They sit in a circle, twenty of them. Maybe not precisely twenty, though it seems like it to observers. The girls are sitting on an extra long twin bed in a dorm room overlooking the lawn. The room is located in a perfect spot for people-watching, with the window looking right out onto the entrance of the building. This group of Turkish boys is an interesting study to these girls. The boys sit every day, seemingly all day, on the lawn in a loose circle, always smoking. The girls wonder as they lounge in varying positions around the room if the Turks ever go to class. That’s what they call them: “The Turks,” sometimes the “Turkey Boys.” The boys remain, languishing on the grass, dragging on their cigarettes, comfortable in the evening light.
The boys seem nice enough as they walk past the window to the room. Sometimes they smile through the screen, every once in a while exchanging niceties like “Hi, how are you?” and “Hey, nice day huh?” This is followed by mischievous grins and then Turkish conversation, which the girls can’t understand. They find this particularly amusing, as they had been offered a couple of weekends ago a good time and some beer, the invite consisting of a smiling boy hunched in the window presenting a briefcase filled with Natty Light. They declined, saying, next week boys. When they left, one of the girls said, “Why is that in a briefcase? They’re legal for that shit.” Another replied, “I don’t know, they want the full American college student experience of hiding their alcohol?”
The girls try not to be so conceited as to think these boys are talking about them all the time, but really, it does seem as if the Turks stare an awful lot, then talk to each other privately. Well, not privately, but in Turkish.
One of the girls, the one in whose room they were lounging, asked one day, “Did you ever notice, they even smoke differently than everyone else?” The other girls stared blankly, and she said, “No really, they don’t hunch to inhale that stuff.” The girls all shrugged, the subject dropped, but this was true, the girl was convinced.
The Turkish boys, laughing and relaxing on the grass as they took loving pulls from their Marlboros, did not wear that cloak of shame that most New York smokers pull around themselves while on a smoking break. They did not huddle in a tight group, hunched under the awning of some sky-scraper, shoulders slumped while tight fingers clutched the white cylinder for dear life, or mental sanity. They did not all climb onto the same smokers bench right across the lawn from their spot on the grass, where all the other smokers went to clump tightly together, arms pulled around themselves and eyes slit into a half-defiant expression, posture seemingly saying, “Yes, I am inviting cancer in and no, I do not want to stop.” This difference seemed to offend watchers, though they did not stop to ask why the smoking was offending them so much. It was, after all, accepted in America, so what was the problem?
These boys were completely comfortable with their habit, didn’t even seem the least bit worried about the state of their lungs. In fact, to the girls, and the other residents of this particular dormitory, these foreign boys seem a little too comfortable with their smoking. In the next room, another group of people sit, having a similar conversation.
“They’re so obnoxious, that smoke goes right in the window.”
“Where are they from, anyway?”
“I don’t know, some eastern European country—Turkey I think?”
“Oh, whatever, it’s not like I know where that is, we never needed to know that before. I’m not about to start now.”
Upstairs, some boys are also staring out the window, looking out at the Turks. The conversation is the same. “What, is the lawn theirs now?”
“Yeah, seriously, I can’t sit on the grass now.”
“Dude, I sat on the grass yesterday and I think they were pissed I took their spot.”
It is as if, to these students, someone had stolen their property. But the grassy patch of lawn in front of the building was communal, after all. It’s our lawn, our school, and our country. All these dormers seem to have the same sentiments.
This sense of otherness grows as the days go on, as the Turkish boys sit on the lawns and smoke with a happiness American smokers do not have anymore. Politicians ready their debates about strengthening the nation’s borders and news teams crack more and more jokes about Iranians and Iraqis. The Middle East turns into anything not Western European or American. They speak in their own language on the buses to and from the different campuses as riders around them think, “How rude, I hope they’re not talking about me,” and cannot even place their accents.
They’re not German, French, Italian, or Spanish, so the language does not exist. People place themselves an extra space away from the foreigners on the bus, and when students write their term papers, Microsoft Word automatically corrects the names of any obscure countries or un-Americanized names with a bold red line. The words “America” and “American” are automatically put into uppercase letters. And still the Turkish boys sit outside in a loose circle, smoking and relaxing.
“I wonder if this will keep up once it gets ridiculously cold outside,” the owner of the room overlooking the doorstep says. And a voice from upstairs drifts out, saying, “That better stop, I’m tired of this cigarette shit.”
“Yes, I know what you mean— hey, you want to smoke tonight?”
“Yeah, why not.”
The night get colder. It’s 2 a.m. and the boys are still outside in their circle, and the girls peer out of the window, clucking their tongues at the noise and smoke coming in with the cold air through the window.
“Turkey, man. I can’t even find that shit on a map. What the hell?”
Yes, what the hell.
Marina Wright is a sophomore English major and a Literary writer for Generation.
