am a very warm person. I would be honored if you would let me be a father figure to you.”
Naveed is here too, but it’s just his second or third dinner at my mom’s and he doesn’t yet have a good understanding of the dynamics of these people I call my family. Courtney and I don’t say anything. We’re moving into neutral gear, slightly manipulated.
But, score one for Laura. She blurts out a deep and throaty laugh. “My father is very warm,” she says, with a buzzsaw no-nonsense voice worthy of Katharine Hepburn. Ty nods his head in agreement. “He’s a wonderful, very loving father and I don’t need any other dad but him.”
Ashamed, I think about how she defended our dad’s character just like a good public relations manager—and a good oldest daughter—should. She woke me and Courtney from the trance Charlie was starting to put us under.
Even so, I have to smirk. Describing Neil as “very warm” is a stretch. But I guess it’s all relative.
Viv
She’s the most beautiful woman I have ever known, with teal blue eyes that match the teal leather interior of her lemon chiffon Cadillac. I’m elated each time someone tells me I look a little bit like her. Grandma Vivian Randolph goes out dancing a few times a week, and even though she’s in her 70s and there are women there as young as forty-five, Grandma’s fresh blonde bombshell looks and feminine shape get noticed. She has long affairs with eligible men who fall madly in love with her, but they usually end when she won’t move in with them or won’t quit dancing with other men.
When I was eighteen I visited Grandma Viv by myself and she had me dancing with some men about twenty years older than I was, much to my Uncle Andy’s annoyance. Since, at eighteen, I still wasn’t over my childhood crush on Uncle Andy, the motorcycle cop, I was secretly pleased at his reaction. I think I would still have a crush on Uncle Andy, but he doesn’t talk to his family anymore. His new wife forbids him even to talk to Grandma Viv now, and nobody knows why except that maybe his wife is just a jealous bitch.
Boxes
I’m snooping again, while Naveed is on another one of his morning errands to Byerly’s for orange juice and pastries. I think of myself as the writer, but now I have evidence that Naveed can write too. I found a paper he wrote in a class, and finally it’s something that I can read, something in English for my searching eyes. It’s about the town where he grew up, and how sad he is that he hasn’t been back there. It’s about how he worries that if he does go back it will have changed so much under the Revolution’s regime that it will destroy all the good memories he has.
The key turns and the door is opening. Byerly’s grocery bags make a rustling noise, and I quickly stash the composition back into a folder and come out to help get our breakfast ready.
Inspired at how even a parking ramp engineer can write something touching and meaningful, I want to spend the rest of the day by myself, writing in my own room at my apartment. We eat and read the newspaper, and then I tell Naveed that I need
a day to myself, at home. He’s started to think of his home as my home, as have I, and to think of us being together as a given on any weekend day. It takes him a minute to understand. But, he says, his buddies are planning to meet for basketball and he could go play with them.
I decide to spend the rest of my day working on Shoedog, deepening the meaning of the story that is turning into a short novel. But my plan doesn’t turn out that way.
When I get home, I just want to go straight to my room. I know that if I start talking to Melinda, who is there with cardboard boxes for some reason, I won’t get around to writing anything today. But it’s hard not to be pulled into a conversation with your roommate when she’s blocking the hallway to your bedroom with moving boxes. You just have to wonder what those are for.
“I just accepted a job offer in New Mexico!” she screams. “I have to get packed—can you help? I’m moving there in four days!”
I’m very confused. I don’t know what to say. How can she be packing up and moving? We live here together. We have a lease.
“Huh?” I ask. She keeps throwing things in the boxes while she tells me about the job and how the offer is only on the table for an immediate start date.
I can’t afford to live alone, and she hasn’t mentioned how she will pay for her half of the rent through the end of our lease, so my first questions are—she believes—a little selfish.
I guess she expected me to give her a big hug and say, Congratulations! Many successes to you. Let me know when you’ve arrived safely.
But I don’t say that. I get mad because Melinda has called the rental office before telling me about this, and already gotten permission for us to break our lease. I feel like our lease is also an agreement between us, to each be responsible for half the rent until the lease is up. She hasn’t felt the need to ask my permission to break our covenant, or even to act like she realizes this puts me in a bind.
Melinda gets mad because my first reaction to her good news is not happy, is not supportive. No, she says, she obviously does not have the time to find someone to sublease her half of the apartment, vacancy available immediately. She says I should do that.
And didn’t I hear her? Didn’t I see her, unlike me, job hunting all the time? And Roger had already been in New Mexico—wasn’t it obvious that she was trying to get there, get with him? Don’t I think, too, that it’s time for us to get real jobs, make some money, and stop just sniffing other people’s cake when we could be eating our own? Isn’t it time to make our own buttercream?
I don’t answer the barrage of questions. Each one of them stings and I know I’m going to cry.
She stares into my green eyes with her same-green eyes and holds fast until I say, “What am I supposed to do? Move in with Mrs. Finklestein?”
Before she can tell me to consider it, I trundle off to my unmade bed and stare at the popcorn ceiling through my tears, looking for answers.
After an hour or so of quiet crying and thinking, I realize that an unexpected giddiness has set in. I’m not giddy for Melinda though. I’m giddy for me. Even though I don’t know what I will do, I wonder if maybe this is my window of opportunity, my time to push myself from Melinda’s nest, to possibly even end this adolescent-formed alliance.
After all, I’m sick of Melinda. For one thing, she’s an imperialist of identities. Even though she has enough style, personality, and talent of her own, she has to copy other people too. This is why she copies the cuisines and décor of her boyfriends, even though she already has her own gilded gold Catholic thing going on. This is why she also now marbles silk fabric and sews pillows trimmed with tassels and beads, like I do. Nothing can be just uniquely mine.
Our apartment is full of Melinda’s décor, her food, her bookcase full of cookbooks, her music, her Post-it notes. Our apartment is full of her, and sometimes it feels oppressive. Like I am nothing, nothing but a subject in the Empire of Melinda.
Of course she’s right—I should be happy for her, if I’m a real friend. We have to grow up, and get some confidence and be successful. I just wanted more advance notice that she was actually doing it. I’m confused—excited at one moment about making a break from Melinda and the residue of my messed-up teenage years. The next moment, I’m afraid—not just about the rent, but about losing her.
I’ve been attached to Melinda for two-thirds of my life. So I have to ask myself:
Who am I without her?
What will I do?
Who will I talk to about everything?
Will she succeed, and…will I fail?
Adult Lives
The next day, Melinda grudgingly tells me she talked her new employer into paying her half of two months of rent. It won’t get us through the lease, but it should give me time to figure out what to do.
As she tells me, she’s throwing the last of the kitchen equipment into a box. She breaks off a long section of paper towels from the roll, and wraps up her Pottery Barn tea cups that I like so much. They’re yellow, with a sun and palm trees and a monkey. They remind me of our camping trip to Jamaica.
She’s vexed about having to ask this of the people who are giving her this new life in New Mexico, and she lets me know how grateful I should be that she asked. I’m vexed too, about her leaving me so suddenly, and not even thinking twice, not even seeming sad.
“This is how it’s supposed to be. We get adult lives,” she says. No doubt she told her mother that I was giving her trouble, and her mother counseled her to say all this. “I expected more support from you. This is hard for me. I have a lot of shit to pack and a lot of loose ends to tie up.”
“Fine,” I say. “What do you want me to help you do?”
Melinda asks me to take her Discover bill to Sears, where it’s due tomorrow, and can be paid in person.
But I cannot even do this one little thing right. I pay it a day later, which puts Melinda over the edge. It seems like she hates me now. She’s ready to give me up for good.
The morning before the day when she moves away forever, I ask Melinda if I can help her move tomorrow, imagining some rented or borrowed truck will come and we’ll fill it up. I think maybe I will even ask Naveed to help, now that I have such a handy boyfriend and don’t have to ask Savi’s husband, Matthew, for help anymore.
But she says, “It isn’t necessary. The company is paying movers.”
I hadn’t thought of that before. “Paid movers,” I say. “Wow.” We’ve moved almost every year since 1987 and never have we so much as rented a U-haul, even if we had to take fifteen carloads and ask Matthew and Kurt for help lifting furniture.
We talk a little bit, and for the first time I ask her about the job, her plans with Roger, and where they’re going to live. I explain to her that I always imagined that we would grow up and start our adult lives at the exact same time.
We make up a little bit, and say we’ll meet at our apartment after my work day. I’ll make dinner, and then we’ll get ready together and go to the New French Bar for drinks to celebrate her new job, her big adventure.
I don’t know how I’ll pay for it, but for some dumbass reason I say, “It will be my treat.”
I get out of my temp job early so I can make a worthy dinner for us before we go to the bar. I’ll have to work faster on filing those fraud cases because they’re piling up. I got a company email account today, and access to the World Wide Web a few days ago. The Web is still just a blue or black screen and text, but I can already find myself wasting a lot of time on it, reading the AP newswires and discussion boards like recipes.group.
I print some recipes from this amazing new World Wide Web and then leave work to go to the store for ingredients. I make calamari with olives, veal scaloppini, and fresh pasta with artichoke sauce. She’s late, so I start getting dressed up, putting on a gauzy blue skirt and a lavender cotton shirt, tied at the waist.
But Melinda doesn’t come home, and I eat the calamari (rubbery, fishy), the veal (tough), and the pasta (not bad!) alone. I write.<
br />
I watch Cheers (with no pot to smoke to make it very funny), and very late Melinda calls me from a payphone. She’s at the New French Bar, but she’s already drunk and she says she’s sorry but tonight just isn’t going to work out. At one-thirty in the morning I hear Melinda and Roger come in and have drunken sex in her room.
Except that it isn’t Roger. Remember? It can’t be Roger because Roger is already in New Mexico.
The next morning, Melinda is still sleeping when I leave for work, but I’m in the kitchen making tea when Melinda’s ex-boyfriend, Omar, comes out of her room and goes into the bathroom with a sheet wrapped around his lower half.
When I come home from work, the apartment is a different place. It’s just my stuff now, and a box with some of Melinda’s books and beads that she must have thought I might want. And one scruffy antique Queen Anne chair she must have decided not to take with her because the old yellow upholstery is dirty. Or maybe Queen Anne doesn’t fit in very well with the adobe homes of Santa Fe.
There is nothing on the walls, no cookbooks, no shiny gold or ethnic décor. For the first time since the day we first looked at the apartment, I notice that the walls are white. The living room and kitchen look plain and sad. There’s just my scratchy red loveseat that I’ve borrowed from Savi, my marbled silk pillows, and my T.V. and VCR, looking bereft outside of Melinda’s antique armoire that had held them in such style and grace before.
Of course, the disaster I call my bedroom is untouched. Everything else bears the signs that someone got out fast and with determination.
There’s no goodbye note, not even a Post-it.
I pick up the phone, to call whom I don’t know because I don’t really want to talk to anybody. There’s no dial tone. Oh yeah. Melinda wanted to close the account because it was in her name. After my tardy drop-off of her Discover Bill, she was not about to trust me with her good credit again (her mother’s counseling, no doubt).
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