The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (43 page)

In ten years this regimen would become ancient history, but while everyone else from my high school went away on college tours and began mailing in their applications to campuses far and wide, I sat in a café in Mill Valley (strictly off-limits, Lili warned me, for in those years there were still “hippies” in Marin), read Kierkegaard, and wrote in my journal with a fountain pen. I’d have to live at
home through college or I wouldn’t be able to go to college at all. It was useless to protest. I pined and ranted in my diary until the day my letter of acceptance came in from UCLA. Within weeks of its receipt, my mother packed up all our belongings and we all headed south, to Los Angeles, so that I could begin my college career.

Tehrangeles.

Some half million to a million Iranian immigrants had landed in Southern California after the 1979 revolution. From the rent-controlled apartments in Santa Monica to the high-rise condominiums on Wilshire Boulevard and the gated mansions of Beverly Hills, it was impossible to walk three paces in this part of California without seeing an Iranian face or catching a phrase of Persian. Iranian grocery stores, Iranian bookstores, and Iranian furniture stores ran the length of Westwood Boulevard, from the Westside to the East-, their signs all rendered in bold Persian script. Even the air in Los Angeles, my mother observed with obvious pleasure, smelled exactly like the air in Tehran.

I was expected home by sunset. I was not allowed to date. Still, Tehrangeles, I was determined, would have no claim on me. There were hundreds of Iranian students at UCLA and nearly all of them could be found on the southern edge of campus, poring over their organic chemistry textbooks and MCAT workbooks. I breezed past the future podiatrists, surgeons, and orthodontists and headed to North Campus, the artsy side, the side with the Romanesque architecture and landscaped lawns. From this picturesque venue I boldly declared my major: English. Fortunately, my mother approved the choice, and in this, at least, she proved more indulgent than most Iranian parents of her generation. For Lili the study of literature was permissible so long as it was cast off after the undergraduate level for a career in law.

There followed then the period in which I traveled everywhere with my
Norton Anthology
, volume 1, tucked under my arm. In the center seat of the front row of Rolfe Hall I scribbled myself into ecstasies over the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It was not long before every one of my
Norton
’s three thousand tissue paper–thin pages was heavily annotated in ink. At night, in my parents’ house and in the same canopied bed I’d slept in since I was twelve years old, I detailed the agonies of my existence in the handsome French composition books I bought in a Santa Monica stationery shop.

Between my passion for English literature and the severe restrictions on my social life, I’d manage to graduate from college in just over two years, but somewhere between the Romantics and all those tortuous journal entries I found my way into the college newsroom, and so it was with my newly minted, freshly laminated press pass swinging from my neck that I strode into the university hospital in pursuit of a story and ran into what was to me then the least likely object of desires, journalistic, intellectual, and otherwise: an Iranian doctor.

In America, good Iranian daughters became doctors, the merely pretty ones married doctors, and the very best did both. I was hopeless at math and science, so there was never any chance I’d join the ranks of Iranian American doctors. For a long time, though, I seemed destined to marry one.

I had no interest in marrying an Iranian doctor. I’d long since decided that if I ever married at all, it would be an artist—a sculptor, say, or a poet. And yet. This particular Iranian doctor possessed a vast knowledge of modern art. He’d actually
lived
in France. He wore round-rimmed glasses and he smiled a slow, lopsided smile. I was, from the very first latte he bought me in Westwood village, perfectly, lamely besotted.

Amin was thirty-one. More problematically, he’d been married before. Childhood friends raised in the same small circle of Iranian Americans, he and his wife had married in their twenties and divorced a few years later. Suitors were not supposed to have ex-wives, because Iranians didn’t get divorced, so far as I’d ever heard, anyway.

“Divorced?” Lili had shrieked at the news, and clutched at her heart. “You cannot imagine I would allow you to have contact with a man who’s been divorced?”

“But Mom,” I whined, “this isn’t Iran—”

“What exactly do
you
know about Iran?”

For weeks the situation seemed hopeless. I made protracted, enfevered productions out of my misery. Deliberations were resumed. In the end my mother’s disapproval was mitigated by two factors: first, that Amin was a doctor and, second, that he could be called my suitor or
khastegari
.

According to the many rules of our courtship, he was allowed to take me out only once a week. On Saturday nights Amin would arrive at our house dressed as I would never see him otherwise—in a suit and tie—and affecting a formal manner that faded as soon as he eased into his car seat and turned to me with a conspiratorial smile.

The first night he took me to dinner in a French bistro in West LA. As votives threw shadows against the white tent he ordered chocolate soufflé in a French that would forever put my high school knowledge of that language to shame. The next week he took me to a gated white mansion in Bel Air to celebrate the birthday of a minor Saudi prince. “A patient,” Amin explained coolly as I struggled to suppress my awe. At the Hollywood Bowl one July evening I sought, desperately, to find transcendence in an interminable German opera. There were, in addition, a succession of cocktail parties
and dinner dates with his medical colleagues and their eminently elegant wives. “What is your opinion of García Márquez?” an impossibly tall, impossibly thin blonde asked me at one such gathering, and I, the nineteen-year-old literary critic, proceeded to deliver a pithy assessment of his oeuvre, despite never having read even one of his novels.

Summers in France had refined my suitor’s ideals of female beauty. He favored darkly lined eyes, pale pink lipstick, skirts, and high heels. I took a stick of kohl to my lids, painted my lips, and adjusted my black wardrobe to include pencil skirts and pumps. One day he took me to a Westside boutique and bought me my first very expensive purse, a small boxlike number with a handle and a tiny gold clasp. “Soigné,” he said as he assessed its effect on me, a word I understood to mean perfection.

“I have to go,” I’d tell him, wrestling myself free at the end of the night.

He always knew enough not to ask me to stay. “But do you know where you are going, little girl?” he’d tease, catching my face in his hands and kissing me one last time before letting me go.

On the nights when I returned home after midnight, my mother would always be waiting for me in the living room, ready to take me in with a single glance.

“Can’t you see that if you give yourself to him like this he’ll never marry you?”

“But I don’t want to get married!”

“Then he can’t take you out at all!”

“But Mom, this isn’t Iran!”

“Iran?” she’d say, narrowing her eyes. “You don’t know anything at all about Iran!”

I’d stare dumbly at the floor, cheeks hot with shame and desperate to escape.

I would on no account have told Amin about these late-night exchanges, and if he ever wondered what happened after I closed the door to my parents’ house he never asked. And if on the next day he and his parents appeared at our door, my mother—now calm and sweet—would usher them all into our living room and I would be called upon to serve everyone tea in tiny gilt-rimmed glasses.

This was the hour of the virgin. Not a single person in the room believed in my fitness for the role, but it was still necessary to play the part. I therefore dressed carefully, in pastel skirt suits and modest makeup, and I crossed my legs at the ankles whenever I sat down. During these visits, Amin and I never sat next to each other. We were careful not to look too long in each other’s direction. Afterward, though, we’d laugh it all off, mocking the ridiculous customs of our parents and congratulating ourselves on yet another perfectly executed performance.

“You can leave this house,” she finally told me one night.

It was two o’clock in the morning. I pulled the door closed quietly behind me. She was standing in the hallway in bare feet and a bathrobe, her arms crossed over her chest. My eyes fell to the suitcase she’d set by the door. I looked up at her, confused.

“You are not my daughter,” she told me. Her voice was strangely calm. “You are not my daughter and you
should
leave this house.”

In the dark she took in the whole of me—tangled hair, chapped lips, wrinkled skirt—and then she did what always scared me more than anything: she started pulling at her hair and beating her chest and tearing at her clothes.

“Look what my daughter has made herself into in this
kharab shodeh
, this broken-down place!” she wailed, turning her palms and her face up to the sky. “Leave your home and every last person who knows your name, and now… this daughter!”

I kept my eyes down. I would not cry or say even a word—I knew better than that—but later, when she’d stopping crying and screaming and had gone to sleep and the house was quiet again, I sat cross-legged on the kilim in my bedroom, tracing its rough knots and thinking of the suitcase my mother had left for me by the door.

She didn’t mean, really, for me to leave home; that was still inconceivable to us both. She’d only meant I should be more clever, that I should stop “giving” myself away so easily, “giving” myself as an American girl would. That was what she’d meant with that suitcase.

Still, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Without a green card, I had no way of supporting myself. My student visa would get me as far as graduate school, but all the schools I’d applied to were far away.

Do you know where you are going, little girl?

I laughed easily whenever Amin teased me with that question, laughed as though I knew the answer and had always known. But I had no answer. And I did not know.

Every day I’d scramble out of lecture halls and seminar rooms, drive to Amin’s studio by the beach, and sit cross-legged on his futon with my books while he cooked. He was a marvelous cook.

By the second year of our “courtship,” I’d progressed to the second volume of the
Norton Anthology
. I traded Shelley, Keats, and Byron for Woolf, Plath, and Rich. I made my first forays into French feminist theory. While Amin stood in the kitchen stirring a pot of bouillabaisse or some such, we had epic arguments about feminism. Or rather, he cooked for us as I rehearsed my epic feminist arguments.

“Marriage,” I informed him one day, “is an instrument of patriarchy.”

Concurring, he gave the bouillabaisse or some such a stir.

“Unjust!” I shouted from the futon. “Unnatural!”

“Maybe so, but what exactly do you propose we do about it?”

I had no proposition as of yet, but that exchange did inspire a game of sorts.

“If you asked me to marry you…,” I’d begin.

“Yes?” he’d answer, raising an eyebrow.

“I’d never, ever say yes.”

“I know you wouldn’t. That’s exactly why I’ll never, ever ask you.”

We played that game a lot.

Or played it, rather, until he sensed that I was coming to hope our courtship really would end in marriage.

It was then that he began to travel. He’d take off on a day’s notice and stay away for weeks. I wasn’t allowed to spend more than one night a week out with him, “suitor” or not, and traveling together was out of the question. This I ascribed to my mother’s ancient Iranian prohibitions and to the broader injustices of “patriarchy,” but secretly I admired the casual air with which he’d set out for Berlin or Hong Kong or Buenos Aires. I coveted the financial independence and, especially, the confidence that made these decisions so natural for him. Already I was measuring the distances not only between us but also between who I was and what I wanted in these ways.

The summer after my college graduation, I drove myself back up the coast to San Francisco. It was an especially hot July day and I’d barely made it out of the San Fernando Valley when the air conditioner in my car broke down and I started to cry.

Amin had not, finally, asked me to marry him. I’d be starting law school in the fall. What I wanted and would never have asked for was to stay in Los Angeles—to be chosen, to be married—but all at once there was no choice but to go.

I drove up the I-5 that summer with all the windows down, crying the whole way, and then, slowly and clumsily, with
prizes, scholarships, and all the uneasy force of the language I’d made my own in America, I began closing in on the distances that eluded me.

We met once, years later, over dinner. Amin had stayed in Los Angeles. He still lived in the same small studio on the beach. He hadn’t remarried. By then I’d made my way clear across the country. I’d finished law school, practiced briefly, and then headed back to graduate school. I had a fellowship to study English at Princeton, a small living stipend, and a very small and ugly apartment of my own. When I wasn’t holed up in the stacks of Firestone Library, I’d slip onto a commuter train to Manhattan and spend hours tooling around the city in a pair of thick-soled black leather boots. I was often lost those days and almost always the happier for it.

It was a lovely dinner, that last dinner with Amin, full of our old banter. Toward the end of the night, we spoke of our “courtship” in Los Angeles and with all the world-weariness of my twenty-five years I’d look back with pity at the nineteen-year-old girl I’d been.

“I was
so
young….,” I groaned.

He flashed me a wry smile. “You were.”

“But I wonder…,” I said. I dropped my eyes to the table. “I wonder—”

“Wonder what?”

“Why didn’t you ask me to marry you?”

“You wouldn’t have said yes, remember?”