Things We Left Unsaid (11 page)

Alice sat down at the kitchen table. She had her hair cut short, layered, and teased to the utmost. Her head looked round as a ball. ‘I came straight here from the
hairdresser.’

I jumped in preemptively, ‘Oh, your hair looks great. Did you go to Angele’s?’

She smiled. ‘Are you kidding? Angele doesn’t know how to do short hair. I went to the Shemshad Salon; they have a new hairdresser from Tehran.’ When she spied last
night’s washed dinner plates in the dish rack, she was livid. ‘Did you have guests?’ She posed the question much the same way one might ask, ‘Did you kill
somebody?’

I started putting away the plates. My rational side reminded me for the thousandth time, ‘You don’t need to explain. Just say, yeah, we had guests. Nothing more.’ I put the
last spoon away, closed the drawer and wheeled around to face Alice.

‘Yeah, we had guests.’ And I told her who it was.

She frowned. ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’

Before I could stand my ground on not needing to explain, my emotional side capitulated. ‘It all happened quite suddenly. And you were at work at the hospital last night.’

Instead of grumbling or picking a fight, as was her habit, this time Alice picked an apple from the fruit bowl and said nothing. Angry at myself for having gone ahead and explained, and also
surprised at Alice for not having bickered, I sat down across from her. She ate the apple down to the core and said, ‘You could have told them to come to Nina’s on Thursday
night.’

In order to keep my cool, I tried to think about something else. I stared at the flowers outside the window. I had never been able to get it through my sister’s head that if a person gets
invited somewhere, it’s not right to show up with an uninvited guest of his own accord. And I could not convince her this time, either.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t have to stand on formalities with Nina. But, fine. It doesn’t matter much. I’ve made my decision. Do you have a
cigarette?’ I got up without a word and brought her the pack of cigarettes. So, my sister had decided to lose weight. I lit a match for her.

She puffed clumsily at the cigarette and let out the smoke. ‘As long as Mother is not here to raise a fuss, let me say that whatever faults and drawbacks Simonian may have are of no
importance to me. The truth is that I’m tired of being lonely, and I’m tired of Mother’s grumbling. So what if he’s been married before? You were right. One can’t have
cake and eat it too. He comes from a decent enough family, and he is educated... Hey, careful! You’ve burned your fingers. Where is your mind?’

The match had burnt to the base. I tossed it into the ashtray. Mother had warned me on the phone, ‘If Alice turns up, no matter what she says, don’t argue. This time she’s
really gone off the deep end.’ I guessed that meant that they had argued again. Now I was sure. I remembered a joke. This man says, ‘I’ve decided to marry the king’s
daughter.’ They tell him, ‘The king’s not going to give you his daughter.’ He says, ‘I’ve made my decision, so the matter is half resolved.’

My sister had decided to marry Emile Simonian, so as far as she was concerned, the matter was
fully
resolved.

Alice grabbed another apple. ‘When his mother dies, her jewelry will go to me.’ And she laughed uproariously. ‘The only problem is the girl. But you said she’s not a
naughty kid. I’ve got no patience for raising kids, but you will help me out.’

And after having settled the matter just like that – cut and sewn and worn from whole cloth, as Mother would say – she got up.

‘Okay, I’m off. I need navy blue shoes to go with my new two-piece white suit.’ My head was spinning and I do not think I even returned her goodbye. Alice left, smiling.

Before I could make it to the hallway to call Mother, the phone rang. Mother had beat me to it. ‘I know. I know. I’ve been filling her ears from last night until now. It’s like
talking to a brick wall. The sooner she sees this lout, the better. Maybe she’ll drop the crusade.’ When I hung up I was mad at Mother, too. What right did she have to call someone she
had never set eyes on a ‘lout’?

I sat down again at the kitchen table. My hand found my hair. I was twisting my hair around my fingers and letting it go. Twisting, letting go. It was not a difficult thing to picture, the first
meeting of Alice and Emile Simonian: my sister is made up to the nines and in the first half hour gives a complete report of her virtues, her education, and her social position. She offers an
opinion about everything from cooking and housekeeping to politics and global economics. Then she speaks of her many suitors (some of them of course imagined), explaining that she refused their
every proposal. Finally, she speaks about her student days in England. My straight hair was twisted like a spring. I coiled it behind my ear and latched onto another strand.

My greatest hope and aspiration was for Alice to marry. Several times I had suggested possible candidates, but my sister would grimace as though I had offered her a poisoned cup. ‘You have
got to be kidding! You mean I’m so hopeless that you have to find me a husband?’

Every time I twisted my hair around my finger Nina would say, ‘Turning into Louis the Sixteenth again? Let go of your poor hair!’ I let go of my hair and stood up. I paced up and
down the room in search of a solution. Finding none, I vowed that if my sister would give up this crusade, the very next day I would buy everyone at the almshouse lunch and dinner.

When the children came home from school, Emily was with them.

Immediately I asked, ‘Did you tell your grandmother before coming over?’ Emily nodded her head and lowered her eyes to the floor. All this shyness was beginning to try my
patience.

‘We just went over and got her grandmother’s permission,’ Armineh explained.

‘Emily has some problems with math,’ said Arsineh. ‘She came to get Armen’s help.’

Before my surprised gaze could settle on my son, Armen ran off to his room, saying, ‘I’ll be right back.’ Quite a day for the unexpected! Math was Armen’s arch nemesis,
right after, or perhaps on an equal footing with, the bane of his life, Composition.

I forgot about their after-school snack until the children asked, ‘What do we have to eat?’

I started making excuses. ‘I was busy. I didn’t have time to prepare anything.’ The twins stood there wide-eyed, looking at me with heads cocked at an angle.

‘What were you doing?’

‘Why didn’t you have time?’

Irritated, I said, ‘There is bread and cheese. Help yourself, and don’t ask so many questions.’ They took a step backward and looked at each other. I put my hand on my
forehead, leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

Armineh stepped forward and took my hand. ‘Don’t you feel well?’

Arsineh took my other hand. ‘You don’t feel well?’

I badly wanted to tell them, ‘No, I don’t feel well.’

The doorbell rang, leaving me no chance to figure out what was making me feel ill.

I withdrew my hands from the twins’ grasp and headed for the door, telling myself, ‘God help me through this.’ I braced myself for yet another strange occurrence, feeling, as I
opened the door, like Alice in Wonderland. In any other circumstance, the similarity of the names of my sister Alice and the little heroine of that book would have seemed amusing. But it was not
some other circumstance – I was not feeling well, and it was not amusing.

It was the Company electrician, come to repair our yard lights. He was a young man I had not seen before, very thin, with a large birthmark on his cheek.

I accompanied him from one end of the yard to the other so he could test every lamp. At each light he paused to talk, explaining that he was newly employed by the Oil Company, and now that he
had a good job, he had decided to marry. From childhood our electrician had fancied his maternal cousin for a wife, so his mother had long ago persuaded her sister to promise him her
daughter’s hand. And finally, he arrived at the conclusion that one of the lamps had a short. That much I had figured out myself. Then he said his voltmeter was broken and, God willing, we
might have one he could use.

I was sure we had a voltmeter, but could not find it after searching all through the toolbox. Armen had probably taken it again. I knocked on his door and went in. ‘Do you have the
voltmeter?’

He and Emily were sitting on the desk, their feet swinging over the edge. They both leapt down to the floor. Armen, flustered, said, ‘No, I don’t have it.’

On my way back to the yard, it occurred to me, ‘Strange way to study!’

The electrician asked, ‘Can you borrow one from a neighbor?’

Mrs. Rahimi was in Tehran. Mr. Rahimi would certainly not be home at that time of day. I did not know my other neighbors well enough to feel comfortable asking to borrow something from them.
‘Well, yes. Wait just a minute.’

I crossed the street and rang the Simonians’ doorbell. Emile would not be back from the Company yet. I was praying that his mother had a voltmeter and would not be out of sorts. Emile
himself opened the door. He went to fetch a voltmeter and walked back with me to our yard. ‘Maybe the electrician will need a hand.’ I don’t know why I did not protest at this (at
least to make a pretense of being polite and saving him the trouble), and I did not ask myself what he was doing home at this time of day. I was feeling a bit better now. Let Alice build castles in
the air. She might not be so dumb after all.

Emile found the problem with the wiring before the electrician did, and the entire time he was fiddling with the wires, the electrician stood idly by, talking about his
marriage and how he might be able to get a house in the Bahmanshir or Pirouzabad neighborhoods, and that, God willing, they would go on pilgrimage to Mashhad after the wedding. In the end, he
gathered his stuff, and as he was leaving, he said with a laugh, ‘With a neighbor like the Engineer, here, why call us?’

He was almost at the gate when I called out, ‘Wait!’

I ran inside, opened one of the kitchen cabinets and took out a box. I went back to the yard and handed the box to the electrician. He stared at it. ‘Chocolate from the
Store
?’ His eyes lit up.

‘Take it for your fiancée,’ I said. He was delighted. He thanked me and left.

Emile was watching me. His hands were blackened and dirty, so I invited him inside to wash up. While he washed his hands, I fixed two glasses of Vimto fruit cordial I had bought from the Kuwaiti
Bazaar. I was the only one in our household who liked Vimto.

Stepping into the kitchen, he looked all around. Then he smelled his hands. ‘What fragrant soap, what a pretty kitchen, what a lovely drink.’

I don’t know why the smell of Vinolia soap reminded me of my father and our house with the dim hallway in Tehran.

He sat down at the table and looked out the window. ‘You built that ledge yourself, didn’t you? Our kitchen window doesn’t have a ledge.’

None of the homes in Bawarda had window ledges. We had just arrived in Abadan, and I was pregnant with Armen when Mr. Morteza built the kitchen window ledge for me.

Emile took a sip of his drink. I expected him to say it was tasty, but he did not. He was still looking out the window. ‘The sweet peas are fading a bit.’

Mr. Morteza had run his dirt-caked hands over the ledge, which was still covered with brick and mortar dust, and said, ‘This ledge is perfect for sweet peas. Their fragrance will bowl you
over.’ I did not know what kind of flower sweet peas were, in fact had never even heard of them before. A couple of weeks after Armen was born, Mr. Morteza came over one day for an
unscheduled stop with a flower box fastened to his bicycle rack. He set it on the ledge, adjusted its position, and said, ‘Sweet peas! Just a little something to welcome the newborn.’
It was the first time I had seen the little blue and pink and white blossoms. How did Emile know the names of such flowers?

‘I have to change its soil,’ I said.

He drank the Vimto. ‘I planted sweet peas in Masjed-Soleiman. I’ve ordered soil and fertilizer for our yard here. When it’s delivered, I’ll change the soil in this flower
box for you.’

‘The Company gardener does that stuff for us,’ I said.

He put the glass down on the table. The chain around his neck had caught on the top button of his shirt. He untangled it. ‘I like digging in the dirt, the soil, and the roots. Watching
something grow that you planted with your own two hands gives you a good feeling, no?’

A ridiculous smile settled on my lips.

He laughed. ‘Of course, I’m no green thumb, like you.’

Seeing my confused expression, he added, ‘I heard from the twins that it was you who grew the flowers you brought my mother that night.’ I felt myself blushing. Was it because he had
addressed me with the familiar form of the pronoun ‘you,’ or because I was not used to receiving compliments?

‘Did you know that electrician?’ Now he was using the formal form of ‘you’ again.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was the first time I saw him. He’s just started work for the Oil Company.’

He looked at the cross around my neck. ‘So how did you know he’s getting married?’

I straightened the cross, which had gotten twisted. ‘He told me so.’

He looked at the sweet peas. ‘I know why. Everyone enjoys talking with you. Talking with you is comfortable.’ He looked at me. ‘A person feels like he’s known you for
years.’

The twins came bouncing and sliding up. ‘Our homework is finished.’ ‘Emily’s not finished yet with her work?’

It only now occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a peep from Armen’s room for over an hour. As I started to get up, Emily walked in, her math book and a notebook under her arm. Armineh
and Arsineh went over and attached themselves to either of her arms.

‘Shall we play house?’

‘Or jacks?’

Emily looked at her father. Emile took the last sip of Vimto and set the glass on the tray. ‘Grandmother is all alone. She’s got her headache again. Maybe it’s better
if...’

Armineh cut in, mid-sentence. ‘Well, let grandmother rest. Emily can stay with us.’