Permission. Saskia Vogel
asleep with my light still on, listening to them shush each other when they couldn’t stop laughing. One day I didn’t see them until dinner.
And then the school year started. I could tell my mother was relieved. She was tired of watching me ‘mope around,’ which seemed like a double standard. At least I looked like I was keeping busy with activities that resembled actual work.
But like the fortune teller said, I was no good at putting myself back together. Ana made other friends over the summer, kids whose parents were also from Iran and who went to the same synagogue. There was no room for me anymore, and because I still valued our friendship, I did what I thought she wanted me to do. I stayed away from her, but I didn’t know where to go. Because we never finished what we started, because it never was allowed to reach a natural close, our ending felt unwritten. I imagined other endings and how they would have defined me, and because I couldn’t explore such endings with her, my desire ran loose where it could. I responded to the desire of others, and I fell easily for those who responded to the desire in me. At times I felt worn thin, but it was exciting, and as I found out, rare to be a person who enjoyed both giving and receiving pleasure, who was interested in the erotic as an exchange. Some people couldn’t see past the sex, some people fell fast and hard, and though I was generous with my body, I was careful and particular about whom I shared my heart with, and that left me lonely. People didn’t think I was into relationships, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, the ability to participate in pleasure seemed to me to be the greatest good. In pleasure, differences fell away and made space for an ecstatic encounter during which the boundaries between us dissolved and we were free.
In their eyes, I was mostly a girl other girls could grind with, lips they could kiss, hair they could twist. This girl or that girl and whichever guys they were working their way through, guys who liked to think their dicks were magic or who approached me sweetly to find out if what they were doing was right. Right or wrong, I didn’t know. In pleasure we were only bodies, and the body is all we have. This perspective wasn’t without conflict. A woman I dated after I moved into my apartment had called me a pornographer because of it. She wanted emotional intimacy before we made love, and I told her I wanted to know what our bodies would be like together before I felt comfortable opening up. It was about trust and communication, I said, but she seemed insulted. I thought about the word pornographer. It suited me, in a way, but only because I knew of no better word for me yet. Sex was sacred to me. I knew it had the power to transform. In my arms, my lovers’ eyes would roll back. Mouths opening, they’d offer me their tongues, their dreams and confessions. They came to me for comfort, they came for me, and each act was a conjuring spell. Just one more kiss, one more caress, I wished, and this body would be revealed to be hers. Why couldn’t Dr. Moradi have let us be?
On the model stand, I fought back tears. All eyes were on me. They could see each quake. There was no place to hide. Fumiko spoke slowly, guiding them through how to break me down. She spread the jaws of the calipers and fitted them around my head. The metal tip on my skin, the unexpected touch, became a point of focus. I allowed it to become all that there was. One end pressed against the soft flesh covering the hollow of my jaw, the other at the crown of my head. The strange comfort of a touch that asked nothing of me. Fumiko had my full attention. There was no space for tears. She walked the apparatus up and down my body. Seven and a half heads high, three heads wide at the shoulders, and on and on, until she reached my feet.
‘Good, good. Lucky class. She is classically proportioned,’ Fumiko said when she was done. Standing among the students again, she said, ‘Resume the pose.’
AS I DROVE HOME FROM the art centre that night, I thought about what I had left behind by leaving this suburb for the city. I was born into privilege and raised on narratives of success. But what my dad had called ‘paradise’ wasn’t paradise to me. I couldn’t understand how my parents didn’t see it. I wasn’t sure anyone who chose to live here did. In a newspaper article about a double-suicide that took place on the cliffs near our house while I was in high school, a mother from the neighbourhood asked to comment on the ‘star-crossed lovers’ said, ‘You work so hard to give your kids everything, and they think it’s hell.’ It’s as though she had forgotten how it felt to be in love, what it felt like to be left wanting. What it felt like when material comfort wasn’t comfort enough. And yet, these values are deeply rooted. Sitting in my childhood home, I began to think of myself as a failure, losing sight of the value of the life I had chosen. Seeing Dr. Moradi made me feel like a loser, not least because I knew there was nothing he would have approved of about me now. He was exactly the kind of person who moved here. Or did the place shape him?
On this bulge of land at the edge of Los Angeles, Spanish, Craftsman, mid-century, and ranch-style homes lined winding roads with ocean views. The area had been conceived of as a beachfront retreat in the early twentieth century, beachfront with minimal beach access, for people who wanted to imagine they were beyond the reach of a hungrily expanding metropolis. Way back when, whiteness was the barrier for entry, but now it was only a certain level of success. Success meant money, and any way you earned it seemed fine. All money was moral, but not all fame, as the parents of my friends made clear with their contempt for the city where so many of them spent their days as lawyers and doctors and aerospace engineers. One of my father’s concessions to my mother was that we’d live someplace where walking was possible. She couldn’t have walked to the store, but there were miles of trails right outside our door. I suppose it was a sort of Eden: perfect only in the absence of knowledge from the outside. The people within its borders were trying to recreate places to which they wished to return. None of those places were real.
Unlike the rest of the city it was attached to, the peninsula was dark at night, a regulation intended to preserve the natural beauty of the place. The brightest lights were from passing cars, passing planes, fishing boats past midnight. But the darkness, its bends and corners, attracted a different kind of person, too. People who were out for a drive, who needed to be alone. For an area with good freeway access, it felt remote.
I was still thinking about this, surprised by the intensity of my resentment toward a place I thought I had simply left behind, when I pulled onto our driveway. The house was dark.
‘Mom?’ I called out when I came through the front door. I didn’t want to spook her.
A sound came from the kitchen, a hissing inhalation that might have been a ‘hello.’ She gestured for me not to bother her. She was watching something out the window.
I opened the refrigerator and leaned into its cold air. Forks jutted from the plastic containers of creamy and fluffy mush. I had been telling myself I wasn’t really eating, just picking at the peas and diced ham but not the mayonnaise-y macaroni. Mandarin wedges and pineapple but not the marshmallow. There was so much of that ambrosia, but I’d nearly whittled it down to the cream and carbohydrates. I picked up a fork and found a maraschino cherry still speared on the tines. I ate it. It was waxy, chilled and sickly sweet. I couldn’t seem to get the sugar off my tongue. The fridge made a clicking sound and began to hum. I put the fork back in the bowl and closed the refrigerator door. I poured my mom and myself a glass of water and sat at the table with her, swishing the water around in my mouth, the sweetness diluted, then gone. When I stopped swishing, there were only waves and palms to be heard. They seemed to be growing louder each night.
We listened to the ocean pummel the shore. The phone rang. It went to voicemail. Telemarketer. After the initial shock, the missing, the waiting, there was nothing really to say. Maybe in silence we were understanding each other perfectly. Maybe silence was a respite we shared. I forgave her for smoking. Mom had her cigarettes, and I had my forks in the fridge. Nothing needed to be said, because we knew. We were in mourning, and it was OK to let our mourning be.
My mother sat up straighter.
I scooted my chair around and leaned over so I had a better view. She pointed at the last farm in the area. It wasn’t much of a farm: passionfruit weighing down a rusted chain-link fence. Tomatoes and sunflowers. Leafy greens and strawberries. The farmer kept a trailer on the property, which stretched all the way to the sea and boasted the only passable road that led down to the beach. He’d come after you muttering, wielding something heavy or with a trigger if he caught you trespassing. I heard