Permission. Saskia Vogel
of vision and I was busy practicing a technique I’d learned in an acting class, relaxing my body so that it was working with gravity instead of against it. But with acting, you were in motion. A few minutes in, I could already feel the strain in my hip where I was putting most of my weight. I was trying to keep my arches high and not sink into my heels, to make sure my ankles were balanced and toes relaxed. My raised arms were tingling. The coastal breeze had chased the heat off for the night and a low fog rested on the hills. A fan heater ticked to and fro, burning my calves when it swung my way. I counted the seconds until its return, because burning was better than the dim chill of the studio. I tried not to think of the tingling, ache, and cold as I monitored the timer’s slow march from twenty to zero, but as my body began to sink, my position shifted enough to see who it was. His face was thinner than I remembered, but it was him. Ana’s father, slicing through his block of clay with wire string, thick lumps dropping to the linoleum floor. I had to force myself to stay put. I had never wanted to see him again. And now here I was, legs on fire, nipples puckering, drafts catching in my pubic hair. Too aware of my skin, my blood. My body’s refusal to be still – especially in front of him – seemed obscene. I focused on Fumiko. It was all I could do. I hoped no one could see how my body had begun to pound.
Fumiko was padding around the room, nodding at some, grunting commands at others and taking their hands in hers to correctly fit them around their tools, slicing at the edges, jamming her fingers into the clay to show what it means to make the hollow of an eye. At Ana’s father’s piece, Fumiko shook with what sounded like a dry cough. I kept my arms up and folded, but turned my head enough so I could see her. She was chuckling sweetly, as though she’d bumped into an old friend. She gave the flanks of his sculpture a hearty slap. She ran her hands over the mounds of clay that made up the breasts, then pinched off a protrusion that seemed to be a nipple and stuck it to his pedestal. The narrow waist was a bridge losing its fight to keep the mighty bosoms connected to the boulders of her ass. Of course his sculpture was confused. He didn’t know how to see me.
Ana’s father avoided looking at Fumiko until she gripped his wrist, and he made a nervous sound. ‘We accentuate the things we find pleasing, but you have to give it a logical architecture. Look at her. Really look at her. It’s why she’s here.’ To me, she said, ‘Stand straight.’ Then, ‘Class,’ she clapped her hands; her fingers left stains on his skin.
Fumiko demonstrated how to use your hand as a measuring tool. The men and women around me each raised an arm and held out their fists, some with their thumbs up, some to the side, others resting their thumbs against hard tools. Dr. Moradi and I locked eyes. I’d tried to hush the memory, but it would not be stilled.
Ana and me. The two of us, the summer before senior year. Afternoon sun in her curtains, hurried hands, too impatient to get undressed. At first the creak and rustle of the bed was everything, then it was hands and skin, the act of kissing, but also the sound, her hands in my hair and mine inside her. We didn’t notice her door had been left ajar until it shut. She thought it was the wind. Then, we heard the rolling click of the lock. Ana froze. I said we should go out the window. When she didn’t follow, when I heard her pleading with him, I started running. I shouldn’t have run away without her, but I ran those few miles home.
Without looking up from the bills she was paying, my mother asked why I didn’t call her if I wanted to leave early and wouldn’t that be the day when I finally got my driver’s licence. But then she must have heard it in my breath, maybe she could smell it on me. My T-shirt was dark with sweat and I had a blister on my foot. Go take a bath, she said. While I was in the tub, Moradi called. She came in without knocking, sat, and slid her hand through the bubbles. She looked spent and tender. You’ll take a break from each other over the summer, and I’m sure it will be back to normal by the time school starts, she said and waited for a reply that didn’t come. I was trying not to drown. The tap gurgled and water splashed into the bath. We don’t have to tell your father. If you don’t want to.
I didn’t want to. There was nothing to say. We hadn’t done anything we had been told not to do; I wasn’t a boy. We were exploring, like what we had done when we were younger, practicing kissing on our pillows and hands. We didn’t talk about what it meant. It was something we had always done, and we never stopped to question whether or not what we were doing was in anticipation of a man. I think about what my mother said next a lot. She may not have meant it the way I heard it, but it was in the ether. A stitch of judgment, a tic of abnormality, the threat of the Other to an ordered life.
You’ve never been one for the easy road, she said.
My mother thought she was lightening the mood, but instead I heard a suggestion about who I was, that what I wanted from Ana was not friendship, but love. And in my mother’s face, her mildness, I understood the trouble desire could cause.
You can talk to me, my mother said, but though I believed her, it would be better for Ana if we all pretended this had never happened. My mother blew the bubbles off her fingers. They sailed between us like dandelion spores and sizzled when they landed on the foam.
Ana’s parents had come to Los Angeles on vacation in the eighties, and it would be years until I understood what it actually meant for them to have decided right then never to go back to Iran. The Moradis had family up in Beverly Hills, but they didn’t see each other often, and Ana had always said that her parents liked it that way, but something changed when the Beverly Hills uncle got ill. Suddenly, they were up there all the time at family gatherings, temple and, of course, the hospital. Ana had never talked about her bat mitzvah as anything other than a big birthday party and a chance to slow dance with Ryan Kim. We were still fondling our pillows then. But she’d started studying harder. I asked her about the effort she was putting into something neither she nor her parents believed in that much, and Ana replied, ‘It’s for my family,’ and I knew she didn’t mean just her parents. Instead of a birthday party, she started talking about becoming a woman, which to me seemed too distant to merit any serious thought. I didn’t understand what had changed.
My parents didn’t think about family like this. My dad said he was tired of being the one to always be going back home to Ohio, his siblings could come out here for a change, so we only saw them if there was a wedding or a funeral. My mother’s parents were already gone, and she had no siblings. I admired Ana’s reverence for something greater than herself. It made her seem protected, as though she could never come to harm because she had a world of people around her who cared. A bat mitzvah seemed like a small price to pay for that. What would it feel like to belong to something so self-evident, something you didn’t give up on because you didn’t feel like getting on a plane?
The summer break didn’t have the palliative effect my mother had promised. But I gave her no reason to believe that time had not solved the problem, and she no longer asked me how I was or what I needed. I appreciated the privacy. ‘I haven’t seen Ana in a while,’ my dad said one day. I pretended like I hadn’t noticed, but he could tell there was more to it. He told me not to worry: people grow apart. I found myself thinking about her at night, her skin. I pushed those thoughts away, and when I masturbated, I pictured her with men. In my fantasies, I inhabited both bodies. I came, thinking about being filled.
That summer went by in a blur of hours. After the drama program ended, my mother made sure I ‘kept busy’ with ‘activities.’ These were words she associated with good kids and used them with a gusto reserved for people who feel ill at ease with language, but that was one thing I couldn’t fault her for: English wasn’t her mother tongue. Keeping busy meant that I spent any free day I had helping one of her friends who was renovating her stables. I couldn’t stand the idea of our charity work for the mother-daughter assistance league; the risk of running into kids from my school, maybe Ana, was too high. So I brushed away the stable’s cobwebs thick with yellow dust. I mucked the stalls. At the end of each day my skin was rubbery to the touch. No matter how I scrubbed I could still smell the sebum, manure, and wet hay.
My dad decided we should all drive down to Valle de Guadalupe for a week. It was the first vacation I could remember that wasn’t also a business trip. He said he could tell we all needed a break. He taught me how to drink wine even though I was underage, and together we watched the sun gild the vineyards