The next day, I’m sitting at an outdoor table at the Butcher’s Daughter, a health-food hub in Nolita, overlooking a quiet Kenmare Street. It’s close to 50 degrees, which means the only table for one without a wait inevitably brought me outdoors. But I decided to go through with it, because the people watching at Butcher’s is truly phenomenal, even if the healthy-ish food isn’t. It’s full of well-to-do vegans and sustainability Soho-ists who spit in the face of single-use plastic but have no problem taking a private jet to Paris. I’m bundled up in my warmest faux fur and typing quickly on my laptop keyboard. It’s around 4:00 p.m., and I’ve finally settled in for a late afternoon of Saturday brunch and blogging.
Normally I like to get an early start on my B&B, but I got home super late after last night’s, ahem, activities and let myself sleep in way past noon. I feel like I’m in high school again, illegally drunk on attention, sneaking around an eternally absent Leila. I’m trying so hard to focus on scheduling my outfit posts for the upcoming week, but my mind is wandering as far as Jersey. I keep replaying yesterday’s tryst in the beauty closet over and over.
The thing about Cal is I’m extremely attracted to him, and not just because of his crater-sized dimples or freakishly Hulk-like biceps. I’m drawn to his ambition, to the fact he truly does seem to have an answer to everything. I admire his hustle—I love that he’s passionate about making the world a better place, that he aims to not only give a voice to his community but improve it. They’re qualities I hope someone sees in me one day.
Which takes me to my next point: I don’t know if I like the person I am when I’m with Cal. The way he sees right through me is scary; it’s as if he’s bypassed Noora and gone straight to Shabnam. But I don’t want to believe that person is my true essence. That, if given the opportunity, I would step on others’ toes until they bleed in order to get what I want. Whatever darkness apparently beckons to him from within me, I want no part in it. I am a good person. I want to believe that.
And I know I can’t trust Cal. After fucking for approximately four point five seconds and giving him a cute lesson on the female anatomy, I asked him once again if he’d consider protecting my secret and not telling Loretta what he now knows. Then he said, with his semen still inside of me (FYI, I have an IUD, but reminder to self to ask him the last time he was tested):
“I don’t know yet.”
Excuse me?
He doesn’t know if he’s going to betray my confidence by telling my boss a secret that could ruin my career and possibly my life? Once those words were out in the open, we lay there, panting in the dark, naked and surrounded by fallen beauty products and empty packaging. The things we left unsaid seemed to suck the remaining air out of the windowless vacuum of a room. Eventually, I sat up and began getting dressed. Cal watched me closely, his eyes never leaving my collarbones.
“Can you help clean this up?” I said, gesturing to all the goods scattered around the carpeted floor.
“Hey,” he responded playfully. “You clean up your own mess.”
Keeping my frustration to myself, I hastily started grabbing lipsticks and empty bottles off the floor and throwing them into nearby bins.
Finally coming to a stand, he reached over and placed his hand on my shoulder. I immediately flinched. We just stood there, two outlines in an unlit room, surrounded by negative space.
“I’ll text you,” I said, before grabbing the remainder of my things and booking it out of there.
I rode the six train home, a little later than I’d like. There was a woman wearing large, thin hoop earrings, crying into the phone in a language I didn’t recognize, seated on my left. A mysterious substance with an even more intriguing smell lined the corner floor. I closed my eyes, held my nostrils, and imagined I was somewhere else. Maybe far, far way, with my parents in Dubai. And my maman was cooking khoresht, a single serving just for me.
You know this doesn’t mean anything, right?
By virtue of being a woman in the world, I’ve learned not to equate sexual intimacy with emotional intimacy. I don’t think that just because a person from the opposite sex wants my body it means they’ll also value my thoughts and opinions. And they shouldn’t have to—I’ve learned from Leila that as long as two people are on the same page before peeling back the layers, there’s nothing wrong with casually getting serious. But something about the way Cal chose to communicate how he felt to me, the nonchalant way he painted his words, felt personally cutting. I begin to itch my arms just thinking about it.
Maybe it’s because what he said resonates in every other area of my life too. Do I mean anything to Loretta? To Jade? Even Saffron is benefiting from their “friendship” with me. Is there anybody in my life who likes me for who I am, whoever I am, not because of what I can do for them?
I woke up this morning (okay, fine—it was the afternoon) to a single message from Loretta. My heart sank, but at least my breathing was stable. I knew this was coming.
Loretta (12:13 PM): What were you able to find out?
For a split second, I considered being honest with her. Coming clean about the whole thing and hoping she’d just forgive me for picking the wrong side. Maybe Jade would step in defend me. I could get promoted, become an actual editor, work remotely whenever I want. All of Vinyl would respect me. Superman would give me a high five every time I walked through the door.
Fat fucking chance.
Noora (12:14 PM): No luck. IP address encrypted. Totally in the dark.
Okay, so I lied. But she didn’t really leave me a choice. A few seconds later, my phone loudly pinged. I looked around the apartment to see if the sound woke up Leila, but of course, she slept over at Willow’s. Fantastic.
Loretta (12:14 PM): That is NOT what I needed to hear, my dear. This is very bad news.
I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to find out. I’d rather spiral in a public place, all by my myself, surrounded by influencers with no real jobs who somehow make ten times more money in a day than I do in a year.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch the woman sitting on my right, a certified pick-me girl, tear apart her avocado toast with a fork and disdain. She attempts to cut it up into sections—never once looking away from her rugged, bearded date—with both her fork and her knife. It’s as if she thinks she’s about to gnaw on a filet of steak. Slowly, she stabs the smallest piece, raises it to her lips, and gives it a good sniff. She hesitantly takes a bite, chewing it like a Starburst that might magically change flavors halfway through consumption. When she thinks he’s not looking, she spits it out into her napkin and places it beneath her plate.
I sift through all my work for the day within the next hour—preparing my posts for the next week, penning the prose that goes alongside it. I write what I believe to be a funny yet harrowing rendition of what can only be described as a performance review of ten swanky old Manhattan restaurants. But I use political language, as if they were physically debating each other on the DNC stage. When I’m done, I can’t tell if what I’ve created is pure satire or pure garbage. But at the very least, it’s on the page. Ever since writing my covert, critically acclaimed debut column, I’ve been feeling a little bit creatively stagnant.
“Actually, I do consider myself a feminist,” Avo Chick’s lumberjack manages to say. “Don’t forget I voted for Hillary. It’s not my fault the rest of Pennsylvania didn’t.”
When I hear those words fly out of his mouth, I take it as my cue that it’s time to go. I pay the check, gather my belongings, and retreat to Leila’s.
But first, I make a pit stop at Petrosino Square. It’s a little past 6:00 p.m. now, which means the sky has somehow gotten darker than my thoughts. I take a seat on my favorite park bench, directly facing trendy eatery Jack’s Wife Freda. I have made many important calls on this bench. It’s where I placed a cowardly call to my high school boyfriend on Indigenous People’s Day (then referred to as Columbus Day) in order to tell him I needed to take a pause from our relationship, which then turned into a break, which somehow transformed into our breakup. It’s the same bench I sat on when I received my NYU acceptance email, then immediately called Leila, who was at college at the time, with the good news. “BIIIIIIIITCH,” her shrill voice had screamed into the phone.
I miss her so much.
This evening, I’m cuddling up alone on this tiny park bench—next to an adorable Pomeranian and an equally cute little old lady reading the Times with a flashlight—in order to call my parents. They’ll be just waking up on their tiny slice of the universe, opening their eyes to the possibility of a new day or some other heinously clichéd bullshit. Here’s what no one ever tells you about adulthood: The older you get, the more comforting corny can be.
Maman answers on the first ring, as she always does. I can hear her calling Baba to come to the phone in the background.
“I thought you had forgotten about us,” she scolds me, her accent thick, caught deep in her throat.
“I know and I’m sorry,” I admit. “Work has been really busy, but I know that’s no excuse.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. My family is a lot of things, but quiet isn’t normally one of them.
“We heard you did something to upset your sister?” my father asks.
His accent weighs heavily on every syllable, causing him to add an eh sound before every letter S and turn his Ws into Vs. Something becomes ehsomething. Sister? Ehsister. EhStarbucks, and so on and so forth. It used to embarrass me, his accent. His voice was just another reminder of our otherness, a dead giveaway that we were foreigners. That was a long time ago. Now, his Fenglish (a Farsi-English hybrid) just makes me realize how much I miss him.
Oh, wait a second. Leila narked on me. Uncool.
“We just had a little argument, that’s all,” I lie. “Also, about work. It’ll be fine, she just needs to get over herself.”
“As long as it’s resolved by Thanksgiving,” Maman says. “I know you girls love your little tradition.”
I gulp—in all the chaos, I totally forgot that Thanksgiving, is like, a week and a half away. “I promise.” I’m not sure whether or not I mean it.
“We have to go—Saeed is coming over for chayee in an hour or so.”
I can hear my father start walking away from the phone, checked out, his mind moving on to his next task of the day. My mother remains on the line.
“What’s wrong, jeegaram? I can hear it on your voice. You are not yourself.”
I feel myself start to sniffle a bit. I will myself to cry, just for the sake of feeling the release. But the tears don’t come.
“Nothing, just work,” I tell her for the third time. She sighs. My mother gave up prying for details years ago, after an accidental encounter with my diary sent her running for the hills—and to CVS to buy several dozen pregnancy tests.
“Well, promise me you’ll apologize to Leila,” she says. “Joonie joonam, family is all we have got in this world.”
With that, she hangs up the phone. I stay seated on the bench, giving my tear ducts one last chance to do their thing. After a few seconds of squeezing my eyes shut and thinking about dead puppies, I give up and walk home defeated.
As I tread the stairs of Leila’s walk-up, I notice that even though she’s not present, her scent is. Her aroma lingers throughout our tiny shared apartment, spreading like venereal disease. She’s clearly coming by whenever I’m out of the house in order to change her clothes and grab necessities. I even notice that this time, she had a spare minute to wipe down the shower and clean my hair out of the drain.
I take out my phone and turn off the Find My Friends feature then stop sharing my location on Snapchat Maps. I’m not giving her the satisfaction of being able to see me when I can’t see her.
When I was younger, staying home alone on a Saturday night would give me a lot of anxiety. I’d think about all the rooms in all the apartments in all the buildings in New York City, lit up by the laughter and a promise that only other people can fulfill. I’d pity myself for having no one, loved by no one but my mother. Back then, the only sources of comfort I had were reading, writing, and watching Saturday Night Live.
For my family, SNL was the equivalent of Sunday football. We’d gather around the TV as if we were a cult and the cable box, our prophet. My parents were both foreigners who, at best, spoke muddled English. But they still laughed at all the right jokes and booed all the right people. SNL made us feel like we belonged and, as a consequence, made me feel like I fit in.
Do you know that inexplicable feeling of body-radiating warmth that can only come from laughing so hard for so long with another person that you start to wonder if, before this very moment, you were ever truly happy?
Only two outlets have provided me with that kind of belly-aching completeness: SNL and Leila. So, tonight, I don’t text Cal after one too many glasses of wine and invite him to come over. Nor do I call Saffron and admit I have no one to spend my weekends with. Instead, I snuggle up alone and allow the words live from New York, it’s Saturday night to move through me like a bad piece of sushi.
The host is none other than Donald Glover. The musical guest? Childish Gambino. I google to see if Donald Glover is a Leo. He’s not; he’s a Libra. Damn.
The next hour and a half go by quickly, like a Jet Blue flight filled with zero turbulence and only the hottest new releases. I laugh at the political cold open (Kate McKinnon is chef’s kiss), talk back a little bit during Weekend Update, and find myself dozing off after the second musical number. By the time I wake up, the entire cast is on the main stage, hugging, and taking their final bows. I smile widely along with them, as if we’re all together at 30 Rock, sweating under the spotlight and owing Lorne Michaels our careers.
But then the screen goes black before switching over to NBC’s next segment on the Hulu app: the late late-night show with SNL alum Seth Meyers. I keep my eyes locked on the TV, too lazy to get up and grab the remote to switch it off.
Seth starts with his usual spiel by recapping the week in news, entertainment, yada yada. I begin yawning again, absentmindedly feeling my face and trying to remember if I put on any makeup this morning that I should probably take off.
Then I hear a familiar shrieking voice right in my very apartment. I literally jump off the pull-out couch.
“I am now joined by Loretta James, editor in chief of Vinyl, millennials’ favorite fashion magazine,” Seth announces.
“Culture magazine,” I correct him.
I rub my eyes, closing and opening them again, in disbelief of what’s happening in front of me. Loretta saunters onto the stage, dressed sharply in a tailored red men’s suit, which matches her hair to perfection, and her signature boots.
“What the actual fuck?” I ask my empty apartment.
Loretta’s arrival is met with applause from the studio audience. I reluctantly applaud along with them. Loretta smiles and does a cheeky bow before taking a seat on the couch opposite Seth’s news desk.
“Now, Loretta, Vinyl is infamous for publishing some prolific work over the years,” Seth continues. “But your recent Beauty Politics column debuted just last week and caused quite an uproar, the likes of which we haven’t seen since that exposé on music streaming rights. In fact, within hours of the article going live, #ReduceHairiffs was trending on Twitter.”
Loretta produces a girlish giggle, as if she has even the slightest clue what trending means. I’m worried my eyes are going to get stuck staring at back of my head.
“Well, Seth, what can I say? At Vinyl, we don’t just care about the ‘what’ of the story. We care about the ‘why.’ Why does this matter? And why should readers care?”
This time, the studio audience whistles, and Seth joins in with a slow clap. I grit my teeth.
“And this mysterious writer? Where on earth did you find C. Bates? Isn’t this her first time being published? Or his? Or their?”
Loretta let’s out a hardy har har, because pronouns are so hilarious. So this was why she was willing to go above and beyond to identify C. Bates.
My arms feel like they’re on fire. I give them a good scratch.
“Well, I can’t reveal my sources,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes. “But let’s just say this one hit very, very close to home.”
Seth and I both sit up in our seats.
“Are you saying the mystery writer in question might even, in fact, be sitting here in this room with me tonight?” he asks. I itch faster and harder.
“I’m not not saying that, Seth.”