Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

They liked this.

  By the end of the night, we had ten pounds of candy.

  “Can I stay up?” Oscar said when we got home. He wanted to count everything. He had chocolate all over his mouth.

  “No,” Amanda told him. Then they screamed at each other. Then he went to bed. Then it was just the two of us.

  It was quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock coming from somewhere deep within the house. We sat on the couch together. My good arm around her shoulder, her leg pressing against my leg.

  I said, “This is what it could be like for us.”

  “What could be like for us?” she said.

  “You and me in this house.”

  “We are in this house,” she said. She didn’t get it.

  “You don’t get it,” I said.

  She unwrapped one of her brother’s lollipops and stuck it in her mouth. She watched me watch her. She leaned over and put her lips close to my ear. I could smell the strawberry. “Come on,” she whispered, “let’s go upstairs.” Her breath made my toes curl. “I have to work in the morning” was all I could think to say. It was true. But I followed her up the big staircase anyway, tiptoeing past Oscar’s room, and then across the landing, and then up another staircase that led to her bedroom.

  It was small and cozy, with slanted ceilings, and it was decorated with the pinks and purples of her childhood. She had fluffy pillows all over the bed. She had posters of kitty cats on the wall. Sitting on her dresser were a hundred tiny bottles and jars. On cue, she opened a tube and squeezed a small amount of cream on her finger. She rubbed it into her cheeks and forehead.

  “One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to wake up in the morning and be cured.”

  “If you believe it,” I said, “it will happen.” I was quoting.

  She looked in the mirror at me. “Is that so?”

  “Good things happen to good people,” I said.

  She snickered. “Who told you that?”

  I couldn’t remember.

  Abruptly, she asked, “Do you think I’m pretty, Max?”

  “I sure do,” I said. Because I did. And to show my sincerity, my romantic interest, I put my good arm around her waist and kissed the back of her neck. But she’d had enough with kissing. She whirled around and stuck her finger in my belt loop and pulled me against her. She was surprisingly strong and her breasts were pressed against my chest. She tugged at my shirt. I twisted awkwardly but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Can’t we at least,” I said, “turn off the light?”

  “No,” she said. “Please,” I pleaded.

  Back and forth we went like this, me wiggling and squirming, she pulling and tugging, me the object of desire, she the kleptomaniac, until finally, too exhausted and embarrassed to go on, I succumbed.

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  She relaxed her hold on me at once. It felt like a snake uncoiling. Then she reclined with a sigh onto her purple bed, her back propped up by a dozen pillows, her hands behind her head in a posture of luxuriousness.

  I stood there in the middle of her bedroom, the lights blazing away, as bright as those fluorescent lights in the supermarket, and I did what she wanted: I undressed. The shoes first, of course, then the socks, and after that I took off my belt because I was stalling for time, and then I unzipped my jeans and stepped out of them, and after that I dropped my boxers, since I’d rather be naked from the waist down than from the waist up. But soon there was nothing left except my shirt, which I unbuttoned as slowly as I could, until my chest was exposed with one sleeve hanging full and one sleeve hanging empty. Then I took it all the way off.

  I stood there naked and silent, waiting for her to issue her verdict about my deformity, which presently she did: “What’s the big fucking deal, Max?”

  Then she turned off the lights and pulled me onto her bed, where she spent the next few hours teaching me how to do all those things I’d only ever watched in the videos.

  In the morning I woke late. I was late for work. I didn’t care. I lay there without moving, next to Amanda in her fluffy bed. Then very quietly I got up and got dressed and sneaked downstairs past her parents’ bedroom, where I could hear a white noise machine whirring, and out the back door.

  In the daylight, the Halloween displays had lost their power to frighten; they were flat and wilted and wet. During the night the ghosts and goblins had fallen or been torn down, and now the roads were covered with pillowcases and cardboard, pounded into the ground by a succession of cars, mine included. The American flags were flying, though, they were flapping in the wind, and when I came over the river, the factories were going strong.

  Everyone said that it was only a matter of time until we took the capital, maybe a matter of hours. But every time the loudspeaker clicked on that day, it was just Mr. Moskowitz letting me know that there was a cleanup in such-and-such aisle, and I would wheel my mop and bucket the other way.

  For two days people walked around holding their breath, looking expectantly at one another. For two days everyone waited to hear what would happen next.

  And on the third day the draft began.

  Pink from coffee was called right away. So was Howie from deli. So were three baggers and someone from fish and someone from bakery. Ziggy was called. He’d gotten his wish after all.

  You could tell who was going by the way he walked, slowly, deliberately, as if groping his way through a rainy night. If I happened to make eye contact with one of them, they would look startled. I tried to avoid them when I could. Within a week they had gotten their papers, and they had gotten their physicals, and the day before they were to depart, we had a surprise going-away party for them. Everyone gathered in the back room, including some customers who’d been shopping in the supermarket for years and knew everyone by name. When the recruits arrived, they pushed their way through the swinging doors, and we shouted, “SURPRISE!” But the surprise was on us, because they’d gotten their heads shaved and they looked strange, like newborns. I couldn’t even recognize them. The baggers looked like they’d give anything to go back to bagging.

  “You boys look so handsome,” one of the cashiers said. The men tried to smile, but they knew the truth. They stood with their arms folded meekly in front of their chests.

  Mr. Moskowitz said, “Eat up, everyone!” And we ate our free doughnuts and drank our free sodas that Mr. Moskowitz had gotten the district manager to donate. No one really knew what to say. We tried to mill around, but it was difficult because the back room was cramped with the day’s delivery, the pallets stacked one on top of another, ten high, towering over our heads. It was a reminder that all of these boxes would soon be opened and unpacked, so as to make room for the next day’s delivery—life goes on.

  Eventually Mr. Moskowitz said he wanted to make a speech. Everyone got quiet and he stood on a box and started by saying how he was proud of each of the guys, even though they didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  “What you’re doing,” he intoned, “what you’re about to do …”

  Ziggy and Howie stared straight ahead—they already had the stare of soldiers. Pink had his eyes closed because he was high. The baggers stared at their feet.

  “I know it’s going to turn out all right for you,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “because you’re good people.”

  The room said yes to that.

  “You’re going to be back soon,” he said.

  The room said yes to that too.

  “It’s not easy,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “but it’s important.” His voice was rising, and his face was getting red, and some of the cashiers were wiping their eyes, and the mood was becoming even more doleful and downcast, and the back room was hot, unbearably hot, and I had the feeling that we were at a funeral, not a going-away party, that this was it for Ziggy and Pink and the baggers. They wouldn’t be coming back. Their faces told the story.

  So I shouted, “Shoot some motherfuckers for me, fellas!” And that broke the tension. The back room erupt
ed, everyone applauded, including Pink and Ziggy and the guy who collected shopping carts in the parking lot. After that, we ate and drank our fill and talked about other things until Mr. Moskowitz said it was time for us to get back to work.

  Later that day, as I was coming out of the locker room, Mr. Moskowitz called me into his office. “Max,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “Come in, Max, and shut the door.” The knot in his tie was loose because it was the end of the day, it was casual time. He put his hands on his spreadsheets and looked at me from across the desk, a paternal, patient look. A look of forbearance.

  What wrong thing, I wondered, had I done now.

  “If you give one hundred percent, Max,” he said, “you get one hundred percent right back.”

  And the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, I changed into my new uniform and took my place behind the coffee bar. I had been right, it’s not hard to pour a cup of coffee, especially when you have a five-dollar raise to go along with it.

  That winter I learned fast and I learned well, and the customers would come walking up to the counter, tracking slush across the floor, which was no longer my problem, and I’d make their mochas and their cappuccinos and their lattes with a smile and a flourish. Sometimes Amanda would stop in unannounced, sometimes with her parents—who were proud of me—and little Oscar, who had started teaching me how to snowboard, which I had a surprising proclivity for. I’d turn around and they’d be standing there waiting for me to notice them. Amanda would be wearing that old fur coat with the American-flag pin.

  “May I help you?” I’d ask, as if they were customers whom I’d never seen before. It was a game we played, and it never failed to get a laugh. Then I’d make their drinks how I knew they liked them—hot chocolate for Oscar.

  When they were done drinking and chatting, Mom and Dad would say that they should let me get back to work. They’d wave goodbye. “So long! So long!” Amanda would stay a few moments longer, leaning across the counter to kiss me on the lips, and with that expert sleight of hand she had mastered somewhere long ago, she would slip a single packet of sugar into her coat pocket.

  For Karen Mainenti and Steven Kuchuck

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to my agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, and to my editors at the Dial Press, Noah Eaker and Susan Kamil.

  Many thanks also to Cressida Leyshon, Deborah Treisman, David Remnick, Philip Gourevitch, Nathaniel Rich, Matt Weiland, Jean Strouse, Kelle Ruden, Joanna Yas, Jessica Flynn, Sarah Levitt, Caitlin McKenna, Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Sharmila Woollam, Caroline Dawnay, Bryan Charles, Laurie Sandell, Keith Josef Adkins, and Thomas Beller. As well as to the Whiting Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York University, and Housing Works Bookstore Café (where several of these stories were written).

  And every Wednesday evening at 6:45, Jeff Adler, Andrew Fishman, and Jeff Golick.

  Also by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

  WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE: A MEMOIR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. He is the author of Brief Encounters with the Enemy and a memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He lives in New York City with his wife and teaches at New York University.

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