That Thing We Call a Heart

by Sheba Karim

  Farah was silent.

  “Farah! Just say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “I told you so.”

  “I didn’t want this to happen.”

  “But you figured it would. You never liked him.”

  “This is on him, Qureshi, not me.”

  This was true, but he was gone, and she was the only other person who knew how much I loved him. “Sorry. I don’t mean to attack you.”

  “So don’t.”

  “Farah, I can’t fight with you right now. I’m a mess.” I started to cry, the phone cradled between pillow and ear, Big Muchli tucked against my chest.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “No, it’s not. I think he’s at the airport,” I said. “I want so badly to call him, like maybe if I ask him one more time—”

  “Don’t call him,” Farah said sharply.

  “Why not?

  “Because he’s a manipulative jerk who doesn’t deserve a phone call, or you.”

  “Manipulative jerk?” I was the one whose heart he’d stomped on, and even I wouldn’t call him that. She was way too harsh. What guy could live up to her standards?

  Farah made this pained sound. “Listen, I can’t talk right now.”

  “What the hell is going on with you?”

  “My parents are fighting.”

  “So? They’re always fighting, that’s like their baseline.”

  When Farah didn’t reply, I said, “Listen, I’m so screwed up I don’t even know what I’m saying. Can you come over, please?”

  “I can’t today.”

  “Tomorrow? Please. I need you.”

  Silence, then, “All right. Tomorrow.”

  I made her swear by Allah she would definitely come before I let her go, and then I cried some more into my pillow. I’d skipped dinner, which meant at some point my mother would knock on my door holding a plate of food, and there was no way to disguise the fact that I’d been crying. I needed an excuse for my tears, so I did something I’d been meaning to do for a while. I Googled Bosnian genocide.

  After reading about mass graves, systemic rape, and concentration camps, I suddenly didn’t want to be alone anymore, but if I went to my mother, she’d ask me too many questions, smother me with overbearing concern.

  So I sought out my father instead.

  “Entry,” he said when I knocked on the study door.

  I was such a wreck that even he noticed. “Is something wrong?”

  “Have you heard of Srebrenica?” I asked.

  My father blinked. “Are you referring to the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust?”

  I nodded, sinking into the armchair, pulling two pens and a potato chip bag out from underneath my butt. “It’s horrible. It’s all so horrible.”

  “Did you expect it wouldn’t be?” my father said.

  “No, I don’t know . . .” I didn’t know why I’d come to my father seeking comfort. I didn’t know what I was doing, saying. All I knew was that the world was a terrible place that murdered innocent children and offered no salve to the brokenhearted except time.

  I was better off alone.

  “I came to tell you there’s blackberry pie in the fridge,” I informed him. “Try not to eat it all at once. I’m going to bed.”

  I was in my room less than five minutes before my knob rattled.

  “Shabu? Open the door.”

  Goddammit. The one night I wanted my father not to care, and he’d gone and told my mother.

  When I opened the door, my mother hugged me. It felt nice to be inside her arms. I wished we could remain in this comforting, nonverbal embrace, but she pulled away, hands on hips, and said, “Why have you been reading about the Bosnian genocide?”

  “Because I found out Dino is a refugee,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, don’t read about such things, especially not at night. It will only make you sad.”

  “Do you know it went on for three years before NATO intervened?” I said. “The whole world watched all those people die. The world didn’t care. It pretended to care, but it didn’t really. It never really cared.”

  “It’s all right,” my mother said, patting my back. “It’s over now.”

  “No it’s not. What about all those people who died? What about all those women who were raped? What about the ones who survived? Suffering doesn’t stop just because something ends.”

  “I know that terrible things happen,” my mother conceded. “But there’s also a lot of good in the world. You have to focus on that.”

  “I can’t! I’m not like you, Mom. I can’t push my pain under the rug and pretend that everything is awesome when it isn’t.”

  “Shabu, is something else going on?” my mother said. “Did you fight with Farah?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I told you, it’s Bosnia.”

  “You know you can talk to me about anything.”

  Ha. When I died, there ought to be two obituaries, one of Shabnam Qureshi and the other of the Shabnam Qureshi her mother never knew.

  My back pocket vibrated. I’d been keeping my phone there, in case Jamie called or texted to say he really did love me, that he’d changed his mind.

  I had to see if it was him.

  “I’m fine now,” I told my mother. “I was reading about all that awful stuff and it upset me, but you’re right, I need to focus on the positive. Like, if there was no genocide, then Dino wouldn’t have come here, and then there’d be no Ye Olde donuts. See, silver lining! You know, I’m tired, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”

  “You still seem upset,” my mother said.

  “Mom, please. I’m fine.”

  “All right, I’ll go if you promise to come to me if you feel sad again.”

  “I promise.”

  She was almost to the door, the phone almost out of my pocket when she stopped and said, “Listen, I’ll need your help next Saturday. Chotay Dada arrives Saturday night.”

  “Chotay Dada?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s coming back?” I exclaimed. “Why is he coming back?”

  My mother frowned. “Why are you asking in that tone? He’s staying one night here because his return flight to Pakistan is from JFK.”

  “Great,” I said. “Perfect.”

  “What do you have against him? He’s a nice man.”

  Chotay Dada had been here when Jamie and I began, and now he returned at our bitter end. My summer fling, bookended by my prayer-bead-happy great-uncle. As if there weren’t enough people in this house who didn’t understand me.

  I sighed. “I don’t have anything against him. I need to be alone, that’s all. I need to process.”

  “Process what? Talk to me.”

  She’d never leave, she’d keep asking me question after question, on the false assumption that I could actually confide in her, when all I wanted to do was see if my beloved had texted me or not.

  My mother was so frigging clueless it was making me crazy. I felt like I was going to explode.

  And I did.

  “Can you stop asking me to talk?” I cried. “Why do you want to talk all the time? I don’t always want to talk to you. Sometimes I want to listen to music, or sit in silence. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

  Her brown gazelle eyes widened, glistening with tears.

  Normally, I would have backed off immediately, but I had had the shittiest day of my life, and it was insane that she even imagined we could be friends. She wore old lady underwear and didn’t use tampons and begged Allah’s forgiveness after she’d accidentally had rum cake at last year’s office Christmas party. She wanted me to confide in her but she never confided in me, about the miscarriages or about how difficult it was to be married to a man like my father. She never dared admit how much it could suck to have an emotionally absent husband and a resentful, rebellious daughter.

  Maybe I was a liar, but she was, too.

  “Listen,”
I said. “Even if there was something to talk to you about, I wouldn’t do it with you or Dad, because neither of you really get me.”

  “Of course I get you,” my mother said. “You’re my baby, my Shabu, my little miracle—”

  “Stop calling me that! I am not your miracle!”

  “Of course you are,” my mother said. Actual tears were sliding down her cheeks, but I didn’t care. She always wanted to cut things off before they got ugly, keep every conversation nice.

  So I made it ugly. I went there.

  “I’m not your miracle, I’m just a regular screwed-up teenage girl, and I can never make up for the fact you wanted a boatload of kids and only got me, and I can never make up for the four kids you lost, and you know what—I hate those Precious Moments dolls! They make me want to puke. And if they’re supposed to represent all my dead siblings, I’ve got news for you—your dead babies were brown, not white, blue-eyed, vapid-looking angels!”

  By the end, I was shouting. My mother stood for a moment, blinking, stunned, and then fled, closing the door behind her.

  I checked my phone.

  A photo of Danny and Ian on the beach, arms around each other, Danny kissing Ian on the cheek. U were right, Qureshi, Ian wrote. Together at last!

  Delete.

  Twenty-Six

  I STARED GUILTILY AT the top of the bookshelf.

  The angels were gone.

  I’d ruined them for her.

  I was a terrible person who didn’t deserve my mother, didn’t deserve love. I was extremely sad but I was also starving. When I opened the fridge, there was the pie Jamie had baked for me, right at eye level.

  The absence of angels, the presence of pie. Everywhere I turned, something to haunt me. I was even worse off than the ghazals’ wretched lover; as far as I could tell, in Urdu poetry, the lover didn’t have parents, or siblings, or best friends. In real life, there wasn’t just one relationship that could mess you up. There were a hundred thousand.

  I took the pie out. My father had already eaten half, wrapping the wrong half in plastic.

  Jamie, you fraud, I thought. You goddamn fraud.

  I stabbed the pie with a fork, once, twice. I scooped up its dark insides, stuffed them in my mouth.

  Holy shit.

  Delicious.

  I ate more, and more, and still more. I was actually glad when I started feeling ill, because at least it was something besides sorrow and despair. I had to leave for work in an hour and I wondered if I should try to make myself vomit. I was tempted to call in sick, except that meant calling Aunt Marianne, who scared me.

  I needed to stop referring to her as Aunt Marianne. She’d never be my aunt.

  Aunt Marianne was already there when I arrived, reading a book on Mrs. Joan Milton’s bench, in the same leather capris and embroidered white kaftan she’d been wearing when we met. Her hair was down today, falling past her shoulders in thin white wisps. She seemed a little frailer than before, but her eyes hadn’t lost any of their cerulean intensity.

  When she saw me, she dropped the book into the straw bag next to her and handed me her keys. “Go unload,” she said.

  Hello to you, too, I thought.

  It was the first time I’d ever unloaded without Jamie sprinting ahead gracefully, doubling back to tease me. Come on, MD, the quicker we unload, the quicker we kiss.

  It had all seemed so wonderful, so exciting, so sweet. What could I have done to make him want me more? If I’d dressed better, or done my eyeliner like Farah, or had a better body, would it have made a difference?

  When I returned to Aunt Marianne, she moved the straw bag to the ground, which I assumed was an invitation to sit next to her. For once, I was too sad to be nervous. Silver lining.

  “Did you enjoy working at Andromeda’s?” she asked.

  “I did,” I replied stiffly. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

  She didn’t respond. A squirrel scurried onto the path, regarded us twitchily, and dashed underneath the bench, back onto the field.

  Our field, Jamie had called it.

  “He told me about your uncle almost dying on the train,” she said.

  “My great-uncle.” Awesome. What else had he told her?

  “It’s a tragic story,” she said.

  For a second, I became paranoid that she knew I’d made it up. But she sounded sincere enough.

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed.

  “You seem like a cool girl,” Aunt Marianne said. “I’m sorry if you thought I was unfriendly when we first met, but I try to stay out of Jamie’s relationships, past, present, future, whatever.”

  “How did you know it would become a relationship?” I asked.

  “Because I know him. I saw how he looked at you. He’d already told me about this girl with the big brown eyes and the big beautiful curls who’d run away from him at the mall. He was so excited when he saw you at the farmers’ market.”

  God, she’d seen it coming all along, Jamie courting me, me falling in love, his unceremonious departure.

  “I’m not the first pie wallah—pie girl this has happened with, am I?” I said.

  Aunt Marianne shook her head.

  Oh, our lovely shack, not only ours anymore. How many other girls had lain in his arms there, exactly as I had done?

  “It’s not like that,” she said, reading my horrified expression. “You’re only the second.”

  I was the prettiest pie-wallah in a hundred thousand miles, the second time around. Who was the first? Ashley? Amber? Jasmine? I was about to ask, but thought better of it. What good would it do me to know?

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” I asked.

  “I do not, as a policy, get in the way of love,” she said. “Who am I to police anyone’s heart? Jamie knows how I feel about his actions. That’s all I can do. And it could be worse—at least when Jamie’s with you, he’s with you. Half the time young people talk to you and they aren’t even listening, they’re on one device or another or have headphones plugging up their ears.”

  “It still doesn’t make what he did okay,” I argued.

  “Did he ever tell you he loved you? Did he ever tell you he wanted something more?” she asked.

  “He didn’t not tell me.” It was mortifying to be talking about this. I stared at her bag, the same one Jamie had been carrying when our eyes met at the farmers’ market. The book she’d been reading was Rough Guide to Brazil.

  “Look, I’m not defending my nephew. I love him, but he can be very selfish.”

  “I loved him too,” I confessed.

  “I know. I read your poem,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

  I groaned, covering my face with my hands, imagining Jamie giving it to her, Aunt Marianne reading it and thinking, oh, this poor, deluded girl. I’d given Jamie the book to my heart and he’d already started passing it around. God, I hoped he didn’t show the ghazal to anyone else.

  I wished I could take it back.

  “Shabnam,” Aunt Marianne said.

  I stayed hidden.

  “Don’t be that way. You should never be ashamed of a poem like that. Writing it was an act of bravery.”

  “An act of bravery that failed,” I reminded her.

  “Like I said, I love Jamie but you’re better off without him. He still has a lot of growing up to do. Next time, go for a guy five years older. Eh, five years, ten years, they’re all so damn immature.”

  “I’m so stupid,” I said.

  “Love makes everyone stupid.” She sighed. “Why do we love the men we love? I’m seventy-seven years old, and fuck if I know.”

  I’d never even imagined an old person could be so interesting. As painful as it was, I could sit on Mrs. Joan Milton’s bench talking to her until sunset. I was never sure how to talk to old people so I’d always tried not to. I guess I was being ageist, or ignorant.

  “Have you ever had your heart broken?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “When I was young, I had blonde hair, blue eyes, n
ice tits. A lot of men fell for me because they thought I was a blonde bimbo. But I was rebellious from the start. I couldn’t stand to be told what to do. I went through a lot of lovers, had my heart broken, broke some myself, before I found a man who loved me for who I was.”

  “Did you marry him?”

  “No. Marriage isn’t for me. He was my great love though. Now that was a love greater than the sum of all my broken hearts.”

  “But how do you find that? How do you know when it’s real?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “You girls, they feed you all this Disney princess bullshit, make you think it’ll be easy. And maybe it is, for Bob and Molly Sue, high school sweethearts, married fifty years, but for most of us, it’s a hard, beautiful road, littered with thorns. But I didn’t come here to gab. You should get to work. Here, let me give you your last week’s pay.”

  As she bent over to retrieve an envelope from her bag, I noticed her grimace.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “As Jamie likes to say, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. That’s a bunch of bull, isn’t it?” She handed me the envelope.

  “So I guess I’ll see you around town sometime?” I said.

  “You won’t,” she said curtly, then added, in a softer tone, “You’ll be fine. You’re a smart girl, and you’re stronger than you think.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  After she was out of sight, I looked inside the envelope. Three crisp one hundred dollar bills. More than twice what I was owed. A feminist version of blood money.

  Twenty-Seven

  “IS YOUR MOM OKAY?” Farah asked when she came over that evening. “I’ve never seen her like that. She almost looks sad.”

  “She is sad,” I said. “I was really mean to her.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay.” Farah took a bag of Hershey’s Miniatures out of her purse. “I know it’s not Ye Olde, but we’ll have to make do,” she said, and ripped the bag open with her teeth, chocolates raining down on my feet.

  “Thanks,” I said, perusing the goods. I hadn’t been eating meals, but I’d gone to the store and bought chocolate chip cookies, salt and vinegar potato chips, dried mango slices, and chocolate peanut butter ice cream. The food made me feel better, until it didn’t.