The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (42 page)

Leaves had made a thick, brown carpet at the bottom of the pool,
and so it took me a moment before I could see them. Dozens of salamanders, ink black, with rubbery bodies and long, thin tails, had gathered in our swimming pool. They wriggled and slipped and skidded over one another. Some lay still, as if dead.

They taught me the essence of time and of deceit, those salamanders, because all at once I understood that we must have been gone from the house for a very long time. But I was my mother’s daughter; I didn’t turn away. I was eleven years old and already I understood shame and secrecy, pride and resourcefulness. I stood by the edge of the pool, staring into the brackish water and considering the salamanders for a long while. Then I rummaged around the backyard until I found the long pole with a net meant to catch fallen leaves. One by one I fished all the salamanders out of our swimming pool and hurled them high over our deck and into the neighbor’s yard.

Those months were the longest I’d lived with my father since we’d left Iran, but I hardly ever saw him. He spent days in his office with the door locked. “Your father’s working,” my grandmother would tell me when I asked after him. “Don’t disturb him,
madar-joon.
”

When she was busy in the kitchen or praying in her bedroom, I’d occasionally wander downstairs and linger by the band of light behind his door. He always had his radio tuned to a classical music station, but if I was very quiet I could make out the sound of a glass hitting the desk or a page rustling, and sometimes I’d hear him talking on the phone in a language that was not German and not Persian, a language I could not name, much less understand.

The police brought him home twice that summer. The first time he’d been walking home drunk on the town’s main thoroughfare, a narrow, shoulderless two-lane highway. He stumbled to the center of the highway and sent a car swerving over the divider. It wasn’t long before a policeman caught up with him, hauled him into a police car, and brought him back home to us.

“
Danke schön!
” Kobra told the policeman that night, trembling
with gratitude. In her broken German and few words of English, she proceeded to ask him into the house for a cup of tea, an offer he politely but firmly refused.

Then came the day when my father staggered into the cul-de-sac, stretched his arms out, and began spinning in a circle like a dervish. One by one the neighbors came to their windows to watch. He screamed, sometimes in German, sometimes in Persian, and spun in circles, from one end of the cul-de-sac to the other, until his knees buckled and he fell, face-first, against the concrete.

When the policeman came for him that time, his forehead was wet with blood and he was weeping.

“Can’t anyone cry in this country?”

“Sir,” the policeman said as he led Johann out of the cul-de-sac, “you can cry all you want in your own house. But in this country nobody screams in the streets.”

It was Kobra who finally saved him.

One day when I was away at school, two tall, muscled young men came to the house in Tiburon. It was nearly noon, but Johann still lay dead asleep in his office, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, his pores rich with alcohol and the whole room sour with it.

Kobra murmured a quick prayer and then knelt at the side of his bed.

“You are my own dear son,” she cooed. “You are a good, good man, Mr. Engineer.”

He groaned.

“You love your family,” she continued. “You love your daughter.”

One eye opened.

“Do it for me, Mr. Engineer,” Kobra pleaded.

He groaned again, turned away, and pulled the sheets over his head.

For nearly an hour Kobra sat beside him, smoothing his brow, cajoling and pleading with him until at last he let himself be taken away.

It was not called a hospital or a clinic but a rehabilitation center. A strange expression, Lili had thought when she first heard it on a TV commercial, but one that suggested homecomings. And beginnings.

Johann would spend the next eight weeks in a room with a single bed, one plastic chair, and a window that looked onto a small redwood grove. For the first seven days he shivered and sweated and screamed, and for the next seven a succession of doctors drew his blood, held his X-rays to the light, and showed him death. His lungs had turned coal black, his arteries blocked. “You will die if you don’t stop drinking and smoking,” the doctors told him, and though for more than two decades Lili had told him as much, he only now beheld the proof.

For Lili there would be a revelation of another kind that year. Once a week she went to visit Johann and afterward she’d sit in a room with the other patients’ wives. The women sat in a circle and one after another they told their stories. They wept openly, without shame, without apology. She had never known anyone to speak candidly of such troubles, and as she, too, wept and told her story, Lili would marvel at the honesty that is possible sometimes only among strangers.

When, at the end of two months, Johann was released from the clinic, he’d gained twenty pounds and his hair had turned completely gray, but he’d been cured of his addiction. He’d never drink again. In this same time, Lili had managed, just barely, to avert bankruptcy. She’d sold the Casa Buena, but she’d lost the house in the Tiburon hills. We had less now, by far, than we’d brought with us to
America, and no hope at all of returning to Iran. Still, what Lili saw when Johann returned to our new two-bedroom apartment on the edge of town was her shy, blue-eyed suitor in his herringbone jacket and his crooked bow tie. What I saw when he returned was the kind, bookish, soft-spoken father whose solitariness was my own.

Every time she came to visit us in America, Kobra arrived with a battered leather suitcase that smelled of mothballs and some other scent I could never place but that for me was the essence of the afternoons I had once spent with her at the Lady Diola. As soon as she got in from the airport, she’d unpack a sweater, two or three prim little house frocks, and a pair of rubber house slippers. Her fancier outfits—all her silk blouses and knockoff Chanel suits—would appear only on nights when my parents’ friends came to dinner, spending the rest of their stay in America in the same suitcase in which they had arrived.

Over the next months, this suitcase would inexplicably expand to accommodate not only several more piles of girdles, sequined party dresses, and coats with matted synthetic fur collars but also huge stashes of toothpaste, razors, dish soap, shampoo, and every department store makeup sample she managed to fish out from the cabinet under my mother’s bathroom sink. By the time Kobra was ready to leave, the suitcase had grown so fat that it would not close with ease. Often she and Lili would spend the day of Kobra’s departure taking turns sitting on that suitcase in an effort to force its metal clasps shut. The Ritual of the Suitcase could go on for hours, and it became Kobra and Lili’s way of arguing about Kobra’s insistence on returning to Iran—and many other things I didn’t understand.

“Why are you dragging all this back again?” my mother would start, bearing down on one corner of the suitcase while snatching vainly at its clasps. “I just don’t understand you! There’s nothing left back there, don’t you see?”

“You don’t know anything about it!” Kobra snapped.

“What are you going to do when you get really old? What am I supposed to do with you then?”

Kobra drew herself up and placed her hands on her hips. “What will I do, you ask me? Well, what did I do all through the
shoolooqi
? What did I do through the war?”

They’d spend the entire ride to the airport bickering and, in the most serious instances, swearing they would not even say good-bye to each other.

When the time came to check her suitcase, Kobra always had a tactic for evading excess baggage fees. Confronted by a man, she would bat her eyelashes and smile a schoolgirl’s smile; confronted by a woman, she’d assume the pitiful posture of an invalid. She was difficult to resist in either case, and her record in evading the fees was nearly flawless.

But one year, after a particularly heated Ritual of the Suitcase, Kobra hauled her luggage onto the scale by herself and looked up hopefully at the young male attendant only to be met by a stern look.

“Thirty pounds over,” he said, shaking his head and frowning.

Kobra turned to me. “What did he say?”

“He says the suitcase is too heavy,” I translated. Even I could tell he would not be won by her usual strategy.

“I’m not paying it,” Lili said. “I’ve had it with that suitcase and all the junk you keep dragging around!”

Kobra reached into the depths of her scuffed handbag and pulled out two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills to pay the excess baggage fee. This would have been enough money to buy half a year’s groceries back in Iran. Nothing in her suitcase was worth that much, but she slid the bills onto the counter without flinching.

“Please take me with you!” I’d once wailed in the last minutes before she disappeared behind the gate. After months of eating her
treats and listening to her stories, I could not easily let her go. I’d clutch her skirts and tell her she could just take me with her in her suitcase and no one would ever know.

My pleas would eventually become a joke between us. “I’d tuck you into my suitcase, but see how you’ve grown!” she’d say. Then, pinching my sides, she’d add, “Now that I’ve finally decided to put you in there you will never fit!”

One year we would hear of an Iranian man who had done just this to smuggle his fiancée into the United States. He had taken the precaution of punching small holes through the fabric of his suitcase, but when he opened the suitcase in America his fiancée was dead.

We could never tell our joke after that, but there was no joking at all this time at the airport. Kobra kissed me on both cheeks, whispered a prayer in my ear, and then she left America for the last time.

Whenever my parents’ Iranian friends gathered for dinner parties and No Rooz celebrations, the men and women invariably parted ways just as soon as they stepped out of their cars and over the threshold of their hosts’ home. As a young girl, my place had always been with the women, perfecting a pleasing muteness as they gossiped over endless rounds of bitter black tea. With each year I’d grown more eager to join my father and the other men in their earnest talk of history, politics, and mystical Persian poetry, but very few women crossed that invisible boundary in those days and in those circles of ours, and it was unthinkable that I, a young girl, should pull up a chair next to grown men. It would have been indecent.

There was so much that was indecent back then. Shorts and miniskirts, to begin. The tweezing of eyebrows and the wearing of all but the most discreet smudge of lip gloss. Sleepovers, school dances, parties, and any event for which my mother could not serve as chaperone were out of the question as well.

To that eternal teenage wail (“But M-o-o-o-om!”) I routinely added: “This isn’t Iran!” This argument had no currency whatsoever with Lili. It didn’t matter that we’d never go back to Iran again. Even after ten years in this country, words like “boyfriend” and “dating” were as good as obscenities in our house. Those were American words, American ideas, and not, my mother Lili gave me to understand, meant for me.

When I turned thirteen she informed me that when a girl “gave herself” to a man—the closest Persian equivalent for intercourse—she damaged herself. What’s more, the damage was immediately apparent. Intercourse changed a girl’s walk, her voice, her smile. And such “giving” before marriage cost a girl everything. “They use you and then…” Here her voice trailed off ominously. “Then they toss you aside like a sullied handkerchief!” Sometimes she preferred another, more distinctly Iranian metaphor: a worn and faded carpet. “Like so,” she’d demonstrate, stamping her foot and then bending down to smooth the silken threads. “Afterward they think of you as nothing but the worn carpet under their feet!”

I knew that daughters of my mother’s Iranian friends were growing up in a similar way, with the same exhortations and prohibitions, but it wasn’t something I’d ever talk about with them. At the large public high school the Iranian girls formed cliques of their own, but at my small private school there were just three other Iranian girls and we kept to ourselves and did our best not to call attention to the Iranian parts of our lives. We did our best to pass as American. I, in any case, did my best to pass.

Once I’d tossed cucumbers and quince fruit into the trash before school started. By high school I’d learned to duck into the bathroom before classes, trade my jeans for a miniskirt, and swipe on some blush, mascara, and lipstick. It wasn’t sufficient, really, to pass, and so whatever my mother forbade me I pretended to scorn. I couldn’t be bothered with boys my age and I had no time for high school parties;
I’d devoted my life to higher intellectual pursuits. Said devotion mostly involved gorging myself on books. At sixteen I read all the diaries of Anaïs Nin, one volume after another, in quick, breathless, heady succession. I took to writing in my own diary. I wore black.

“What’s all this?” my mother would say, throwing her hands up in the air. “Who do you think you are? Simone de Beauvoir? Can’t you at least put this junk aside and read some real literature? Shakespeare, say, or some Dickens…”

I’d roll my eyes or pretend I hadn’t heard her.

My father did not usually involve himself in these scenes. “Let her be,” he might, however, interject on occasion. “It’s perfectly harmless.”

“Yes, harmless now,” Lili howled, “but where, I ask you, will it end?”

Real trouble came in my senior year of high school. “Make something of yourself!” had been Lili’s injunction as she hauled me from after-school class to after-school class, but what this “something” should be, and how I might become it, grew less and less clear as my graduation date approached. With the sole exception of medical school, Iranian girls did not go away to college or graduate school. They lived at home with their parents until they got married. Smart, ambitious Iranian daughters went to one of the local liberal arts colleges or else the closest public universities; the others went to community college or didn’t go to college at all; and Iranian girls who left home under any other circumstances were considered members of a profession so shameful its name could not be spoken aloud.