Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

The one time that Mother had dropped her preference for the oblique occurred the last time she visited. Marie-Anne had been unwell for some time. We weren’t sure it was a cortisol spike then and had been giving her a diet that might resist hypothyroidism, the other possible diagnosis. Mother — as I called her — had gone with me to Reading Terminal to help buy some foods containing iodine, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, and vitamins A, B, and D. After she made a joke about how the letters a - b - d formed the root for a West Asian word for slave , she said that she needed to discuss Marie-Anne.

“I do not want you to be offend,” she whispered.

“What is it?”

“She should not look like this,” Mother said, puffing her cheeks and jutting out her elbows. “It is not good in marriage.”

“What isn’t good?”

“Bad appearance,” Mother said. “It will kill feeling. It is known that men need attractive.”

“She’s beautiful. You remember her at the wedding.”

“She was. But even then, very big and tall.”

“She will be fine.”

“What if it takes years? What will happen to you? A man cannot be with a woman who looks off.”

“Nothing will happen to me. I love her. We will stay together.”

“What if she never deflate?”

By this time I grew angry. I wanted to make assertive exclamations. To tell Mother how upsetting it was to have this sort of skepticism cast upon our love. It reminded me of what Mrs. Quinn had done. She had also doubted me on the basis of physicality. In her case it was something I lacked. In my mother’s case it was something Marie-Anne lacked (or, rather, accumulated). I concluded that both mothers were the same. They were not comfortable verbalizing the true bases of their prejudices so they highlighted alternative shortcomings in their children.

That conversation at Reading Terminal changed our relationship. I could see, driving home that day, as we wound through the falling cherry blossoms in Fairmount, that Mother realized she had rattled me. Remorse had been writ all over her, like fur on a wolf. But I didn’t believe it was the right kind of remorse. She was aggrieved that I was upset. She was not upset with herself for her position. The recognition prompted me to adopt a posture of hermetic silence toward her, the same kind of taciturn stance that had marked her life. I maintained my silence throughout the duration of her trip.

Two weeks after she got back to Alabama, she passed away.

It was somewhere during that trip that Mother had booby-trapped my apartment.

For the first time in our marriage, Marie-Anne and I ignored each other’s birthdays. Marie-Anne gained reprieve from the apartment by going to the MimirCo offices as frequently as she could. It seemed like she was always in Virginia. Perhaps it was a prelude to her finding a place there.

Loneliness brought memories of Richard Konigsberg. He had been the one I used to get drunk with when things with Marie-Anne went sour. He had not been the biggest proponent of the institution of marriage; but when it came to Marie-Anne, he made arguments that impressed upon me the importance of stability and structure. He always said that making it in America was a multigenerational enterprise, and that it wasn’t in the cards for me to achieve both social advancement and freedom at the same time. I had to choose the former. “It will be the next generation that will get to have the benefit of doing whatever they want,” he’d said. “It’s for them that your sacrifices must happen. It’s for them that you must marry a good girl from a good, established family and stick it out.” That sacrifice was the primary reason I wanted to have children. Their existence would legitimize the effort I had put into maintaining a loving relationship in the face of the longest odds. They needed to be born so that I could tell them all that I had done for them, much the same way my parents used to tell me all that they had done in order to leave their home country and make it in America. Progeny was how a debtor became a creditor.

Valentine’s Day came and went without acknowledgment. Without Richard to mope with I reached out to Ali Ansari. When he learned that I didn’t have plans with Marie-Anne he sent me a text with red hearts in it and announced that he was going to take me out. “Something to offset the internment!”

I met him on Ben Franklin Parkway, at the beginning of the alphabetized row of flags belonging to every country in the world. The only flag not alphabetically placed was Israel, which was on the pole closest to city hall, even before Afghanistan and Albania.

Ali and I started out at Reading Terminal and ate brisket at an Amish kiosk. With drinks in hand we sat on the steps of city hall and watched the workers on the scaffolding around the building as they wiped away hundreds of years of grime.

Philadelphia, Ali Ansari said, was America’s pretty but rebellious daughter. She subjected herself to piercings and ugly makeup and tattered clothing and abstained from showering, as if there was authenticity to be found in shirking the established norms. Philly was shy inside, he said. She didn’t want people looking at her; but the shyness came from wisdom. Philly understood that when you reveal yourself, the world starts expecting you to maintain yourself. Beauty is a slavery. But now Philly was washing up. Getting her hair done. Adding highlights. It was out of character. He said she would regret her decision.

“Maybe the city will attract more people. More diversity?”

“Multiculturalism? It’s a recipe for estrangement. Everyone performing their pantomime. You just realize how different we are from one another.”

The sun hit us on the face, energizing us to move. Ali suggested a trip to Northern Liberties. He wanted to show me something weird. We took the subway under the Galleria and the jewelry shops, under Independence Hall, all the way to the riverfront, until we emerged near the Ben Franklin Bridge. The river was pepper gray. It gave the sun no surfaces to twinkle in.

We stayed on this side of the river, looking out toward Camden. I had only been to Camden once, when Marie-Anne and I had gone to do a little circumambulation of Walt Whitman’s grave. The lone man in history who had become one with America.

We soon arrived at a refurbished warehouse. I was expecting some kind of hipster convocation. What I saw instead was a roped wrestling ring surrounded by two levels of seating. There were a few stout men of Irish descent taking their seats, beers in hand, holding the fight card, placing wagers.

“The Extreme Wrestling Association of Philadelphia,” Ali Ansari said, and nudged and pushed me toward the front row. The smell of turpentine mixed with sawdust and talcum; it had an intensity that brought the warehouse to life. The steel and stone and aching bone that had been used up in its past. The night shift, with minimal light, sedate faces hammering out metal parts and metal gizmos with which America armored itself and strode forth into the inhospitable world, manifesting a destiny outward after having mastered its interior.

We waited half an hour for the seats to fill up. Most of the audience members were factory stiffs and other longtime residents from Northeast Philadelphia. The show, meanwhile, had all the ingredients of the kind of wrestling popularized by the WWF, WWE, and Vince McMahon. But there was a twist — it was much more violent. The wrestlers bled more, threw themselves from higher ladders, and tossed each other into the bleachers in order to inflict pain that would be deemed more and more believable.

We had come to see the main event, which featured a massive, bearded wrestler named Marty Martel. He had a cross tattooed on his stomach. He entered the arena to Norwegian death metal music and carried a great broadsword in his hand that he handed off to his manager, a smaller guy wearing a crown and robes; his name was Charlie Main.