When Skateboards Will Be Free

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Karen is from Paramus, New Jersey. Born and raised Roman Catholic on Mayfair Road. Her parents have been together for thirty years. Chuck and Barb. They’re schoolteachers, and they’ve worked hard all their lives. Their house is a cozy split-level with a garage, a garden, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Karen has told me stories about how, during the summer she turned eight, she watched her father cut down the apple tree, break up the concrete swimming pool with a sledgehammer, and extend the house into the backyard. Friends, neighbors, and relatives came over to help. And the summer she turned twelve, he put on new aluminum siding while she stood next to the ladder and tied tools to a string so he could pull them up.

  If I had walked past that house when I was a child I would have thought, Look at them. The rich asses.

  About a month after we had started dating, Karen asked me if I considered myself a communist. “I guess so,” I said. “What does that mean?” she wanted to know. So I began to explain to her how workers are exploited under capitalism and how wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, but somehow we took a detour and got caught up in a discussion about whether or not under communism we’d be able to buy fancy soaps and beauty products and things like that. “Of course,” I had told her, but I wasn’t really sure. I wasn’t sure if under communism the goal was for there to be overwhelming abundance or for everyone to have evolved to where they no longer desired material things. She didn’t let the matter drop and asked me more questions that on the surface seemed rather elementary, like what’s the difference between communism and socialism. Really I had no idea, but I gave a vague answer that socialism leads to communism, because that is what I remember my mother saying years earlier when I had asked her. But this did not satisfy Karen in the way it had satisfied me, and she went on with her inquiry. Continually flaring inside me was the impulse to respond either with generalizations, or various patched-together facts, or to just simply steer the conversation into familiar territory, where I could speak with some authority. To do this, however, felt immoral and unforgivable in the face of Karen’s authenticity. Eventually I stopped trying to answer, and muttered to myself, “I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.” And she had responded, more surprised than accusatory: “Yes, it sounds like you don’t.”

  At midnight, and not one second later, the lights of the Empire State Building click off.

  “Look! Look!” she says.

  We stand and stretch our legs and I put my arms around her waist and pull her to me. Her head comes up to just below my chin.

  30.

  ONE DAY, A FEW MONTHS before I turned sixteen years old, my mother suddenly did the unthinkable: She resigned from the Socialist Workers Party.

  Just like that, it was all over. Simple and noiseless and done by way of letter, where she apologized and thanked them all the same. After almost twenty years of membership she had decided she had given all she had and could give no more.

  There had been no indication she was considering such a thing. I did not even know such a thing could be considered. Only a week before I had seen her leave to campaign all day for Mel Mason, the party’s presidential candidate. Behind the scenes, though, somewhere far out of earshot, a friend had casually posed the question: “Have you ever thought about what you would do with all your free time if you left the party, Martha?” That is how my mother had explained it to me. A friend’s simple question had been enough to jog her into conscious action.

  “I would be a writer,” my mother had replied.

  Now in the evenings and on weekends she wrote with determination, clacking away at the typewriter at all hours, writing and revising, until she felt satisfied and would drop a hopeful envelope in the mail to Mademoiselle, or Redbook, or to her brother—now teaching at Arizona State University—asking for his critical feedback. And when the last issue of my mother’s subscription to The Militant arrived in the mail, she did not bother to renew it. The years of accumulation had finally run their course. Not long after that, seeing no reason why we should have them in such close proximity, she asked me to move all the old bundled issues down to our storage unit. Which I gladly did, shutting the closet door and transforming the apartment. In the damp, dim, dusty basement I made room for them beside my comic book collection, my stamp collection, my teddy bears—all relics of the past.

  And then our lives changed in another material way: We moved. To the apartment next door, which was smaller but had a sovereign bedroom that my mother would not need to cross in order to reach the bathroom. For the first time since I was eight years old, I would have some sense of privacy. The weekend before we moved, my mother and I walked over to the carpet store, where she splurged on a soft brown rug for my bedroom. Later I hammered a latch onto the door. There were no longer comrades we could ask to help us move, but that didn’t matter; I was strong enough to do it myself. And so I did, dragging every single piece of furniture from apartment four to apartment five.

  These were new beginnings for us: closet doors that closed, bedroom doors that locked, stories written late into the night. But two flights beneath it all, the Militants remained. Sitting there in the darkness. Why exactly were we saving them? All those years never referenced. They could be bound and stacked and moved, but why could they not be thrown away? Because our allegiance and loyalty to the party, once so absolute, once so all encompassing, could not be undone by a mere resignation letter.

  Which meant that when my teacher handed out blank ballots in my eleventh-grade scholars class and told us to choose—anonymously—the presidential candidate of our choice, there was only one choice for me. After we had each cast our votes, the ballots were collected by Mrs. Alexander, shuffled extravagantly, and then randomly redistributed back to us. One by one my classmates read the name of the candidate that had been ticked off on the anonymous ballot they held in their hands.

  “Reagan.”

  “Móndale.”

  “Reagan.”

  Down one row of students, then another, then down my row, and I called off the name on the ballot—“Reagan”—and then on, one after the other, until there came an abrupt pause and the rhythm broke and Connie stared down at the piece of paper on her desk.

  “I don’t know,” she said, almost inaudibly, “I think this might be a joke.” And then she looked up, at a loss. “Someone has written in a name for president.”

  “Well, go on, Connie,” Mrs. Alexander said, no doubt pleased that the paradigm of voting had been organically extended to include this possibility.

  So Connie read the ballot loud enough for everyone to hear. “Mel Mason,” she read, “Socialist Workers Party.”

  There was another pause, as if everyone in the room had inhaled at the same time and held their breath at the same time, and then, on cue, the entire class exhaled simultaneously and erupted with laughter. Long, loud, familiar laughter. Everyone in the room laughed, including Mrs. Alexander.

  The envelopes that my mother mailed to Mademoiselle and Redbook came back with regrets. Determined, she sent others to other magazines, only to see those returned. Perhaps fiction is not your forte, her brother counseled, while he celebrated the publication of yet another novel to add to our bookcase. Into the night I would hear the dinging, the sharp fingers against the keys, the ding, the keys … but twenty years could not be redeemed in six months. Twenty years could not be redeemed in twenty years. My mother was the woman she was now, the woman who had become a secretary and then consoled herself as the years passed by basking in the sweet shade of belief.

  “When will it come, Ma?”

  “Soon.”

  “Will I be eleven?”

  “No.”

  “Will I be eighteen?”

  “Yes, Saïd. Yes. You’ll be eighteen. When you’re eighteen the revolution will come.”

  Eighteen was fast approaching.

  31.

  THE LOCAL SUPERMARKET HIRED ME to bag groceries after school for $3.35 an hour. After a month it was raised to $3.45. It was an
enormous supermarket, like an airport terminal, with endless aisles of fruits and vegetables, boxes and cans, stacked high onto the shelves. The manager was a hulking, white-haired man named Al Sandonata, who at first struck me as avuncular and then tyrannical. All the employees lived in fear of him. Early in my tenure he had berated me harshly about the forbidden process of “double bagging,” and another time he shrewdly caught me punching in from my break three minutes late and put me to work cleaning behind the garbage compactor. My mother loved to hear these stories, delighted in them, as they confirmed everything she had ever told me about bosses.

  In spite of Al, and in spite of the relentless tedium that comes with standing in one place for four hours a day and fitting objects into a brown paper bag, I actually enjoyed my job. I enjoyed the fact that I had good reason to be out of the apartment and away from my mother, and that I was required to wear a tie as if I were an accountant, and that I had to punch a clock as if I were a steelworker, and that food surrounded me like a mountain range—some of which I would steal. But mainly I enjoyed the cashiers. Especially Giuliana, pretty, dark, Italian, and five years older.

  “Good afternoon, Saïd,” she’d say when I arrived at her register, her accent making my name sound languorous and suggestive, making me happy to have a name like Saïd. “How was school today, Saïd?”

  “Good afternoon, Giuliana,” I’d say, trying not to stare at her lips. I’d kissed girls before, but I’d never kissed a woman and I wondered what it’d be like.

  And for the next four hours we’d talk about my high school, and her college, and why Italy is better than the United States, and why the United States is better than Italy, an uninterrupted conversation that carried on as the customers arrived with their groceries, paid their bills, took their brown bags from me, and departed. In the background stood Al, perched behind his customer-service window like an owl, observing all.

  If I was not assigned to Giuliana’s register, I would do all I could to switch with the bagger who had been, and if I could not switch I would watch her as she rang up the orders, took the money, gave the change, every motion impossibly sexy. And when there was a brief interval between customers, five seconds of rest, she would turn and our eyes would meet.

  One chilly evening about four months after I’d begun working at the supermarket, we both happened to be getting off at the same time and she offered me a ride home.

  “Would you like a ride home, Saïd?”

  The question made me hot. The heat made me shy.

  “You have a car?” I said.

  “No, silly, I have a bicycle.”

  It was beginning to rain as we left the store, and we ran fast through the parking lot. I watched her brown hair swish from side to side. Inside her car, the drops pattered lightly on the roof.

  “Tell me which way,” she said.

  “Go this way,” I said. “I don’t live far.” I wished I lived far.

  We glided over the dark and empty streets. My mother would be sleeping now, I thought. “Turn here,” I said. “Go straight,” I said. I watched her hands on the steering wheel, slender fingers, long red nails. When we arrived at my apartment building, instead of pulling in front, she looked around for a parking spot. Three blocks away she found one and parked the car but left it running. The rain tapped harder.

  She turned a switch on the dashboard and the headlights went out. “I feel sad tonight,” Giuliana said. Then she stared straight ahead through the windshield, her hands positioned on the steering wheel as if she were still driving.

  “Did you hear,” she said, “about those terrorists hijacking that Italian boat?”

  I braced at the word terrorist.

  “I think my dad knew somebody who knew somebody on that boat.”

  Yes, I had heard about it that morning, vaguely, indifferently, the news coming over the radio about Palestinians who had done something on a ship.

  “That’s sad,” I said. Was I supposed to say something about the Palestinians’ struggle for self-determination?

  “They threw that Jewish man overboard. Did you hear that? That man in the wheelchair?”

  “That’s sad,” I said again.

  “The world is sad,” she said.

  We sat there saying nothing for a while. The rain let up a bit. Eventually she said, “I’ve thought about it, Saïd, and I’ve decided I’m too old for you.”

  “You are?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be graduating this year,” I said.

  That made her laugh.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. “We should go.”

  She started the car but didn’t drive off. I wondered if I was supposed to offer to walk the three blocks since now it wasn’t raining so hard. Finally she leaned over, pulled me to her, and kissed me on the mouth.

  That Friday night, Al caught me double bagging at Giuliana’s register and threatened to fire me on the spot. “I’m thinking about firing you right this second,” he said. He sounded like he meant it. The first thing I thought was that I’d never see Giuliana again. I looked at her, but she was pretending to be occupied with groceries coming down the conveyor belt. “Come with me,” Al said. I followed behind obediently, feeling light-headed. His large frame cut a path through the crowd of shoppers. We stopped at the customer-service window, where he announced loudly and to no one in particular, “I’m going into the back room with Saïd. I’m thinking about firing him.” A woman peeked her head out of the window and then withdrew it. The back room was packed tightly with the weekend’s shipment. Pallets of boxes were stacked one on top of the other all the way to the ceiling. The night shift was lounging on empty milk crates, but when they saw Al they got up and made themselves busy. We stood between two towering columns of Pepsi.

  “Why were you double bagging?” he asked again, this time as if he was just curious.

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said. I didn’t look at his face, I looked at his tie.

  “Do you know how much paper bags cost?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Take a guess.”

  “Twenty-five cents?”

  “They cost one cent each,” he said, his voice rising. “How much would it cost if every bagger double bagged all day everyday?”

  He made it sound like it was a number I should be able to figure out. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you think it would add up to a lot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m thinking about firing you,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What would your parents say if I fired you?”

  My mother was sitting on her couch, writing in her journal by the light of the lamp when I got home. I told her what had happened. She nodded as if she already knew. “That’s how bosses are,” she said. “They threaten you with things like that to keep you in line.” She shrugged. I went to my bedroom and latched the door. That night I slept poorly and woke before my alarm. It was six o’clock and I had to be back to work soon. When I opened my bedroom door to leave, I was startled to see my mother standing in the living room in her T-shirt and underwear.

  “Your boss thinks you’re an Arab,” she said matter-of-factly

  “What’s that, Ma?”

  “I said, your boss thinks you’re an Arab.” Her face was pale and her eyes rimmed with red, as if she had been up all night reasoning it out. “He’s Italian and he thinks you’re an Arab and he’s angry about what happened on that cruise ship.”

  “I was double bagging, Ma.”

  “I’m telling you!” she said. Her voice escalated and her hands punched the air, lifting her T-shirt slightly.

  “Ma,” I said. “Listen to me.”

  “No! Listen to me! I’m telling you!” And I could see her face transforming back into the old face of the party member, cracked with anguish and outrage over injustice, that face I thought was gone for good. Now here it was again, staring at me. I was frightened by that face, unsettled by it
.

  “Okay, Ma,” I said, “I understand.”

  But she could not be placated. In that still Saturday morning, she screamed as loud as she could. “HE HATES YOU! HE THINKS YOU’RE AN ARAB! HE HATES YOU!”

  “Okay, Ma, okay. You’re right. Okay.”

  And after a while, convinced that I was in full agreement, she stopped yelling and regained her composure. Finally she said, “You better get to work.”

  I made out with Giuliana one more time in her car before she confessed to having a crush on a twenty-two-year-old guy who worked in the produce section. “He’ll be able to take me out to nightclubs,” she told me. I wrote her a love letter, which flattered her but did not win her back. November arrived. The nights I was off from work I would eat supper with my mother. I no longer told stories about Al, but I would entertain her with anecdotes about customers and their shopping habits. “Tell me the one again about the guy who bought twenty-five loaves of bread,” she would say. I would tell her and we would laugh and then we would fall into silence, just the sound of our forks scraping the plate. Sometimes I would look up and catch her staring out into space. “Ma,” I would say. “Hey, Ma.”

  “What? … Oh … What?”

  After supper I would go to my bedroom and latch the door and do my homework. Later I would hear the ding ding of the typewriter as she composed the stories that no magazine wanted.

  Then one night when I returned home from work, at about eight o’clock or so, I found my mother already sound asleep in bed. She was lying on her stomach with the covers pulled up tightly around her neck and her face turned toward the wall. She must be tired, I thought. And I went to my room.

  The next morning, however, when I woke for school, she was still in bed, in the same position.

  She must be staying home from work, I thought. She must be sick.

  I ate my breakfast at the kitchen table just a few feet away from her, trying to be quick and quiet so she would not be disturbed. When I was done, I put my dishes in the sink, took a shower, dressed, and left for school, noticing she had not stirred once. And when I returned home that night, there she was in bed again. And the next morning too. I’m sure she’ll be feeling better by tonight, I thought.