Maps on St. Mark’s was a small dusty place owned and operated by its founder, Rasheed Ghazi, who first opened the store in 1980. Mr. Ghazi, as everyone, including Rebecca, now called him, had been a philosophy professor in his native Tehran before his disagreements over matters such as freedom of speech and other trifles ran him afoul of the ayatollah and he was forced to depart. In Tehran, Professor Ghazi had specialized in giving people complicated answers designed specifically to provoke more complicated questions, but now he ran a dusty tiny store selling maps in the East Village, and specialized in giving people large pieces of paper designed to tell them simply where to go. The irony was not lost on him, or Rebecca, who had learned his life story over their many long afternoons together, watching the tourists outside of the store’s one window drift by.
Mr. Ghazi referred to Iran by its older title, Persia, as the only act of rebellion left to an expat unable to return to his homeland. Not that he would have wanted to. The country he had known and loved was gone, its current incarnation bearing little resemblance to what he thought of as home. With his family either displaced throughout America or slaughtered, and unwilling to put old friends in danger by contacting them, Mr. Ghazi contented himself with the small older Persian population he could scrape together in New York. However, he did not limit himself to their numbers alone. He found he had a kind of affinity with many immigrants, especially Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian ones. They shared spices and rices, and the whispers of a destroyed but still missed home buzzed in all their ears. Mr. Ghazi felt comfortable with these men, these Pakistani cab drivers and Lebanese convenience store owners, much to the consternation of his wife, Sheedah, who felt that he was lowering himself in spending time with uneducated foreigners. Rebecca heard them arguing about it some days, for the Ghazis lived over the store. Personally she enjoyed the strange men who came to greet Mr. Ghazi and bring him rose-scented pastries and bags dripping with grease. She always got the leftovers.
Mr. Ghazi had bought his tiny apartment and the store below it twenty years ago when the East Village was still a wild no-man’s-land. Back then it had been all he and his wife could afford. Now he and Sheedah were immune to astronomical rent raises and were, in fact, sitting on a gold mine. Sheedah, whose only interest in American events was reading the local real estate news, begged him to sell so they could buy a condo and retire in suburban New Jersey, but he refused. For this, Rebecca would be eternally grateful, as the work was easy, the pay was enough, and the stability of the store was the only thing keeping her vaguely sane.
Mr. Ghazi was a creature of habit. He opened the shop each day at ten A.M. exactly. He ate lunch, a curry from a local place that delivered, along with a fruit salad (for health) and strong black coffee, every day, closing the shop from twelve thirty P.M. to one thirty P.M. to enjoy his lunch in peace. Anyone who knew him knew this. Rebecca assumed he would be surprised to see his only employee knocking tentatively on the door at one twenty-five that Friday afternoon.
She didn’t need to knock, being in possession of a key, but she did so anyway out of respect. Rebecca made her own hours but always told him what those hours would be, and she felt a twinge of guilt at not calling to tell him she was coming. After all, he barely needed her at all, even when she was scheduled to work.
Mr. Ghazi had hired Rebecca seven years ago after he had broken his ankle due to a fall reaching for an atlas from 1498 describing the geography of medieval Europe. He needed help while he healed. At twenty-one Rebecca was kind, responsible, and cheerful, and in need of part-time work. She competently ran the shop as he recuperated. Once he had fully healed, however, he couldn’t bear to fire this bright young actress, and he kept her on to assist him, to keep him company, to charm customers and browsing friends, and to give Sheedah someone to foist lamb dishes and pastries on. Sheedah, who usually hated American women with their bare arms and their loud voices, took an instant liking to Rebecca for no particular reason other than her once-mentioned interest in Persian rugs. It was done. Rebecca became a permanent fixture in the shop.
Rebecca smiled tentatively as she entered the shop, savoring the scents of old paper and dust and curry from Mr. Ghazi’s lunch. The needs reflected in the eyes of her recent bed partner were mercifully banished by Mr. Ghazi’s familiar smiling gaze, though it did hold a hint of worry.
“Do I look that bad?” Rebecca patted her still-damp hair self-consciously.
“I have never understood how you leave your home with hair still dripping. My mother would have had fits.”
Rebecca smiled as Mr. Ghazi scolded her. “So would mine.” She stepped around Mr. Ghazi and headed to the minuscule back room to put her bag down and try to do something presentable with her wet, bedraggled hair. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her eyes smudged with last night’s eye makeup, she sighed.
“I do look that bad,” she called out to him.
“These are your words, not mine.” Rebecca smiled. Her boss was a sweet man. “It was a bad night?” Rebecca was wiping off her eye makeup and almost missed the question. She paused for a moment, as she often did before responding to Mr. Ghazi’s probes into her personal life. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but Rebecca was careful with her candor, because Mr. Ghazi, while liberal in many respects, was still a Muslim immigrant from Iran, and Rebecca was never sure what would shock. It was safer to test the waters with little moments than to reveal her entire life to him. Rebecca didn’t want to lose her tentative Persian family, so she made her life fit into what she perceived to be their scope of understanding and morality.
But something about the morning, with its crushing panic, and her immediate reaction of escaping and fleeing to the map store, made her feel that if she did not tell Mr. Ghazi in some small way that she was suffocating she would start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that in front of him.
“It was a bad night.” She finished washing her face and stepped back into the main room of the store, where Mr. Ghazi’s inquiring eyes made tears spring from her own. Damn, she thought, there I go.
“What is it, Rebecca? What makes you so sad?” Mr. Ghazi gestured for Rebecca to sit, keeping a formal distance. He had always been awkward around emotional females, his wife included, but he considered it an honor that Rebecca had admitted her pain, which she so often kept tucked away like a handkerchief. Watching her in the seven years she had been in his employ, he had seen her early enthusiasm become a hardened fear, and he worried for her.
Rebecca struggled to contain herself, but it felt so futile. What was the point of holding herself back? What was she containing her feelings for, anyway? A politeness? A vague social expectation that she wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all? The way everyone kept saying that they were fine until the point where the word lost all meaning? She wasn’t fine. She hadn’t been for years.
“There was this boy—” she started.
“Did someone hurt you?” Mr. Ghazi looked both disturbed and in some way relieved. If it was a love affair gone wrong, this was at least familiar territory. There were platitudes he could express, soothing words he could say. He waited.
“He’s not important. I just feel like I am slipping. It’s harder than I thought anything could be and I’m so tired. I need someone to give me the chance. I hate that. Why can’t I choose, instead of wanting to be chosen?”
She felt pathetic. He looked at her with pity and she wanted to hide.
“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.” Rebecca’s voice pierced the air as she apologized for herself, brushing aside her feelings in a bid to return to normalcy. She should have claimed it was women’s troubles and let it be.
“You are not stupid, Rebecca. But if this is your life, you must change it. If this is the world you live in, one that confronts you with a feeling that you are not worth being chosen, then it is a stupid world.”
He didn’t understand. He was kind, but he didn’t understand anything.
“Unless I can change the things I want, how can I change the way my life is?”
Mr. Ghazi had no answers. Maybe that