Girl Meets Boy (9 page)

I mutter back a lame, “Oh, yeah, that too.”

Now
she
looks confused for just a second, then asks, “What else?”

I try to find my place in my practiced speech; I try to figure how to start, where to start. I can’t do it, can’t remember anything.

She’s staring at me, waiting.

I must look pathetic. I just say, “Nothing, really.”

I think I see a flicker of disappointment in her expression. We’re standing in the hallway with a thousand kids brushing past us, just like that day with Debra and the punch. But at this moment, I can only see Raffina. I really like her a lot.

It’s now or never. “Wanna go out?” I ask, not too loudly, but not too softly either.

She’s looking in my eyes, and I’m waiting. At least this time I’m braced and ready for a punch to land.

Softly, so low that no one else can hear her, she says simply, “Sure.” And smiles again.

Suddenly everything I’ve been worried about seems ridiculous. She’s a girl. I’m a guy. I like her and she—

I feel one last flash of doubt. “I mean like on … like on a date-type thing?”

She smiles again and gives a little laugh. “Yeah, I got that,” she says.

In spite of myself, I can’t stop from thinking,
Take that, Debra.
But in another few seconds, looking into Raffina’s eyes as she looks back into mine, I realize that Debra Quarantino is the last person in the world I’ll ever think about again.

Kerry is rhapsodizing about Mars. We park as many nights as we can get away, but we’re here now, on this field access, dangerously close to Kerry’s midnight curfew, because it’s the darkest place we could find with an open view of the southwestern sky where Mars hangs closer to Earth than it has in sixty thousand years. I told her this was a must-see. I lied. I wanted in her pants. I take delight in American English slang:
in her pants.
How do you not love the irreverence? I’d be all about
shoplifting the pooty,
like Jerry Maguire, if Kerry’s pooty were shopliftable. Actually, the content of Kerry’s pants is a long-range goal. It is a
consum-mation devoutly to be wished,
as Shakespeare says in
Hamlet.

“Rafi,” she says, “it’s amazing. It’s like a pearl on velvet, and the stars are spread out around it like tiny diamonds.”

I’m burrowed into her breasts like a mongoose after a couple cobras of medium heft, so I know she won’t hear me. I don’t want to speak too loudly in case Homeland Security or INS has the Jeep bugged. You can only quote so much Shakespeare in the States. When the government hears about it, they cancel your visa.

…
she hangs upon the cheek of night

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear.

Kerry scoots away. “What?” she says.

I look up at her, but I keep my head at breast level. All around the car, smells of farm country rise out of the land; it is the breath of Mother Earth. But in the front seat, in the few centimeters between my nose and Kerry’s open blouse, the fragrance of baby powder remains after its release with the falling away of her bra. “These are the pearls I’m interested in,” I say.

“Oh, you goof!” she says. “You’re the one who got us out here so late, Mr. Let’s Go Observe Mars.” She hits me on the shoulder with her fist. I love it when she does that. Muslim girls never hit you.

I sit up. Two sentences later, we are into the sex confrontation we have four nights a week—the two nights our folks let us go out, and the two nights we’re able to sneak. Kerry suffers more guilt in this than I do, although I have a lot more to lose if our families find out that we’re this far over the line we swore to them we drew. I show her the tumescent crotch of my Carhartts.

“Poor baby,” she says. She reaches. Her hand is a space probe entering the atmosphere of a planet where molten organic matter
courses in the substrata. The probe does not set down. I’m going to have to send out a probe of my own when I get home. Again.

My affection for Kerry is genuine. She is the furthest thing in the world to me from a
punchboard, a slut, a skank, a stain, a cooze.
I love this nasty American slang. And I love Kerry. I tell her I love her, at least, and in moments such as these, I believe with all my heart I do. I suppose a human being almost eighteen years old is capable of romantic love. We are certainly capable of erotic love, which seems to me a fair definition of this turgid heaven/hellish yearning. Of this
passion.

I realize, technically, that the organ responsible for this passion is not my heart, but in spite of the anatomical distance between the organs, and their fundamental difference in shape, they often function as one.

Kerry made it clear months ago that she will go only so far. I tell my family that we hold hands; that’s how big a liar and hypocrite I am. Premarital sex is a serious sin for Muslims. And I don’t mean intercourse specifically; I mean any sex, period. My parents and my grandmother are devout, five-prayer-a-day Muslims. They’re so strict they squeak. That is to say their knees literally squeak from all the genuflection. I myself am a quarter-prayer-a-week guy, and then it’s only in fall and spring before races. And I go through the motions if I’m caught at home at prayer time. There may be no limit to my hypocrisy.

I respect the limit Kerry has set to our … to our love, and I’m grateful for it. God knows what trouble we’d be in if I was at the switch. The animal wants what the animal wants. Kerry’s resolve bends, but it has not broken. Kerry is the one responsible for keeping our animals on a short leash. I do realize I’m responsible
for my own animal, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for him to be confined to so limited a range. I wonder why God created in us such powerful desires if he only wanted us to act on them under specified circumstances. It is a test of righteousness, and I fail.

“Let’s head for home,” I say. I slide Mix R, which Kerry hates, into the box. Tupac is up first: “Thug Passion,” which Kerry double hates. She thinks I’m mad at her, but I’m not. I’m just … frustrated. I turn the key, hit the gas, and all four tires spin. My heart and that other organ sink in unison. We’re stuck.

I drop Kerry off after getting pulled out of the mud in a surreal stroke of luck, and drive home in an aural bath of Da Lynch Mob’s old-school outrage: “Freedom Got an A.K.” Then Tupac is up again, and I rap along, idling down the two-lane blacktop through the deep buzz of this late-summer night, no po-leece chasin’ me.

Of all the things my parents and my grandmother loathe about my love for America, they loathe the music with equal intensity.

I park a block down the street, sneak back like a slimmer, dark-haired, permanently tanned Chris Farley in
Beverly Hills Ninja,
hop the fence, and hit the latch on Muttski’s kennel door. He stands with his paws on my shoulders and gives me a lick. I tell him we have a mission. We jump the fence and jog back to the Jeep.

I dial Mom on my cell and ask if Dadi—that’s the Bangla word for Grandma; it’s pronounced
Dah-dee
—needs anything from Hy Vee on my way home. It’s my hope that Dadi cannot imagine me on a grocery run while simultaneously sustaining a vision of me ruining my future in the clutches of a
daughter of Satan.

Dad and Dadi aren’t pleased about me dating Kerry, but they haven’t forbidden it, based on my stream of lies about our chaste behavior and my description of us as
friends.
They don’t know her. Dadi doesn’t need to know her; she’s seen Kerry’s photo in the school paper, she knows she’s Christian and an American teenager, and that’s all the info she needs to be certain that Kerry is not only a slut but a gold digger after my inheritance. Kerry hasn’t got a clue how much money my family has, and wouldn’t care if she knew. The diminutive endearment dadi sounds cute and sweet, but my little dadi is as hard as Abe Lincoln’s noggin on Mount Rushmore.

Yes, Dadi is a bigot. My father is not, but he defers to his mother. This is odd, because outside the house Dad cuts a figure of authority and erudition. His accent is so deeply British it’s almost Churchillian. He’s a professor of agronomy at Iowa State: Dr. Vikram Mahdood. I think I’ve got them talked into meeting Kerry and her family tomorrow at the county fair. Once they meet her, I know they’ll like her. I want to surprise Kerry, and I want to make an apologetic gesture for my behavior tonight. Dadi will be civil, but if she doesn’t rise to graciousness, I’ll introduce her to the pigs. Dadi
Mahdood, I would like to present Herbert, Gerbert, and Helga Hog.

Kerry and I have been going out for two years now, and my mom’s the only one who’s met her. My family, and most of the other Muslims in Ames have kept a low profile since 9/11. The exception is another professor at ISU, Dr. Kamilla Jamini in women’s studies. I’m also an exception, but it’s not become I’m brave like Kamilla; I get attention because of cross country and track, and there hasn’t been anything to do but go with it.

There are Muslim girls in Ames, where we live, but all the attractive ones go to the university. I never see them except once a year when Dad hauls us all to East Asia Night. He and Dadi stuck me in the little
consolidated
high school in Huxley, a tiny town ten miles south. They wanted to protect me from the drugs and violence in a big American school. Ballard High certainly isn’t violent. But drugs …
they got a shitload a drugs there.
The first day of school, I met Kerry.

Kerry is America for me. She’s that vibrant, athletic, hang loose, smart but not classically educated, funny, work hard and get dirty, oblivious to social class, ain’t nothin’ we can’t fix personification of the American spirit. She carries a farming tool in her backpack. Kerry and America have really done a number on me.

And so has my dear Muttski Bear, who cruises with me to Hy Vee, where I pick up six big cans of chickpeas. That’s garbanzo beans to the legume-challenged. I also sneak down aisle seven, where the baby powder nestles between the diapers and the wipes, just below the pacifiers, where I whiff the sweet redolence of Kerry.

Then we hit the car wash at Kwik Trip. I spray off all the mud and grass and vacuum inside while Muttski bites at the spray from the passenger seat. There are no lengths to which Dadi won’t go to catch me beyond the parameters she and my father set for my behavior in America—academic behavior, substance-abuse behavior, and most particularly dating behavior that precludes the need for safe-sex behavior—so for her to conduct a DEA-style search of my car wouldn’t surprise me. All she’ll find now will be fresh Muttski fur.

I can’t swing through Kwik Trip without looking at the spot between the front door and the caged racks of propane bottles, right below the water faucet, where I first set eyes on Muttski. It was the evening of September 14, three days after the attack on the World Trade Center. I was driving home from cross country practice and pulled into Kwik Trip for a Powerade. Every person in America who looked Middle Eastern was so self-conscious in those minutes and hours and days and weeks that our quaking probably registered on seismographs. The fact is that I don’t look Middle Eastern. But you have to be familiar with different ethnic groups to recognize that, and most Americans—especially those who live in the heart of the heart of the country—aren’t. People have spoken Spanish to me, thinking I’m Mexican. What I am, ethnically, is Bengali. People who have a sense of the world think I’m Indian—from India—which is the right ethnic group, but the wrong nationality. I’ve run into an amazing number of people who’ve never heard of Bangladesh.

I was having fearful thoughts about going back the first time I saw Muttski. My family didn’t know what would happen to us. We didn’t know if all Muslims would be deported or rounded up and detained in camps. We wondered if we should go back before the government had time to act. I didn’t want to go home then, but I could have stood it; now going home would be the worst thing in the world for me. At the time I was scared. Beneath our fear, we were also confused. Muslims had been in the towers when they were hit, and Bangladeshis, too; plus, plenty of Muslims in America are Americans, either born or naturalized: We were so scared that our fear disrupted our compassion and our grief. It
took people as mindful and tough as Kamilla Jamini to speak out in sympathy as anyone would to a neighbor whose loved ones had been murdered.

But when I saw the five fuzzy cinnamon-gold puppies peeking out from the Charmin box, my fear and self-consciousness fell away. I registered the boot steps behind me, but I paid them no mind. I looked at the boy and girl standing on each side of the box with the black crayoned FREE sign between them.

“They’re free,” the boy said.

“To good homes,” the girl said.

An older biker, a big guy in a dark blue watch cap and a flannel shirt with cut off sleeves, sat on the cement next to the box. On his lap, a little boy in bib overalls squirmed in delight at the frenzied licks of the two puppies he held in his arms. The man leaned down. “These little muttski bears are smoochers, all right,” he said. “We’re gonna need a dozen shop rags to clean off all these guys’ smooches.”

I opened my mouth to exclaim about the puppies. They were beauty and joy and innocence made flesh and fur, in an ugly time when fear and sadness and mistrust hung over the world like a sickly green tornado sky. Before I could speak, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. “What’s up, Ahab?” said a voice I didn’t recognize. I turned.

The man was in his thirties, shorter than I, but half again as broad. He wore dirty work clothes, and he smelled like Kerry’s chicken house. The smell almost knocked me over. His face was so close I could have counted the individual red whiskers poking through the gray film of old powdered chicken manure. He wore a red, white, and blue NAPA auto parts cap exactly like the one I was
wearing. He moved to speak again, but he stopped when he saw my cap. His mouth twisted into a snarl.

A sheriff’s car wheeled off the street and bore down on us. I was watching it when the guy swung. He only knocked my cap off, but I fell back on the edge of the box. The biker bellowed, the three kids shrieked, and puppies yipped and catapulted into the air.

It sounds funny, but it’s only funny from a distance.

The deputy extended his hand and helped me up. The kids gathered the puppies and straightened out the box; the biker soothed his little boy and their two puppies; the man in the NAPA hat and the grotesquely obese man who stood behind him like a chunk of landscape glowered at me.

“Ahab the Arab here was sneaking around the ammonia tank at the Co-op,” the man in the cap said.

The deputy asked for my driver’s license.

“The kid runs track at Ballard,” the biker said. “I saw his picture in the paper.”

“I’m on my way home from cross country practice,” I said.

The deputy asked what I was doing at the Co-op. I had to think. The Co-op? Then it dawned on me. “I stopped to pee,” I said. “I drove back where no one would see me.”

“We saw ya,” the huge man said.

“Yeah, and we called 911 and tailed ya here,” said the man in the cap.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “There’ll still be a wet spot in the dirt.”

The deputy looked at the biker and his little boy, each of whom held a puppy. He looked down at the kids soothing their puppies in the box. He gave me back my driver’s license, told the
men who had followed me that it was time to head home to dinner, and he stood with us until they pulled away in their pickup. He told me that the next time I needed to
water my horse
not to do it near anything that could be stolen to make explosives. I thanked him. I meant for his kindness, but I was too nervous to get it out. He nodded and climbed in his car.