Life Is Funny Read online

  “If it is too difficult for you to follow our laws here in this country, Hanif,” my father had once said after Nif had been spotted by a neighbor sneaking out of a movie theater, “you will have to go home, where temptation is not always so near.”

  But when I told him he was right and that I would confess to my father immediately about the closet, Nif got nervous. It’s a brother’s responsibility to help a sister keep from being improper. As the one closest to me in age and in friendship, Nif knew he would be disgraced a little bit along with me. So he never told, and even with my shame, I didn’t either. I meant to, but that night I noticed that I could see from my window into Sarim’s. He waved at me.

  * * *

  Sometimes Sarim disappeared for a few days. I wouldn’t spot his light blink on, wouldn’t pass him in the street. I never had the courage to ask him where he went, and he never told me. But I began to know when to expect his disappearances because just before them, the circles under his eyes would be darker than usual, the small smile more fixed, and his soft, steady walk would lighten into a float.

  What? he’d ask me sometimes, a lot of times, when I hadn’t said anything. I always thought he was just tired, exhausted.

  Law school must be very hard, I’d answer. He would nod and hand me one of his brown-and-yellow ribboned touchstones.

  These make it easier, he’d say, letting me hold the smoothness for a moment. I never knew what he was talking about, really, but the feel of cool shine in my palm distracted me from asking anything more.

  You’re not crazy, Sarim, I whisper a lot these days. I’m sure there’s some other explanation.

  * * *

  We became friends without anyone knowing. The shame faded, or maybe it hid somehow, like a virus or a cavity, and I stopped worrying that we were doing anything wrong. Even though we talked on the street when nobody was looking or spoke at neighborhood parties and festivals in a crowd that probably thought he was my cousin or uncle. Even though sometimes, on a detour home from an errand for my mother, I would visit quickly in his apartment. Fifteen minutes there, ten minutes here.

  He wrote me notes and left them under his front stoop mud mat folded into hard packages, little blue-lined squares filled with slanted ink.

  Dear Sonia,

  Yes, I do know how to cook, though I rarely have time to prepare my own meals.

  Regarding our discussion of waves, I believe that water does not move forward so much, but rather seems to rise and fall in place.

  I prefer butterscotch to licorice.

  Yesterday, there was a dress in the red shade you admire in a shop window on Seventh Avenue.

  Sonia, every dog does not bite, nor does each bee sting. For each schoolmate who insults you, there must be fifty who do not. And for every Muslim terrorist, there are thousands of us who oppose violence. Tell those who are cruel to you that in their cruelty, they are the terror. Then inform them that they are forgiven, for such forgiveness may shame some toward kindness.

  Love,

  Sarim

  After a while, not even Nif knew how close Sarim and I had become. In public we had to pretend we didn’t know each other very well. Pretending always made me smile inside, a special secret between Sarim and me.

  * * *

  So when he died, when he killed himself, I wasn’t expected to cry but to marvel. To whisper with the others and watch his blanket-covered body on Channel 7. I wasn’t expected to leave the sink running until it overflowed or to lose my homework and fight with Nif. I wasn’t expected to rip my fingernails bloody, to forget to shower, to lose ten pounds. Maybe it was because these things were not expected of me that nobody noticed them.

  At school I try hard to keep my slippery feelings hidden inside some outer hardness. I picture my skin as a brown eggshell hiding the slimy mess of its insides. It works until the end of gym today, when some kids begin to guess whether that Statue of Liberty man was dead even before he hit the lower balcony that caught him.

  “Not,” says a ninth grader called Monique, who usually skips to smoke in the locker room. Today she is caught and made to watch the rest of us from the lowest bench of the bleachers. “He was wide awake on the way down,” she says, as though she really knows. “Scared shitless.”

  My shell tears with hard little rips while this Monique smirks and leans back on her elbows. “That asshole felt everything when he hit. Pain like you wouldn’t fucking believe.”

  * * *

  A boy who is not Muslim and who is not Pakistani but who has rich skin close to the color of Sarim’s brings a gym teacher for me. I am frozen underneath the corner basketball hoop.

  “Something’s wrong with her,” the boy says. I think his name is Sam. A name close to Sarim’s. I begin to cry.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Ms. Manning scolds.

  I can’t move.

  “I saw her here before lunch,” the boy tells us. “She’s an eighth grader.”

  “Before lunch?” Ms. Manning asks.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  * * *

  The guidance counselor agrees not to call my parents if I agree to visit her three times a week for an hour. Another rule broken. In Pakistan you don’t share your problems with anyone outside the family. Definitely not outside the religion. The guidance counselor is Spanish and Catholic. She wears a tiny gold cross on a tiny gold chain around her neck. Improper. I’m improper. I explain that, and she nods, as if she knows. She doesn’t seem to be offended.

  She asks if there’s anyone in my community I could share this with instead of talking to her. There’s not. My parents would hear about it practically before I could even decide who to tell. The guidance counselor and I are stuck with each other. She asks if I want to kill myself, and I am so surprised I stop crying.

  “Why would I want to do that?” I say, and she seems pleased.

  Her office is full of bright cloth flowers and desktop toys. It smells of cinnamon.

  * * *

  In my dream I am screaming at Sarim’s broken body, How could you do it! How could you? I wake up in front of my window, looking down at his. There’s no light. No Sarim. He’s gone, and he’s taken me with him. In the bathroom mirror my face looks like his: dark circles under my eyes, distraction in my mouth.

  * * *

  I bring my report card to the guidance counselor. I failed every test taken in the past two and a half weeks. I have two Bs and a C. They are my first Bs and C. I’ve always gotten only As. My parents could send me back to Pakistan.

  “It’s his fault!” I wail. “It’s his fault!”

  * * *

  “I’m not really angry,” I tell her at our next meeting.

  She ignores that. “Write to him,” she suggests. “Tell him every feeling you have. Allow yourself only one hour each night. No more leaving class to talk to him, stop visiting his picture in the middle of the night, don’t keep repeating his name all the time. Just the letter one hour each day. No more, no less. Then sleep.”

  I follow her directions. I write him letters and leave them in hard packages under his front stoop mud mat. I tell myself the ones I left the day before look as though they’ve been opened, read, and refolded. I leave them all there, letting them collect and flatten under the mat. The guidance counselor asks if I’d like to read them out loud to her. I don’t bring them in, but I tell her about what I write, and we talk about all of it. I gain back five pounds and make straight As. My hair gleams like polished shoes, and I stop picking at Nif and my fingers. I’m required to see the counselor only once a week.

  But it’s improper. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to a man. I’m not supposed to be talking to a Spanish Catholic guidance counselor. They’ll find out. My older brothers will hear their friends speak disrespectfully of me. The neighborhood will whisper about it behind our backs. My mother and father will be ashamed. Muslims are competitive that way. The children must shine for the sake of the parents.

  Dear Sarim,

  W
hy did you do it? Were you feeling sad, and if so, why didn’t you tell me? I would have listened. I am very angry at you for doing such a stupid thing. I am angry at you for leaving me like that. You didn’t even stop to think how this would be for me. You were selfish. You disappointed me. If you ever come back, I’ll kill you all over again for what you have done.

  Dear Sarim,

  I didn’t mean what I said in the last letter. I keep thinking of you all alone, climbing. I keep wondering how much pain you must have been in to do what you did. I cry every time I think of how lonely you must have been, how upset you must have been to do something like that. I wish you could have told me what had happened. Did something happen? Did something or someone upset you? What made you do it? I just need to understand because it’s very hard being here without you and not understanding why you aren’t here.

  Dear Sarim,

  In case you can’t hear the words I say to you and can only see the words written here, I want to make sure you know a few things: I love you. I miss you. You are the most special person I ever knew. Thank you for being my friend.

  Dear Sarim,

  Could you at least give me a sign that you’ve gotten all of my messages? It’s very hard for me not knowing what or where you are.

  * * *

  I’m a disgrace. I’ve met with the guidance counselor too many times.

  I cry each time, and she doesn’t seem to mind. Each time she asks if we might call my parents to share with them what I am feeling. I won’t let her. Each time she asks me how bad things are, if I might kill myself, and then, why not? We talk about death and what it means. When I refuse to be angry that I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, that I wasn’t allowed to love him, she gets angry for me. She tries not to show it, but I can tell by the way her voice changes, by the way she has trouble looking at me. At first her anger is a relief. Later it makes me sad.

  “When will all this go away?” I ask her.

  “In time,” she says.

  * * *

  I used to believe that anyone who kills himself must be crazy. Now I think about what it really means to be crazy. Because Sarim wasn’t. He was kind and quiet and had ideas and feelings and studied law. He made other people happy. He listened to everyone. He floated and smiled and sometimes disappeared. But he wasn’t crazy.

  Dear Sarim,

  Why didn’t you come to me first if you were feeling so bad?

  * * *

  Sometimes when I’m talking to the guidance counselor, a little worm of fear crawls up through my belly and into my neck. Fear that maybe he did try to talk to me about something, and I didn’t listen carefully enough. Fear that he’d asked for my help somehow, and I hadn’t given it to him.

  The guidance counselor guesses about the worm.

  “One thing I do know,” she tells me, “is that when someone we love dies, a lot of us start to wonder if it was our fault. A lot of us feel guilty.”

  I explain again how I wasn’t supposed to be talking to him, and the worm swells. The guidance counselor reminds me that in Pakistan sticking to the rules might be simple, but that living here in Brooklyn, seeing other ways of life, seeing other people choose different options, makes rule keeping difficult.

  “From what you’ve said,” she reminds me, “he was your friend. Truly your friend. Nothing else happened between the two of you.” She means that nothing improper happened. Nothing sexual. But that doesn’t matter.

  “Rules are rules,” I say. The worm and the bees, the fear and the shame, are making it hard for me to breathe.

  She stares for a long time at a tiny stuffed caterpillar I’ve draped over my fingers. I hear the lunch bell ring. I hear the halls rush with kids. She’s still staring at the caterpillar.

  “What?” I finally ask.

  “Maybe his death had absolutely nothing to do with you,” she says. She touches my hand. “And maybe you will never understand why he did it.”

  She thinks he was crazy.

  “Well, he wasn’t crazy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wasn’t. That’s all. He was just tired. I shouldn’t have talked to him. I shouldn’t be here talking to you.”

  Somebody knocks on the office door. Another kid. A group of kids. I can hear them arguing.

  “If you hadn’t ever talked to him,” she asks, “if you hadn’t ever hidden in that closet with him, would anything be different now?”

  That’s when I understand what happened. As clearly as bright chalked letters on a new blackboard. Because the answer is yes. It is my fault. It is absolutely my fault.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” I tell the guidance counselor. The kids knock louder.

  “What?”

  “I don’t need to come anymore.” I place the caterpillar back on her desk. I know what I have to do.

  She tries to change my mind. I won’t. I have to be perfect from now on. I can never do another improper thing. I can only make it up to him, wherever he is, by being the perfect daughter, one day the perfect wife. The perfect Muslim. I have to make my parents and my brothers, especially Nif, proud. I have to follow every single rule as perfectly as possible.

  The guidance counselor asks again if I’m going to hurt myself. I promise that’s not in my plan. She won’t call my parents because she swore not to unless it seemed I might follow in Sarim’s steps, and she can see that I won’t do that. She’s a person who keeps her promises. I’m safe. She tells me to come back anytime. She hugs me hard while I hear the other kids curse, kick at the door, and then shriek away.

  I’m grateful to the guidance counselor for helping me. I wish I could keep meeting with her because even though she doesn’t understand too much, she listens the way Sarim used to. But rules are rules. And I have to be absolutely perfect.

  * * *

  I write another letter on the bus home.

  Dear Sarim,

  I am so sorry for what I put you through. I never should have hidden in the closet and talked to you. I understand now that you must have suffered terribly for disobeying the laws in order not to hurt my feelings. You saw that I needed a friend, and you broke our laws to be that friend. If I had known what a terrible situation I put you in, I never would have said one word to you. If I had known that you would end your life over it, I never would have even looked at you. Please forgive me.

  * * *

  When I arrive in my room, Nif is sitting on my bed. Holding all of my blue-lined squares of paper. Unfolded and rumpled.

  “How could you?” he asks.

  I won’t ever be rid of the shame.

  Drew

  MY FATHER BRINGS me with him to take in the Jag. He leans back on the hood to a half sit and keeps his arms crossed while he talks to the mechanic, a Spanish guy who’s got day-old stubble on his upper lip and chin.

  “You call me with an estimate before you do anything,” my dad goes.

  “Yes, sir,” the Spanish guy says. He’s got an accent. I try to wander away, but my father pulls me in under his armpit.

  “If you can’t reach me, you talk to my son here.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Spanish guy says again, while my dad keeps me in a shoulder lock.

  “If you get my wife on the phone, don’t ask her anything.” He laughs a little and then pushes me away with one of those man shoves to my head. “She can’t make a decision to save her life.”

  “Papi,” I hear, and a pair of legs from underneath a dented Saab slides out. The legs are attached to a kid around my age in jeans, a greasy T-shirt, and a tool belt. He’s got a rag in his hand.

  “Papi,” the kid says, sitting up, “el tambor está rayado.”

  “Lo atiendo en un minuto,” the Spanish guy goes.

  “That your boy?” my dad asks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You let him work on the cars?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Spanish guy goes. “He very good.”

  “I don’t want him on the Jag,” my father tells him.


  “He very good,” the Spanish guy says again.

  His son jumps to his feet and walks over to us. He doesn’t look all that Spanish to me, except he’s got dark skin. But that could just be a tan.

  “I don’t care how good you think he is,” my dad says. “I don’t want him near my car.”

  The mechanic looks at the Jag for a minute, like he’s trying to figure something out, and then he turns to his son. “Vas a trabajar con el carro,” the mechanic says to the kid. “Este pendejo no notará la diferencia.”

  The kid looks at me and my dad, real friendly.

  “No problem, sir.” He doesn’t have any accent at all. He’s cool as anything, and extra polite, like he doesn’t even get that my father is being a total jerk. “I won’t touch the car.”

  * * *

  Right before we left the house this morning, I found my mom unpacking books in my dad’s new study and arranging them on his built-in shelves. She was moving sort of slow, the way she always does after he’s been mad at her.

  “Could you start flattening the boxes when you get back?” she’d asked.

  Her right eye was the shiny color of a black olive, and her cheeks had four gray fingerprints opposite a thumbprint from where he had squeezed her face. I’d already seen her left eye last night. It had turned the shiny color of a green olive about five minutes after his first punch.

  “Where do I put them after they’re flat?” I asked her.

  “On the landing. And see if you can get Dad to eat at the diner for lunch.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you want us to bring you anything?”

  “Maybe a grilled cheese.” She was talking a little thick, like her jaw hurt.

  “It looks good,” I told her, even though mostly everything in the apartment was still in a box.

  “Yep,” she said. “Looks pretty good.”

  * * *

  On Monday I wear the safest clothes I can think of. Jeans that are sort of baggy but not too baggy, a black T-shirt, and Air Jordans.