ON OUR FIRST DATE, your blue eyes are as clear as cut glass, like those marbles the boys in my hometown, Tehran, used to roll against the bumpy asphalt. As we wait for our steak and seared asparagus, you ask, ‘What was it like growing up in Iran?’
I smile cautiously. ‘When you smile wide, you look like a hallucinating cow,’ my mother said. When was it, last year? Ten years ago? Upon my birth?
‘Did you ride camels to school?’ you say and chuckle, ‘I’m just joking. I know you must drive cars by now.’ My teeth chatter in protest to a chilling sip of my drink, more ice than water. A wave of cold goosebumps ripples across my arms. I hate your question, the way its expansiveness threatens to swallow me, the way every response I can think of feels like a shrunken version of the truth.
‘I used to watch Japanese dramas as a kid,’ I say finally.
‘Really? In Iran?’ You pull back your lips after a gulp of Pepsi, licking them. You lean back into your blue banquet chair. I envy your confidence, as if no one has ever accused you of consuming too much oxygen.
‘My favourite was called “Osheen”. I watched it so often that the tape snapped. About a Japanese maid girl. I made pretend Kimonos with our bedsheets, wore my sandals with socks and scrubbed the floors pretending to be her.’ I don’t tell you that I was seven and oh, so alone. I don’t tell you that it was a Farsi dubbed version which took massive creative liberties so that a story about a prostitute was transformed into one about a lonely daughter whom the world had wronged.
‘What about you?’ I ask, worried that I have said too much and too little. Sometimes, my studio apartment walls have a habit of creeping closer imperceptibly at night.
‘A heart is connected to another heart, feeling the same emotions.’ Who knows what can be done with jagged shards of a mother’s advice? ‘Never confront a man directly. Spin him dizzy with tales. Never gaze at the sun with bare eyes.’ One day, when someone has invented surgical extraction of maternal advice, I will be their first patient.
‘Fishing with my dad in Silver Lake. We used to go every summer. Nothing is like eating what you’ve caught. There’s a guttural goodness to it.’ You go on about the mystery of the lake, that last jolt of a fish’s body before its eyes go dull, the right way to separate bone from flesh. I want to listen, but once again, I have turned seven. I am alone in that new apartment while my mother is with the new stepdad. New white couches. The plastic covers that only came off for guests. The new stove used less often than the couches. My new coffin-feeling of a bed. I hated the smell of my new blanket, pungent like burnt rice. I want to claw my way back to this yellow-lit restaurant, the jubilant look in your eyes as you go on about your much-loved childhood, but I am sorry, I cannot.
In that apartment, I watched each day bleed into the night and die. One night, I lifted the end of my new mattress and wrote with a red crayon, ‘Dear thief, please do not steal me. I’m not worth the trouble.’ I let the mattress end flap over the words, sealing them in place.
Hook. Jigging. Tackle box. Bait. Fisherman’s knot. Cast net. Scales. Angling. I feel like a worm caught in the flood of your words. I sink smaller into my chair and ask the waiter for a third serving of ice water until my mouth is numb, your eyes are no longer two blue marbles but coal-cold and dark.
‘Did you ride camels to school?’ you say and chuckle, ‘I’m just joking. I know you must drive cars by now.’ My teeth chatter in protest to a chilling sip of my drink, more ice than water. A wave of cold goosebumps ripples across my arms. I hate your question, the way its expansiveness threatens to swallow me, the way every response I can think of feels like a shrunken version of the truth.
‘I used to watch Japanese dramas as a kid,’ I say finally.
‘Really? In Iran?’ You pull back your lips after a gulp of Pepsi, licking them. You lean back into your blue banquet chair. I envy your confidence, as if no one has ever accused you of consuming too much oxygen.
‘My favourite was called “Osheen”. I watched it so often that the tape snapped. About a Japanese maid girl. I made pretend Kimonos with our bedsheets, wore my sandals with socks and scrubbed the floors pretending to be her.’ I don’t tell you that I was seven and oh, so alone. I don’t tell you that it was a Farsi dubbed version which took massive creative liberties so that a story about a prostitute was transformed into one about a lonely daughter whom the world had wronged.
‘What about you?’ I ask, worried that I have said too much and too little. Sometimes, my studio apartment walls have a habit of creeping closer imperceptibly at night.
‘A heart is connected to another heart, feeling the same emotions.’ Who knows what can be done with jagged shards of a mother’s advice? ‘Never confront a man directly. Spin him dizzy with tales. Never gaze at the sun with bare eyes.’ One day, when someone has invented surgical extraction of maternal advice, I will be their first patient.
‘Fishing with my dad in Silver Lake. We used to go every summer. Nothing is like eating what you’ve caught. There’s a guttural goodness to it.’ You go on about the mystery of the lake, that last jolt of a fish’s body before its eyes go dull, the right way to separate bone from flesh. I want to listen, but once again, I have turned seven. I am alone in that new apartment while my mother is with the new stepdad. New white couches. The plastic covers that only came off for guests. The new stove used less often than the couches. My new coffin-feeling of a bed. I hated the smell of my new blanket, pungent like burnt rice. I want to claw my way back to this yellow-lit restaurant, the jubilant look in your eyes as you go on about your much-loved childhood, but I am sorry, I cannot.
In that apartment, I watched each day bleed into the night and die. One night, I lifted the end of my new mattress and wrote with a red crayon, ‘Dear thief, please do not steal me. I’m not worth the trouble.’ I let the mattress end flap over the words, sealing them in place.
Hook. Jigging. Tackle box. Bait. Fisherman’s knot. Cast net. Scales. Angling. I feel like a worm caught in the flood of your words. I sink smaller into my chair and ask the waiter for a third serving of ice water until my mouth is numb, your eyes are no longer two blue marbles but coal-cold and dark.
Pegah Ouji is an Iranian-American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip, Necessary Fiction among others. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly as well as an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words.
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