When Skateboards Will Be Free

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People.” It was my mother’s idea to come to New York City to see the exhibit with us. Fond memories of her father reading The Saturday Evening Post, she wrote to me in a postcard. The three of us ascend the spiral walkway, winding our way to the top. My mother moves with a sprightliness that belies her age. Nearing seventy, her mind is still sharp and her health is good. Karen has even remarked that she has a youthful voice. And her knapsack is filled with the possessions of someone who has a wide range of interests: novels and The New Yorker, pens and paper, a camera. It is her face, though, that tells the story. A drawn and haggard face, with sagging skin around the eyes, a downturned mouth, a constant frown like she is at all hours trying to work through a complicated problem. The face will light up at moments, will even laugh, but then it will return to that shape I know so well. And each time I see her she will seem as if she has grown smaller, more stooped around the shoulders. When I was a child she once made the mistake of telling me that it was normal for people to shrink as they grew older. I thought, of course, this meant that my mother would one day grow so small that she would disappear completely, and this frightened me and made me cry.

  Inside the gallery, we are surrounded by large, colorful paintings so vivid they could be photographs. I had assumed they would all be the size of a magazine cover. “So did I,” my mother says. We are all delighted. Here before us is an adorable little girl, nearly lifelike, wearing a red beret and holding her doll up to the family doctor, who examines it with his stethoscope. And here are three boys, partially undressed, running with terror past a wooden sign that reads No swimming. And here is a truck that can’t get through because the dog won’t move. We have entered a sentimental, idealized vision of America where all conflict is simple conflict. It has a calming effect. We walk quietly. The three of us side by side. Occasionally someone will offer a bit of observation. “Look,” my mother says, “this girl’s shoes are untied.”

  We spend a while marveling at a painting that shows a little boy, his mouth wide in disbelief, as he stands at the open drawer of his parents’ dresser with Santa Claus’s outfit in his hands. Titled simply The Discovery.

  How funny, we say. How well it’s been captured. How well it’s been rendered. The boy is so alive, he looks like he might emerge from the canvas at any moment.

  And then Karen tells us the story about the year she finally learned there was no Santa Claus. She was probably seven, she says, and it was just a hunch she had. But still she waited, smartly, until Christmas was over and all her gifts had been opened before she posed the question to her parents: “Is there really a Santa Claus?” And her mother answered: “We’re Santa Claus.”

  My mother thinks this is a sweet story. And so do I. And I throw my arms around Karen, imagining her as a little girl standing shyly in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas, asking a question that she doesn’t really want to know the answer to.

  The mood abruptly shifts in front of the painting of a little black girl. The Problem We All Live With. There is more to Norman Rockwell than just an idealized vision of America, the exhibit tells us, and he knows that not all conflict is simple conflict. The little black girl is being escorted by four federal marshals on what is presumably her first day at an all-white school, and scrawled on the wall behind her is the word nigger. My mother approaches the painting and peers at it closely. Her face has grown alert and angry, and it is etched with that familiar outrage over injustice.

  “Do you know what this is about, Saïd?” she asks me. Her voice is cutting and it reverberates with accusation, as if I might have been the one to write nigger.

  “Sure, Ma,” I say, “I know what it’s about.”

  After the exhibit, Karen and I take my mother to our favorite restaurant in the Village. It’s a macrobiotic restaurant that serves dishes like kuzu stew and fried seitan cutlet. With the exception of the tofu soup, my mother’s never heard of any of the things on the menu, but she’s adventurous and lets us do the ordering for her. She’s also never eaten with chopsticks and decides that tonight’s the night she’s going to learn. I give her a primer on how to hold them. “Like this, Ma,” I say, shaping her hand, “put your thumb here and your index finger here …” But the food, once grasped, drops, and drops again, and soon I lose patience. Karen takes over. “Like this, Martha,” she says, but even Karen’s patience wanes, and eventually we give up and ask for a knife and fork.

  When dinner is over and we’re all stuffed with grains and vegetables, the bill arrives. My mother looks at it and then unzips her knapsack and removes an envelope filled with traveler’s checks. She tears off four of them and sets them down. But the waitress has no idea what traveler’s checks are. She must ask the manager. And the manager has no idea what traveler’s checks are. He must make a phone call.

  “Why don’t I just pay with my credit card?” I say.

  “No!” my mother says. “Let me pay”

  When the manager arrives he says that, yes, they can accept traveler’s checks.

  And after that we go to Port Authority to see her off on her bus back to Pittsburgh. In the terminal the air is hot, the fluorescent lights are harsh, and an upturned cockroach lies in front of a vending machine. I can smell the fumes of exhaust. I hope to never ride on a bus again as long as I live. The chairs the three of us sit on are just a narrow strip of metal, barely wider than the average ass, that flip up automatically when you stand. They have been designed not for comfort but with the aim of keeping homeless people from sleeping on them. If you wish to lean back, you must lean against the wall behind you.

  “What a fun day,” my mother says.

  “It was great,” I say.

  “It was great,” Karen says.

  And it is then that my mother asks, without prelude of any sort, “Saïd, can you tell me? How is Mahmoud?”

  Her face blushes at the question, like a young woman’s, like a young woman’s at a dinner party in Minneapolis forty-five years ago. I should have been prepared for her to ask me this, since she asks it every time without fail. And every time, without fail, I find myself flustered and at a loss for how to respond. What should I say? He’s doing just great, Ma. He’s dating someone thirty years younger, Ma. Maybe if you’d been thirty years younger, huh, Ma? Or maybe if you’d been prettier, or smarter, or been able to keep up with his politics. Maybe then. Maybe then things would have worked out differently for you. For us.

  But the fact of the matter is, I haven’t seen my father for a long time. And most likely it will be a long time to come. And this embarrasses me and makes me resentful that she would ask. I did happen to talk with him on the phone a few months ago, and it was a pleasant talk, and he sounded so excited to hear about Karen and said he couldn’t wait to meet her, but he couldn’t right now, but soon, definitely soon.

  “He’s doing fine, Ma.”

  I was seventeen years old the summer my father returned from Iran. He told the Iranian authorities he wanted to attend a mathematics conference in California, but he had no intention of ever going back. The first thing he did when he arrived was to visit my brother in Detroit and my sister in Levittown, Pennsylvania, both of whom had resigned from the party by now and were working their way through college. He was supposed to come see my mother and me, but he never did. He found an apartment in New Jersey and a job teaching math in Brooklyn. And then he asked my mother for a divorce, since his new wife would soon be leaving Iran to join him. My mother consented, and thirty years of marriage finally came to an end.

  We talked on the phone a few times. They were awkward, stilted conversations. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to him, and I had no idea what to say. He seemed to take a keen interest in what I was going to do with myself now that I had graduated from high school, but I had no clue. Maybe work at the supermarket. Maybe get a job in a post office. I’d always heard that was a good job. What about college? he asked. I couldn’t afford college. “I’d like to help
,” he said.

  And the day I left to see him, my mother opened up that brown sugar jar and removed a fifty-dollar bill. “Don’t let him pay for dinner,” she said.

  “Okay, Ma.”

  When the plane landed at Newark Airport, I was holding in my hand Malcolm X Talks to Young People. I wanted my father to see me with it. But something had gone wrong, a mix-up of sorts, and he was not at the gate as planned. Perhaps it was my fault and I had misunderstood. Not knowing what to do, I wandered aimlessly through the airport, looking for him.

  “Saïd Harris,” I heard a woman’s voice say over the intercom. “Saïd Harris, please meet your party at such-and-such gate.”

  No one had ever called me Saïd Harris before. Even when I had desperately wanted to be Harris, I had remained Sayrafiezadeh. Now here Saïd Harris was being announced before thousands, as if he were the recipient of an award.

  “Hello,” my father said when he saw me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He was dressed in a white shirt and a blue tie and he looked just like the man in the photograph. We shook hands like friendly acquaintances. Then we got on a train and went to a restaurant in New Jersey to have our first dinner together.

  It was an uncomfortable meal. I sat bolt upright in my chair the entire time and tried to act mature. The silences were long and deadly, and I blamed myself for them. Not knowing what to call my father, I was forced to wait until we made eye contact before I said something. Hey, guess what! He ordered red wine and I drank it and it went to my head. And then he ordered steaks. We talked about colleges and things I might study. Political science, I suggested. And we talked about plans to get together with my brother and sister.

  He had no idea what I had gone through to get there for that first dinner. The past lay beneath us, pristine and unexplored. He did not know that less than one year earlier I had dressed his wife—because she was still his wife—and taken her to the hospital. Nor, for that matter, did he know about the storm door I once hid behind, or the television cord I would hunt for, or the photograph of him that hung above my bed for years and years.

  My mother never told my father what transpired that night when I was four years old and she left me alone in the apartment with the traveling comrade. I believe that is a crime tantamount to the crime itself. The truth must not only be the truth, it must also be told. Maybe she thought that such an unseemly development would have made our home less inviting were my father ever to consider returning. When she called party headquarters and told them what the comrade had done to me, they had responded, “Under capitalism, everyone has problems.” Such an explanation, which I know my father would no doubt have endorsed, was apparently sufficient for my mother. And a few days later the party found another place for the comrade to stay. What had happened was never mentioned in our home again. It was up to each of us to bear our private miseries alone, until that glorious day in the future when it would all be resolved once and for all, and a perfect world would emerge.

  My father wouldn’t let me pay for dinner that first night. He wouldn’t hear of it. The fifty-dollar bill sat heavily in my pocket. And while we waited for the waitress to arrive with my father’s change, he removed a small photograph from his wallet. “Look,” he said. It was a small black-and-white photograph of me as a baby in the old Brooklyn apartment. I am on my belly, raising myself up by my arms, and I am smiling at the camera.

  “I’ve carried this with me the whole time,” my father said.

  My mother’s bus has arrived.

  “Good-bye,” she says to Karen, giving her a hug and a kiss.

  And then she turns to me. “Good-bye, said.”

  “Good-bye, Ma,” I say.

  And suddenly she throws her arms around me, clutching me around the shoulders, dragging me down into her.

  “Good-bye, said,” she whispers, but she is crying now and the words can barely be formed.

  Before I can say anything more, she picks up her knapsack and boards the bus. A line of people board behind her. Through the tinted window I try to find her. I think I can see her waving. I wave back. And soon the bus is filled, and the driver closes the door with a whoosh, and it pulls away toward Pittsburgh. We watch it pull away. The smell of diesel lingers.

  And after that, we walk down to the subway station, Karen and I, where we get on the train, she drapes her leg over mine, and we rumble beneath the city back toward home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Matt Weiland; my agent, Zoë Pagnamenta; and my editor and associate editor at The Dial Press, Susan Kamil and Noah Eaker. This book could not have been written without them. I am deeply indebted.

  My appreciation also to Eugenia Bell, Bryan Charles, Keith Josef Adkins, Philip Gourevitch, Nathaniel Rich, Francesca Richer, Hannah Tinti, Elizabeth Grove, Carolyn Murnick, Joanna Yas, The Sirenland Writers Conference, Antonio Sersale, Carla Sersale, and Franco Sersale at Le Sirenuse. As well as The New York Public Library, The University of Delaware Library: Department of Special Collections, The New York State Bar Association, The Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and that comfortable chair at Housing Works Bookstore.

  And every Wednesday evening at 6:45, Jeff Adler, Andrew Fishman, Charles Gansa, and Jeff Golick.

  A CONVERSATION WITH SATD SAYRAFIEZADEH

  Random House Reader’s Circle: In When Skateboards Will Be Free, you on more than one occasion quote Castro’s maxim “The truth must not only be truth, it must also be told.” Perhaps there’s an irony in your quoting from Castro, but is this a statement that you fundamentally agree with? How important was it to you to tell the truth of your childhood?

  Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: I’ve always felt burdened by that statement—that feeling that you have to tell the truth no matter what the consequences are. There are a lot of people who probably wouldn’t get that from those words, but I think my childhood, where I was always taught to be high-minded and principled, showed me what the implication is: There’s one truth and certain people are in possession of it. And that can be dangerous. Not only does it lead to vanity, but it leads to isolation. As a child I was always coming up against that compulsion to tell the truth. I felt guilty a lot, tormented. In the book I describe a scene at a friend’s house when I was ten years old and I told a dinner table full of people, “I support the struggle of the Iranian workers and peasants against U.S. imperialism.” That wasn’t a popular position to be taking in 1979. It seemed that I was consistently caught between either betraying the party or betraying my friends. Generally my allegiance to the party won out.

  But having said all of this I guess it’s pretty much true that I’ve come around to embrace Castro’s maxim. I wasn’t completely aware of the irony when I first decided to quote it in the memoir, and only later did I realize that in many ways I’ve actually become the ideal Socialist Workers Party member. That’s very funny when I think about it.

  RHRC: That’s interesting. What do you mean by that?

  SS: Well, I’ve told the truth with this memoir: some very difficult truths—some very difficult truths it took me a long time to accept—that’s the irony. I’ve become a great truth-telling comrade.

  RHRC: What was the precipitating factor in your decision to write about your childhood? How long had you felt that impulse?

  SS: Writing about my childhood was something that I had wanted to do since my early twenties when I began to seriously think about what I had gone through. But at the time if you’d asked me what the defining characteristics of my upbringing were, I would have said “being Iranian-American” or “being deprived.” I didn’t really make the connection to my parents’ commitment to the Socialist Workers Party as setting me apart in any interesting way. If this sounds now like an incredible omission, I suppose it is. But it’s an indication of my ability to compartmentalize certain aspects of my life. And of course, there was the fear of betraying an organization that had in essence helped raise me. But eventually I rea
lized that if I continued to avoid the subject I would be forever limiting the scope of my writing.

  So shortly after the 2004 presidential election I wrote a piece about the Socialist Workers Party, and about growing up without a father, and about how extremely difficult it is for me to bring myself to vote in any election. It was really the first time I had ever written so directly about these things and I was overwhelmed by the response. The author Thomas Beller posted the essay on his website mrbellersneighborhood.com, and just a few days later I received an email from Matt Weiland, who was then deputy editor of Granta, asking me to write something more about my family—which I did. And what he ended up publishing became the foundation for my memoir.

  RHRC: Were there other memoirs that inspired you as you began to write? We know from your book that your parents’ apartments were each filled with the books of Marx and Engels. But when did you yourself become a passionate reader?

  SS: When I was a child my mother would occasionally suggest adult books for me to read: Go Tell It on the Mountain, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye. I remember those very very fondly. One of my mother’s great redeeming qualities is her love for literature. It’s also one of her tragedies, because she spent so many years trying to suppress her hunger to read books that were not related to the Socialist Workers Party or published by their publishing arm, Pathfinder Press—not to mention suppressing her aspirations to be a writer. So while it’s true that the books in our home were overwhelmingly on one topic only, the books that my mother would bring back from the library were of a different nature. And there were three distinct memoirs that had an absolutely profound effect on me: Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. I was probably no more than ten years old when my mother gave me these to read—far too young—and I was traumatized by their graphic descriptions of poverty, abuse, violence, and racism. The stories felt hopeless, but I also saw that it was possible for people to actually use their unhappy experiences to create something. I’ve often wondered if my mother’s motivation in giving me these books was a way to prove how much worse things were for other people. That would have been consistent with her overall tendency to be always outraged with the suffering of others, but not our own. And it’s occurred to me recently that part of the drive to write my memoir was to place my own book alongside those others which had been so successful in gaining my mother’s sympathy!