My mother delicately places a cupcake stand into a box, then fills it with paper stuffing. I remember hearing her reverent whispering earlier about my going to that all-important Armenian extravaganza. It suddenly doesn’t seem like the worst idea to check it out, sniff around the (likely) heavily cologne-scented edges of it. I step toward her but don’t try hard to catch her eye.
“What would you say if I were...” I hesitate, realizing I’m about to say something bigger than casually attending Explore Armenia. And once I say the big thing, it’ll be tough to take it back. But I’m feeling daring. I want a change. I want to try something, do something, at least give myself a chance for my mom to look into my fiancé’s eyes with anything other than disappointment. A chance to not mute my culture for the rest of my life.
I restart. “What if I were to give dating Armenians another chance?” My mom’s face snaps into focus. The cupcake stand is forgotten; a piece of stuffing flops halfway out of the box. Icontinue, talking fast, “Explore Armenia. Like you said, I can go to some events, meet some men—”
I stop because her hands are up in front of her, like this news is too perfect and she needs to repel it. “Vai Asdvadz,” Mom says, then she dials it back because she can never accept that something is actually going her way without a catch. “You are not joking, right? Sometimes you make these jokes I do not understand...”
I’m all in now. I feel weirdly smooth, confident. “Nope, I mean it. And if there’s any guy you want me to meet, no matter how hairy, I’ll meet him.”
A tiny voice in my head wishes I could say “guy or girl,” but that’s not the world we live in. I snuff out that thought immediately, which is easy to do because my mom is staring at me less like I said a normal sentence and more like I told her I’m beginning to think Gucci is a totally overrated designer. Then her face shifts to confusion, an eyebrow lowered.
“What about Trevor?”
I shrug, acting more casual about this than I feel. “We’re basically over.”
Diana walks over. “What’s going on?” She must have seen my mom’s face.
Mom trembles, and oh God, I hope she doesn’t cry. I can’t handle that. “She is going to Explore Armenia. To meet Armenian men.”
Her voice gets small and high at the end, though she mostly keeps it in. She wipes a tear with the back of her hand. I shift my weight and look away.
Diana’s eyes grow into concern. “Men... What about Trevor?”
Mom waves her hand in front of her face like she is so over this old news even though she asked me the same question ten seconds ago. “They’re not together.”
“Not right now anyway,” I correct. I quickly tell Diana what happened last night, seeing the landscape of her face shift and burst at appropriate times. My mom stares in front of her, less in shock, more calculating.
“Enough about him,” my mom interjects. “Hokees, why are you finally doing this? I’ve been telling you to marry an Armenian man your whole life. You never listen to me.”
Diana is nodding at that a little too fervently. I say, “Can we not talk about the past? I’m telling you I’m going to do the thing you’ve always wanted me to. Because...” Now faced with the actuality of stamping out my Armenian culture, I’m terrified and clutching it like a lifeline. “Maybe you’ve had a point all these years.”
Oh, my mom loves that. She’s trying to tamp down an I-told-you-so smile and struggling to appear modest. “Well, they say mother knows best in America, that is true.” She grabs her phone from a nearby table and starts tapping furiously. “Now, we need to start adding all the events to your calendar, and I will go to my network to find out—”
I interrupt her and gesture around the room. “Hold up. Can we finish here please?” Not because I’m particularly interested in cleaning, but because my mom’s enthusiasm is starting to make me nervous about what I just agreed to. Like a tic, I glance down at my phone, which is exploding with love for the centerpiece photo I posted earlier. I breathe out.
Diana says, “Have to agree with her there, Tantig. They look ready to kick us out.”
She nods toward a woman in a pencil skirt standing by the door holding a clipboard, thinly hiding her impatience. They know we’re not members, just sponsored by one, so the club administration doesn’t have to be polite to us.
“We’ll review this at home.”
3
You can’t cook pilaf with big talk.
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—Armenian Proverb
Back home, we’veunloaded all the boxes of leftover food, serving dishes, and extra floral arrangements that weren’t claimed. Mom seemed in a daze during the car ride, occasionally muttering Armenian men’s names to herself, filing through her mental Rolodex of single guys.
I rush up the stairs to get undressed, past the dark sconces and candles and the mesh of traditional Armenian art and mediocre HomeGoods art. The style in our small but immodestly decorated home can be described as Tuscan villa–aspiring with a touch of goth. Not what I would go with personally, but it’s Mom’s house, and some dark Italo-Armenian mash-up is her muse, so who am I to tell her otherwise. One odd thing is that after Dad passed, she lugged all these Armenian rugs out of storage and unfurled them one by one around the house. I didn’t know it was possible to amass so many rugs in a lifetime, but I guess my momhad been buying them, running them by my dad, getting vetoed, then secretly stashing them away.
In my room, I wiggle out of my dress, and I swear my rib cage expands about a foot. I take my first deep breath in hours. I shouldn’t be judging my mom’s design style since my room is sort of a shrine to my high school days, when I cared enough to decorate. Dad died a year and a half after I returned home from college, and I haven’t been able to change anything. Yes, I’m pissed at him for drinking that night, and for taking out a second mortgage he never told my mom about, but so much of this room reminds me of him. There’s a Love of Learning award I was given junior year that made the rich kids’ parents mad because they thought their kids deserved one, too. Dad laughed so hard at them, at one father in particular, right in his face. “Turns out you can’t buy everything,” he said, and I was mortified but so proud at having such a brave dad. There’s the desk he bought me in middle school, complete with heart cutouts for drawer handles, which we picked out together. My matching dresser is topped with organized clutter of makeup and perfumes from the last decade. Some of the smells remind me of him.
There’s also a bevy of posters of Maroon 5 orThe OCthat don’t have anything to do with him, which I should take down. I was obsessed withThe OC’s Marissa in high school, her waify, doe-eyed beauty causing me to overpluck my eyebrows for years, which I so regret. I mean, what kind of self-respecting Armenian woman has to fill in her eyebrows?
A Chopin mazurka filters into the air from Nene’s room. She has a repertoire of about a hundred or so songs she’s been playing for the last couple of years, since she’s been living here, so I’m basically a noted classical music genius now. Nene’s a totalintrovert, and the way she’s playing, with immediacy, feels like she is loving her me time after a social morning.
