One Man Guy

by Michael Barakiva

Alek had to stop himself from hugging Mr. Weedin. “Thank you, Mr. Weedin, thank you so, so much. I promise that I’ll do my best.”

  “What is your best, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Weedin, but I’m looking forward to finding out.”

  “Me too, Alek.”

  Alek scurried to his new seat, took out his homework and textbook, and made sure to be inspecting them intently when Ethan entered the class. Alek hoped Ethan would be surprised to see Alek sitting on the other side of the classroom.

  * * *

  Confined to his home, Alek actually welcomed the increase in his homework load. He just wished that his parents could dock his grade, the way Ms. Imbrie had told him she’d do when he handed in the Shakespeare paper that morning, and then move on, instead of looking at him with hurt and disappointment every time they were forced to interact with him.

  The next Saturday morning, Alek got up just before nine a.m. and tiptoed downstairs to get to the New York Times before anyone else in the family woke up.

  As he was putting down the Magazine an hour later, Nik walked in.

  “Mind if I read with you?” he asked. They were the first words Nik had spoken to him since the family had arrived from their vacation a week ago.

  Alek shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

  Nik sat next to Alek, picking up the discarded Magazine as Alek made his way through Arts, Sports, and the front page. They sat reading for another hour in silence. When Alek finished International News, he put down his folded section and got up to go back to his room.

  “Alek, you have a sec?” Nik asked.

  “Nik, if you’re going to give me crap for something I did or didn’t do, save it. I don’t have the energy.”

  “You don’t have to be hostile.”

  “Really? Don’t I? This whole week has been hell, Nik. You’ve never been grounded, even for a day, so you wouldn’t understand. Isn’t the older sibling supposed to be the one who screws up so it’s easier for the younger one?”

  “What?”

  “Do you realize how hard it is to be your brother? You do everything right. You get perfect grades, you work as a camp counselor during the summers, you’re never late for breakfast or dinner, and you’re in the church youth group, for God’s sake. I wish you did one thing—anything—that Mom and Dad didn’t approve of.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Nik asked.

  “Do I sound like I’m kidding?”

  “Alek, you’ve got it all wrong. Being the oldest one sucks. Do you think I like the burden of feeling like I have to do the right thing all the time? Do you know how many times Mom or Dad tells me that they’re counting on me, Andranik, firstborn, and that I can’t let them down?”

  “Then why do you always do what they say? And what they expect? You’re even dating an Armenian, for God’s sake!”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What?”

  Nik looked around to make sure they were alone. “Did Mom and Dad tell you why we came back early from our trip?”

  “Honestly, with everything that happened, I didn’t feel like changing vacation plans was on the very short list of things I’m allowed to talk to them about.”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t the reception you would’ve planned if you had been expecting us,” Nik said pointedly.

  “Not in the least,” Alek agreed.

  “Well, it turns out Nanar isn’t really Armenian. Or at least, not just Armenian,” Nik confided. “The day before the vacation was supposed to end, she told me that she’d learned something that she thought I should know.”

  “What could it possibly be?”

  “Well, her dad is Armenian, but her mom isn’t. She’s Turkish!”

  Alek’s jaw dropped. “So that means…”

  “Nanar is half-Armenian, half-Turkish. When her mom and dad fell in love, they knew his parents would never accept her. So they lied about it and have been lying about it ever since.”

  “How did Nanar find out?”

  “It started with the heritage project we were doing for Armenian Youth. She started digging into her mom’s family history, and the more she dug, the shadier things got. Even before we left on the trip, she told me she felt like her mom was hiding something from her. Then we were doing research at the library in Burlington, and she found a census from the town where her parents were born. Her father’s family was listed on the Armenian side, but her mom was listed with the Turks! She confronted her parents and they confessed, and she came running to tell me.”

  “What did you do, Nik?”

  Nik looked away.

  “Oh, no,” Alek said.

  “I told her I couldn’t date someone Turkish,” Nik admitted, looking away in shame. “And then I ran and told Mom and Dad, who told the rest of the families, and one by one, everyone decided to go home from the vacation early. The Kalfayans didn’t even wait for Nanar and her parents. They just packed up and left. I don’t even know how they got home.”

  “Nik, you have done some stupid things in your life, but I have to say, this one really takes the baklava. Your girlfriend, the only person you’re actually bearable around, outs herself to you, and you reject her? She didn’t have to tell you. She could’ve just kept her secret to herself, but she decided to be honest with you. Do you know how much courage that takes? Is there something about being straight that makes you insensitive, or is it just a cosmic coincidence?”

  “Don’t you think I know that I acted like a jerk?” Nik asked, anguished. “Even when I was doing it, I felt it wasn’t right.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I knew it was what Mom and Dad would’ve wanted,” Nik confessed. “But now, I don’t care. Being without Nanar, I feel like a dolma without its stuffing. Like a baklava without its pistachios. Like a—”

  “Okay, I get it,” Alek cut him off.

  “I need to figure out a way to get her back.”

  “Even if it means pissing off Mom and Dad?”

  “Even then,” Nik swore. “Is that what being apart from Ethan is like for you?”

  “It’s not the same thing, because Nanar didn’t do anything wrong, unlike Ethan. He hasn’t talked to me since that day.”

  “And have you tried to talk to him?” Nik asked.

  Alek looked away rather than responding.

  “At least I know when I’m being an idiot,” Nik said. “Can you imagine what it must’ve been like for him? Meeting Mom and Dad would be traumatic under normal circumstances. You have to reach out to him, Alek.”

  Alek felt that sinking feeling inside that he got when he was wrong and someone else was right. And that feeling started morphing into something else, something wild and dangerous and crazy. “I think I know what we need to do,” Alek said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Something that will win Nanar back for you, fix things with Ethan for me, and get Mom and Dad off our backs. But that’s only if it works, of course.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then Nanar and Ethan will never speak to you and me again, and Mom and Dad will ground us both until the Turks finally admit to the Armenian Genocide.”

  “Where do I sign up?”

  “You really up for this?”

  “I trust you, Alek. Think about how long we’ve been working against each other. If we actually started working together, what can’t we do?”

  20

  “You’re rolling the sarma too tight,” Alek insisted.

  “Am not,” Nik said.

  “They’re going to burst when they’re cooking,” Alek warned.

  “Will not.”

  “Will too.”

  “Will not!” Nik practically screamed, ripping the leaf he’d been working on, sending lamb and rice stuffing flying all over the kitchen.

  The brothers Khederian paused for a moment and took deep breaths.

  “Why don’t you do it with me?” Nik asked.

  “You know Mom and Dad haven’t taught me how
yet,” Alek responded.

  “So I will. Here,” Nik said, passing one of the unwrapped grapevine leaves to his brother.

  “Really?”

  “Why not? Put around a tablespoon of the stuffing in the middle, fold in the sides, then roll it up from the bottom.”

  Alek accepted the leaf and got to work, following his brother’s instructions.

  “You see how much faster it goes if we do it together?” Nik said. Alek nodded in agreement, enjoying the long-awaited feeling of the grapevine leaf in his hand.

  “Alek, after we finish rolling the sarma, I’ll start chopping the onions for the string beans and lentils.”

  He placed the completed leaf in the pot, starting a second layer on top of the already-rolled leaves.

  “Why don’t you start on the lahmajoun and I’ll do the onions?”

  Alek surveyed the family kitchen, which looked like a war zone. Nik had gotten one of his friends from student council to take him shopping for the ingredients that morning. They had returned hours ago, which Alek and Nik had naïvely believed would give them more than enough time to do the cooking, and laid out each ingredient neatly as they’d seen their parents do before embarking on a great meal-making. Between then and now, however, it looked like an earthquake had rumbled through the kitchen, violently tossing the ingredients in random directions. And not a single dish was ready.

  “What time is it?” Alek asked nervously.

  “Seven fifteen.”

  “That only leaves us forty-five minutes!”

  “Then what’re you waiting for?”

  Alek chopped his anxiety out on the onions. When he had suggested the dinner party to Nik last week, it had seemed like the perfect idea. They had spent the rest of that Saturday and all the next Sunday flipping through their parents’ cookbooks, trying to put together the perfect meal.

  “What about making kufteh for the appetizer?” Alek had asked his brother.

  “What’s that again?”

  “Can there possibly be some piece of Armenian culture you don’t know?” Alek asked, faux-shocked.

  “Just tell me what it is.”

  “Aunt Arsinee makes it every Easter, remember? It’s that lamb/pine nut/parsley patty thing, like an Armenian slider. She makes it with lots of cumin.”

  “Isn’t that really hard to make? I think we need to make things that we know how to do. Or at least things that we think we can pull off.”

  Alek considered this. “Good point, Nik,” he conceded.

  They had agreed to start with premade lahmajoun instead, a thin flatbread baked with ground meat and herbs that simply needed to be heated up. For the entrée, they had decided to make the sarma, which would be accompanied by bulgur, lentils, and green beans in a walnut sauce.

  If he had realized how much chopped onion the green beans needed, Alek might’ve selected a different dish. He tried to look away while chopping to protect his eyes from watering, but was worried that he’d end up cutting his fingers.

  “Here, let me show you a trick,” Nik offered. He lit a candle from the dining room and placed it next to the chopping board. “That should do it.”

  “Really?” Alek asked.

  “Yeah, cutting onions makes you cry because enzymes from the surface mix with the sulfenic acids inside to produce syn-propanethial-S-oxide. The gas floats up to your eyes, reacting with the moisture to create sulfuric acid. Then your eyes burn, releasing more water, and a chain reaction forms. But the flame draws the gas away, preempting it.”

  “I can’t believe I’m actually happy you’re a nerd for once,” Alek said.

  “Just chop those onions, okay? T-minus thirty minutes.” Nik filled a large pot of water, put it on the range, and turned the flame to high. “Let’s see,” he thought out loud. “That’s probably two gallons of water, and at a minute a quart, I’m going to guess it’ll boil in around ten minutes.”

  “Your sorta cool nerdiness just descended into uncool super-nerdiness, FYI,” Alek informed him. He took a large skillet for the green beans and put it on medium-low heat. Once the skillet was warm, he poured in a few tablespoons of olive oil, waited for it to start shimmering, then dumped half the onions in, gently stirring them until they were translucent. While the onions cooked, he pounded the walnuts and garlic into a paste, then seasoned it with coriander, paprika, salt, cayenne, and red wine vinegar.

  “I’m going to start the lentils,” Nik said, putting a pot on low heat. He waited for it to warm up, then added a few tablespoons of olive oil. He took the remaining onions and dumped them inside, letting them cook slowly until they caramelized, as he’d seen his dad do a million times. While the onions quietly sizzled, he gave the lentils a thorough rinse and began sifting through, looking for stones or debris.

  “Good call,” Alek commended him. “Can you imagine the fuss Mom would make if she bit into something hard and inedible? It’s almost enough reason to slip one onto her plate to see what happens.”

  “Almost,” Nik said, making sure Alek was kidding. “You never told me how you got Ethan to come, by the way.”

  Alek laughed nervously, then removed the trimmed green beans from the fridge and tossed them in with the translucent onions in the large skillet.

  “He is going to be here, isn’t he, Alek?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what’s that nervous giggle about?” Nik asked.

  “It’s just that, well, I spent the last week trying to get the courage up to ask him—” Alek began.

  “Which is your way of telling me that it didn’t actually happen, right?” Nik continued.

  “So I had a friend do it for me,” Alek finished.

  Alek’s dad had another job interview and hadn’t been able to pick him up after school on Friday, so Alek had taken a detour to Becky’s house on the way home. He had knocked on the door urgently, praying that Becky would be home. He was supposed to call his dad’s cell phone from the landline after school, so his window was only a few minutes wide.

  “Where have you been, dumb-ass?” she had asked him when she opened the door. “You haven’t returned any of my calls. Or e-mails. Or texts. Or smoke signals.”

  “I’m grounded for life. My parents walked in on me and Ethan.”

  “I wonder if I should start a support group with them. I was totally traumatized when it happened to me.”

  “Thanks, Becky.”

  “Always here for you.”

  “Look, I need you to do something for me.” He rushed through the explanation of everything that had happened. “That’s why I need you to carry a message for me and ask Ethan to come over for dinner tomorrow night with my family.”

  “Are you Romeo or Juliet?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Well, if I have to be the Nurse, ferrying messages back and forth between the two of you, I want to know who’s who.”

  “I’m going to have to tell you I’m Juliet for you to do this for me, aren’t I?”

  “You’re quick.”

  “Okay, Becky. If you’re the Nurse, then Ethan is Romeo and I’m Juliet.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I’m Juliet,” Alek repeated.

  “Leave it to me. He’ll be there,” Becky had reassured him.

  “And make sure he knows what he’s in for, okay?” Alek had told her.

  Alek looked at his brother, who was giving the lentils one final pass. “How did you get Nanar to agree to come over?”

  “I did what any self-respecting guy would do. I returned all the Armenian books I bought this summer and used that money to have a dozen roses delivered to her house with a note begging for her forgiveness and telling her that if she took me back, I’d be her slave forever.”

  “Very masculine.”

  “It worked, okay?”

  Alek let the pot with boiling water cool down for a few minutes, and then gently poured half of it into the pot with the uncooked, rolled-up sarma. He turned the flame to medium-high, and the moment the wat
er started boiling again, covered the pot and dropped the heat down to medium, letting the dish cook at a gentle rolling boil. The rich, earthy smell of grapevine leaves wafted from the pot.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to smell sarma without thinking of home,” Nik said.

  “I know what you mean,” Alek agreed.

  Nik’s onions had finally caramelized into a crispy dark brown. He poured a few cups of the rinsed lentils into the pot, stirring them around to coat them in the remaining oil. “Now, you know not to put salt in with lentils until after they’ve finished cooking, right?” Nik instructed.

  “Duh,” Alek responded. “I’m not one of these Americans. Everyone knows you can’t put salt or vinegar in with legumes until they’re already done or they’ll never cook through all the way.”

  “You know, I don’t mean to imply that you’re stupid when I tell you things. I’m just trying to be a good older brother,” Nik said.

  Alek felt thousands of possible sarcastic responses journey from his brain to his tongue. But instead of releasing any of them, he just mumbled “Thanks” under his breath and continued stirring.

  “Let’s see,” Nik said. “The bulgur just needs to sit in there and finish absorbing the water, the sarma has to finish cooking—”

  “Don’t forget to put the tomato paste in.”

  “I won’t. We’ve got to finish up the beans, pour the chicken stock into the lentils and let them simmer, put out the madzoon sauce, and heat up the lahmajoun, but I want to wait until the last minute to do that so that it’s still warm. I think I can do all that. You want to set the table?”

  “Sounds good,” Alek said. “I can also put the hors d’oeuvres out.”

  “Do you really think we need the string cheese as well as the soojoukh? It might be enough just to have the meat out with the pita and olives.”

  “The string cheese is a must, okay?”

  “Okay,” Nik conceded.

  Alek grabbed the soojoukh, a salted, air-dried meat, from one of the bags and sliced it thinly, then arranged it on a small platter around an impressive serving of the braided cheese. Then he cut the pita into quarters, drained the olives out of their plastic container into a ceramic bowl, and grabbed another small bowl for the pits. He set all the dishes in the living room with a neat stack of napkins nearby.