by Adib Khorram
“All right, I’ll be there in a bit. Did you get the goldfish?”
“Um.”
Dad breathed a Level Five Disappointed Sigh.
My ears burned. “I’ll go grab them now.”
* * *
“Hey, son.”
Dad got out of his car and helped me load my wheel-less, seat-less bike into the trunk of his Audi.
Stephen Kellner loved his Audi.
“Hi, Dad.”
“What happened to the truck nuts?”
“I threw them away.”
I did not need the reminder.
Dad pressed the button to close the trunk and got back in. I tossed my backpack onto the backseat and then slumped in the passenger seat with the goldfish suspended in their plastic prison between my legs.
“I almost didn’t believe you.”
“I know.”
It had taken him thirty minutes to come get me.
We only lived a ten-minute drive away.
“Sorry about your bike. Does security know who did it?”
I buckled my seat belt. “No. But I’m sure it was Trent Bolger.”
Dad put the Audi in drive and took off down the parking lot.
Stephen Kellner liked to drive much too fast, because his Audi had lots of horsepower and he could do that kind of thing: Accelerate to escape velocity, slam the brakes when he had to (in order to avoid running over a toddler holding his brand-new Build-a-Bear), and then accelerate again.
Thankfully, the Audi had all sorts of flashing lights and sensors, so it could sound Red Alert when a collision was imminent.
Dad kept his eyes on the road. “What makes you think it was Trent?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell my father the entire humiliating saga.
“Darius?”
Stephen Kellner never took no for an answer.
I told him about Trent and Chip, but only in the broadest strokes. I avoided mentioning Trent’s references to tea-bagging.
I did not want to talk to Stephen Kellner about testicles ever again.
“That’s it?” Dad shook his head. “How do you know it was them, then?”
I knew, but that never mattered to Stephen Kellner, Devil’s Advocate.
“Never mind, Dad.”
“You know, if you just stood up for yourself, they’d leave you alone.”
I sucked on the tassels of my hoodie.
Stephen Kellner didn’t understand anything about the sociopolitical dynamics of Chapel Hill High School.
As we turned onto the freeway, he said, “You need a haircut.”
I scratched the back of my head. “It’s not that long.” My hair barely touched my shoulders, though part of that was how it curled away at the ends.
That didn’t matter, though. Stephen Kellner had very short, very straight, very blond hair, and he had very blue eyes too.
My father was pretty much the Übermensch.
* * *
I did not inherit any of Dad’s good looks.
Well, people said I had his “strong jawline,” whatever that meant. But really, I mostly looked like Mom, with black, loosely curled hair and brown eyes.
Standard Persian.
Some people said Dad had Aryan looks, which always made him uncomfortable. The word Aryan used to mean noble—it’s an old Sanskrit word, and Mom says it’s actually the root word for Iran—but it means something different now.
Sometimes I thought about how I was half Aryan and half Aryan, but I guess that made me kind of uncomfortable too.
Sometimes I thought about how strange it was that a word could change its meaning so drastically.
Sometimes I thought about how I didn’t really feel like Stephen Kellner’s son at all.
THE DISTINGUISHED PICARD CRESCENT
Despite what boring Hobbits like Fatty Bolger might have thought, I did not go home and have falafel for dinner.
First of all, falafel is not really a Persian food. Its mysterious origins are lost to a prior age of this world. Whether it came from Egypt or Israel or somewhere else entirely, one thing is certain: Falafel is not Persian.
Second, I did not like falafel because I was categorically opposed to beans. Except jelly beans.
I changed out of my Tea Haven shirt and joined my family at the dinner table. Mom had made spaghetti and meat sauce—perhaps the least Persian food ever, though she did add a bit of turmeric to the sauce, which gave a slight orange cast to the oil in it.
Mom only ever cooked Persian food on the weekends, because pretty much every Persian menu was a complicated affair involving several hours of stewing, and she didn’t have the time to devote to a stew when she was overwhelmed with a Level Six Coding Emergency.
Mom was a UX designer at a firm in downtown Portland, which sounded incredibly cool. Except I didn’t really understand what it was that Mom actually did.
Dad was a partner in an architecture firm that mostly designed museums and concert halls and other “centerpieces for urban living.”
Most nights, we ate dinner at a round, marble-topped table in the corner of the kitchen, all four of us arranged in a little circle: Mom across from Dad, and me across from my little sister, Laleh, who was in second grade.
While I twirled spaghetti around my fork, Laleh launched into a detailed description of her day, including a complete play-by-play of the game of Heads Down, Thumbs Up they played after lunch, in which Laleh was “it” three different times.
She was only in second grade, with an even more Persian name than mine, and yet she was way more popular than I was.
I didn’t get it.
“Park never guessed it was me,” Laleh said. “He never guesses right.”
“It’s because you have such a good poker face,” I said.
“Probably.”
I loved my little sister. Really.
It was impossible not to.
It wasn’t the kind of thing I could ever say to anyone. Not out loud, at least. I mean, guys are not supposed to love their little sisters. We can look out for them. We can intimidate whatever dates they bring home, although I hoped that was still a few years away for Laleh. But we can’t say we love them. We can’t admit to having tea parties or playing dolls with them, because that’s unmanly.
But I did play dolls with Laleh. And I had tea parties with her (though I insisted we serve real tea, not imaginary tea, and certainly not anything from Tea Haven). And I was not ashamed of it.
I just didn’t tell anyone about it.
That’s normal.
Right?
* * *
At last, Laleh’s story ran out of steam, and she began scooping spaghetti into her mouth with her spoon. My sister always cut her spaghetti up instead of twirling it, which I felt defeated the point and purpose of spaghetti.
I used the lull in conversation to reach across the table for more pasta, but Dad pressed the salad bowl into my hands instead.
There was no point arguing with Stephen Kellner about dietary indiscretions.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
Salad was inferior to spaghetti in every possible way.
* * *
After dinner, Dad washed the dishes and I dried them while I waited for my electric kettle to reach 180º Fahrenheit, which is what I liked for steeping my genmaicha.
Genmaicha is a Japanese green tea with toasted rice in it. Sometimes the toasted rice pops like popcorn, leaving little white fluffy clouds in the tea. It’s grassy and nutty and delicious, kind of like pistachios. And it’s the same greenish yellow color as pistachios too.
No one else in my family drank genmaicha. No one ever drank anything besides Persian tea. Mom and Dad would sniff and sip sometimes, if I made a cup of something and begged them to taste it, but that was it.
My parents didn�
�t know genmaicha had toasted rice in it, mostly because I didn’t want Mom to know. Persians have very strong feelings about the proper applications of rice. No True Persian ever popped theirs.
When the dishes were done, Dad and I settled in for our nightly tradition. We sank into the tan suede couch shoulder to shoulder—the only time we ever sat like this—and Dad cued up our next episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Every night, Dad and I watched exactly one episode of Star Trek. We watched them in broadcast order, starting with The Original Series, though things got complicated after the fifth season of The Next Generation, since its sixth season overlapped Deep Space Nine.
I had long since seen every episode of each series, even The Animated Series. Probably more than once, though watching with Dad stretched back to when I was little, and my memory was a bit hazy. But that didn’t matter.
One episode a night, every night.
That was our thing.
It felt good to have a thing with Dad, when I could have him to myself for forty-seven minutes, and he could act like he enjoyed my company for the span of one episode.
Tonight, it was “Who Watches the Watchers?” which is an episode from the third season where a pre-warp culture starts to worship Captain Picard as a deity called The Picard.
I could understand their impulse.
Captain Picard was, without doubt, the best captain from Star Trek. He was smart; he loved “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”; and he had the best voice ever: deep and resonant and British.
My own voice was far too squeaky to ever captain a starship.
Not only that, but he was bald and still managed to be confident, which was good, because I had seen pictures of the men on my mom’s side of the family, and they all shared the distinguished Picard Crescent.
I didn’t take after Stephen Kellner, Teutonic Übermensch, in many ways, but I hoped I would keep a full head of hair like his, even if mine was black and curly. And needed a haircut, according to Übermensch standards.
Sometimes I thought about getting the sides faded, or maybe growing my hair out and doing a man-bun.
That would drive Stephen Kellner crazy.
* * *
Captain Picard was delivering his first monologue of the episode when the doot-doot klaxon of Mom’s computer rang through the house. She was getting a video call. Dad paused the show for a second and glanced up the stairs.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “We’re being hailed.” Dad smiled at me, and I smiled back. Dad and I never smiled at each other—not really—but we were still in our magic forty-seven-minute window where the normal rules didn’t apply.
Dad preemptively turned up the volume on the TV. Sure enough, after a second, Mom started yelling in Farsi at her computer.
“Jamsheed!” Mom shouted. I could hear her even over the musical swell right before the act break.
For some reason, whenever she was talking over the computer, Mom had to make sure the sound of her voice reached low Earth orbit.
“Chetori toh?” she bellowed. That’s Farsi for “How are you,” but only if you are familiar with the person you are speaking to, or older than them. Farsi has different ways of talking to people, depending on the formality of the situation and your relationship to the person you’re addressing.
The thing about Farsi is, it’s a very deep language: deeply specific, deeply poetic, deeply context-sensitive.
For instance, take my Mom’s oldest brother, Jamsheed.
Dayi is the word for uncle. But not just uncle, a specific uncle: your mother’s brother. And it’s not only the word for uncle—it’s also the relationship between you and your uncle. So I could call Dayi Jamsheed my dayi, but he could call me dayi also, as a term of endearment.
My knowledge of Farsi consisted of four primary vectors: (1) familial relations; (2) food words, because Mom always called the Persian food she cooked by its proper name; (3) tea words, because, well, I’m me; and (4) politeness phrases, the sort you learn in middle school foreign language classes, though no middle school in Portland has ever offered Farsi as an option.
The truth was, my Farsi was abysmal. I never really learned growing up.
“I didn’t think you’d ever use it,” Mom told me when I asked her why, which didn’t make any sense, because Mom had Persian friends here in the States, plus all her family back in Iran.
Unlike me, Laleh did speak Farsi, pretty much fluently. When she was a baby, Mom talked to her in Farsi, and had all her friends do the same. Laleh grew up with the ear for it—the uvular fricatives and alveolar trills that I could never get quite right.
When she was a baby, I tried to talk to Laleh in Farsi too. But I never really got the hang of it, and Mom’s friends kept correcting me, so after a while I kind of gave up. After that, me and Dad talked to Laleh exclusively in English.
It always seemed like Farsi was this special thing between Mom and Laleh, like Star Trek was between Dad and me.
That left the two of us in the dark whenever we were at gatherings with Mom’s friends. That was the only time Dad and I were on the same team: when we were stuck with Farsi-speakers and left with each other for company. But even when that happened, we just ended up standing around in a Level Seven Awkward Silence.
Stephen Kellner and I were experts at High Level Awkward Silences.
* * *
Laleh flounced onto the couch on Dad’s other side and tucked her feet underneath her butt, disturbing the gravitational fields on the couch so Dad leaned away from me and toward her. Dad paused the show. Laleh never watched Star Trek with us. It was me and Dad’s thing.
“What’s up, Laleh?” Dad asked.
“Mom’s talking to Dayi Jamsheed,” she said. “He’s at Mamou and Babou’s house right now.”
Mamou and Babou were Mom’s parents. Their real names were Fariba and Ardeshir, but we always called them Mamou and Babou.
Mamou and babou mean mother and father in Dari, which is the dialect my grandparents spoke growing up Zoroastrian in Yazd.
“Stephen! Laleh! Darius!” Mom’s voice carried from upstairs. “Come say hello!”
Laleh sprang from the couch and ran back upstairs.
I looked at Dad, who shrugged, and we both followed my sister up to the office.
MOBY THE WHALE
My grandmother loomed large on the monitor, her head tiny and her torso enormous.
I only ever saw my grandparents from an up-the-nose perspective.
She was talking to Laleh in rapid-fire Farsi, something about school, I thought, because Laleh kept switching from Farsi to English for words like cafeteria and Heads Down, Thumbs Up.
Mamou’s picture kept freezing and unfreezing, occasionally turning into chunky blocks as the bandwidth fluctuated.
It was like a garbled transmission from a starship in distress.
“Maman,” Mom said, “Darius and Stephen want to say hello.”
Maman is another Farsi word that means both a person and a relationship—in this case, mother. But it could also mean grandmother, even though technically that would be mamanbozorg.
I was pretty sure maman was borrowed from French, but Mom would neither confirm nor deny.
Dad and I knelt on the floor to squeeze our faces into the camera shot, while Laleh sat on Mom’s lap in her rolling office chair.
“Eh! Hi, maman! Hi, Stephen! How are you?”
“Hi, Mamou,” Dad said.
“Hi,” I said.
“I miss you, maman. How is your school? How is work?”
“Um.” I never knew how to talk to Mamou, even though I was happy to see her.
It was like I had this well inside me, but every time I saw Mamou, it got blocked up. I didn’t know how to let my feelings out.
“School is okay. Work is good. Um.”
“How is Babou?” Dad asked.
&
nbsp; “You know, he is okay,” Mamou said. She glanced at Mom and said, “Jamsheed took him to the doctor today.”
As she said it, my uncle Jamsheed appeared over her shoulder. His bald head looked even tinier. “Eh! Hi, Darioush! Hi, Laleh! Chetori toh?”
“Khoobam, merci,” Laleh said, and before I knew it, she had launched into her third retelling of her latest game of Heads Down, Thumbs Up.
Dad smiled and waved and stood up. My knees were getting sore, so I did the same, and edged toward the door.
Mom nodded along with Laleh and laughed at all the right spots while I followed Dad back down to the living room.
* * *
It wasn’t like I didn’t want to talk to Mamou.
I always wanted to talk to her.
But it was hard. It didn’t feel like she was half a world away, it felt like she was half a universe away—like she was coming to me from some alternate reality.
It was like Laleh belonged to that reality, but I was just a guest.
I suppose Dad was a guest too.
At least we had that in common.
* * *
Dad and I sat all the way through the ending credits—that was part of the tradition too—and then Dad went upstairs to check on Mom.
Laleh had wandered back down during the last few minutes of the show, but she stood by the Haft-Seen, watching the goldfish swim in their bowl.
Dad makes us turn our end table into a Haft-Seen on March 1 every year. And every year, Mom tells him that’s too early. And every year, Dad says it’s to get us in the Nowruz spirit, even though Nowruz—the Persian New Year—isn’t until the first day of spring.
Most Haft-Seens have vinegar and sumac and sprouts and apples and pudding and dried olives and garlic on them—all things that start with the sound of S in Farsi. Some people add other things that don’t begin with S to theirs too: symbols of renewal and prosperity, like mirrors and bowls of coins. And some families—like ours—have goldfish too. Mom said it had something to do with the zodiac and Pisces, but then she admitted that if it weren’t for Laleh, who loved taking care of the goldfish, she wouldn’t include them at all.