Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

My phone was ringing.

The caller ID read “Unavailable.”

I tend not to answer calls identified as Unavailable. But sometimes Unavailable shows up because someone is calling from, say, the hospital.

“One garlic chicken,” a man’s voice is saying. “One side of salad, with the ginger-miso dressing. Also one white rice. White, not brown. This isn’t for pickup,” he says. “It’s for delivery.”

He probably has the wrong number, I figure. I mean, of course he has the wrong—

“Not the lemon chicken,” he is going on. “I don’t want the lemon. What I want—”

“OK. I know—”

“Last time, you delivered the wrong thing—”

“Lemon chicken—”

“Garlic chicken—”

“OK—”

“I know you,” he says.

“What?”

“Don’t just say ‘OK’ and then bring me the wrong order. OK, OK, OK. Don’t just say ‘OK.’ ” He starts dictating his address. I have no pencil in hand.

“OK,” I say. “I mean: all right.” I’ve lost track of whether it was the lemon chicken or the garlic he wanted. Wanting and not wanting. Which tap is hot and which is cold. I still have trouble with left and right.

“How long?”

“Thirty minutes?”

He hangs up.

Ack. Why couldn’t I admit that I wasn’t going to be bringing him any chicken at all? Now I’m wronging a hungry man. One tries not to do too many wrong things in life. But I can’t call him back — he’s Unavailable!

Just forget it.

—

Forgetting is work, though. I returned to not making spaghetti, a task to which I had added not setting out to buy yogurt. Then it struck me that getting dressed would be a good idea. It was 10:40 a.m. Early for chicken. Yes, I should and would get dressed. Unfortunately, on the issue of getting dressed I consistently find myself wishing that I were a man. I don’t mean that in an ineluctable gender-disturbance way, it’s not that; it’s that I think I would have an easier time choosing an outfit. Though having a body is problematic no matter what. Even for our dog. One summer, we thought we would do her a favor by shaving her fur, but then afterward she hung her head and was inconsolable. Poor girl. The key is to not have time to think about your body, and dogs — most dogs, anyhow — have a lot of free time. So do I, I guess. Although, I don’t feel like I have a lot of time, I feel constantly pressed for time, even though when I had a job I felt like I had plenty of time. But even then getting dressed was difficult. For a while, it was my conviction that pairing tuxedo-like pants with any of several inexpensive white T-shirts would solve the getting-dressed problem for me for at least a decade, maybe for the rest of my life. I bought the tuxedo-like pants! Two pairs. And some men’s undershirts. But it turned out that I looked even more sloppy than usual. And by sloppy I mostly just mean female, which can be OK, even great, in many circumstances, sure, but a tidy look for a female body, feminine or not feminine, is elusive and unstable. Dressing as a woman is like working with color instead of with black-and-white. Or like drawing a circle freehand. They say that Giotto got his job painting St. Peter’s based solely on the Pope’s being shown a red circle he’d painted with a single brushstroke. That’s how difficult circles are. In the seven hundred years since Giotto, probably still—

I found myself back in the kitchen, still not making spaghetti, and wearing a T-shirt. Not the one I had woken up in, but still a T-shirt that would be best described as pajamas and that I wasn’t feeling too good or masculine or flat-chested in, either. Giotto? It was 11:22 a.m. Making lemon chicken for that man would have been a better way to spend my time, I thought. Or garlic chicken. Whichever. I felt as if there were some important responsibility that I was neglecting so wholly that I couldn’t even admit to myself that it was there. Was I really taking that man’s delivery order so seriously?

At least I wasn’t eating.

I decided to not surf the Internet.

Then to not watch a television show.

Hugging my favorite throw pillow, I lay down on the sofa, and thought, Just count backward from one hundred. This is something I do that calms me down. What’s weird is that I don’t recall ever having made it to the number one. Sometimes I fall asleep before I reach one — that’s not so mysterious — but more often I just get lost. I take some sort of turn away from counting, without realizing it, and only then, far away even from whatever the turn was, do I realize I am elsewhere.

The throw pillow has matryoshka dolls on it. I started counting down. Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four…

The phone rings.

It’s Unavailable.

I hate my phone. I hate all phones.

Why should I have to deal with this hungry man’s problems, these problems that stem from a past to which I don’t belong? Not my fucking jurisdiction.

Although, admittedly, the fact that our paths are now entangled — that part kind of is my fault.

“OK?” I say, into the phone.

“I think I know where it is,” a familiar male voice says.

“It’s not even on its way yet,” I confess. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s not on its way? Are you asleep?”

I locate the voice more precisely. The voice belongs to my husband.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m here now.”

“I’m saying I think I know where it is. I think I lost it when I was in the courtyard with Monkey, tossing tennis balls for her.” Our dog’s name is Monkey. One of the reasons I was lonelier than usual was that Monkey was on a kind of dog holiday in the country, with my in-laws. “My hands were really cold. I had bought an icy water bottle.”

“OK,” I say.

“You know how it is, when your hand gets cold; your fingers shrink. So maybe that’s when the ring fell off. I’m almost sure of it. It’s supposed to rain later today and I’m worried the rain will just wash the ring right into a gutter. I’m sorry to put this on you, but would you mind taking a look around for it?”

He is talking about: a couple of weeks earlier, I had very briefly gone away, to my uncle’s funeral, and when I returned my husband was no longer wearing his wedding ring. It’s such an unimportant thing that, to be honest, I didn’t even notice he was no longer wearing it. And he hadn’t noticed, either. We’re not symbol people. We didn’t realize that his ring was gone until we were at dinner with a friend visiting from Chicago and she asked to see both of our rings. Then my husband was a little weird about it. I guess he had simultaneously known and not known. Meaning he had known. A part of him had. And had worried enough about it to pretend that it hadn’t happened. Poor guy.

“I’m not going to go look for it,” I find myself saying into the phone. It’s not really a decision, it’s more like a discovery. I’m not going to be a woman hopelessly searching for a wedding ring in a public courtyard. Even if the situation does not in fact carry the metaphorical weight it misleadingly seems to carry. Still no. I had recently seen a photograph of Susan Sontag wearing a bear costume but still with a serious expression on her face; you could see that she felt uneasy; even a titan is anxious about images that can mislead.

“Just go and even try not looking for it,” my husband says. “Just give the courtyard a little visit. Please.”

“There’s no way it’s still—”

“You really can’t do this one little thing?”

“This is my fault?”

“I’m on hour twenty-nine of my shift here.”

“I’m not doing nothing,” I say. I find I’ve neither raised nor lowered my voice, though I feel like I have done both. “You think I’m not capable, but that’s not right. You just don’t understand my position. You see me all wrong. It’s not fair, it’s not right—”