“She’s doing just fine,” the doctor says.
“She?” Maryam’s smile is broad. “We’re having a girl? And she’s okay?”
The technician nods. “You want to listen to the heartbeat ?”
All three of us listen in turn—Maryam, me, then Rose.
Thu-thump, thu-thump
—her heart beats strong and true.
Ardishir arrives in a frantic rush.
“We’re having a girl!” Maryam says. “Come listen, Ardi. She’s fine. She’s perfect!”
His eyes tear up as he listens to his daughter’s heartbeat. “Good girl,” he whispers. “You’re my good, good girl.”
But there has been this stomachache, and there has been this dark spotting. Thankfully, the baby is not the problem—Maryam’s cervix is. She’s two centimeters dilated. At only twenty-eight weeks, Maryam’s body is going into labor before the baby’s ready. The official diagnosis: an incompetent cervix.
Maryam, so good at so many things, who hates to be bad at anything, is furious. She needs something called a cerclage, a stitch to close her cervix. For this procedure, she’s admitted to the hospital overnight. The next day, the doctor prescribes weekly shots of progesterone to help prevent early labor. She and her incompetent cervix are placed on bed rest, indefinitely.
Because their master bedroom is upstairs, far from the main action of the house, Ardishir sets up the guest bedroom off the kitchen for her and brings in the large television from the living room so Maryam can watch her American soap operas and her Persian news stations on the satellite television. With her world shrunken so small, she quickly becomes bored (as well as boring), and cranky, and needy. She’s got opinions about everything, including the coffee shop—what colors the walls should be, how we should advertise for employees, how we should wear uniform shirts with the business logo (a steaming mug—which, according to her, not that we asked, isn’t flashy enough), and so on. I begin to leave my cell phone at home so I don’t have to take her constant calls.
But Rose is so good with her. She visits Maryam each afternoon, and together they knit booties and blankets for the baby and listen to books on tape. They play cards and Scrabble and over the long hours they become very close. Throughout this whole experience, it’s saddened me that Maman has known nothing about Maryam’s pregnancy, that she hasn’t been able to—hasn’t been given the opportunity to—offer Maryam the comfort she needs. It seems like an insult. As hard as it’s been, this experience has brought us closer, all of us—Maryam, Ardishir, Rose, myself, and even Ike—and yet it’s left my parents ever farther apart from us.
And every week when I call them, my father has no news about their visa application. It gets so I can hardly bring myself to ask anymore, because his answer always makes me so sad. We need them, I need them, but especially Maryam needs them.
Immigration Interview:
THREE WEEKS AWAY
“Just act natural,” Ike tells me as we approach the border patrol checkpoint on Interstate 8 on our way to San Diego. We’re taking a much-needed long weekend off from our coffee shop preparations after several frustrating weeks of unfairly failed inspections, and problems with sign permits and emergency exit signs, and toilets that flush on the left instead of on the right, and on and on. I don’t think I’m exaggerating much when I tell people it would probably be easier to open a business in Iran than in Tucson. In Iran, you could just pay people off, but in Tucson, it’s almost as if these city workers get kickbacks for
not
letting new businesses open. We’re driving from Arizona to California and the Pacific Ocean, but when Ike suggested this trip, he didn’t say anything about a border patrol checkpoint, and I begin to shake with fear as we approach it.
“How do I act natural?” I ask. “What should I do?”
“Nothing,” Ike says. “Just sit there.” He glances at me, then leans over and opens the glove compartment, pulling out an old pair of sunglasses. “Here, put these on. You look terrified.” He half laughs. “You look guilty!”
“I
feel
guilty.” I can’t help it—in Iran, you
are
guilty. Always, no matter what.
“I promise, it’s no big deal,” he says. “Just relax.”
I try, but the men have guns. There’s one car ahead of us, and an officer is bending over, looking at each passenger, a woman and two kids, questioning them. Clearly, they are a family going on vacation, so what’s taking so long? If
they’re
suspicious to the officer, what on earth will he think of me?
“You didn’t happen to bring your immigration paperwork, did you?” Ike asks this question very casually, so casually I know there’s nothing at all casual about it.
“No!” My entire body is frozen from panic. “Do I need it?”
“No, no. Never mind, you don’t need it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have asked. Just relax. We’re a married couple on a weekend away. We’re just like everyone else.”
This is where he’s wrong. Being from the axis-of-evil Iran, I’m
not
like everyone else. Not to a border patrol officer anyway, whose job is to keep the borders safe from ... well, from people like me.
The officer steps back from the vehicle in front of us and waves it along. As it’s our turn, Ike rolls down his window.
The officer peers at us.
“Good morning,” Ike says.
“Morning,” the border patrol officer says back. “Where are you folks traveling from?”
In my heart, I gasp. I cannot tell him Iran. I simply cannot.
“Tucson,” Ike says.
The officer looks at me. “Both of you?”
“Yes, both of us.” It’s only because I know Ike so well that I hear the false cheeriness in his tone. He’s heard the border patrol horror stories, too. By now, everyone has.
The officer keeps looking at me, and I know he can tell something’s wrong. Fear has its own physiology, a certain smell, and he’s smelling it. If I don’t do something fast, he’s going to tell me to step outside the vehicle, and then I’ll be surrounded by officers, with the guard dog barking at me, wanting to tear into me, with hundreds of people in the cars behind me watching, saying to each other,
I wonder what she did wrong. Drugs, you think?
Or
, I bet she’s an illegal.
Or, worse,
She’s probably an illegal alien
, as if I’m not only
not
legal, but also that I’m an alien from another world! Ike will try to help, but they’ll take me away while holding him back. I can’t let this happen. I’ve got to get rid of this stench, this fear. I’ve got to save myself.
I fall back on Eva’s fake-it-’til-you-make-it advice: I’m twenty-seven years old. I’m married. Young, beautiful, happy. I’m afraid of nothing, for I’ve done nothing wrong. Kindness oozes from me. I’m a friend to everyone, a threat to no one—especially not to this friendly officer and his friendly dog. He probably thinks I’m a Mexican, and so I have to talk. Sure, I have an accent, but it’s not a Spanish one. I take off the pair of men’s sunglasses I’ve been wearing, which are wrong for my face anyway, and smile at the officer.
“We’re on our honeymoon,” I tell him brightly. I give a little wave with my left hand so he can see my wedding ring, which matches the one Ike is wearing on his left hand, which is resting on the steering wheel. We got these last week, finally—simple gold bands. Sadly, there was nothing very romantic about it. We were having dinner at North at La Encantada and I mentioned we needed to have wedding rings before the immigration interview. After dinner, we were walking through the ritzy outdoor mall and Ike steered me into Tiffany’s. We bought the cheapest bands they had, because right now a walk-in freezer for the coffee shop is more important than flashy wedding rings, but, hey, at least they’re from Tiffany’s!
After I wave my ring at the officer and tell him we’re on our honeymoon, he says, “That right?”
“That’s right.” Ike taps his ring finger on the steering wheel so it makes a clicking sound.
“All right, then. You’d better get on with it.” The officer slaps the frame of Ike’s rolled-down window and steps back. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!” I give him my best smile, but the officer already has his eyes on the driver in the car behind us. He—an employee of Homeland Security, a representative of the United States government—has judged me innocent, deemed me worthy. This is good, a good omen, I’m sure of it.
We stay at a hotel in Mission Beach where President Nixon used to stay and the weather is so perfect and the ocean so beautiful and there is so much life going on that I say to Ike several times, “Tell me again: Why aren’t we living here?” I love Tucson—it’s very special, probably there is no place like it in the world—but I’m a big-city girl. I miss the fast pace of Tehran. Tucson is a great place to catch your breath, but San Diego is great for everything. I gawk at the women in bikinis ... at the grocery store! Ike gawks at me in a bikini (a sexy turquoise one), but I wear it only at the beach. I feel self-conscious even there, so no way would I wear it to a grocery store! And the tattoos—they’re everywhere! Everyone seems to have one. At first, I don’t understand why people would get them, why they’d mark their bodies in this way. I understand their desire to express their individuality—I understand this desire quite well—but it seems like this attempt to be original just ... isn’t, not when everyone else also has them. And yet, on our third night, after doing what Ike calls barhopping, we each get one—tiny tattoos on our hip bones, for no one except each other to see, hearts with the other’s name inside. Thanks to all the peach-flavored wine coolers I drank, it hardly hurts at all.
On the last day, it’s nearing sunset and Ike is surfing. I’m happily watching him from shore, having already resolved to take swimming lessons once we’re back in Tucson so that next summer I can join him. I like the idea of riding the waves rather than fearing them. In front of me, a little girl plays with her father. She’s three years old, maybe four, in the water up to her ankles. She faces her father, who faces her, in the water up to his knees. Over and over she points and yells,
Look out! A wave!
And he keeps saying,
No, there’s no wave.
And then one smacks into him and he reacts with surprise each time, and she laughs and laughs. They do this for thirty minutes, maybe more. It makes me wonder if my father was playful like this, if he made me giggle like this, when we lived in America and visited the ocean. I bet he did. I bet he was that sort of father, for that happy little while we had as a family in America. And I bet he’d be that sort of grandfather, too, for Maryam’s baby and, one day, for mine—if he could be here for them.
He swam in the ocean all those years ago, in the very same ocean my husband swims in now. I’m almost certain of it, because he swam as a teenager in the Caspian Sea. I’ve heard the stories of my handsome, wild father before he met my mother. I’ve seen the photographs, I’ve seen how he glistened in the sun. I watch Ike, and he glistens, too.
I think they’d like each other, my father and Ike.
I think they’d like each other very much.
Immigration Interview:
TWO WEEKS AWAY
Maryam, thirty weeks along and finally off bed rest, arrives at the coffee shop with a color wheel and a paintbrush and some sample-sized cans of paint for us to test on the walls. When Ike sees her unloading them from her car, he grits his teeth.
He’s in a grumpy mood, and I don’t blame him. Our least favorite inspector just left, having refused to sign off on a permit to have the gas turned back on. The plumber had turned it off while he was changing out some fittings, but the gas company happened to come by to read the meter, saw the valve was off, and locked it. Now the only way to get it back on is to go back to the city and have it reinspected. The inspector’s name is Le-Rick, but we call him Le-Dick. He’s got a beer belly and an outdated ponytail—a frustrated hippie, Ike calls him—and you can tell just by looking at him that he hates his life and his job. He walks around the store making notes on his clipboard, criticizing everything. When he did his pressure test on the gas line, the pressure dropped. This could turn out to be something small, or it could turn out to be a $1,500 repair; we just don’t know. And even though Le-Rick was only here to inspect the gas line, he got mad at Ike for having changed out the hood over the grill. He said the floor drain wasn’t done right and the hand sink shouldn’t be where it is—even though the health inspector said there
had
to be one in that spot
and
had already signed off on the floor drain. I keep telling Ike these people must be looking for bribes, but he says no, they’re just all assholes.
And now Ike grits his teeth at my sister as she waddles into the shop with her color wheel and paint cans. Ike loves Maryam’s Persian food, but he doesn’t care for her many unsolicited opinions.
“I’ll take care of things with her, love.” I rest my hand on his forearm for a moment, hoping it will calm him. “Why don’t you call the plumber?”
“I’m going to call my dad first.” He cracks his neck. “Hopefully, he’ll know how to cut through the bullshit.”
He says hello to Maryam before disappearing into the back. I give her a bright smile. It’s so good to see her on her feet again; we all feel triumphant.
“Guess what? Ardishir’s aunt is coming to visit from Canada!” she says. “Homa Nasseri
.
You’ll love her; she’s so funny. She’s coming to help with the baby! Ardishir’s so happy! She called him at his office to tell him, and he brought home the biggest bouquet of flowers he’s ever given me, and his eyes glowed all night. He’s like a little kid waiting for presents! I didn’t realize how much he must be missing his family, too. It’s too bad his parents can’t come, but they’re too old to travel so far anymore.”
His parents live in Tehran, too, a few kilometers from mine. That’s how Ardishir met Maryam, while on a visit home to see them.
“It’s an important time for both of you,” I say. “Of course he wants his family here.”