The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  Eliza laughed. “It could be a generational thing.”

  “What?”

  “Your basic weirdness.”

  “Thanks a lot. Don’t get me wrong. I love knowing certain married people. Like Francesca and Ettore. They’re a beautiful couple. Their houses in Italy are like the histories of their love for each other, their long time together. And I know that Giselle, my ex, will make a great married lesbian. She’ll be a wonderful partner and mother.” Shar shivered theatrically again and brought the heavily tarnished silver teapot to the table, then turned away and brought two little glasses down from the cupboard.

  Eliza let out a small involuntary gasp.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have those exact same glasses.” Shar set them down; they were decorated in a filigree design of gold and aquamarine paint. “But I’ve never drunk tea out of them. We use them for sherry, or scotch. I—I—bought them in Istanbul.” Actually, Andrew had bought them. For Eliza. They were his first gift to her. It’s a sign, she thought. But of what? “Where did you get these?”

  “My dad brought them back a few months ago.”

  “Not from Istanbul?” Eliza asked incredulously.

  “Yes. Of course. He was just passing through.”

  “Passing through? Where was he going?”

  Shar didn’t answer right away. “He was on his way home. From Iran.”

  “What an adventurous trip.”

  “Not really.” Shar busied herself at the counter. Eliza almost didn’t hear what she said next. “He’s Iranian.”

  The silence scooped out a space between them. Eliza was confused. “I thought he was French.”

  “No. I told you that we lived in France when I was little.” Shar set a silver pitcher of milk on the table, the spoons, the little bowl of sugar cubes. “My mom is French.”

  “But…isn’t ‘Radfour’ a French name?”

  “Radfour? My last name is Radfar. Maybe you turned it into French in your head. Radfar is a common Iranian surname. My father went to study in Paris in the sixties, like a lot of middle- and upper-class Tehrani. He met my mother at a street protest. My parents, the young anarchists! They married first in Paris, then again in Tehran. That’s where I was born.” She carefully poured the tea; steam rose from the spout, from each of the glasses. The smell of earth and woodsmoke. Lapsang souchong.

  Eliza touched the gold edge; it was still too hot to pick up. Her empty hands felt awkward on the table; she put them in her lap. Then lifted them back up and put two sugar cubes in the glass, stirred with a little silver spoon. The clinking seemed to be interrogatory. Why had Shar never told her this? She thought of the painting above the sofa. Those men in the garden, the little channels of water. Script like Arabic. But it must be Farsi.

  “You speak Farsi?”

  “Of course. I spoke only Farsi and French for the first few years of my life. I still speak Farsi well. But my reading sucks. I used to spend summers in Tehran with my aunt. Auntie Ghazal. She runs a kind of artists’ salon in her apartment, and always has people in and out, intellectuals, writers, painters. And incredible musicians. That kept the language going for me.”

  Eliza sat back in her chair, mouth open.

  Shar didn’t disguise the annoyance in her voice. “Why are you so surprised? Do you have a thing against Iranians?”

  “No. But—I—it just seems like a big part of who you are. I thought you would have told me.”

  “That my dad is from Iran? Would it have made a difference?” Shar gathered her hair in that familiar gesture of—defiance? or refusal?—and tossed it away from her face. Or was it nervousness?

  “No. It’s just—I don’t know.” A light went on. “Your first name is Persian, too.”

  “Of course.” Shar aspirated the r. “Shahrzad. Or Scheherazade, in this English neck of the woods.”

  “The princess who tells stories to save her life.”

  “Exactly. But she was also a good lover. Gave good head.” She enthusiastically slurped her tea.

  “You’re so crass!”

  “Not at all. A storyteller who is also good in bed is worth his or her weight in gold. The Nights is crammed with sex. The story beneath the stories is that the king and Shahrzad became passionate lovers. That’s why he couldn’t kill her. Good sex and fine conversation calmed his violent rage. Saved her ass. That’s what my auntie says.”

  “The one in Tehran?”

  “Mm-hmm. Auntie Ghazal says the whole Middle East would calm down if everyone could just have good sex without the looming threat of family shame. Or floggings. Or death!” Shar giggled, her small mouth suddenly big with teeth. She added, in a theatrically deep voice, “Or, especially, marriage.”

  “Couldn’t she get in trouble for saying something like that?”

  Shar shook her head indulgently. “God, people think Iran is so backward. The government is backward, yeah, but people are pretty sophisticated. My aunt doesn’t shout anything from her rooftop. Most people don’t, but they live beyond the government in all kinds of ways. They’re clever. Cunning, even, like Shahrzad.

  “My mother gave me that name, by the way. Though my dad likes to tell people that Shar is from Shariati, the famous intellectual he spent time with in Paris. Shar-i-a-ti. I love that name, too. I like the idea of having a man’s name. Shariati has been dead since the seventies, but he’s still famous. There’s a street in Tehran named after him. He believed that Islam would evolve into an enlightened force for social justice.”

  “Wow. An idealist.”

  “Hard to believe, but in the seventies, people were living through a sort of enlightenment in Iran. It was an amazing time, especially for women. My dad’s family is still very progressive. Even now, all my cousins say they’re Muslim ‘on their passports only.’ When my dad was growing up, his main pursuits were pretty girls, poetry and politics, ‘in that order,’ as he likes to say. In Paris, he planned to find a beautiful blonde French girl, write lyric poetry and overthrow the whole capitalist system in his spare time. And he fulfilled his first two objectives. Shariati was busy translating Frantz Fanon’s work into Farsi when my dad first met him. Everyone my mom and dad knew in Paris was a genius, or having sex with a genius. Once they were having coffee with Shariati in a café when Jean-Paul Sartre sat down to chat with them. He and Shariati were friends. Isn’t that fabulous? Then we moved to bloody Ottawa! What were they thinking?”

  “What were they thinking?”

  “Well, the move was probably the best thing that could have happened. They were very installé in Paris—we left Tehran soon after the Ayatollah seized power—but when the Iran—Iraq war began, a lot of their Iranian friends in Paris started going back, either consumed by guilt or full of patriotism. I was just a toddler then, I don’t remember any of this. My mom told me that after one of my uncles was killed at the beginning of the war, my dad used to obsess about going home to do his duty. It scared her to death, so she applied for work permits in Canada without telling him. They both got jobs, my father as a highway engineer—his degree was from the Sorbonne—and my mother as a French and science teacher. Et voilà. Here I am. Another Canadian mongrel.”

  “Right. That’s the first word that pops to mind when I think of you. Woof-woof.” They stirred their tea. “So. Is your dad still an idealist?”

  “More a fatalist now. Especially about the Middle East.”

  “But what about the Arab Spring? Doesn’t it show that whole societies can change for the better?”

  Shar’s eyes narrowed. “What Arab Spring? Nothing but more violence has come from it. Those young protesters, and the old ones, they were all betrayed.”

  “But regular people forced their dictators to step down.”

  “Big fucking deal. A hundred more dictators are always waiting in the wings. Egypt is a disaster. Syria is being destroyed as we speak. Libya is a mess. Trust me, there’ll never be a shortage of power-obsessed, bloodthirsty Arabs.”

  “Shar!”
Eliza was shocked. “Apple pie and racism are so good together!” She put the last piece in her mouth.

  “I’m not being a racist. It’s the truth. All they want to do most of the time is kill each other. And anyone else who disagrees with them.”

  “But…aren’t Iranians basically…Arabs?”

  Shar’s chair stuttered back across the kitchen floor as she pushed away from the table. “No! Iranians are not Arabs. We are Persians. Persia was a great kingdom. Persians are not an Arab race. It’s a different language, a different culture. Persian territories were colonized. We still view Arabs as ruthless conquerors.”

  Eliza shook her head. “Does that include my dry cleaner? He’s from…Yemen. I think. Or is it Oman? Anyway, how about all those little Palestinian kids in Gaza with rockets blowing up their living rooms? Are they ruthless, too?”

  “They will be.”

  “Getting bombed does nasty things to children.”

  “Why are we ruining this excellent tea by talking about politics?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re half-Iranian?”

  “Because it’s not my defining feature, okay?” She shook her head. “I’m sick of having all that history stuck to me. The very first time I got vocal about gay rights was at an International Women’s Day rally in my fourth year of university. The speech was filmed, put online and linked to the university website. Over a year later, an old family friend in Tehran saw it when he was checking out universities for his daughter. The man was like an uncle to me. And he immediately phoned my dad.” Shar did an excellent Iranian accent in English. “ ‘Do you kno-ow Shahrzad ees morally seeck? Do you kno-ow you’ve raised a depraved chile?’ That is how my dad found out that I’m queer. The man said that if I visited Iran again, I risked arrest. My dad took it as a personal threat. This guy had always been envious of him for going to Paris, for marrying a French woman, for coming to Canada. I don’t believe anything would happen to me if I went back. Homosexuality is illegal, but there are plenty of gay people there, quietly living their lives. My aunt is one of them. You just have to be careful. But my dad still doesn’t want me to go. And Auntie Ghazal agrees with him. So I haven’t been back for eleven, no, twelve years.”

  “Was your father…angry?”

  “About that asshole? Yes, furious.”

  “No, I mean…about you…”

  “About me being queer?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. He was just grumpy that I hadn’t told him when I told my mother. But I was a kid when I told her, fourteen. I wasn’t ready for my dad to know. When I started going out with boys, too, my mother thought I had grown out of my ‘girlhood crushes.’ She said that unless I was sure about being gay, there was no need to tell my father.”

  Seeing the anxious expression creeping over Eliza’s face, Shar rolled her eyes. “My dad’s not some Middle Eastern patriarch waiting to chop off my head, okay?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything. I’m the one who believes that…um…even bloodthirsty Arabs can be decent humans.”

  “There you’re mistaken. As I’ve already pointed out.”

  “So Arab men are vile and Iranian men are civilized? Your dad’s friend wasn’t very civilized. All people can run that gamut between goodness and evil.”

  Shar turned away and muttered something under her breath.

  “Pardon me?”

  “ ‘Another liberal.’ That’s all I said.”

  “Oh. I thought I heard you say ‘another fucking liberal.’ You’re in the mood for tossing around the insults today.”

  “It’s a fact, not an insult. Canadian liberals are naïve. And you fucking like being naïve. Believing the best about people, welcoming the world with open arms. Just wait until the Bloor-Yonge subway station blows up.”

  The two women stared at each other, the smiles gone from their faces.

  Though Eliza still didn’t understand why Shar was so angry, she recognized the lie: her Iranian heritage was one of her defining features. Eliza asked in a mild voice, “Can I have some more tea?” She slid the glass over the table toward Shar, adding archly, “I’m glad I asked where these glasses came from. It’s so pleasant to chat about international relations.” Maybe they wouldn’t have sex today. That would be a first.

  Shar reached across the table slowly, past the glass, opening her hand as though to touch Eliza’s cheek. Instead she gave a lock of her hair a tug.

  “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  Shar stood up. “Come to my room and take off your clothes. You deserve a good spanking.”

  “For what?”

  Shar fixed her with a glittering eye. “For getting Persians confused with Arabs! And for being a naïve liberal.” She stepped behind her chair, put her hands on Eliza’s shoulders and squeezed, too hard.

  Eliza flinched. “I wonder what else you haven’t told me.”

  In a low voice, Shar said, “Stand up. Up, up.” Eliza obeyed and rose. Shar kneed the chair out of the way and stepped behind her. “Let’s go to the bedroom.” They went, and undressed. Shar man-handled her in a way that was rough and impersonal but full of unspoken emotion. Eliza knew that the sex was about something else, but she didn’t understand what—love? anger? Arabs?—and for the first time, she was afraid to ask.

  24

  Enigma

  LIKE MILLIONS OF COUPLES ACROSS THE CONTINENT, they were lying peacefully in bed. Andrew was stretched out beside his wife in his boxer shorts and white winter limbs. It was too warm on the third floor of the house. Eliza had kicked the quilt off her legs; still she felt stifled. “I should go turn down the heat,” she muttered, pushing the quilt further away from her body.

  He didn’t lift his eyes from his book. “Darling, would you please stop wriggling? It’s like being in bed with an eel.” He flipped a page.

  She glanced up but his face was obscured by Enigma: The Biography of Alan Turing. Someone she had never heard of. A scientist, probably. Andrew loved the biographies of big-brained men.

  Observe, she thought, wearily closing her eyes, our oasis of peace. Unlike millions of other couples across the continent, Eliza and Andrew were not fighting; they weren’t even stewing in silent resentment. They didn’t hate each other; she could not imagine that they ever would. They didn’t have to: her personal self-loathing would be enough to damage both of them.

  Whenever she was quiet, not busy with the events, tasks, messes, calls, distractions and emergencies of any given day, the voice began. Selfish bitch. It made her close the bathroom door and cry, silently. Slut. That old insult, finally accurate. Sometimes, on her way to work, she wore her sunglasses and wept almost all the way there. When she walked into the studio and bared her face, Kiki would say, “Your eyes are so red from swimming. Aren’t you using your goggles anymore?”

  But this evening, the voice just annoyed Eliza. How can you lie beside him, pretending you love him, pretending everything is the same as it was? It was beginning to sound like her mother at the height of her religious devotion. But Eliza was no longer an impressionable child. And she knew that suffering was not caused by a vengeful God. It was caused by bad luck, poor choices, tragic accidents and unfortunate lapses in wisdom. Such as the one she was currently experiencing.

  You take this peace and love for granted every single day. You abuse it. I don’t take it for granted. I help to create it every single day. I have dedicated my life to it. How self-righteous! You make family life sound like a religious vocation. That’s the smartest thing you’ve said in ages. It is like a religious vocation. It requires the same level of dedication.

  Was it wrong to think of one’s conscience as a tiresome nag? That voice was just one more demand on her time and resources. Do you remember what the Bible says about adulterous women? Oh, fuck off. Adulterous women in the Bible were stoned to death. If I were stoned to death, who would make dinner, clean the lint screen and remember to wash the bedsheets every once in a while? Don’t make jokes about be
traying your husband and your family. That’s what you are. A traitor. And a liar.

  The last part, she conceded, was true. It was bloody hard work, keeping her lies straight. She recycled the lies she told Andrew and used them with Kiki and Bianca—but she had to make sure she didn’t get confused.

  The voice went on, You want to get caught. And you will get caught, like every cheater does. Then he’ll leave you. He’ll abandon you. The children will abandon you. You’ll be alone.

  The only way she could drown out the doom was by cleaning something, noisily, scraping out the burned-on remnants in the oven or turning up the water, hard and hot, to scrub the dirt-ring from the boys’ bathtub. The house was extremely clean. She’d stopped complaining about doing more than her fair share. Even when Andrew forgot to do some token task, she wordlessly swallowed her resentment.

  “Honey,” Eliza murmured, “I’m just going to turn down the heat.” And clean up the kitchen. Even though they had agreed, after dinner, to leave it messy. Andrew had noticed how much more housecleaning she’d been doing lately. Now he murmured, “Eliza, please stay here and read.” He knew exactly what she wanted to do. “We’ll clean up in the morning.”

  “I’m too hot. I want to turn down the heat.”

  “Why are you so restless?”

  The question so surprised her that she had no snappy lie to offer him.

  He put his book down on his chest and eyed her over his reading glasses. “You seem very…jittery. And you yelled at Jake tonight. What was that all about?”

  “When I was reading to the boys, he kept putting his hand on my breast. I told him half a dozen times to stop, but he wouldn’t. He knew it was bugging me but he kept doing it. I just lost my temper.”

  “You’re the one who nursed him until he was two.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Breastfeeding and touching me inappropriately are not related. Haven’t you noticed that he’s been a little troublemaker lately?”

  “He’s more clingy than usual. You’ve been working so much in the evenings. He misses you. And he’s only six. His body remembers the comfort of breastfeeding.”