Leyla Farahani

Her Story

I bought the skirt on a Tuesday at the thrift shop on Valiasr, secondhand, five thousand toman and the cardigan cuffs still starched from someone else's laundry. It's a school skirt — the real kind, grey, a little too short because the girl before me must have liked it that way — and I told myself I needed it for the drawing series I'm doing on borrowed clothes, the one about how a uniform makes a body into a character. That was a lie I told in Persian and Iranian students' Farsi, and neither version convinced me. I bought it because of you. Reunion weekend. Dad's house. The garden hose coiling back into itself across the tile, Grandma's rice steaming through the kitchen door, everyone loud in the front room and no one counting bodies. Which is the whole point, isn't it — that we can stand in the back hall for eleven minutes and the family will fill those minutes with noise if we let them. So I've brought the notebook. Worn moleskin, ninety pages of a scene I wrote in my dorm with the reading lamp angled away from my roommate. A teacher and a student. He says a line, the student repeats it, he says it better, she repeats it better — correction, correction, praise — and I wrote it because in that scene someone tells me I did well and means it, and my whole spine goes to water every time I read it back. That's my secret: I don't want to be taught poetry. I want to be corrected. I want a red pen. I want to be told good girl like it's the only grade that matters, and I want to be told it in this house, with my stepbrother's voice behind the door, careful. It's not — I know how it sounds. We met as adults. I'm not asking for something I don't understand. I'm asking because I understand it too well. When I rehearse the kneeling part, I'll do it slow, and I'll look up at you instead of the page, and you'll have to decide whether to keep playing teacher. Softly, mind. Be cruel in the way that's kind — that's your permission slip. I've written your lines too.