“I’ve never had a pedicure,” Paige says.
“We should go sometime,” I say. “I’d love to treat you. Maybe that’s what you could do with your mom for her birthday—a pedicure and lunch?”
“My mom hates stuff like that.” She begins braiding. “She can’t stand spending time or money on something so
impractical
.” I recognize her mother’s chastising tone when she says that last word.
I laugh. “I must really make her crazy, then! I’m pretty sure my nails are a different color every time I go over there!”
“Not you so much—she thinks you’re really pretty,” she says. “But she’s always on Izzy’s case about stuff like that.”
“Well, then we’ll have to think of something else for her birthday.”
“Besides, Ike takes her to lunch for her birthday. He does it every year.”
I wonder if I’ll be invited along this year. I decide I won’t go if I am. I’ll let them keep up this special tradition. I wonder, though: What should I get her?
“Can I ask you something?” Paige says.
“Of course.”
“How old were you the first time you . . . you know . . . had sex?”
I inhale sharply. So
that’s
what this is about. This is the reason for her visit. This is the reason she has me sitting on the floor, braiding my hair, so I’m facing away from her as she asks this personal question.
“Oh, Paige.”
She’s fourteen!
“Are you . . . Did you . . . ?”
“No,” she says quickly.
“Will you tell me what’s going on?”
The words spill out of her in a rush, like they’ve been dying to get out for so long. She tells me about the boy she likes, Garrett. It’s the same boy Mrs. Hanson told us about at Lodge on the Desert that awful day, the one with lots of gel in his hair, who snarls his lip when he talks to his teachers, who is a guitarist and singer in a rock band . . .
and who is seventeen years old.
When Paige tells me this, I’m so glad Ike isn’t here. He’d throw a fit, which is probably why she came when he wasn’t home. For all I know, she biked by the house ten times until she saw that his truck was no longer in the driveway. Paige and Garrett aren’t even officially dating. He says she’s too young for him, so they’re FWB, friends with benefits. But he’s so
nice
to her, and when he looks at her, he makes her feel beautiful. When they’re together, neither one of them can
get enough.
Paige says she loses herself when she’s with him, that she can hardly control herself. And he wants to have sex, of course. He always has condoms, and he always lets her know he has them. She doesn’t know how much longer they can go, realistically, before they’ll have sex, even though she always thought she’d wait until she was in college.
She’s been braiding my hair the whole time she’s been talking, finishing a braid, then unraveling it and redoing it. I, too, am glad we’re not facing each other as she tells me all this, because I’ve never felt like such a foreigner as I do right now. I’m sure hers is the story of a typical American teenage girl’s first love—but who am I to give advice? Ike’s the first man I’ve loved—the only man I’ve loved. He’s the only man I’ve had sex with, and almost the first I kissed, as I don’t count the various neighborhood boys with their pushy, grimy hands who’d reach for me with lustful eyes in the shadows of our streets in Tehran. I kissed a few of them, but only because it seemed like the quickest way to get them to leave me alone. One close-lipped, unaffectionate kiss in an alleyway could fuel their fantasies for years, it seemed. But love? Lust? Really, these feelings are as new to me as they are to Paige. I get all my sex tips from the
Cosmopolitan
magazines I read at the library!
“Would it be wrong of me?” she asks. “Lots of girls my age already have.”
I sigh. My heart would break for her if she went ahead with this idea. Young teenagers in America wear call-girl makeup and push-up bras and thong underwear and they watch things on television you could be arrested for in Iran, but in so many ways, they’re still such innocents. Life has its cruel ways of breaking people, but if American teenagers her age have had a good family life, like Paige has, they’ve not yet been damaged. They haven’t lived in a police state; they haven’t known of family members being tortured. And I’m not saying having your heart broken by a boy after you’ve had sex with him is in any way comparable to these things, but sex for someone who’s inexperienced brings with it powerful, complicated emotions that I can only hope to understand one day. I sure don’t now. Would it be wrong? That’s not a value judgment I want to make.
“If he broke up with you right now, today, how would you feel?” I ask her.
“Oh, my God, horrible!” Paige says. “Don’t even ask me that—I can’t stand to think about it!”
This friends-with-benefits deal seems like it’s better for him than it is for her, since she wants him to be her boyfriend. “Have your parents met him yet?”
“Not yet,” she says. “They’ll just tease me.”
“Your parents would tease you?”
“No, but my sisters would. They always do. Nothing’s private in my family.”
“So you meet him out somewhere?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I hang out with his band when they rehearse, or sometimes he waits for me to get off swim practice.”
“Does he have other friends with benefits?”
“We don’t talk about it,” she says. “But I don’t think so.”
And here I thought
I
was naïve.
She’s finishing up my second braid again, and to prevent her from unraveling it, I say, “Done, my dear?” She wraps a band around it, and then I get up and sit next to her on the couch. I stroke her cheek like my sister sometimes does to me when she feels bad for me. Because that’s how I feel—bad for her. Horrible for her.
“Sweetie, I think this boy might break your heart.”
Paige’s eyes well with tears and she nods. She knows this, too, deep down.
“I think he’ll break your heart whether you have sex with him or not, because . . . well . . . besides the difference in your ages, I worry that he doesn’t know how special you are.”
“That’s the thing,” she whispers. “I’m not, except when I’m with him.”
“I didn’t grow up thinking I was anything special either,” I say. “Even though my father always told me I was, I never believed him. But it’s good he told me this, because it made me never want to let him down, to never do anything that might cause him to be disappointed in me. Even coming to America—it was really hard for me to do, to leave everything behind. I was very scared, but I did it because I wanted to make my parents proud.”
“You must think my problems are so small,” Paige says.
“Not at all, sweetie! Not at all!”
“They are, compared to yours.”
I firmly shake my head. “I only said all that to help you see that more people than just this boy, Garrett, think you’re special. Your parents do. Ike does. I’m sure your sisters do, and I do, too. And they care about what happens to you. And we don’t know exactly what Garrett wants
for
you—we only know what he wants
from
you, yes? But these other people really want the best for you, and so you should think of them. You should think if they’ll be proud of you if you do what you’re thinking about doing, or if they’ll be disappointed.”
She clears her throat and nods. Not like she’s happy with my answer—more like she’s wondering if she’ll ever be able to have a private moment with Garrett again without imagining her father’s stern face watching her. I, for one, hope she can’t!
“Do you know what I think?” I take her hand. “I think Garrett’s probably a really nice boy, and he’s probably really fun to be with.”
“He is,” she says. “He’s really, really nice.”
“I think you should take things slow,” I say. “Very, very slow. Even just holding a boy’s hand—that’s a pretty awe-some thing to do, isn’t it? To walk down the street and not have a care in the world. To share an ice cream cone, or have a picnic in the park ... to go to movies and on bike rides ... those small pleasures really are the most important ones. They’re what so many girls all around the world never get to do. And so
you
should do them.”
“I should because they can’t?”
“You should because dating is all about finding out who you are and what you like and what you want, which is why governments like mine forbid it. They don’t want women and girls to know who they are because it might not fit in with what
they
need for us to be. But they shouldn’t get to define us. We should define ourselves. No boy, and no government, should do that for us. Right?”
“Right.” Paige nods, although she still looks unsure.
“So if you always thought you should wait until college before being so physical with a boy, then maybe you should wait. You shouldn’t be the girl who has sex with a boy at fourteen just because he wanted to. Does that help at all?”
“I guess.” She smiles and looks a little relieved. “But I sure wish I had your confidence.”
I smile. This is the first time in my life someone has admired my confidence!
Immigration Interview:
FIVE WEEKS AWAY
“I met this woman from Canada who had to have a
vaginal exam
at her immigration interview,” Eva says one day as we are walking back from class. “Can you believe it? A
vaginal exam
! No lie! A
Canadian
! What the hell?”
Eva has not had her immigration interview yet, either. Maybe I got mine scheduled for sooner because I’m Iranian, I don’t know, or maybe because her husband is in the military and overseas, but she hasn’t even gotten the date for hers yet. She’s only filled out the first forms and had her fingerprints taken. But like every other not-passed-the-interview-yet person, she pesters everyone who has.
Other immigration horror stories people tell me:
There is the one about the man from Egypt who, when asked his wife’s mother’s maiden name, didn’t know. He failed the interview and had to go back to Egypt.
There is the one about the pregnant Mexican woman who followed her boyfriend to America. Her boyfriend was a U.S. citizen, but she was not. She gave birth to her baby in the U.S., was arrested at the hospital, and driven back to the other side of the border, which left her baby with the gift of U.S. citizenship but without a mother. She never even
got
an interview.
Even poor Nadia has her immigration-interview horror story, but hers is due mostly to her horrible husband. The night before their interview, Lenny threatened to say all sorts of lies about her, such as that she’d been a prostitute in Russia and that she’d left several children behind which he hadn’t learned about until later—all cruel lies. But if she got her green card, then she could get a job, which he wanted to happen because why should he work when he could sit around all day in his grubby T-shirt drinking beer, feeding his Internet pornography addiction, and sending the wife he hated out to work instead? Nadia said there was no way the interviewer believed they married for love, but she thinks he took pity on her because she was pregnant. Nadia says now that if she hadn’t been pregnant, she would have left Lenny on her own.
But for every horror story, I hear three more from people who say the interview is no big deal, that as long as you have all your paperwork in order and are living with your spouse and have a bank account together and seem to be in a real relationship, then the interview is just a formality that doesn’t last more than ten or fifteen minutes.
These stories—the ones with happy endings—are the ones I cling to. Ike and I not only live together, not only have a shared bank account, we also have a shared business. I have made a substantial investment in our relationship by going into partnership with him. Plus, everybody says they can tell just by looking at us that we’re madly in love.
And they’re right!
Immigration Interview:
FOUR WEEKS AWAY
Maryam calls me, too upset even for tears. “It’s happening again
.
” Her voice over the phone is a weak, mournful whisper
.
“I’m losing this baby. Oh, God, Tami, I can’t
do
this again. I don’t have it in me to go through it again.”
Her stomachache has come back and there’s been some bleeding, and her hope is already gone. I cling to mine and plead for her to hold on, to close her mind to bad outcomes and just
hold on.
Ardishir is far away at work, and I’m so close, and even while I’m telling her to hold on, that just because there’s some spotting it doesn’t mean she’s lost the baby, even as I’m saying this, I’m crossing the backyard to Rose’s house and tracking her down in the laundry room. I’m covering the phone and saying, “Please, Rose. I need your help. It’s Maryam. It’s the baby,” and we’re on our way immediately, and I soothe Maryam on the phone as we drive to her. I fill her mind with the tasks we will do and the thoughts we will think until these tasks are done—positive thoughts, only positive thoughts. If there’s to be sorrow, it will not be yet. We’ll hold on to our hope until the last possible moment, and we’ll hold on and we’ll hold on, until the doctor tells us to let it go. “But it’s not over,” I tell her. “Until this baby’s last little heartbeat,
it’s not over
.”
I say all this as if I believe it, and in fact, I do. We create the gods we need, and my god simply would not do this in this moment, at this time. My god would let my family have its happiness for once, and this is just a test of our will, of our strength, and as we drive to Maryam’s, at the same time I’m reassuring her, I remind my god of this, that this is our moment for joy. I’m not asking for forever; I’d gladly trade my forever for my sister and for
exactly right now.
Now, I know as well as anyone that a woman’s prayers aren’t always answered. Sometimes, not even the prayers of an entire country are answered. But for once, mine are.
We get to the emergency room, where an ultrasound clearly shows the baby moving, weaving her little fingers as if dancing a dreamy dance.