Leah Franqui - America for Beginners

Next to her, Max shifted again, throwing his hand over her breast. It was clammy with sweat. Glancing at her buzzing phone, Rebecca realized that she was late for work at the coffee shop, again, which meant she would be fired, again. She supposed she should be unhappy, but she only felt annoyed. Every job but the map store was disposable and yet she was always surprised when she discovered her employers felt the same way about her.

“Turn that off, would you?” the guy, Max, asked groggily. It was one in the afternoon. Rebecca’s phone buzzed again, a voice mail this time. She deleted it, already knowing what it said.

“Thanks.” Max coughed, and reached down to his pants, which were lying in a heap on the floor of Rebecca’s otherwise neat apartment. He took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled around his pocket for a lighter.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca didn’t mind smokers. She even had the occasional cigarette herself, when drunk or stressed or devastated or all three at once, which happened more and more these days. But no one smoked in her apartment. Not that he was asking, this near stranger, this idiot poser who claimed to want to make music but really just spent his time getting high in the Williamsburg apartment his parents had purchased for him after he graduated from the Berklee College of Music without a record deal or a clue.

The strength of Rebecca’s sudden hatred surprised her. She had enjoyed Max, his banter, his faux self-deprecation and real self-satisfaction. She even liked him in bed, finding his confidence and his rich vocabulary welcome. Now, sitting naked, blowing smoke in her face, with last evening’s drinks seeping out of his pores and sweating onto her sheets, he disgusted her.

“I have to go. I have work.” Rebecca stood and walked into the bathroom. In her studio apartment, the walk wasn’t long. Avoiding her own gaze in the mirror, she ran the shower, soaping up briskly, tempted to linger in the hopes that Max would leave and never return and that would be the end of it.

“I’m making us breakfast!” His cheerful call echoed through the apartment. Damn it, Rebecca thought. He was trying to be nice. He was trying to be the “good guy.” There had been ones like him in the past, ones who had thought they liked her for her no-strings declarations, somehow thinking they were a lure and a challenge, not statements of fact. They rushed in to claim her in some way, but this quickly moved from amusing to disturbing. They took such pride in being good, these men, in being what they assumed she must want based solely on her insistence that she didn’t.

Rebecca rushed out of the bathroom in a manufactured hurry.

“I’m late! Sorry, sorry, so sweet of you, sorry, but I have to run. Sorry!”

She pulled on clothing quickly, tying up her wet hair and hopping into jeans as Max, standing with a bowl of half-beaten eggs in his hands, looked on, concerned.

“You should eat something, Beck. It’s important.”

He had a nickname for her? Rebecca’s mouth twisted with disgust.

“No time! Sorry! Had such a good time I didn’t even remember my stupid job. Really gotta go! That smells great. Please, eat it, obviously, and let yourself out when you go. The door locks behind you, okay?”

And she was gone, closing the door on his protest. Her phone beeped.

Last night was great. Miss you already, sexy. Get some breakfast on your way.

It was perfectly constructed, a neatly packaged mix of flirt and feeling. Rebecca closed her eyes, her head pounding even harder.

Thanks, she responded. Please don’t smoke in my apartment. She turned off her phone, and, with nothing else to do, she headed north, to the map store.

Maps on St. Mark’s was a small dusty place owned and operated by its founder, Rasheed Ghazi, who first opened the store in 1980. Mr. Ghazi, as everyone, including Rebecca, now called him, had been a philosophy professor in his native Tehran before his disagreements over matters such as freedom of speech and other trifles ran him afoul of the ayatollah and he was forced to depart. In Tehran, Professor Ghazi had specialized in giving people complicated answers designed specifically to provoke more complicated questions, but now he ran a dusty tiny store selling maps in the East Village, and specialized in giving people large pieces of paper designed to tell them simply where to go. The irony was not lost on him, or Rebecca, who had learned his life story over their many long afternoons together, watching the tourists outside of the store’s one window drift by.

Mr. Ghazi referred to Iran by its older title, Persia, as the only act of rebellion left to an expat unable to return to his homeland. Not that he would have wanted to. The country he had known and loved was gone, its current incarnation bearing little resemblance to what he thought of as home. With his family either displaced throughout America or slaughtered, and unwilling to put old friends in danger by contacting them, Mr. Ghazi contented himself with the small older Persian population he could scrape together in New York. However, he did not limit himself to their numbers alone. He found he had a kind of affinity with many immigrants, especially Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian ones. They shared spices and rices, and the whispers of a destroyed but still missed home buzzed in all their ears. Mr. Ghazi felt comfortable with these men, these Pakistani cab drivers and Lebanese convenience store owners, much to the consternation of his wife, Sheedah, who felt that he was lowering himself in spending time with uneducated foreigners. Rebecca heard them arguing about it some days, for the Ghazis lived over the store. Personally she enjoyed the strange men who came to greet Mr. Ghazi and bring him rose-scented pastries and bags dripping with grease. She always got the leftovers.

Mr. Ghazi had bought his tiny apartment and the store below it twenty years ago when the East Village was still a wild no-man’s-land. Back then it had been all he and his wife could afford. Now he and Sheedah were immune to astronomical rent raises and were, in fact, sitting on a gold mine. Sheedah, whose only interest in American events was reading the local real estate news, begged him to sell so they could buy a condo and retire in suburban New Jersey, but he refused. For this, Rebecca would be eternally grateful, as the work was easy, the pay was enough, and the stability of the store was the only thing keeping her vaguely sane.

Mr. Ghazi was a creature of habit. He opened the shop each day at ten A.M. exactly. He ate lunch, a curry from a local place that delivered, along with a fruit salad (for health) and strong black coffee, every day, closing the shop from twelve thirty P.M. to one thirty P.M. to enjoy his lunch in peace. Anyone who knew him knew this. Rebecca assumed he would be surprised to see his only employee knocking tentatively on the door at one twenty-five that Friday afternoon.

She didn’t need to knock, being in possession of a key, but she did so anyway out of respect. Rebecca made her own hours but always told him what those hours would be, and she felt a twinge of guilt at not calling to tell him she was coming. After all, he barely needed her at all, even when she was scheduled to work.

Mr. Ghazi had hired Rebecca seven years ago after he had broken his ankle due to a fall reaching for an atlas from 1498 describing the geography of medieval Europe. He needed help while he healed. At twenty-one Rebecca was kind, responsible, and cheerful, and in need of part-time work. She competently ran the shop as he recuperated. Once he had fully healed, however, he couldn’t bear to fire this bright young actress, and he kept her on to assist him, to keep him company, to charm customers and browsing friends, and to give Sheedah someone to foist lamb dishes and pastries on. Sheedah, who usually hated American women with their bare arms and their loud voices, took an instant liking to Rebecca for no particular reason other than her once-mentioned interest in Persian rugs. It was done. Rebecca became a permanent fixture in the shop.