My sexual harrassment case part1

Okay, allow me to explain the problem. I have quite a loving family you see…little dog, huge apartment, my daddy has that gruff business man look, my mommy is practically anorexic and a huge shopaholic…the whole shebang you know? Living the American dream(except I don’t live in the US…)


Hello my name is Shoe Maiden and I’m a stereotype…
Honestly, I find stereotypes the most delightful things(even though I hate people who stereotype other people…I have a taste for irony and hypocrisy) and I think it’s because with everyone trying to be so original these days…stereotypes are the only original things left.

I was born in Dallas, TX you see…a town(I refuse to call it a city) which I have deemed to be the last place I would live(no offense meant to anyone who actually enjoys living in that temperature) and have complained(dramatically) many times on my many visits that: “I will simply die if I live in this place for more than a month.”
This I say with a perfected English accent ,which I have spent years correcting so it sounds like it’s being spoken by some old movie star like Audrey Hepburn. Pathetic? Perhaps. Untrue? Never…not to you guys. I really do adore the way Americans used to speak English…the accent is subtly British but not quite. Enough of my rambling.

Robert’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt…I lived in Dallas a grand total of three months before my parents made the wisest decision of their life, and I say life and not lives because it’s a singular term now…the last time they made a choice in their lives(separate lives) it ended up with my mom in complete control of my dad’s(life that is:D) and therefore ruined the possibility of the term lives having any meaning in their marriage, and decided to move…away.
This is how I imagine the conversation going.

Dad: hey! I have a chain of restaurants here but what do you say we pack up and leave?
Mom*mentally*: Let him think he’s in control. In reality: Yes dear.
Dad: We can go live close to our parents…raise a bunch of children…live happily ever after!
Mom*mentally* haha! You think I’m gonna have more children? I knew I married you cause you make me laugh. In reality: Yes dear.
Dad*feeling powerful*: good…glad it’s settled.

And that is how I moved to Iran…the country of my origins. Both my mom and my dad are part Iranian and so…there! I will spare you the details of the next fourteen years of my life and I’ll only say that they were interesting and that my experience in Iran and traveling around Asia and Europe and USA is worth telling. That is for another time and another blog.

So there I was fourteen years later(not to the date of course) sitting on the edge of my suitcase near a school gym in Maisons-Laffitte…a small rich suburb just outside of Paris, France. Waiting for the rest of the students to arrive.
My father and I had mutually decided that I should go to an international school in France…learn another language, meet some people, make it easier to get into an Ivy League(my goal is Harvard…more on that later)
“After you become fluent in French,” he said airily like it was some item of grocery, “try to pick up a good deal of Spanish at school.”
“Yes daddy,” I said. Don’t roll your eyes. Don’t roll them. Never a good idea.

And now here I am a year later. Having spent a subtly amusing year, picked up as much French as I could while being in an entirely English speaking program, and lived with a dozen other people in a dorm. A dorm that is governed by(if you’ll excuse the pathetic pun) ‘government’. The ‘government’ is a very appropriate code name for the alarmingly manly, sadistic woman who wants to rule our lives a.k.a our dorm parent. You see? Even my dormitory is a stereotypical dungeon. Helpless little American-Iranian lands in boarding school where the mean ol’ boarding mother wants to discipline(and torture) her and her little friends. OOOO! Save me!
She woke me up by pouring water over me once…I don’t know what hurt more…feeling like I was in a chick flick or being woken up in such a rude manner?

More on France later. I promise to entertain you with my anecdotes about which color cup you should take at the cafeteria and how the government’s ass is so big that she has panty lines even when she wears a thong.

For now…I am distressed. I need your help! I’m being molested. Yes…as I mentioned in my previous blog I am staying with my aunt S and uncle C for the summer. Only I swear on my movie collection…*this said in a paranoid whisper towards the computer* he’s coming on to me!

I think I first noticed it last summer.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked innocently one afternoon. Me on the coach in my oversized on my laptop and him in the chair on watching TV.
Didn’t find this odd at all. He was asking and I would answer, “not at the moment,” I shrugged.
“Is that what you’re looking at online?” he winked(he didn’t actually wink but his tone was quite winky, I’m sure you understand) “pictures of boys you want to date.”
I smile in good humor, “not at all.”
And then after a while he gets up to go get something but before heading to the kitchen he comes up behind me and pats my shoulders in good nature and then slips his hands further down to my breasts, sort of patting them and then giving them a brief squeeze. His manner was as un-sexual as you can get while squeezing a pair of C-cup breasts (didn’t see that coming eh? I’m a DD now…they’re quite big for my frame and attract a lot of unwanted, and I swear its true, attention) and I let it pass.

After I moved to France I received an email from him. Even if the email wasn’t suspicious, the bad grammar was horrible (this coming from the girl who actually used the word hungriness when she momentarily forgot that what she meant was hunger):

hey, i miss. give me ur French phone number and best time to call(so just I can call) got it

And how pray tell do you expect me to ‘get it’ if you can’t even put a little ‘?’ at the end of that? Adults and their expectations I tell you. Sigh!
So I give him the number, quite innocently, and inform him of the best time for him and aunt S to call (I remember to mention S of course)
He called but I don’t answer numbers I don’t know and his call was probably one of the thousand that went unanswered (people say I was born in the wrong time…the only technology I like is the computer, the car and cinema)
I come back this summer (without my parents this time) and he greets me at the airport. S battled with lung cancer last year. She’s a strong lady whom I admire very much and she’s doing fine now (they removed the tumor) but she’s still on these recovery pills that make her quite tired and unable to go around and about a lot.
So we get in the car after hugs and the usual ‘how is everyone?’ and he gives me a once over.
“Wow. Your boobs have grown…they look sexy,” he says casually, holding my hand.
I shrug, trying not to think that it’s unusual for him to say that, “thanks,” a nervous laugh, pull my hand away to adjust my hair. He grabs it again as soon as I am done
He presses the subject of my boobs again. I don’t really know where he’s taking it so I change the subject.
He left the next day for a business trip (thank god!)
“See if you can stay longer,” he smiled, “wanna see you when I come back.”

He was gone for a month. I dismissed the whole thing as my insecurity with people who are touchy feely. Despite my lovey dovey huggy parents I never grew accustomed to the whole thing.
He comes back and I’m grateful. I’d been taking a taxi everywhere (S can drive but she does it after sundown, the sun hurts her thinned out skin…maybe she’s a vampire?) and I was glad to have someone else in the house.
Also worthy to mention that I’d grown bored with shopping and movie watching after the first two weeks and started working out at the gym to keep myself entertained.

Back to the point, he starts giving me rides everywhere. And for some reason keeps holding my hand when he does.
“You’ve lost weight since I last saw you,” he observes.
“Cool,” I smile, “that’s always good to hear. Even if you don’t need to.”
“Yea, you’re thinner right there,” he rests her hand on my thigh and squeezes it. Tiredly I shrug his hand away, “and there.”
He squeezes my breast. I slap his hand away this time, wondering how he thinks it’s okay.

Next incident came when he picked me up from the gym. I really enjoy working out…it seems he enjoys my workouts too.
“Do you do chest exercises too?”
“I do all kinds of exercises,” I say carefully, “every muscle.”
His hand darts towards my boobs again…I despise that word by the way, boobs. I think, between you and me I shall prefer to call them breasts…but that makes me feel like a chickenm you see.
Like ‘two breasts…two thighs…and a pound of the legs.’
‘yes sir, that’ll be twenty four ninety nine…unless you want some of the bones? Excellent for soup sir…the bones are great.’
‘no I was never much for the bones, thank you.’
Do let me know if you come up with a better name for them. Something that doesn’t sound like a chicken or a form of balloon or toy(boobs…it just reminds me of the sound a horn makes when you squeeze it)

Anyway he darts his hands towards my aforementioned body part and I slap it away again but he manages to get a squeeze before I do.
“Yup. Definitely firmer,” he says innocently, “I can show you a massage to make them firmer.”
“No thank you,” I say firmly…pun not intended, I assure you.
“Why not?”
I sigh, exasperated. Oprah always tells you to be defiant and never do what you don’t want to but no one ever told me what to do if he counters your refusal with a ‘why not?’…at this point I expected a ‘sorry’ perhaps or even an ‘okay’ but not a ‘why not?’.
How about I don’t want to?

And I remember that once when he asked me if I had found a boyfriend yet. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend a while ago. I informed him of this with ease. I didn’t want to act as if anything he asked was a big deal.
“You should get one.”
“Oh the guys in our class are mostly idiots,” I shrug, “there’s this one guy…but he’s just incapable of intellectual conversation.”
“So? You don’t have to marry him or have sex with him. Just mess around…you know?”
I sense where the conversation is going so I attempt to change it, “so what about—“
He just continues, “you make him come, he makes you come…it’s good for you. Yeah, just make each other come a lot.”
Thankfully we pulled up at the AT&T store where I was going to get my phone fixed. Never had I ever jumped out of a car faster or been happier to see the smiley Hispanic woman behind the counter who barely speaks English. I nearly jumped into her arms and gave her a hug.
Of course when she told us she can’t exchange or fix the phone after thirty days and that we would have to go to the center C got really mad and yelled at her. And then he grabbed the phone and dashed out.
I looked at the woman apologetically, feeling sympathetic and guilty before following C reluctantly.

He seems determined to squeeze my bosom ,that doesn’t work for me either…I immediately associate bosom with ‘heaving’…my breasts. Yes he tries to squeeze them after every time he picks me up from the gym to ‘check’ if they are ‘getting any firmer’.
I keep slapping his hand away but alas! He manages some way or another.
And once he almost slipped his hand under my shirt (which had loose collar but not a very low cut) and I could felt his hand against my bra for a fraction of a second before a yelped and threw it away.

He’s a stubborn one. But lucky for me I live by one motto ‘my life will always be a comedy, not a tragedy’ and so I dealt with the advances and the whole situation rather comically. It’s the stuff of great novels(or bad blog entries) really.

I’ll post more of his disgusting advances and my rather pathetic conclusion to the matter in the next entry. We had the most amusing conversation about 'French kisses' the other day.
Please drop a word.

Toodles.
Shoe Maiden

P.S: No kiddin’ about the ‘boobs’ issue people. There simply has to be a word other than pectoral muscles that isn’t completely ridiculous sounding. What do you think?