Darya walked to the Queens Public Library under streetlamps festooned with banners for an upcoming neighborhood carnival. She stopped and hesitated in front of the redbrick building. Against her better judgment, and because Parviz was absolutely convinced that improving her Excel skills was her key to happiness, she’d come. But in truth, she’d come because, of course, Parviz had woken up early and mailed in the registration with full payment before Darya could get rid of the form. When she had called a few days later to cancel her registration, they’d said the fee was nonrefundable and now Darya needed to talk her way, face-to-face, into a refund.
Going down the musty steps caused a sharp twinge in her right knee, which probably meant the beginning stages of some form of arthritis. Lovely. Middle age and all its new aches and pains. Darya followed signs on yellow paper featuring a hand-drawn arrow and the words “Miranda Katilla’s Spreading Spreadsheet Specs!” until she arrived outside a room with an opaque glass door. She turned the knob and walked in. Was she late? Because the teacher was already talking and people were already seated on folding metal chairs, taking notes as if it mattered. Darn it. Now she couldn’t talk privately to the teacher till after the class was over. Darn it, darn it. It was too late to go back. She’d already walked in, and all eyes were on her and the teacher motioned for Darya to sit with a huge, welcoming smile. Darn. It.
Miranda Katilla was the kind of chipper that came about from overly caffeinated bad coffee. Darya eyed the Styrofoam cup in Miranda’s hand. How rude. People here always ate and drank in front of others, when the others weren’t eating and drinking, which in Persian culture was considered beyond uncouth. She hated herself for being so judgmental, but she’d lived long enough and had seen enough to know a few things. For example, already Darya knew that Miranda was the kind of woman who never ironed anything.
Miranda Katilla was talking about the importance of spreadsheets in everyday life. “Not just for work. Not just for accounting, per se. But for everything. Your groceries. Your home budget. A way of measuring and keeping a record. Documenting. Adding up.”
Darya sat a little straighter. She did like the sound of this. Perhaps she would sit through this one class, then ask for her refund. Poor Miranda Katilla. Teaching this class at night instead of having a real job. Yes, Darya decided, she would be more open-minded, as Mina would say, and give this fool a chance. There, she was getting better at being less judgmental already.
Darya rummaged for a pen in her handbag.
“Here you go,” she heard a whisper.
A man was handing her a pen. He was about Darya’s age, slim, with brown hair and deep laugh lines around his mouth. He wore a flannel shirt that looked like a second-rate lumberjack’s.
Darya took the pen and murmured, “Thank you.” She held it in her hand. It was a fountain pen. Who on earth came to a spreadsheet class with a fountain pen?
Miranda’s curls (unnatural, forced into shape by chemicals, Darya had already surmised) bounced as she continued to extol the virtues of Excel.
“Sam, was it? Sam, can you tell me one thing you think spreadsheets could help you with? In your own life?”
The man next to Darya looked up. “Well.” His voice was much deeper than it had been when he was whispering. “For my music. Lesson plans, student names. Grades. Especially grades.”
“Teachers need spreadsheets more than anyone!” Miranda said, apparently delighted. “Now. If we all turn on our programs, I’d like to review some Excel basics, then take you all to another level.”
Parviz would really like Miranda Katilla. She spoke his language: “another level” and all that. Darya realized she didn’t have a computer. Of course she didn’t. She had only come to get her refund and leave.
Sam’s chair was suddenly closer to hers. “Share?” he said and flipped open his laptop.
His chair had made no noise. Darya looked down and saw that all four legs ended in yellow tennis balls. She looked around and noticed that all the chairs had tennis balls attached to the bottom of their legs. So that’s why Sam’s chair had sidled so silently next to hers. Darya found herself enchanted by this trick of tennis balls.
Sam smelled of soap and tea, a bergamoty smell. Not of Old Spice. His eyes were kind, and he pulled his chair even closer and tilted the screen so she could see. His kindness reminded her of Parviz.
When Miranda Katilla asked them if they really appreciated the difference between columns and rows and if they truly understood how mastery of the program could do no less than “change their spreadsheet lives,” Darya couldn’t help but snort.
Sam raised his eyebrows at her and smiled. He didn’t smile the way a classmate smiles at another classmate in the basement of the Queens Public Library during an adult education community class. No, he smiled at her the way those boys of her youth had smiled at her, back when she hiked in the mountains with them, back when she had suitors, back before she got committed to the gift her mother gave her, and before she signed up for the strict columns and rows of adult life.
WALKING HOME FROM THE LIBRARY that night, Darya felt that the evening air was a little sweeter than it had been on her way to class. When she opened the front door and saw Parviz sitting on the couch, eating pistachios, and he asked, “How was it, Darya Joon, how was class?” Darya felt almost guilty when she said, “It was so wonderfully wonderful.”
She hadn’t asked for a refund. Maybe she could use more spreadsheet knowledge. It would help her at work, wouldn’t it? Maybe she could even get a promotion with this training.
“Was it interesting?” Parviz asked.
“Yes.” Darya again felt guilty saying this to Parviz as he sat there shelling pistachios. She put down her handbag. It was just a smile from a middle-aged man in a class taught in the basement of the public library by a woman who never ironed anything. But during that smile, Darya’s round middle had whittled down, her wrinkles had been erased, her skin firmed, her legs toned, her knee pain vanished, and she didn’t need her reading glasses. Her daughter’s eye rolls no longer broke her heart, and she wasn’t in chronic grief for the mother she’d lost to the bombs that fall and kill at random. For that brief moment, within those musty library walls, Darya Daneshjoo felt herself again. Her old, young self. The self that stood at the top of the mountains of Tehran and laughed because she felt free. That self.
“So, you liked it, Darya Joon?” Parviz asked.
“I did,” Darya said.
“Highlights?”
“Hmmm?”
“The class, the teacher, the students. Anything stand out?”
Darya fluffed her hair. “There were tennis balls at the bottom of the chairs.”
“Tennis balls?”
“Tennis balls.”
Parviz held a pistachio in midair. He seemed to be thinking. Darya got ready for more questions. She stopped him before he could ask more. “To keep the chairs from scraping the floor when you move them.”
Parviz nodded as it dawned on him. Then he popped his pistachio into his mouth and clapped his hands in the air. “Genius!” he cried. “What will they think of next?”
And with the clap of his hands, she was back. Back in her living room in Queens, no longer on the mountaintops of Tehran. No fountain-pen-wielding, lumberjack-shirt-wearing, deep-voiced music teacher was smiling at her. Her right knee started to hurt. She asked Parviz if he wanted some warm milk before bed.
“With honey, my honey,” he called out.
He did not just say that, Darya thought.
But of course, he did. He always did.