Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  There’s a space under my passenger seat where my purse fits perfectly. I look around to see if anyone is watching me hiding my valuables, but the only lurker is a smug looking cat on the retaining wall of Wayzata Boatworks.

  Melinda offers me a drink in a crystal goblet, and I take just one sip. There are no red Solo cups in Melinda’s world. Just new music and exclusive liquor in crystal drinkware. “It’s artisanal tequila,” she tells me, pronouncing it the right way now, instead of artesian.

  The chauffer takes us to Lord Fletcher’s, where Melinda, her friend, and I share a lobster-bite appetizer plate on the lakeside patio as we wait for our party boat to pick us up.

  The first person I see waving from the boat coming in to dock is not the person I expected to see. When Melinda said it was a friend with a houseboat, I thought of another guy she knows. It turns out that it is that guy’s boat, but the person waving is not him. It’s Kurt, and another guy besides the boat owner. No other women.

  It’s been years since I have seen Kurt, but he’s wearing the same shirt I’ve seen him in a hundred times. It’s his long-sleeve red Coca-Cola jersey, with the rip in the arm at the left bicep. The rip is much bigger and there’s a hole in the shirt at the clavicle and the hem is undone. I think, this shirt wouldn’t get him into Lord Fletcher’s, but it doesn’t matter because he isn’t getting off the boat. We’re getting in.

  I turn and whisper to Melinda. “You know I can’t see Kurt! I’ve promised Naveed, and I’ve kept my promise.”

  But I board the boat, and she hisses, “I’m glad Roger doesn’t make all the rules in our relationship.”

  I’m mad, but I don’t turn around and get off the boat. I don’t know why not. I just don’t want to let Melinda be right about Naveed making all the rules.

  But then somehow, probably because I see the irony of how Melinda is actually the one to think she can make all the rules in our relationship, I dish it right back out for once. One deep breath, and then a swallow, and then, “And I’m glad that Naveed isn’t an embezzler like Roger.”

  When her jaw drops, I add, “I’m just afraid that could end badly.”

  Melinda’s face goes blank in disbelief, but she’s perfectly composed, her face seamless. Instead of responding, she seems to make a decision to pretend I did not just talk back to her, and walks to the stereo to load up her CDs into the stereo system and unload her fine tequila.

  The boat is moving. It’s too late to turn back.

  I haven’t been in a boat on Lake Minnetonka since the early 90s. It doesn’t feel like anyplace else in Minnesota. I quickly kill the feeling of being misplaced and let myself feel like I’ve been scrubbed clean and dressed in a white tennis sweater, like I belong here in this scene straight out of The Official Preppy Handbook.

  Kurt’s eyes light up to see me, and he offers me a hit off a joint right away while he complains that Chantal took away his bong this morning and he had to go to the gas station to buy Zig Zag rolling papers. “At least she didn’t find my stash,” he says.

  I think about asking him what he’s been up to, because I don’t have any idea about how he’s making a living or anything. But I stay quiet. The less I talk to him, the less guilty I feel about breaking my promise, breaking the rules. I don’t even smoke the joint.

  As I take my second-ever sip of good tequila, a voice breaks through the stereo system to announce a tornado watch for Mower County, a few hours away from here. Nobody changes what they’re doing. It’s nothing here. The sky has some sun peeking through the clouds. It’s not even raining. I think of my family, all of them. The tequila is smooth, and I know it would help me to fend off the panic attack I feel setting in. But fine tequila is not my thing, so I set it down.

  The panic attack isn’t because I’m worried about a tornado half the state away from here. It isn’t because I’m breaking anybody’s rules. I just know Goli Joon needs for us to all be together when there’s a tornado watch, even if it’s for Mower County, or Madelia, or even for the Mariana Islands.

  We’re supposed to be home together when tornadoes threaten places that begin with an M.

  “Melinda,” I say, addressing her but looking at her friend who owns the boat, “I want to get off the boat. Can we please cruise over to Wayzata Bay, so I can get my car and go home?

  Melinda says, “Chill out, little Valerie. We’ll go back later.” Her friend looks at me and shrugs, as if a decision has been made and there’s nothing to be done about it.

  Kurt rolls another joint, this time with weed from a different container—an old metal film canister that I recognize from our years together in the 80s. He lights it and passes it to me, but I tell him no, that I’ll try some later.

  I take a deep breath, and Kurt puts his arm around me affectionately—I know that is all. I have not felt his strong weight-lifter arm around me for more than a decade. I have an urge to reach one arm over to that rip in his Coco-Cola shirt, to feel the resistance of his bicep when I try to squeeze. To know that it has not softened over the years. To be assured that we are all forever young. But I turn away from him and get up to look over the water.

  The voice comes over the radio again. “It’s still not for anywhere near Hennepin County,” Kurt says, and he gets up to take a piss off the side of the boat. I go to the back of the boat, and look out over the bay and at all the other boats. I try to imagine the people on those other boats—who are they and what are their lives like? All rich and happy, I’m sure. Then something comes into my head—something my writing teacher had said.

  What was it? That I needed to develop a personal interest in others?

  No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t even personal. Now I remember. She said I should start with a professional interest in others, that the world doesn’t revolve around me, that everybody has feelings.

  That if I could not see that personally, as a writer I could at least begin to see it professionally.

  I try to imagine the people on the boats again, as who they are without their boats and their money, about a time when maybe they were hurt, a time when they felt failure or loss. Or felt alone, or stayed silent like Savi with her depression that I had not been either personally or professionally interested in enough to detect.

  Then I look at Melinda and see her offering more of her expensive tequila to her friend, hungry for approval. She needs so badly to impress people, to be admired. I distance myself from her for a moment, forgetting the hurt between us and assessing her more objectively. Things aren’t going well for her. Not really. Maybe if I could stop taking things so personally…

  The letter on the floor of my car comes to me at that moment, interrupting my thoughts. I suddenly realize: It isn’t a rejection. I write these letters to agricultural scientists all the time at work—it’s not a rejection, it’s a “revise and resubmit,” and they might even be interested in Shoedog.

  I know what I need to do, and how I need to revise.

  And maybe, how I need to start living. My teacher told me months ago—it’s simple: Take an interest in people. That’s all there is to it. All the rest are just bullet points.

  Melinda cranks her music louder. The boat had been anchored in the West Arm, but now we’re heading under the bridge to Crystal Bay. I close my eyes and try to imagine Lake Minnetonka—Big Water—before white men came, without all the mansions and motor boats.

  We pick up speed, going about the fastest the houseboat can travel. Noerenberg Gardens, where Naveed and I got married, comes in to view. I know this means we’re near Quentin’s house too. But I can only see the houses on the peninsula from a distance and I’m not sure which is his from this far away and when it’s been so long since I was there. All I see is manicured shoreline, flowers in pots, boats tied to their docks and covered with striped Sunbrella awnings.

  Melinda is dancing around on the boat to her new music—something I haven’t heard before. Melinda is always playing something I have not heard before. I can’t hear myself think. We ke
ep moving, past the site of my wedding and into Brown’s Bay.

  Kurt is moving from the railing on the other side of the boat to the little fridge, pulling out a brown bottle of beer. Melinda brought the beer too. It’s a kind I’ve never heard of before. Always something I’ve never heard of before. She tells Kurt it’s brewed locally. It’s a microbrew. In five years, this will be nothing unusual, but in 2001 the only local small batch beer I’ve heard of is the kind guys like Matthew brew in their basements.

  Although I didn’t smoke the joint, I pick up the end of it from the built-in ashtray and sniff at it. Kurt offers me the lighter, but I’m bracing as the boat picks up more speed and then comes to a sudden stop. The waves from the inertia slam the boat. I fall down on the bench and just lie there for half a minute, a little nauseated.

  And then I know where we are. We’re in Wayzata Bay. The far side of it, but the boat starts moving again, and I see the mansions I’ve been ogling for my whole life: the mansions where I’ve babysat, the mansion where our high school class always had our last-day-of-school parties, the mansion where my next-door neighbor boy moved after his father’s once-small company went public.

  I look out over the big bay. I can see Wayzata beach, and very far away and small, the small park playset shaped like a sailboat. Simeen would like to play on that, I think. She’s getting so big. I see the dot that is my car, behind the garden that’s kept up by the Wayzata Garden Club.

  It looks far, but not impossible. I have swum in the middle of this lake before.

  The water looks warm. So warm. So silent—there’s none of Melinda’s loud, new, experimental music out there. Just a long, calm swim to the beach, to my car, to my baby, to my love. To Goli Joon, who would have heard about the tornado in Mower County and worried that it was bearing down on Minneapolis. I imagine her…no, I sense her.

  I look to the waves and I sense Goli Joon upon them, as if I’m high even though all I have had are two sips of tequila. She’s blessing me from somewhere invisible, wafting smoke from her wild rue all around me, whispering a prayer into my ear. I’m imagining it; I must be high from the second-hand smoke of Kurt’s joints. But it seems so real and my nausea builds. I can smell the smoke of the wild rue. The scent of rosewater hits me too, as if it is emanating from Lake Minnetonka.

  This momentary hallucination hits me with the knowledge that Goli Joon is not going to live much longer. We’ve been told again and again by the doctors that her heart has held up impossibly long already.

  I need to get home.

  I slip off my sandals, climb up on the ledge and quietly lower myself into the lake. There’s a gentle splash as I land in Wayzata Bay—resting home of my old pink and green tote bag and my Ray Bans, resting home of a million lost things.

  First, it’s breast stroke, the quietest stroke I know to get away from the boat but make headway without making an embarrassing scene. Then I move to back stroke, and look back toward the boat. Nobody looks out searching for me. How long will it take them to realize, I wonder, and then I realize: I don’t care.

  I swim. And when the beach doesn’t come any closer and I realize I may have misjudged the distance, I float on my back to catch my breath. I think of the ten-foot sturgeon of Lake Minnetonka legend and hope it does not come to bite my foot.

  I turn my head and see the cat that had been on the Wayzata Boatworks retaining wall earlier, and I realize that if I’m close enough to see that cat, then maybe I’m close enough to start swimming again. After a little rest, I think. But I can’t fall asleep. Maybe it would be good if the legendary sturgeon exists. If it would come gliding along and rescue me.

  The clouds are getting darker, and I think that’s good, the coming rain will keep me awake so I can swim.

  Or, maybe that rainbow will keep me awake.

  A banding of colors swirls together like marbling paints, and then floats away into a marbled sky. The crisp Sunbrella fabric stripes of color come in and out of focus, and the scent of the wild rue and rosewater I’ve been imagining swirl away back to shore.

  Where did these moving rainbow ribbons of color come from, sailing toward me in this big water?

  As I float above a million lost items in the waterbed of Lake Minnetonka, and while a houseboat cranks its music louder across the bay, a canvas catamaran flutters and swerves my way. It clips along on the waves of Wayzata Bay, and I begin to swim.

  Acknowledgements

  I have the luck to have two especially talented writers as friends: Kathleen Cleberg and Pauline Chandra Graf. They have treated Roseheart with love, enthusiasm, and their usual imaginative spirit that I know I take too much for granted. Thank you, Pauline and Kathleen.

  I also owe my gratitude to Jennifer Erdem, a most loyal friend whose sense of humor astounds me, and to friends from the University of Minnesota Master of Liberal Studies program and The Loft Literary Center.

  Other longtime writers, teachers, and friends have generously read my work and provided extensive feedback: Paulette Alden, Mary Beskar, Cynthia DeKay, Shadon Ghassemlou, Walt Jacobs, Mary Carroll Moore, Bita Payesteh, Allison Sandve, and Aimee Viniard-Weideman. Special thanks to Cynthia for also enlisting beta readers, to Sally Thompson for copyediting, and to Justin Clifton for answering the panicked call to get my text “back on the grid.”

  For encouragement and unconditional support, I thank my entire family. While Roseheart is a work of fiction, and no character is intended to represent any real person, it is born out of my experiences. My live-in mother-in-law, Zari Behbahani, was a transformational person in my life, for example. My own mother, Leslie Hakkola, is my model of strength and resilience. Like Valerie’s father in the story, my father, Elliot Kjos, has always told me, “Education is always worth it.” Thank you, Dad, for investing and believing in me.

  Sisterhood was a minor theme in this story, and my sisters are a major part of mine. I don’t know how I would live without you, Jennifer Fackler and Susan Woodward.

  Many authors thank their partners for reading dozens of drafts and being their front line of reader/editor. I’d like to thank my husband, Mohammad Dehdashti, for not reading my drafts. It was better that way. You did exactly what I needed you to do: support me in my dream, and make up for my neglect of our children.

  For a debut novelist, it’s a blessing when a reader takes a chance on a new name. If you enjoyed Roseheart, please tell a friend, write a review, or mention it on Facebook or Twitter. A new writer needs nothing as much as to know her readers exist.