My tuition benefit doesn’t guarantee me getting into the class I want, however. I end up in one class about chaos theory after I didn’t get into the writing class. There’s talk of paradigm shifts, and fractals, and when one student strays off of topic he likes to discuss helixes. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
One week into chaos theory, a spot opens up in a novel-writing class and I switch. The class is in the evening after work and sometimes I can barely hold on, but I do. I’d hoped to finish Shoedog in this class, but that part of my life—when I sold shoes at Dayton’s—seems so long ago now. I have farm stuff on the brain in my new job, so I admit to myself that Shoedog isn’t just marinating, and maybe it’s time to ditch it. For the class, I’ll work on my other novel, the one about the dysfunctional farm family.
At work, I’m producing textbooks for the technical colleges that teach agriculture. The content liaisons get all their research information from the university, and just rewrite it all so the students can apply it to the jobs they hope to get after they finish their programs. The editors have various content beats, just like at a newspaper. I’m on the manure beat right now.
Now that I’m on the manure beat, I lecture my family about how critical manure really is to everybody, since we all rely on farmers for our food. Now that I don’t work on PR for the Romani human rights guy anymore, I’m looking for a new group to defend against prejudice. Farmers are like my new Gypsies.
Maybe it’s not as exotic, but I get good story ideas learning about things like hog barns that explode from the methane gas in the manure. My new novel has an exploding hog barn, but it will turn out that it was only rigged to look like an accident.
The ag science liaisons talk about things that have zero, or different meaning to me. Like the “drought of 1988” which has gone down in history as one of the worst drought years ever. I remember that year because nobody could score any weed. The next year, Kurt got a T-shirt that said, “I survived the drought of ‘88.” I never realized that shirt might not have been made just for the stoners, that farmers might have made that T-shirt.
Even though Wayzata was within ten miles of many farms, I don’t remember knowing any farm kids. Even kids who lived west of Wayzata in nearby Plymouth and Hamel (which were not on Lake Minnetonka) were considered hicks. Playing with them was taking a risk on popularity. Ironic, really, since so much of the money in Wayzata flows from the family that owns the largest privately held agricultural business in the world. I never knew anything about farm life at all until I dated Quentin. He was a stockbroker in Wayzata, but he had grown up on a soybean farm in Mankato.
Quentin had taken me on a luxury vacation to Florida in the short time we were together. His penthouse condominium looked out over the Kennedy compound in West Palm Beach. One night, at dinner, he told me all about when he dropped out of agricultural college to learn finance. His family refused to talk to him the rest of that year because he was “going to hell in a handcart.” That was probably the only really meaningful conversation we ever had.
Suicide Sisters
Lately, even though we email almost daily, Melinda has started calling and leaving me long voicemails on my work phone. My system cuts off after four minutes, so sometimes I arrive in the morning to the message “You have four voicemails” and every one of them is Melinda telling me some drunken story in installments that my system plays back to me last-one-first so I have to listen to the end before I can hear the beginning.
Listening backwards, she sounds calm at first and progressively more excitable, which leaves me feeling upset, but the real order of the messages is that she’s upset at first and calms down after talking for several minutes. I wish she didn’t leave me these messages at work. It’s hard to edit publications about manure and other topics, like “Soybean rust—when will it hit Minnesota fields, and how will you respond?” when I feel all agitated after her disturbing calls. But she doesn’t want to call me when I’m at home at night with Naveed.
Finally, I learn that things aren’t going so well with Roger, who may be in trouble for how he has handled grant funds at the arts organization. Apparently, you’re not supposed to take a vacation to Cabo San Lucas with that money. She sounds unstable. She asks in one message, “Do you ever think, you know, about not wanting to live anymore...for it to all be over?”
I think, Yeah, when I get to work and have to get through sixteen minutes of your drunken messages. But I call and check on her and she acts like she’d just been kidding. I make her promise to tell me if she ever thinks about it again.
At the end of the last one of her messages in order, she says, “I love you,” and asks me when I can come see her in Santa Fe. She’s been ending our conversations and her messages with “I love you” for a few months, and I say it back even though it’s awkward for me. I only say that to Naveed, and I say it back to my mom and my sisters if they say it first. And, Melinda does not have to tell me. I know. No matter how many times she’s taken me for granted or screwed me over, I never believe she will do it again. She talks at length about how important it is, she’s realized, to cherish the people in your life.
I’ve known that she really does love me since eighth grade, the time I’d ended up in the hospital after drinking alone and my dad had found me face down in my vomit.
My parents had called my friend Anne, who told them I drank because a girl had started a rumor about me. Then when Anne got off the phone with my father, she called two people. By that evening, a new rumor had it that I had committed suicide. Everybody was saying I was dead.
The girl who had written “Valerie Kjos is a slut” in marker and started the rumor? That was Melinda. We barely knew each other. But when she heard I had killed myself, she locked herself in her parents’ bathroom and opened their medicine cabinet. She ran a bath, took the half bottle left of her mother’s asthma medicine and a full bottle of aspirin. She wrote a note to my family, saying she was sorry. She wrote that she’d been jealous of me because I was so pretty and that she’d just wanted to get my attention. Then she’d gotten into the tub.
While I was being released a couple of days later, I saw Melinda, her parents at each side of her gurney as she was being moved from the ICU to the psych floor I’d been on after I had left the ICU. She was awake and rolled her head to the side, saw me standing up with my mother as my father had gone to get the car.
“That’s Valerie,” she’d told her mother—they’d all learned by then that I had not died. Her parents were grateful that she had not become my Romeo and died for me. She’d been saved by the stomach pump.
My mother touched my arm. “Who is this?” We all looked at each other.
“Melinda,” I’d said.
Melinda’s mother gave us icy stares, but my mom looked at her empathetically, because even though she knew Melinda had started the rumor about me, she knew that Melinda’s mother was just another mother whose child nearly died.
Because of what had happened, lots of girls sort of held me in awe—or at least were a little bit afraid of me, and they gave me respect. And yet nobody ever asked me to do anything with them, so when my spring birthday came around the only person I could think of to celebrate it with was Melinda. She wasn’t so much obsessed with me anymore, but she wasn’t saying bad things about me to get my attention either. I guess we’d become friends. The “suicide sisters” thing had stuck, so we just went with it and hung out together at lunch, passed notes at detention, that kind of thing.
Mom agreed that I could have thirty dollars to take a friend out to dinner at the Chi Chi’s in Minnetonka. It was the most popular place to be on a Friday night in 1983, unless you happened to be of the crowd that frequented Lord Fletcher’s on the lake. But as I’ve mentioned, we weren’t lakeshore families.
Mom and I went to pick up Melinda, my mom promising Melinda’s mom she would stay nearby and then have Melinda home by ten-thirty. You might predict that my then-drinking mom got bombed on margaritas in the Chi
Chi’s bar. But she wasn’t that kind of an alcoholic. That would have been too fun, and she had studying to do for nursing school. She just dropped us off and went home to study and drink.
Melinda and I ate a basket of the free tortilla chips with hot salsa, and Melinda ordered the loaded nachos as well, and the steak and shrimp fajitas. Even though thirty dollars was enough for dinner in the 80s, the steak and shrimp fajitas was the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered another basket of the free tortilla chips and a taco plate. Melinda asked the waitress to bring us margaritas, on the off chance that she was even stupider than she looked in her long fake mariachi dress. She was. I didn’t have much interest in drinking alcohol after my little incident, but I drank mine anyway and decided it was better than the gin in my parents’ liquor cabinet.
I was keeping our total added up in my head, so when Melinda suggested we get the fried ice cream for dessert, I managed to negotiate with her that we could split one if she helped out with the tip. But the waitress accidentally brought two, so we each got our own anyway. By the time we stood up to leave, we thought we had never felt so full in our lives.
“Hey, should we go behind the building and puke?” I asked as we walked out the door and saw my mom wasn’t there yet.
I’d just read a novel about a girl with anorexia and bulimia, and even though I thought the symptoms were disgusting, I’d become curious. I told Melinda that if we threw up, none of that fried, cheesy, salty Mexican food would count. Her eyes betrayed her concern, but she said “Sure!” as if I’d just asked her to go with me to the fair.
She was not skinny, and all of the popular girls were skinny. And I was skinny. We walked around to the dark side of the building and stuck our fingers down our throats, leaning into the shrubs down around the foundation. My long fingernail poked my throat and I couldn’t make anything come out. Melinda experienced a lava flow, managing not to splatter herself as she covered the Chi Chi’s foundation. It took her a minute to catch her breath and wipe her mouth with a dried leaf.
“Lucky!” I said.
“Why didn’t you puke?” she asked.
I just shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I can afford to eat a lot.”
“Yeah, you got lucky with the genes,” she said. “Weight is mostly what it is because of genetics.” We walked around to the front, expecting to see my mom’s car. It was Melinda’s mom, though, who sat in her Buick Regal at the curb, looking at me with fury and suspicion in her eyes.
“What were you doing behind the restaurant? If I catch you girls smoking, drinking, or doing anything with boys, I will shave your heads—both of you.”
I noticed Melinda furtively smell her own breath for the margarita then look offended when the puke smell went up her nose instead.
What happened to my mom, I wanted to ask, but I was too shocked at the head-shaving threat to talk. I’d hardly even met her. Melinda told her mother we were just walking off dinner. Then Melinda asked about my mom.
“Eugenia, it seems, did not stick around here as she had promised me,” she said. “Instead, Valerie, your mother is at home too drunk to drive.” Then she sighed, and brought it down a notch. “I am very sorry for you, though. It’s not your fault, but this is a problem.”
She didn’t tell me how she’d found out that she would need to do the pickup. She was as quiet as a rock the next ten minutes that it took to get to my house, but she did wait for me to get into the house before she pulled out of the driveway. I was confused. I couldn’t tell if Melinda would be allowed to see me again or not. Then I remembered how she said she’d shave our heads if she ever caught us doing anything bad, and I decided that meant we could still hang out together.
Mom was asleep in bed, propped up against her pillows neatly and properly dressed in an ivory satin nightgown and her cerulean blue bathrobe. She was never a sloppy drunk; in fact, she looked beautiful and studious with her textbook open at her side. Her hair was still auburn then, and it flamed a brighter red against the blue robe.
The next day at school, Melinda made a couple of friends telling them about the puking trick on how to eat without gaining weight. She even gave them the title of the novel I’d told her about, even though she had not read it herself. (Laura had given me the book—all the tenth-grade girls had read it.) A few girls approached me that day to ask if I had the book and if they could borrow it, and soon Melinda and I both had new friends.
Within weeks, all the popular girls in our grade had read the book. I had more friends than I even wanted, because just like now, I was already an introvert who dreaded having too many plans for the weekend.
Orientalism
Savi had given me her copy of The Dance of Anger book when she realized that I was more conflicted about Goli Joon than I’d tried to let on. She’s the one who said I should admit that I actually love Goli Joon, but that I’m angry at her at the same time for moving in with me and Naveed. Only through dealing with my anger, she says, can I become at peace. Even though Savi and I have been friends since college, sometimes I think she doesn’t know me that well. I mean, I know she doesn’t, because I haven’t let her get to know me. She doesn’t even know about all of the drugs I’ve done. I sort of keep my friendship with Savi and my mental/criminal history with Melinda and Kurt separate. So she can judge me all she wants, but she doesn’t really know the half of it.
She does see through me sometimes, though. Like how she’d seen through my ruse of always defending Goli Joon and bragging about how much I’m learning from her—about cooking, the musical greats like Googoosh and Marzieh, Persian feminist poetry, and such.
“You’re just exotifying her, and if that’s what you need to be happy about her living with you, fine, but you will eventually have to realize that behind all of those spices and sitar songs, she’s not a temporary visitor from a far-off land of make-believe.”
This is all coming from another book Savi has given me: Orientalism, by Edward Said. I haven’t finished it, but apparently it’s all about how my interest in Eastern stuff is a relic of white imperialism, and how I judge everything else in relation to my hegemonic norms.
“I’m not exotifying her,” I argue. “She’s not some foreign ‘other’ to me you know—I see her every morning in her velour zip-up robe and Dr. Scholl’s shoes. I see her partial dentures sitting in a cup in our bathroom every morning. She’s not exactly Sheherazade from Arabian Nights.”
I realize that I totally exotify her, of course. How can I not? She’s from a land of wild Mohammadi roses. She grew up hip-deep in a rose petal harvest. If that is not exotic, what is it? But I don’t mean disrespect by my awe. I learn from her. One reason I don’t complain about her in front of other people, even Savi, is because of something I’ve absorbed from her culture. A Persian saying goes, “If you spit straight up, it lands in your face.” This means that when you talk shit about the people in your own family, you’re talking shit about yourself. Goli Joon is my own family now. No matter how else I feel about her, I know this is true.
Savi may be projecting some too. She gets offended sometimes when people treat her like an exotic bird in a cage. Although, not always. It depends, I think, on if she’s being admired or treated like a second-class citizen. She’s very beautiful with her shiny black hair and big brown eyes, so of course she does have that Eastern allure, but I know one woman in Matthew’s neighborhood assumed she was the housekeeper when she first moved in with him. All in all, I don’t feel that bad about thinking of Savi as slightly exotic and imagining that being her friend makes me a little more interesting. I’ll admit it—being her bridesmaid and standing next to her in her wedding sari felt special. When she married Matthew, I’d secretly hoped maybe she’d have her bridesmaids wear saris too, but in retrospect I know I would have looked like a fool.
Also, going to Savi’s Caribbean dance parties and her Hindu Diwali dinners is something unusual to tell people about at work when they ask what I did on the weekend. It’s not all that shallow. Sav
i brings something else—some sort of happy spirit—to my life. Sometimes she even gets me to dance.
“Goli Joon thinks Rice Krispie bars seem exotic,” I tell Savi. “See, everything is relative.”
Professional Help
Goli Joon is having oral surgery. She’s had partial dentures on the bottom already, but she needs more teeth pulled so she can have full bottom dentures and a bridge on the top. She’s very confident, but she has to have it done at the hospital because it’s riskier for her than for most people due to her blood-thinning medications. She had to go into the hospital two days early to start weaning off one medicine and she’s going on another one temporarily.
The health insurance policy Naveed got her doesn’t cover oral, so she’s hoping the result of all this is going to be work a chunk of her bank account.
She hands Naveed her gold and turquoise jewelry in a small plastic bag, then gets wheeled away while Naveed and I croon after her. She waves a fist in the air. “I’ve survived heart surgery!” she yells with bravado.
“Aye! Fight, Roseheart!” he calls after her. “To battle, Roseheart!”
Goli Joon bleeds out. They have to stop the surgery before they can remove all the teeth. They’ll have to try again later, and the whole ordeal is all very tiresome for her.
Still, she gets up to cook our meals and then she mashes up some of the rice and khoresht for herself with a mortar and pestle until her mouth recovers slowly over a few months. “Dirt to her head!” she says about the oral surgeon.
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