Leah Franqui - America for Beginners

Rebecca smiled tentatively as she entered the shop, savoring the scents of old paper and dust and curry from Mr. Ghazi’s lunch. The needs reflected in the eyes of her recent bed partner were mercifully banished by Mr. Ghazi’s familiar smiling gaze, though it did hold a hint of worry.

“Do I look that bad?” Rebecca patted her still-damp hair self-consciously.

“I have never understood how you leave your home with hair still dripping. My mother would have had fits.”

Rebecca smiled as Mr. Ghazi scolded her. “So would mine.” She stepped around Mr. Ghazi and headed to the minuscule back room to put her bag down and try to do something presentable with her wet, bedraggled hair. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her eyes smudged with last night’s eye makeup, she sighed.

“I do look that bad,” she called out to him.

“These are your words, not mine.” Rebecca smiled. Her boss was a sweet man. “It was a bad night?” Rebecca was wiping off her eye makeup and almost missed the question. She paused for a moment, as she often did before responding to Mr. Ghazi’s probes into her personal life. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but Rebecca was careful with her candor, because Mr. Ghazi, while liberal in many respects, was still a Muslim immigrant from Iran, and Rebecca was never sure what would shock. It was safer to test the waters with little moments than to reveal her entire life to him. Rebecca didn’t want to lose her tentative Persian family, so she made her life fit into what she perceived to be their scope of understanding and morality.

But something about the morning, with its crushing panic, and her immediate reaction of escaping and fleeing to the map store, made her feel that if she did not tell Mr. Ghazi in some small way that she was suffocating she would start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that in front of him.

“It was a bad night.” She finished washing her face and stepped back into the main room of the store, where Mr. Ghazi’s inquiring eyes made tears spring from her own. Damn, she thought, there I go.

“What is it, Rebecca? What makes you so sad?” Mr. Ghazi gestured for Rebecca to sit, keeping a formal distance. He had always been awkward around emotional females, his wife included, but he considered it an honor that Rebecca had admitted her pain, which she so often kept tucked away like a handkerchief. Watching her in the seven years she had been in his employ, he had seen her early enthusiasm become a hardened fear, and he worried for her.

Rebecca struggled to contain herself, but it felt so futile. What was the point of holding herself back? What was she containing her feelings for, anyway? A politeness? A vague social expectation that she wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all? The way everyone kept saying that they were fine until the point where the word lost all meaning? She wasn’t fine. She hadn’t been for years.

“There was this boy—” she started.

“Did someone hurt you?” Mr. Ghazi looked both disturbed and in some way relieved. If it was a love affair gone wrong, this was at least familiar territory. There were platitudes he could express, soothing words he could say. He waited.

“He’s not important. I just feel like I am slipping. It’s harder than I thought anything could be and I’m so tired. I need someone to give me the chance. I hate that. Why can’t I choose, instead of wanting to be chosen?”

She felt pathetic. He looked at her with pity and she wanted to hide.

“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.” Rebecca’s voice pierced the air as she apologized for herself, brushing aside her feelings in a bid to return to normalcy. She should have claimed it was women’s troubles and let it be.

“You are not stupid, Rebecca. But if this is your life, you must change it. If this is the world you live in, one that confronts you with a feeling that you are not worth being chosen, then it is a stupid world.”

He didn’t understand. He was kind, but he didn’t understand anything.

“Unless I can change the things I want, how can I change the way my life is?”

Mr. Ghazi had no answers. Maybe that was the cure for pain. It was to stop wanting anything at all.

Ronnie woke up to the sound of a buzzing phone. He often woke up this way. His life was ruled by buzzing. He received texts from tour guides reporting on the nature of their tours and complaining about the Indian food in Iowa, a state where it was impossible to find decent paneer, and clients alternately praising him and berating him for some new trial or tribulation, and sometimes even his mother informing him of the latest developments in her soap operas, which Ronnie followed religiously without ever seeing a single minute of any of them.

It was five A.M. in Queens, which meant it was two P.M. in Kolkata, just around the time that most people, people of means, at least, took their tea. Ronnie sighed and glanced at the screen, where his suspicions about his caller were confirmed. It was Mrs. Sengupta making another bid to contact him and check, he assumed, on the progress of her tour arrangements.

Ronnie usually placated his clients with a mixture of obsequious flattery, gentle intimidation, and well-placed xenophobic warnings, a cocktail that always left them putty in his soft ring-bedecked hands. But none of those tactics seemed to be working on Mrs. Sengupta, not his soothing tones nor his invocations to trust in fate, destiny, the stars, and his own authority as a World-Class Number One Best Tour Guide. Didn’t she know that he was a busy man?

In the twin bed three feet from Ronnie’s own, Anita snored and snorted in her sleep as if she were laughing at him. Ronnie looked over at her with disgust. Ronnie had felt deeply betrayed by Anita’s refusal to cooperate with his brilliant plan. He should have known better than to ask her. Ronnie watched Anita shift in her sleep, marveling at her ability to fall asleep anywhere and sleep through anything. Here he was tearing what was left of his hair out, tormented by clients, and she simply turned over, enjoying her dreams, in the bed he had paid for, in the apartment he had bought.

He leaned back on his pillow and, unable to sleep, for he was not a good sleeper under the best of conditions, played a game in his mind of counting objects. This often helped him sleep, at least briefly. He had heard that the American equivalent of this was called counting sheep, but attempts to count lamb-based dishes had made him hungry, not tired. It was no use. Once the buzzing began he was up.

Anita slept on. Eventually, if they ever wanted to start a family, as his mother and hers constantly urged them to, he would probably be the one waking up at the baby’s screams as his wife dreamed blissfully. That, more than anything else, held him back from suggesting they start trying. The business was his child, and it was already keeping him up. Why add something else to disturb him?

Walking from the subway later that morning, Ronnie decided that instead of sending a lackey to fetch his monthly supply of maps, which he kept in large supplies for all his guides and clients, he would fetch the things himself. Thinking of lamb, he had hopes that the trip to Manhattan and subsequent diverse lunch options it would entail might clear his head and give him an idea for Mrs. Sengupta’s companion.

He had asked each of his guides for options, but the women they presented, sisters and cousins from their own families, were all either too traditional or too wild for his liking. This companion must be someone who could aid Mrs. Sengupta in her trip, a respectful, intelligent, and interesting person without a personal agenda or an interest in flirting with Satya Roy, the guide. Green as the boy was, this was an easy job in theory, with only one guest to corral and a companion to aid him. Ronnie thought this would be the perfect introduction for Satya to cross-country guiding, a task he wanted to train Satya to do. It was simply unfortunate that as the boy had worked for Ronnie and gotten large helpings of good food and long walks shadowing guides for day-trippers, his emaciated form had started to fill out and Ronnie now had a rather handsome guide on his hands, despite his oily skin and crooked smile. The boy had inspired breathy sighs on the part of the interviewees for companion-hood, good Bangladeshi girls who were supposed to be the perfect companions for Mrs. Sengupta. Instead, their love-struck giggles ruled them all out instantly. If only they had seen him when he had just arrived, thought Ronnie ruefully, all this nonsense could have been avoided.