That Thing We Call a Heart

by Sheba Karim

  “Whoa, woman. I’d definitely put my money on you,” Jamie said, looking a little awestruck. “And that band sounds cool—Rebel Antigone?”

  “Yeah, you guys want to hear my favorite song by them?” she asked.

  “Hell yeah!” Jamie replied.

  She pulled her big headphones out of her messenger bag and plugged them into her phone. Jamie and I shared the headphones, my cheek pressed to his. The lead singer could definitely hold a note, and the screams were a lot more melodious than in most punk songs Farah had made me listen to.

  Everyone stop trying to put a label on me

  Everyone stop trying to put a label on me

  I’m not a girl I’m not a guy

  I’m not an x I’m not a y

  I’m me

  I’m me

  If that’s too vague

  Then you’re afraid

  If that’s too vague

  Then you’re afraid

  But not me! Not me!

  I’m the head I’m the tail

  I’m Dorothy I’m the Wiz

  I’m the Founding Fathers’ anal snail

  I’m the Statue of Liberty

  I’m the heartbeat of

  The land you love

  I’m the home of the brave

  And the free

  The free! The free!

  Saxophone!

  Jamie, who’d been grooving the whole time, started rocking out to the frenetic wailing of a saxophone and something sounding like glass breaking. I let him have the other earpiece because he was obviously enjoying it so much.

  “They’re amazing!” he said, really loudly because of the headphones.

  “Did he—she, they, say the Founding Fathers’ anal snail?” I asked.

  “The Founding Fathers’ anal grail,” Farah corrected me, as if that made any more sense.

  Jamie took off the headphones.

  “Sorry to cut this short,” Farah apologized, sliding off the hood and tossing the headphones into her bag. “I gotta head. My mom needs to go shopping before iftar.”

  “Are you okay to drive?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  I couldn’t imagine driving right now. “Text me when you get back,” I said.

  “Will do. Later, kids.”

  “What’s iftar?” Jamie asked after she left.

  “Breaking the fast. It’s Ramadan, the month of fasting.”

  “But didn’t she eat a donut?”

  “You’re not supposed to fast when you’re on your period,” I said, blushing a little, not that Farah would care.

  “Do you ever fast?”

  “No. My mom used to, until she fainted at the office last year. Now she just prays a lot instead.”

  “Cool. Well, Morning Dew, what should we do now?”

  We couldn’t figure out where to go, so we drove down the street and pulled into a strip mall to figure out our next move. Jamie parked in front of the Amazing Chinese Restaurant, which had a dragon carved into its wooden door and paper lanterns hanging from its red awning.

  As I was marveling at the audacity of the restaurant’s name, Jamie played The National’s “Fake Empire.” He put his arm around me, reached for a curl that had escaped my ponytail, giving it a gentle tug as he coiled it around his finger.

  I was relieved by this familiar, intimate gesture, a physical assurance that I was the one he liked, that it was my curl laying across his shoulder.

  “What’s her hair look like?” Jamie asked.

  “What?”

  “Your friend Farah. I was picturing short, maybe spiky?”

  “No, it’s long and straight, and very limp.” I’d meant to say very thick, I really had. Limp sounded terrible, but I didn’t correct myself.

  “Why do you care?” I asked.

  “Just curious. Are you all right?” Jamie asked, lifting my chin with his curl-wrapped finger.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “Hey, should we see a movie?” he suggested. “Since we’re across the street from the mall and we’re still a little high . . .”

  This reminded me I was supposed to see a movie with my mother. “I can’t, I gotta be home in like an hour. But I think that gives us enough time for . . .” I spread my hands toward the windshield. “Amazing Chinese Restaurant!”

  “That sounds—” he grinned.

  “Don’t say it don’t say it—”

  “Amazing!” he proclaimed, and I hit his chest playfully, and then we were kissing, so hot and heavy the windows turned steamy. When we broke away, I was sweaty and burning and a little surprised, because making out in the car was one of those seminal suburban high school moments I thought I’d never have, and not only had it happened, it had come so easily, so naturally, with a guy so cool.

  Sixteen

  I WAS STILL A bit high when I got home, and a little nervous about hanging out with my mother, but I was also flying from my amazing meal with Jamie and our second minivan make-out session. Being with my mother turned out to be super fun, because instead of focusing on what she wasn’t (a liberal white mom who I could talk to about Jamie), I was able to relax and enjoy her for what she was: gentle and caring and a pretty good sport. I joked with her like I joked with Farah, tailoring my humor to her more refined nature. I even threatened to put a pea under her mattress to see if she’d feel it and she laughed and said “What nonsense,” a phrase she’d stolen from my father, which got me cracking jokes about Dad, a source of endless comedic fodder, both imagined and real, like the time this auntie got a nose job and he asked her point-blank at a party what had happened to her face.

  I hadn’t seen my mother laugh so much in ages, and it made me guilty, because she should have had a couple of children to make her laugh and she had only one, who’d been doing a pretty miserable job of it.

  After we got home from the cheesy rom-com, my mother hugged me and said, “I had such a lovely time. I hope we have more times like this before you leave for school.”

  Maybe the secret to getting along with your parents was marijuana.

  I went to bed exhausted but unable to sleep; my mind was too wired, my thoughts lucid but tangled. I thought of rom-coms and Bollywood and how we loved them because they were so predictable, how strange it was to see Farah smoke weed in a hijab, how she so openly displayed her Muslim identity whereas if someone saw me they wouldn’t know I was Muslim unless they asked, what Jamie said about his mother not loving his stepfather. I circled back to rom-coms, thinking about the universal happily ever after they had in common with Bollywood films, and I wondered if my parents loved each other, not the love you settle into because you’ve lived with a person for so long, but love like in a Faiz poem, love like in a Bollywood movie. Had they ever felt that way about each other? My mother had chosen him out of several suitors, but they hadn’t really known each other before the wedding. Was my father capable of such a depth of emotion? And if he was, could he even express it? And if he wasn’t, did that secretly upset my mother?

  A little agitated, I turned on the bedside lamp, comforted by the sight of familiar objects: Big Muchli, the purple stuffed whale I’d had since I was four, on the pillow next to me, the Radiohead OK Computer poster over my desk, my clothes from today hanging over my desk chair. Everything in its right place.

  I headed downstairs for a late-night snack. I’d very wisely stashed away a few Ye Olde donuts for moments like this. My mother had asked me to hide them from my father, but now, as I stood in the cold air of the open fridge, I couldn’t remember where they were. Then I figured I would have picked the place my father was least likely to venture. Sure enough, they were at the back of the veggie drawer. Victorious, I grabbed the last two donuts, made two cups of tea, and knocked on my father’s study, where I’d noticed the light was on.

  “Entry,” my father said.

  I assumed he meant enter, and stepped inside.

  I hadn’t been in his study in years. Besides my bedroom, it was the only other
space my mother didn’t clean with her usual obsessive regularity. It smelled like old socks and Old Spice. There were papers everywhere, some stapled, some loose, some circularly imprinted by mugs, some bearing stains as yellow as urine. The wastebasket was overflowing. One wall had floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves, the lowest shelf home to a collection of leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannicas coated with a layer of dust you could spell your name in, the rest filled with books in Urdu and English in disorderly stacks. The recliner was similarly besieged, piled nearly to the top with books.

  I paused, uncertain where to put his teacup; his desk was so cluttered you couldn’t tell what it was made of.

  “Here,” I said, handing the cup to my father, who set it down without even bothering to look.

  “Is this a Ye Olde donut?” my father asked.

  “Don’t tell Mom.”

  My father didn’t reply; his mouth was already full.

  I started removing books from the leather recliner so I could sit. Underneath the last book, a bright yellow math text called An Introduction to Knot Theory, was a highly fragrant brown-and-red striped sock. “Dad,” I said, holding the sock up and away, “this is disgusting.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said, opening the door and tossing it into the den for my mother to deal with later. “It’s a wonder Mom hasn’t murdered you, you know.”

  “Your mother abhors violence.”

  “I didn’t mean it literally.”

  “Hmmph. Even so, the impossibility of the stated action undermines the efficacy of the hyperbole.” My father said this in English, the language he used for such complex sentences, though that might also have been because I lacked the capacity to understand it in any other tongue.

  “Yeah, okay. Listen, I have a question.”

  My father still had one bite of donut left. If he really liked something, he’d inhale it, but then hold off on the last bite, reluctant to finish, though I’d never seen this reluctance last more than a minute.

  “Yes?” my father said.

  I hesitated—was it wise to ask whether my father loved my mother? What did it matter? Even if he said yes, it wouldn’t turn him into some expressive romantic, or even a normal guy. And what if he said no? What the hell would I do then? Did I really want to know all the ways in which my parents’ marriage was depressing? Maybe not, but I felt like I’d plunged past the point of no return.

  “So, we’ve been talking about love, and the lover, and the beloved, and longing, and all that, and I was wondering if you love Mom like that?” I asked.

  My father blinked. “Like what?”

  I tried again, more simply. “Do you love Mom?”

  “Do I love your mother?”

  “Do you?”

  My father glanced at the last bit of donut, debated, put it down on top of his keyboard, picked it up again, ate it. I made a mental note to buy keyboard cleaner.

  “Yes,” he said. “I love your mother.”

  “Like the lover loves his beloved?”

  “That kind of love is for Sufi mystics,” my father said, “and poetry. That kind of love cannot be sustained between two mortals.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because the love of the Sufi mystics, the love the poets mirror, is divine love. Humans are terribly flawed. Humans hurt each other. Humans become bored, humans become sick, humans are weak. When you are consumed by human love, it is like looking into a fire of your own making—you believe you are seeing your beloved, but it is a mere reflection of the intensity of your own emotion. When that fire cools, your beloved’s true face, flawed, hopelessly mortal, is revealed. The only beloved who will not disappoint when you see his true face is Allah, because He is the source of all love, all light.”

  “I thought you were an atheist.”

  “I never said I was an atheist.”

  “So you believe in Allah?”

  “That is a very complex question for such a late hour, though it is perhaps the most appropriate time to discuss such matters.”

  But I was finally starting to feel sleepy, and we were on the precipice of a long and potentially long-winded one-sided dialogue. “Okay, well, back to your love for Mom—so you’re saying you can’t really love a human because they will disappoint you.”

  “No, I am differentiating the love for the divine with the love for mortals.”

  “So you love Mom like a mortal.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning you know she will disappoint you because she’s not Allah.”

  “Of course she will disappoint me. She is human, we are all flawed. It is the opposite—I don’t expect her not to disappoint me. I don’t expect not to disappoint her. I don’t expect her to be Allah. That is the whole point.”

  “Okay, I get that two humans in love are inevitably going to disappoint each other. But I think you need to try harder not to disappoint her,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why don’t you help her with the dishes, buy her flowers? Mow the lawn before she asks you, without all your usual drama. It’s really not that hard, Dad. I’ve mowed the lawn, twice.”

  I could see my father’s face glazing over, as it did when my mother admonished him, and snapped my fingers in front of his face. He flinched, his glasses slipping off one ear.

  “I’m serious,” I told him. “I know your love is . . . pragmatic, but you should still tell her you love her, show her you care.”

  “But she knows I care.”

  “Really? I didn’t think you cared about me until recently. And you definitely don’t care about a lot of things that concern me.”

  “What concerns you?” my father said.

  My mother may never murder him, but sometimes I thought I definitely could. “Even the fact you have to ask that—okay, what grade did I get in pre-calculus?”

  “D?” my father ventured.

  “A D? I know I’m not a math genius like you, but really? I got a B+, thank you very much. Anyway, my point is . . . Pardon my French, but love means sometimes acting like you give a shit.”

  My father frowned. “That’s English, not French.”

  If I stayed, I was liable to hurl an Encyclopedia Britannica in his direction. Plus, I wasn’t sure I could keep my eyes open much longer. “I’m going to bed,” I stated. “And your glasses are crooked.”

  But I still couldn’t sleep, this time wondering why love was so confusing, why I usually felt my very best with Jamie, but today, I didn’t like how I’d acted right after Farah left—jealous, dishonest. I guess I’d assumed love equaled joy; I hadn’t realized love might bring out the worst in you, too.

  But none of that was Jamie’s fault, or love’s. I was responsible for my own actions. I was the one who called Farah’s hair limp.

  Hugging Big Muchli close, I closed my eyes and remembered how passionately we’d kissed in the van, how we’d played chopstick wars at the Amazing Chinese Restaurant and how it made me so happy to keep my foot against his leg the whole meal, how for once Jamie had done most of the talking. He told me how, when his father left them, Jamie had burned all of his photos, then swept up the remnants and stored them in his piggy bank because he felt guilty, how his father died in a motorcycle accident a few months later, how he still had the piggy bank with his father’s photographic ashes.

  Hearing this, I wanted to cross the table and embrace him, comfort that sad, sweet, guilty boy hidden inside, kiss his hurt away, assure him everything would be all right, that I was there for him, always.

  I offered him a shrimp dumpling instead, except it fell from my chopsticks onto his lap.

  Jamie said, “Missed connection,” and even though I laughed, my heart ached a little. Because we’d talked about our fathers but we still hadn’t talked about us, and we were running out of time.

  Seventeen

  THE NEXT DAY, I texted Farah to ask what she thought of Jamie.

  Seems nice, she responded.


  I called her immediately. “Nice? That’s the worst. Did you not like him?”

  “I like him fine,” she said.

  She was a terrible liar.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” I told her.

  She sighed. “I didn’t not like him. And shouldn’t we talk about what matters more?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you in love with him?”

  “Because he’s cute,” I said.

  “Okay. That’ll only take you so far, though. What else?”

  I groaned impatiently. This was classic Farah, to avoid answering by interrogating me instead. “Because he listens,” I replied. “Because he’s nice to me, because he likes me.”

  “So you love him because he’s cute and because he likes you.”

  “You say that like it’s bad.”

  “Shouldn’t you love him because of his character? Because he’s empathetic, intelligent, kind—I don’t know, quirky, witty, sentimental?”

  “Of course I love his character! He’s really fast, and graceful. And adventurous. And usually fidgeting annoys me, but when he does it it’s sexy.”

  “All I’m saying is that you say you love him, but how well do you really know him?”

  “I know him,” I said. “God, Farah, why do you have to think so deeply about everything? Love is a feeling. It’s almost like . . . instinct. There’s a reason that in Urdu poetry they say the liver is the seat of passion, not the brain. One day, when you actually fall in love, you’ll know what I mean.”