Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [83]
WE BEGAN to spend more time together, but she was an Iranian girl so it was always in the presence of someone else, usually her roommate Parvine, and later, in a small apartment a half mile from campus with her mother and younger sister and ten-year-old brother. Her mother spoke very little English and wore designer clothes and tasteful jewelry, and she was shorter than Marjan but warm, so often smiling sincerely at whomever she addressed, and it was from her Marjan got her looks.
She called me “Andereh” and would invite me to sit and eat with them on the sofreh, a wine-colored Persian carpet she had her daughters unroll onto her apartment floor. She then covered that with a clean sheet and set out dishes of stewing meat and tomatoes, eggplant and rice and saffron, a yogurt dish mixed with cucumbers they would dip bread into, and I would sit on the floor with this family and listen to them speak in their language—Farsi, I later learned. Sometimes Marjan would look at me and smile and I’d feel as if I’d tripped and fallen into some exotic tale.
After dinners, I would help her little brother or sister with their homework, mainly teaching them standard rules of English I did not know I knew. Marjan’s mother would sit on the sofa with a clear glass of tea and listen to a cassette tape of Persian music, the drums and stringed instruments sounding thousands of years old, a woman or man singing long mournful notes of lovers split apart and never reunited. That’s what it sounded like to me, though I had no idea what they were singing. On the sofa Marjan would curl her feet up under her next to her mother and the two of them would talk in a fast, heated way that in America sounded like fighting, though they would smile often and laugh, sometimes glancing over at me, this new friend of the family.
I liked spending time with them. I liked how polite they were to each other, how every time one addressed the other by name, it ended with the word jahn, which means dear. So Marjan was Marjan-jahn, her mother was Maman-jahn, and I became Andereh-jahn. But if they really felt affection for you, you’d become Andereh-joon, Andre dearest, which is how they all began to address me, and I began to address them, too, for they had become dear to me and for the first time the idea of becoming some kind of gentleman bloomed inside my head, a man with manners and class and a good upbringing.
I WAS walking from Academy Hall. It was late on a weekend night and I’d just drunk a beer with Saeed. The air smelled like dead leaves and cashmere. I didn’t own a car and sometimes walked the three miles home down through Bradford Square over the Basilere Bridge and up the long hill of Main Street past the shopping plaza and GAR Park and the statue of Hannah Duston, her long iron dress, her raised hatchet, then up through Monument Square, walking by the sub shops and gas stations, their fluorescent light casting out over the sidewalk.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and started walking.
“Ryan, please. I didn’t do nothin’, Ryan. C’mon.”
In the parking lot, three men stood in the near darkness next to a sedan. One was over six feet, but he was skinny, his shoulders narrow, and now he was backing away from who I thought was his friend, but then his friend stepped forward and slapped him across the face, the tall one’s hair swinging.
“Please, Ryan.” He hunched his shoulders and took another one to the face, this one a fist, and I was running toward them, could see how much bigger this Ryan was. The air was cool, but he was wearing a T-shirt that showed his rounded shoulders and wide back and thick triceps, a lifter. He punched the tall one in the cheek, the tall one flinching and beginning to cry. “C’mon, Ryan, what did I do?”
Ryan hit him again, and now I was close enough to hear it, the dulled thud of bone under flesh on bone under