The Mexican Year

I have two of Nick’s business cards now. The old one is a memento from the day we met, still in its plastic baggie, shredded into a jumble of pieces by Nasrin. The new one is pristine except for his handwriting on the back. The harsh scrawl is a nearly violent collision of pen and paper. Nothing he does is slow or measured, not even writing down an address for me:

Calle Acuelta #117
Colonia Aviacion
Tijuana, B.C. 22420
Mexico

Nick’s home for the next year is a language I don’t speak, a culture where even the similar is dissimilar, a foreign country I’ve always longed to visit. I copy the address into my notebook, double-checking the spelling and numbers. “That looks right,” I say hopefully. A small envious thrill is creeping through me. At least one of us will turn the calendar into a brand new life. I’m right back where I started, trapped under the heavy suffocating blanket of my family. My same old life is too many D words, I’ve decided. This is my scribbled list so far:

• Depressing — the past, the future, and pretty much everything in between
• Doubt — what my brain does all day
• Deformed — who needs a mirror when I’ve got my aunts to remind me?
• Drain — like, I’m going down it
• Dishrag — me in a word
• Detest — how my in-laws feel about me now
• Divorced — the place I’m trying to get to

I’m ambivalent about the last word on the list:

• Drudgery — my job as a research assistant

Behind me the digital scanner works through its stack of documents at 10 pages per minute. Even with my back turned I know the machine is performing smoothly. I just listen for the hissssssssss KA-CHUNK of another page scanned, another page loaded. My job isn’t research assistant. My job is babysitting the scanner. I almost feel guilty that Nick is paying me for it. So far he’s wrong about frequent paper jams and the ongoing need to rescan pages. The feeder tray has jammed twice in two days and I’ve only rescanned a dozen pages. Mostly I just sit on the bed, one foot tucked underneath me, marinating in my disappointed apathy. Who knew digitizing an archive would be more boring than housework?

Voices are leaking down the hallway and puddling against the bedroom door. I can overhear the English and Farsi but I’m not really listening. For a while my name drifts in the conversation like flotsam. Then it becomes a refrain. Then an angry summons. “Nooshin! Before we die, Nooshin!”

I sigh and unfold myself from the bed — being careful not to tip over the scanner. My Nikes are heavy with dread as I open the door and plod down the carpeted hallway. A little slice of the living room comes into view, then a bigger slice. I adjust my t-shirt, which fits my body like I’m a clothes hanger, and do a hair-toss to hide my crooked eye.

My parents and sister are packed hip-to-hip on the floral-print couch. I’m not used to seeing Dad look this haggard. He’s turning into the Grandfather of my memories, a weary old man who seems baffled to discover himself in America. Mom’s headscarf is wound loosely around her face, revealing new wrinkles and hair streaked with gray. She wears a belted dress that accentuates the hourglass body I didn’t inherit. Between them Nasrin is rigid with tension, sitting as if all her joints have been fused. The cowl of her hijab doesn’t turn to acknowledge me.

Across from the couch are matching wingback chairs. One is occupied by my uncle-in-law Gamal, bleary and red-eyed after a late arrival last night. He wears a cheap black suit that gapes at the chest and stops halfway up his forearms. His beard is full and unkempt and reaches past his open collar. I’m surprised that a Qu’ran is splayed open on his thigh. He has memorized more of the holy book than I’ve even read.

My brother-in-law Afshar slumps in the other chair. I can’t remember if he’s the youngest or second-youngest brother in Saman’s family. Frosted hair curls out from under his stocking cap, knees protrude from the stylish holes in his cargo pants. Middle Eastern pop is drifting faintly from iPod buds, winding from a pocket up to his ears. You’d never guess that he belongs in a cave in the 8th century.

Separating the two families is the coffee table. Its surface is covered with dates, halva and chelo-kabob. The electric samovar is surrounded by five cups of tea going cold. Even divorce negotiations require a display of Iranian hospitality.

“Nooshin, this is the compromise we’ve — Nooshin!” Dad barks to get my attention. “This is the compromise we’ve reached. You will go back to Kansas City and live with your aunt-in-law Euda. Saman will be allowed to visit you whenever he wants, and you will accompany him to mosque. There will be a separation period of up to two years. If you and Saman haven’t reconciled by then, the divorce will be granted.”

The words I hear are papering over the daylight — Kansas City, two years, reconciled. Somehow I find the courage to shake my head. “No way. I’ll never do that.”

“What?” Dad tilts his stubbled chin away, presenting an ear. “What did you say?”

“Would it kill you to speak up once in a while?” Mom snaps.

Being the center of attention is intimidating, then overwhelming. I drop my gaze to the coffee table and try to speak louder. “I don’t want a stupid compromise. I want a divorce. Right now.”

People are stirring restlessly in my peripheral vision. I’ve caused a crisis — or just worsened one. Gamal pats down his beard and glances at his Qu’ran. Mom tries to pass around a plate of dried fruit. It only gets as far as Nasrin, who remains motionless, radiating hostility. Bored, Afshar takes out his iPod and thumbs for new music.

Dad rises to his slippered feet and points at me. His outstretched arm is angled slightly upward because of my height. “I brought this family to America so we could have a better life. I worked two jobs to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. I arranged a good marriage for you, with a good family. And now I give you a compromise that allows you to live separately from Saman, but still work on your marriage.” He darkens with anger, a vein standing out in his neck. “After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me? What have I done to deserve such an ungrateful daughter? What, Nooshin?”

The only person allowed to intervene is the other senior male. Gamal looks comical in his ill-fitting suit as he gets up to pacify my father. “Please calm yourself, my brother. Remember that God will judge our disputes in the end. God is forgiving and merciful.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Dad lets his arm fall, momentarily distracted. “God is forgiving and merciful. All praise be to God.”

“All praise be to God,” Gamal echoes. He steps closer to Dad, emphasizing their status as decisionmakers for the rest of us. “With your permission, Afshar and I will go back to the hotel. I won’t say anything to Saman until I speak with you. I’ll await your call tomorrow.”

It’s a thinly-veiled threat — straighten her out. Dad wastes no time, directing Mom and Nasrin to handle the goodbyes while he escorts me to the guest bedroom. We pause in the doorway, surveying what’s left of my married life. A powder blue Samsonite hardshell that’s only been half-emptied into the dresser. More clothes and some shoes in the closet. Makeup that I never use, because mascara and eyeliner and eye shadow only advertise my crooked eye. It’s the same reason I tape things to the mirror until it fills up. I already know what I look like. I don’t need to be reminded.

On the bed is my future, if you can call it that. The laptop with a UCLA security sticker, connected to the oddly quiet scanner. Its feeder tray needs a refill. I dip into a cardboard fruit box for another helping of archival documents.

Dad peers down into the fruit box. “This is your job.”

“Yeah. I get paid $9 an hour for this. Digitizing an archive from a maquiladora in Tijuana.” Then I add proudly, “Not bad for my first real job, huh?”

My pride isn’t reflected in his eyes. “We need to talk, Nooshin.”

I want to scream I ran away from Saman TWICE before you needed to talk! But of course I don’t. I just hang my head and nod.

For a while we watch the scanner do its thing — hissssssssss KA-CHUNK, again and again. I become lost in the documents materializing on the laptop’s screen. Their Spanish is pleasantly inscrutable.

Dad settles himself on a corner of the mushy bed. He looks even more brittle with his slippered feet planted wide for balance. “Well, go ahead. You start talking first. I can tell there are things you want to say.”

“Me? Nah. Not really. Although…why is everyone trying to keep us married? I don’t get it. Saman already has his green card. He doesn’t need me anymore. And that’s why he married me in the first place, right? So getting divorced doesn’t matter anymore.”

“As long as Saman refuses to grant you a divorce, his family must seek your return. Anything less would be dishonorable to their family name, even dishonorable to God.” Dad bends over to tug at his socks, which have fallen down. “Gamal and I aren’t monsters, Nooshin. We won’t force you and Saman back together. We understand the circumstances.”

“But you are forcing us back together! Maybe I’d be living with Euda, but Saman gets to visit whenever he wants. And I have to go with him to mosque. That could be daily, you know.”

“Does Saman go to mosque now? At all?”

“No,” I admit.

“Haven’t Gamal and I hit upon a brilliant compromise?” Dad grins, a rare flash of bad teeth. “If Saman doesn’t change his ways, then you can get divorced from him. It won’t matter if he consents or not, because he will have proved he isn’t a faithful Muslim. If he does go to mosque regularly, he will become a faithful Muslim again and you’ll find happiness with him.”

“That’s what you really think? I want to divorce Saman because he’s not a faithful Muslim?”

“That’s the underlying reason, whether you realize it or not. Your marriage is a blessing from God. If you husband dishonors that blessing by turning away from God, it won’t be a happy marriage.” Misreading my dismayed shock, Dad gets up to embrace me. His grasp is cold and frail. “It’s not your fault. Gamal says that Saman wasn’t like this back in Iran. He’s changed since he came to America.”

“So have I,” I murmur into Dad’s thinning hair. I slip from his arms and collapse to the floor. “None of us are the same here. Not even you.”

Overhead Dad seems to hang from my accusation, waiting for me to release him. The scanner finishes its last hissssssssss KA-CHUNK and falls silent again. The unmistakable sounds of sex begin drifting through the townhome’s common wall — a bed’s rhythmic creaking, a man’s grunts, a woman’s silence. I’m so tired of holding it together that I’m falling apart. This is me, a girl shattering into pieces. This is me this is me this is me.

Planes are things you always hear coming, like prairie tornadoes and my father in a shitty mood. Here they begin as a low turning rumble in the east, somewhere over the distant sawed-off peaks of the Tecate Mountains. Above the maquiladora sprawl of Ciudad Industrial their sounds become distinctive and cut right through this cheap shoebox of a house, wedged into the dusty blocks that separate Tijuana International Airport and the border fence. The passenger turboprops are a buzzing whine far away, a tractor pull up close. The twin-engined jets are a muddy howl until they’re directly overhead, when the Boeings sound throatier than the Airbuses. But nothing can compare to the noise of the monstrous four-engined 747s, a stupefying droning shriek that flakes paint right off the goddamn walls.

Standing outside on the scrap of front “lawn” — just pink and mint-green patio pavers — the jumbo jet looks as if it’s on a crash course instead of final approach. It barely clears the maquiladora smokestacks and powerlines, shrouding them in a cloud of milky exhaust. The massive bulk hovers closer in ear-splitting noise, its shadow rippling along the border fence. I can make out the flaps and ailerons subtly altering its silhouette, individual turbofan blades spinning, faces in the cockpit –

Then the 747 is literally on top of me. I crane my neck to watch the underbelly scrape overhead in a single sun-blotting instant, wheels so low I can almost touch their smooth rubber, each engine bigger than my truck, decals that say JET FUEL ONLY –

And then it’s past, leaving a backwash of noise and fumes and suction. I’m rocked onto my heels, holding my meshback to keep it from blowing off. “Que padrisimo!” — how fucking awesome! — I yell, so deafened I can barely hear my own voice.

Only in Mexico can you live at the end of an airport’s runway. Only in Mexico, man.

Nobody echoes me in neighborly camaraderie. The gravel road is empty in both directions — north to the rusting steel sheafs of the border fence and America behind it, and south to the intersection with the main drag. Flanking the road are ramshackle homes that were assembled, rather than built, from a mishmash of cinderblock, stucco plaster, plywood, corrugated aluminum, and blue tarping. Some are two-story with pole-mounted satellite dishes that almost interdict the air traffic. Most are a single level of working-class domesticity. All seem to be locked up with curtains drawn, their occupants returning to extended families in the Mexican interior for the Christmas holiday. Tijuana is a migrant city where 1.5 million people have eddied.

Ears still ringing, I go back inside. I’m greeted by home sweet home — bare concrete floors, plain dirt-streaked walls, windows filled with security bars. The living room’s decor is limited to the papasan chair and my TV, sitting on cardboard boxes that I haven’t unpacked yet. My sleeping bag covers the bedroom floor, since my futon “disappeared” from the U-Haul trailer while I was moving in. The bathroom door is kept shut to hold in the seeping stink.

None of that bothers me. After all, what can you expect from a $300-a-month casa de alquiler in Tijuana? What bothers me about this rental house is that nothing works. Outlets are useless things and lightbulbs dangle like taunts. I’m camping indoors, cooking on a propane stove and sleeping in a zero-degree bag and navigating by flashlight. And that’s bullshit. I may not be paying for the lap of luxury, but I’m damn sure paying for electricity.

My service calls to the electric utility are refresher lessons in south-of-the-border patience. Manana they promised me yesterday. Manana they repeated today. Tomorrow it’ll probably be manana again. Just goes to show that manana is an elastic and largely theoretical unit of time in Mexico.

At least my cellphone is working again. Today I visited the local Wal-Mart — identical to an American Wal-Mart except for the language on its displays and the currency on its price tags — and bought a cigarette lighter recharger for my rustbucket Ford Explorer. I felt like an earth-hating asshole, burning a couple gallons of fossil fuel just to resuscitate my cellphone, but what the hell. Makes it easier to nag the electric utility and keep in touch with Nooshin.

She answers on the first ring. “Does this mean you have electricity?”

“Uh, not exactly.” I decide not to admit I worsened global warming to make this call. “So how’s it going?”

“Don’t ask me that right now.” There’s an interlude of tinny echoing silence. When Nooshin’s voice comes back, it’s small and frayed. “Do you ever feel like life is something you’re doing all wrong?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. A feeling that I’m really bad at life. Worse than most people. Incompetent, even. I have it all the time lately.”

I’ve been kicking dustbunnies along the baseboards, trying to corral them into a corner. Now I flop in the papasan chair and focus on our conversation. “What happened today?”

She sighs. Evasively.

“Come on, Nooshin. Tell me.”

“But — ”

“No buts,” I interrupt, reminding her of my rules of engagement. “No standing me up. No disappearing again.”

Another pause, this time with sniffling in the background. “Nasrin, she told me…things. Things about our family. And nothing can ever be the same. When I look at her, my feelings are all different now. My feelings for Dad and Mom and my aunts.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand either.” Nooshin’s voice frays even more. “I try to get it, I really do. Like, if I was them, and I had a sister or daughter or niece as imperfect as God made me? But still, I couldn’t do what they did. Not even if it was for the good of the family.”

The good of the family. How many times have I heard that excuse for incestuous codependent circle-jerks and emotional blackmail and lies lies lies? That’s why I put 1,700 miles and one international border between me and the Roberts farmstead. I leap to my hiking boots and begin kicking dustbunnies along the baseboards again. “What did your family do to you?”

“Maybe it’s a Persian thing, I don’t know. I’m too tired to explain it.” More sniffling, and a nose-blow into kleenex. “Saman is coming out here tomorrow.”

“Saman? What for? Are you getting back with him?” The possibility is a chainsaw ripping away beneath my navel. “You’re not going back to your marriage, are you?”

“No way. I’m never going back. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted.” Nooshin shimmers with a sad decisiveness, as if amputating her past. “But we have to work out the family stuff. His family stuff, and mine.”

“Does that mean you’re getting divorced?” I ask the question warily. Her answer could lead anywhere.

“Well…” she says, making the word a debate with herself — we-lllllllllll…

“Well what?” I prod after a while, trying to neuter the long dragging silence into a pause. But it doesn’t work. Nooshin remains mute. I picture her in the shadows of the guest bedroom, hugging herself on the bed. Even in my imagination she turns away, vertebrae dotting the back of her t-shirt in a slumped arc, inhabiting a solitary maze of pain. Our magnetism seems to wane, dwindling into a torrent of hissing static, until my cellphone reports CALL WAS LOST.

Nick is running late on Wednesday afternoon. The telephone periodically rings with updates on his excruciating progress, delayed by traffic on I-5 over East LA and a pile-up at the I-5/I-405 interchange in Orange County and finally a motorcade of National Guard vehicles winding into Camp Pendleton. His frustrated voice is almost lost in the music swelling in the background — Mclusky, Velvet Revolver, Rage Against the Machine. I can picture him perfectly, jaw a clenched line of impatience, staring a hole through the windshield, cranking music that resonates with the violence in his heart. He is not a man who likes to wait.

Meanwhile I’m sitting on the living room couch, the foot tucked underneath me a dead limb, glancing out the window at the driveway, finishing Post Office by Charles Bukowski. The pages are raw with language that could be describing my pointless hamster wheel of a life, the way I was holding down my marriage like Bukowski holds down his lousy postal service job. I’m closing the novel by the time Nick finally arrives in a soundtrack of brakes and protesting springs.

My expectations die a quiet little death when he unfolds himself from the Explorer, an imposing figure who manages to look muscular even through his — sigh — baggies. He didn’t exactly dress up to meet my sister and her family. His Kangol hat is pulled low over his eyes, gangsta-style. A pale yellow front-button shirt is tucked messily into his beltless chinos. He’s wearing skateboarder Vans with fat laces, just like half the kids in the neighborhood.

I watch him sling his backback over a shoulder and retrieve a big cardboard box with KODAK printed on it, then stride up the driveway. I hobble to the front door on my still-sleeping leg, calling out “Nick’s here!” The townhome rustles into motion behind me.

“Heya. Sorry I got so fucking delayed. I hope I didn’t screw up your day.” He hovers in the doorway, smiling tightly at me. At least he shaved, if only around his panhandle sideburns and the royale beneath his bottom lip.

Farid is the first to arrive in the foyer, a lumbering swarthy bear of a man with arms outstretched. “Here, let me take that for you,” he says, wrestling the cardboard box away from Nick. “Come in, come in.” Somehow he manages to balance the box on a fat uplifted thigh and shake hands.

Standing behind is Nasrin, aloof and disapproving. Her rib-knit dress flares in all the right places and her hijab is pulled back slightly, revealing a lustrous fringe of dark hair. She makes no attempt to introduce herself to Nick or even welcome him. My niece and nephew cling shyly to her legs.

In the guest bedroom where I live Nick is all business, pulling a laptop out of his backpack and extricating a scanner from the cardboard box. The laptop is a loaner from UCLA with a threatening orange security sticker on top. He mates it to the scanner, a flatbed with a big feeder tray attached. “This puppy does about 10 pages per minute,” he tells me, nodding at the laptop screen, showing me how documents fill in from top to bottom, one after another. Then he dumps several manuals on my bed and suggests I call the UCLA IT helpdesk if I need technical assistance.

I’m a couple steps behind, wondering about those 10 pages per minute. “If the archive has 100,000 documents in it, that means I’ll be done scanning everything within a couple months, right?” I start to get caught up in the math. “10 pages per minute is, um, 600 pages per hour, and if I’m working eight hours a day — ”

“Two things to keep in mind,” Nick interrupts. “First, there’s no way you’ll average 10 pages per minute. There’ll be paper jams, you’ll have to adjust the settings and re-scan documents, crap like that. I’m guessing it’ll take more like six months to get the archive digitized.”

“And what’s the second thing?”

“There’ll be lots of other projects. Other documents to digitize, grant applications to write for me, stuff I’ll want you to research. Enough to keep you busy all year, if you want.” He pauses for emphasis. “Of course, hopefully you’ll find something better in a couple months.”

We’ve had this conversation before. Nick keeps reminding me that I’m an independent contractor. My only commitment to him is as much — or as little — of my time as I want to give. Otherwise I’m free to quit, or get another job and keep working for him on the side. A girl can’t survive on his $9 an hour, not in costly southern California.

His stoic profile is glancing around the bedroom, taking in the empty walls, the bookshelf filled with books that don’t belong to me, the open closet with only a few outfits and pairs of shoes inside. “Home sweet home, huh?”

I don’t know what to say. “I guess so.”

“It’d be cheaper if you got a digital camera, you know. Instead of wasting film on that thing.”

He’s talking about my antique Polaroid camera. It sits on the floor in a corner, on top of the photo album that contains my adult life. A photo album suddenly bulging with snapshots. More has happened to me in one month with Nick than five years with Saman.

“I like that camera,” I say in quiet defiance. I bought it at the flea market in Kansas City, an impulse purchase when I felt sorry for a mournful woman selling junky trinkets like they were pieces of her life. Nick was the reason I was at the stupid flea market in the first place, tagging along with my mother-in-law so I could find a pay phone to call him, since Saman had canceled my cellphone.

He sits down next to me on the bed, almost tipping me into him. It’s not a very good mattress. His eyes are more bloodshot than icy, the toll of his tireless preparation for Mexico.

I grope underneath the pillow for the Christmas card I’m hiding from Nasrin, a tagboard snowman decorated with scraps of sewing materials — black felt stovepipe hat, plaid shred of a scarf, orphaned buttons trickling down his front. My voice tries to run away when I offer the card to Nick. “Here. I made you something for Christmas.”

He admires the card long enough to make me blush. “Wow. This is really cool. You make this yourself? I especially like the way you did his arms, like they’re twigs — that’s pipecleaner, right?” Then he flips it open, the snowman pivoting on velvet ribbon bindings. A smirk twists his handsome face. “I’m your buddy, huh?”

I try to reach over and close the card. “You can look at the outside some more if you want.”

“Oh no. I think I’m gonna read the inside again. Because I’m your ‘buddy’.” He says it making little quotation marks with his fingers, laughing at me.

“Nick…”

“Your best bud? Or just one buddy among many?”

“At least I didn’t call you my dawg.” Now he’s got me giggling too. “Seriously, what was I supposed to call you? My hiking guide? My boss?”

The labeling dilemma plunges Nick into silence. The obvious answer — we’re friends, nothing more and nothing less — doesn’t escape his pursed lips. Eventually he considers my card again, riding up and down on his pistoning knee. “Is this why Nasrin is pissed at me? Because you’re making me Christmas cards? Or is there more to it?”

I sag inside my skin. “Shhhh, not so loud.”

He glances at me sideways, lowering his voice. “Now I understand why you always wanted to meet at McDonald’s.”

“It’s not you. It’s me. My family kind of hates me right now.”

“Kind of?” Nick snorts in grim amusement. “Why do they kind of hate you? For leaving Saman?”

The conversation is making me paranoid. I can imagine Nasrin eavesdropping through the thin walls, through the vents, hating me more with every word. I turn on the only music I have — the clock radio, since my old boombox was abandoned back in Kansas City. The hyperventilating tones of a used-car commercial seep out of the speaker.

“Don’t worry,” Nick is saying, reading the distress in my face. “You’ll get out of here soon enough. There’s nothing like a little distance when it comes to family. Trust me.”

“I hope you’re right about that.” My gaze slides into my lap, where my hands are tightening around the calf tucked underneath me.

“Hey. I forgot something in my truck. A bunch of documents that I want you to scan. Don’t worry, I already made copies in case the scanner eats them.” His weight vanishes from the bed so suddenly that I almost tip over in the opposite direction.

He fixes a steely smile in place and walks through the door. Voices go silent in the family room with his passage, then start up again. I reach over and turn off the clock radio’s noise and stare at the foot of the bed, at the laptop in sleep mode and the scanner blinking, at the Christmas card I made for Nick without even really knowing why.

I reread what I wrote:

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year! Thanks for being my buddy, Nooshin

The words are vapid. Meaningless. Everything I didn’t want them to be.

I grab a pen and start scribbling on the blank half of the card’s interior, tiny lines that squish into the snowman’s body, an accidental stream-of-consciousness poem:

In the middle of the ocean
a girl found herself weary in the waves
and drowning, maybe
a sunset guttering behind her
and the horizon an empty and darkening arc

I wake into tears
and the dream hovers in emulsion
reflecting me back to myself
a plaintive upturned face
lost behind the rise of rhythmic swells
that flare crimson in the dusk
then ebb into darkness until she appears again

I’m not afraid of the night
or the ocean that may never end
or even drowning, because we all tire and sink

I’m not afraid

I’m up and running — literally — at the buttcrack of dawn, putting a couple miles on my crosstrainers, scoping out the traffic flow and store parking lots. Koreatown is a gridlock of orgiastic consumerism and atomized families commuting back together. I’m the fastest-moving thing in sight.

I know exactly what kind of scanner to buy for digitizing the maquiladora archive. But calling around to check if retailers have it in stock is pointless. I listen to muzak loops long enough to know they’re loops. I don’t blame the clerks. Much. The customer in their face is always more important than the customer in their ear.

Half a day and a whole tank of gas later, I’ve got the goddamn scanner.

Waiting for me in the mailbox is a Christmas card from Phoebe. The kind with her employer’s logo emblazoned across the front. Straight from the heart, baby.

I kill the rest of the afternoon writing a grant application. Some foundation in south Texas I’ve never heard of. They make grants up to $500 in support of border cross-migration research, mostly in the Rio Grande corridor. I put my odds at about 2%. Slightly better than playing slots in Vegas.

Later I call my siblings to remind myself that I have some.

Wendy is out having dim sum with her eternal boyfriend. She talks about him like he’s not sitting right across the table from her. “…but I’m like, we’ve got a good thing going. Why screw it up by getting married…?”

Brian is already psycho about the impending Christmas Eve dinner with Mom and Dad, a traditional spread of lefse and Swedish meatballs and passive-aggressiveness. Meanwhile he’s got pain flaring down his left arm and shortness of breath. Cause and effect, dude.

Brian hangs up without asking if I want to speak to Mom and Dad, because he already knows I don’t.

There’s almost nothing on TV to indicate that it’s Christmas. I flip aimlessly without watching, making bluish patterns that flicker across the walls and ceiling. The effect is claustrophobic, shrinking this studio apartment even smaller. For three years I’ve been sleeping in the kitchen, dressing in the living room, eating in the bedroom.

A few minutes before midnight my cellphone beeps with a text message. r u up. It’s Nooshin. I message her back, letting her know it’s okay to call.

Her voice is an excited whisper, trying not to wake her sister’s family. “I was just trying to go to midnight mass at this Catholic church a couple blocks away, except I missed it because get this — they started midnight mass at 11 PM! Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?” Then her voice catches. “Or does midnight mass always start an hour early? Are you Catholic? Do you know?”

And I start chuckling, a little at first, then harder and harder, until I’m almost sobbing in relief, because Nooshin’s voice is a lifeline, and suddenly all I want for Christmas is a starlit conversation with her about why the hell she’s interested in midnight mass.

“What are you doing?”

I glance up at Nasrin, one hip cocked and wrinkling her brow in curiosity, taking in the craft materials scattered across the kitchen table — fabric swatches of different patterns and textures, piping and ribbon, white glue, glitter. I have a scissors in my hand, trimming a miniature stovepipe hat out of black felt. “I’m making something,” I say in bumbling evasion, willing her out of the kitchen. Leave me alone, leave me alone…

“You’re making a…snowman?” Before I can block her, she reaches down and snatches my fabric-and-tagboard creation. It falls open on ribboned hinges, revealing a blank interior. “This is a Christmas card.”

“Yeah,” I admit. “I couldn’t find any I liked at the store.”

Nasrin makes her accusation more pointed. “You’re making a Christmas card for Nick.”

I risk another glance up at her, hoping she isn’t getting that irritated look on her face. Too late. Way too late. Her cheeks are already darkening with anger, her mouth is opening to spit out words that will hurt, probably a lot, even long after she apologizes.

“Are you sleeping with him?” she snaps.

“What?” I gasp. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not stupid, you know. You go camping with the guy, you spend the night at his apartment.” Nasrin drops the snowman card like it’s diseased. “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?”

“No!”

She raises a palm to silence me, her long fake nails gleaming in a French manicure. “Don’t think you owe him something because he gave you a job. You don’t owe him anything, Nooshin. Especially not sex.”

I feel a piercing pain in my right hand and discover that I’m making a fist around the scissors handle, a tiny impotent fist. I carefully unclench my hand and put the scissors on the table. “Please, just listen to me. Nick, he’s…like, the only friend I have — ”

“And what am I?” Nasrin instantly interrupts, a harping voice in my ear. “I’m nothing to you? Is your family nothing to you?”

Our argument is long and loud enough to provoke Farid’s intervention. He meanders in from the living room, standing with his belly protruding into the kitchen, waggling his chins in disapproval. “Nasrin, come on. Just let her be.”

For a moment she’s poised on the verge of attacking him, lips starting to curl back in a tirade — probably something about how our relationship is none of his business — but then she thinks better of picking a fight with husband too. Instead she almost knocks her chair over in her haste to stomp out of the kitchen, nose in the air, giving him the look. The look I always wanted to be brave enough to give Saman. The look that promises no sex until further notice. He follows her into the living room, already apologizing.

Nick’s snowman card is lying open, splayed into six joined circles of white tagboard. I stare at the blankness. What do I write?

Suddenly I’m not even sure about Merry Christmas anymore. He hasn’t revealed anything about his religious background and beliefs, the same way I haven’t told him that I’m a poor excuse for a Muslim. For all I know he could be an atheist, or maybe even Jewish. I better stick to something safe, like Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year.

I scribble out the words in a gold glitter pen, but when I’m done they sit there like cold impersonal things. I need to close with something personal, words that let him know I really appreciate him and everything he’s doing for me.

I try a few different sentiments, writing them invisibly with my fingernail. Nothing seems right. Sincerely yours, Nooshin sounds like a business letter, and Warmest regards, Nooshin isn’t much better. Always yours, Nooshin makes me sound like I’m stalking him to the grave. And Love, Nooshin or combinations of my name and big loopy hearts are even worse, the perfect way to send a guy like Nick fleeing. But Your friend, Nooshin isn’t right either, because maybe, just maybe, we can be more than friends someday.

I wish I’d been allowed to date before I got married. If I had some experience trading notes with boys, I’d probably know exactly what to write.

Resigned to getting it wrong no matter what I do, I pick up the glitter pen and write Thanks for being my buddy, Nooshin.