Laughing Without an Accent Read online

  Eight hours, dozens of bad jokes, and three Denny’s meals later, we arrived in Berkeley. We drove straight to the apartment that we had rented sight unseen.

  I was living off campus not by choice but by necessity. Berkeley in those days had a massive housing shortage, and assignments were based on a lottery. I did not get in the dorms my freshman year, which meant I either had to find a place off campus or pitch a tent.

  The apartment was a typical one-bedroom college dwelling about fifteen minutes’ walking distance from campus, right next door to the Bing Wong Laundromat. We carried my belongings to my apartment, ignoring the abandoned shopping cart and other telltale signs of a street person living in the apartment building’s garage.

  We piled my boxes in the apartment and went looking for a place to eat dinner. As the three of us walked down Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley’s famous main street, my mother started to cry. Having spent the past eight years in Newport Beach in a planned condominium community where flowers were replaced before they wilted, she was wholly unprepared for the certain je ne sais quoi of Telegraph Avenue. People with matted hair lay on the sidewalks, either asking for handouts or selling homemade bracelets, chunky clay mugs, and pipes. A tarot reader advertised his supposed skills on one corner. Another guy did brisk business selling Ronald “Raygun” T-shirts. The most “different” was the man wearing sandwich boards espousing conspiracy theories on everything from John Lennon’s murder to the building of the pyramids.

  The college brochure had described Telegraph Avenue as “lively.” Perhaps describing it truthfully—“a freakish locale full of druggies sure to scare most parents”—would have diminished its charm. And then there was the smell, a mixture of patchouli, sweat, and a certain odeur later identified as pot.

  We assumed these were all students, my future classmates, taking a break from their studies to warm up the sidewalks. Every few minutes, my mother broke the silence.

  “Don’t ever eat there.”

  “Or there.”

  “Don’t ever talk to those people.”

  “Are we still in America?”

  This was my first visit to Berkeley, and I hated it. But there was no turning back. I had no options but to feel really, really bad. And I did.

  My parents left the next day. There were no teary goodbyes, just a shell-shocked perfunctory hug followed by my father’s reminder: “Call us whenever you want. It doesn’t matter if you wake us up.”

  “We won’t be sleeping anyway,” my mother added.

  When they left, I stared at the avocado-green shag carpet and wondered how many species of insects had laid eggs in my apartment.

  School started the following week. All my introductory freshman classes were huge. My chemistry class had seven hundred students. I met no one. I was not on a sports team, had no hobbies, and did not belong to any group. I did attend several social events at the local church, hoping to meet clean-cut types, but once they found out I was Muslim, they could barely contain themselves. Convinced I was a project sent from Above, they did their best to save me. But my soul was fine; I was just looking to be saved from boredom.

  My lack of a social life meant that weekends were spent at the library, where I didn’t study much. Truth be told, I spent my mental energies feeling sorry for myself. As I sat in the library cubicle reading the graffiti left by generations past, I thought about how much I had hated high school, even though it was supposed to have been the best years of my life. And now I was in college, which were definitely supposed to be the best years of life, and here I sat, on a Saturday night, sneaking a bag of chips in the library.

  When I started to have severe pains in my stomach on an ongoing basis, I assumed I was dying. I accepted my self-diagnosis without much of a fight. It just seemed like a fitting end to my life. I hadn’t gone to my high school prom. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had never learned how to use hair products correctly. I hated all my classes. I was wasting money on an education that somebody else would have appreciated much more.

  I didn’t bother going to the doctor. I spent hours every day imagining the reactions of various friends and family members to the news of my early demise. It filled the time that college students normally spend laughing and bonding with friends, living the best years of their lives.

  It wasn’t until I came home for a vacation that my parents took me to the doctor. They were shocked to discover that I had been feeling ill for months and had not bothered to tell anyone. They didn’t realize that in my head, the full impact of my early demise could be attained only if it came as a total shock. No sneak previews of my death were allowed.

  I was very disappointed to find out I had an ulcer. “Are you sure it’s not fatal?” I asked the doctor. My entire fantasy life, or rather fantasy death, was blown away with a simple pill and a few chugs of Mylanta. I was very disappointed.

  I returned to Berkeley with a somewhat better attitude and resigned myself to my boring life, a life that would never be made into a movie, expect maybe one of those Ingmar Bergman types where nothing happens. I figured in life there were those who lived exciting lives, and then there was the audience. I had a permanent seat in the front row.

  Through sheer will, I convinced myself that not having a social life had a positive consequence. Unlike other college girls, I did not have to spend hours in the shallow pursuit of “getting ready,” since I had nowhere to go. My versatile wardrobe of navy blue sweat pants and tennis shoes took me from bed to class to library and back again. Better yet, the elastic waistband accommodated my daily diet of ninety-nine-cent pizza slices and bagels the size of my head.

  I eventually decided to put my free time to good use and join the workforce. Like most unemployed people with no marketable skills, I wasn’t about to settle for just any old job. I wanted one with little if no responsibility, high pay, and a stimulating work environment. No cog in a wheel for me. I wanted a job befitting my unique set of skills. And no matter how much money anyone dangled in my face, I would not compromise my principles.

  I found a job stapling flyers to telephone poles and bulletin boards. This scintillating job allowed me to walk all over the city of Berkeley with a staple gun, defacing public property. The woman who had hired me was an aerobics teacher with a fledgling studio who wore leg warmers as a permanent accessory. She wanted her flyers everywhere, “as if a big bird pooped them all over town,” she told me. She also instructed me “not to forget the trees.” When I told her that stapling flyers to trees is probably illegal, not to mention damaging, she mentioned that by the time someone ripped down the flyer, she might snag one or two students. She also told me that walking around town would probably “be good for me.”

  Armed with my staple gun, I spent hours walking the streets of Berkeley. Problem was that there are only so many poles and bulletin boards, and each one already had three inches of flyers stapled to it, which I, frankly, enjoyed reading. Having grown up in Newport Beach among beautiful people driving beautiful cars, I had completely missed out on the culture of flyers. Reading them was like being invited into people’s living rooms when they weren’t home. I could make all sorts of assumptions and take my time doing so.

  In order for me to actually do what I was hired to do, I had to cover up someone else’s flyer, which, frankly, I didn’t like doing. I spent hours reading other people’s notices: landlords looking for students, students looking for teachers, teachers of pseudo-Indian relaxation techniques looking for stressed souls, and stressed souls looking for their lost pets. I wanted to help them all. I visualized happy endings for all their searches. But armed with my staple gun, I faced a moral dilemma. Whose flyer should I cover? Not the ones for lost pets. Those flyers inevitably included a photocopy of a cat that looked like every other cat I had ever seen. I was touched by the hope evident in the descriptions: “Has a black patch on his left side, a brown patch on his right leg and answers to ‘Big Bubba.’” How a random person walking down the street was suppose
d to look at a skittish cat long enough to notice unique markings was beyond me, but nonetheless, I tried to learn some of the names just in case I ever ran into Big Bubba, Choo Choo, or Elvira.

  I never covered up flyers for band members looking for musicians who were “serious and want to make awesome music together.” Who was I to thwart someone’s artistic dream? I admired the kind of person who would put up an ad for a drummer. At least he had a dream, however useless, impractical, and disappointing to his parents it might be. I always assumed that none of the people in the Band Member Wanted flyers were recent immigrants. No way would Arjun, Guan-Yin, or Omur ever dare tell their parents, “Actually, Mom and Dad, I’ve heard my calling, and it’s a heavy metal band.”

  I did, however, cover signs for groups offering free vegetarian meals. I had heard about those so-called free meals. First, the nice people take your shoes so you can’t leave. Then you have to sit through a very long lecture. Next thing you know, you’re selling carnations at LAX. Lord knows how many lost souls I saved by redirecting them toward Jazzercise.

  My stapling career ended when leg-warmer woman abruptly fired me, claiming she did not see enough flyers around town. She also had the nerve to tell me that I should consider taking her classes. I told her I knew a great place where she could get a free vegetarian meal.

  After a string of menial jobs that made me understand why so many women aspire to marry rich men, I was hired as an orientation counselor. This job provided food and lodging for the summer, plus a salary. If that were not enough, the other counselors were interesting and smart, the types of people I had imagined meeting in college in the first place, but had not. I finally understood why people loved college.

  One day close to the end of the summer, I woke up early to get ready. I went to the bathroom and when I went to flush, I froze. Even though I had not had a single symptom of my ulcer in over a year, I was bleeding. I remembered my doctor’s words of warning: “If you ever see blood, that’s bad.” I started to panic. Everyone else was still sleeping.

  I woke up my roommate. “I need you to take me to the hospital,” I said.

  She sat up in bed. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m hemorrhaging,” I told her, emphasizing the first syllable, making it clear that I was having a hard time saying the word since I was hemorrhaging. I don’t know why I did not use the word “bleeding,” but hemorrhaging felt more appropriate for the eventual Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of my life. “Don’t cry for me, UC Berkeley,” I would sing, arms outstretched, while the masses cried beneath my dorm balcony.

  “Where are you bleeding?” my roommate asked.

  “My intestines,” I told her.

  Truth was, I had no idea where the bleeding was, but I figured any organ that measures nine feet in length is a good bet.

  I also noticed that I was speaking in a slower, raspier voice. I assumed this was my body’s way of conserving my much-needed energy since life was literally being drained out of me.

  My roommate wanted to call 911. I talked her out of it, still speaking in a raspy voice but also holding on to my stomach, holding everything in.

  By the time she found one of the counselors who had a car, I was bent over, not out of pain but out of instinct. The other counselor also wanted to call 911, but I convinced him that I had enough time to make it to the hospital in his car. The hospital was five minutes away.

  The three of us lumbered to the parking lot. My legs were feeling heavier and heavier, my breathing was more labored. But oddly enough, I had no pain whatsoever. I found it very odd that one could have internal bleeding and not feel a thing. It reminded me of an episode of Oprah where a crime victim who had been stabbed numerous times described how she could not feel a thing while she was being stabbed. I figured this was yet another example of the body shutting down in order to survive extreme pain.

  I lay down in the backseat of the car. “Drive slowly,” I said, still speaking in a raspy voice that was now getting softer and softer.

  We arrived at the hospital after a few minutes and I was immediately taken to the see the doctor. I assume the sight of me barely able to stand, combined with the liberal usage of the words “hemorrhaging” and “internal bleeding” had allowed me, for the first time ever, not to have to wait endlessly to see a doctor. The counselors wanted to stay and hold my hand. My roommate was crying. I told them that because of the private nature of this exam, I would prefer that they leave. “Make sure someone takes over my freshmen group today,” I told them, leaving them with the lasting impression of my sense of responsibility in the face of death.

  As I lay on the examining table, I once again thought how odd it was that I had no pain whatsoever and yet I had seen with my own eyes that, well, there was red.

  The doctor asked my medical history. I told her that my ulcer was bleeding. She asked me to describe the pain, which I could not since, frankly, there was none. She started the invasive physical exam, which requires no description.

  Once it was over, she told me to lie still. Because of the urgent nature of my condition, the lab would process the results immediately.

  Twenty minutes later she came back holding several sheets of paper.

  “The results are in,” she announced. “There was no trace of blood whatsoever.”

  “How could that be?” I asked. “My stools were red. It was quite clear. Maybe I should have saved them.”

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Did you eat beets yesterday?”

  “Most definitely not,” I told her, feeling rather insulted that she was talking about a root vegetable as my life was being drained out of me, albeit in a painless way.

  “What about beet juice?” she asked.

  All of sudden, I remembered. In my efforts to eat healthfully, I had purchased a carrot-beet-spinach juice combo the day before instead of my usual lamb burger with garlic fries.

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  I got up and, no longer speaking in a raspy voice or holding my stomach, thanked her and picked up my clothes. Lacking the superpower strength to make myself completely invisible, I did what I always do when I should just be quiet—

  I tried to be funny. “So I guess this is what they mean by ‘the beet goes on’?”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “If you ever eat asparagus,” she said in an even more serious tone, “your urine will smell funny.”

  “I know,” I told her. “That one everyone knows.”

  I changed and walked back to the dorms.

  News of my grave condition had spread among my co-workers, and the remaining counselors were shocked to see me walk through the door. “Are you okay?” they asked.

  “I’ll be fine. I just have to take it easy for a couple of days,” I told them.

  “Of course,” they said. “If there’s anything we can do, just let us know.”

  “I will,” I assured them. “I will.”

  ’Twas the Fight Before Christmas

  The second year we were married, François decided to invite my parents for Christmas. “I want them to experience a French Christmas meal,” he said, displaying the enthusiasm he reserves for elaborate menus.

  My parents were more than happy. My father called the next day to give us their flight information. “We arrive at noon on December twenty-fifth,” he said, “at Oakland Airport.”

  “That’s the wrong airport!” I said.

  “The airport near you guys was too expensive,” he explained.

  “They’re arriving when!? Francois asked, rather incredulously. “And why are they arriving at the wrong airport? Tell them to change their flight.”

  I called my father. “We can’t change the flight,” he said. “It’s one of those special fares. We just won’t come.”

  “No, of course not! We’ll pick you up. No problem,” I said.

  François reluctantly agreed to change his Christmas lunch to a Christmas dinner. He also agreed to pick up my parents, since my fat
her told him that I would probably get lost and they felt much more comfortable if he came.

  “Your family is very difficult,” François said.

  “But they love you,” I reminded him.

  For the next three weeks, all our conversations centered around The Menu.

  “Would your parents like carpaccio?”

  “No.”

  “Would they try quail eggs?”

  “No.”

  “Bone marrow on toast?”

  “Dad, Yes. Mom, definitely no.”

  My parents arrived on December 25 in jovial moods. This would be their first Christmas meal with somebody who actually celebrated Christmas, and they came laden with gifts. François put the gifts aside to be opened after dinner.

  “Open them now!” my parents insisted, shoving their mismatched luggage behind the Christmas tree.

  Many of my relatives had sent a gift or a card, each with my husband’s name spelled differently, none correctly. François was nonetheless touched by the sentiment behind the misspellings. The cards were charming, in a nontraditional way. “Merry Christmas to Franseos! Many happy days and healthy!”

  My parents always buy wrapping paper on sale, paying attention only to the pretty colors. As François held his stack of gifts, all emblazoned with “Happy Birthday!” and “Congratulations, Graduate!” he looked a bit puzzled. A steep learning curve lay ahead of him.

  The first, second, and third gifts were tricolor sweaters with the zigzaggy pattern so popular with infomercial salesmen, men who wear bracelets, and my male relatives. After that came the bottle of Paco Rabanne, a couple of ties, and a pack of Calvin Klein underwear from my mother. My father also gave us a Christmas ornament that read, “I Love Pugs!” which he had found on the luggage carousel.

  We also received packets of saffron, a bag of dried limes for Persian stews, and my favorite snack, tamarind paste.

  Once we opened what we thought were all the gifts, my mother announced, “Von more for Fransva! Fransva, I make you carrot jam vit pistachio. I know you like!”