by Michael Cart
The only way up and out, Baba reminds me daily since I was in fourth grade, hinges on my getting scholarship aid. School is your Silk Road, he says.
I have done okay in school. I don’t possess Baba’s sense of tragic separation from his homeland. So I don’t buy into his panic. He insists that American college is the only way for us all to thrive: His and Maman’s sacrifices, their self-imposed exile from home, will only have been worth it if I make good. It depends on me.
Besides, in some ways Baba has been more than ready for me to live far away in some grotty dorm. Out of sight, out of mind, maybe. Maybe he sees the possibility of failure in me, and doesn’t want to watch it happen.
I learn over the phone that Tupperneck doesn’t offer Shakespeare over the summer. Brontë sisters—that sounds wet. Puritan Literature, Anne Bradford to Jonathan Edwards? It’s too Puritan at home in Tonawanda; I’m wanting to get away from perfection. Then I discover a cross-discipline course, credit given either in music or English, called Melody and Lyric: Tin Pan Alley to American Top Forty. Criticism and composition on the art of the popular song. Limited to ten music students, ten English students. They have space. I’m in. I’m no more interested in music than my peers—meaning I know and care a little bit—but lyrics are near enough poetry for me to tolerate for six weeks.
So I am shipped off on Trailways bus.
With Baba’s blessings? Baba doesn’t bestow blessings. He gives attitude, Persian style. “Excuse me,” says Baba, “there is big difference between Summer of Love and Donna Summer. You think Baba doesn’t know the musics. Baba knows the musics. Baba knows the young. You be credit to Maman and to the jamat, Faroukh-jan. Behavior. You do good grade in school so you avoid maintenance department.” He works at Sisters of Charity Hospital with buckets of Lysol; we don’t ask.
The bus is frigid, with an overzealous air-conditioning system. I can see though a weird sea-glass green of the windows that men on the work site are stripping off their shirts and working in streaks of sweat. Streaks of sweat down their backs. The sweat cleans the dust and that back, the one turning away, just there, is so strong: the stripes articulate the form. Draw the contours of that strength as clearly as the mown wheat field beyond shows the contours of the strong slope. The shape of America. (Hoping to be an English major, I’m guilty of standing by while my own metaphors metastasize then collapse into idiocy.)
Voices petition for my attention, distraction from the interesting views.
You are a liar, says Laurel Finn; and I feel I don’t even know myself well enough to know if she’s right.
You skip college, and you dig ditches, says Baba. Or you move hospital beds around. Sisters of Charity offers many fine employments for strong, young, stupid peoples.
You are a liar and you are cruel, says Laurel.
You say one word and your teeth are about to parade out your asshole, says her father. Get away from my daughter.
“Twenty-minute stop at Tupperneck,” says the bus driver, pulling in at the edge of a gas station. “Potty break. If you’re going on to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, or Canadian points beyond, don’t wander from the bus. I don’t wait for stragglers.” He lights a cigarette before pulling the handle to open the door.
What do fathers want their children to see, and why? What did Baba want for him that summer?
His habit of thinking in big, unanswerable questions hasn’t abated.
The boys obediently peer out the window when, hoping to surprise them with being airborne already, Faroukh lifts the plastic shade. But they don’t recognize the ground below as earth. What do they think it is? Bathwater brown, not as much snow as he’d guess. “Those are clouds,” he tells them, indicating with a knuckle on the Lucite the prettier world of distant, icy domes.
They turn back to their tiny sachets of pretzels, more impressed with the in-flight dining.
“No surprise to me that Bush has creamed Kerry and won a second term,” says a fellow in the next aisle. “We haven’t finished kicking Iraqi butt.” He turns to flick a speck from his nostril toward the aisle. His eye meets Faroukh’s. The patriot has a tender, even sentimental mouth, which in almost slow motion opens and then closes before he shifts his gaze to Faroukh’s children.
Faroukh leans down and says the first thing in Farsi that comes to his mind, the only thing the boys might remember from their grandfather. “Tavalodet Mobarak.” It’s a happy birthday message and means nothing today, but it works: Matthias smiles winningly. Faroukh turns back to the man across the aisle and shrugs, as if to say, You can’t win with children, can you? You’d sacrifice the whole world for them, including fellow passengers on a plane.
At least this is what he wants to suggest. The other guy tracks Faroukh’s eyes for just long enough that Faroukh guesses he is trying to memorize his face for identifying in a sheaf of enemies of the state. Were this same gaze happening before September 11, it couldn’t have meant anything but sexual curiosity.
As if he realizes that, too, the armchair patriot drops his eyes and turns scarlet, busies himself with his own pretzels.
“Pierce,” says the registrar, a chunky woman wearing what looks like her daughter’s tank top. The stitching must be made of iron thread, the way it’s able to hold in her amplitude. Her hair seems an homage to Sally Ride, or maybe that’s just New Hampshire humidity.
“I’m Faroukh Rahmani,” I repeat, meaning, Not Pierce someone: Isn’t it obvious?
“You’re not listening,” she answers. “I’m telling you: the class meets in Pierce. Pierce 203. On the Perimeter Road, to the left as you leave the student union. Your dorm isn’t listed?”
“I’m staying with a relative nearby.”
“Lucky you. Class is Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, nine to eleven thirty, and lab Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, four to five. Your prof will fill you in on everything else.” She shakes her hair as if to liberate her mind of my tedious schedule, readying herself for the next set of questions.
“Pierce?” says Auntie Nurjahan. “I do anti-draft counseling there when is still Episcopal Student Services building.”
“I didn’t know you had Episcopal leanings. And I didn’t know women could be drafted back then.”
“I couldn’t. But others could. Your Baba, for one. And then where would you be?”
I have no answer. Part Persian, part Vietnamese maybe, growing up on a rice paddy in the Mekong River delta? What possible lives have we sidestepped by the merest of accidents?
“Good of you to care,” I say.
“You can’t fight every enemy. You fight ones that matter. I’ll drive you to school tomorrow; you’ll have to walk rest of time. Is three miles. In Mashad we walk six miles every morning.” Iran is always twice as wonderful and twice as impoverished as America, depending on the slant of the conversation.
“Do me good,” I say, meaning it: That’ll cut down her opportunities to stuff me with Persian delicacies by an extra ninety minutes a day. Mom’s sister prides herself on her superior knowledge of child rearing. Being single, she has been untainted by maternal experience, which she believes keeps her idealism fresh and nutritive.
The boys have been enjoying ripping the pages out of Northwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine. With deft folding, Faroukh has been supplying the boys with paper airplanes they can fly into the window, making little booming noises. It’s not exactly PC, but it’s better than launching them over the heads of passengers. Now the boys find the remaining pretzels and begin to squabble over what’s left. Faroukh rings the bell for the attendant.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she says, “we’ve closed up the galley; the pilot has rung the first bell to signal our initial descent into Boston. We’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes or so. Perhaps they can wait until then?” Her deference to Faroukh as a paying customer has increased incrementally with every state they have successfully traversed without a midair calamity. Her smile of apology seems genuine. “Good little tykes. And traveling without their mommy,
too.”
“They’re used to it.”
The plane lands on time. Faroukh rings home; gets the message machine again. “So far so good. Now the hard part.”
Auntie Nurjahan has been anxious about becoming stuck in traffic behind a stalled delivery truck on my first day. She can’t risk being the cause of my arriving late, failing the course, losing my scholarship, and living my life at Sisters of Charity, mopping up behind my Baba. So we’re twenty minutes early.
“Make us proud,” she says, two hands clutched firmly on the steering wheel as if it might suddenly buck and take her away with it. Her face is thin between the cotton triangles of her flowered head scarf. “Iran brings you here, Faroukh-jan.”
I’ve read about the campus in the promotional material. A good part of Tupperneck is made up of late-nineteenth-century cottage-style homes, purchased by the college during the Depression and modestly retooled for educational purposes. When I skulk toward my first class, I see that a city street or two must have been scraped out and replaced with lawns and walks, and the fences between properties removed. The place has the feeling of a neighborhood that has been flooded with grass.
Pierce Hall is among the nicer of the buildings, Queen Anne according to the caption under the photo. The carved front door is wide and heavy, and the slate roof slopes in several directions. Dormers and gables are finished with ornamental fretwork and shingles laid out in patterns, though the effect is diminished by having all the constituent elements painted the same dirty white. A wedding cake left in the dust. Even the field-stone porches have been painted white.
No one looks at me as I tromp into Pierce, though some pretty undergraduates at desks and file cabinets are singing out questions about the weekend to one another. The front hall leads to a wide oaken staircase in need of new varnish; the steps are scuffed almost to beach gray. I pop up two steps at a time as if I’m not a high-school student on probation, as if I have gone to Tupperneck for several semesters already. Room 203 is the main one at the top of the stairs.
Blaise d’Anjou is standing at the window, his eyes shaded, his back turned to the door. I don’t know it is Blaise yet, of course. Sunlight glaring around him, I see him as a prototype for an ideal human body design, rear elevation. Such a confident carriage that for a minute I think he must be the professor, except for the shorts. He has a saucy stance but broad shoulders. College professors don’t wear shorts in class. College professors don’t look like—that.
Though I don’t know what the that is.
Before I even take a seat, the professor swans in, a slender fellow who appears to be wearing eyeliner. Professor Theodore Farber. Other students clatter up the stairs. Despite the heat the professor is dry as a banana skin. “Call me Tod,” he says, “or call me Toodles: Just call me.” The class sits as if stoned. We don’t know one another, but we’re united in condescension.
The floors have been linoleumized, the ceilings lowered with acoustic panels, but the walls still bloom with pale faded flowers, and the wood molding is the color of toasted honey. This was a bedroom once. An electronic keyboard is shoved against a tiled fireplace surround. I pick a seat right in the middle of the class. The immigrant’s syndrome is to be more eager than Pollyanna, while the immigrant child’s syndrome is to appear just perfectly eager, never too eager, for anything that’s on offer around the room.
The professor goes through the syllabus. He passes around some photocopied pages. Begins to write with squeaky chalk. This is a school on a budget: He writes on a World War Two–era blackboard nearly incapable of taking any further impressions. He slips a tape into the deck and goes moony over a scratchy recording of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” You can barely hear the lyrics through the static of time and the professor’s breathy appreciation. “Don’t expect you’ll write a line worth saving this semester, not a line, darlings. But you’ll write a thousand lines that will teach you what not to write next year, and sooner or later your ear will catch up with your heart. All you have going for you, you precious young things, is your proximity to love. All great songs yearn for love, and you know the yearning. You know it better than I do. Do I hear a demurral? No, I do not.”
No one speaks a word that first morning. When Professor Farber—“No, do call me Tod, it’ll improve your grade-point average”—when Tod opens the floor for discussion, no one asks a question. “Shy little pikers, you’ll get used to it,” says Tod, and gamely goes on to dissect lyrics of “If Love Were All,” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and “The Man That Got Away.” Outside, someone is riding a mower. You can’t help thinking of the heat, and the sharp aroma of cut grass and gasoline, and wondering if the summer help has taken off his shirt because it is so hot, so hot.
“On Wednesday we’ll look at the first sung line of a dozen classic love songs,” says Tod. “See what is implied melodically by the shape of the initial musical statement. Cue up ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ and that old ditty ‘I Gave My Love a Cherry.’”
Before he dismisses the class, Tod pairs us up. I’m teamed with Francesca Comstock, a black girl with a frosty manner. It turns out that one of the twenty students is missing; there are only nineteen of us. Someone didn’t show. So some student has no partner. “I’ll work with you, Monsieur d’Anjou,” says Tod, “through the first assignment anyway. It’s the least I can do. Perhaps on Wednesday our missing Miss Missy will show up and relieve me of the burden.”
We lumber to our feet. I grunt an acknowledgement to Francesca, who seems less pleased about our pairing than I am. Perhaps she thinks that we minority students have been saddled with each other. On the way to the door, I see Blaise’s face for the first time.
“I insist: ‘Over the Rainbow’ is a love song, only Dorothy doesn’t know it yet,” Tod is saying to Blaise. The professor leans forward; the student is trapped in his chair. His shoulders lurch back; his preppie olive green shirt stretches open. The whole thing constructs itself as a scene clear as a page in a pop-up book. Against his will, Blaise is a Venus flytrap, lethally attractive to any marauding honeybee. Professor Tod is a lech. Blaise’s face is so shut it might as well be wrapped with yellow police procedural tape: Go no further.
It’s no easier to say what makes any individual face beautiful than it is to dissect a compelling melody—and we tried all semester to name some musical attributes we could agree signified beauty. Later in my life someone told me that if you walk the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan behind the teeming lunch crowd, you can tell ninety-five times out of a hundred if someone is attractive by the shape of the back of their head. I’ve road-tested this theory and it holds up. Good proportions are good because they’re consistent through the whole package.
Still, Blaise’s face, that first glimpse of it—what is so compelling? The strength of resistance he is putting up against Tod Farber’s overtures? The secret withheld? Is the racing of my heart just sympathy? Shorthand, I’d say he’s an Anglo-Gallic chorister, and I confess I flatter myself by thinking, Like my own make and model, but presented here in a different color scheme and clearly an upgrade in the detailing. He’s not quite blond, not quite chestnut, not quite perfect-looking. Just perfectly heart stopping.
I try to call out “Francesca” but I can’t get my voice to work. I walk into the carved newel post at the landing and hope no one has noticed. Tod Farber’s precise diction flutes out over us as we clatter around the turn in the staircase. We’re all hurrying to get out, preferring the oppressive humidity outside.
Blaise is back there, incapable of doing anything but trapping the professor. I have seen on his face that this has all happened before.
Faroukh guides the rental with a deceptively light hand, rolling his palm across the beveled rim like a young operative in an advertisement for Scotch, oiling along in a closed universe of sexy drives and sexy women. His boys are asleep, Jamesy in a car seat supplied by the rental company, Matthias tilted in a cushiony w
odge made of candy-colored parkas and snow pants.
Faroukh is glad that highway driving makes the boys pass out. Neither Jamesy nor Matthias has pestered him since he pulled away from the Avis parking lot at Logan Airport several hours ago. It gives him time to remember, while they are securely caught in their own nests of dreams.
As all the young are. As he was, back at eighteen. A little more than twenty years ago. Caught in the kind of isolation and appetite that seems to be the punishment for outgrowing childhood.
The sun winks off the wheel, off his hand, off the silver band on his ring finger. Winks like a spotlight into his iris, blinding him for an eighth of a second. But no deer lunges from roadside underbrush, no kid on a motorbike swerves fatally into his lane. Everyone’s safe, in that wink of an eye. Still safe. For now.
He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. Fatigue, all this sun on snow, he tells himself. Again glad the kids are asleep. The little wet on his cheek would spook them. Even little kids can notice some things.
He holds the car at a steady sixty-eight miles per hour. His first approach was in a Trailways bus on some trunk road. This bypass wasn’t completed yet. He keeps an eye out for the past in the shape of the hills, but of course that was July into August, 1983, and this is February 2005.
The season was different, as well as the decade.