Close Range

When I was twelve years old, I was pretty sure I had a handle on what was happening in the world, and it went like this: the United States was good, Afghanistan was good, Ronald Reagan was great, and the Soviet Union was pure evil. No, wait—back to Reagan. Reagan was off-the-charts excellent. I was lucky to live in a country where the president would do whatever it took to defeat communism and save the world from nuclear disaster. And the Afghan Freedom Fighters battling the Soviet Empire? They were the most glorious men on the planet. Reagan was such a fan that he invited them to sit with him on white couches at the Oval Office while photographers snapped photos. I saw the whole scene on Dan Rather’s Evening News, Reagan’s tie knotted around his neck, his upturned Hollywood hair, and the mujahids in chunky sandals, crispy perhan tumban, spiffy turbans. Reagan loved his guests so much he had the CIA smuggle them Stinger missiles, probably across the Pakistani border with mules who never made it back because they were made to walk across minefields after.

Sometimes Baba recognized men on Dan Rather’s news from his youth in Kabul. “This guy”—he yelled from his News Chair to Mom at the dining room table—“he was in my engineering classes. He is mujahideen leader.”Mom looked up from her students’ homework. “Amazing, honey.”

Before the Stingers, the mujahideen had no way to defend themselves against Soviet gunship helicopters, but now they could return fire from rocket launchers balanced on their shoulders. When Dan Rather broadcast news of the first Stinger shipments, Baba sat up in his News Chair across from our wood-paneled TV. “Finally, U.S. sends powerful weapons.” I looked at him from the couch where I was watching too. “If U.S. sends more eh-Stingers,” he said, “war will be over.”

I knew what he’d say next. He’d been waiting all my life for the war to end. “Soon,” he said, “we go back to Kabul.”

I never knew why he said “we” would go back, when he was the only one of us who’d ever been there. My mother, my siblings, and I were all born in the United States. And Afghanistan on TV looked nothing like the Afghanistan he remembered. He called his homeland the “most beautiful country in world.” He talked about fruit trees, pomegranates, picnics with his sisters. He showed me postcards of lakes, gardens, massive Buddhas carved into the sides of mountains. But on the news I heard the taka-taka of machine guns and watched parents and children running for cover. And that wasn’t the only story not adding up. I remember Reagan shouting at Gorbachev, the new U.S.S.R. leader, from a podium at the Berlin Wall: “Come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But now, Reagan smiled at Gorbachev, shook his hand, and patted his back like they were long-lost chums reunited. I didn’t trust sudden affection between former enemies. It reminded me of my parents.

~

I started bleeding that year. When I first saw the red splotches at the bottom of my underwear, I balled up the fabric and stuffed it in my pocket. I planned to smuggle it into the kitchen trash, but my mother was peeking into a steaming pot under the stove light, ladle in hand, and my little sisters, Aisha and Fatima, were chopping potatoes. I hovered near the fridge, waited until all three turned the other direction, and then slipped the underwear under some onion peels in the garbage. Tossing out a perfectly fine pair of floral underpants felt bonkers. I was the daughter and descendant of scrimping immigrants, Afghan on one side, Slovak on the other, and here I was, violating every rule of thrift. But there was no way I could tell my mother, who lifted the ladle right then and taste-tested the stew. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed. And I wasn’t confused. It simply felt impossible to open my mouth and ask for help.

I began scavenging period supplies. I had a whole act. I waltzed up to lockers, so friendly and relaxed. Oh my God, Suzie, guess what? I got my period, and, like, I don’t have a tampon, this never happens! I’m always prepared! I flipped my feathery long brown hair and wondered, Is this how American girls talk? I wasn’t sure, but I kept at it. While my jaw opened and closed and performed the movements of speech, I hoped and prayed, insha’allah, fingers crossed, that the toilet paper I’d pulled off its spool in the school bathroom and wrapped-wrapped-wrapped around the crotch of my underpants wouldn’t spring a leak and spread blood stains all over my nice school pants—which was the worst thing that could happen, for anyone to see evidence of uterine lining behaving as hormones dictate. Also not ideal would be to raise suspicion that I wasn’t cared for at home, so already at age twelve, I knew to distribute my mooching widely. One month I tried Suzie at her locker in the Foreign Languages hallway, and the next, Sara in the science wing, then Jessica in math. The ideal person to ask was my best friend, Elizabeth. She had a brown paper bag in her locker stuffed with all kinds of menstrual supplies, refilled regularly by her mother.

On the toilet, I rifled through Elizabeth’s paper bag, which contained a whole grocery aisle’s worth of “feminine hygiene” products. I inspected labels. Wings or no wings, heavy flow or light, daytime or nighttime, applicators or no.

I told myself my mother would help out soon. She had frowned at my chest and announced I’d outgrown my training bras. When I’d broken out on my cheeks and on that area Seventeen magazine called the T-zone, she’d handed me a bottle of Oxy-Wash and told me to use it daily. I just needed to wait for her to catch up. She would put the signs together.

“Does your mom—when did she,” I began to ask Elizabeth, handing back the bag, but I wasn’t sure what exactly to say, so I asked her an easier question: “What’s a pantyliner?”

She went up on her toes and returned the bag to her locker’s top shelf. “Oh, it’s for when your period is really light, like at the end.”

That’s what I’d thought. And what great news! My stockpile was always too strong for my needs. I over-relied on my mother’s super plus tampons, which I stole from her box in the bathroom closet, though I took only a few at a time—I didn’t want her to notice. And I snuck into the locker room between classes and bought the one-size-fits-all “sanitary napkins” from the metal box bolted to the wall. The pads were bulky—they barely fit in the crotch of my underpants, always threatening to roll over and around with insufficient adhesive—so Elizabeth’s pantyliners sounded like pure luxury.

I stuck my hand in my pocket, where I’d stashed a few extras.

~

There was a summit in the capital of Iceland and a summit in Geneva. Summit was just a fancy word for meet-ups between leaders of superpower nations. Baba watched from his News Chair and I watched from the couch as Reagan and Gorbachev signed papers. They made statements. They talked about nuclear treaties. They discussed how and if and when and why the Soviet Union would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

Baba sighed at the TV. “Deadline! When is deadline?”

Each time the reporters mentioned the Star Wars missile program, Han Solo popped into my head, how he got frozen in that box, how cute and hilarious he still was after they thawed him out—and how I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to be him or be his girlfriend, Princess Leia.

I heard about the next summit when a reporter from Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle called our house on a Sunday afternoon, just as we arrived home from classes and prayers at the mosque. I picked up the phone and a man asked for my father. Just like my mother taught, I responded with, “To whom am I speaking?” and “May I ask what this is regarding?”

He said he’d like a statement from my father on the upcoming summit at the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Baba spoke loudly into the yellow rotary phone, the way he did when he talked to his sister in Pakistan, like his words wouldn’t reach their destination unless he projected. Standing in the kitchen, he stated his expectations: Reagan and Gorbachev, at the D.C. summit, would agree on a deadline to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The U.S.S.R. had learned its lesson: it could not beat the Afghan people. The Soviet Union must end this senseless war.

Four days later, the D.C. summit over and still no exit plan, the Democrat & Chronicle called for another comment. “It bothers me,” the published article quoted my father as saying. “I was under the impression that the first time Afghanistan came up, the Soviets would say they wanted to leave.”

I shook my head when I read the article. I was sure Reagan did his best, but the communists were dodgy. Gorbachev never did what everyone said he should do, which was to get out of Afghanistan, pull out the Soviet military. And I was secretly happy about this.

Every time Baba said we’d return to Kabul, I tried to imagine my life without my favorite maple tree in our backyard. I was always hopping up to grab its lowest limb, swinging a leg over and pulling myself into the tree, like a gymnast mounting the uneven bars. Sometimes my cousin Madinah climbed with me. Though she was two years older, her arms were not as strong as mine, and I figured this was because she’d missed a few years of school and gym classes when her family lived in Pakistan. I cupped my hands to make a step for her sneaker and pushed her up. One branch after another, up, up, up, until we were twelve, thirteen, fourteen feet in the air, tree bark under our bottoms, cool trunk against our backs, our legs dangling in the breezing leaves.

Who’d look out for my trees if I disappeared? Or the squirrels and chickadees and frogs in our backyard? Baba said there were fruit trees in Kabul, but he never said anything about maples.

~

A few months into seventh grade, my inhaler stopped working. All day, class to class, I puffed and puffed and puffed on my inhaler, but my lungs wouldn’t stay open. My doctor warned me to not use it more often than every four hours, but what was I supposed to do? I squeezed the dispenser and tried to suck in enough air to make each next burst of spray finally reopen my lungs. It didn’t work. By late afternoon I had to hold school walls for support, resting every few steps, as I walked back to my mother’s classroom.

“Why didn’t any of your teachers call me?” she said.

I collapsed on her Reading Corner couch.

“I didn’t”—I tried to catch my breath—“tell them.” I hadn’t thought to ask for help.

After my three-night stay at the hospital, our family doctor said, “I don’t know how to help you anymore.”

He referred me to a respiratory specialist, who, at my first appointment, taught me about asthma triggers and ordered allergy tests. I learned I was allergic to straw and dust and pollen and cats. He explained how to properly use an inhaler. “Don’t do it like that kid in that Goonies movie,” he said, shaking his head. He handed me a plastic device called a Flo-Meter, which would measure the strength of my breath on a scale of 0 to 850 if I filled my lungs and blew into it forcefully. He slid some graph paper across his desk toward me. “Chart the results. Sunday through Saturday. Can you do that?” It sounded like a fun homework assignment.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “We’ll figure out what’s causing these attacks.”

~

After years of calling local news outlets to encourage coverage of the Afghan war, my father had established himself as the one and only Afghan pundit in the Rochester metro area. He’d been educated by American instructors at the Afghan Institute of Technology, and then by American professors at Kabul University, after which he won a USAID fellowship to go to grad school in New York State. He met my mother there while earning his masters in international politics. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he put his English fluency and foreign policy expertise to work, fighting as another kind of mujahid—a media holy warrior from his base in the States. He combed his mustache, spritzed his combover with Mom’s Clairol hair spray, and sat down with American journalists for interviews. He delivered sound bites into reporters’ microphones.

Anyone on screen, in those days, seemed powerful, almost famous, so I found it disturbing— even though my father and I were not on the best terms—when the cameras zoomed close to his face and captioned his image with “Immigrant from Afghanistan.” Technically accurate, yeah, but he seemed like not just that? What about his graduate degree? His refugee-resettlement work? His engineering job?

I was mislabeled too. In articles and news segments featuring my father’s words, I was a dark-haired blur in backgrounds of photographs, in hazy establishing shots, part of a crowd captioned “Immigrants from Afghanistan” or “Afghans Escape Soviet Invasion.” The misrepresentation was necessary, I supposed. For years I’d watched my father play up his Afghanness for cameras. Instead of the professional slacks and button-downs he wore to his engineering job Monday through Friday, he reached for one of his precious pairs of perhan tumban for these news appearances. He never mentioned that he was already safe in the U.S. when the Soviets invaded. And journalists didn’t ask. It was easy to divert them if you fulfilled a role, spoke a strange language, played into preassembled stories, if you wore the right outfits. But maybe being reduced to his immigrant status while he delivered geopolitical analysis bothered him. I once found a newspaper article that described him as “President of the Rochester Afghan Association.” I’d never heard of that organization. I think he made it up to be taken seriously, translating his very real leadership role in our Afghan community into professional language.

~

I handed my latest Flo-Meter chart to the asthma specialist. He traced my coordinates and lines with the end of his pen, and looked up at me on the exam table. “Your lung capacity plummeted. Every few weeks this happens, and your lungs don’t recover for a week.” He flipped papers, compared charts, turned back to me again. “You make great charts, they’re clean and neat, but you need to pay attention to triggers. Think about what you’re recording. Your lungs are still at seventy-five percent. What was the trigger?”

I searched my mind, but it was winter, so no pollen. And I hadn’t been exposed to any more dust than usual.

“I wasn’t around straw or cats,” I said.

“You didn’t add a number on Sunday night. Look, Sunday morning, lungs fine”—he turned the chart toward me and pointed—“Monday morning, fifty percent. Think hard. Sunday night. What happened?”

How did I miss Sunday night? Today was Wednesday. I counted backwards three nights. Tuesday—Monday—then—nothing. My brain stopped when I reached Sunday night, like a barricade was blocking my access. I pushed: Sunday mornings we went to the mosque for classes and then to Madinah’s house for tea with her mother . . . and then what?

“I don’t remember.”

The specialist looked at Mom. She was in the chair beside his desk. He handed her the chart. “Her lungs have still not recovered. What happened on Sunday night? This could be the clue we’re looking for.”

She looked at the paper. “I—I don’t know—I can’t—” Her free hand touched her ear, her chin, her hair—that hand motion, that voice tremble—I’d seen and heard this before. When? When was it? Then I remembered that morning, maybe a few months earlier, when Mom and I ran into my English teacher in the hallway by the school cafeteria, and she’d squinted at Mom’s face.

“Looks like there’s something on your lip?”

I saw it—light blue, purple—I panicked—a bruise—Mom’s cover-up was smudged. Everyone would know, the whole school would find out, I’d lose everything—

Mom stuttered that day too, “I—I don’t know.” Her hand fluttered by her face. “I can’t—I—” And then she lied: “Oh, this, oh, it was a pen—a pen exploded on me earlier.”

When my teacher took off down the hall, file under her arms, and called back to me—“See you later in class!”—I didn’t know if I felt better or worse that my mother had lied to save us, better or worse that my teacher had believed her.

In the specialist’s office, Mom, again, pulled out of her shakiness. She tilted her head. “I’ll think about it, but right now, no, I can’t think of anything.”

I winced. Was this the same lie? Even if it was, did it matter? Triggers were physical. Triggers were molecules in the air, pollution in lungs. Cats and straw and dust and pollen. I needed to stop losing my inhaler. Like right now—I put my hand to my chest, my other hand in my pocket—where was my inhaler?

~

When the Democrat & Chronicle published the article about the failed summit, the Associated Press picked it up and distributed it nationally. Baba cut it out of the newspaper, magnetted it to the fridge, and every time I opened the door to chug milk from the plastic jug, I saw his statement, lifted out in enlarged, bold text, beside a black-and-white photo of the superpower leaders at the Soviet embassy. When I grabbed a tube of orange-juice concentrate from the freezer, I saw the photo. When I grabbed the egg carton from the fridge for Saturday breakfast, I saw the photo.

The newsprint had begun to yellow. The corners curled. Over time the photo seemed to transform, and Reagan and Gorby’s grainy image began to reveal new meanings, which happens when you look at anything long enough, but I didn’t know that yet, so seeing this change in the photo felt almost like hallucinating. Gorbachev held a wineglass high—his drink had made me suspicious from the beginning. On account of having a Muslim father and a teetotaling Catholic mother, I believed wine a ruinous substance. But now I noticed that Gorbachev’s face looked goofy, like he’d just, I don’t know, told a joke or something? Oh man—was he drunk? Soviet soldiers killing Afghans, hunting down mujahideen, shooting them from helicopters, and Gorbachev is acting funny around Reagan?

A couple of days later, grabbing jam from the fridge for school lunches, I realized that Gorbachev was cheersing Reagan. Who cheerses his enemy? Even if they were chummy-chummy like I saw on Dan’s news, were we really at the point where a Soviet leader would raise a glass to the American president? I looked again while shoving another saran-wrapped bowl to the back of the fridge—my family liked to pretend we didn’t waste, but we just disappeared leftovers into a moldy forever—and I paused on Reagan’s face, which seemed oddly twisted. How had I not noticed before? He looked like he was—no way—stifling a giggle. Was this possible? These dudes were supposed to hate each other’s guts, their nations were stockpiling nuclear weapons to annihilate each other. Newsreels of Reagan speechifying at podiums flashed through my mind. Struggle between right and wrong! Communists are evil! Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Did it mean anything?

I believed that Reagan was helping the Afghan Freedom Fighters because Muslim people were suffering. Because Afghans were dying (so far 1 million). Because so many people were in refugee camps (so far 5 million), so many landmines had been buried (official count, 30 million)—I couldn’t quote these facts back then, but I felt their reverberations when I descended our basement stairs to deliver fresh pots of tea to the family of Afghan refugees staying with us until Baba found them an apartment. They had a son, five years old, who never let go of his mother with his single hand. He must’ve been playful at one time, like on that day he bent down to scoop up that bright shiny toy he’d found lying on the ground—an act that should’ve been harmless except that the Soviets had gotten the idea to make pretty, exploding objects that attracted children, to design landmines that looked like butterflies, like red balls and glittering pens, and planted them in the soil for kids to pick up, so that those kids would never grow up to resist their nation’s colonization, so their fathers couldn’t join the resistance and their mothers would have to care for them forever.

I hoped that boy got a prosthetic arm, that he learned how to use it, that it was state of the art and felt natural, but I never heard what happened to him. His family moved on, probably to where so many Afghans eventually went, to the Little Afghanistans in California or Virginia.

~

After my appointments with the respiratory specialist, Mom sometimes glanced at her wristwatch and asked, “Wanna go out for lunch? I have a substitute teacher.” She took me to real restaurants with printed menus, where waitresses snapped gum and wrote orders on little pads—not like the fast-food joints I was used to. One time we slurped vanilla shakes through straws on a bench by the Erie Canal. Mom crossed her legs, faced me, asked about my classes. I knew this meant she wanted to spend some quality time together, away from school, away from home, away from my father and siblings.

The paper milkshake cup sweated cold beads under my fingers. Why was I uncomfortable? I went through the motions. I discussed teachers and homework. I sipped my shake and shifted on the bench and felt the mammoth pad from the locker room between my legs. Mom nodded while I talked about chorus and band. I didn’t tell her how the summits worried me and I didn’t ask why Baba was always saying we’d move back to Kabul. I didn’t tell her that I remembered her saying once that the happiest day of my life would be the day I got married. I didn’t ask if she was happy. I didn’t ask if she would move to Afghanistan with the rest of us.

Instead, I told her about the English report I was writing on Edgar Allan Poe, and while I was talking, a bird dropped a slimy white poop in her hair. It dripped onto the shoulder of her navy teacher-blazer. The saddest thing I ever saw. I wanted to die watching her search for a tissue in her purse. Why hadn’t the bird pooped on me? Poop on me, bird. I can handle it. Not on my poor mother. I felt like I’d caused the whole tragedy.

She couldn’t get the poop out of her hair without a mirror, so I leaned over and wrapped a tissue around a hair-sprayed curl. I tried to clean it. I tried to act like it never happened. I tried to be the daughter she wanted. I folded the poopy tissue, tucked it in my pocket, and restarted our conversation.

“My favorite Poe story,” I said, “is ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”

~

The next summit was at the Kremlin in Moscow, May 1988, and my father invited the Channel 13 news team to join us at the mosque for an interview. The setting provided religious authenticity (people bowing to Allah and head-covered ladies) and scenery (behind Baba, a couple of dozen Afghans sitting in chairs beneath sunny windows). The reporter and cameraman set up their equipment while Baba set the stage. I was thirteen by then, and knew my role. I took a chair beside my cousin Madinah, both of us in mosque outfits, perhan tumban and headscarves. Being a media prop bored me out of my mind, so I brought along my latest crochet project. I was making pink booties for Mom’s sister’s baby.

Baba spoke into the mic. Gorbachev must give a deadline. Why are the Soviets still in Afghanistan? Where is the deadline?

Madinah held her headscarf over her mouth and leaned close to my ear.

“I have a boyfriend.”

I stopped crocheting. Lately Madinah had started opening up to me, but this was too much. My Afghan refugee cousin could not have a boyfriend. We weren’t allowed. She knew that.

Afghanistan must be free. Afghan Freedom Fighters are fighting the world’s nuclear enemy.

“Who’s your boyfriend?” I asked, trying to keep my face stone-blank for the cameras, since we were right behind my father going on and on about the Cold War. Madinah lived under the same conditions as me—no socializing outside of school, no talking on the telephone, and most important of all: no talking to boys.

“His name is Khalid.”

I hooked and needled, single-stitched and double-stitched. This cousin of mine, I thought, she’s way too obsessed with boys. She needs a hobby. Maybe she’d enjoy crocheting.

We need a deadline for the Soviets to leave.

Tight-lipped, I whispered back: “And where is this Khalid?”

“He’s in Islamabad,” Madinah whispered, her headscarf still covering her mouth. “We used to meet in a park.”

I’d been to Pakistan only once, to visit relatives, and teenage girls meeting boys in parks didn’t seem like part of the culture.

“How did you meet in a park? Did you talk to each other?”

Madinah leaned back and sighed. “We talked with our eyes.”

~

That night, my family gathered round the TV to watch Baba’s interview on Channel 13. He looked good: mustache trim, combover in position. The report cut from his face to shots of Mosque Moms in headscarves and men praying in the prayer hall, then returned to his face delivering statements and did slow scans of silent Afghans gazing at the camera.

The segment was almost over. Baba aimed the remote at our VCR to stop recording, when, suddenly, my face appeared on the TV, filling the screen. Baba lowered his arm as the footage played.

My face was huge. My face was the closing image. The camera lingered on my face, on my hands crocheting, on my headscarf, a pink lace headscarf I’d borrowed from Madinah because I’d forgotten mine that morning. The camera lingered—and lingered some more as my eyes glanced up at the camera and down at my yarn. I remembered that moment. I’d been worried that Madinah and I were talking too loud and looked up to see if anyone was listening. Did they enlarge my face later, in the editing room? Could they do that? And now my look-up-look-down twisted into new meanings out of my control. I came across as submissive, demure. Head-covered in pink. My stomach turned with the sickest non-sick feeling I’d ever felt.

I saw myself in the eyes of America, and I knew what Americans would see: a passive Muslim girl. I didn’t even like pink lace! I liked Madonna and other girls I saw rocking out and banging on guitars in videos whenever I had a chance to see MTV. I watched my hands crocheting with the pink yarn on screen. Oh my god, people probably think I’m knitting some ancient Afghan handicraft from the provincial mountains! Americans probably thought Madinah was covering her mouth in some sort of pious gesture, but the whole time she was hiding stories about eye-talking with Khalid!

Baba rewound the tape. He wanted to watch the interview again, but I couldn’t breathe. I went to the kitchen, but Mom was there. “Are you okay, honey?” I reached for the fridge, for cold water, and for the hundredth time saw Reagan and Gorbachev getting drunk. I needed to find my inhaler. I didn’t know yet but soon those two would agree on a deadline, and the Soviet Union would withdraw its troops, and there would be no need to worry about moving to Afghanistan because I would never step foot in Afghanistan, not then, and not even later, when I wanted to, because during all those summits, during all the paper-signings and the statements and Reagan and Gorbachev hand-shaking and all those Russian and American flags waving, no Afghan mujahideen were present at the negotiating table. The U.S. and the Soviet Union would celebrate that the Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall would come down, the gates would open, and the superpowers would forget Afghanistan, cut off all humanitarian aid, and abandon the weapons they’d sent there—more than enough guns for every man, woman, and child—and then all the mujahideen with the Stinger missiles would turn on one another, and my father, “Immigrant from Afghanistan,” would call his journalist contacts at the Democrat & Chronicle and the reporters from Channel 13 to offer commentary and analysis, and no one would call him back. And they’re still not calling, and I don’t call him either, and I also don’t call my mother.

“Honey? Are you okay?”

I turned from the fridge and stared at her. I wanted to know when was she going to buy me tampons? Why did I have to ask? Why couldn’t I ask? She put her arms around me. There was no one else. I laid my head on her shoulder.