The Mexican Year

Of all the bullshit myths about graduate school, this one takes the cake — the graduate coordinator is your best friend, your departmental advocate, your unflagging guide through the labyrinthine bureaucracy. What a shitty illusion to foster in the minds of grad students. Especially foreign nationals overwhelmed by the dual burdens of university policy and post-9/11 immigration crap. They desperately want to believe a beneficent paperwork-slaying ninja has got their backs.

In reality, graduate coordinators are a different manifestation of the same problem. Think public defenders — drowning in clients, devalued and underpaid, just trying to move caseload while their existence “proves” the fairness of the system. Graduate coordinators will plea-bargain the bureaucracy, not go to trial for you. Or better yet, they’ll dump some papers in your lap and tell you to go file them yourself.

This isn’t to say that graduate coordinators are useless, like some human appendix of the bureaucracy. They function as an early warning system for sick building syndrome, since they’re tethered to their desks while profs and grads breeze in and out. They can also be a handy source of do’s-and-dont’s where norms of collegiality are concerned. But mostly they know a lot of shit. It’s hard to say what portion of their headspace is dedicated to pointless crap about this form or that policy, but ask the right questions and you can always learn something useful.

That’s why I’m knocking on the door of Tammy-Sue, the graduate coordinator for my department. She’s shoehorned into one of the “small” offices as they’re euphemistically called, really just a broom closet with a sealed window on one end and a nameplated door on the other. There’s barely room for her turn sideways to welcome me. Limpid too-black hair dangles in front of her tortoiseshell glasses, and her merle turtleneck sweater seems like a bad choice given the greenhouse effect in her office. But that’s her deodorant’s problem, not mine.

“Hey Tammy-Sue.” I wedge myself into the visitor’s chair, located right behind the door. Then I drop my customary surprise gift on her desk. “Go ahead. Try to guess what I got you this time.”

She grins at me like an evil den mother, tap-tap-tapping the envelope with dangerously long fingernails. “It wouldn’t be free passes to an all-ages show? Or a lottery ticket? Is that it?”

“Bzzzt. It’s a Domino’s 2-for-1 coupon. But you have to use it by this weekend.”

“Whoo hoo! Christmas is coming early this year.” As we laugh together, I’m reminded that Tammy-Sue is painfully human, drawn to us graduate students — her brood, as she calls us — because she and her husband are still trying to conceive at fortysomething. “What kind of favor do you need, Nick?”

“Just the information kind. I’ve been poking around for additional funding, and I stumbled across this thing called a supplemental research grant. What can you tell me about it?”

“Not much, really. Supplementals are only for faculty. Graduate students don’t qualify for them.” She folds her pale hands. Easy question, easy answer. But something is bothering her. She unfolds her hands again. “That’s not an entirely true statement. Back in the 1980s we managed to award one to a grad student.”

“It went to Cecilia Nepomuceno for her dissertation research, right?”

“You have been poking around, haven’t you?” Tammy-Sue adjusts her glasses to see me better. “That was before my time, so I don’t know the details. But my understanding is that Cecilia got a supplemental to preserve and organize that abandoned archive in Ecuador. Apparently it was like a home renovation project in the rainforest. She had to hire a local work crew, rebuild the roof and floor, salvage the documents, things like that. All with the blessing of the Ecuadorian government, of course.”

“Of course,” I nod, and sweat drips off my chin. What impoverished South American country wouldn’t love a free jobs program to preserve their history? “So how did Cecilia manage to land a supplemental when it’s supposed to be impossible?”

“It was special circumstances, I’m sure. Extraordinary circumstances.”

“It was Hercules.”

“And that.” Tammy-Sue grins evilly again. Both of us know how this department works.

“What did he have to do, go to the dean? He went all the way to the dean, didn’t he? Fucking A.” Despite myself, I’m coming down with a bad case of Hercules admiration.

“I don’t know what it took. And I don’t want to know.”

“How much did Hercules get for Cecelia?”

“I have no idea. I could dig through Michelle’s files and see if I could find an amount.” Michelle was the previous graduate coordinator. Tammy-Sue inherited her files like a future generation inherits a toxic waste site. She glances tiredly at the shelves above her desk, bowed with three-ring binders and a fan spinning uselessly.

I take the hint. “Nah, that’s okay. Don’t waste your time looking. But I’m curious — did anybody else in the department have to sign off?”

“Who knows? It didn’t happen on my watch.”

“But if you had to guess?”

“If I had to guess, then no. Probably not. Assuming the UCLA back then was anything like the UCLA now, the whole thing must’ve happened outside of channels.” The words make Tammy-Sue recoil, as if somebody just told a scatological joke in front of her. Her career depends on doing things inside of channels. Following official procedures. Documenting compliance with mounds of paperwork.

I quickly replay our conversation in my mind. This is my first and probably last chance to broach the topic with her. Any information I need, I have to ask for it now. But no further questions occur to me. “This has been great, Tammy-Sue. Just what I needed to know. Thanks!” I struggle to my feet, plowing through layers of torpid heat.

She’s peering at me, her professional distance eroding into curiosity. An eyebrow rises above the rim of her glasses. “Why are you asking about — ”

“No reason,” I interrupt her, wondering if I’m standing upright yet. Nothing about my posture or locomotion feels right, as if I’m a giant shambling hotdish. I bang out the door and into the relative coolness of the hallway. How many more times will I have to endure Tammy-Sue’s office before I finally get the fuck out of UCLA?

My cellphone drowns in a sweaty palm as I call Nooshin. Or try to call, more like. A soothing female voice informs me “The number you have reached is not in service.” When I check the quickdial, the slick clamshell almost squirts out of my hand. But I called the right number. I wipe my palms on my t-shirt and try calling again. The same soothing female voice, the same canned message. What the hell?

Departing for LA I experience one of those poignant discomfiting moments with a couple, when you see them engaged in everyday life — parting for a trip, in this case — and the intimacy between them is almost unbearable, like you’re intruding on their privacy, the omnipresent camera in a reality TV show. Farid is staggering around with armloads of luggage, and Nasrin keeps asking him to drop everything so she can unzip their bulging tops and doublecheck the contents, and they keep bickering back and forth — why are you taking that if it’s only a brief visit? what are you doing with the kids while I’m gone? did you leave anything for us in the fridge? They’re just like I imagine a happily married couple to be. A little annoyed with each other, a lot in love.

(Saman and I interact like puppets pulling our own strings…)

My suitcase and all of Nasrin’s luggage are packed into the Saturn’s trunk, since Farid needs the minivan to shuttle my nephew and niece. Their bright faces riot around our hips in glee. A couple nights alone with Daddy — synonymous with watching Cartoon Network for hours on end, a steady diet of donuts and Happy Meals, staying up later than Mommy would ever allow. Kid heaven.

(”When are you going to give Saman a son?” my mother-in-law nags in Farsi…)

In the car Nasrin’s silence is screaming at me. I slouch in the passenger seat, my chin pinned to my right shoulder, feeling my weakness like a burst of nausea. There’s nothing I can do to stop her from unleashing her temper. Suddenly our relationship seems tectonic — peaceful for years, then everything falls to pieces in an upheaval. I don’t know why it has to be this way. I desperately wish it doesn’t have to be this way. Because it will take so long to heal the wounds she inflicts on me.

(Saman is angry like that too, abandoned in Kansas City with “that guy” lurking in his imagination…)

Speeding across the barren scrub of Camp Pendleton, the accusation finally boils out of her frowning mouth. “Are you going to leave your husband?” The words land on me like pent-up blows. Nasrin has been spoiling for a fight ever since I arrived in San Diego without Saman’s permission. The violence of conviction is written in her face. Her little sister is discarding her marriage like clothes that don’t fit anymore. Making the biggest mistake of her 23-year-old life. And whatever else she thinks when she looks at me and I don’t look back.

(An aunt I barely know is bent over my hand, inspecting the heirloom diamond on my finger, rasping “You married well…”)

Instead of exploding into Farsi, a volcano in the driver’s seat, Nasrin just slumps a little. Then she slumps a lot. Then she begins trembling with sobs that grow stronger and stronger, until her face is streaked with tears and her shaking hands are guiding the headlights toward the shoulder, decelerating fast, and my seatbelt tightens across my flat chest. When we finally screech to a halt, she slams the car into park and loses all self-control. Her bowed weeping is the worst kind of accusation, miserable and cutting and dire. Beyond her silhouette the highway traffic is rushing, sometimes so close we rock on invisible swells.

(In Nick’s truck The Strokes are singing I’m not drowning fast enough…)

After a while Nasrin retrieves a kleenex from her purse and leans into the rearview mirror, wiping away eyeliner like spilled ink. Her lips begin moving. Don’t I care that Saman never hits me? Have I already forgotten that I don’t have to work or go to school, only take care of my husband? Am I so ungrateful for his family’s ambition and traditional Persian ways? Anger is flooding her voice. Disdain. “Dad and Mom aren’t going to let you throw your life away,” she predicts. The words crack my defensive trance. Somewhere inside me emotions are churning, blunt blind vying shapes that blot each other out. I rest my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger door window. Orange County picks up speed, from stationary to streaking past.

(My hope can’t fill a lipstick case…)

Of all the parking lots at UCLA, this one is my favorite. A narrow strip of asphalt hidden behind a screen of lilac bushes. Six parking spots total, all squeezed against what used to be some kind of loading dock but is now just an elevated sidewalk running past the bricked-up bays. An alley overlooked by the UCLA campus map, undocumented, secret. Sometimes I encounter other furtive parkers here. We swear each other to silence with wary nods.

I emerge from a haze of lilac pollen and zigzag between giant cement planters placed to keep anybody from driving a truck bomb into North Campus. Then I’m cutting through the world-renowned Murphy Sculpture Garden, five acres of manicured lawn dotted with works in metal. Appreciative types are always gawking at the sculptures, their plaques rich with surnames like Arp and Moore and Rodin. I know I’m a philistine by comparison. To me it looks like a scrapyard strewn across a golf course.

My destination is the Research Library, a throwback to the bad old days when UCLA wasn’t swimming in alumni donations and corporate sponsorships. The four-story building doesn’t make any kind of architectural statement other than “we built this fucker cheap”. From a distance it resembles a giant slatted Lego with an inverse portico carved out. Up close it’s poured concrete and right angles. The utilitarian vibe continues inside — lots of plain wooden tables and chairs, metal shelving stuffed with books, fluorescent lights that glare off the tile. Welcome to the native habitat of the rare and endangered graduate student. I take the stairs two at a time, bounding up to the second floor and the East Asian collection.

It’s amazing how much time I can waste on the books full of ukiyo-e, the 17th-century Japanese woodblock prints of the “Floating World”, that ancient Tokyo of theaters and teahouses and brothels. I linger over the stylized depictions of then-famous actors and beautiful courtesans, the cityscapes made of pagodas and spined bridges and rain sleeting down. Those flat colorful prints are so alluring I want to step right into them. Art at its best, romanticizing a world that was mostly dire and open-sewered.

But soon it’s sayonara to the Tokugawa period and konnichiwa to the Meiji period, since I’m doing a comparative research paper on Meiji Japan and Porfirian Mexico. By any developmental metric imaginable — GDP, miles of railroad, steel output, infant mortality, you name it — both countries were equivalent at the dawn of the 20th century. But in the 21st century Japan is an economic power and Mexico is a basket case. The question we’re always asking in Latin America — what went wrong on the way to the future?

Somewhere against my spine a cellphone starts vibrating. I unlimber my backpack and grope through its guts until I find the familiar clamshell. “Yeah?”

“Hi. It’s Nooshin.” Sometimes an email in my inbox, rarely a voice in my ear. “Why are you whispering?”

“Because I’m in the library. The East Asian section. Let me get over by, uh…” I weave back and forth through the massive rows of books, trying to get a good signal.

“Is this a bad time? I can call back.”

“Christ. Hang on.” I finally get decent reception by a slit window. Its bar of sunlight is hot on my chest, making the rest of me feel cold. “Okay, that’s better. So how you doing?”

“I’m doing alright. Why are you in the East Asian section of the library if you study Mexico?”

My reflection smiles bitterly in the narrow glass. “Actually, I wanted to do my Ph.D. in East Asian history. But I can’t hack the language requirement. I took 2 years of Japanese as an undergrad. Never learned a damn thing. Meanwhile I drove down to Mexico that one summer and came home fluent in Spanish, no problemo.”

“Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.” The words seem directed at herself, not me.

“How’s Saman?”

“Oh, you know…” I can picture her glancing away, hands writhing in her lap, fretting with that gaudy diamond ring. “Do you think it’s weird that I’m married?” she suddenly asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, um…” Nooshin sighs. “I guess I don’t know what I mean.”

“You’re my friend.” I say it just to say it, a reflex to lessen her guilt, but the words come with matching emotions. I’m a little surprised, a little dismayed. I thought I knew how to guard against an attachment.

“Yeah.” Then stronger. “Yeah, we’re friends.”

I turn around to warm my back in the window’s sunlight. “Did you get that Blue Oyster Cult song I sent to your Gmail account?”

“The Godzilla mp3? I love that song!” She breaks into the refrain. “Oh no, they say he’s got to go — Go go Godzilla — Oh no, there goes Tokyo — Go go Godzilla!” A warble of laughter fills my ear. “I even played it for my nephew and niece. They were pretending to be Godzilla, stomping around the living room. Cutest thing ever.”

“So when are we getting together again?”

Her voice turns shy. “Well, that’s kinda why I’m calling. I have to see my parents in East LA. My sister is driving me up. Will you be around? Maybe we could just, um….I don’t know. Hang out for a while?”

I consider saying yes and I consider saying no, contemplating my last best chance to bail. Her voice is stoking a vulnerable queasiness in my chest, right behind my solar plexus. What I’m feeling right now is why I hooked up with Phoebe for four years, why I have acquaintances instead of friends, why I’m even more distant from my family than geography implies. And all I need to do is make that choice again.

But there’s just something about Nooshin. Something that got under my skin, into my head, through my ribcage. Cautiously, as if I’m entering a swimming pool for the first time in years, I ease myself into caring and say, “Yeah. I’ll be around.”

Nooshin
Monday
November 12, 2007

Today I dedicate to avoiding the inevitable. I leave my cellphone turned off. I spend all day people-watching at the neighborhood park. I spend all night memorizing the San Diego Union-Tribune at the local McDonald’s until it finally closes, kicking me out into the chilly moonlight. Even then I dawdle back to my sister’s townhome, arms wrapped around myself for warmth, trudging slowly. But that’s why they call it the inevitable. It always comes, this time in the form of Nasrin looming disappointedly over the kitchen table, over me and my steaming bedtime tea. She drops the phone into my lap. “It’s your husband.”

At first nothing happens when I move my lips. I have to swallow my fear and try again. “Hi Saman.”

“You are not coming home after all? Thanks, Nooshin. Thanks for telling me. I thank you.” His words turn edgewise and slice through me.

“I, I’m…”

“Sorry? It is too late for sorry. You have shamed me. I talked to your sister and brother-in-law today. I must ask them what my wife is doing — and then I hear about that guy!”

My heart stops beating. Nick. Omigod. He’s referring to Nick.

“Did you think it would be a secret from me? You are dragging my family name through the farmyard. My wife, acting like a common whore!”

“It’s not like that!” The kitchen swims in tears. I wipe my cheeks with a shirtsleeve. “I swear to you, it’s not like that.”

“You met him before this. You met him on the internet! You met him on the internet, and went out there to see him, and — ”

“No! Listen to me. Please, just listen to me.”

Light spills out of the hallway. I can hear Nasrin’s hushed tones urging a child back to bed. The light clicks off again.

“You are not saying anything,” he snarls in my ear. “You never say anything!”

“What? I’m the one who never says anything? How can you say that? You’re the one who never says anything! You never eat dinner with me and tell me about your day. You just sit in front of the TV like a turd — ”

“Turd? Tell me what that word means! What are you calling me?”

Another English word that Saman hasn’t learned yet. I rephrase my anger. “You always watch TV instead of talking to me.”

“It is all my fault? I am a horrible husband? I made you do this?” He laughs disdainfully. “I give you a roof over your head. I give you a car to drive. I give you a cash card. You do not even work — ”

“I want to work!”

“You would humiliate me like that? As if I cannot provide for you!”

For a while our voices fall silent. The long-distance hum is like an emotional current, buzzing and tangled between us. I watch the microwave clock turn from 11:37 to 11:38. “I’m sorry,” I finally whisper.

“It is too late for apologies. I am furious with you, Nooshin. Furious!” Saman exhales into the phone a couple times, trying to calm himself. When he speaks again his voice is deadly soft. “You will come home. Immediately.”

“You ran out of clean laundry. Didn’t you? And I bet there’s dirty dishes stacked to the ceiling. That’s the only reason you want me home. That’s all I am to you. A maid who puts out.”

He groans in exasperation. “The housework is your responsibility. Your responsibility! I provide for us.” A timeless quid pro quo. “That is our marriage for five years. What has changed? I do not understand what is different now. Nothing is different now!”

His words blanket me in despair. Nothing is different now. That’s the whole problem. I can’t live with nothing being different anymore.

“Nooshin! You will come home immediately!”

“You forgot my birthday again,” I murmur, blinking away tears.

“What?”

“My birthday. You forgot it again. It already came and went.”

“You know I am not good with dates! I would forget my own mother’s birthday if she did not remind me.”

“Do you remember our anniversary? How about that date?”

“Stop it.” A plea, not a command.

“I know your birthday, Saman. May 11th.” I start to shake like a car going over potholes.

He curses me in Farsi and hangs up.

The enormity of what I’ve done — what I’m still doing, what I may do — is a vast shaming guilt, something deep inside me that rots long after our argument fades and dawn bleeds through the blinds and Nasrin finds me right where she left me, at the kitchen table avoiding the inevitable.

God I hate 600-page books. Nosebreakers, we call them in academia. They’ll break your nose if you’re reading in bed and fall asleep with that slab of hardbound paper balanced on your chest. An occupational hazard of the social sciences, along with nearsightedness and diminished attractiveness to the opposite sex.

The only thing worse than a 600-page book is a 600-page book filled with fine print and tabular data instead of something interesting, like porn. Right now I’m slogging through Timothy Cardflecher’s Agrarian Trends in Hacienda Tenoteches, 1715-1810. A century of data about the operations of a large hacienda in a forgotten backwater of New Spain, as Mexico was called back then. Commercialization, price movements, productivity effects, you name it. It’s all here in excruciating detail. This is the worst drubbing my attention span has ever endured.

Normally I’d just read the introduction and conclusion and skip all the dreck in between, but I’m writing a book review. Because nobody else wanted to. Book reviews are publication credit in this publish-or-perish dystopia, which means somebody on the bottom rung of the academic food chain — a mere Ph.D. student like me — never gets a chance to review the good books. The books with pictures instead of tables. The light bedtime reading, as opposed to the nosebreakers. The good books are always snapped up by the tenured and tenure-tracked, with leftovers for the visiting faculty who are playing musical chairs with each other. But every once in a while a table scrap falls to the floor.

Sad thing is, I happen to know Professor Cardflecher. Tim. Met the dude at a conference in Miami. I believe the feminist descriptor for him is “nice guy”. We got drunk on cheap beers in the hotel bar and exuded an all-too-resistible heterosexuality for the benefit of any cute girls in pheromone radius. He was bragging about the book contract, a golden opportunity to repurpose his Ph.D. dissertation. Four years of research and writing validated. Then another two years of editing and rewriting until the text was finally acceptable to University of North Carolina Press. All for a print run of 200 copies. 200 copies. A hundred to various research libraries around the world, a hundred to Tim for mementos and doorstops and stuff.

It’s within the realm of possibility that nobody will ever read Tim’s 600-page book, just my 4-paragraph review. That should motivate me to diligence, but my reviewing style isn’t particularly diligent. Lacking the intellectual horsepower of my peers, I focus on entertainment value. I eschew the classic book review format — intro paragraph, paragraph about strengths, paragraph about weaknesses, closing paragraph — and chase from one punchline to the next. “A waste of trees” is how I dismissed a tome about Sandinista pacifists. “Mercifully short” was my reaction to a study of Mexican demographic data. “Begs the question of Argentine economic development” I complained about a history of Argentine economic development.

I don’t have any witty smackdowns for Tim’s book. Not yet, anyway. I flip through more pages. Eyes glazing over. Pulse flatlining. 30 cc’s of adrenaline for the patient, stat! But I already drank all my Diet Pepsi, made all my coffee. Now I’m down to cheap vodka. The highway to hell in a convenient plastic jug.

Out the window the afternoon is fading into angry pink tints. Traffic ebbs and flows in the street, Koreatown respiring. Somewhere a lowrider is pumping bass. The tang of diesel smoke assaults my nostrils. But everything is coming at me dimly, through a displaced temporal fog, not here and now. My head is swirling with memories — all the fun I had with Nooshin, our long sandy hike into the harsh beauty of Canyon Sin Nombre, the contentment she radiated.

A married woman. Who won’t tell me a thing about her husband. Or her family. Or even herself, really.

Memories of Nooshin. Like I don’t have enough bullshit distracting me already. I try to drink those brain cells dead, one by one.