Veil of Roses

by Laura Fitzgerald

  He strums the chord again, harsher. But briefly, no humming this time. He’s got his final point to make, this ponytailed man who’s now got the eyes of a zealot. “I used to wonder, what do they have to lose, these people who hold others back? These husbands, these parents, these governments? And I’ve come to realize that’s the wrong question. The correct question is: How do we help them realize what they have to gain by letting us, encouraging us, insisting to us, that we develop our God-given talents and put them to good use in the world?”

  “We Shall Overcome.”

  That’s the song he sings to us, teaches us, then insists we sing along with him.

  We shall overcome, one day.

  Haroun calls that night, full of complaints about his eight-hour drive to Albuquerque. The truck stop was filthy, so he didn’t want to use the bathroom and went outside behind a tree instead, but got bitten by a mosquito in a place he won’t mention, and so itched the entire way to Albuquerque. He itched so badly he almost drove off the interstate several times. And his eye began twitching from tiredness after three hours on the road, so he had to stop and buy some medical supplies so he could fashion an eye patch for himself.

  “It must have been hard driving with that eye patch,” I offer, glaring at Ardishir, who sits at the kitchen table flipping through old address books, looking for any eligible Persians he might have overlooked. He makes big eyes at me, eager to hear of Haroun’s latest strange saga.

  “It was. I wish you were with me,” Haroun says with affection.

  “I wish I were there, too,” I say through a gritted smile.

  Ardishir nods at me, like, Keep up with the compliments, Tami, and all I think is, My, how the worm has turned. He finally realizes how desperate the situation is.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “I miss you,” I tell Haroun. “I’m counting the days until you return.”

  But what I am really counting is the number of days until my visa expires.

  It is now down to eighteen.

  Maryam brings me a pink cowboy hat, a pair of Tony Lama boots, and tight blue jeans with a boot-cut leg. She also brings me a fitted white blouse and a bolo tie and a belt with a turquoise buckle. Tonight I am finally going to the country-western bar, and she wants me to have fun. She also wants me to look cute, because the owner is Persian and, you never know, maybe he wants to get married before my crazy fiancé gets back. I know this because I overheard her talking to Ardishir.

  “Well?” I come to the living room and spin around. I have done my hair in braids and tied pink ribbons around each end.

  Maryam claps. “You look adorable.”

  “You do,” Ardishir agrees with a laugh. He reaches for his wallet and pulls out fifty dollars. “Buy a round of drinks for your friends.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And don’t drink more than two drinks,” Maryam tells me for the third time.

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t lose the camera. Americans steal, you know.”

  I burst out laughing. Her generalizations sometimes are quite amusing.

  Ardishir holds out his hand for my camera, and I pose for several photos.

  “Take a photo of my boots,” I tell him. “Only my boots.”

  He does. I take off my cowboy hat.

  “And now a close-up of me and my braids.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he jokes. Then I put the hat on Maryam and throw my arm around her shoulder. “Take one of me and my sister.” As he is doing so, Edgard pulls up in a battered old station wagon and honks the horn.

  “They’re here!”

  Maryam frowns. “Can’t they come in? It would be good for us to meet your friends.”

  “Let her go.” Ardishir hands the camera back to me and opens the door. “Have fun.”

  “Thanks.” We have made our peace. I know he only wants the best for me.

  The Rustler is big, loud, and packed. But Agata and Josef came early for happy hour and got a table for us right near the dance floor, so we have a place to sit. Eva leads me to the bar and she orders a pitcher of beer and I see right away who the Persian owner is. He looks like he is sixty years old and he wears a wedding ring and so I do not even bother to introduce myself.

  Haroun it is.

  This bar mesmerizes me. Music, alcohol, and couples dancing. Three big no-no’s where I come from, where having fun is against the law. People go around in a big circle on the dance floor. Promenading, Edgard informs me, pointing out the lanes on the dance floor that are only for couples. Other times, line dancers take over and all the people do the same dance moves at the same time. Men on the sidelines stand with their thumbs in their belt loops, and the women have the biggest hair I’ve ever seen.

  Eva drinks a beer very quickly and then hitches on to the group of line dancers.

  “Want me to teach you how?” Carrie offers. She is Edgard’s wife and we have just met and I like her very much because she treats Edgard with such respect, and she brought him back with her from Peru and gave him a chance at a new and better life.

  “Come on.” Agata pulls me up and leads me to an open spot at the edge of the dance floor. She and Carrie teach me the grapevine and the hot turn monterey and the sailor left and sailor right and the kickball change. It is very fun, but by the time I learn the steps, the song is over. So we go and drink a little bit of our beer and practice some more, and by the time “Boot Scoot’n Boogie” comes on, I feel confident enough to let them drag me out with all the others.

  All I can say is, thank goodness for the beer! I make many mistakes, but I don’t care. My cowboy hat has fallen off my head and hangs down my back, and my braids bounce with each step I take. But it is so fun! We continue into “Friends in Low Places” and then “Electric Slide” and by the end of “Electric Slide,” I am dipping low like Eva and pushing my chest out when I land on my heel.

  And I am laughing, laughing, laughing with all my friends. This is the most fun I have had since arriving in America.

  “Someone’s got his eyes on you,” Eva yells to me. With her arm around my shoulder, she continues to dip low and drags me down with her, so low I can see my own cleavage. I feel like a badjen, and I like the feeling. But when I look up to the edge of the dance floor, I stop dancing. I freeze, and Eva yanks me back up with her. But I can barely go through the motions of this electric slide.

  For, standing at the edge of the dance floor, looking more handsome than I’ve ever seen him before—in his light-brown, well-worn leather cowboy boots, faded blue jeans with a hole in the knee, and a crisp white T-shirt—is Ike. I don’t need to take a picture with my camera. I know I will remember this image of him forever. Of Ike, standing there, watching me. Beautiful, wounded Ike.

  “How did he know we would be here?” I yell at her over the sound of the music.

  “I have no idea,” she says with that devilish grin of hers.

  I duck out of the line and my friends continue the dance without me. I have to sidestep and pause and dash my way around the other dancers as I make my way to Ike. I stop a few feet in front of him. I will try for humor.

  “Howdy, pardner.” I put my cowboy hat back on my head and latch my thumbs through my belt loops and pose like I have seen the men do. I give him my best smile. He remains serious.

  “Howdy, Persian Girl.”

  Tears fill my eyes.

  “Are you very angry with me?”

  “For how you blew me off?”

  I look at him quizzically.

  He asks again, without slang. “Am I mad that you stopped coming to see me?”

  I nod.

  “No.” After a pause, he adds, “I just miss you, is all.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I tell him quietly.

  He watches my friends dance for a moment. “You look good out there on the dance floor.”

  I laugh. “No I don’t.”

  “You look happy.”

  “Do I?” I can hardly contain my surprise.

  “Defin
itely.”

  “Really?”

  He looks at me quizzically. Our eyes lock, and his turn serious. “We’re wasting time, Tami. We should be spending every minute together.”

  I look to the ground. He reaches for my hands and squeezes them. In response I step forward onto the toes of his cowboy boots.

  “Hey!” He feigns offense, but I just give him an evil-Eva grin.

  “I like you far too much to spend time with you, Ike.”

  “That makes no sense at all,” he chortles.

  I pull on him. “Come have a beer with me. Tonight is for fun. I don’t want to be sad.”

  “Sometimes I don’t think Persian girls even know how to be happy,” Ike grumbles as I lead him to our table. I feel very daring, to be holding his hand like this in public. And I also feel desired. What a nice feeling this is, to be wanted. I am sure Ike is not going to pull out an antiseptic wipe and scour my germs out of his skin.

  When we get to the table, I introduce him to Edgard and Josef and point out Carrie and Agata on the dance floor. Then I pour him a beer and hand it to him.

  “Just how many Persian girls do you know,” I ask him, in a teasing voice, “to be able to judge that they do not know how to be happy?”

  He gulps a few sips. “One,” he admits, chagrined.

  “Meaning me?”

  “Meaning you, Persian Girl.”

  I pull down the brim of my hat so it sits low on my forehead. “I’m not a Persian girl,” I inform him. “I’m a cowgirl.”

  The skin around Ike’s eyes crinkles when he bursts out laughing. As I watch him, a sudden recognition comes over me: Tonight, I can be anyone I want. Tonight, I am with Ike and my friends, and they enjoy me and maybe being happy only means living in the moment, appreciating the exact moment you’re in and not thinking about the worries of the future. And I think, I can do this. Tomorrow, once again, I can be the girl who settles. Tomorrow, I can be the girl with a fiancé who likes but doesn’t love her. Tomorrow, I can be the girl who might perhaps never have laugh lines of her own.

  But tonight, I can be a cowgirl.

  Eva, Agata, and Carrie make their way back to our table after a while to have a drink. When the music turns slow, the dance floor shifts from line dancing to something akin to a slow promenade around the perimeter of the huge dance floor. Couples hold each other and effortlessly move in rhythm, turning and stepping and gliding as if they were one. I stare openmouthed. They are so beautiful, these couples.

  Ike stretches out his hand to me. “Dance with me,” he requests.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know how.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’ll dance with you,” Eva offers. But Ike ignores her.

  “Come on,” he urges me, gesturing with his head in the direction of the dance floor. “I dare you, Cowgirl.”

  Well, that just does it. Faking a confidence I definitely do not feel, I walk ahead of Ike to the dance floor. I hold my hands up like I have seen the couples do and wait for Ike’s direction. He takes my hands and keeps a proper two-foot distance between us. Still, my heart pounds.

  “Okay, this is a waltz,” he tells me.

  “A waltz,” I repeat, and nod to let him know I am ready.

  “We step forward on the left,” he instructs, and steps to the side. I follow him. “Then step right beside the left.” This, I also do. But it soon becomes too complicated, all this stepping left in place and then stepping forward on the right and stepping left beside the right and backward on the left and then cross left over the right. I become flustered and fall several steps behind and Ike smiles gently at me and acts as if he doesn’t care, but every mistake I make only confirms that this world of slow dancing with a man is beyond me.

  I stop trying halfway through the first waltz. I simply halt. Ike stops, too. I try to pull my hands back, but he keeps holding on.

  “You’re doing great, Tami,” he assures me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him, my beautiful Ike with the laugh lines. “I just don’t know how to do this.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  But I know I will never get it right, and all of a sudden, it is about so much more than the dance. Tears spill over before I can even try to fight them back.

  “Hey,” Ike says softly, and pulls me toward him. “Come here.”

  I step into his hug and he wraps his arms around me and holds me close. “You fit right in,” he murmurs.

  I smile into his shoulder. It is how I feel, too, like he is a part of me. You’re not a Persian girl tonight. I remember this and tighten my embrace. I take in Ike’s clean-soap smell, the smoothness of his freshly shaven cheek. And then, without thinking, I do something I would not have thought myself capable of doing.

  I kiss his neck.

  It is warm and so very soft and I feel him smile when I kiss it and he smells so good that I kiss his neck again in the exact same spot. And then I realize what I have done and step back.

  “Sorry.” I smile sheepishly.

  “No need to be sorry.” He leans forward and I shake my head to warn him that I lost myself for a moment but now I remember who I am and I cannot kiss him anymore. As we look at each other, happy and miserable at the same time, the overhead lights flicker on and off and on and off.

  “What is this?” I ask, looking around me. The place looks not so special in the harshness of the light.

  “Closing time.” He swallows hard. “Can I give you a ride home? Please?”

  I take a deep breath and hold it for as long as I can before exhaling. Ike watches me, and I can tell he already knows my answer from how I am breathing. I don’t even have to say it.

  I am back to being a Persian girl, and there is no way I can agree to what he has proposed.

  Maryam picks me up after class on Monday and drives me to see Haroun’s physician, Dr. Saeid Haji. I have never been to a male doctor before. I sit looking out the window, rubbing and twisting my hands.

  “You’re in America. Don’t be scared, Tami Joon,” Maryam reassures me. “There’s nothing wrong with a male physician examining a female patient.”

  “I know this, logically,” I tell her. “But it’s hard nonetheless, when you’re told your whole life by the government that it is wrong.”

  Maryam reaches over and pats my knee. “I know. I still get nervous myself.”

  Based on how Dr. Haji has decorated his office, I think he must see mostly Middle Eastern patients. There are photographs of geographical sights in the Middle East. There are health pamphlets written in Arabic and Farsi. And there is a stack of prayer rugs in a basket. This makes me swallow hard. Great, he’s religious. I should have worn hejab.

  Maryam gives me one last smile of reassurance, but remains in the waiting room when a Middle Eastern nurse wearing a headscarf comes for me. She takes me to a small examining room and points me to a chair.

  “Dr. Haji will be with you in just a moment.”

  My voice sounds frightened when I speak. “Should I lie on the examining table? Should I change out of my clothes?”

  “You’re here at the request of Haroun Mehdi, is this correct?”

  I nod.

  “You are to marry him?” She shows no expression, so I don’t know how to take this question.

  I nod again.

  “The doctor will be in shortly.”

  I am so nervous that when Dr. Haji knocks gently on the door to the examining room, I cannot even tell him it is okay to enter. I am bent over, clutching my stomach, tensing all my muscles.

  He enters on his own after a moment and looks concerned to see my posture. He is about my father’s age, bald with very pale skin.

  “My dear, are you in pain?” He takes a seat on a rolling stool and slides close to me.

  “Just nervous,” I whisper.

  “Is this your first visit to a male doctor?”

  I nod.

  “You’re new to America?”

>   I nod again.

  “Well, I think you’ll find this to be quite painless.” He pats my knee and smiles. I watch the skin around his eyes crinkle. Laugh lines. I take them as a good sign.

  I breathe deeply and make myself sit tall. He nods encouragingly.

  “So, you’re marrying Haroun Mehdi?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Haji pulls out a penlight from his breast pocket and peers into my ears. He shines the light in each of my eyes, and has me open my mouth so he can examine my throat. His hands are smooth and soft and kind as he presses against the glands in my neck. His gentle manner relaxes me, as do his questions about my parents and the neighborhood I am from in north Tehran. He is from north Tehran as well.

  Dr. Haji scribbles a few notes in my file. With his eyes averted, he asks, “How well do you know Haroun?”

  “I met him a couple of months ago.”

  He looks up. “You are here on a tourist visa?” It is more a confirmation than a question.

  I nod. He studies my eyes, and after a long moment nods back. I can tell he knows exactly what my purpose is in marrying Haroun.

  He clicks his pen closed and puts it in his breast pocket. He crosses his arms and clears his throat.

  “Haroun has been my patient for many years, so I know him well,” he says. “From a medical standpoint, anyway.”

  “He speaks very highly of you,” I tell him.

  At this, Dr. Haji’s mouth breaks into an involuntary smile. “I’m sure he does.”

  I think back to my restaurant meal with Haroun, how the staff placed bets on his behavior. I can only imagine the crazy things Dr. Haji has heard from Haroun’s mouth over the years.

  “I am restricted in what I can say to you, due to doctor-patient confidentiality laws,” he says.

  “I understand.”

  “But I have to wonder if you know what you’re getting into with him.”

  My voice is shaky as I reply, “I know he is quite concerned about his health and germs in the environment.”

  Another involuntary laugh from Dr. Haji. “Yes, this is true. You put it very kindly.”

  He stops for a moment as if measuring his words, and when he speaks again, his voice is quiet, like he is breaking bad news to a family with a member in the hospital. “I want to tell you something about America, Tamila.”