Together Tea (4 page)
“Oh,” Darya said.
“That's what I'm saying! Oh! indeed. It's like it was meant to be. What do you say? Let's get this done!” Sounding just like his go-getter guru, he ripped out the registration form at the end of the booklet and started filling it out with a pen. He quickly wrote in her name, their address, their credit card number and expiration date. “In the mail tomorrow morning, I promise. Your first class starts next week. This will help you. Done! Now, let's get some sleep!”
With an excitement and zeal that only Parviz could muster for the simple act of having filled out a registration form for an adult education class that Darya didn't even want to take, he jumped back into bed, snuggled in, and, before long, was snoring again.
Darya stood there staring at the filled-out form. The air around the desk still smelled of Old Spice. The scent clogged her brain. Spreading Spreadsheet Specs. Had she said she wanted to take a class? Is that what she had said? No. But that's what he thought would make her feel better.
Well, the solution was simple. She'd get rid of the form before he could send it in. She simply wouldn't go. Silly class in some library at night taught by who-knows-who. Who said she had to go?
D
arya walked to the Queens Public Library under streetlamps festooned with banners for an upcoming neighborhood carnival. She stopped and hesitated in front of the redbrick building. Against her better judgment, and because Parviz was absolutely convinced that improving her Excel skills was her key to happiness, she'd come. But in truth, she'd come because, of course, Parviz had woken up early and mailed in the registration with full payment before Darya could get rid of the form. When she had called a few days later to cancel her registration, they'd said the fee was nonrefundable and now Darya needed to talk her way, face-to-face, into a refund.
Going down the musty steps caused a sharp twinge in her right knee, which probably meant the beginning stages of some form of arthritis. Lovely. Middle age and all its new aches and pains. Darya followed signs on yellow paper featuring a hand-drawn arrow and the words “Miranda Katilla's Spreading Spreadsheet Specs!” until she arrived outside a room with an opaque glass door. She turned the knob and walked in. Was she late? Because the teacher was already talking and people were already seated on folding metal chairs, taking notes as if it mattered. Darn it. Now she couldn't talk privately to the teacher till after the class was over. Darn it, darn it. It was too late to go back. She'd already walked in, and all eyes were on her and the teacher motioned for Darya to sit with a huge, welcoming smile. Darn. It.
Miranda Katilla was the kind of chipper that came about from overly caffeinated bad coffee. Darya eyed the Styrofoam cup in Miranda's hand. How rude. People here always ate and drank in front of others,
when the others weren't eating and drinking,
which in Persian culture was considered beyond uncouth. She hated herself for being so judgmental, but she'd lived long enough and had seen enough to know a few things. For example, already Darya knew that Miranda was the kind of woman who never ironed anything.
Miranda Katilla was talking about the importance of spreadsheets in everyday life. “Not just for work. Not just for accounting, per se. But for everything. Your groceries. Your home budget. A way of measuring and keeping a record. Documenting. Adding up.”
Darya sat a little straighter. She did like the sound of this. Perhaps she would sit through this one class, then ask for her refund. Poor Miranda Katilla. Teaching this class at night instead of having a real job. Yes, Darya decided, she would be more
open-minded,
as Mina would say, and give this fool a chance. There, she was getting better at being less judgmental already.
Darya rummaged for a pen in her handbag.
“Here you go,” she heard a whisper.
A man was handing her a pen. He was about Darya's age, slim, with brown hair and deep laugh lines around his mouth. He wore a flannel shirt that looked like a second-rate lumberjack's.
Darya took the pen and murmured, “Thank you.” She held it in her hand. It was a fountain pen. Who on earth came to a spreadsheet class with a fountain pen?
Miranda's curls (unnatural, forced into shape by chemicals, Darya had already surmised) bounced as she continued to extol the virtues of Excel.
“Sam, was it? Sam, can you tell me one thing you think spreadsheets could help you with? In your own life?”
The man next to Darya looked up. “Well.” His voice was much deeper than it had been when he was whispering. “For my music. Lesson plans, student names. Grades. Especially grades.”
“Teachers need spreadsheets more than anyone!” Miranda said, apparently delighted. “Now. If we all turn on our programs, I'd like to review some Excel basics, then take you all to another level.”
Parviz would really like Miranda Katilla. She spoke his language: “another level” and all that. Darya realized she didn't have a computer. Of course she didn't. She had only come to get her refund and leave.
Sam's chair was suddenly closer to hers. “Share?” he said and flipped open his laptop.
His chair had made no noise. Darya looked down and saw that all four legs ended in yellow tennis balls. She looked around and noticed that all the chairs had tennis balls attached to the bottom of their legs. So that's why Sam's chair had sidled so silently next to hers. Darya found herself enchanted by this trick of tennis balls.
Sam smelled of soap and tea, a bergamoty smell. Not of Old Spice. His eyes were kind, and he pulled his chair even closer and tilted the screen so she could see. His kindness reminded her of Parviz.
When Miranda Katilla asked them if they really appreciated the difference between columns and rows and if they truly understood how mastery of the program could do no less than “change their spreadsheet lives,” Darya couldn't help but snort.
Sam raised his eyebrows at her and smiled. He didn't smile the way a classmate smiles at another classmate in the basement of the Queens Public Library during an adult education community class. No, he smiled at her the way those boys of her youth had smiled at her, back when she hiked in the mountains with them, back when she had suitors, back before she got committed to the gift her mother gave her, and before she signed up for the strict columns and rows of adult life.
WALKING HOME FROM THE LIBRARY
that night, Darya felt that the evening air was a little sweeter than it had been on her way to class. When she opened the front door and saw Parviz sitting on the couch, eating pistachios, and he asked, “How was it, Darya Joon, how was class?” Darya felt almost guilty when she said, “It was so wonderfully wonderful.”
She hadn't asked for a refund. Maybe she could use more spreadsheet knowledge. It would help her at work, wouldn't it? Maybe she could even get a promotion with this training.
“Was it interesting?” Parviz asked.
“Yes.” Darya again felt guilty saying this to Parviz as he sat there shelling pistachios. She put down her handbag. It was just a smile from a middle-aged man in a class taught in the basement of the public library by a woman who never ironed anything. But during that smile, Darya's round middle had whittled down, her wrinkles had been erased, her skin firmed, her legs toned, her knee pain vanished, and she didn't need her reading glasses. Her daughter's eye rolls no longer broke her heart, and she wasn't in chronic grief for the mother she'd lost to the bombs that fall and kill at random. For that brief moment, within those musty library walls, Darya Daneshjoo felt herself again. Her old, young self. The self that stood at the top of the mountains of Tehran and laughed because she felt free. That self.
“So, you liked it, Darya Joon?” Parviz asked.
“I did,” Darya said.
“Highlights?”
“Hmmm?”
“The class, the teacher, the students. Anything stand out?”
Darya fluffed her hair. “There were tennis balls at the bottom of the chairs.”
“Tennis balls?”
“Tennis balls.”
Parviz held a pistachio in midair. He seemed to be thinking. Darya got ready for more questions. She stopped him before he could ask more. “To keep the chairs from scraping the floor when you move them.”
Parviz nodded as it dawned on him. Then he popped his pistachio into his mouth and clapped his hands in the air. “Genius!” he cried. “What will they think of next?”
And with the clap of his hands, she was back. Back in her living room in Queens, no longer on the mountaintops of Tehran. No fountain-pen-wielding, lumberjack-shirt-wearing, deep-voiced music teacher was smiling at her. Her right knee started to hurt. She asked Parviz if he wanted some warm milk before bed.
“With honey, my honey,” he called out.
He did not just say that, Darya thought.
But of course, he did. He always did.
S
amosas and mango chutney for you ladies, made by yours truly.” Kavita handed Darya a plate covered with a dishcloth. “I told Shenil that if he doesn't learn to appreciate the virtues of his domestic goddess soon, he'll find himself with a ghost of a wife in search of a bon vivant Clark Gable for romantic times tout de suite!”
Darya let Kavita in and led her to the dining room. It was their third math club since Darya had started her spreadsheet class at the library. In class, she and Sam sat next to each other. They'd talked a little. She'd learned that he lived on his own, had no kids, and that he liked fly-fishing. She had no idea what fly-fishing was. Catching fish with flies? He was so . . . American. They chatted before class and sometimes after, and during “break” they went outside while others smoked or ran to get coffee from Starbucks. Darya and Sam never got coffee. They just stood together under the starless New York sky, and Sam told her about his students. He taught guitar. Not violin. Not piano. Not Persian sitar, which would've been really impressive. But guitar. That wasn't a “high-class” instrument in Darya's book.
“I do believe you have wafted to the fjords!” Kavita said in her high voice. “My dear, what has gotten into you? What puts you so deep in thought, darling?”
“Oh, nothing! I love your samosas, you know that!”
Kavita arched her overly tweezed eyebrows. “I do believe, Darya dear, that our guitar hero with whom you are so besotted has convoluted your mind and gotten you in a tizzy. What tomfoolery! Who would've ever supposed that math-obsessed Darya would find her heart flying out to a children's music instructor, ey? The world does not cease to amaze
moi
!”
Darya had confided in Kavita and Yung-Ja over equations and samosas and
dolmeh
. Confided wasn't the word. She'd
shared.
Wasn't that the expression? So American, so Sam. They had asked her about her new class, and she had answered. Only unlike Parviz, who believed that her fascination with the class lay in mathematical precision and tennis balls on chair legs, Kavita and Yung-Ja had caught on that there was a certain someone whom she liked to sit next to and read her xeroxed handouts with. She'd insisted that it was nothing more than that, but Kavita and Yung-Ja had chuckled and giggled and snorted and wheezed. They were convinced that Darya was “besotted,” as Kavita called it, with American Sam.
Well, they were wrong. It was nothing like that. She loved her husband. Sam was just different, that was all. A “laid-back” person who was always “mellow.” Darya didn't know too many mellow people in the Persian community.
The bell rang. It was Yung-Ja, holding a Tupperware dish filled with kimbap, or “Korean sushi” as Yung-Ja described it. Over the years, math camp had turned into math camp with food. Which none of them minded because they all loved to show off the cuisine of their homelands and, more than that, they all loved to eat.
“It's the early onset of menopause that has me all aflutter,” Kavita said. “My face is burning half the time, and sometimes I truly feel as though smoke is emanating from my ears. When Shenil smirks at me, I am tempted to take my hand and slap the side of his face for no reason whatsoever other than this rise of feminine hormones that plagues us all at this stage in the wild charade that we call life.”
Darya sighed. Yung-Ja looked confused. Yung-Ja's English, even after years in the United States, was still not that strong, and half the time she could barely understand Kavita. Darya was used to Kavita's unique excessive verbiage, her British English sprinkled with French, her constant references to her husband as some kind of menace when he was actually a charming, sweet biology professor and hardly thoughtless. Kavita loved to joke about cheating on Shenil, although her only points of reference seemed to be Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, and Spencer Tracy. Kavita now focused on who American Sam looked like.
“Humphrey Bogart?” Kavita asked eagerly.
“Who's that?” Yung-Ja said.
“No, no. Not Bogart.”
“Jack Lemmon?” Kavita quizzed.
“No. I saw a movie from the video store the other dayâwait, what was it called?
Crimes of the Heart
. He looks like the man in that movie. Sam Shepard, I think is his name,” Darya said.
“Who's that?” Yung-Ja asked.
“Never mind,” Darya said. “Let's just do math.”
As Darya placed the samosas and kimbap on the table and got out the math workbooks, she wished that she had never told Kavita and Yung-Ja about Sam because they were making it out to be more than it was, when it was actually nothing. But part of her also enjoyed having friends to chat with about something so silly. She couldn't tell Parviz, of course, because he might think it was actually something, when it
wasn't,
and she couldn't tell Mina or her sons because, well, that just wouldn't be right. So, grateful for the company of Kavita and Yung-Ja, and for the equations they were about to tackle, and for the smell of spicy samosas and sweet kimbap, Darya sharpened her pencil and asked her friends to take a seat.
FOR A SOLID FORTY-FIVE MINUTES,
they lost themselves in math. That was their rule. To stick to the project at hand for forty-five minutes, no veering, no break. They were allowed to talk, but only about the math problems. No one could go off topic. And they stuck to that rule strictly because all three of them loved rules, and all three of them had deep disrespect for people who broke them. That's what brought them together. Strong convictions about math and life. Love of numbers. A need to solve. They scribbled and thought and broke things down and built them back up. They showed their work and argued about how to arrive at the answer. Darya had even invested in a big white dry-erase board. She loved the squeak of the markers on the board, loved seeing how the solutions all made sense. When they were finished with their work for the day and reemerged into the real world around them, it was as though they had been swimming underwater and were now coming up for air.
And they were starving. The samosas had an excellent kick, the kimbap hit the spot, and Darya's handmade baklava was the perfect accompaniment to tea. When Darya hosted, math camp always ended with tea. She had even succeeded in stopping Kavita from putting milk in hers.
After math, they were allowed to talk about anything. Usually, they talked about their children and husbands. Occasionally, they discussed politics. Darya and Yung-Ja competed over who had suffered most in the twentieth century: Iranians or Koreans. Whenever Darya brought up dictatorship, military coup, torture, war, Yung-Ja said, “Ya. Korea had that.” To which Kavita would say, “Yes, but do you two ladies have a country that has been artificially manipulated into two based on nothing more than the false gods of organized religion and the fallacies of fatuous farts in office who wish to portend great power and prestige?”
And then Yung-Ja would be silent because she didn't understand what Kavita had just said, and Darya would get up to open a window because when Kavita discussed “The Division,” as she called the topic of India and Pakistan, she got overly animated and menopausey and before long would be dripping with sweat and asking Darya for a glass of water and a wet washcloth for her forehead.
Today's math camp ended with a short discussion about their respective children's inability to truly understand the gifts of America and how they were all so sheltered in New York because they knew neither war nor bombs nor true poverty. “These children of ours do not know the pain of prolonged prostration under the piddling paucities of pauper politicians turned princes,” Kavita said.
That was another thing. Sometimes the combination of calculus and menopause made Kavita extra alliterative. Made her “mull over the messy and malleable morphings required to manage magnificent mathematical mountains from mere marginal molehills.”
At the end of math camp they did the dishes together. After that, Yung-Ja, who was the best at calculus, reviewed the best way to answer some of the harder equations. Then Yung-Ja took her Tupperware dish, Kavita took her empty samosa plate, and Darya kissed her friends good-bye.
Whenever math camp was over, Darya felt a certain emptiness. She loved these afternoons with her friends. She loved being in her dining room with two women who, unlike most Americans (and this included Sam), knew a thing or two about war and dictatorship and “the pain of prolonged prostration.”