The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?
We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.
Do you remember Marti? He was the dining room supervisor. To you, he probably seemed like any other server in the dining room. But to us, the other servers, he seemed wholly exalted, God-like in the way he went about ordering our lives. He organized shift schedules and trained the newbies among us. And for me, a young girl from the middle east whose earlier personal interactions with non-relative males had been less frequent than humanity’s trips to the moon, he meant much more. I was convinced that I was in love. You see, in Farsi, you either like someone, or are madly in love with them, verbs for anything in between non-existent. Only years later, I would learn that in your language, English, there is a term for what my youthful heart felt those days. Having a crush. The phrase sounded illogical at first, how could anyone have a crush? A crush involved action, but I also remembered that at the time, my insides felt crushed by the weight of my teenage sentiments. So, I don’t go around questioning the efficacy of the English language anymore.
During my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, on the day I met you for the first time, Marti gave me more or less the following instructions about you:
“You’re going to meet George today. He is crazy particular about his drink. Take three cups, one with orange juice, one with cranberry juice, and one empty. Then at his table, pour the cranberry juice first in the empty cup halfway, then pour the orange juice slowly. Like super slowly. He likes to watch the drinks mix. Got it?”
Forgive me for saying this but the first thought that ran through my head was “wow, such first world demands.” I may have actually scoffed but if Marti saw it, he didn’t say anything. Awestruck by Marti’s nearness, soon all my other thoughts were subsumed by his Adam’s apple, his well-shaped goatee, and the easy way in which he ambled from table to table in the dining room like he had been born in that place.
We walked through the maze of the crowded tables and the buzz of dinner conversations, the three cups resting on my black plastic tray. Marti motioned for me to begin pouring your drink after he introduced me to you.
“George, meet our new server, Lily. She will mix your drink today.”
You looked relaxed in your chair like half-melted wax.
“Lily, what a pretty name! Where are you from, Lily?”
“Iran.”
After all these years, I still wonder how you sensed my foreignness just by looking at me. Usually, that question attacked me after I had opened my mouth. My thick accent convicted me of my origins, but you just knew. How?
You looked impressed after I had said Iran. Like being born in Iran counted as a personal accomplishment. Truth be told, your unusual reaction etched a soft spot in my heart for you and your particular juice drinking habits.
You sat on the opposite side of the table from where Marti and I stood. I placed the cups before you and poured in half of the cranberry juice. I felt important, sensing your concentration, like I was performing an impressive magic trick. All was going well. I could do this, no problem. But then, a moment before the whole was about to draw to a close, Marti moved a step closer, probably just to shuffle his legs after standing on them for a while. Most likely, there was nothing to it but of course, for me, at the time, there was a lot to it, because I caught a whiff of his cologne and the smell descended on me like mad lightning. I forgot where I was and what I was doing and I poured the orange juice for a beat too long and the whole drink spilled over, little pink rivers running across the white cloth, onto your lap, and the carpeted floor and the whole world might have as well ended at that very moment.
Except that it didn’t. The world kept going and I had to do something with the flames of shame burning up my insides from my toes to my cheeks. You fared no better. Your pale face suddenly burst with too much color, red, pink, orange. Your white-haired eyebrows were so deeply furrowed that I wondered how you could ever untangle them. Only Marti remained calm among the three of us. I crouched down trying, stupidly, to wipe the juice with my bare hands, the soaked dining room carpet prickling my skin. Marti crouched down with me, put his palm on mine and looked at me with a tight smile and nodded. “It’s OK. It happens.” He said.
To your credit, you stayed quiet, your changing colors the only hint of your internal turmoil. In no time, Marti had a new white cloth on the table, and he poured your drink, while I watched, biting any loose flap of skin on my lips until I eventually tasted blood.
But that was just the beginning for us, for you and me, not for Marti and me. In fact, Marti and I never got anywhere, never even got on a road, so to speak, for there to be anywhere to get to. I watched him obsessively during the next few weeks, my nighttime dreams saturated with his calm face, his deep voice. He hardly ever spoke to me outside of what was necessary and soon I began to realize that it was just me and this other guy, Pram, from Thailand whose accent rivaled mine in thickness and difficulty to understated who were outsiders of Marti’s inner circle of servers. Pram and I were put on napkin folding duty in the laundry room night after night, where we sat in absolute silence while our hands folded birds of paradise with the maroon-colored cloth napkins. Marti, meanwhile, frolicked around Esmeralda, the tall, stunning girl with lush, straight black hair and a slim nose that put the plastic surgeons in Iran to shame. She was from Bosnia, but her parents moved to the US, moved not immigrated mind you, when she was seven. What was left of her original accent now became a little jewel to top off her amazingness, meanwhile my accent loomed like a black ugly nose-mole, the ones with a single hair sticking out of them.
But as much as Marti was out of reach, you and some of the other residents were within reach, all of you curious about my home country. I felt like a shiny new thing on display. At the time, being on display enlivened me, made me feel like I mattered. As I have aged though, I must confess, I hate my foreignness more and more, precisely because it puts me on display. I am tired of being on display. I want to be left alone with the other uninteresting inventory items in the storage room, away from the prying eyes of the customers.
The dining room buzzed with life during dinner, all tables occupied, guests and their visiting families queuing in the hallway for seats to open. You never had any visitors though, did you? I can’t recall ever seeing you with any family members. I did learn to pour your drink eventually so well that you asked Marti if he could put you at a table assigned to me every day. I secretly wished that this request of yours possessed the power to make Marti jealous, now that I had become popular with some of the residents but when he gladly shrugged his shoulders up and said “sure” with a smile, I knew for certain that he didn’t feel about me the way I felt about him.
The dinner rush only allowed enough time for your simple questions. “Yes, we do have cars in Iran.” “No, we don’t ride camels to school.” “Yes, I had to cover my hair.”
But when my shift hours changed during school summer break to include the lull hours between lunch and dinner, your questions grew in complexity. Now the slow trickle of residents into the dining room allowed time for me to sit down with you and Delores, the friendly resident living right next to your room. She had also been your bridge partner for some time. To be honest, I wondered if you and her liked each other more than friends. You both came down every day after lunch, and I served you the cranberry-orange juice mixture. Delores liked her coffee black and steaming hot. You each nibbled on a raisin oatmeal cookie while we talked.
“How does it feel to be finally free in the US, Lily?”
“Are you happy that you don’t have to suffer anymore now that you live in the US?”
“Do you miss Iran?”
“What did it feel like to live under an oppressive regime?”
“Doesn’t it feel nice not to have to hide your hair?”
I have a confession, George. People still, at the doctor’s office or the grocery checkout line, still ask me these questions. I don’t have the same patience as I did before though. With you and Delores, I remember feeling flattered, like I mattered enough to be wondered about. I felt exotic. For a seventeen year old girl that was a grand feeling. But I am tired of feeling exotic. I want to belong but these same questions, asked year after year, make me wonder if regardless of all my efforts to blend in, I will always be judged as an oddity, an outsider.
I honestly cannot remember what answers I gave you and Delores at the time and if those answers were satisfactory in the least. The English words necessary to answer these questions were locked away from me at the time, but also my own emotions were tangled like a bird’s nest. I feared that picking at any of its flimsy sticks would cause the whole nest to come undone. If magically, I could see you again, and if you asked me these same questions now, I am afraid, I still don’t have satisfactory answers for either of us. Maybe some questions are just unanswerable.
Still, I liked that you cared enough to ask. Many of the other residents just wanted me to bring their mashed potatoes and cutlet veal before they got cold. As you cared, I came to care too. The real delight of those afternoons came to lie in getting to know you better George. You had worked as a journalist for the Seattle Times. You graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor’s in Journalism and Communications. You had a wife. She looked lovely, I told you when you showed me a small, black, and white photo of her one afternoon. Delores commented that your wife looked lovely too and I wondered if Delores felt a twinge of jealousy. A beautiful pearl necklace draped around your wife’s slender neck in the photo. After saving up for a few months, you had surprised your wife with the necklace as a tenth-year anniversary gift.
You had no children. At the time, I didn’t know what a complicated statement that was. I took it at face value. OK, no children. But now I wonder. Did you not want to have children? Did your wife not want children? Did you try but couldn’t have a child? Did your wife miscarry? Did you have children—did they die young?
Your wife had died ten years ago. It was obvious how much you loved her from the way your voice got quiet when you said you didn’t know how to survive without her constant care and that is why you moved into Hillside Retirement Community. I remember Delores’s green eyes held a tender look as she stared into her coffee mug. I honestly wondered if you were going to cry but then Delores put her wrinkly palm on yours and said, “I am glad you moved here George.” Your romantic comedy unfolding before my eyes. The hopeless romantic inside of me, who is still very much alive by the way, clapped internally and cheered you on. But you were hard to read. Did you like Delores?
That same summer, I moved out of my mother’s house and moved in with my grandmother. I had just turned eighteen and that felt like the right thing to do, what I thought all American teenagers did as soon as they turned eighteen. I never told you, but I didn’t, and still don’t, really like my mother. She is a real bother. But my grandmother was the opposite of my mother, all soft voices, and warm hugs. So, I rented a room from her and Mrs. Yazdi. She was my grandmother’s friend. They had met during a Gentle Water Yoga class at the local YMCA the year before. We rented a three-bedroom apartment, with cherry blossoms blooming in the courtyard of the complex. My grandmother and Mrs. Yazdi lived practically half of their day at the local YMCA, inhabiting the sauna room and frequenting the swimming classes. I went with them once a week on my day off, Sunday. I still remember their plump, cherubic red faces, pomegranate-like, as they stewed in the sauna for an hour at a time. I wondered at their stamina. I was usually out of breath after ten minutes and did swimming laps for the rest of the time. I loved jumping in the cold water after poaching in the hot sauna. The sharp contrast between the two felt as jarring as the difference between my life in Iran and in the US.
Mrs. Yazdi was a woman brimming with compliments, “What lovely cheeks you have!”, “What a beautiful watering can!”, “This is the most delicious tea I have ever tasted!” I had watched her build a friendship with my grandmother one compliment brick at a time and now they were inseparable, taking long hikes, coming back with buckets full of dandelion greens and wild blackberries. Suddenly, I had two grandmothers.
Mrs. Yazdi and my grandmother had one supreme mission in life: to find me a husband. Thousands of miles between Iran and the US had done nothing to change their ways, a girl was a girl no matter where she dwelt. There was a prime age for marriage, which apparently, I had now entered having turned eighteen, and there was a growing urgency in their quest for prince charming. They called around, took me to Persian Mehmoonies where we ate a dinner of saffron rice, and slow-cooked stews at 9pm, read poetry, danced to old Googoosh songs, and drank so many cups of tea that I was sure, after two months, that tea ran in my veins instead of blood. Prince Charming was very good at hiding, they never found him. I did eventually find a man on my own, years after my grandmother had died, but I like to think she approves of him. I think you would like him too. His name is Adam. He is a dentist. And he is an American, George! I married an American!
Your orange and cranberry drinks grew on me over time. I started making them for myself and I watched intently, like you, as the red and orange colors created something new, swirls of hues twirling around one another like the Milky Way. Is the universe all that big if I could see a galaxy in the bottom of a simple drink?
I liked the drink so much that I decided to take my grandmother out for her sixtieth birthday to Applebee’s and ordered the drink, giving the same instructions to the waiter, a young girl. She looked at me with a strange expression, like I had lost my mind. I chuckled after she left, wondering if I had had the same expression the first time I heard about your drink. My grandmother had refused to come to this restaurant initially and I had almost given up asking her, but at the last minute she acquiesced. Don’t judge her for this. She belonged to a different world, to a different time. You see, in Iran, restaurants were the sole privilege of women with hair dyed blond or fake nails. My grandmother’s nails hardly saw any polish, the fanciest color adorning her nails were the orange residue from the henna powder which she religiously applied every month to her thinning hair. My grandmother prided herself on having survived through the strength of her own arms. I watched my grandmother’s reflection in my drink as the colors mixed, seeing her small brown eyes, and the winkles. Those days I saw so many wrinkled faces at work and at home that I found it strange to look at the smooth face of a young person, so naked and exposed.
My grandmother took a sip of her drink and her face scrunched up like a used-up sponge.
“This is too sweet Lily. If you drink this every day, your teeth will rot and then no one will want to marry you.”
Turned out she was wrong about that one.
Shortly after that birthday celebration for my grandmother, I heard the news that you hadn’t been able to renew your driver’s license. Delores told me after I asked her why you hadn’t come to the dining room for a few days. You had asked the resident nurse, Alberta, to take up your meals. “He is sad about it. It’s hard to lose our independence.”
You eventually came back to the dining room and resumed your life, your more limited life, I should say. I wonder now at the thoughts that must have gone through your mind as you confined yourself to your room during those few days and the weight on the world that must have felt heavy on your chest, and I wish that I had come up to your room and checked on you.
A week after that, you asked if I’d ever been to Arby’s.
“No, why?” I told you as I wiped down the dining room table. Each wipe left a streak of shining liquid on the black, plastic, heavy-top tables, and the fluorescent light above us reflected in each streak like a half-moon.
“I want you to go with me this Sunday. I miss Arby’s. They have really good fries. You can drive my car.” Your enthusiasm for Arby’s was palpable, transcending your beige jacket and your brown leather slip-on loafers.
I’d told you a few days prior that I had just gotten my driver’s license. You looked really happy for me. And only as I walked away from your table, did the insensitiveness of what I had said dawn on me. You had lost your license and I just received mine. Your independence shrunk, mine grew. So, I was happy to take you to Arby’s, as a way of apologizing for my youthful arrogance.
We met at 10am, which I thought was too early for lunch but didn’t want to point that out. You had the same outfit on as the day you asked me to take you. You sat in the front seat of your car, and I sat in the driver’s seat of your Chevrolet Impala, the beige leather seats cold under my legs. It drizzled as we drove out of the parking lot.
You ordered a roast beef sandwich with curly fries. I ordered a chocolate milkshake. I was grateful that you didn’t lecture me about the teeth-rotting effects of sugary drinks. That was the first time I noticed the tremor in your hands, each fry shaking between your fingertips like a wiggling worm. We sat there, the two of us, amid shuffling humans and the hum of their conversations, in a silence that felt rich despite the lack of words. Or maybe it was because of the lack of words. Thinking about that visit, I can’t help but remember Saint-Exupéry’s words, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Your next request came around Christmas time. You wanted a box of Frango mint chocolates. You said you and your wife gave a box to each other every year for Christmas. You had kept the tradition going in her memory. You gave me fifty dollars for two boxes and told me to keep the change. I thought you would give a box to Delores but when I brought you the two boxes, you asked me to keep one box and to share it with my grandmother and mother. I must confess George; I was weary of their lectures about chocolate’s damaging impact on my teeth or waistline so I kept the box in my school locker and ate one every day after lunch for a month. I hope you can forgive me for that.
It was around February when I heard the sad news. You had fallen and the doctor had ordered bed rest. You could no longer come to the dining room table. I missed you and your endless questions, which is why I was delighted when Marti told me that I was to take your dinner up to your room, a job usually reserved for the resident nurse. I didn’t know how you convinced Marti to let me step away from the dining room rush, but I was grateful, even though it broke my heart when I saw your shriveled figure amidst the crumbled bed sheets and layers of blankets. You still smiled, warm as always, but I did notice that your cheeks sagged more, like a bullmastiff dog. I wanted to pat your head, or your cheeks to make you feel better, but my hands had never willingly touched a male body, even my own grandfather’s. I know it sounds ridiculous, but some rules internalized in childhood etch themselves in the memory of each muscle cell with no easy-to-access override button.
That was the first time I saw your room, your single bed, your ancient TV, your wooden writing desk, your neat stack of papers, your fancy gold-plated pen in its pen-stand, your piano right by the sole window overlooking the parking lot. And then there was the cork board. Large enough to cover an entire wall, showcasing clippings of newspaper articles, old photos, and your graduation diploma. The one thing that caught my attention on your board was a cutup article of Seattle Times titled “A Separation: a wholly engrossing Iranian tale of a couple divided.”
You must have sensed my interest in the article.
“Lily, I want you to go to that Iranian movie as soon as I can get out of this bed. There is a showing in Miracle Theater in Edmond. Your grandmother can come too.”
You had been mentioning my grandmother more often though you had never met her. Maybe from what I had told you about her, you had conjured up an image of her in your mind. I imagined you two meeting, my grandmother staring up at the light fixture in whatever room you happened to be in, massaging her aching palms, cracking her knuckles as you asked her your questions about her life in Iran. No matter how much I tried to imagine it, your meeting felt odd, like seeing a fish in a bathing suit.
But you were offering me free tickets to a movie theater and there was no universe in which I would have turned down such an offer, especially to watch a movie in my own language,where I wouldn’t feel excluded from all the inside cultural jokes that could send an audience into a laughing fit while I barely managed a fake smile.
It was around March when you finally had enough strength to venture out of your bed. My grandmother had refused your offer because for her, movie theaters sounded even more preposterous than restaurants. “Be polite Lily when you tell him that I cannot come. I don’t want him to be upset. He is a good man.” I guess even my grandmother had conjured up an image of you in her head. You two would eventually meet just not at a movie theater.
I drove your car again, this time the steering wheel feeling more familiar in my hands. You bought our tickets, and a large bucket of popcorn which you promptly handed to me as we walked inside the darkened hollows of the movie theater. Besides us, there were only a few other people scattered throughout the seats. I offered you the popcorn as the advertisements began but you pointed to your teeth and shook your head side to side. Yet another time, where my youthful ignorance of the afflictions of old age reared its ugly head.
The movie was depressing. The couple fought endlessly, one dramatic argument after another. I wondered what you would see of Iran through this movie. I wish you had seen a better movie, like The Color of Paradise, or The Children of Heaven, so at least you could see the beautiful scenery of my country, could see that we were not all depressed and locked in a struggle for life. But there was only so much that could be grasped through the peephole of a movie about a land as beautiful and ancient as my birth country.
One afternoon in the dining room, you finally asked me a question that I wondered how long you had been holding onto.
“Why did your family leave Iran?”
“Because we are Baha’is, a religious minority brutally persecuted by the Islamic regime.” This question was easy. I had memorized the answer before for our interviews with UN agencies advocating our refugee case.
You became quiet for a long moment. I excused myself and went to check on a few other tables. After you finished your meal, you came to me as I was pouring some Soda and whispered, “How do you spell Baha’i?” I told you and you left, repeating the letters to yourself as you slowly walked out. B, A, H, A, I.
The very next day you came in early, the dining room not yet open for residents. I was sorting the silverware when Marti told me you were waiting for me by the front lobby.
As I walked out of the kitchen, I saw sitting on a chair, your profile turned towards the window, starting out into the rainy afternoon. You looked like a pelican with your floppy chin skin. A dear old pelican.
I sat across from you and your eyes glinted strangely as you handed me a stack of papers. I was puzzled and read the headlines, realizing that the entire stack was printed articles about the Baha’i faith. I couldn’t help but smile at the boyish look in your eyes. You looked like a school child turning in a homework assignment he is exceptionally proud of.
“I read about your religion. It sounds peaceful. I am sorry they treated you all so badly in Iran.”
And there it was. The moment that broke something inside of my heart, destroying my previous notions about myself and others, about Iranians and Americans, about insiders and outsiders. You, with your kind eyes, sat across from me, apologizing on behalf of my government, on behalf of people who had after all been my own people, my own kind, my own race and here you were, so foreign, so different, your pale colors unheard of in my hometown. No one in Iran, not even my Muslim friends who sat silently as my religious studies teacher stood me in front of the entire class and ridiculed my faith had the courage to even acknowledge the wrong done. But you did. And for that, I am eternally grateful, George.
It was getting close to my high school graduation, the weather warming up, the sun gracing us with her presence in more frequent bursts. One Saturday before my graduation ceremony, you came in for your drink and asked me if I had a few moments to sit down with you. I did.
Your smile was tentative, flickering on and off as you took out something from the inside pocket of your rain jacket. It was a small box and an envelope. You slid them both towards my end of the table.
“This is a small gift for your graduation.”
I was utterly shocked. I had not expected any gifts. One did not receive gifts for fulfilling a duty.
Inside the small box, sat the pearl necklace identical to the one your wife had been wearing in her photo. I took it out, the pearls feeling cold and heavy.
“Is this…?”
You nodded. “I want you to have it. I think it would make Ruby happy too if you had it. Better for it to be used than to gather dust in my closet.”
“But…”
“Please.” You said with such sincerity that I felt like I was doing you a favor, not the other way around.
Inside the envelope, there was a stack of money. Lots of twenty-dollar bills. I was speechless, so much emotion concentrated in this moment of receiving such a generous and unexpected gift.
“I want you to buy a car for yourself with this money. You will need a car when you go to university.”
How could your heart hold so much kindness? I remember my face feeling wet from my own tears and you came towards me and gave me a hug that felt even more generous than the gift you had just given me. Strangely enough, I didn’t recoil though you were not a relative, your embrace should have felt wrong but instead it felt right.
“Your American dream begins now, Lily. Make the best of it.”
I had no words to express my gratitude, so I just hugged you tighter, pressing my wet face into the rubbery texture of your rain jacket.
I bought a car with the money. A white Ford Focus, a perfect companion for the next ten years of my life. Eventually the car aged to such a degree that it turned off at every intersection and I had to restart the car each time it came to a full stop. But I still couldn’t bring myself to let it go. I held onto it until, believe it or not, it was stolen when I was visiting a rough neighborhood in Tacoma. I felt bad for the poor person who had tried driving it around it. It was found two days later, abandoned blocks away, after being rendered undriveable. There was no fixing it. It had to be sent to the impound lot.
I moved to Bellingham for university, a few hours away from where you lived. The distance became an excuse for my infrequent visits spanning the interval of six months. The first time I came back for a visit, I brought my grandmother to see you.
You still lived in the same room, though I learned that Delores had died of a sudden heart attack. You recalled her death with a solemnity that made me think if all my romantic projections into your friendship with her had been just that, the hopeless imagination of a young girl who had only known love in romance novels.
You had aged, your shoulders drooped more, your bent back hunched even more, your hands shaking violently but your memory as sharp as ever. You slurped your words together but that posed no problem for me. You and I had never needed many words to communicate, after all.
My grandmother was excited to finally meet you. She didn’t say this out loud, but I saw how she combed her thinning hair, how she rubbed Vaseline into her hands, and how she tried and failed miserably to draw eyeliner on her eyelids. Her eyeliner had traveled with us from Iran, it was as dry as chalk. I had to take over the job of applying her eyeliner, but the wrinkled folds made a straight line almost impossible. So, we came to see you with crooked lines above her eyes and overly oiled hands. You sat on your bed, my grandmother in the armchair, and I on the piano bench. You ordered three orange-cranberry drinks. A young girl, who looked like a child to me, came up with the three glasses. The drinks were premixed! I was sure you would object but you remained quiet and slurped your drink with a loud sucking noise.
My grandmother sat with her hands folded neatly across her lap, her sugary drink untouched by the windowsill. She had her immigrant smile on, the wide one where she looked like a person from a dentist office advertisement. The smile more or less communicated, “I don’t know what you are saying but I want you to know I am friendly. I pose no threat.”
“What is your grandmother’s name Lily?”
“Ghodsiyeh.”
“Go..d.se? Say it again. Slowly.”
Even after three more tries, you still couldn’t pronounce her name. You abandoned the futile endeavor, moving on to other questions.
“Do you like it here in the US?” you asked her very slowly, pausing between each word. I hated it when people spoke to me that way, no matter how much I needed them to, but I could tell my grandmother appreciated your effort by the way she nodded her head and by her prompt response.
“It is very good, George. Thank you,” she said, hands still folded.
“That’s wonderful to hear. I am happy you are both free now.”
Those were the last words I ever heard you speak. Your happiness for my freedom. Shortly after that visit, I became too preoccupied with my own life, with endless classes, midterms, boys- which came in plenty, took up my imagination space, but never materialized in any real form in my life for a long while, and my new job as the coordinator of an after-school program. My work took me all over the state of Washington, your gifted car my steady companion as I drove up and down the I-5 corridor.
I don’t know how time passed so quickly but away it did and the next time I was in town a year had passed. I wanted to visit you. I had been thinking about you, promising myself that I would go one of these weekends, one of these school holidays. As I drove down from Bellingham, I called the Hillside Retirement Community front desk so they could give you a heads up about my visit.
A lady, whose voice I didn’t recognize, answered the call.
“I am happy to inform the resident of your arrival. Can I have their last name please?”
And that’s when it hit me. I didn’t know your last name. After all this time, how could I not know something as basic as your last name?
I tried telling her about you, how you were a journalist, your wife had died, you had been there for six or seven years now.
“I am sorry, but George is a very common name. I am afraid I can’t help you without knowing their last name.”
I wanted to yell at her, hauling the depth of my guilt and frustration onto her unwilling self. But instead, I said goodbye and hung up.
I drove straight to Hillside Retirement Community, rain pouring in a downward torrent, creating little lakes in the parking lot, each puddle reflecting the gray angry clouds above. I ran inside the building, introduced myself to the front desk lady. She gave the same speech, about how she couldn’t give out information for the privacy of the residents.
“Lily is that you?” I knew the voice; I’d heard its deep cadence in the recess of my dreams when I was seventeen.
“Marti!” I turned around and saw him, not looking a day older even after two years.
“Good to see you! How have you been?”
“Good! I came to visit George. This is really embarrassing but I am realizing I don’t know his last name.” I must have looked like a grinning sheep.
His face grew somber as he ran his palm behind his neck like he had discovered a nasty knot there.
“You haven’t heard? I am sorry Lily. But George died a few months ago. I know you were really close. I thought you knew.”
He was right. We had been close, George. You were my friend. How could I not know that you had died? I tried to think back. What was I doing when you died? Taking my biology exam? Accepting the promotion to a regional coordinator? Was any of it more important than you?
My hands began to tremble. Marti placed a hand on my back, gently.
“I am really sorry Lily. Want to take a seat for a bit? I can get you something to drink.”
I nodded.
Where were you buried, George? How did you die? Were you in pain? What day of the week was it? Did you die sad? Were you disappointed that I hadn’t visited?
Marti brought me three cups, one of orange juice, one of cranberry juice, and one empty. He poured the drink more carefully and slowly than I ever remembered and we both watched the swirling depths for some time in silence.
You were gone, George. Forever. Marti told me that you had been buried in Floral Hill Cemetery. Your gravestone looks serene George, I try to visit it every few months. Your gravestone calms me, your hilltop burial place has become a solace for my tired feet, and even more tired heart. I imagine you telling me, “It will all be OK, Lily.” I imagine smiling at you through my teary eyes. I imagine telling you, “Freedom is such an overrated thing, George. Isn’t it?”
Look at me, George. Look at me, now. I am supposedly free, but why am I not happy? Answer me, George. Answer me, please.
About the Author:
Pegah Ouji is a writer from Iran who writes short stories in Farsi and English. She currently lives in Oregon with her family. She is currently working on a short story collection set in various regions of Iran that highlights local traditions and customs in light of contemporary problems faced in each area.
Isele Magazine 
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