Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

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The shower went predictably. After my shower, I went right for the skirt and blouse I thought were a perfect balance of mature and still had hints of my personality. But once I put it on it was more like a combination of pretentious and someone who was not trustworthy. I started from scratch. I picked my underwear — serious underwear, but new. Car-crash undies. Then I picked footwear: dressy boots with square heels. Once you know the shoes, that narrows your options. Soon my mom was screaming for me. “It’s not a beauty pageant!” I don’t know why she has to scream, the house is not that big. I guess it doesn’t matter what I was wearing. But it does to me.

All the way in the car I wished I had skipped the tampon and went with a pad. It must have been in crooked, but at the time I thought this must be what it’s like. My mom, who is a bad driver and also incredibly opinionated about driving, was on her cell phone talking a hundred percent understandingly about someone in the hospital after an incident in the home, and then suddenly on another call, a hundred percent enthusiastically about someone’s idea for self-catering a wedding in a schoolhouse on a cliff. She’s not faking, either. Endless empathy, one person after another, all day long, like a buffet. I just wanted my madman.

Meanwhile I watched the world go by out the side window, comparing regular view versus including the mirror. I kept wondering if the world was going to look different after I had a madman, so I wanted to get a good “before” shot of it. To sum up, the world was: green, green, green, house, street, green, gas station, green, green, strip mall, green with brown, then hillier and hillier. Then, exactly as my mother was saying “schoolhouse” again, we went by this little white schoolhouse I’d never noticed before. It was as if her saying the word “schoolhouse” made it appear — I was so surprised I tried to point it out to her, but she shook her head not to interrupt, and by then she’d missed it. Or maybe it was a church.

It had its own velvet hill. It had a weathervane. A deer ate puffs of grass the mower had missed by its front steps. A motorcycle was parked nearby, tilted on its kickstand. It looked like it was thinking. The weathervane was spinning, so I couldn’t tell what it was, a horse, a whale…It didn’t seem windy out, but it’s hard to tell. Being in the car was like another planet.

I know it sounds stupid, but this was a big day for me, and everything felt like it might be important at any second.

After a few more hills, the facility rose up in the middle of nowhere. Ours was a nice facility, known to be professional and well equipped, but in some counties it could be hard, even dangerous to go, and some kids brought their whole extended families for protection. In those counties some kids ended up with a madman who died almost immediately. That’s meaningful to go through, but it’s better if you have time for a broader perspective. The building looked like a normal white country inn, but closer up you could see it went on and on down the hill. We pulled into the parking lot and my mother stopped the car by as usual bumping into the curb. Maybe three other cars were spaced out in the lot, and two beat-up vans. My mother was still working on her phone call, though she did make some eye contact with me, meaning “just a minute.” The person would never know, from her nodding and assenting noises, that she was in any way ready to get off the phone, which she never really is. It’s the empathy. She loves to empathize. Sometimes I feel bad because maybe I don’t. She dove her hand into her purse, which sat open on the seat beside her, the most crammed thing in history, and dragged out a length of crinkled toilet paper because she doesn’t believe in Kleenex. My mother was admirable — for example, trying to teach me to be the last person on earth resisting the corporate identity takeover of personhood. It made me so angry at myself when I just wanted her to go away, which is not the same as wanting her to die, although she will never understand the difference. She blew her nose using one hand and pushed the toilet paper back into the purse.

Oh my god we were still in the parking lot. When I tapped her on the shoulder she looked about to smack me so I just sat there, probably the fastest route to her hanging up anyway. But I was resenting getting into a bad mood. My phone, for instance, was on vibrate for privacy on the occasion, and the last thing I needed was to be in a bad mood making a decision like this. She kept being herself on the phone. I got angrier and angrier. Then luckily my dad pulled into the spot next to us. I jumped out of the car to meet him, and he’s such a huge dork, he never knows what to do, but then sometimes he does exactly the right thing, and this time he got out of his truck with a shopping bag with a bow stuck on it because he can’t wrap boxes, although it’s funny when he tries.

I hugged him and took the bag. “What have we here !” I said, and dug in. It was a harness for my madman, the best kind, made of real leather with quality hand-stitching and brass appointments. My mother came around the car, stuffing her phone into her purse, saying, “Poor Irene!” She was about to launch into recounting everything from the phone, and it’s true that Irene’s life is pretty shocking and worth hearing about, but all I thought was, Isn’t there a time and a place? I handed her the gift bag for her to put in the car and catch the hint. She put her hand on my head and I could see her deciding whether to say something or not. For good reason she didn’t know if expressing her opinion was the best idea when it came to getting me to feel what she wanted. Finally she just plunked my gift into the back of Dad’s truck and said, “Here we go.”

We stepped up to the giant double doors, the kind with wire netting between the panes, and I buzzed the buzzer. A plaque on a rock by the stoop read AN ATTACHMENT TO ONESELF IS THE FIRST SIGN OF MADNESS. It was riveted under an engraving of a Ship of Fools, a little hard to see but you could tell it was a really good artist. A woman’s face appeared in the window, filling it with puffy red hair, and I thought I was making it up, but she had the kind of eyes a cat has — golden with black diamond-shaped slits instead of pupils. I grabbed my dad’s hand in the midst of a flashback to The Wizard of Oz where I’m Dorothy and Oz is the doorman but you don’t know it yet. My dad held my ID up to the window. She let us in. She wrote some stuff down from my ID and then gave it back to me. She was obviously really nice, but I couldn’t look at her. She sat us in the waiting room with another family and left through another set of double doors. This family was one with a boy who must have been turning thirteen, which is when they get theirs. It’s really unfair. They should have to go when they start splooging in the night or whatever. God, boys are known for being immature in general, but this one seemed especially short, making me feel extra freakish, that everyone has their madman already and here I am with this kid with a cowlick. But I went right over and plunked down next to him and asked, “What is up with her eyes?”

He said, “It’s just a disease. My dad’s a doctor. Dad, what’s it again?”

His dad was reading a magazine about cars. “Coloboma of the iris,” he said. His mother was sitting so close to his dad that their thighs touched all the way to the knee. Her magazine was called Pet City.

I whispered to the boy, “God, if I wasn’t already crazy and she was my nurse, I think I’d go crazy.” I could tell he thought I was making light of the situation, but I wasn’t.

“She’s nice,” he said.

I said, “I know.”