W
ith our new sense of shared purpose, we go to my sister’s house. Although we hadn’t set a specific time because we weren’t sure how long things would take with Ike’s parents, Maryam and Ardishir are expecting us, and on the drive over, I find myself relaxed for the first time since our airplane touched down in Tucson. Relaxed and almost giddy, because I
know
Maryam and Ardishir are happy for us, and I can’t wait to give Maryam the biggest hug of thanks for going to Ike and telling him of my situation. She
saved
me.
But my excitement turns to worry as we pull up to their house, for Maryam is standing on the front walkway with her hands on her hips, her long black hair loose, and her eyes wild. She’s wearing a skirt and high heels and is glittery in her jewelry, but her face is furious. Ardishir holds two grocery bags and is halfway to the house from the car, but he’s stopped still because Maryam is blocking his path.
She yells, “The whole reason I asked you to go to the store was to get me some nacho cheese sauce! How could you have forgotten this? I even sent a text message to remind you!”
Ike turns off the ignition and we remain seated in the cab of the pickup, watching. They’ve seen us, but Maryam is too mad to care about the impression she’s making on Ike, while Ardishir gives us a close-lipped smile of apology.
“You think this is
funny
?” Maryam yells at him. “One thing I ask you to do—ONE THING! And this is what happens? After all I do for you?”
The neighbor lady next door pretends not to listen as she waters her yard. I’m dumbstruck. This is so unlike my sister. She’s usually so refined and concerned about behaving in a high-class manner.
“Do you want me to go back to the store?” Ardishir’s voice is even.
“YES, I want you to go back to the store!” she screams. “How are we supposed to have tortilla chips without nacho cheese sauce?”
I’m by now so mad at Maryam that it’s all I can do not to jump out of the truck and begin defending Ardishir. Having lived with them for three months, I can say without hesitation that Ardishir treats her very well. My sister is a bit of a Persian Princess—it’s not true that this nacho cheese sauce is the only demand she’s made of him; it’s always,
Ardi, can you rub my feet?
And,
Ardi, will you scratch my back?
And,
Since you’re going to the kitchen anyway, would you mind getting me a glass of water?
All the time, she makes these requests. Yet I’ve never known her to send him away like this, and certainly never to scream at him this way. This is not how we were raised. Voices remain lowered in our family.
“I don’t know why she’s acting like this,” I whisper to Ike. “And what the heck is nacho cheese sauce, anyway?” In my three months of living with Maryam, I have never heard of this before.
Ike laughs. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. She probably thinks she’s going to make a good impression on her new American brother-in-law by serving crappy processed food.” Ike’s voice is amused. “Either that, or . . .”
His voice trails off as the scene on the front lawn continues. Ardishir, in a very levelheaded manner, like he is dealing with a crazy person who’s brandishing a gun, asks, “Do you want me to take the bags inside, or what do you want me to do with them?”
“Give them to me,” she growls. “Just . . .
give
me them. I’ll take them in my
self
.”
Still stunned, I watch as Ardishir hands her the grocery bags and returns to his black Lexus.
To his back, Maryam yells, “Bananas, too! Get me some bananas or don’t bother coming home!”
A little smile crosses Ardishir’s face as he climbs into his car—thank goodness Maryam doesn’t see it! He backs out of the driveway and smoothly drives away. Ike and I watch Maryam storm back inside; then he says, “Man, she’s got some serious cravings going on.”
“Cravings? What do you—?” All of a sudden it occurs to me. “You think she’s pregnant?”
“My mom had raging hormones like that every time she was pregnant,” he says. “Let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight.”
“Oh, my God!” I clutch his arm. “Do you really think that’s it?”
“Why else would Ardishir put up with that shit?”
“He’s a very patient person.”
“Nobody’s
that
patient,” Ike says, laughing. “Nobody
should
be, unless there are some seriously extenuating circumstances.”
Maryam pregnant.
I look out the truck’s window. It’s dark, but Maryam’s house is lit with spotlights, and I remember back to my first night in America, when in the airport bathroom, Maryam stuffed me into a low-cut red dress and open-toed sandals and then brought me here. Waiting for me were Persians like her, who had already established themselves in America, and that night from the street, we could hear the music and through the open-curtained windows we could see them dancing. I saw how open and free they were—no need to hide behind high walls and thick curtains—and suddenly, all my years of idle dreaming—all the
might I
’s, the
can I
’s, the
will I be able to
’s—all those half-formed questions, half-formed desires—had an answer, and the answer was
yes.
In America, everything was possible.
I married the man I love. That is a dream come true.
Maryam being pregnant would also be a dream come true.
I look out the truck’s window and through the living room window’s sheer curtains make out my sister’s form. She sits on the couch in her living room, alone with only her raging hormones to keep her company. I’m glad she’s alone, for I want her all to myself for a little while. I want to find out if it’s true, if it could really be true that she’s pregnant, and if it is, I want to hold her close and for us together to celebrate the happy possibility that maybe—just maybe—whatever curse has befallen my family has finally been broken.
Ike agrees it’s best for me to go inside alone. He’ll return to his parents’ house and talk with them some more, and we’ll see each other tomorrow and the day after and the day after—every single day for the rest of our lives.
When I get inside, I find Maryam still sitting on the couch. She’s flanked by the grocery bags and staring at the television screen, which isn’t even turned on. “Maryam?”
Dazed, she turns to me. “Did that really just happen?”
I burst out laughing. Whoever that beast was, she’s gone now. Only my chastened sister remains. “That really just happened.”
“I need to call Ardishir,” she says. “I need to apologize. And Ike! Oh, what must he think of me?”
“Ike thinks maybe you’re pregnant,” I say. “He says this is how pregnant women sometimes act. From hormones.”
“Really? They do?” Immediate relief floods her face.
“You
are
? You’re pregnant?”
Her eyes light up as she nods. Yes, she’s pregnant!
I’m instantly a crying mess. I rush to the couch and we embrace. “Maryam, this is such good news! When did you find out? How far along are you?”
“More than three months,” she says. “Fifteen weeks, the doctor says.”
“But you’re not even showing! Let me see!” She lifts her untucked blue blouse to reveal a precious little pooch of baby. “How could you have kept it a secret from me when I was living right here? You’ve been pregnant the entire time I’ve been here!? Oh, you and Ardishir must be so happy!”
“We haven’t known for sure for very long,” she says in apology. “I wouldn’t even take a pregnancy test for the longest time because—well, just because.” She sighs. “It’s hard to keep getting your hopes up for something you don’t think is ever going to happen. You know?”
I know. Of course I know. “Have you told our parents?”
Maryam’s no is very firm.
“Oh, but why not?” I ask. “They’ll be so excited!”
“It won’t change a thing,” she says. “Not one stupid thing.”
I pull back. “What do you mean?”
She gives me a long look.
“What, Maryam? Tell me what you meant.”
“It’s nothing,” she says. “I’d rather talk about your marriage! Tell me, was it—”
“Why aren’t you sharing such good news with our parents?” I say. “We should do all we can to give them happiness.”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Then she adds, “Poor Tami. Nobody ever tells poor Tami the truth, do they? You’re our baby. We all want to protect you.”
I sit back, stinging from her comment, even though I know it’s true. After all, it was only a few days ago that I learned what really happened to our mother when we returned to Iran from America in 1979. Only weeks after we moved back, she was arrested at a rally protesting the new law that mandated the veiling of women. She was on the outskirts of the crowd—not an organizer, but simply one of many, and yet she was singled out in the worst of ways. Arrested. Thrown into the horrible Evin Prison and not allowed a lawyer for many weeks. No one knows what happened to her there. She doesn’t talk about it.
Throughout my childhood, this was kept from me. I’d grown up thinking the hours, days, and years my mother spent sheltered indoors or in our courtyard garden were from regret—sadness at having made a bad decision to go back to Iran and getting stuck there. I knew nothing of how she suffered. I’d had no recollection of the time she was gone, but since recently learning of it, flickers of memory have emerged about the day she came back.
It happened suddenly, in my memory. I was actually in my parents’ bedroom, at my mother’s dressing table, with her curlers amateurishly spindled through my hair. I was holding her blue perfume bottle with its puff nozzle that I so adored, spritzing myself. Although the perfume was gone, with each puff, the smell of my mother came out of the bottle, and I chased it with my nose.
There was sudden action from the living room—startled voices, the sounds of grown-ups. My grandmother was there—my mother’s mother—and my uncle, my mother’s brother who now lives in London. There were others, too, but if I knew them then I don’t remember now. There were loud cries, and a blur of grown-ups moved past the half-open door of the bedroom in which I played. My mother was in the middle, I think—I’m almost sure of it. Passing by, my grandmother looked at me, put her finger to her lips.
Stay quiet, Tami Joon. Stay silent
, she whispered as she closed the bedroom door.
Much, much later, I was led to the living room, to my mother, who’d been freshly bathed. I approached tentatively, held back a bit. My mother had thinned—her wrists, her neck, her waist—while her cheekbones had grown more pronounced. Yellowed bruises were covered with makeup. I knew her, but I didn’t know her. She’d been cracked and patched back together like Humpty Dumpty, one of my favorite rhymes. And I, in playing with her perfume bottle, had taken on her smell. When she clasped me to her, her breath came in sobbing heaves. They had to pull me from her, and they made me go away again so as not to cause her further upset—she, who’d already been kept from me for so long.
I understood very little that day, as a child of not even four.
The one sure thing I understood was how I’d made my mother cry. I’d made her sad, and her sorrow never went away. I believe now that she was crying not only from how she missed me, but from how she missed herself, too. Gone was the most beautiful woman in Tehran, the one with the carefree heart and the smile given freely to all, the one who loved to dance and put on fancy party clothes and enchant my father with her magical perfume. When she wore it, he’d playfully nip at her earlobes, lift her dangly earrings, and kiss her neck—again and again, until she’d swat him away with a look that promised more playfulness later.
“So you be the one,” I say to Maryam now. “You be the one who tells me the truth.”
My sister’s sigh is deep and her voice quiet. “You don’t remember how Maman was before, but I do. At night when I was little, she used to chase away the monsters under our beds. She had a smile that brightened the whole room, and her spirit filled the house with lightness. And now . . .” Her voice fades. “Well, she hasn’t chased away our monsters in a long time, has she?”
I used to spend hours upon hours watching our home videos from the time before, and besides being the one who chased away our monsters, my mother was a tickler. She was a hugger, a teaser, a twirler-arounder. But none of these is the mother I know.
My mouth has soured at my sister’s words, at my realization that there are so many pieces of my mother I know nothing about. “Poor Maman,” I say.
“Poor
us
.” Maryam’s voice is harsh. “When I first came to the U.S., I was so homesick. I cried every day for months.... Poor Ardishir!” Now she’s half laughing and half brushing away her tears—what a roller coaster of emotions this pregnancy has brought her! “I think he would have sent me back those first months if he could have!”
“Oh, no. Not Ardishir.”
“He was so nice to me,” Maryam says. “But I just begged Maman over and over to please come, that there was no reason for us to be separated from each other like that.”
“You know it’s not her fault,” I admonish. “You know it’s the government that won’t allow them to leave.”
“The government has nothing to do with it,” she snaps. “It’s her. She’s too . . .” She stops and shudders. “It’s her fault. It’s her fault for not even trying. She won’t even try to come.”
The blood rushes to my head and I feel like I might faint. Maryam all of a sudden looks very far away. What she said isn’t right.
It isn’t right.
“They
can’t
come,” I correct her. “They can’t get their visas. You know this, Maryam.”
“You said you wanted to know,” she says. “I’m just telling you. Baba’s got their visa paperwork all filled out—he’s had it filled out for years—but Maman won’t let him submit it.
She’s
the reason they’re not here, not the government. She’s afraid of getting arrested again, or of their application being rejected, or of something else equally stupid. Who knows? She won’t talk about it.”