
Our Place
There are only a few days in town that really blister, the kind of days that smell like hot garbage.
There are only a few days in town that really blister, the kind of days that smell like hot garbage. And that quickly shifts into snow and months of rain. And drizzle and fog and dampness that settles into clothes and skin. It had just started to get warm again. Warm for June in St. John’s.
Rebecca said that goldenrod reminded her of our first summer—there were bunches sprouting all over Davis Park near our high school—us rolling around in the weeds after basketball practice. A year ago. Burdock in our clothes when we got home—tiny stalks of grass down our t-shirts, staining and itching at our skin. I smiled, kissed her neck, the little line that reached down her collarbone. The taste of sweet sweat almost cloying. My arm slid around her shoulder, moving down to her waist. She kissed my cheek. “You remember?” I remembered parts but not the way she did. Colours, not scenes. “You wearing those little shorts … man, I can’t wait for it to get warm again.” The rain would come soon enough. I remember thinking, but I won’t be there. We reached Charlie’s in the middle of the hemmed-in downtown, past eight and almost dark, the wind stinging. She gave me a thin smile. Goose pimples all down her arms but didn’t want to put on her sweater. I didn’t know if she wanted me to give her my jacket or what. I called Charlie’s our place, like a character in a movie with a mid-Atlantic accent; Rebecca called Charlie’s the place where we hid from my parents. Local bands did laid-back acoustic sets on a small step they called a stage, being small-town famous. There were huge picture windows, kind of like you were sitting in someone’s giant living room. Most of the people who hung out in the battered burnt orange leather chairs were in their twenties and thirties. A dozen people lounged, shoulders drooping, in a caterpillar of a line. We waited to order, my thumb stroking her palm. I dropped her hand. “What’s wrong, babe?” Rebecca's hand floated by her waist, its gravitational force pulling toward me. “They’re sitting over there.” I gestured with a small wave, down by my thigh, to a couch where Rebecca and I often sat. A couple with dark skin, the woman wearing a scarf. Both reading books, sitting just close enough to suggest that they came in together. Leyla Auntie and Rahim Uncle. “So?” Her voice pitched high, like a cartoon. “You want me to leave?” I paid for my drink in a daze. Next thing I knew, I had walked past my parents’ friends, one of the only other Irani couples in the city, up the cement stairs in the centre of the café to the 70’s linoleum of the second floor. To a seat by the window, leaving Rebecca to follow me.I called Charlie’s our place, like a character in a movie with a mid-Atlantic accent; Rebecca called Charlie’s the place where we hid from my parents.I tried to act like nothing had happened, pressing her hand under the table, feeling my way to her thigh. I could see these dark flashes in her expression. “Thanks for the flowers. I put them in a vase on the dining room table—Mom thought they were super sweet.” She emphasized mom. “You were so good! Wish I could’ve gotten you something bigger.” The enthusiasm strained out of me. I couldn’t think of what else to say about her last show as Rizzo, her last high school performance. “Everyone thought you were amazing. You should’ve gotten the lead.” Rebecca loves singing. You can’t put enough emphasis on love. She was in all three school choirs, jazz, madrigal, and regular. You didn’t even need to audition for the third one. If she could’ve majored in fine arts without her mom going berserk (a therapist but not the kind who thinks kids should pursue their dreams), she would have. I remember Rebecca once lamented how kids in big cities, the ones who got to go to performing arts schools, would always have a leg up on her. “No way could I sing better than Maria! But thanks.” Her smile fluttered in and out. “That first night, man you saw how nervous I was … you know, before the ‘where are all the guys?’ joke, I blanked. I thought I would forget everything. I can’t believe it’s over.” The harsh fluorescence of the café lights angled on her cheeks, somehow softening the features of her face. “So, can I tell Maria that we’ll go in on the limo together?” My arms began to shoot up in defense but I pressed them into each other. “Not yet.” Her nose scrunched in a way that made me want to leave her at the café by herself. “She has to give the deposit, Nadeem.” “I’m going to ask my dad tonight.” I felt my way back to her thigh. “This week. She has to give them money by the end of the week.” “I’ll ask when I get home.” “Tonight?” She said it like an old-timey movie actress, like Katharine Hepburn, all drawn out. I laughed. “Tonight.” Me and Rebecca must have spent hundreds of hours watching old movies on her parent’s dilapidated VCR in the basement. Or streaming them from her laptop on sites that gave her malware, that skipped sound and froze faces. Black and white movies that we watched under the blankets on her bed when her parents were out. Ridiculous dialogue. Especially Barbara Stanwyck movies. Rebecca loves Barbara Stanwyck. Even her weird breathy singing. But the dialogue … The dialogue was what got us. I would pounce on her: “You'd like to kill me, wouldn't you?” And she would deadpan: “You're a mind reader.” And “Don't you come near me, you seawolf, after the way you deceived me ...” “I deceived you?” “Yes! You're engaged!” “You're married!” “That has nothing to do with it!” She would shout that last line. We whispered quotes to each other when we were bored in math class. What would have happened if I hadn’t gotten the nerve to go up to Rebecca on the very last day of eleventh grade, right before school let out? My best friend Matt had had a crush on her first. She was sitting by herself at the back of the classroom, getting something out of her bag. I figured, hey, if I completely embarrass myself, I have all summer to forget about it. To forget about her. I repeated my opening line over and over to myself as I approached. “Magical.” “What?” Of course I’d flubbed it. “Ah, your singing. At the assembly. Good. It was good.” She knew I liked her; why else would a dude come up to talk about choir? I sat down next to her. When she touched my knee, it was all over. Rebecca was silent, drinking her americano. I kept my right hand on her knee, and picked a loose scab at the back of my head with my left, peeling it gently and pulling it through a strand of my hair, then tossing it to the floor behind my chair. “Yes, tonight. I promise.”
Trickles of water punctuated each step home. It was a twenty-minute walk from Rebecca’s three-storey house on the corner of Bannerman and I was on a high on Rennie’s River Trail, the friendly sounds of the stream guiding me along. My body electric from fingering her in the dark. I thought of her little moans just outside the fence where we could see light emanating from her living room. I could picture the two of us in a big city, something that made St. John’s look like a dot on a screen, a wave in an ocean. Over the Atlantic. I stepped lightly through the back door. Confidently. In the prayer room, Dad knelt on a janamaaz, prostrating. He sat on his knees, and turned his head to the right, and to the left. The room was plain, naked of the kitsch and knickknacks Mom put everywhere else. Beige and covered wall to wall with thick rugs. Two posters of Mecca on opposing walls, one old and sepia-toned and deserted-looking, and one with thousands of pilgrims in sajdah around the Kaaba. In the corner an old school desk, the kind that opened and closed, covered in Dad’s creased and underlined copies of The Telegram. Next to that a bookshelf, books with cracked spines. The same corner where Dad made me and Selma memorize surahs, getting frustrated with us for our terrible pronunciation. I waited, my right hand running up and down the strap of my book bag. Dad held out his hands in du’a. The tipsiness from being with Rebecca dimmed. Dad stood up slowly, his knees cracking. “Baleh perseran?” He was in a good mood. He brushed my hair, pushing the strands in the wrong direction. His hand felt large enough to engulf my entire head. I shook the hand off my scalp. “How was the basketball practice?” “Good! Really good.” I started with the positive. “Baba, you know I’m graduating soon.” “Deemie—before I forget, we told your uncle about your scholarship. He wants you to visit before you go away for university. Hah? You should call him.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Did your Mamaan tell you she bought a new camera for the ceremony?” “Yeah, Mom told me. So to celebrate, the grad class is putting on events.” Dad nodded awkwardly, as if jarred out of momentum. “You remember we went bowling last week …” “Yes. Get to the point.” He stretched again, his six-foot-two self towering over me. “So the prom is coming up next.” “Prom is a dance.” “Yeah …” I became hyperaware of the forehead lines and eyebrows stitching into a deep frown. “Maadar and I said no to dances. We told you when you started at the high school.” “Yeah but Dad, it’s the prom! It’s the last one. Ever. It’s for graduation!” “We thought we could have a barbecue here, with your friends.” “Yeah, Dad, that’s nice—but I don’t know why I can’t do both.” “Nadeem, I told you.” “It doesn’t—it’s not fair.” He grew another foot taller. “Just because we live here, doesn’t mean we act like these people.” I stepped back. “Understand?” “Baleh Paadar.” I stalked to my bedroom and slammed the door. Classic teenager move. I could hear Mom loudly asking Dad what was wrong. He murmured something, and she said, “What? He doesn’t want to have a barbecue?” The room was painted in dark blues and greys, a product of my ninth grade emo phase. A less complicated time when I had glasses and wore all black AKA before my parents let me get contacts. Back when I wrote poetry on yellow legal pads, and hid them under my bed until Selma found them and laughed for days, quoting passages. Mom worried that I made the room too depressing; it was kind of like living in storm clouds.
I managed to stop before I dug too deep. There was something so satisfying about tugging at the dead skin until it fell away. But I almost always went too far.I should just go, I thought. If Rebecca broke up with me tomorrow, she could have another guy by the next day. A prom date by the afternoon. Maybe she was already thinking about it. I was pacing and scratching at my scalp until flakes of skin scattered all over my black tee shirt, trying to think of ways to convince Mom and Dad. I managed to stop before I dug too deep. There was something so satisfying about tugging at the dead skin until it fell away. But I almost always went too far. “Do you have to play so goddamn loudly?!” Selma stomped past my parents playing chess on the dining room table and turned up the volume on the TV. “You don’t even have to talk to play the game!” She hated when she missed a word of The Good Place, and there was no DVR to rewind. I sat down next to her on the couch, wondering how I could worm my way into my parent’s conversation. Sometimes Mom could get me out of things. But then again, sometimes she agreed with Dad. Every so often, I got this feeling like they thought we were getting too different—like they don’t understand us the way they used to when we were little. I mean, kids are essentially the same no matter what country they grow up in. But teenagers? Mom’s easier to talk to; Dad thinks an Islamic lecture at the mosque is quality family time. I would much rather watch a movie. I tried to get Selma’s attention, but she waved at me to keep quiet. When her show was over, she finally mouthed “What?” “Help me talk to them.” “What do you want me to say?” “That I should be able to go to prom.” “Dude.” “What about when you wanted to go on your class trip to Quebec City?” “That’s different. You know what Dad thinks a dance is. He thinks everyone’s drunk and having sex in a cavern located in the darkest recesses of Hell.” Even I had to laugh. “What did Mom say before?” “She said, you know how your father feels about dances.” Selma made a face. “Doesn’t look good.” “Don’t you want to go to prom in two years?” “Meh. I can live without it.” “Selma!” Mom works as an analytical chemist at an R&D lab. Science and logic is her thing, so I figured if I came up with a great argument for why I should be allowed to go to prom … I’d been on her good side since I’d decided to major in chemistry. I think she’d hoped, all along, that we both would—she used to do little experiments with me and Selma—teach us how batteries worked, gave us a chemistry set for Nowruz when I was eleven. Plus she’s a chess fanatic; goes to tournaments every couple of months, won fifth place in the NL open the year before (even her favourite movie is that one about Bobby Fischer). The ideal time to ask for something was after a game. Mom made a move and laughed deviously. One bishop down. “Mohammed, one doesn’t have to play well, it’s enough to play better than your opponent. Siegbert Tarrasch.” “In that case,” Selma said, “stop playing Dad or you’re never going to get any better.” “Hush now, all of you, I’m concentrating,” Dad said. “You’re taking too long,” Mom replied. “We should use a timer.” “No time limit Ghazeleh!” Dad was bent over the chess board. “Don’t change the rules in the middle.” The dining room table spilled into the small living room. They played on a hideous black and green plastic set with large kings and queens. Any time one of them lost a piece, the other heckled. They were giddy. It was like Dad had totally forgotten his conversation with me. He’d switched into a different personality. Every time Dad got a piece from Mom, he said, “You better watch yourself.” Most nights though, he lost and then sulked. Mom would crow for hours. But not tonight. “Shit,” Mom said, and then, “I mean, shoot.” It was Dad’s turn to gloat. “Ghazeleh, I like to think of chess as the struggle against the error. I think Johannes Zukertort said that.” Me and Selma exchanged glances. “I’m going to go clean my room,” Selma said, as we watched Mom’s cheeks flush with annoyance. “Me too.”
“It’s like you keep me at a distance. You didn’t even want me to be friends with Selma!”
“I just said that I didn’t want to hang out with my little sister at school. You can do whatever you like.” “But school is one of the only places that you and I get to spend time together.” The door of her upstairs bathroom was wide open. Her cat was lying on its side on a sunspot in the hallway, pawing into the air. I understood to some extent. Rebecca didn’t exactly get to hang out with the rest of my family. Like I went to dinner at her house but I couldn’t really return the favour. “I don’t know what you want from me.” I propped myself on the hard lip of the bathtub, staring at Rebecca's profile, her wobbling chin. “What do you mean?” She clipped her toenails, sitting on the closed toilet lid. Her voice was loud, edging itself with something mean. “We already bought the tickets.” As if the refund was the main issue. I focused on her feet. “You can go with someone else if you want … I don’t mind.’ That was worse. “I mind!” She flicked each clipping toward the wastebasket but they fluttered around the rim and then scattered onto the floor. “When are you going to tell them? When we go to college? When we come back from break? Are you going to have to sneak around when we’re home for Thanksgiving?” Tight pressure in my chest. “Of course not.” I wanted to be able to say, I don’t care what my parents think. It’s just easier. It’s easier for now. We’ll figure it out. “Do you see a life with me at all? Like at all? After we graduate?” One hand covering her right eye and as she held it there, I realized she was wiping away tears. Her hand left shadows under her cheek that made her look alien to me. I thought about what she was like when she was aggressive, how she would pull me into her room when her parents weren’t around. I didn’t know what to do when she was like this.That night, I had a dream. I was playing basketball with Rebecca, we were both breathing hard and sweating, but then her head turned into my Dad’s. She was wearing a purple flowery mini-skirt, and a little golden tank top. Mohammed, Dad, had her dimple. And her curls. It was too literal. When I woke up, I wouldn’t let myself go back to bed. By the time Rebecca arrived at school, I was cross-legged in front of her locker, the two prom tickets between my teeth. She was ecstatic, pulled me up, kissing me in front of our math teacher, who passed by with raised eyebrows. But after that, after making up, I felt like all we did was fight. That’s all I can recall from those mid-June weeks. How was there suddenly so much pressure on everything? Sometimes she’d be in my arms, relaxing into my chest, watching a movie, and then she’d wriggle away. But then she’d say she didn’t want me to let her go. Her thin lips in a frown. Sometimes I felt like I hated her. The relationship felt like I was trying to shoot free throws from above ground, on a pulpit, a podium. From a goddamn mountain. And in reality, I avoided her by playing b-ball most nights. She started asking when she was going to meet my parents. “We can’t hide forever!”
I can remember myself stumbling out of the limo. The corsage remained intact, the petals of the deep purple calla lilies only slightly crumpled. I could see Rebecca and her mother peeking out from behind ghostly linen curtains, before Rebecca skipped outside. She lifted the skirt of her dress off the front porch and stood there like a statue until I ran up and kissed her. The statue undone. A few brief seconds for pictures against the living room wall—her violet dress against the mauve wallpaper. “She’ll look like a floating head,” her father teased. The red heat of the flash continued to go off behind us as we fled to the limo. For a minute when I got in, I had this gasping panicky thought that the driver could be someone who knew my parents, or someone I knew. I hoped Dave wouldn’t be a jerk, that none of the guys would leave a mess. We squeezed in tight, girls on boys’ laps. Maria handed around a flask, giggling and loudly whispering to Rebecca that her lingerie gave her a wedgie. Dave, her date, made the dude drive us around town two or three times while the crew danced and screamed to Migos. A joint passed until it burnt to a nub. The restaurant was an Italian place with red tablecloths that Maria had picked. It wasn’t cheap. Like forty bucks a plate. We got to the prom after I had paid a hundred in cash including tip for fettucine alfredo and cheesecake. “This is fun, right?” Rebecca kept saying. Her hair was shiny and curly and pulled up. Her earrings were shiny too, dangling toward her shoulders. They twirled and jumped when she swayed to music. “Yeah … I’m having a good time. Are you having a good time?”
Giant turrets of dresses. Thin strips of black suits. Awkward smiles and blushes and braces. Father-daughter and mother-son dances.Parents stood around the line, a protective barrier, and took pictures of the entrances. There were even a few parents from the mosque. Giant turrets of dresses. Thin strips of black suits. Awkward smiles and blushes and braces. Father-daughter and mother-son dances. I was relieved to stand aside as Rebecca danced with her father, his beard lightly touching the top of her hair-sprayed coif. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Bill was crying. I took a picture of them on my phone. Almost no one on the dance floor wasn’t Snapchatting at the same time. I stepped outside the old brick convention centre for air, stood close to the group of guys drinking and smoking. When I came in, someone told me that Rebecca had been searching for me. “There you are,” I said breathless, once I found the violet lipstick that matched the violet dress, as if it hadn’t been me who had left. “Want to dance with me?” I kissed her again and didn’t answer. From that point, we held each other all night, wouldn’t let go. Matt didn’t try to cut in, but Jonathan McIntyre did. I leaned into her moist, clammy skin. Or maybe that was my skin, my nervous sweat. “Let’s skip it,” she whispered in my ear, when the others were leaving. So we went to Rebecca’s house instead of to Maria's after-party. We stopped at the lake on the way and made out under fog and maybe three stars, and snuck in the back door of her house, through the kitchen, stumbling and sighing, and reaching her bedroom and falling in a tangle, and her breath like juniper and like the first snow, soft and malleable but cold to the touch until it melts. At four a.m. I wobbled over to Matt’s with my spare key. He was still at the party. I dreamt about Rebecca while collapsed on the deflating air mattress. At 7 I woke with a kinked neck, seized with sudden anxiety. Matt wheezed on the bed above me. I texted Selma to make sure Mom and Dad knew I was at Matt’s. Of course, she wasn’t up. I looked through the prom pictures on my phone and told myself I should be grateful. It was a prom night anyone might have wished for.
“What do you mean, she doesn’t want to talk?” Her friends were saying what? They created a physical barrier, a protective circle around Rebecca and her locker, the same locker where we’d made out a couple of weeks ago. There was a Polaroid of me inside that locker! “Rebecca! Come on,” I said. Matt nudged me away, back toward the hallway, as my brain misfired. Rebecca had straightened her hair. She had it clipped back, a little bit on each side. Rebecca’s friend, the tall, annoying one in her choir, Martha, laughed raucously and pretended not to see me.
I kept looking out onto the street for her, feeling like a stop-animation character, moving incrementally frame by frame.I had tried to call her Saturday after prom. Then on Sunday. No call back. I would keep trying for weeks even though she no longer sat next to me in math class. It was a shock every time the ring went to voicemail. Thursday came around, and I went to Charlie’s anyway. On the couch facing the picture windows, I drank coffee and tea until my hands shook on my lap. I kept looking out onto the street for her, feeling like a stop-animation character, moving incrementally frame by frame. I stayed until it rained and then cleared up again. She sat with Jonathan during math. Front row. I sat at the back. My bag on her old seat. Class was lost to daydreams: Becca and Deem together in college dorm rooms and long hazy days of sex and studying. Matt kept bugging me to skip class, “Let’s get donairs and play pool,” but I didn’t want to. “It’s the last week until we’re free. Lighten up!” There she was, only ten feet away, sharing gum with Jonathan who gelled his hair and was on the debate team. We were still going to the same college. We were supposed to find ‘our’ place in Kingston. Why wouldn't she just tell me what I had to do? I was embarrassed about my reaction to the breakup. Said shit about her to friends and some acquaintances. Stabbed the first note she wrote me with scissors. If that isn’t emo … I told Selma I never really liked her that much anyway. She scoffed but lent me pity money for the movies since I was broke after prom. I tore up my math notebook, leaving pages of notes in Rebecca’s locker with words like misunderstanding and promise. Then left another note, a bitter one, saying all the things I never wanted to tell her, only half of them true. Graduation day blah blah blah. Mom and Dad took pictures although Dad hadn’t been speaking to me since the prom debacle. Me and Matt went to graduation parties where I avoided Rebecca. Who was already avoiding me. On the last day of class, I had tried to talk to her once more but tall Martha got in the way. “She doesn’t want anything to do with you. She says you know why.” Maybe I did. Maybe she had gotten fed up with my promises to one day tell my family, to one day let the secret go. Maybe she had decided there was no point in ruining prom for both of us. And I knew nothing I did could fix things now.
... but instead I would fall through the sky in various unpredictable formations, each time dashed against the rocks, my body tumbling into the harbour while a hundred boats sailed off in the distance. Bad omens.Summer dragged on. I dreamt incessant dreams about how I would never leave St. John’s. Dreams where I ran up to the peak of the Battery jumping onto ships in the Narrows that would take me to the mainland, but instead I would fall through the sky in various unpredictable formations, each time dashed against the rocks, my body tumbling into the harbour while a hundred boats sailed off in the distance. Bad omens. I crossed days off my calendar so hard ink bled onto the other side of the page. For July and August, I interned at Fathom Software along with several recent graduates, meaning that in the early, practically primeval, mornings, before the songbirds even knew that it was morning, I would step into stale, uncirculated air, turn on my monitor, and remain absorbed in code until past dinnertime. Their languages made more sense than English. I told myself this would mean good recommendations later on, but really I stayed late to avoid Dad and to avoid thinking. Mom tiptoed around both of us. Only Selma acted normal, was a buffer, and played video games with me, insulted me like nothing was wrong. I played basketball with my friends on the weekends. Went to Selma’s soccer games, unless Dad was going. Went to the community pool until I saw Rebecca there with her friends. I had never thought that one day I would be wishing for summer to be over.
A shrill wap-wap-wap of the alarm. As I moved the blanket off my face, the sound pierced, increasing in pitch until I slammed the button and hid beneath the comforter. The shuffle and slap of Mom’s slippers entered the room. I could hear her busy herself, picking up things, making enough noise to force me to surface. “You’re awake!” she said, as if it were a miracle, when I sat up. Her hand paused on the back of my head, smelling like chamomile. “What’s left to pack?” “Just my toothbrush and stuff. I don’t know—it’s fine. I think I have everything.” “Did you tell your father?” “What?” “That you’re leaving.” I didn’t answer. My eyes shuttered. “You should tell him today you’re going.” “Mamaan, he knows I’m going.” “You shouldn’t keep fighting, Nadeem. It’s haram.” “He started it.” She wagged her head. A month and a half. It had been a month and a half ago that a well-intentioned uncle showed Dad prom photos on his cell at Friday jamaat, preening about the young boys grown up. I had jaunted by just at that moment, as if God himself had ordained it, wanting me to see Mohammed’s right eye twitch in its full glory. I made a beeline for my friends who were standing by the mosque doors, asking, begging to go to one of their houses. When I got home later that night, I could feel it, that the house had stiffened into silence. First, Selma found me, severe and bitter, her eyes dark. “While you were eating lamb biryani and barfi at Hussein’s house, Dad was freaking the fuck out.” He had thrown peaches that were going bad against the fridge, letting them slime down, saying they were all wasting food. “This is your fault, man. You better do something.” Not long after, Dad came into my room while I pretended to be asleep. First he woke me up, and then he slapped me so hard I vibrated. And he still had some yelling left in him. “Bisho’ur! You thought I wouldn’t find out?” I think I was more in shock from the idea of the slap than the slap itself. I let him yell at me until he got tired of it. Since then, neither he nor I wanted to be the first to broach the silence. Mom stepped back and forth, asking me if I would need this or that. “You don’t want your posters?” She pulled the tape off my Foo Fighters poster. “Mom, it’s fine. I don’t need to bring them.” “Of course you left it all for me to clean.” “Mom, I’ll do it.” “So why didn’t you tell me about her?” Tiny splotched flowers bloomed on her cheeks. “Mom?” She turned and picked at the tape on another poster. “I saw the pictures, Deemie. You thought I wouldn’t know?” “Where—who showed you?” “I made Auntie Reena show me the pictures.” Auntie Reena, Hussein’s mom. I wasn’t sure if I should deny. Say, Rebecca was just a classmate. Tell her, all of my friends were going. She kept picking at the posters, taking them down one by one and settling them neatly on my desk. I couldn’t see her face. “Mom, tell me really, you didn’t know at all?” “No.” I wasn’t sure if I believed her. She noticed everything, if any item was out of order anywhere in the house, if Sel or me were in an off mood. “How could you lie like that to me? Did I ever give you the impression that you couldn’t talk to me?” “I’m sorry Mamaan.” What could I say? That I didn’t want her to have to keep stuff from Dad? That if I told her, she would have to lie to him or rat on me?
Did she know all the times I had lied to her face? I had gotten good at it, I had thought.As she fiddled with the curtains, tying them to the side, my chest hurt with unexpected gentleness. But I still wasn’t sure what she knew. She knew I went to prom with a girl, but did she know how many times I had snuck out to see her? Did she know all the times I had lied to her face? I had gotten good at it, I had thought. I watched the way my mother moved while I talked about Rebecca. Whether she was furious, or just sad. She switched topics. “I’m going to miss you so much, azizam. For the first time, no little Deemie running into my kitchen and asking what’s for dinner and then making faces when he finds out.” I thought I saw something in my mother’s half-closed lids but then it disappeared. “Don’t forget to say goodbye to your father,” she repeated. “You’re disappointed.” Her shoulders moved but barely. Even the faint stir in her voice was unsettling. Tone thin, shivering at the edges. Ghazeleh was always optimistic, sensible, reliable. “Does Dad know?” She shook her head. “Please don’t tell him—I …” “He used to have a girlfriend.” She was half-sitting on the thin windowsill, not fidgeting. The dull light a mediocre halo. “What?” I knew my father had worked in Newfoundland for four years before sending for Mom. Somewhere in that time he had gone back to Tehran for the wedding but I didn’t want to ask for the timeline. “Karen told me when I came—you know she likes to gossip.” Karen, a colleague of my father’s. “How did—” “I told her not to tell me another word.” She started to say something else, and then stopped. “Say Salaam to your father for me. I’ll need to run into work soon. Selma said she’ll help with your suitcases. Oh, and the food is in the cooler. Matt has a cell phone, right?” “Yeah. I have one too, Mom.” “Better two in case something goes wrong with one! Call me every two hours.” I stood up. “How could you stay with him?” She sat on the bed. “Nadeem.” “How could he be so mad at me, when.” “He’s strict because he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you. I don’t know, it was a long time ago. “I was cynical, even at that age. I had heard stories about men doing things while their wives and fiancées were away. Before they came over, I mean. Some marriages broke up over that.” “And you just pretended it didn’t happen?” “I didn’t pretend anything. I wanted to travel. Marriage was a way for me to get out of the country. I liked working here. He’s nice.” She named off a list that to me seemed barely related. “He’s nice?!” “He is nice, Nadeem. You know he is. Sometimes his temper is annoying. And if anything like that had happened here, I’d have been out like a shot.” She looked at me closely. “I think I think of it, if I think of it at all, as something from his past. I mean, we barely knew each other back then.” “God.” “Okay, get up. Time for breakfast.”
Selma shoved my bags onto the backseat of Matt’s car. “Don't leave me alone with them,” she whined as she hugged me goodbye. I promised I would bring her back something good from Ontario. “But who’s gonna make Dad pull out the rest of his hair?” She stuck out her tongue. “What do you mean?” “You know how he’s balding like around this region,” Selma gestured to the top and front of her hijab, “and then when he’s stressed, he pulls out those hairs near his neck, and now there’s like this gaping hole. I’d like to think he’ll name that hole after you.” “You noticed that.” “Dude, he does it all the time. Whenever he gets upset.” I hadn’t realized Selma was watching so closely. I wondered if she noticed when we watched TV on the couch and I would pick at the back of my head. “I’m sorry, Sel.” “Whatever, you owe me. I’m going to think of something big. A huge favour!” “Anything you want.” As Matt's car rumbled away, off through Clarenville, through Cornerbrook, to the ferry at Port-Aux-Basques, my family held a dream-like distance. Later, sitting by myself in calculus, surrounded by a couple hundred strangers, my thoughts would drift backwards out the window, thirty-six hours driving east.
Leaves falling outside my dorm window. Autumn. Was this the right shirt to wear? Was this the right girl? Was I smart enough to be here? Not making the basketball team—too short, or not enough stamina, or the coach was a jerk who didn’t like me. Not making it to that 8:30 a.m. chemistry class. Seeing Rebecca on campus for the first time, that Monday morning in Chernoff Hall, my exhales twisted into inhales, my eyes widening. Her glance towards and then away. Her turn in another direction. Getting to the point where we could say hi. Her saying it first and then eventually one week, “Are you going to the football game?” Her dark hair shining down her back, and her eyes shining too, a little, I thought. Me saying, “How do you like Pysch?” and “That bracelet is great,” and wanting to say “Let me know when you’re heading to the game.” Us walking away down bisecting hallways.
Afterward I thought of things I could have said. Old quotes of ours. I could have been Joe asking her, “Why didn't you come home before?” And she would have been Mae: “Why didn't I go to China? Some things you do, some things you don't.” And that would have maybe broken the ice. Maybe. I didn’t have the drive I did in high school when a scholarship was my ticket out. I don’t know if it was the stress, but in my room late at night, I frantically picked at the back of my head and sometimes the top of my scalp too. I felt so guilty when I felt blood on my hands. When John, my roommate, came home, I would leave to go shower.
... and it was nice to not have to lie, to not have to remember all the lies so I didn’t trip over them when I got an unexpected question from Mom and Dad.I could do whatever I wanted now, but somehow without Rebecca, it wasn’t fun. Matt and I went to freshmen parties and it was nice to not have to lie, to not have to remember all the lies so I didn’t trip over them when I got an unexpected question from Mom and Dad. But it could be lonely. You met people at orientation and in labs, but you had to start all over again. Rebecca had probably already joined a choir or two. She had been one of my best friends. We had talked about everything. I think that’s part of why I was so mad. Like, didn’t she get that I basically would be disowned by my parents if they knew? She didn’t care. Yet I knew, even while thinking it, that that was unfair. We had hurt each other and then didn’t know how to undo it. Maybe that had happened with Dad too. The back of my head was rough with older scabs and new. It was hard to sleep and I scratched and then felt guilty about scratching. I wondered if I should tell Selma what Mom told me. I felt guilty that I hadn’t. I didn’t know if I could look at Dad the same. He was a hypocrite. He was. But something about Mom’s nonchalance bothered me too. One time after the “slap,” sometime in August a few weeks before I left, I heard Dad talking loudly in the living room as I got milk from the fridge. Mom and Selma were on the couch. He was saying something about how things were different back in Tehran when he was growing up. “We were never allowed to talk back. That’s how you get a slap. That’s just the way it was.” I felt like he was talking loudly so that I could hear. Was this his indirect apology? His plea for forgiveness? I wouldn’t bite.
The duplex looked as though it were made of clapboard. Like I could kick it apart. Smaller and crummier than I remembered. I stood outside, shivering in my thin leather jacket, waiting to ring the bell. Selma must have been watching for me. “Nadeem!” she hollered. Dashed out.
Mamaan materialized outside too and dragged me into the house, and pulled me to her, clasped my head to her neck. “Deemie!” She was burning esfand to ward off the cheshm khordan. I came in and the metal spoon was on the stove and the seeds were cackling and jumping. She donned an oven mitt to hold the spoon, looped the potent-smelling fog around and around my head and made me ferry it over the house, where it lingered in the air consuming or destroying the evil eye, I wasn’t sure. We said the prayer for cleansing our family: “Esfande dune dune, esfande siosee dune, cheshme hasudaro koor kon.” “I love that little Deemie is following in my footsteps,” Mom gloated when we sat down to a bowl of fesenjan and I was telling her about my semester. “Aw, Mom. Don’t call me Deemie. At least don’t call me little Deemie.” She smiled. “I’ll call you whatever I want.” “You love chemistry so much and yet …” I pointed toward the metal spoon. “Yes, I still cleanse the house, science be damned!” She laughed. “I won’t let go of my traditions.” Dad was still at work. I laid my bag out on my desk chair. My room smelled like the house, like old books and the heady smells of rose water and fenugreek and saffron. The posters were still folded neatly on the table. My body crashed onto the intimate heft of my bed. How surreal it was to leave one’s family. How surreal it was that now my home was Kingston. If I closed my eyes, it was May again and Becca and Deem were a sweet secret. Somewhere in my stomach, muscles tightened when I heard Dad step in the door, just in time for dinner at a quarter to seven. Still tall. Still pulling my gravity close to the ground. Dark dress shirt unbuttoned to the third button now that he was home, undershirt exposed, somber expression. When I went out to the dining room, his eyes were on me. “Salam alaikum,” he said as his arms swung around my back, patted it twice. He asked me how I was doing in my classes, told me to study more. We hadn’t talked, not really, since that day at the end of June. Mom was jubilant. As she put out dishes on the table, she whispered, “Your dad’s been so grumpy lately, but now look at him. He’s glad you’re back.”I tried to imagine Rebecca sitting at the table, next to Mom, complimenting Dad’s polow and Mom’s abgoosht. Laughing at Mom’s jokes, telling Dad about her psych and biology classes. I told them about not making the basketball team, and Dad said I should try again next year. At one point, while we ate, he mentioned offhand, “I was worried you wouldn’t come.” No one commented and we continued to eat and Selma began talking about soccer practice. The coach had made her team captain. I ate each bite slowly. I took in the smells and senses of the house, trying to memorize the traces of my family. Soon I’d have to leave again. I kept going back in time, to that image of my mother framed against my bedroom window, her blue shadow blotting out the light.