Girl Name That Starts with B
BY ASYL OSPAN
On the last evening before you left for America, Ana invited family over for jolayaq. Aunts, uncles, toddlers, and tweens crowded your family’s three-room apartment and fed on greasy lamb and potatoes from a gigantic wooden tabaq that crowned the dining table. You smiled a shy, uncomfortable smile at Ana and Äke’s bragging of their brilliant daughter who got a full scholarship to a college in America and pretended that you remembered the names of your elderly aunts and uncles as they said their tedious bata, wishing you a safe journey and success in your studies. After the guests left and you and Jazira helped Ana deal with the crumbs cluttering the dining table and the mount of dirty dishes piled up in the sink, you and Ana sat in the quiet, dimly lit room that served as the dining room, the living room, and Aje’s bedroom and stared ahead at your plump suitcase hesitant to zip it up.
Promise me two things, Ana said and switched from Kazakh to Russian. You won’t eat pork. You won’t do any khernya. You won’t do any bullshit. Ana pronounced the word as “kherrrrrrrrrrnya,” her “r” rigid and elaborate. After the countless hours you spent studying for the SATs and writing your essays, the constant worry about all the things you were probably doing wrong, and 18 rejection letters you opened prior, the one single “Congratulations” that popped on your computer screen was a miraculous reward. Your life has been celebratory since– your public school threw a party to honor their first student to be admitted to a foreign college and Ana, Äke, and Aje spoiled you without measure to make you feel special in your last months home. The balloon of ease and joyful anticipation in your chest deflated slightly at the sight of Ana’s stern, even menacing eyes. You held her thick-skinned hand and promised you won’t eat pork nor do any khernya.
After Ana’s last soft kiss on the nose, Äke’s last itchy kiss on the cheek, Aje’s last wet smooch, Jazira’s last bony hug, 30 hours of flying, and the 3-hour long passport control line, you felt stale and oily like the slices of cheese that dry up on a small plate overnight and become crunchy and covered with exudated grease by morning. Your hair was flat and sticky, you were sore and dreamed of the biggest shower of your life. The first thing you felt when you stepped out of the Boston airport, trailing your huge suitcase behind you, was heat, and not the usual, turning-your-skin-dirty-brown kind you were used to. The American heat turned out to be wet– pavement and trees released puffs of steam. You got into a shuttle that took you to Williams, for which you cashed out 46.50$ (with experience, you would also get into the habit of never mentally converting dollar prices to tenge to avoid moral distress). As you fell asleep, you prayed that the driver and two other students in the shuttle wouldn’t smell your 30-hour-old underwear.
At Williams, you made discoveries. To get to your classes, you had to walk outdoors, which felt odd after 11 years in a public school where the entire campus was one building which students weren’t allowed to leave except for spring gym class or when the school day was over. It turned out America wasn’t necessarily fancy– your room was dusty and half the size of the room you shared at home with Jazira and there was always a hairball in the communal shower. You discovered that the very fact of your citizenship was astonishing. Folks kept saying “Oh, wow!” when you said “Kazakhstan” in response to their “where are you from?” You discovered that your name marked you with invisibility. You said it slowly when you introduced yourself, syllable by syllable: “Bal-qa-di-sha.” Most people tackled “Bal” but were tripped over by the back-in-the-throat “q.” Even though you started saying “Bal-ka-di-sha,” people often forgot your name, and subsequently, forgot you. You discovered that you had learned some English words with a misplaced accent, that it was “obl i gatory” and not “oblig a tory.” Speaking of accents, you discovered that you didn’t have a perfect American one as you thought you did; no, your accent made English sound chopped and heavy compared to the fluid, fast American speeches. You made one of your biggest discoveries when a cashier at the bookstore said something that to you sounded like “sheshe,” an alternate Kazakh word for “mother,” when you paid for your binder (and didn’t mentally convert the price to tenge, of course). Excuse me? you said. I said thank you, the cashier replied. Wait, you’re not Chinese?
At home, there were ethnicities. You were Kazakh, your classmate Marina was Russian, your math teacher Kausar Farhodovna was Uzbek. You described Marina as “light” and yourself as “swarthy.” You remembered how boys in middle school, all Kazakhs, stretched their eyes even thinner and said “look, I’m Chinese, I’m Asian!” and you were amused now that you knew that they were just as Asian to Americans. You became Asian. Kind of. Other Asians you met were just as unfamiliar and unavailable to you as your “white” peers. You once sat down with a group of Chinese students, and they chatted in Mandarin without paying much mind to you, their unfamiliar and bendy words gliding past your ears. Eventually, you got up and left. Nobody noticed.
You never described people as “white” in Kazakhstan, but in America, you did. You started to notice the “white,” too. Your roommate, who gagged when you told her people in Kazakhstan ate horse meat, was white. Most girls in the dance collective you joined were white. They left some of their words echoing with a slight “ah”: “Stop-ah!” “What do you mean-ah?!” and always huddled in an impenetrable circle before rehearsal, their private white laughter reeking of gossip and betrayal. You sat in the corner and observed them, increasingly aware of your warm barren shoulders glowing light-brown with a red undertone– a forgotten, unknown Asian. When you weren’t in class, studying, or wiping tables in the dining hall, you bedrotted in your stuffy flex, mindlessly munching on the stash of Kazakhstan chocolates in your drawer that you packed in your suitcase to give to the friends you were certain you’d meet.
The classes were strange. You could sit wherever and go to the restroom whenever. People talked without raising their hands, and talked a lot– your American professors stressed “participation” was very important. Most things you heard in class earned approving nods, though almost all of them sounded spoken without having much to say. You were usually called on with a mere “yes” and your classmates didn’t address you by your name when they responded to you, so when in your introductory poetry class, a blond boy two seats over said “I agree with what Balqadisha said about the usage of enjambment,” you were surprised. Yes, he put the accent on “di” instead of “sha,” but he said your name. You made a habit of stealing short glances at him; you noticed that his lips were small and bright-pink, like a raspberry, and that he had nice, slightly veiny hands. You abandoned your glancing when his blue eyes started looking back at you. Though you felt strangely cold and exposed under his gaze, you started to perform for it– you made sure your hair was washed; you sat with your back straight and held your tongue in a way that concealed your double chin. You didn’t fully understand why you performed and you knew it was foolish, yet you still did it.
When he first walked with you to your next class, he did what Americans called “yapping.” You learned that his name was Caleb, that though he was mostly a “STEM” guy, he loved the arts, hence taking the poetry class and that his brother and sister were a decade older– his mom had him when she was almost forty. He kept yapping during all of the following times he walked with you and the unwavering confidence with which he yapped was strangely flattering; it was as if he was certain that you wanted to know what he had to say or really wanted you to want to know what he had to say. He called you “an astonishingly good listener” compared to other girls who only wanted to gossip or talk about themselves. You remembered the giggling circle in the dance studio and felt a slight glad prickling in your chest. The first time his raspberry lips pressed against yours, his hand in your freshly-washed, slightly perfumed hair, felt like you stepped over a dangerous threshold into an abyss and just kept on falling. You weren’t supposed to do this– at home, girls got slutshamed for merely hugging boys. The next time you called Ana, you chose to not mention either the boy, the raspberry, or the falling. You had a feeling that all of those things qualified as khernya.
Sometimes, after his long answer to your short question, he asked “How about you?”, a phrase that sounded born out of obligation instead of genuine interest. You told him small things about yourself, like about how you and Jazira used a ruler to split your post-dinner chocolate candy, like typical sisters, or about how Kazakh aunties’ kisses left your face wet with saliva. He listened to you with a faint smile, his captivating eyes slightly distant, and gave a slight “hmm” in response. When you told him about how your name was an invisibility cloak, he laughed slightly and admitted that “Balqadisha” took him a long time to remember and that he kept looking up your email address before he got the guts to say your name out loud and talk to you. He said you could get an English name. After all, his childhood best friend Maxwell was Chinese and had a Chinese name in addition to his English name. You asked what Maxwell’s Chinese name was and he said he didn’t remember.
You considered the English name thing. There was temptation in the prospect of introducing yourself without internally debating whether to say “Balqadisha” or “Balkadisha,” without repeating your name over and over again. There was a revolt in your chest, a thing already mourning the name Ana gave you with so much love– Balqadisha, the girl whom the legendary folk song describes as outstanding from the crowd of eighty other girls with her Venus-like glow. There were the eyes of people blankly staring past you.
One night, you sat on his soft mattress, his head resting on your knees, and asked him, “How do I choose an English name?” He googled “girl names that start with B” and you read through the whole list. You were capricious– “Brianna” sounded like a luscious, fat woman who wore too much makeup; “Brooke” sounded like a stern, unhappy school principal; “Bella” sounded like a spoiled brat. You went with “Bailey”– not because you liked it, but because it was the only name which you couldn’t mock elaborately. Your professors sighed with relief when you told them to call you “Bailey.” You started to write “Best regards, Bailey” at the bottom of each email and signed your name “Bailey Imangeldi” which felt strange, like bananas with ketchup. He chuckled when you told him that, and said that “weird food combos” sometimes taste surprisingly good and that fries with ice cream was his favorite.
A few weeks later, he invited you to dinner with his family. You didn’t have time to wash your hair beforehand, so you slicked the greasy mess into a braided ponytail, which made your head look like an egg. His brother and his sister’s boyfriend were fat. You felt their skin stretch intensely over their fingers as you shook their hands. His mother and his sister, however, were dainty, and their hands felt as if there was too much skin on them. You looked around the two-story house, wondering how four people could possibly need so much space– you considered your family of five very well off with an apartment half the size of his family’s first floor. You eagerly anticipated your first family-style American dinner, the pastel plates neatly sectioned with meat, chalk-white mashed potatoes and “string” beans. You wound up disappointed, however; the seemingly fluffy mashed potatoes were bland and dry and each bite of the string beans filled your mouth with a splash of cold grassy water. You left the pork chop untouched to keep at least one promise you made to Ana.
You began to understand where he learned to ask questions as if it was his obligation to do so; everyone except his mother practically interviewed you but their voices were barren of curiosity. What do you study? What is Kazbekistan like? Where did you learn to speak English? Have you seen “Borat “? I think it’s about your country. Your answers were unentertaining– you were still undecided, Kazakhstan was nice, you learned English in school and from watching movies, and you haven’t seen “Borat.” Soon enough, the questions were abandoned and replaced with familiar chatter about Caleb’s studies and things that happened to people you didn’t know. You briefly caught his mother’s watery blue eyes fixated on you. They strangely reminded you of the resentful-younger-sister stare Jazira shot when you ate her piece of candy or ignored her “dibs” on the laptop the two of you shared. Jazira’s stare, you could meet and reciprocate. His mother’s, you could not.
When dinner was over, your stomach full but not satisfied, he thanked his mother for the delicious meal and invited you upstairs to see the rest of the house. He went to the restroom first, and you waited for him, meandering in the hall, wondering what he did there except for the obvious business. Passing the ajar kitchen door, you heard an agitated voice half-whispering like a gossiping white girl in the dance studio. All of them are just coming here to get a greencard… And I mean, she’s not that smart, undecided and taking a poetry class? I didn’t even know they accepted foreigners who aren’t STEM majors. Let’s just hope she doesn’t manipulate Caleb into anything. You stood frozen, your ears muffling the rest. The door creaked open a little while later. His mother came out with a bland-looking pie. Her watery eyes opened wide when she saw you. You looked at this busted, old gossiping white girl as her thin red mouth quivered in search of words to say.
You waited through his tour, the chunky apple pie, and bidding farewell with another round of handshakes. You stared at the floor as you shook his mother’s wrinkly hand. In his car, you told him about what his mother said and eagerly awaited his compassionate rage. His eyes looked blank and watery. I’m sorry, he said, but after all, she’s an old white lady who hadn’t seen much of the world. You can’t take her close-mindedness too personally. Flakes of snow hit the windshield as he waited for you to say something. You couldn’t think of anything but ask him to start driving. As he drove through the woods and occasional short, wide buildings, he didn’t ask you anything and he didn’t yap either. You reluctantly kissed him goodbye before leaving the car, and you realized you never wanted to kiss him again.
Back in your dorm, you felt like you were supposed to cry, but you didn’t have the tears, so you lay on your bunk and counted cracks in the ceiling. You searched “Borat” on Youtube and hysterically laughed at Borat’s washing his face with toilet water before you started sobbing. Ana called you. You hung up. You knew you’d done a shit ton of khernya. You didn’t want Ana to see your ugly bloated face. You didn’t want to explain anything.
You picked up Ana’s call a few days later and almost immediately, Ana asked you what was wrong. You lied and said nothing was wrong, you were just busy. She didn’t believe you and asked again and again, and you said that nothing was wrong, again and again, your voice loud and irritated, yet barren of sincerity. Ana’s face dropped. She hung up without saying a word. You hated her for reading your face so precisely. You hated yourself for lying. You hated his mother. You hated the khernya your America was turning out to be. You checked your new bank account for the amount of money you scraped up from your dining hall job and spent almost all of it on plane tickets back to Kazakhstan for winter break.
Home was fresh with the newness of the old. You were reintroduced to small specificities– the haphazard Almaty streets where slum-like, grey Soviet-era buildings stood next to glass skyscrapers; the big apples that filled your mouth with floral juice; Aje’s oiled skin as she lay plopped down on an old sheet, awaiting to be massaged by your “golden hands.” You mentally converted tenge prices to dollars and everything started to seem cheap– the 150-tenge fresh tandyr loaves from your favorite Uzbek cafe cost only 30 cents and the 1500-tenge taxi fare cost just three dollars. Some things reminded you that time didn’t stand frozen merely because you were away. When you opened a can of your favorite salted caramel ice cream, you found that the caramel drizzle on top, the small indulgence you and Jazira often fought over, was gone. Jazira was a flat-chested, scrawny girl when you left, but now, she wore a bra and her forehead became sprinkled with grainy pimples. She often stood close to the mirror, squeezing them with a purely teenage zeal. Though Ana fluttered around the apartment in her usual manner, endlessly circling from laundry to dishes to watching Turkish dramas with Aje, there was a new coldness between you and her, a distance you felt even when she kissed you on the nose.
On New Year’s Eve, relatives flooded the apartment again. Your uncles and aunts greeted you with wet kisses and exclaimed: “There’s our fancy-shmancy American girl!” They all barely fit at the dining table laden with et-nan, baursak, and an endless variety of Soviet-style mayonnaise-garnished salads. At midnight, you drank your first glass of real champagne. Everyone else earnestly whispered a wish into their glass, but you just chugged. At 3AM, some relatives left and others occupied all the beds. You and Ana slept on the old, musty körpe laid out on the floor of the room that served as the dining room, the living room, and Aje’s bedroom. Aje snored like a tractor on the pull-out couch as you watched Ana’s face. She looked older than before you left; there was more concern in her eyes, more stretch to her skin. Ana started half-whispering. Since you left, I watched your face become more unhappy and bloated. I’m helpless over here, an ocean away. My hands are tied. I can only wonder what kind of khernya is happening to you over there, she said. I don’t even know who you are anymore. You listened, tears dripping into your ear. Before you knew it, you were telling Ana about the blank faces, the gossiping white girls, the chocolate in your drawer, the falling, the girl names that start with B, the relieved sighs, the bland mashed potatoes, the old gossiping white girl, Borat. Your rant broke off into silence, your chest light, cleansed of khernya. Your heart echoed in your elbows as you waited for Ana’s reaction.
Bailey? What kind of a name is that? She cackled quietly. You cackled with her and you both muffled your laughter with your pillows. Ana pulled you in and held you like she’s done so many times before to protect you from your nightmares when you crawled into her and Äke’s bed in the middle of the night. She ran her hands through your thick hair. You only need one girl name that starts with B, she hummed.
Eighty girls walk with you
Among them, you’re Venus, my bright light, my Qadisha…
Ana sang breathily, her lips grazing your forehead. You breathed in. Breathed out.
You’re walking to your first class of the semester and Williams feels joyfully asleep, like a swaddled child. Snow cinematically falls on your hair. You enter the classroom and see him, seated near the professor’s desk. For a second, you think he might get up and walk towards you, but he doesn’t. You look straight into his watery eyes and he’s the first to look away. You understand you’ll never speak to him again. You put your backpack down and take a seat next to a white girl. Her eyes are kind and her lips point upward. Hi! I’m Mia. What’s your name? she asks. You can call me Bail… You change your mind at a half-word. My name is Balqadisha.
