The question, no matter how scary, felt as though it had been coming, she had to admit. She swallowed hard. When she first met him, she had to admit, the first thing she thought was, Here is a Black Man. I don’t know many blacks. I’ve seen them on TV before and now on the streets of America. In Iran, I did not see them ever. On TV, but only Sidney Something and Sammy Something Else. Here is the first Black Man I am expected to talk to and befriend. I don’t think I have ever befriended one or thought about it. My. How do I act normal and not let the Black Man know I think and feel this way?
Lala did not know how necessary it was to be honest, but could not muster the energy to lie either.
“There must have been,” she said, “somewhere. …”
“You didn’t know any,” he said flatly, without much surprise in his voice.
“Not really.”
“None in America either,” he stated.
“But I don’t know anyone in America,” she piped up, happy for that truth suddenly.
“I’m your first black man!” he declared, with a small smile and his fist softly pounding the table.
“Well, if you put it that way,” she tried to smile back, uncertainly.
But his beam grew to its usual epic proportions. “Congratulations!” It was of course possible that it was mocking or mean-spirited, she sensed, worried. He looked upward and laughed, as if into the face of a slow god. “Shit!”
He got quiet again, though he capped his reticence quickly by plastering on a wide smile over his silence. The fish came. It was delivered on blocks of damp wood, in a nine-piece tic-tac-toe of rice filled with colorful green orange yellow, secured by a crusty bandage of green seaweed holding each motley monstrosity in a tight bind. She looked at the chopsticks and watched Marvin expertly break them apart from one another, rub them together, and then trap them in his fingers in a way to naturally create a graceful picking-up device. He ate effortlessly. She chose the moment he looked down at his food to reach out and stab a roll with her chopstick, stuffing it quickly into her mouth before anyone noticed. It was, as expected, cold and wrong. Surreal even. She swallowed most of it whole and then did it again.
“How is it?” Marvin asked.
“More than I imagined!” she said, picking a few rice bits off the roll.
He ordered some drinks, plum wine, and Lala drank it like water, thirstily, grateful for its going right to her head.
He went on with his usual babbling, “This place—it’s amazing—Japanese food, what history, sushi, sake, soba, sashimi, tempura—I tell you, culturally the country is about as daunting as it is economically, I mean it—” and then like a shot in the dark, of course, it came—“so, Lala, you like black people?”
She nodded immediately, but worried her nod was a lie. What did she know about liking a whole people anyway? She never liked anyone, really. Nobody was okay, she liked to think, until they were.
And perhaps because of the misleadingly weak-tasting plum wine, which she had immediately had a second then third glass of, she decided it was safe and perhaps a good intimate move for her to tell Marvin about an incident she had not thought about in a long time, namely the first time she saw and interacted with a Black Man—long before him, before America even. …
He raised his eyebrows and motioned with his handheld wooden crane to please, girl, continue and suddenly all the evening’s talk was hers:
So it was in Paris. Now don’t think anything of that—we had been on the run, fleeing, we had just run away from our own country, over to Istanbul, ready to be accepted by anyone who had trust in our flimsy passports, waiting for The Great American Green Cards, killing time with makeshift vacations, and we had some relatives there, and thought why not, it may be our last chance—and it was—so: Paris. He—my husband, Darius, who you don’t know, and never will actually, better that way, trust me—was out as usual job hunting, seeing what may exist for us out there after all the running, uncomfortably eating off our distant relatives, trying to carve a future for us in a very daily hope-filled way. It was a hard time. The days had no structure, sunup to sundown, for me and little Xerxes, barely six, so we roamed through the beautiful city. We did not know the language, we did not know our way around. We just walked like two characters out of a dream suddenly finding themselves existing in a real world. We would go to cafés and we would spend almost entire days there—we would start at lunch at, say, one and stay all the way till dinner at, say, six. Our day was one long stay at a single café. There was less risk in that and Xerxes could be managed, fed, contained, entertained, and fed again: bathrooms, snacks, water, people-watching. It also felt like something one would do in Paris. It was pleasant. So there we were at a particularly nice café I recall, too nice for us—we were immigrants now, we had to save, just all that eating out today even shocks me—and anyway Xerxes was eating some fries or something, deep in his own little kid head—who knows what they’re thinking and do we even want to know—you laugh, but you don’t know my son, what my son has become—anyway, suddenly his attention went outward. To the people. To a person, I should say. Before I knew it, to my horror he was pointing at the person, pointing and smiling, like he found an old lost friend, crying “Look, look, look, over there, look at what I see”—and here I was trying to put his finger away, trying to hush his laughter, telling him, “Okay, Xerxes, I will look, I see, I see,” and struggling to see in the crowd what on earth could have possibly gotten his attention, when I realized it was right in front of me, at the café. A waiter.
A black man waiter. Yes, the first.
I said, “Okay, Xerxes, so what, it’s a waiter”—but even I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was striking, very very black, very African, wearing the dark red uniform of the café and smiling and waving back at Xerxes. Xerxes was overjoyed. Because you see, in our country it means something else: the Black Man, that is. This will sound silly—trust me, I am embarrassed at many things in my culture, add this one to the list—but he exists in our culture as a character, let’s say. See, our New Year’s is like your Christmas in many ways. The biggest, most important of holidays. And we, too, have our own fake things and fake people like your reindeer and elves and Santa. We have a man we call Haji Firooz—which actually means Mr. Festive or something, so I guess he’s like a Santa. Except, he is … black. Well he’s not black-black but his face at least is painted black. But I mean, he is black not out of race, but, well, because he is dirty … oh dear. I mean, coal, his blackness has something to do with coal, you know, like your Santas and their chimneys, perhaps, except he more realistically gets really dirty. Oh my. I know, it sounds bad. What can I do about this tradition? He is a good man to us. He laughs, dances, sings, he is everyone’s favorite outsider! Maybe he is black? You know what I mean. I mean, the tradition is so old, so who knows? Do I think it’s bad? I don’t know. Could it be? Maybe. Look, there are no black people in my country and we have this black Santa guy and, sure, he resembles you people but there are also explanations like … dirty. Oh, I wish dirty didn’t mean dirty. Well, you know, right? It’s just language and tradition and old stuff? Who knows what to make of it? Anyway, my son thought it was Haji Firooz and he was overjoyed and eventually so overjoyed that the waiter could tell and came over and played with Xerxes a bit. And I tried to explain in my barely English and barely-even-less French that my son had mistaken him for someone else. And the waiter had smiled and said, “Are you looking for someone?” I had to tell him back, “Oh, no, my son thought you were someone, someone we aren’t looking for at all, someone who doesn’t even really exist, pardon me.” I must have seemed a madwoman. But this is the problem. Not everything is translatable. My country is not bad or wrong, just different, and I knew at that point the rest of my life would be one long chain of meaningless untranslatable unutterable perhaps offensive perhaps excuseless explanations for my existence, mine and my family and my heritage, all best left to silence and maybe apology—
“Hey, no need!” he h
ad laughed, with a stop-sign hand, banishing the whole thing off to the suddenly desperately tense, sound-system-less silence that became their whole ride home.
It felt longer than it was, of course. In the parking lot she tried to mutter her good-bye, when he suddenly grabbed her arm, and said with an unprecedented earnestness, “Lala, I want you to know I like you very much.” Before she could even attempt a smile, he unbuckled his seat belt and reached out and hugged her stiff stunned torso for longer than would seem comfortable to any human, much less one who had just spent an hour or so steeped in the most sticky of racist guilt. Black Santa, my God, she replayed in her mind. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she tried to comfort herself by recalling that they had made Blonde Genies, so there. …
The next day she ran into Gigi, who seemed fully recovered from whatever illness. Lala told her about her night “and at the end, he hugged me and for longer than was comfortable, let me add,” she declared.
“Oh, sister!” In came the hoots. “What are you saying? Are you saying …?”
“I am saying nothing,” she snapped.
“Well, don’t worry about Marvin,” Gigi said. “He’s not like that.”
Lala nodded the conversation away, as if she knew what was meant by that. They went on their walk silently until it occurred to Lala that there was no benefit in pretending she understood what Gigi meant by that. What that was that?
“Oh, you know,” Gigi smiled mischievously. “He isn’t about us!”
Lala squinted her eyes in confusion.
“About us ladies I mean!” Gigi grinned.
“Hmm,” went Lala, absently stalling, the part of her brain that was so good at piecing paranoid factoids suddenly disabled. She suspected, but wasn’t sure, but she wanted Gigi’s bluntness, did she mean he was, he was—
“Fag!” cried Gigi.
Lala stared blankly, puzzled at the foreign word that just maybe sounded like, that maybe she had heard, that perhaps meant he was—
“Homo!”
—that also sounded like, that indeed could be, perhaps she did mean he was really and truly—
“GAY, girl!”
They walked on. Lala felt relieved and yet, not relieved at all. “So many of those kinds of people in your country,” was all she could think to make of it.
“They’re everywhere! Not just popping up but they’ve been there all along, sister!”
Lala nodded numbly. Gigi was able to live in a world like that and worse, Lala imagined. They’ve seen it all, she thought, the Americans. As she let all the new bad ideas have their way with her head, Gigi pulled Lala in conspiratorially and added with a widening grin, “Oh, I am sure they exist in your own complex even …!”
Their son relentlessly worried them. In the time of commonplace resolutions, in the time when their family’s least happy of endings still made the ranks of happy endings—the only time that Xerxes believes he was close to happy, when life existed in a box you could turn on and off without leaving your couch, when dilemmas would relieve themselves with laugh tracks strung together in the neat span of the miracle half hour—his parents watched him with worried eyes constantly.
Who was their son? How was their son? What was their son?
He was a kid. His routine was quintessentially kid-ish: get dragged up to go to school, dread home life so much that the ride to school with Dad would appear bearable as an ephemeral gateway to the school day, have such a generally terrible day that suddenly going home took on the desirable role, get picked up by Dad, get reminded again that home is no better after an annoying conversation or nonconversation with Dad in the car, the routine follow-up questioning by Mom as a price to pay for after-school snacks, watch TV, do homework, eat dinner, watch TV, get forced into bed, lie awake contemplating all the TV, and dream, dream, dream of a nonreality of a nonera with a nonperson named Jeannie. …
Back then, in between all the being-a-normal-kid stuff, he neglected to recognize their relentless picking and probing as, say, early psychologically destructive hurdles fit for a good lifetime of therapy sessions.
“Xerxes, say, what do you want for your birthday?” they would ask.
“Toys!” he would naturally reply.
“I know, but say, a train set or … a teddy bear? Monopoly … or Candyland?”
“I want a He-Man.”
“A He-Man doll?”
“A He-Man … action figure?” he’d reply, not on to them at all.
“Maybe He-Man’s spaceship, is that what you want, Xerxes?”
“He doesn’t have a spaceship. Just a He-Man and … Skeletor. That’s what I want.”
“Maybe. No promises. We’ll look into it,” they’d gingerly offer, but always going further: “So explain He-Man’s relationship with Skeletor.”
“Mortal enemies.”
They’d give each other the facial equivalents of high fives in relief. “Oh, good!”
If he had lived in the time of Jeannie when there had been plastic Jeannies to be had, maybe, he thought later, just maybe, he would have wanted her … because what they didn’t understand was that Jeannie was no different than another boy’s superhero. Honest. Instead of being a flying muscular guy in tights and a cape with boring predictable dialogue, Jeannie was a pretty, funny, magical, blonde pseudo-Middle-Eastern sprite. Cool.
Darius would try not to question too much lest he give himself entirely away but eventually during his occasional supervisional drop-ins on TV hour, he’d take the commercial break as an opportunity to investigate further, on his terms:
“So, where the hell did she come from?”
Xerxes would flip open to his TV Trivia Time! encyclopedia’s only bookmarked section and reword naturally as if it required translation for his father. “Well, Dad, in the first episode ‘The Lady in the Bottle’—1965—we see Nelson, the astronaut, in his space capsule landing way off course and onto some deserted island where he finds a bottle. He rubs it and there she is, the two-thousand-year-old genie Jeannie!”
“Fine. Why does she make that sound all the time?”
“Well, Dad, it’s the sound of the Jeannie magic move—the crossed arms, the nod and blink.” He actually did his best impression of it, much to Darius’s dismay. “When she blinks we are hearing the sound of a Jew’s harp—when the trick fails, that’s a warped chord on an electric organ.”
“Fine. So who is that annoyed man in the suit? Her husband?”
“Well, good question, Dad—not in this episode, he’s just Master still. He’s Tony Nelson, an Air Force officer who works with NASA. At home, he’s the genie’s master. But eventually—‘The Wedding’ episode … December 1969, yes—Jeannie and her master do get married!” He looked almost too ecstatic, over-the-top iridescent, Darius worried—he was like a knitting circle propagandist, a butterfly-chasing toy puppy, a snowman made of ice cream!
It would always get him down. It always pointed to that biggest fear. Is he? Isn’t he? And so he’d have no choice but to change the subject, to a subject that just seemingly forked off his investigation,
“So, son, what’s your favorite color these days?”
“I don’t know. Red, black.”
“Red or black?”
“I don’t know. Maybe red.”
“Red, huh? Hmmm. Red like a fire truck? Or red as in … strawberries, cherries? Fruit?”
“Red like … I don’t know.” He thought for a moment, blinking. Finally he said with a shrug, “Blood?”
The obsession was graphable, peaks and valleys, cosines and sines. In the summer between eighth and ninth grade, though, they noticed a seeming drop in his interest—no more incessant humming of the theme song, no more did you know Fritz Freleng who did the Looney Toons cartoons and Pink Panther did the opening IDOJ cartoon?, no more useless facts, no more collecting of weird bottles that might contain genies (often just empty wine cooler bottles or malt liquor jugs left in neighborhood Dumpsters and immediately returned to them by his irate germ-phobi
c mother). He was getting over it, they thought. Perhaps that was what junior high did to them: in the name of cool and fitting in, preteenagedom burst their obnoxious candy-flavored youthful bubbles.
Or so they hoped. But then came autumn 1990, and they could see it in his eyes: TV once again gaining all-importance, TV meaning one thing certainly. …
“Dallas??!!”
A little older, Xerxes to his credit gushed with a pinch less enthusiasm in his voice when he revealed it: “Well, Barbara Eden is going to be on Dallas—you know, Larry Hagman aka Tony Nelson’s show. She’ll be taking over his oil business, as his boss, in a pretty cool reversal of their old IDOJ roles. It’s an, um, pretty monumental TV milestone, if you don’t mind.”
He did mind, Darius told him. So did she, chimed in Lala. This was ridiculous. What was his deal? Who the hell watched Dallas? Darius grabbed the remote and announced he had to watch the news that night, very very important nightly news, and told his son with doomsday frankness to get lost.
Lala sat him over by the couch and distracted his stunned self with questions,
“Xerxes, so you’re getting older, and you have girls in your class …”
“So?”
“And boys, I guess?” she said, avoiding his eyes, not being able to bear it.
“Yeah.”
“You like them?”
“Who?”
“Well … girls! Yes?”
Xerxes was fifteen. The female species—Mother included—agonized him. “Oh, God.”
“Oh, God? Listen, Xerxes, it’s normal, as you get older, to not hate girls so much. I, your mother, was a girl once! And boys liked me!” She plastered on the smile of good mothers in classic cinema. She paused and went ahead with it, “And what about boys?”
“They’re …” and he shrugged it out, “Okay.”
“You’re a boy, Xerxes.”
Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 10
