Our Farsi classes were in the evening, in one of the portable classrooms at the middle school. It was the school most of us would be attending in a year or two, so it was very exciting for us Iranian kids to see it at night. You get to know a school building at night, and you start thinking that nothing too bad could happen there in the daytime. You’ve already seen it in darkness. You’d know it was just something to tell yourself, but it was nonetheless convincing.
The only other activity there on Wednesday nights was in the gym. At first we didn’t know what it was. We heard the music and thought it was something with elderly folks. Then Mani Rezai discovered that the windows on the far side of the gym were lower than the ones on our side, and we saw them: They were kids our age, white kids, and it was ballroom dancing. There was a man and a woman who were walking among the kids and teaching them how to move. It was the damnedest thing. We didn’t say a word. I didn’t know if Mani and Houman and Ghobad were thinking the same thing as me, which was, I guess Americans have a soft side too.
The nice thing about Farsi class was that you didn’t have to choose between being quiet and being tough. It wasn’t like school. The way it felt among the kids there was that everybody knew that the same person could be quiet sometimes and loud other times. It was wonderful. So when we watched the dance class, it didn’t feel like there was any need to make fun of the boys in the class because we already thought of Wednesday nights as a time to be free.
Not only that, but I knew one of them. His name was Jeff Emory and I knew him from day camp. I liked him because he was very gentle. Sometimes I would think he was too gentle, like when he would stand at the back of the court in dodgeball and not try to catch any of the balls thrown at him. But then I would remember how he was like me and didn’t join in with the boys who’d started calling each other by their last names in the second week. Gentle white boys always felt like something close to Iranian to me. They gave you something to work with at least. I didn’t care that he was afraid of catching a ball. I knew I could have a conversation with him and it wouldn’t turn into him trying to find out something he had over me.
There was another reason we didn’t make fun of those boys. We were thinking of how it would be to dance while touching girls. Our families made us dance when the Iranians got together, but our dancing didn’t have touching. That looked like a whole different thing.
It was funny how we could build a little world in that Farsi class, but all you’d have to do was step outside and see a little thing like how their dancing had touching and ours didn’t, and you’d remember how limited that little world was.
Afterwards, with my father driving home, I thought some things I was ashamed of: Even the gentle white boys like Jeff Emory knew more about how to be with girls than I did. I already knew the tough boys did. The boys who called each other by their last names were always talking about what they’d done with girls. I was already used to that. Anyway, I felt bad to think it, but it was nothing against Jeff. I still liked him and I was glad to have seen him in there.
There were evenings as the weather got warmer that we’d take a break from class at the same time that those kids would take a break from dance class, and I got to say hi to Jeff and talk with him. I wanted to ask him how come he’d never told me about his dance class because I hoped he knew I wouldn’t have made fun of him for it. I wanted him to know that maybe the other boys who were good at dodgeball would make fun of him for it, but that us Iranians knew there were ways to be quiet and tough at once.
He didn’t seem embarrassed or not embarrassed about it though. He just smiled and listened the same way he had at day camp.
One evening we were sitting on the steps of the gym, me and the Iranian boys and Jeff, and he asked us what we’d been learning in class.
We laughed. Khanoum-e Khorrami, our teacher, had a way of teaching that didn’t consider what we already knew. We were going over colors, even though we all already knew them pretty well.
“How do you say blue?” Jeff asked.
It was nice that he would ask us. I was used to white kids asking me how to say swear words in Farsi.
We told him and he asked us a few more and then he asked us how to say orange.
“Narenji,” I said.
He thought about that in his gentle way.
“It sounds a little bit like orange,” Jeff said.
“That’s because we got it from America,” Mani said. “We didn’t know that anything could be orange until Americans came and showed us.”
“Oh,” Jeff said, and smiled.
I thought he was going to bust up laughing, but he didn’t. I thought back to day camp and times that we’d been talking and I’d seen him laugh. I needed to remember that he knew how to laugh. He just didn’t have a thing to laugh about then.
Mani and Houman and Ghobad saw it too. They did what I knew they would do, what I would have done if it had been somebody other than Jeff. They kept it going.
“We didn’t even know about oranges until they came and showed us,” Ghobad said.
Jeff smiled gently. I felt heartbroken. I knew different kids understood different kinds of jokes, but it was something more.
“We only had two kinds of fruit till they showed us,” Mani said. “Apples…”
“And pomegranates,” Houman said.
They busted up laughing. Jeff just smiled.
It was awful. Even with as gentle as he looked as he listened to us, there was something very far from gentle in the way he didn’t know those guys were joking. What made it so miserable was that they were joking about Iranians and fruit, which was the one thing that Iranians spoke of and treated with great reverence and deep intimacy. It was the one thing that both my mother and father went to the grocery store for, sometimes just to be around the stuff even when we had enough at home. They would stop the car at the sight of a fruit tree, believing that American notions of private property applied to all things except fruit.
Jeff seemed to believe every word those guys said.
Maybe it is just part of his American style of gentleness, I thought. It includes an innocence and naiveté towards the larger world. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something you had to already believe about Iranians in order to believe that we wouldn’t know about orange or oranges or fruit. It wasn’t just that there was an empty space where some basic knowledge should be. There was something else in its place.
Those guys saw I wasn’t laughing and they laid off the joking. But they started up again when we said goodbye and walked back to our classroom. I tried to remember how nice Jeff had looked in the gym, a gentle boy engaged in a gentle activity.
“How could he think we wouldn’t know about orange?” Mani said.
“We could’ve told him we didn’t know about any colors in Iran,” Ghobad said. “Our lives were in black and white. He would’ve believed it.”
They laughed, not with any hate, just having a good time. I wished I could join in. I wished Jeff was somebody I didn’t know, but he had given me hope back in the summer when those other boys had started calling each other by their last names.
The one thing I knew was that in that particular time and place, with the four of us feeling like we owned the school that we were all a little nervous about someday attending, I couldn’t stop it. I had to let the Iranian boys laugh and have a good time. It felt like as close as we got to how our fathers laughed and had a good time together.
“Do you remember the man who asked you if there were highways in Iran?” I asked my father going home.
“Ha ha, yes,” he said.
He laughed.
“Highways? What are those?” he said.
He winked at me.
“Can I take my camel on the highway?”
He laughed some more.
I wanted to ask him if it made him sad too, along with being funny, but he was having too much of a good time.
It started up again next week in Farsi class. Khanoum-e Khorrami was going over the names of kitchen items, which we all already knew.
“Let’s tell Jeff we didn’t know what cups were until we got to America,” Mani said.
“Let’s tell him it’s wonderful to eat food off of plates now instead of just holding it in our hands.”
I felt like a fool for how much I’d liked Jeff back in the summer. The gentle white boys weren’t an answer to the question of what I was going to do about the rough white boys. It was too bad. It had seemed like an answer with as much potential as any.
“Forget it,” I said. “Who wants to talk to someone doing something as girly as ballroom dancing anyway?”
They looked at me. The words felt very sad and ugly coming out of my mouth. The ugliness was in knowing that when I needed to reach for them, they were there.
“I thought he was your friend,” Mani said.
“Him?” I said. “No. I know him, but he’s not my friend.”
The whole thing was miserable. I couldn’t tell those guys not to joke about cups and plates because Khanoum-e Khorrami’s classroom was the only place we could do that. And we had to find out. If there were boys who thought that we didn’t know about orange and there were grown men who thought we didn’t know about highways, then we had to find out how far this thing went. I just didn’t want them to find out through Jeff, because his face and his eyes and how he listened were still gentle through the whole thing.
“But we dance too,” Ghobad said quietly. “At those parties at the community center.”
“That’s different,” I said. “Our parents make us do it.”
“Maybe his parents make him take the dance class.”
“No,” I said. “He told me all about it at camp. He said he loves doing all those dances.”
I felt sick. I sounded like how those other boys at camp would’ve talked about Jeff if they’d known he took a dance class.
I wanted one of the Iranian boys to tell me to shut the hell up. I thought that if one of them would tell me to shut the hell up, then we could all go outside and sit on the steps with Jeff and not talk about dance class and not talk about cups and plates and orange either. We could just talk with him the way he and I had talked in the summer, just two boys talking to each other about anything they wanted and listening in a way that didn’t have to do with trying to be better than each other at all. I knew it was possible, because I could do it with the Iranian boys and I could do it with Jeff. But they were quiet and nobody told me to shut the hell up, and I knew it was because the same way you had a power in calling something girly in English, the same thing was true when you said it in Farsi, and we stayed in the classroom during our break, and through the window I saw Jeff come out and stand on the steps when the dancers took a break from their class. He looked softly around the schoolyard and then he walked back inside.
—Siamak Vossoughi (Pithead Chapel)