Permission

by Saskia Vogel

  Ana’s father avoided looking at Fumiko until she gripped his wrist, and he made a nervous sound. ‘We accentuate the things we find pleasing, but you have to give it a logical architecture. Look at her. Really look at her. It’s why she’s here.’ To me, she said, ‘Stand straight.’ Then, ‘Class,’ she clapped her hands; her fingers left stains on his skin.

  Fumiko demonstrated how to use your hand as a measuring tool. The men and women around me each raised an arm and held out their fists, some with their thumbs up, some to the side, others resting their thumbs against hard tools. Dr. Moradi and I locked eyes. I’d tried to hush the memory, but it would not be stilled.

  Ana and me. The two of us, the summer before senior year. Afternoon sun in her curtains, hurried hands, too impatient to get undressed. At first the creak and rustle of the bed was everything, then it was hands and skin, the act of kissing, but also the sound, her hands in my hair and mine inside her. We didn’t notice her door had been left ajar until it shut. She thought it was the wind. Then, we heard the rolling click of the lock. Ana froze. I said we should go out the window. When she didn’t follow, when I heard her pleading with him, I started running. I shouldn’t have run away without her, but I ran those few miles home.

  Without looking up from the bills she was paying, my mother asked why I didn’t call her if I wanted to leave early and wouldn’t that be the day when I finally got my driver’s licence. But then she must have heard it in my breath, maybe she could smell it on me. My T-shirt was dark with sweat and I had a blister on my foot. Go take a bath, she said. While I was in the tub, Moradi called. She came in without knocking, sat, and slid her hand through the bubbles. She looked spent and tender. You’ll take a break from each other over the summer, and I’m sure it will be back to normal by the time school starts, she said and waited for a reply that didn’t come. I was trying not to drown. The tap gurgled and water splashed into the bath. We don’t have to tell your father. If you don’t want to.

  I didn’t want to. There was nothing to say. We hadn’t done anything we had been told not to do; I wasn’t a boy. We were exploring, like what we had done when we were younger, practicing kissing on our pillows and hands. We didn’t talk about what it meant. It was something we had always done, and we never stopped to question whether or not what we were doing was in anticipation of a man. I think about what my mother said next a lot. She may not have meant it the way I heard it, but it was in the ether. A stitch of judgment, a tic of abnormality, the threat of the Other to an ordered life.

  You’ve never been one for the easy road, she said.

  My mother thought she was lightening the mood, but instead I heard a suggestion about who I was, that what I wanted from Ana was not friendship, but love. And in my mother’s face, her mildness, I understood the trouble desire could cause.

  You can talk to me, my mother said, but though I believed her, it would be better for Ana if we all pretended this had never happened. My mother blew the bubbles off her fingers. They sailed between us like dandelion spores and sizzled when they landed on the foam.

  Ana’s parents had come to Los Angeles on vacation in the eighties, and it would be years until I understood what it actually meant for them to have decided right then never to go back to Iran. The Moradis had family up in Beverly Hills, but they didn’t see each other often, and Ana had always said that her parents liked it that way, but something changed when the Beverly Hills uncle got ill. Suddenly, they were up there all the time at family gatherings, temple and, of course, the hospital. Ana had never talked about her bat mitzvah as anything other than a big birthday party and a chance to slow dance with Ryan Kim. We were still fondling our pillows then. But she’d started studying harder. I asked her about the effort she was putting into something neither she nor her parents believed in that much, and Ana replied, ‘It’s for my family,’ and I knew she didn’t mean just her parents. Instead of a birthday party, she started talking about becoming a woman, which to me seemed too distant to merit any serious thought. I didn’t understand what had changed.

  My parents didn’t think about family like this. My dad said he was tired of being the one to always be going back home to Ohio, his siblings could come out here for a change, so we only saw them if there was a wedding or a funeral. My mother’s parents were already gone, and she had no siblings. I admired Ana’s reverence for something greater than herself. It made her seem protected, as though she could never come to harm because she had a world of people around her who cared. A bat mitzvah seemed like a small price to pay for that. What would it feel like to belong to something so self-evident, something you didn’t give up on because you didn’t feel like getting on a plane?

  The summer break didn’t have the palliative effect my mother had promised. But I gave her no reason to believe that time had not solved the problem, and she no longer asked me how I was or what I needed. I appreciated the privacy. ‘I haven’t seen Ana in a while,’ my dad said one day. I pretended like I hadn’t noticed, but he could tell there was more to it. He told me not to worry: people grow apart. I found myself thinking about her at night, her skin. I pushed those thoughts away, and when I masturbated, I pictured her with men. In my fantasies, I inhabited both bodies. I came, thinking about being filled.

  That summer went by in a blur of hours. After the drama program ended, my mother made sure I ‘kept busy’ with ‘activities.’ These were words she associated with good kids and used them with a gusto reserved for people who feel ill at ease with language, but that was one thing I couldn’t fault her for: English wasn’t her mother tongue. Keeping busy meant that I spent any free day I had helping one of her friends who was renovating her stables. I couldn’t stand the idea of our charity work for the mother-daughter assistance league; the risk of running into kids from my school, maybe Ana, was too high. So I brushed away the stable’s cobwebs thick with yellow dust. I mucked the stalls. At the end of each day my skin was rubbery to the touch. No matter how I scrubbed I could still smell the sebum, manure, and wet hay.

  My dad decided we should all drive down to Valle de Guadalupe for a week. It was the first vacation I could remember that wasn’t also a business trip. He said he could tell we all needed a break. He taught me how to drink wine even though I was underage, and together we watched the sun gild the vineyards from the pool. It was nice. After dinner, I’d disappear to my room to read, falling asleep with my light still on, listening to them shush each other when they couldn’t stop laughing. One day I didn’t see them until dinner.

  And then the school year started. I could tell my mother was relieved. She was tired of watching me ‘mope around,’ which seemed like a double standard. At least I looked like I was keeping busy with activities that resembled actual work.

  But like the fortune teller said, I was no good at putting myself back together. Ana made other friends over the summer, kids whose parents were also from Iran and who went to the same synagogue. There was no room for me anymore, and because I still valued our friendship, I did what I thought she wanted me to do. I stayed away from her, but I didn’t know where to go. Because we never finished what we started, because it never was allowed to reach a natural close, our ending felt unwritten. I imagined other endings and how they would have defined me, and because I couldn’t explore such endings with her, my desire ran loose where it could. I responded to the desire of others, and I fell easily for those who responded to the desire in me. At times I felt worn thin, but it was exciting, and as I found out, rare to be a person who enjoyed both giving and receiving pleasure, who was interested in the erotic as an exchange. Some people couldn’t see past the sex, some people fell fast and hard, and though I was generous with my body, I was careful and particular about whom I shared my heart with, and that left me lonely. People didn’t think I was into relationships, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, the ability to participate in pleasure seemed to me to be the greatest good. In pleasure, differences fell away and made space for an ecstatic enco
unter during which the boundaries between us dissolved and we were free.

  In their eyes, I was mostly a girl other girls could grind with, lips they could kiss, hair they could twist. This girl or that girl and whichever guys they were working their way through, guys who liked to think their dicks were magic or who approached me sweetly to find out if what they were doing was right. Right or wrong, I didn’t know. In pleasure we were only bodies, and the body is all we have. This perspective wasn’t without conflict. A woman I dated after I moved into my apartment had called me a pornographer because of it. She wanted emotional intimacy before we made love, and I told her I wanted to know what our bodies would be like together before I felt comfortable opening up. It was about trust and communication, I said, but she seemed insulted. I thought about the word pornographer. It suited me, in a way, but only because I knew of no better word for me yet. Sex was sacred to me. I knew it had the power to transform. In my arms, my lovers’ eyes would roll back. Mouths opening, they’d offer me their tongues, their dreams and confessions. They came to me for comfort, they came for me, and each act was a conjuring spell. Just one more kiss, one more caress, I wished, and this body would be revealed to be hers. Why couldn’t Dr. Moradi have let us be?

  On the model stand, I fought back tears. All eyes were on me. They could see each quake. There was no place to hide. Fumiko spoke slowly, guiding them through how to break me down. She spread the jaws of the calipers and fitted them around my head. The metal tip on my skin, the unexpected touch, became a point of focus. I allowed it to become all that there was. One end pressed against the soft flesh covering the hollow of my jaw, the other at the crown of my head. The strange comfort of a touch that asked nothing of me. Fumiko had my full attention. There was no space for tears. She walked the apparatus up and down my body. Seven and a half heads high, three heads wide at the shoulders, and on and on, until she reached my feet.

  ‘Good, good. Lucky class. She is classically proportioned,’ Fumiko said when she was done. Standing among the students again, she said, ‘Resume the pose.’

  AS I DROVE HOME FROM the art centre that night, I thought about what I had left behind by leaving this suburb for the city. I was born into privilege and raised on narratives of success. But what my dad had called ‘paradise’ wasn’t paradise to me. I couldn’t understand how my parents didn’t see it. I wasn’t sure anyone who chose to live here did. In a newspaper article about a double-suicide that took place on the cliffs near our house while I was in high school, a mother from the neighbourhood asked to comment on the ‘star-crossed lovers’ said, ‘You work so hard to give your kids everything, and they think it’s hell.’ It’s as though she had forgotten how it felt to be in love, what it felt like to be left wanting. What it felt like when material comfort wasn’t comfort enough. And yet, these values are deeply rooted. Sitting in my childhood home, I began to think of myself as a failure, losing sight of the value of the life I had chosen. Seeing Dr. Moradi made me feel like a loser, not least because I knew there was nothing he would have approved of about me now. He was exactly the kind of person who moved here. Or did the place shape him?

  On this bulge of land at the edge of Los Angeles, Spanish, Craftsman, mid-century, and ranch-style homes lined winding roads with ocean views. The area had been conceived of as a beachfront retreat in the early twentieth century, beachfront with minimal beach access, for people who wanted to imagine they were beyond the reach of a hungrily expanding metropolis. Way back when, whiteness was the barrier for entry, but now it was only a certain level of success. Success meant money, and any way you earned it seemed fine. All money was moral, but not all fame, as the parents of my friends made clear with their contempt for the city where so many of them spent their days as lawyers and doctors and aerospace engineers. One of my father’s concessions to my mother was that we’d live someplace where walking was possible. She couldn’t have walked to the store, but there were miles of trails right outside our door. I suppose it was a sort of Eden: perfect only in the absence of knowledge from the outside. The people within its borders were trying to recreate places to which they wished to return. None of those places were real.

  Unlike the rest of the city it was attached to, the peninsula was dark at night, a regulation intended to preserve the natural beauty of the place. The brightest lights were from passing cars, passing planes, fishing boats past midnight. But the darkness, its bends and corners, attracted a different kind of person, too. People who were out for a drive, who needed to be alone. For an area with good freeway access, it felt remote.

  I was still thinking about this, surprised by the intensity of my resentment toward a place I thought I had simply left behind, when I pulled onto our driveway. The house was dark.

  ‘Mom?’ I called out when I came through the front door. I didn’t want to spook her.

  A sound came from the kitchen, a hissing inhalation that might have been a ‘hello.’ She gestured for me not to bother her. She was watching something out the window.

  I opened the refrigerator and leaned into its cold air. Forks jutted from the plastic containers of creamy and fluffy mush. I had been telling myself I wasn’t really eating, just picking at the peas and diced ham but not the mayonnaise-y macaroni. Mandarin wedges and pineapple but not the marshmallow. There was so much of that ambrosia, but I’d nearly whittled it down to the cream and carbohydrates. I picked up a fork and found a maraschino cherry still speared on the tines. I ate it. It was waxy, chilled and sickly sweet. I couldn’t seem to get the sugar off my tongue. The fridge made a clicking sound and began to hum. I put the fork back in the bowl and closed the refrigerator door. I poured my mom and myself a glass of water and sat at the table with her, swishing the water around in my mouth, the sweetness diluted, then gone. When I stopped swishing, there were only waves and palms to be heard. They seemed to be growing louder each night.

  We listened to the ocean pummel the shore. The phone rang. It went to voicemail. Telemarketer. After the initial shock, the missing, the waiting, there was nothing really to say. Maybe in silence we were understanding each other perfectly. Maybe silence was a respite we shared. I forgave her for smoking. Mom had her cigarettes, and I had my forks in the fridge. Nothing needed to be said, because we knew. We were in mourning, and it was OK to let our mourning be.

  My mother sat up straighter.

  I scooted my chair around and leaned over so I had a better view. She pointed at the last farm in the area. It wasn’t much of a farm: passionfruit weighing down a rusted chain-link fence. Tomatoes and sunflowers. Leafy greens and strawberries. The farmer kept a trailer on the property, which stretched all the way to the sea and boasted the only passable road that led down to the beach. He’d come after you muttering, wielding something heavy or with a trigger if he caught you trespassing. I heard property developers were always trying to get him to sell, but the farmer must have been happy with what he was making renting out his access road to film crews. A picture truck was parked on the road, carrying something large on its bed.

  One second we were looking at the truck, the next we were blinded by a bright, round light. A blue-flamed artificial sun. I had to look away. Chips of ash cast shadows on the kitchen table.

  ‘They’re shooting a major motion picture,’ my mother said. ‘That actress who looks like you is in it. What’s her name?’

  I didn’t want to say it.

  ‘Lola?’

  I nodded.

  ‘The location manager came by. Nice man. He seemed to worry that we would make a fuss. He invited us to drop by,’ my mother said, sounding as if she thought it were that easy. A nice man came to your door, you had a nice chat and then you were invited to the set, as good as in. She always made it sound like everyone else knew how to do life better, it was just me who refused to walk down Easy Street. Try harder. Be better. Be nicer. Be more like Lola LaForce, who was basking in the same blue light, but being fawned over and paid.

  ‘OK, I will,’ I said, and started t
o get up, but then she put her soft hand on mine. The green eyes I’d inherited from her, suddenly sharp.

  ‘Do. I want to know you’re going to be OK…because…’

  The water was rising inside her. She wiped fresh tears away.

  I hugged her. She was stiff in my arms. I let her go. We were closer than we’d been in years.

  There was discomfort in her smile. Her eyelids, angry swollen red. She fished a tube of hemorrhoid cream from the pocket of her silk robe, squeezed some out on her ring finger, the gentlest finger, and dabbed it around her eyes. Like she’d taught me. Her fingernails were perfect pale ovals. She hadn’t even missed her fortnightly nail appointment at Janine’s. I teared up at the sight of her rings. She was still wearing them.

  Her diamonds, her nails, these things that were as they always were: I expected Dad to arrive at any second. The car would rumble up the driveway, the door to the garage would open and slam behind him. He’d want to go for a run before dinner but would decide he was too tired, pour himself a drink, sit on the balcony, and look at the view until dinner was ready. But it was well past dinnertime. And the keys to his car had disappeared along with him, so the convertible was gathering dust in the garage. My mother said she couldn’t find the spare key. I couldn’t bring myself to rummage through his hiding places. Surely, she knew them too. But it was enough to believe we’d find them one day. When we were ready to start looking. Maybe we’d look together, and she’d open up boxes of things I’d never seen and tell me stories about their marriage that I’d never heard. Ones that didn’t end in pain or resentment.

  My mother lit another cigarette.

  ‘It’s time to go home…’ she said in her mother tongue.

  To preserve whatever sense of camaraderie we had, I tried not to let on how her words hit me. I did my best to sound calm. I might not have understood her, after all.

  ‘Haven’t I been…’ I started to say in English. She gave me one of her severe looks, her face all angles, just like mine. Disappointment, I thought, for not answering her in German.