STORY

My brother had a girlfriend, the first real girlfriend he had ever had.  They had met at the end of his first year of college.  He showed me her picture.  She was pretty, and everybody was happy for him.

     Just having her picture in his room made our whole house seem different.  I didn't know if it made us more American, but it was exciting to think about.  There was a lot happening on television with boyfriends and girlfriends, and it felt like some of that had come into our house.

     At the same time it seemed to make us more Iranian too, because we were newcomers to it.  We weren't like the families on television who knew what to do when their son and their brother had a girlfriend.  I had seen little sisters who would tease the older brothers about it, but I didn't feel like teasing him about it.  We all seemed to find some new parts of ourselves while he was home for the summer.

     One evening he came and sat down after he had been talking with her on the phone.

     "Well," he said.  "Something is dead."

     "What?" I said.

     "I don't know," he said.  "She called me honey.  We were talking on the phone and she said, okay, bye honey."

     He sat back in his chair.  "It was nice to hear," he said.  "I admit it was nice to hear.  But I just felt everything our people had ever called each other coming to an end in me."

     I had never thought about it.  Honey was what they did call each other on television.  I had never noticed it as having such weight if it was said to one of us.

     "Honey," my brother said.

     I liked the thought of my brother having a girlfriend.  I hoped that it wouldn't take me as long as it had taken him to have a boyfriend.  At my school there was one Iranian boy and one of the girls in my class had said that he was my boyfriend.  I had felt like crying when she said it, but I hadn't cried in front of her.  I had told my brother about it and he'd gotten angry and asked me what her name was.

     "I need to go look at some old pictures," my brother said.

     I went with him to my parents' room and he took out some old photo albums.  We looked at the old pictures.  The faces were all serious.  Even the pictures of my mother and father were serious.  There was one picture of my grandmother where she was smiling.  She was sitting by herself.  When I saw it, I thought that maybe it was good that something was dead.  She had gotten married to my grandfather when she was fourteen and she hadn't had any choice in it.  But my brother was looking at something else.  I knew that what he was sad about was worth being sad about, but I thought he should look at the other part of it too.

     "It's not so bad to be called honey, is it?" I said.

     "No, it's not bad.  It's just lonely.  I don't feel like part of the men who didn't get called honey and I don't feel like part of the men who did get called honey."

     I didn't think my grandmother had ever called my grandfather honey, in English or in Farsi.  She hadn't had a chance to.

     I tried to see what my brother saw about being lonely, but I just couldn't, not for very long.  I just kept thinking about how lonely my grandmother must have been.  I felt like part of her for that.

     It was funny - I liked how my brother and I could always talk about anything, but now that he had a girlfriend, it seemed like there were going to be some things I didn't understand, or that I could only understand a little bit.  We were still going to be able to talk about everything else like we always did, and I was still going to tell him about it when I felt bad about something, but that was another new part of the presence of a girl whose picture he kept in his room.

     All I knew was that when I had a boyfriend, I was going to call him honey, and if he was Iranian, I was going to call him Asal, and when that happened, I was going to come back and open up the photo album to the pictures of my grandmother and have all my own feelings about her and about the one picture where she was smiling as she was sitting by herself.