A Very Large Expanse of Sea(8)
“They’re a work in progress,” he said, and chucked a water bottle at Carlos, who dodged it easily.
Carlos was still laughing. He walked over to where I was sitting on the floor and offered me his hand.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Really.”
I took his hand. He hauled me to my feet.
“All right,” he said. “Let me see that six-step I keep hearing about.”
I spent the rest of that day practicing simple skills: doing handstands and push-ups and trying to improve my uprock. An uprock was the dance you did while you were upright. Much of breakdancing was performed on the ground, but an uprock was given its own, special attention; it was what you did first—it was an introduction, an opportunity to set the stage—before you broke your body down, figuratively, into a downrock and the subsequent power moves and poses that generally constituted a single performance.
I knew how to do a very basic uprock. My footwork was simple, my movements fluid but uninspired. I had a natural feel for the beats in the music—could easily sync my movements to the rhythm—but that wasn’t enough. The best breakdancers had their own signature styles, and my moves were still generic. I knew this—had always known this—but the guys pointed it out to me anyway. We were talking, as a group, about what we knew and what we wanted to learn, and I was leaning back on my hands when my brother tapped my knuckles and said, “Let me see your wrists.”
I held out my hands.
He bent them forward and backward. “You’ve got really flexible wrists,” he said. He pressed my palm backward. “This doesn’t hurt?”
I shook my head.
He smiled, his eyes bright with excitement. “We’re going to teach you how to do the crab walk. That will be your signature power move.”
My eyes widened. The crab walk was exactly as strange as it sounded. It was nothing at all like the sort of thing they taught you in elementary school gym classes; instead, it was a move that, like much of breakdancing, challenged the basic rules of gravity. It required total core strength. You held your body weight up on your hands—your elbows tucked into your torso—and you walked. With your hands.
It was hard. Really hard.
“Cool,” I said.
Somehow, it had been the best day of high school I’d ever had.
4
Four
I didn’t end up getting home until around five, and by the time I’d finished showering my mom had already shouted at us several times that dinner was ready. I made my way downstairs even though I knew I had a bunch of worried, and later, exasperated, text messages from Ocean waiting for me on my phone, but only because I didn’t have the kind of parents who allowed me to ignore dinner—not even for homework. Ocean would have to wait.
Everyone was already assembled when I made it downstairs. My dad had his laptop out—the ethernet cable dragging all across the floor—and his reading glasses on his head; he waved me over when I walked into the room. He was reading an article about pickling cucumbers.
“Mibini?” he was saying to me. Do you see? “Very easy.”
It didn’t look particularly easy to me, but I shrugged. My dad was a master of making things, and he was always trying to recruit me to join him in his projects, which I didn’t mind at all. In fact, it was kind of our thing.
I was nine the first time my dad took me to a hardware store, and I’d thought the place was so cool my brain just about exploded. I began daydreaming about going back there, about saving up the money I would’ve otherwise spent on Lisa Frank notebooks and instead purchasing a piece of plywood just to see what I could do with it. Later, my dad was the one who taught me how to work a needle and thread. He’d seen me stapling the cuffs of my jeans to keep them from dragging, and one night he showed me how to properly hem a pair of pants. He also taught me how to swing an ax to split firewood. How to change a flat tire.
But sometimes my dad’s mind worked so quickly I almost couldn’t keep up. My father’s father—my grandfather—had been an architect in Iran, responsible for designing some of the country’s most beautiful buildings, and I could see that same kind of brain in my dad. He devoured books even faster than I did; he carried them around with him everywhere. Wherever we’d lived, our garage became his workshop. He’d rebuild car engines, for fun. He built the table we were currently sitting around—it was a re-creation of a mid-century Danish style he’d always loved—and when my mom went back to school and needed a bag, my dad insisted on making one for her. He studied patterns. He bought the leather. And then he pieced it together for her, stitch by stitch. He still has a scar, spanning three of his fingers, where he accidentally sliced his skin open.
It was his idea of a romantic gesture.
Dinner was already on the table, slightly steaming. I’d been able to smell it from upstairs: the scents of buttery basmati rice and fesenjoon had flooded the whole house. Fesenjoon was a kind of stew made of walnut paste and pomegranate molasses, which sounds weird, I know, but it was so, so good. Most people made fesenjoon with chicken, but my late aunt had reinvented it with bite-size meatballs, and it had become a family recipe in her honor. There were also little side dishes of pickled vegetables and garlic yogurt and the still-warm disks of fresh bread that my dad baked every evening. There was a plate of fresh herbs and radishes and little towers of feta cheese. A bowl of dates. A cup of fresh, baby walnuts. The samovar, gurgling quietly in the background.