Laughing Without an Accent Read online

  “I’m his daughter,” I replied. “I just thought he might need some help with his English,” I added.

  In another era, this officer could have made his living in a circus sideshow. An obvious devotee of bodybuilding, this man was solid. As I stared into the eyes of this neckless wonder, it appeared that where the instructions on the steroid powder had said “one teaspoon,” this man had used a cup.

  “Why did you stop?” he yelled at my father.

  My father nervously tried to explain that he had stopped because he wanted to make sure his load was safe.

  “You stopped, so I’m giving you a ticket,” the cop announced.

  “But he didn’t do anything,” I said. “He stopped on his own accord. I bet there are probably crimes being committed right now, and you’re ticketing people for stopping?”

  “Who asked you to speak?” the cop yelled at me.

  He reminded me of when I was a little girl in Abadan and every so often I would find a fly with damaged wings. I would kneel on the floor, observing it closely, knowing that it was scared of me but had no power to get away. Now we were that fly.

  “Where’s your car?” the cop asked me.

  I pointed to the Chevette.

  “You’re getting a ticket, too,” he said smugly.

  “You are the most irresponsible policeman…” I told him. That’s when my father told me to be quiet, in Persian.

  The policeman, who was clearly uncomfortable hearing us speak a foreign language, looked at me and said, “Did you know I can give you a ticket for slandering a police officer?”

  I shut up.

  After he wrote both of us tickets for having unsafe loads, he told us that we were not allowed to drive with these goods and that if we attempted to do so, he would issue us a second set of tickets.

  We stood on the side of the road pondering our predicament. My dad asked me if I knew anyone who owned a truck. That was like asking me if I knew anybody in Newport Beach who was out of shape. Newport Beach is not an area known for diversity, corporal, vehicular, or otherwise. Diversity was limited to the various German carmakers represented in any given parking lot.

  I couldn’t think of anyone with a truck, but I did recall that one of our neighbors owned a van. Since we were nowhere near a phone, my father and I unloaded the fifty-nine-dollar desk out of the Chevette and I drove off to try to find Susan, our van-owning neighbor.

  Susan, God bless her, happened to be home, and agreed to help us out. She drove back and forth several times, helping us bring our purchases home. My older brothers, Farid and Farshid, helped unload the goods into the hallway of our condo.

  The furniture had looked much more desirable in the parking lot. Without the hordes of other shoppers milling around, it now looked cumbersome and ugly. Granted, all the pieces were in great condition, except of course for the damage they had incurred in our attempts to bring them home. Their fine condition spoke volumes about the engineers who had once used them. There were no initials carved in the chairs, no gum underneath the desks, and no profane doodles anywhere.

  “This is really ugly,” my mother declared of one of the desks.

  “It’s huge and ugly,” Farid added.

  “You two should never be trusted to make any type of decision,” Farshid declared.

  And we hadn’t even told them about the tickets.

  My father, visibly upset yet managing to ignore all the comments, asked my brothers to help him carry the first of the desks upstairs. This is when they ran into a problem that made our other problems appear minor. The desk was wider than our staircase.

  Meanwhile, my mother was doing her best imitation of a radio station, KNAG.

  “This is the ugliest stuff ever.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Maybe if you go back now, you can return it.”

  My father, who even in the face of a glaring mistake will insist that he is right, told my brothers that if they carried the desk on its side, it would fit. As he shared his brilliant plan, I could see the vein throbbing in his neck, a sign that we were only moments away from a volcanic outburst.

  As my brothers and father were attempting to turn the desk on its side, my mother reminded my father of the time he had hurt his back washing his feet in the shower while standing up, and how the doctor had told him that he should not lift heavy things. Before she could finish her soliloquy, the volcano formerly known as my father erupted.

  My mother was quite upset that her helpful remarks were not appreciated. Normally, she would have gone and sulked somewhere, but not today. There had not been this much action on our staircase since the annoying son of one our distant relatives got his head stuck between the stairway railings.

  Even on its side, the desk barely fit the staircase. As my brothers started to climb the stairs, my mother yelled, “Stop! You’re scraping the wall!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” my father said. “Keep going.”

  My brothers managed to carry the desk all the way up the stairs, leaving a deep gash along the entire wall. Hundreds of years from now, archaeologists will study the ancient wall and try to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyphic line. After years of research, one of the scientists will announce, “Desk too big.”

  It came as no surprise that the desk did not fit in the doorway of my bedroom, but having carried the monster upstairs, my brothers were not about to carry it back down. With my father giving orders to my brothers to “just keep going,” interspersed with orders to my mother to “just keep quiet,” my brothers managed to force the desk into my tiny room, but not before breaking the molding around my door.

  My once-tiny room all but disappeared. It was now a desk.

  My father surveyed the scene and announced, “It looks great!” He ran down the stairs and brought up one of the swivel chairs. “Sit behind your new desk!” he ordered me, trying to conceal the obvious: we had bought a big, ugly desk that was more appropriate for a coroner performing autopsies than for a sixteen-year-old doing math homework.

  My brothers then carried the other pieces upstairs and placed everything in their old room, which not surprisingly already had a desk, chair, and bookcase in it. Their old room now looked like an office furniture showroom. All that was missing was a sign declaring, “Visa and MasterCard Accepted!”

  Like the curse that befell those who disturbed Tutankhamen’s tomb, the furniture continued to bring misery to my parents’ condo. The scraped walls, the gashed doorways, the useless furniture that took up half of our living space, the $220 spent on traffic tickets—these were often starting points for conversations that ended with at least one person sulking.

  Once I graduated from high school, my parents decided to get rid of the desks, chairs, and bookcase. But getting rid of a Pinto would have been easier.

  My parents placed an ad in the paper. This resulted in a long parade of people, usually accompanied by screaming toddlers tracking dirt into our house, looking at the furniture, smiling, and leaving. This was always followed by an argument during which my mother would re-create that fateful shopping day and ending with my father watching television with the volume set on high.

  After their paid ad expired, my parents decided to simply give away the furniture. They asked several of the gardeners who worked in their condo complex if they were interested. The gardeners were willing to come into the condo and look around, but none wanted the furniture. These were people earning minimum wage who labored all day and they did not want the furniture for free. This was a bad omen.

  My parents began calling charitable organizations, all of which were interested only until being told of the approximate weight and second-floor location of the goods. Then they weren’t interested.

  Finally, my father called a handyman and offered him a hundred dollars to remove the furniture. The handyman agreed.

  One hundred dollars later, the furniture was history, except of course for the damage it had left on our walls and doorways. Erasing that me
mory took a few more years and a remodel, courtesy of my brother Farshid.

  Without the physical evidence of the fiasco, my father has taken it upon himself to create his own version of the story, a sentimental tale involving father-daughter driving tickets. “It’s not a story I care to remember,” I tell him. “Plus,” I remind him, “do you know how much that bargain furniture ended up costing us?”

  That’s when he turns on the TV, volume high.

  The Jester and I

  Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? At what point must we listen to the music of Kevin Federline?

  I do not have the answers to any of these questions. All I know is that this feeling of being on the outside has shaped me into the perfect party guest. A roomful of strangers? No problem. A roomful of strangers who don’t speak the same language? No problem. A roomful of strangers who have never tried sushi but who claim to hate it? A challenge, but I could do it.

  The one and only time I felt like a complete foreigner was in college. Observing the behavior of college freshmen made me wonder if I belonged not just to the same culture but to the same species. Sure, we shared certain characteristics—backpacks full of textbooks, opposable thumbs—but the similarities ended there.

  A big slice of college life happens after dark. That’s a problem. I do not like to stay up really late, or even somewhat late, hence the magnetic nickname “Grandma” bestowed on me by my brother. I never saw Saturday Night Live until I had to nurse babies. I have always been much fonder of early mornings than late nights. Paris, Tehran, Idaho, or Berkeley at 6:00 AM is magical. At midnight, it’s the same cast of characters, the same smells, the same endearing voices floating in the distance: “Back off, jerk, before I call the cops.” It’s fine with me that most people don’t like early mornings. That’s part of the magic, but apparently not so in college. Asking someone if they want to go for a walk before an 8:00 AM class is downright freakish, I discovered, one level more freakish even than signing up for an 8:00 AM class.

  If there is something worth staying up for, I will. But that was the other problem. Almost all evening activities revolved around binge drinking. The common belief was that drinking made people more fun-loving. But the truth was that those people who needed to drink to be “fun-loving” were equally boring when they were drunk; they just didn’t remember it.

  Needless to say, I was very disappointed in college social life. I discovered that my idea of fun—dinner at an ethnic restaurant, a foreign movie, and discussion afterward about minutiae—did not match the collegiate definition of “good times.” For a majority of my fellow students, fun began with the magic words “We got a keg!”

  My not drinking had nothing to do with my being Muslim or Iranian. When I was in high school, my father said that if I ever wanted to try alcohol, I could, but only at home. Of course there was never a drop alcohol in my parents’ house, but my father offered to buy whatever I wanted to try. This pretty much ruined any enjoyment I would have had in sneaking alcohol, the sneaking part being the magnetic component.

  After spending my freshman and sophomore years trying to find people who shared my idea of fun, I pretty much gave up, but I did not go gently into that good night. If there was a group that sounded remotely interesting, I gave it a try. Since I lived off campus, I did not have the benefit of meeting people in the dorm. For my first attempt at finding my niche, I joined a church social group, thinking they didn’t drink and might be fun. They probably would have been fun if there had been more than six of them and if I had not mentioned that I was Muslim. But I was right about one thing: they didn’t drink.

  Next I joined a group of volunteers who practiced English with foreigners. I met a lot of people who didn’t speak English.

  Then came a running group, which I quit in a record-breaking two weeks. The final straw was jogging with them through the hills of Berkeley and watching them become small dots in the distance, until they lost me. These people were not into jogging together and mingling. They just ran, fast.

  Then came a group whose job was to promote team spirit at football games. I was really, really desperate since there was nothing about this group or its goals that interested me, not to mention that the only two things I know about football is that I don’t like it and the game takes too long. I still cannot remember what prompted me to join this group, except for the sheer desire to belong to a group. But after three weeks, I quit. It was like a Hollywood marriage.

  Then came the paying job of doing advertising for an aerobics studio. That job involved me, a staple gun, and telephone poles. No friends found there. Finally, I became a volunteer usher at the local performing arts center. This job came with the greatest perk ever—admission to all shows. Most of the other volunteers were adults and senior citizens who lived in Berkeley, so no bonding there. But in exchange for walking around with a flashlight and showing theatergoers where row K was, I was allowed to attend performances by world-class musicians and dancers. I saw dancers from Harlem, Taiwan, India, and Russia. I attended performances of Taiko Drummers, pianists, and artists I never knew existed, such as throat singers. I saw Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and the Peking Acrobats, a virtual all-you-can-soak-in buffet of culture, and all for free.

  As much as I loved this new window in my life, I still yearned to meet someone my age, someone who shared my interests. I had made a few friends during my summer job as an orientation counselor, but once school started, everyone went back to his own routine. There was nothing in mainstream college for me.

  To me, nothing symbolized mainstream Americans in college more than the Greek system. Every day, on my way to class, I walked past the rows of fraternity houses, in their permanent post-party state. At Berkeley, the fraternity houses are enormous, exquisite homes, most of which were originally built for professors. Today they are living proof why groups of men in their late teens and early twenties should never live together. Suppressing the urge to renovate, decorate, and landscape each and every one of their houses, I was nonetheless amused by the frat boys’ endless quest to attract females, preferably scantily clad ones. Every hunter needs bait, and every weekend constituted a different theme party. There was the beach party (bikini tops, shorts), the luau (bikini tops, shorts, leis), the Mardi Gras (bikini tops, shorts, beads), and the fiesta (see “beach party”).

  I loved the idea of the parties, the themes, and the socializing, but the allure of a houseful of drunken men eluded me. I wanted conversation, or at least evidence of the possibility of conversation.

  My junior year, I moved into Berkeley’s International House, a residence for six hundred, comprising half American students, half foreign. It is the kind of place where one often sees an Israeli, a Palestinian, an Italian, and a student from Nebraska eating dinner together and discussing politics, soccer, and Bollywood. If every world leader could spend one year living at an International House, there would be far fewer wars. Of that, I am absolutely certain.

  My reasons for moving into International House were far less noble. My cousin Mehrdad had lived there in the seventies and always said it was the most enjoyable year of his college life. He had shown me photos of him sitting on his bed, with long, unattractive sideburns, strumming his guitar surrounded by Anka, Lars, Sophronius, and Maria, all looking like they were having the best time of their lives. I always considered my cousin Mehrdad a fun-loving g
uy, but on my scale of “fun” relatives, I put myself higher. I figured if he had such a great time, I would have an even better time.

  Because most foreign students who come to study in America are males, Berkeley’s International House tends to have a shortage of female residents. The year I applied to be a resident, the shortage of female residents had reached its peak with a male-to-female ratio of nine to one. One need not be an accounting major to know that those are good numbers. For someone with a nonexistent dating history, and the selfesteem that goes with it, those numbers were God’s way of telling me, “Do not worry, my little lamb. All shall be fixed.”

  When I moved in, my roommate, Debbie from Delaware, had not yet arrived. Anticipating her arrival, I bit my nails to the nubbins. Our room, with its bunk bed, two tiny desks, and one dresser, required harmony. I just didn’t know if Debbie from Delaware and Firoozeh from Abadan would work.

  Debbie turned out to be a premed major with a great sense of humor. I liked her right away, so much so that I told her that her chances of reaching her medical goals would be increased if she changed her name to Debra. Not only is Dr. Debra a bona fide doctor today, but she also teaches at a prestigious university. I take full credit, having saved her from her certain future as Debbie from Delaware, Director of Cheerleading Camp.

  During my first week at International House, I discovered that one couldn’t spit without hitting someone interesting and smart. Foreign countries do not send their dumbest abroad (although that is a policy with potential benefits). Debra and I met people from all over, all of whom knew something about Iran but nothing about Delaware. “Where is Delaware?” spoken in a multitude of accents began every conversation.