Subway
- Jan 14, 2022
- 4 min read
by Mohammad Hakima
The first thing you notice about America, when you and your family step off the plane at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, is a gargantuan picture of a man smiling affably at a sandwich. The picture makes you shudder, because you don’t like images of wholesome men towering over you, but the good thing is that this man doesn’t have a turban. He’s certainly not Ayatollah Khomeini or anyone related to him. Your father, who is trying very hard to learn English, walks up to the image, puts on his reading glasses, and carefully pronounces the man’s name.
“Jah-red Fuh…Fugly,” your father takes out a pen and a little notepad from his breast pocket and writes down the name, along with the company logo, “Soob-vey.”
It doesn’t take long for Subway to become your father’s favorite restaurant, especially after he finds out about five-dollar footlongs.
“They’re incredible!” he tells you, years later, when you’re sitting across from him at a Subway in the local mall. “Can you believe it? I mean, look at this thing,” he holds out his sandwich like a trophy. “It’s even bigger than my foot. It’s like the size of Goliath’s foot.”
“Dad, that’s not the kind of foot they’re talking about.”
“But it’s a good deal, isn’t it? It’s what these Americans call a bang for the buck.”
“You know Subway isn’t even real food, right?” You show him the sliced turkey in your sandwich, which looks like a pale piece of cardboard, but your father shrugs. He’s not interested in this conversation. You feel bad bringing it up, because you don’t want to ruin his meal. You want him to enjoy his toasted meatball sub with extra cheese and jalapenos, even though thirty minutes later he’ll complain about having heartburn.
“They don’t make stuff like this in Tehran,” he says. “Those kebabs from down the street that you used to love—they’re making them with cat meat now! Feral cats running around the street. They catch ’em and butcher ’em, because the price of poultry is too high.”
Your father is right. Iran’s economy has drastically deteriorated in the past few years, and you’re extremely lucky to be in America. But the problem is that the United States isn’t everything you thought it would be. You’ve been here for about fifteen years now and something about this country bothers you. What’s even worse is that you can’t talk to your father about it. Every time you bring it up, he changes the subject and starts talking about how much better this place is than Iran.
The television mounted on the wall across from you is blaring the evening news. There is an image of a soldier standing on a ship, rapid-firing a machine gun, along with the headline, “Iran’s navy releases footage of skirmish with American Tanker.”
“Es-ker-meesh,” your father pronounces. He asks you what that word means, and he chuckles when you tell him. “Americans have all these different words for fighting. It’s the one thing they’re good at.”
The kid working behind the counter looks up at your table. His name tag says “Robbie.” He’s scrawny and tall, with blue eyes and a forehead full of acne, probably a high-schooler working a summer job. He walks over to the soda machine to grab a drink and sits on a nearby table to watch the news. The soldier on TV has a thick mustache and bushy eyebrows, kind of like your father, and Robbie sips his drink and glances warily at you guys. It’s the kind of hostile wariness that you’ve seen many times before, especially when you were in high school, kids staring awkwardly at your foreign features, commenting on your unibrow, telling you that you resemble some terrorist on TV.
“This kid, Rowbee, is looking at us like we wanna eskermeesh with him,” your father says.
He smiles, takes a big bite of his sub, and gives Robbie a thumbs up. “Very good,” he says aloud in English. “Mr. Jahred’s sandwiches—very delicious!”
Robbie nods with pursed lips, and your father starts chowing down on his sub, chewing emphatically, licking the sauce from his lips. He glances at Robbie after each bite and groans with contrived satisfaction, trying as hard as he can to eat like an American.
“Dad, what’re you doing?”
“I’m doing that thing Jahred does…What do they call it? Eating good in the neighborhood!”
You want to laugh and tell your father that he’s reciting the Applebee’s slogan, but then you notice Robbie’s sardonic look of judgement, the fearful way he’s regarding your father, and humiliation flushes your face. You throw the rest of your sandwich out and glare at him. He averts his gaze, but two seconds later he’s stealing glances again, loudly sipping his drink, practically proclaiming that he has a right to look where he pleases.
Your father finishes eating and is ready to go. He gives Robbie a hearty goodbye and walks out the door, belching at the top of his lungs. You’re glad to be finally leaving the restaurant.
As you guys step into the car and drive away, you want to talk to your father about that jarring encounter with Robbie, but you know exactly what will happen if you bring it up. Your father will dismiss it with a chuckle and tell you that you’re being too sensitive, that you focus too much on what other people think of you.
You take one last look at Robbie, who’s standing behind the counter. “He’s still watching us, dad.”
Your father laughs and gives him another thumbs up. But this time there’s something pointed, almost infectious, about his laughter, something surprising that you didn’t know you could connect with, and it puts a smile on your face.
“Very good, Mr. Rowbee,” your father says in English, and you can’t help but snicker at what a thumbs up means in Iran.
Mohammad Hakima has work published in The Evergreen Review, The Capra Review, Weekly Senator, and has been supported by Vermont Studio Center. He started writing when he learned to speak English, after his family immigrated from Iran to the United States in 1998. He is currently a high-school special education teacher in New York City and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.
