Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  Like a bachelor, I turn on the T.V., smoke the potent resins that line my empty pot pipe, and eat the leftover pasta and a few bites of tough veal. I jump when somebody knocks at my door, and quickly stash my pot pipe, spray some Windex in the air, and go to answer it.

  It’s the superintendent. He sniffs at the air as soon as I open the door. “I got a call from one of your neighbors who thought she smelled something burning over here. Are you smoking marijuana?”

  “Not me,” I say, wide-eyed and innocent. “Oh my gosh, no way. I wonder if it’s somebody else. Or if it could be my dinner—I burned it a little.”

  I see Mrs. Finklestein’s door opening just an inch across the hall and imagine her standing there listening. Maybe she’s the one who called, which is odd because we’ve smoked pot in here a hundred times. The super just nods and turns to leave. Apparently, there’s no fooling him when it comes to the scent of pot resins.

  “It’s a good thing you’re only on a two-month extension,” he says. “Because if you weren’t moving out soon enough, I would probably kick you out.”

  Mrs. Finklestein’s door moves slightly, and then closes silently.

  I gulp and deny my smoking once more and then say goodnight before closing my door. The chain slides into place. My eyes sting with tears, but I let it go. Moving out soon, indeed. I’m not going to cry over Mrs. Finklestein narking on me.

  Then I go to the hall, to the box of junk Melinda has left me, and I save a couple of books (What kind of person would leave behind a first edition hardcover copy of The Color Purple?) and a small box of beads. The rest of Melinda’s detritus goes to the dumpster.

  When I come upstairs to the apartment, my door is buzzing, and I wonder if it’s the super again, but he would just knock instead of buzzing from downstairs. It must be Naveed. I want to be alone, but he’d have seen my car and known I was home. Argh, why didn’t I park underground? I buzz him in.

  “I tried calling, but your phone is disconnected,” he says, then looks around. “Wow, she really cleared things out.”

  I just nod and go to the bathroom, and see how stoned I look. I drink some water from the faucet, and put scented lotion on my arms. I come out, reluctantly.

  “It smells in here. Have you been using drugs? Why are your eyes red?” He looks right into my eyes and I just squint back.

  “No,” I lie, “I’m not using drugs.” Anyway, it was just the pot resins in the pipe—who knew they would smell so strong.

  “It’s probably the smell of the Italian food I just reheated. And my eyes are red because I’m sad that my best friend moved. If you were more sensitive, you might guess that I’ve been crying.”

  As soon as I say this, my voice cracks, and it becomes true. I sit down on Melinda’s scruffy yellow chair and bawl. Naveed’s brow furrows with worry. He’s perhaps not fooled, but sorry anyway. He kneels, head against my thighs, arms around my hips, and holds me up from my center of gravity.

  Part II

  Visitor

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” I say, when Naveed asks me if I just want to move in with him when the two months of Melinda’s rent money are exhausted.

  “I want you to live with me,” he says, “but maybe we wouldn’t do it yet if you had another option.”

  What hangs in the air is that I haven’t been looking at other options. There’s nobody else I want to live with, I don’t want to put out fliers looking for a roommate, and I can’t afford to live by myself. Maybe if I would try harder to get a communications job, the reason I went to college. It’s just hard.

  “You can take your time deciding what you want to do,” he says. “Or we can just make the decision now.”

  I don’t play hard to get, since the offer doesn’t seem that firm. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to insist, or beg me to move in with him.

  “Okay, I’ll move in,” I say. It’s not going to be a major move—a lot of my stuff is already at his place and there’s not much in the apartment.

  “Before you commit though…,” he says. “I have something to tell you.”

  I’m pretty sure now is when I’m going to find out what’s wrong with him, why I’ve been lucky enough to have a decent, contributing citizen be willing to be in a committed relationship with me. Like, maybe he doesn’t want kids. Or maybe he already has some.

  “My mother is coming for a visit,” he says. “My sister, Firoozeh, bought her plane ticket yesterday.”

  “Oh, great, it will be nice to meet her.” I say. “How long will she be staying?”

  I know of those extended families that used to come to the Dinky Kebab, but Naveed said the word “visit,” so I’m sure it won’t be like those families that have parents living with them. I mean, he didn’t say she’s coming for a heart surgery this time, so it should be short.

  “At least two months,” he says.

  “Oh, wow,” I say. I’ve never actually heard of a visit lasting two months, except a study abroad trip, or a few of the rich kids in Wayzata who went to camp out east for most of their summer.

  “At least two months? And what’s the max?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I don’t understand that answer and so I probe. “How can you not know how long she will be staying?” Once I realize he means at least two months, right here, in this house, the question reverberates in my mind in many ways: How Can You Not Know How Long? Howcanyounotknowhowlong? HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW HOW LONG?

  “Because,” he says, a little impatiently, “that’s not a question that I can just ask. It’s considered rude.” He says this, I think, in a tone that seems to insinuate that I’m rude to ask.

  “Well, it’s not a rude question here,” I respond. “It’s just normal to want to know, to want to plan.”

  To want to throw up, I add, but only in my own head.

  Then I think of the obvious—her plane ticket. “Won’t her airplane ticket be reserved for the return flight?” I ask. “We can just look at it, or ask your sister.”

  “I don’t know. I could ask about the return flight if you really need to know,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. The dates can be changed anyway.”

  I repeat his words, “The dates can be changed.” Then I add, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” My plane tickets have always been firm on arrival and departure, as far as I knew.

  “Are you going to be okay with that?” he asks. “She’s my mom, you know. I’m going to let her stay as long as she wants.”

  This last statement eclipses me by what he doesn’t say, but which I think he really means: because this is my house. But I tell myself not to complain. After all, if it hadn’t been for his mother, Naveed would not have had to go to the post office that icy March day when I crashed into him.

  I think back to that package he had to mail to her, and think, She’s part of my fate. If not for her, he would have been just another customer at the Dinky Kebab. And, of course, I did not date my customers.

  Swimming

  Savi and I are at my apartment. Finally, she comes here—she wouldn’t come when Melinda lived here since she can’t stand her. I’m showing her how to marble fabric and paper, and she’s amazed at the strangeness of the process. After an alum mordant is applied to the fabric and dries, I put some seaweed powder in a blender with water and whirl.

  The seaweed powder, called carrageenan, is the same ingredient that plumps up commercial ice cream. I pour the resulting grayish slime into two plastic tubs, one for each of us. We drop colors of paint from plastic squeeze bottles. The colors swim across the surface of the slime

  It’s my first time marbling fabric without being high, but I feel high because Savi is saying things that stoned people would say, even though she does not get stoned. She tries to make life into literature, analyzing everything for symbolism and metaphor.

  She squints her brown eyes, pushes her black hair back, and says, “So you are done with this wealthy farm boy turned stockbroker, the cl
assic American. Along comes Naveed, the dark foreigner, the forbidden fruit,” She says this in a whisper, as she drags a comb across the paints, pulling them into swirls.

  “Naveed isn’t the forbidden fruit!” I swear. “Do you think you were the forbidden fruit for Matthew? Naveed isn’t some exotic toy for me, you know. He’s an American citizen who wears a dorky little name badge to his boring job. He’s an engineer, like my dad.”

  I almost talk myself out of being in love with him with this defense. Forbidden fruit sounded better.

  “Maybe he symbolizes your father.”

  I stop what I’m doing, which is to dance a stylus through the swirls to make a pattern that looks like a hundred whirling dervishes. “No. He symbolizes nothing. But he’s stable, and he’s a good guy. And I really, really like him.”

  “But…” she says.

  “But what?” I ask.

  “But you said you needed my advice about something.”

  “Oh. Right. The ‘but’ is that his mother is coming from Iran, and I don’t know for how long. I’ve never done very well with boyfriends’ mothers,” I say. “I used to have to go to Kurt’s hockey games with his mom sometimes. Men’s moms make me nervous. And I usually don’t think they like me.”

  She draws in a quick breath. “Me neither,” she says. “I don’t like to spend too much time with Matthew’s mom. She’s never gotten used to Matthew marrying a person from another culture.”

  I’ve met Matthew’s mom. I say, “I don’t know if she would have ever gotten used to Matthew being with any woman from any culture.” His mother adores Matthew. She’s critical of Savi, who in turn is not impressed by her, or by the obligatory vacations at the family cabin on Fish Trap Lake.

  The only time Savi likes to go to the lake is when Matthew’s parents aren’t there. Quentin and I went up with them once late last summer right after we’d started going out. We spent a day with Matthew cruising us around the lake on his rainbow-striped catamaran and swimming out in the middle of the lake. It wouldn’t have been the same with parents hanging around.

  She nods. “I know. And you and I both have issues with our own mothers already. I find it’s just easier to be the least amount involved possible with mothers-in-law…or future mothers-in-law.”

  Savi seems suddenly not so sure I should be moving in with Naveed now that his mother is coming. I have to remind her that she’s actually sounding a lot like Melinda sounded when I first told her about Naveed. Since Savi can’t stand Melinda, this turns her back around to supporting the relationship, even hoping we get married.

  “Well, we aren’t engaged yet,” I say. “But we’ve talked about it. I’m pretty sure I would marry him.”

  “I see,” says Savi, the English literature major and the best writer I know. “So he’s the right guy. But there is conflict.”

  Mrs. Finklestein sits out by the swimming pool with a big hat and sunglasses and talks to anyone who will talk with her. Except for me. She hasn’t talked to me since the night she reported me to the building superintendent. It’s probably my last swim at Joppa Lane Apartments, since I’m moving out in a few days.

  The sign on the deep end says “NO DIVING” in big stenciled spray paint letters, but I know this is deep enough for a shallow dive. So I do it—hands together forming an arrow out in front of me, I take a deep breath and cut a wide angle through the water. It gives way and opens to let me though deeper and deeper until I touch bottom. With my eyes open under water, I feel it, the painted grainy-textured concrete.

  A memory from long ago brings me up to the surface for a breath, so I can swim underwater some more and think about it. Laura learned to dive down and touch the bottom of the swimming pool, in the deep end, at our swim club one year. By the middle of the next year, I still couldn’t make it to the bottom without getting scared about running out of breath and high-tailing it back to the surface.

  It wasn’t so much that I wanted to touch the bottom of the deep end, but I just wanted to be able to tell my mom that I could do it like Laura. So one day I just said I’d done it, even though I hadn’t. She didn’t seem convinced. I’d wasted my lie.

  Later that summer, I finally did touch the bottom. Since I’d already told my mom I’d done it, I couldn’t go and brag to her about really doing it this time. There isn’t really any point to touching the bottom of the pool anyway. It’s just one of those things kids who belong to swim clubs do, a casual rite of passage.

  I take another quick breath and then feel my way now with both hands, turning around and going to the deepest side of the pool. I have breath to spare, but not much. Down there at the bottom of the swimming pool at Joppa Lane remembering this moment from my childhood, I remember that my mom said she was going to go running around Lake Calhoun today and she might stop by. The water glides over my skin as I let it buoy me back up to the surface.

  There, at the far end of the courtyard, already talking Mrs. Finklestein’s ear off, is my mom. She says she’s come to clean on top of and under the refrigerator and scrub around the electric burners so I won’t lose my deposit. Because she knows I won’t do that.

  Moving Out

  Savi sends Matthew over to my apartment with his truck. Matthew and his truck have shown up to help for my last three moves, plus at my parents’ house for their big divorce move. It’s hot outside—it seems like it’s always hot outside whenever I’m moving, and this time I’ve planned ahead and made lemonade.

  Matthew and Naveed move my furniture, including Savi’s borrowed red loveseat, while I box up my things and throw them in the truck. I pull my now-forbidden pot pipe out of its secret hiding place, sniffing the pungent resins one last time before tossing it in the dumpster. Even though the neighbor, Mrs. Finklestein, doesn’t drive, for some reason she’s lurking in the underground garage and sees me.

  “You know, your mother is a very nice lady,” she says. “You should be a good girl for her. Don’t you want to make her proud of you?” She turns away and I go back up to the nearly empty apartment.

  I throw away some other incriminating items: photos of me and Melinda hanging out with the Rastafarians in Jamaica, rolling doobies and smoking them while dancing to reggae music with the men who make a living as unofficial tour guides. I think about how we have always said we would go back to Jamaica together someday, like the song from the Jamaican tourism commercial says to the tune of that Christmas/New Year song: “Come back to Jamaica, what’s old is what’s new.”

  I save a couple of the snapshots, slipping them into in the middle of a stack of family pictures.

  I also throw away at least ten crunchy bouquets of dried roses, picking them off the wall hooks and out of tall water glasses, then dropping them into a garbage bag. Savi shows up to help me do a final cleaning and refill glasses of lemonade. Then she goes with me to turn in my keys, saying sharp things about Melinda every few minutes and then assuring me it’s all for the best anyway.

  That evening, I find myself at home in Naveed’s house in South Minneapolis. The renters saw Matthew and Naveed moving in my things and so when I run into one of them in the shared laundry area downstairs, she says “Welcome” as if I haven’t already been there most of the time for the past several months.

  I look around and think about how I can make this house my own. How I can put my own stamp of style on it—mark my turf—before Naveed’s mother arrives.

  It’s not like there’s a redecorating budget, but I get back in my car and drive to Byerly’s to page through magazines like Metropolitan Home. Architectural Digest is too depressing. As if.

  Then right in front of me is this pink, white, and robin’s egg blue confection of a magazine: Martha Stewart Living. I pick it up for the first time, feeling its promise. It’s been around for awhile, but has just come to the magazine rack here at Byerly’s. It has a few possibilities that won’t cost much more than a can of paint and some stencils.

  Martha’s advice is to first assess what you like about your space,
and to make those things the design foundation.

  What Naveed does have is one ugly fake Persian carpet and a lot of Persian block print fabric and wall hangings. It’s mostly stuff his sister, Firoozeh, sent him from Tehran’s bazaar, and it’s sort of interesting to me.

  Martha suggests that I can pull the eye up from the ugly carpet. My marbled silk pillows and a can of gold spray paint I can use on some outdated furniture help with that. Still, I realize, after all of my redecorating and rearranging is done, I haven’t done much to put my own mark on this place. It still looks like his style, even though the walls are now Benjamin Moore’s “Venus Moonglow” and my books are on the shelves. It still looks very Iranian, and even though I’m becoming obsessed now with all things Iranian, I don’t want to be like Melinda and match my style to my boyfriend’s country of origin.

  So I go back to the magazine rack at Byerly’s. Metropolitan Home has an article on decorating with nudes. I remember that I have a stack of drawings from my DRAWING 1001 class in college. Nudes, lots of them, based on the university student models. Only three of the sketches are good enough to frame, even though we drew for two hours, three days a week, for three months. I didn’t take that class too seriously—it was just for excitement, drawing naked male and female student models that got paid seven dollars an hour. A lot of people hooked up through that class.

  Naveed seems impressed by my drawings, but then he goes off to one of the rooms and pulls out his own stack. He took the same class, turns out. All his friends took it too.

  We choose three of the best from his portfolio to add to my three.

  “Will your mom freak out?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “You know, she’s not six years old. She’s seen nude art.” I’m slightly disappointed to hear that she might not be shocked and offended at our drawings of naked people, but I clip a newspaper coupon for Michael’s craft store and take the drawings in to be framed.