Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  I am Eden’s Eve, she once christened herself. The Adam Eve. Ha! Like most women with inconsistent impulses toward humor, she found flickers of entertainment in the cave of her sober mind by repeating her few witticisms back and forth, smugly, immaturely, like the guy who invented the word “invention”. …

  For Lala Adam, just being alone in her mind all day was usually three-quarters blessing and just a quarter curse. Done with the always-off household men, done further with a country she couldn’t even imagine anymore, done with the fragments of an old family scattered like tears, just done in general with the past that at its worst had somehow half-claimed a brother she had resigned herself to having lost like a severed limb you are aware of daily but no longer feel for—for Lala Adam this was what freedom in America really meant: being rid of things.

  Then, only once in a while, the feeling overdid itself and Lala Adam was confronted with her humanity—the loneliness that only those who once had and then lost companions can feel. At those times, she’d feel like a husk of her former self—dry, apathetic, automatic, pulseless. But usually she knew better. Often before that anti-feeling could creep in she’d remind herself that it was all shit and she’d snap back with a triumphant Oh, thank goodness for ridness!

  For instance, she didn’t call when Darius Adam was out visiting their son in New York, the first time she was in Eden without him. She thought of them, often, but never called. Let them call her, she thought, knowing they wouldn’t. And they didn’t, of course.

  One of Lala’s favorite Americanisms was “get a life.” The first time she heard it muttered on TV by a fat blond kid to a skinny blond kid, she did something she rarely ever did: laughed, and hard.

  “What?” Xerxes, thirteen, snapped.

  “What is that, ‘get a life?’” She couldn’t stop giggling.

  “You haven’t heard that? It’s like bad. It’s like ‘get lost.’” He tried to explain clearly and quickly, disturbed by the notion of depriving the home of its usual somber feel by this unprecedented emotional response, from her of all people.

  “A life equals lost? I don’t think that’s right. …”

  “Mom,” he sighed, knowing how to win it once and for all, “who’s the American here?”

  Since then, she had thought of it often. Used it secretly, sometimes in a murmur, more often in a holler just in her head, almost always at Darius. Lost Darius, life-less Darius.

  Because she was on her way to one, she knew—it would take over a decade from when she first learned the phrase from her son, but eventually she would have it—and yes, here it is, oh yes, a life, a big normal crazy American life!

  Best of all, the life came to her. One afternoon as she was doing her laundry in the unit’s laundry room, she faced it in the form of another woman.

  “My name is Gigi, apartment thirty-four,” the woman declared. She had a slight accent. Mexican, Lala could recognize by that point in her Californian experience, although it was still something that Lala dubbed as “Espaniai”—which was Farsi for anything from Spain, Latin or Central America, maybe even Southeast Asia.

  This woman, Lala noticed, was not that unlike her. She had her height, her weight, most likely her age, her class maybe as well, also doing laundry when she was doing laundry—she could be taken as her Espaniai equivalent, she decided to conclude.

  “Hello, my name is Lala,” she said quietly, robotically, embarrassed at an interaction that was a first for her but clearly second nature to her newfound twin.

  “Lala?” Gigi exclaimed, with a laugh. “Hello, Lala!”

  Lala had no idea what was so funny. Her name was Gi-gi. Still she didn’t want the encounter to end, the potential for whatever may come with this woman to dissipate, so she just smiled and nodded.

  “So you live where?” Gigi asked.

  Lala pointed outside, to the top floor of a visible stucco tower.

  “So, you do what?” she asked.

  “I,” she paused. She hated the question. It had always followed her, as even in Iran she did not know what she wanted to be. In America, she still did not know what she wanted to be, so there she was, putting it the only way she knew how, resigning herself to its reality, yes, she did, “keep house.”

  Gigi hooted—a literal hoot. She could not believe this woman, Lala thought, smiling politely, mesmerized at what she’d done to deserve it.

  “No, no, no!” Gigi burst, hysterically, clapping her hands even.

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “We are the same!” Gigi cried, pointing to the four enormous laundry bags at her feet. “I am a housekeeper, too!”

  Lala looked at the laundry and back at Gigi fully digesting the meaning. No. That bag of laundry, that was not her life. She hadn’t meant it, of course. “Housekeeper” was different than “housewife,” a word she could not recall then, damn that slippery English and its subtleties! She shook her head at the laundry: no way. Gigi was in fact insulting her with the misunderstanding.

  “No, no, I live with my husband and before with my son, too,” she tried to explain, “and I am at the house. I am a … housewoman!”

  “So am I, sister, so am I,” said Gigi. “You don’t think I made some babies in my day, girl? Ha!”

  It took days, a few conversations later—as suddenly Gigi was everywhere, constantly bumping into her outside, on the steps, once even eerily outside her front door—until Gigi got what she did or rather what she didn’t do.

  “So?” was Gigi’s reaction, when one day Lala’s remembering the word and remembering to tell her all happened to coincide perfectly.

  “So, that is who I am. Housewife, usually. That is all.”

  “No big deal!” Gigi snapped. She got quiet, which made Lala nervous, and they proceeded to take a tense walk together.

  “So you need a housekeeper, or what?” Gigi asked her at the end of her walk, the first of many times she would ask.

  “No, I am sorry,” said Lala. “I am—I mean, I do it myself.”

  “You housekeep. Yes?” Gigi’s eyes looked ready for a laughter that Lala couldn’t quite tell to be good or evil.

  “Yes, well, no, I mean well, yes, for my family. For no money. You see?”

  “I feel sorry for you, sister!” Gigi raised her voice, suddenly. “I get paid, I have a family who lives far away where I don’t have to keep their houses, I live alone, for myself, and I get money!”

  Lala couldn’t argue with that. “That sounds good.” She thought about it. “It really does.”

  Gigi laughed, hoots riddling the still air. “Right, right! But whatever, we can be the same, we’ll be friends? Yes?”

  Lala was touched and frightened simultaneously. The woman was overbearing, impenetrable, and yet interested in perhaps rescuing her from her unbearable nothing existence. Enter conversation, laughter, mishaps, insults, teas, walks, pokes in the ribs, et cetera, all the et cetera she could never predict, into her usual vacuum of daily existence. Bad or good, her standard of living was on the tip of a potentially dramatic shake-up.

  She didn’t ask, didn’t question it; nonetheless Gigi, obesely equipped with replies for everything, felt compelled to kiss off the silence with her answer.

  “’Cause you need a life, sis!”

  She didn’t immediately tell Darius about Gigi—until she was forced to casually introduce them in the courtyard, but she could see the brief awkward interlude vanishing from his consciousness without a second’s staying power—she didn’t know why but knew he would somehow disapprove of her life-getting, somehow see something threatening in it. But in the week that Darius was in New York, she saw Gigi constantly—day and night, they took walks, made soups, watched soap operas together, told stories about their lives—often the truth, sometimes the truth tinted—and even had a good time. Gigi was Lala’s first American friend. In her week of total freedom from keeping house, indeed—she was suddenly agreeing with Gigi that she was essentially a housekeeper, but while Gigi had the more exalted role of
freelance, she was on the lowest rung, an intern, a slave—she not only hung out with Gigi, they went out. They saw a movie, had dinner, had drinks. Gigi bought her her first American drink, an Espaniai one surely, Lala decided, all pink and fruity and icy and tasting like an underage bad girl. Once they even met up with Gigi’s only other friend, a tall black man in a shiny shirt, with a sweet growly “hello” that sounded like granola-in-the-throat. He was black indeed, and tall like a basketball player, which Lala assumed he might as well be—either that or a singer, a jazz musician, an entertainer possibly, no?

  “Marvin, at your service,” was his introduction, with a firm handshake and huge smile. He was like Gigi: happy. Happy and strange.

  Lala smiled and shook his hand. They all got very drunk: Gigi after a whole rainbow of exotic candy-looking scandalous drinks whose umbrellas and flower by-products were used as weapons to assault her companions; Marvin after about a dozen shots of something clear and undoubtedly lethal; Lala after three of the same dirty-girl drinks.

  “You’re like Gigi. But not!” he laughed, causing Gigi to hoot.

  “Isn’t that right, sister?! Hoooooo!” Gigi hooted.

  Another round, they decided.

  “You dance Persian?” he finally asked.

  She shook her head. At gunpoint she could, but would she? Never.

  “Belly dance? Genie style?”

  Marvin and Gigi were beside themselves with laughter. Lala joined in: oh, yes, her country, her Middle East actually, was hilarious, yes, she’d agree!

  “Never mind, another round, waitress!” he shouted. As the round came and they simmered down—Lala softly giggling into the bar’s smoky air, so grateful to be alive in the night, even if it be with these strange and maybe ultimately undesirable people, but people nonetheless, and people who had some investment in her, something, she sensed—she was confronted with her own name in a new voice: “Lala,” Marvin, leaning, said in a faux-secretive-sounding whisper, “from tonight on, we three are a team, you hear me?”

  She did. And the next day schemed on how to keep this new world under wraps when Darius would return. She was suddenly invested in her new friends’ air of reckless optimism—she could see Marvin laughing at her worries, and she could hear Gigi saying, Oh, sister, everything will work out, cool it! It was worth the cover-up. Because she knew it when she saw it … there it was: suddenly more than she expected, after a couple decades worth of hardly searching in that barely–New World, the goal miraculously had been wholly met—she had gotten it, A Life, and maybe it was good.

  Once, he left his life and it was bad. But it occurred to Darius Adam, waiting at his departure gate at JFK International for the flight back home to LAX, that it could get worse—for one thing, he had not called home, not once in the last week in New York. He considered how angry she must be, how much she must have missed them, how panic-struck Lala must be by now, and eventually decided, against his better judgment, to face the painful call.

  “I don’t care,” she grumbled, but added softly, “but it would have been nice, maybe once or twice.”

  “Why does it matter how many times I call? It was a week and I am calling now,” he said.

  “Oh, what do I expect? That you two think of me? I know what happens to you men once you leave this place.”

  Darius Adam uttered nothing but a heavy breath to let her know he was there, but that he had nothing to say to that.

  “Well, how was it?” she finally asked.

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” he retorted.

  “What is the point of this call, Darius?”

  “To tell you my flight is on time and I’m coming,” he snapped and moaned. Why had he, why …

  There was some silence. Finally she asked, “How was he?”

  “Terrible. Fine. You know. The same. I don’t want to talk about it.” He was not prepared to answer that.

  “And you have nothing more to say than that.”

  “My flight is on time,” he repeated, “and our son, maybe the only difference is that he is more himself than ever. As in, he did not hide his hatred of us. Are you happy?”

  “What do you mean?” she gasped.

  “I don’t want to talk about him. I just spent a week living him, the last thing I want to do—”

  “Well, I’m calling him. Maybe he can be a man and tell me something.” It was her greatest weapon: challenging his manhood. She could sense his fury throbbing through the receiver. “Then, soon, you’ll talk, I promise.”

  “When I say I don’t want to talk about him, woman,” he snapped, “I mean, not at all.”

  She hung up, as she was prone to do, and spent the next several months leaving messages on Xerxes’s answering machine without a word back from him. Apparently their son had nothing to say about it. Meanwhile, back at home, Darius Adam, to her surprise—like a man, indeed, a big stubborn fool-headed man, she thought—stuck to his word completely.

  Although nobody ever saw them—nobody saw anybody; this was suburban California after all, and occurrences like the meeting of Lala and Gigi were classified under “miracle” in the context of antisocial LA apartment units—there were secret immigrants everywhere in the neighborhood. In Eden Gardens especially. The Pelican had done quite a decent job of housing those not from “there.” If someone were to be creepy enough as to put a glass to their doors, in nearly every unit they would hear the always-angry-sounding coarse garble of a language that was not the reigning tongue of the land. The foreigners lived their old lives, each family thinking they were the only odd one out.

  For all they knew, the Adam family were the only Iranians in Eden. And, in fact, they were right.

  For them, as for every foreign family, it was all up to this first generation—the ones maybe not quite born here, but close enough, who maybe went through only a few months of tackling their way into the tough putty of a new language. But how did theirs do it—the young oblivious things constantly exposed to the Old World linguistics of a lost mother culture, at best subjected to their parents’ broken imperfect attempts at assimilation? How did the kids manage it, cultivate those smooth form-fitting American accents, when just to hear them was to imagine some T-shirt-wearing, baseball-capped, freckled run-of-the-mill American kiddo? Only their names, and sometimes the pronunciations of their names—if they didn’t immediately give in to the assimilatory meltdown of their oddball appellations—made them something other. But for the most part, through the vehicle of language, the youth of Eden Gardens became the Americans-in-residence in every way.

  For Xerxes Adam, American English came to him effortlessly via only two vehicles: A) school and B) television. Especially the latter, for that was how he contextualized what he heard in the former—that was his dictionary to look up playground insults, and to discover new ones to try out the next day. Television was the icebreaker, the playground unifier—if there was nothing to say there was always TV talk. There were He-Men and She-Ras and sitcom dunces and cartoon villains and commercial quips and the dumb stuff their parents watched, to bust out and congregate over.

  The only hole in the kid+TV→school success→English proficiency = a future of adult American normalcy equation was the one only Xerxes Adam was, of course, doomed to the trenches of. What happened if your kid—your not-a-freak kid with two legs and two arms, average looks, acceptable clothes, a good disposition, above-average learning aptitude, an eagerness to people-please—happened to not watch the right TV shows?

  Xerxes Adam actually did watch all the right shows—he skimmed them like a book that was good for you but in the end action-and-dialogue anorexic, full of long descriptive landscape paragraphs that practically pleaded for ADD eyes. He knew—somewhat—the shows the kids liked. He could smile and nod at their references, somewhat. He knew a catchphrase, a scenario, a superhero, a punch line here and there to drop at emergency points in kid talk. But it was not where his heart was. For Xerxes Adam, there was really only one show, THE show, a show that was
so before his time and out of his universe—and in fact out of all universes, almost implying a societal disregard, part of its beauty for Xerxes—the show that he could thank for filling his ears with edifying English language lessons, but really a show that shaped him, his character, his future aesthetic sensibility, his sense of not just the world, but its possibilities, a show that made his everyday hell in this supposed Eden a heaven, a show that was less show for him than the one livable half hour of another long lost day—thank God for cable channels and syndication culture!—a show known as: I Dream of Jeannie.

  Although not quite godhead, it was, it had to be admitted, a reasonable television milestone of its era. Inspired by the success of rival network ABC’s occult farce Bewitched, about the domestic life of a married “witch” (debuting in 1964 as the second most watched program in the United States), Sidney Sheldon wanted something to compete on his network, NBC. By 1965, Sheldon had his situation comedy: I Dream of Jeannie, which ran until 1970 and revolved around the conjugal mishaps and sexual tensions of one blonde genie (Barbara Eden) and an astronaut general (Larry Hagman). The story lines were as simple as TV convention, once you got past the premise: that an astronaut has to abort a space launch and crashes on a desert island; he finds a bottle on the beach; he opens it. A genie is stirred from a two-thousand-year imprisonment. Since the liberator of a genie thus becomes its governor, Captain Tony Nelson reluctantly accepts the role after insisting the genie can go free, upon his rescue. But Jeannie the genie has fallen in love with him, the first man she set eyes on in two thousand years; she follows Nelson home to Coco Beach, Florida, where she goes from the cutely antagonistic household “help,” to Nelson’s fiancée, and subsequently becomes his wife in the fifth and final season. “Master’s” challenge is keeping her supernatural talents a secret, while very often relying on them to rescue him and Jeannie from the very sticky situations the mischievous outsider is also capable of conjuring.