Page 2 “Did you have carpets like this growing up?” he asked as he lugged the thing back to their car in a fireman’s carry. Zuleika fumbled with the keys. “That’s from Iran,” she said, which he knew was true because it said so on the unraveling tag affixed to the back of it, along with Home Dynamix Caravan and Handmade. She pulled the trunk open. “My family’s from Damascus.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but he hadn’t really expected one. She never talked about her childhood, or her parents, or anything related to those subjects. “From Damascus” was more or less the sum of her confessed history, and she always said it that way, because (she had explained) when Americans hear “Damascus” they think of silk merchants and minarets, but when they hear “Syria” they think of terrorists. For all he knew, she could have sprung fully formed from the steps of the Ackerman Student Union that sunny April afternoon when he had thoughtlessly followed her several blocks down Westwood, not really planning to talk to her but unable to stop watching the dark wing of her hair swaying gently across her sweater-clad back, and with equal thoughtlessness tackled her out of the path of an accelerating campus shuttle bus swinging around the corner as they crossed Charles E. Young Drive. She walked away with a scraped knuckle. He walked away with six stitches in his upper back from having landed on a piece of a broken beer bottle, which would have made for a nicely ironic tale about the dividends of spontaneous heroism had he not also gotten a coffee date with a girl who caused his higher brain functions to sputter out like a candle flame pinched by moist fingers. A week and a half later, during their fifth date, she took him to her bed and her skin was soft and fragrant as jasmine petals, and he was desperate to touch all of it before it could be taken away. Afterwards, she rested her cheek against his sweat-sticky arm and he realized that he might never have a coherent thought again. He found the prospect strangely unalarming. Aaron graduated from his program at the Anderson School in June and stymied himself with the thought that he’d come so close – two months and a near-vehicular homicide – to never meeting her at all. That August they moved in together A year later, they slammed the trunk shut over their new rug and headed back into the store to find Zuleika her vanity. He hadn’t meant to be married at twenty-five. He hadn’t meant to know pricing trends of aircraft carriers or a whole dictionary of acronyms. Someone had told him that things happened more slowly as you got older, but to Aaron it seemed that everything was accelerating out of his control. The slightest decisions – clicking a link on Monster or deciding to walk down to the grocery store from the student center instead of driving – bore life-defining repercussions. It wasn’t that he was unhappy, or regretful. He just felt unprepared. What if the next coin-flip of destiny brought it all tumbling down? How would he hold onto things he had never earned to begin with? Aaron wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulders despite the August heat and tried not to think about the future. |
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