“Snag.” Eva snorts. “That’s such a bullshit word. Let’s all stop using that word.”
Jenna ignores her and raises an eyebrow at Ike. “A snag of the financial variety?”
“You could say that,” he says. And then to Eva, he says, “Snag.”
“How are your parents?” Jenna asks. “And your sisters? I miss Camille!”
“They’re all good,” Ike says. “Izzy’s just her usual cool self, and Kat is . . . well, you know Kat. She manages to keep the whole house on its toes. It’s all about her.”
“And how’s Paige?”
“Oh, Paige.” Ike’s voice is wistful. “She’s still my precious girl. Almost too nice. Kat just runs right over her, and Paige just lets her. I worry she’s getting lost in the shuffle.”
“She’s a gentle soul,” Jenna says. “I hope she goes into nursing or hospice care or something—one of those care-taking professions.”
“So far, she still wants to be a kindergarten teacher,” Ike says.
“Well, Lord knows she’s got the patience for it,” Jenna says. “And Lord knows I don’t! Tell them all I say hi, will you? Maybe I’ll stop by one of these days.”
“They’d like that.” Ike’s voice is falsely neutral. “Do you have a place yet?”
“I’m staying at the Hotel Congress at the moment.” She gives Ike a too-long look with her too-green eyes.
“You can crash on my couch if you want,” Josh offers.
“Thanks, but I like it at the Congress. For now, anyway. I’ve got special memories there.” Ike’s neck is red, something I’ve never seen before, and I feel absolutely nauseous imagining their special Hotel Congress memories. Jenna smiles at his reaction. “So, Ike . . . just how much do you need to get your coffee shop open?”
I swear, there’s something sexual in the way she asks it.
Just how much do you need?
“Way more than I have.” Ike fiddles with his disposable coffee cup and locks eyes with her.
“Such as . . . ?” Jenna raises her horrible, cute, kiss-me shoulder at him. “How much?”
“I’m about a hundred, hundred twenty-five thousand short.”
“Whew!” she says.
“Right,” Ike says. “It’s not going to be happening anytime soon.”
“I thought your parents—?”
“Turns out I don’t want to take their money,” he says. “I mean, they’re going to need that for my sisters’ college. Tuition’s not getting any cheaper.”
“But I thought they—?”
“Nah,” Ike says. “It’s just not happening.”
“Well,” Jenna says. “So.”
Ike smiles as if he’s missed this familiar expression. “Well, so, what?”
“Well . . .” She glances at me before focusing once again on Ike. “I have my grandmother’s inheritance money, remember, and so if you’re . . . I don’t know . . . looking for a partner, we should talk.”
Ike probably doesn’t even notice that his grip on me slackens, but I do. “Jenna, are you
serious
?”
“It’s time for me to get serious about
something
for a change, don’t you think?” She blinks her perfect eyelashes at him. “The money’s not doing me any good just sitting there. I’ve got to put it to work.”
“You’ve got that much?” Ike says.
“I’ve got that much.”
They proceed to have a private, eyes-only conversation right in front of the rest of us.
Jenna:
This means we’d get to see each other every day.
Ike:
You think we can handle being around each other?
Jenna:
We’ll see, won’t we?
“Ahem, bad idea,” Eva says. “Never go into business with someone you used to fuck, or you’re going to get fucked.”
Ike narrows his eyes at her. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” Eva says. “Besides, someone’s wife might have an issue.” She kicks me under the table. “Right, someone?”
Suddenly, all eyes are on me.
“Oh,” I say. “Hmmm. Well.”
“I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble,” Jenna says.
“Yes, you would,” Eva says.
Josh laughs. I don’t. Neither does Ike. Neither does Jenna. Josh stops laughing.
“Tami?” Ike says. “How do you feel about the idea?”
He looks at me with sympathy—looks and looks, waiting to hear what I’ll say. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but it seems to be too complicated, or maybe too private, for words.
“I don’t know what to say,” I finally tell him. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know.”
But even if I don’t know what to say, I do know how I feel: Bad. Horrible.
Not good.
I feel like maybe Jenna is the answer to his prayers, that she’s his destiny. I feel like I’ll lose him.
I feel like maybe I already have.
Chapter 16
B
ack in Tehran, when I was younger, Maryam used to leave me at home while she did the shopping. It was during the war with Iraq and there were shortages of everything, and so there were very long lines. Shopping for a few items could require an all-day effort. Having her little sister along was too much for Maryam to worry about, so she’d set me up in front of the television, put on
The Wizard of Oz
for me to watch, and then she’d leave. I wasn’t completely alone—my mother was always home, but she rested in her bedroom in the afternoons. I loved
The Wizard of Oz
, but I hated the flying monkeys. When they came on, I’d bury my head against my knees and press my hands over my ears to drown out their screeching sounds.
Sometimes this worked, but other times my fear would get the best of me. When that happened, I’d slip off the couch and go into my mother’s darkened room and silently get into bed with her. No matter what time of year it was, she kept a small fan running on the dresser, chilling the room, and she’d cover me with her blanket and kiss my forehead and hold my terrified hand in her calm, cool one. With her on those afternoons, I wasn’t afraid. In her bedroom, I felt like I was tucked away somewhere safe.
This is what I need today—to be soothed. To feel safe and accepted and loved in a way I feel only with her.
I need my mother, desperately.
I call her from Rose’s house, using the telephone in the kitchen. Rose isn’t home, but she keeps a key under a watering can in the backyard in case I need to use the laundry or make overseas phone calls—for any reason, or no reason at all. As I dial our home in Tehran, it strikes me that I’m the same age Maman was when we left America, with my little hand clutching her smooth, slender one. I hate that her happiest days are decades behind her.
“ ’Alo, Maman?”
“Tami Joon,
Salaam
! How are you? Are you well? Is your husband well? And Maryam and Ardishir, how are they?”
“Everyone’s fine, Maman. Everyone misses you.” I wish I could tell her how precious Maryam looks with her bulging stomach and how she could be a model for maternity clothes, but Maman
still
doesn’t know about her pregnancy. I can only hope she’ll forgive me later for keeping Maryam’s secret. “How’s Baba?”
“He’s fine, we’re fine,” she says.
“Maman?” Tears blur my eyes, my throat constricts, and I can’t continue.
“
Chi shoda
, what’s wrong?” Maman tempers her panic as best as she’s able, but it comes through nonetheless. “Did somebody get hurt?”
“No one’s hurt, Maman. It’s—”
“It’s what, Tami?”
“Ike’s girlfriend came back to town.” Saying it loud pushes me over the edge, and my tears come out in a rush. “Oh, Maman, I don’t know what to do!”
“A girlfriend, Tami Joon?” Maman’s voice is strained, stressed. “You never told us he had a girlfriend. What’s this?”
“She’s not his girlfriend anymore,” I quickly say. “But she
is
beautiful, and . . .”
And he still loves her. I know he does.
“Maman, she wants to go into business with him. She wants to be his partner in the coffee shop, and he wants it, too, and . . .”
And my heart is broken because of it. Because of his wanting.
“And I just don’t know . . .”
“Oh, Tami. My poor girl.”
Her maternal comfort almost causes me to cry again. “Maman, I don’t know what to do. I’m so afraid of losing him.”
Ike and I had an odd and uncomfortable night after we left Starbucks, a night I wish I could scratch from existence. He was quiet and seemed sad, while I was quiet and terrified.
You looked like the sky was closing in on you
, he said.
And you looked like you’d seen an angel.
I’d thought this but didn’t say it—afraid, I suppose, that he wouldn’t dispute it.
We shared a lounge chair and spent a long time on the patio. We talked back and forth, not saying much of anything. He was uncharacteristically indirect, for hours, until he finally said,
If there’s a way for us to make this work, I want to make it work.
Then let’s find a way to make it work
, I said, feeling like I was signing my own death warrant. I still feel that way now. I don’t have the right to deny Ike his dream, and yet I’m almost certain I’ll lose him if he goes ahead with Jenna as his partner.
There’s a long silence on the phone until at last my mother says, “Did I ever tell you why I made us all go back to Iran, Tami?”
I gasp, for
of course
she’s never told me. No one in the family talks about this period of time, and yet the story lives on: She wanted to be part of the revolution sweeping Iran after the fall of the Shah, to help usher in a new era of justice. Many people wanted this.
“Well, because you wanted to make things better,” I say. “You thought—”
“I thought your father was having an affair.”
“What? Baba? No, Maman! Come on!”
“At Berkeley, your father had become friendly with an American woman, a neighbor of ours,” Maman says. “I didn’t trust her, and I didn’t trust your father
with
her. He was so in love with all things American, it only made sense this would apply to beautiful blond American women, too.”
Jenna’s blond.
“Oh, Maman.” My heart breaks for her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know this.”
“I figured if we went back to Iran, he’d have to give her up.” Her voice is soft. “I was just young, and suspicious, but he never betrayed me. Your father never did anything wrong. We came back for nothing.”
Leaning against Rose’s counter, my eyes sink closed. They went back because of a woman. Because of my mother’s suspicions about a woman. What a waste. What a waste of all our lives. “Didn’t you talk with him about this at the time?”
“I talked with him, sure. And he denied it. But I didn’t believe him,” she says. “I saw the way he looked at her.” Just as I saw the way Ike looked at Jenna. I sigh. Women know these things, even if their husbands don’t—or if they do, but won’t admit it. Women always know.
She continues. “But now I think, even if he had fallen in love with her, even if he wanted to be with her, even if he had left us . . . we would have been okay. Maybe I would have remarried, or maybe not, but really, everything would have been fine.”
This conversation cannot
really
be taking place. All this time, I thought my parents were deeply in love.
At least they have that
, is what I always thought. I guess maybe I just wanted to see things that were never there.
“You don’t . . . love him?” It comes out in a whisper.
“I love him very much,” she says quickly. “I always have.”
“But, then—”
“I would have survived without him.” After a long pause, she adds, “In coming back, I gave up too much.”
This must be what she thought about in prison. After she’d been stripped of everything, especially her dignity, she must have decided that the price she paid to save her marriage had been too high. It’s what she must have thought afterward, after her release, all those afternoons, as she lay in her darkened bedroom, as the world outside her windows turned so hateful, the walls closing in on her like a python its prey. She must have remembered the wind dancing through her hair at the ocean that day, her skin browned from the sun. She must have remembered herself, sparkling. Laughing. How she was barefoot in the sand. Beautiful in her freedom.
“I’m sorry for you, Maman,” I say. “I’m so sorry for what you suffered.”
“When men lose their dreams, it destroys them,” she says. “They can’t help but hold it against their wives.”
“So what are you saying? That I should—”
“Things aren’t any better here since you left,” she says. “Iran is no place for you to make a life, Tami.”
“Maman—”
“You must keep your husband happy,” she says. “No matter what. That’s very important right now. It’s the most important thing. If he’s happy, this will come through during your immigration interview. He must be happy at least that long. Longer if possible, yes, of course—but at
least
that long.”
“I should put my marriage at risk to pass the immigration interview? Is this what you’re telling me?”
But I might lose him, Maman! I might lose the only man I’ve ever loved—the only man who’s ever loved me!
“One bad decision can ruin a life.” My mother’s words are gentle but firm. “A woman must never trade her freedom for her marriage, Tami Joon. Believe me, no man is worth it. But freedom? Freedom’s worth it. Freedom is
everything
.”
Chapter 17
T
o further complicate things, a letter from Immigration Services arrives in the mail telling us that our immigration interview has been scheduled for the seventh of September, four months from now. In four months, we’ll know for sure. In four months, my life will either really begin . . . or really end.
I’m alone when the letter arrives. I’ve skipped my English class because I don’t want any more of Eva’s opinions about Jenna. She might convince me to do the wrong thing, and, as my mother said, sometimes it only takes one bad decision to ruin a life. Instead, I spend the afternoon trying to read
The Great Gatsby
, but when I’m supposed to be imagining Gatsby’s face as he stands on his grand lawn, looking out to the green light of Daisy’s estate, I imagine Jenna, yearning in a similar way to be reconciled with her beloved. Yesterday I’d felt sympathy for Gatsby, but today he seems like a horrible, unwelcome interloper.