Maybe she has a rug made of structured bamboo or plush white polyester. Georgia’s room at home in Santa Barbara is modern, white, with high ceilings and large plants. “Defne,” Georgia says seriously, emerging from the closet with her bra off. “Are you pissed?” she asks from inside the closet. I turn away from her and sit on my bed, my socked feet floating above the rug. Georgia pulls her shirt over her head like it is made of water and moves towards my closet. When I opened the door, Georgia scanned my room like one of those sonar devices they use in oceans or in medicine on people’s bodies, and the way she stared at my bookshelf, my flowery bedspread, then my rugs-silk and wool, blue and red-made me think she was looking at my skin. My laugh, this thing that sounds better on somebody else. “She just broke up with her boyfriend,” I say, “the one our parents told the whole family, back in Istanbul, she would marry.” “She’s too cool for us, huh,” Georgia says as we climb the stairs to my bedroom. Georgia heads for the stairs as if she has been here before, as if the floor-plan of our home has been stamped neatly onto her heart, as if I would ever not follow her. Georgia looks from Zeynep to me before pointing towards the back of the house where the stairwell rises to the bedroom floor. Don’t leave the door unlocked when you leave.” She stares at Georgia for the longest time. She is going to a party with her med school friends tonight, while I bring Georgia to the Christmas party. Zeynep pulls her eyelid off her eyeball, making the lid into a roof. Zeynep looks away from the mirror, and I see two of her: the dark-capped head of hair and long nose ending in a small hook, neither facing the other in the mirror.
Her mouth is popped open into a tiny O and she draws a thick black line on her eyelid. In med school she gave herself back her name-Zeynep-and she wore it on a gold chain around her neck as a present from our parents to celebrate her academic achievements. Inside, my older sister is standing before the mirror in the foyer. We come to my house, a small two-story home with a pointed roof and a door always locked twice. Georgia’s parents are separated and live in new homes with new families but, like she said, they’re dying to get their hands on her. “I’m really hot-blooded,” she adds, and she sucks on her cigarette again without breathing. Its straps show like sinews between bones. Georgia wears only a leather jacket, a white silk tank underneath. It’s Georgia’s first time this deep in Brooklyn, but I know she would never admit this. The Italians cover their homes in colorful lights-on some lawns there are plastic reindeer or lit-up toy soldiers-while the Arabs lie low.
Some nights, if it’s silent enough, I can hear the Atlantic smash into the rocky Brooklyn beach below the Verrazano. We walk the quiet streets between bare trees and short brick houses. “This will only be for a few days,” Georgia says, speaking clearly even with a cigarette in her mouth.
She’s staying with us because her flight to California got cancelled. It took Georgia two hours to get from our dorm in Manhattan to my neighborhood in South Brooklyn. We just finished our first semester of college in the city. When I meet Georgia at the subway station she pretends not to see me, and when I wave in her face she glances up with a look of practiced surprise, as if I hadn’t agreed to meet her here before we walk to my family’s home, as if I hadn’t marched through snow to get to her, as if I hadn’t done the right thing. This piece was first published on November 13, 2019.
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