"Hello, sweetheart, welcome home!"
Surprisingly, it was not her grandmother but Auntie Surpun who opened the door. "I missed you," she twittered lovingly. "What have you done all day long? How was your day?"
"It was OK," Armanoush said placidly, wondering what her youngest aunt was doing here on a Tuesday evening.
Auntie Surpun lived in Berkeley, where she had been teaching forever, at least ever since Armanoush was a child. She drove to San Francisco on the weekends but it was highly unusual of her to show up during the week. But the question would cease to concern Armanoush once she proceeded to give an account of her day. She remarked heartily, with a beaming face, "I bought myself some new books."
"Books!? Did she say `books' again?" a familiar voice yelled from inside.
That sounded like Auntie Varsenig! Armanoush hung up her raincoat, flattened her wind-ruffled hair, and wondered in the meantime what Auntie Varsenig was doing here as well. Her twin daughters were coming back this evening from Los Angeles, where they had been participating in a basketball tournament. Auntie Varsenig was so excited about the competition that she hadn't been able to sleep properly for the last three days, constantly chatting on the phone with either of her daughters or their coach. And yet on the day the team was returning, instead of arriving at the airport hours early, as was her habit, here she was at grandma's house setting the dinner table.
"Yes, I did say `books,"' Armanoush said, shouldering her canvas backpack as she walked into the spacious living room.
"Don't you listen to her. She's just getting old and grumpy," Auntie Surpun chirped from behind her as she followed her into the living room. "We are all so proud of you, sweetheart."
"We are proud of her, but she could just as well act her age." Auntie Varsenig shrugged as she placed the last china plate on the table and then gave her niece a hug. "Girls your age are usually busy beautifying themselves, you know. Not that you need to, of course, but if you read and read and read, where is it going to end?"
"You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one." Armanoush winked without knowing how pretty she looked under the sun's fading light in the room. She set her backpack on her grandma's armchair and instantly emptied it, like a kid eager to see a bunch of new toys. Books rained on top of one another: The Aleph and Other Stories, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Frolic of His Own, The Management of Grief, Borges's Collected Fictions, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Landscape Painted with Tea, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, and two by Milan Kundera, her favorite author, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Life Is Elsewhere. Some of them were new to her, others she'd read years ago but had been wanting to read again.
All things considered, Armanoush knew, perhaps not rationally but instinctively, that the Tchakhmakhchian family's resistance to her passion for books came from a deeper, darker source than simply from an urge to remind her of the things girls her age were busy with. It was not only because she was a woman but also because she was an Armenian that she was expected to refrain twice as much from becoming a bibliophile. Armanoush had a feeling that beneath Auntie Varsenig's constant objection to her reading lay a more structural, if not primordial, concern: a fear of survival. She simply did not want her to shine too bright, to stand out from the flock. Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian millet to be eliminated by the late Ottoman government. They had first gotten rid of "the brains" and only then proceeded to extradite the rest-the laypeople. Like too many Armenian families in the diaspora, safe and sound here but never truly at ease, the Tchakhmakhchians were both elated and vexed when a child of theirs read too much, thought too much, and swerved too far away from the ordinary.
Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality-that stringent and stolid truth from which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn't help to be so naive to think things wouldn't get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. If as a child of survivors you still wanted to read and ruminate, you should do so quietly, apprehensively, and introspectively, never turning yourself into a vociferous reader. If you couldn't help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as ifyou had been de-energized and now had only enough strength to be average. With a fate and family like this, Armanoush had to learn to downplay her talents and do her best not to glimmer too brightly.
A sharp, spicy smell wafted from the kitchen and tickled her nostrils, yanking her out of her reverie. "So," Armanoush exclaimed, turning toward the most talkative of her three aunts, "are you going to stay for dinner?"
"Only briefly, honey," Auntie Varsenig murmured. "I need to leave for the airport soon; the twins are coming back today. I just stopped by to bring you guys homemade manta and" Auntie Varsenig beamed with pride-"guess what? We got bastirma from Yerevan! "
"Gosh, I'm not eating manta and I'm definitely not going to eat bastirma." Armanoush frowned. "I can't reek of garlic tonight."
"No problem. If you brush your teeth and chew a mint gum there will be no smell whatsoever."
That was Auntie Zarouhi walking in with a plate of musaqqa, beautifully garnished with parsley and slices of lemon. She left the plate on the table and opened her arms wide to embrace her niece.
Armanoush embraced her back wondering all the while what was she doing here…? But she started to get the picture. What a wellplanned "coincidence" it was that the whole Tchakhmakhchian family had materialized at Grandma Shushan's house at the same time Armanoush would be going on her date. Everyone here had shown up with a different pretext but exactly the same purpose: They wanted to see, test, and judge with their own eyes this Matt Hassinger, the lucky young man who would be dating the apple of their eye this evening.
Armanoush looked at her relatives with a stare that bordered on desperate. What could she do? How could she be independent when they were so frighteningly close? How could she convince them that they didn't have to worry so much about her when they had had so much in life to worry about? How could she break free from her genetic heritage, especially when a part of her was so proud of it? How could she fight off the kindness of her loved ones? Could goodness be fought?
"That's not going to help!" Armanoush gasped. "No toothpaste, no chewing gum, not even those awful minry mouthwashesthere is nothing on earth strong enough to suppress the smell of bastirma. It takes a week to finally disappear. If you eat bastirma you smell and sweat and breathe bastirma for days on end. Even your pee smells like bastirma!"
"What's peeing got to do with dating?" Armanoush heard a befuddled Auntie Varsenig whisper to Auntie Surpun as soon as she had turned her back.