A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (16 page)

Finally Khanom Omidi comes to escort her to her future. She sits in the corner of the room watching intently as her father and Agha Abbas discuss terms. Abbas offers rugs, gold, jewelry, and a small fortune in cash in case of divorce. Her father offers a tenth of the sum as a dowry and demands that Saba be Abbas’s final wife, that he take no other wives, legal or de facto, while she is alive. Abbas bows his head. He understands what is asked of him. He has no children, no remaining wives or heirs. Agha Hafezi is asking that he leave his daughter a rich woman, with no other claimants to add complexity to her widowhood. Besides that, he wants to put property and cash in Saba’s own name. He creates a marriage document with every loophole plugged as tightly as they are in any other of his business dealings.
Agha Abbas raises his hands, palms up. “What’s mine is yours. . . . Ehsan jan, when you’re my age, you will know the price a man will pay for happiness in his final years.”
Agha Hafezi nods when he is satisfied with the terms. Saba breathes out. This moment doesn’t seem so ugly or frightening now that she has a firm grip on her future. This is the act of a logical and forward-thinking woman—an American scholar or businesswoman entirely unlike her adolescent self. From now on, Saba Hafezi will behave a little less like Ponneh, beaten for her beauty, waiting helplessly for change, and a little more like the sister conquering the world so many scoops of a teaspoon away.
Later, when Reza comes to congratulate her, Saba smiles icily. With her eyes she accuses him of so many things. He has been weak, no hero at all. Who cares that she may never again touch Reza’s warm, prickly skin? Marrying him would be worse. There is no romance in self-sabotage. From now on, Saba will sweep her heart of useless longings. She will be in control of her own emotions and make this old man her world. She will see the good in him and block her every disappointment. She will protect herself against pregnancy; children would bind her permanently to Iran and make it hard ever to marry again. There will be happy days ahead, and afterward she will make new dreams.
The icy smile stays on her face for days, even as the women prepare her for her wedding with gold jewelry and henna and
noghl
candy, and as she sits in her wedding dress under a canopy with Abbas, she submits to a frenzy of Persian arts and ministrations and tries to look older, self-assured.
Beautiful girls always find that they’ve broken some rule,
Khanom Basir once said. Silently Saba replies,
But smart girls make their own rules
; and she watches Abbas as Khanom Alborz and Khanom Basir rain sweetness on her marriage by rubbing two large cones of sugar over her head for what seems like an hour.

hen my friend Bahareh called, I rushed to examine her daughter in the Rashti hospital even though childhood trauma isn’t within my specific field. This was in the early days after the revolution and the war . . . I believe sometime in 1981.
As I expected, Saba hadn’t been informed of her sister’s death
and continually asked for her. I told Bahareh that she must tell her
daughter the truth soon, but my friend was in a state of denial. She
said that it might be best to keep Saba in the dark until the two of
them could start anew in America, an idea that I found preposterous
because it would only lead to a double dose of stress. Saba was already
suffering from delirium and she likely knew on
some
level. But Bahareh said that she wanted to keep things simple, that it would help
Saba to imagine her life in two parts, to sever all ties at once. I must admit that I felt a deep sorrow for my friend, who was
beginning to show a certain obsession. She said in a confused, almost
manic voice, “This must be God’s plan. Saba will do wonderful things
with her life. My job is only to deliver her there.” Bahareh was always fanatical about her children’s purpose in the world and had been planning for some time to educate them in the U.S. It was her greatest strength. She was willing to die in a stampede just to lift her daughters’ heads one inch higher than the horde.
Later Saba asked me if I believed in heaven and hell and I said that no one really knows. Then she asked if I believed in America and I responded that, yes,
that
is a real enough place. She seemed pleased with the answer. I do wish I knew exactly what happened to Bahareh on the day they tried to leave. Her husband has forbidden me from contacting Saba because of the dangers involved. But I will continue to search for my friend. I see all the most likely answers, of course, but that is no substitute for knowing.

aba slaps the top of the VCR until it comes to life under her hand and images flicker across the screen. She leans back on a cushion in her father’s living room. She is still wearing her wedding dress and the room is a mess from celebrating. She won’t be delivered to her husband’s house until tomorrow, when a group of friends will help move her possessions. She finds it strange that Abbas didn’t insist that she spend their wedding night with him—but that’s a blessing she doesn’t question. She has so many other things to worry about now. Did she make a monumental mistake? What is this panic in her chest and how can she drive it out? She is watching a movie she has read about in American magazines ever since she was a child. The Tehrani has finally managed to get her a copy.
Love Story.
Set in Harvard University, full of wonderful Harvard details that she can drink in. A building that Mahtab would admire. A corridor Mahtab could have passed through. A chair she might have sat in, in a class she might have taken. She watches the movie all the way through, even though she finds the story too sickening and sweet. Love doesn’t work like that. If Mahtab fell in love at Harvard, it definitely wouldn’t work like that.

She hears a noise outside and Khanom Mansoori
,
the Ancient One, shuffles in. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” She lowers herself onto a cushion and pushes away some plates of half-eaten pastries. She caresses Saba’s cheek, brings Saba’s face closer to hers like she’s going to kiss it, but doesn’t.

“Khanom Mansoori,” Saba whispers as she buries her head in the old woman’s shoulder. “What have I done?” Will being married to a rich Muslim really protect her any more than being the daughter of a rich Christian? Is his money any safer? Will this plan help her to find freedom or someday to reach America? Should she have gone to Tehran?

Khanom Mansoori offers no answers. She hums a song. When she is finished, she mutters, “Has Agha been to see you? He had a gift for you.”

Saba holds out her wrist to show the bracelet that Agha Mansoori gave to her that afternoon. “You have the nicest husband,” she says to the old woman. Saba wishes she could see a photo of the couple when they were her age, but maybe that would ruin the fantasy. She suspects that, even when young, they weren’t particularly beautiful. They are both so petite that they give the impression of miniature people. Agha Mansoori has a small head, even for his size, and Khanom Mansoori’s eyes are too wide apart. But somehow, when Saba imagines them at twenty, they morph into a statuesque movie couple with waves of jet-black hair and brooding eyes. She thinks of the lovers from
Sultan of Hearts—
an old Persian film in which the heroine sings mournfully in the town square—and imagines herself in love, or even involved in a dramatic affair.

Khanom Mansoori nods and grins gummily. “You are like a granddaughter to us. And now Abbas will be like our grandson.” Saba chuckles, and Khanom Mansoori responds, “All right, maybe more like a son or a cousin.”

Tonight a layer of gray fog hangs over the village. A hard rain began half an hour ago.
Love Story
plays on the screen and Saba explains the plot to Khanom Mansoori. She doesn’t recall how or when the story transforms into a tale of Mahtab’s American life. At some point the sights and sounds of Harvard, all the details she has devoured from books, magazines, and movies, gel into a clear and inevitable picture of her sister.

“It’s the twin sense.” Khanom Mansoori nods with certainty. This is the effect the old woman has on the world. Somehow she forces the murkier truths to emerge from nothing. It isn’t like the art of
maastmali
, which is about distorting truth, but its complete opposite, like chiseling out the delicate bird that has been hiding inside a shapeless rock.

Please don’t start thinking that my sister has forgotten about me just because there has been no news from her for a while. I have so many stories of her, but this is the next one I’m choosing to share with you because, well, I was right. She
did
manage to purge another big Immigrant Worry. She accomplished something that I couldn’t: she reached out and grabbed for herself the power to say no, the strength to do and be anything—ultimate success, endless possibility. And this is how she did it: Mahtab strolls through Harvard Yard—which from a bird’s-eye view looks like the most scholarly place on earth—her black winter coat wrapped tightly around her body, her boot heels clicking tentatively as they avoid potholes and cracks in the brick sidewalk. To her classmates, Mahtab is a puzzle. At first glance she is the vision of a typical American girl. Auburn hair. Elegant clothes. Even her skin seems paler, no olive peeking out from under porcelain powder. Yet she is somehow unavailable to them. In fact, Mahtab feels more foreign than ever at Harvard. She is bad at making friends, which is the trouble with twins. She hasn’t called Maman in weeks.

“I don’t like this part,” says Khanom Mansoori. “Why must she be so alone?”
You’re right. And she does begin to feel the need for something— but not affection or love. Though she is ready for her own
Love Story
, my sister doesn’t want to replace me. It’s a new kind of accomplishment that she wants. Someone to stamp her as eligible for this world—complete and free from all things Cheshmeh. She finds that someone in the winter of another college year—thanks to a pair of broken high heels.
Yes, yes, it’s
just
like that other pair of broken high heels. I tried to tell this story to Ponneh, and she would not hear it. But
you
know that there are mystical ties between twins. Remember what you told us about the Unseen Strand?
Now, let us get to the scenery of Mahtab’s new life. It is very different from Cheshmeh. She is in her first or second year, I have lost track of the cycles and semesters, but I do know that she lives in a tiny attic room with a round window overlooking the Charles River and a foggy, hazy bridge with streetlamps. The room sits atop a famous library, the one that houses signatures of almost every U.S. president and a book signed by T. S. Eliot. And no, I am not exaggerating. I’ve read about this library in a travel guide. Imagine a Saturday night—the night of the week when American college students socialize. Mahtab prepares to go to the library instead. She wants to be the best. To be special to Baba Harvard, her new father. Isn’t that
just
like her?
Tonight, as she puts on her shoes, a fateful heel snaps off in her hand.
She knocks on her neighbor’s door. Clara, an overly feminine girl from the American Northeast, answers the door. She calls my sister “May,” and when she cocks her head, a whole row of light brown curls falls to one side. Have you ever seen
real
American curls, like the ones on Shirley Temple or that girl they call a Steel Magnolia? I have seen her only in a photo, but the Tehrani has promised that when this movie is finally on video, he will get it for me. Mahtab holds up the shoe and asks if Clara has any glue. From inside she hears several voices and the sound of clicking heels on a hardwood floor. Someone laughs and stumbles out of the room wearing a thin dress but no shoes.
“Hey! Look who it is. It’s
Mah
-tab from next door.” Simone, a malcontented New York princess, doesn’t care what Mahtab wants to be called. She says Mahtab’s name as often as she can, with emphasis, like an accusation. She lets the name fly unexpectedly, pointing and shooting with amazing accuracy. She changes its meaning, turns it into a weapon.
You’re a fraud,
she says. “Are you here to go out with us?” She eyes the broken shoe with an upper-class American disdain that can’t be explained without a full lesson on the history of her people. The head and tail of it is that they don’t really have any history. Age is one thing America lacks, so certain Americans compensate for it with scorn.
“Leave her alone. Muslims don’t drink,” says a third roommate— the one with clicking heels—as she applies lipstick in the hallway mirror.
“I’m . . . not Muslim, actually,” Mahtab says.
The third roommate smiles sweetly. “Yeah, but
culturally
, right?”
Khanom Mansoori chuckles, because mocking educated Americans is so satisfying. “You made that part up to amuse me.”
All right, maybe I heard it on TV.
Having failed to find glue, Clara returns holding several pairs of high heels, some black, some blood red like Mahtab’s. “You can borrow one of mine,” she says, because Clara, like most American girls, has thousands of shoes that she throws away like corncob skins the moment they are off her feet. She is even more shoe-crazy than our own Ponneh, though I defy you to find an American girl who has been beaten for her heels.
Mahtab thanks her. “Where are you all going?”
Clara says—and let me make sure to get all these words just right—“I’m going to see
Lord of the Flies
, and these girls are going whoring at the Fox.”
Hah! What a thing to say! I do wish you understood the snappiness of the word
whore
used as a verb. Once I saw it in print, and it doesn’t sound quite as ugly as it does in a vile mouth like Mustafa’s. These Americans have the most wonderful phrases.
“I did not understand any of that,” says Khanom Mansoori. “Do you want tea? I want tea.”
Fine, fine, I will explain.
Lord of the Flies
is an old black-and-white movie about a book on the evils of boys left in a world without female goodness. The Fox is an exclusive men-only private club at Harvard that dares to exist even in the eighties. It is a place where they smoke and drink and sleep with desperate women. There are other clubs too, with strange names like Fly and Porc. . . . I learned that from a juicy article in
Harvard Magazine
, which the Tehrani charged me twice his fee to procure, even though he has a cousin who owns an Italian restaurant in Harvard Square, and the ads were ripped out in case of border inspections, and the pages were covered in dried red sauce.
Now, here’s something I know for sure. Mahtab isn’t one of those girls who lobby against the Harvard men’s clubs. She has always found them intriguing. They remind her of the Harvard she’s seen in movies from the 1950s. Mahtab usually rages at anything that even hints at sexism. But somehow the all-male clubs have escaped her rage. Let them have their club. As long as the women aren’t serving drinks, it doesn’t offend her. Mahtab is more bothered by the concept of a cookie-baking, dinner-at-six housewife than the idea of being excluded by any man. She would rather be left out than boxed in. Until now she has refused to line up outside and be judged for entry. Despite the blatantly sexual nature of this act, for Mahtab it bears a strange resemblance to Iran. When she passes a club on a Saturday night, sometimes she stops and watches. The blazer-clad golden boy at the door leers at the first girl in line, probably a first-year student. He looks her up and down, stops just past her hemline. Suddenly a white scarf flies off someone’s neck. It turns and weaves and makes its way through the line of scantily dressed girls. It wraps around the boy’s head. Now he is wearing a turban. Now he’s growing a black mustache and unruly beard. The expression on his face doesn’t change. Mahtab always leaves right then.
But today, after three of these same boys—all members of this Fox Club—arrive in Clara’s room, Mahtab is tempted to stay. They lounge in the corner. One of them, James, squeezes beside her on the couch. “You smell nice,” he says and eyes her from head to toe, and starts talking to his friends before she has a chance to introduce herself.
James plays something called
lacrosse,
a bizarre sport. He is tall like Reza, rough-chinned and athletic. He wears his sandy brown hair long and shaggy, has freckles on his pinkish tan arms and short blond hairs that run from his wrist to his elbow. He is a big American, hard to overlook.
“Ooooh ho ho, Saba jan,” says Khanom Mansoori. “You’ll have to keep your blond-man fantasies in check now that you’re married . . . but no harm in a little storytelling. I met a blond man too once. A Dutch man with yellow hair like wheat.”
Mahtab eyes his white polo shirt, his khaki pants. She stares at the golden fuzz on his arms. She is attracted to his whiteness, to his New England banality. It’s promising. Not at all threatening. Nothing bad ever comes from a man with white baby fuzz on his forearms. She has never seen white baby fuzz raised up over a woman’s head, can’t imagine it surviving in a rice field. She considers this and acknowledges it, is aware of it. She decides it’s a good first criterion— as good as any. She’s always known that she would never be with a Persian man. She would sooner die a virgin.
“Saba, why say such a horrible thing?”
Don’t blame me. These are Mahtab’s words. For as long as she lives, Mahtab will never welcome a Persian man into her bed. But who knows, maybe she will change her mind. American girls are allowed that and so much more.
“Do you want to come out with us?” James asks Mahtab. Simone raises an eyebrow at one of the boys. Mahtab sits on the edge of the couch, waiting for the eyebrow to shoot off her head and fly away. James makes a pleading face and mouths
Please?
and Mahtab finds that her feet are tapping out an eager rhythm of their own—what a beautiful surprise. Oh, how I love telling you about my sister’s elation, her happiest moments.
“Why not?” she mutters—an American way of saying
God, yes!
— a reverse
tarof
.
Two weeks pass and Mahtab has a boyfriend. James has phoned every day since the night at the Fox, when he walked with her all the way to the club, stayed with her the entire evening, brought her drinks, even took her out for food when she got hungry in the early morning. He commented on her careful walk, the color of her hair, her pretty feet. Once he touched her neck with his rough lacrosse hands and told her she was very soft, even for a girl. “A girl like you should never set foot in a gym,” he said. “It would ruin you.” The shy, uncertain compliment was an unexpected delight that made her unconsciously caress her own neck now and then for the rest of the day.
“Where are you from?” he asked one day early in their cautious romance.
“California,” she said.
“And ‘May,’ that’s just a nickname, right?” he said. “You don’t look like a May.”
“No? Okay, June then. My name is June.” James laughed, so she told him the story of her mother sending her a birthday cake to Harvard.
Happy Birthday, Mahtab Joon,
the frosting read. And the delivery boy, not realizing that
joon
meant ‘dear,’ told her she had a cake from a person called Joon.
Mahtab Joon
. May June.
They played a game where he tried to guess her country, and even her city. Then he kissed her in the street and she thought of how easy it was. She made careful note of his warm, tomatoey breath, his thin lower lip, and the way he kept his hands away from the parts of her she knew he was desperate to touch.
“Saba jan,” says Khanom Mansoori, “ how do you know about such things? Maybe we should talk about what comes after a wedding . . . or better yet, let us call Khanom Omidi! She will tell you stories that will make you grow horns from shock, though, from what I hear, no man ever complained with that one. Yes, you’ll need to learn these things now that you’re married.”
What’s the matter? Do you think I know nothing? I don’t believe people need lessons the way you think they do. Take Mahtab, for instance. She wonders how she understands this or that. Who taught her what to do with James at such a time? I don’t have to experience it myself, Khanom Mansoori. I can pretend. God knows, when my time with the old man comes, I will be shutting off every such instinct, imagining myself in another place, another time. I have already prepared the story I will play in my mind and the song that will transport me there. But I don’t need lessons. I know a lot of things. I have read a thousand books, a sea of magazines, and I watch American television.
Two weeks later Mahtab sits in a café, waiting for James to bring her coffee. She wonders what people in Cheshmeh would think of
that
: a preppy American boy bringing her coffee. She watches him stop by the sugar station, pouring exactly the right amount of milk and brown sugar into her drink. The elation rises and pops inside her chest, like a soap bubble from a television ad, clearing out so much of the bitter heaps that are lodged there. She has the feeling that she is important now, because someone like James knows how to make her coffee, knows what she likes for breakfast and that she eats with spoons instead of forks, that she is never full until she’s had rice. These small corners of James’s mental space are tangible places that she owns and occupies; they somehow make her more real. Rare now are the moments when she imagines herself hanging on the edge of every scene, pulling and struggling to stay put while someone far away holds her by a taut rope. You see, like any immigrant who has been offered the best of a new world, Mahtab is costantly afraid that it will be taken away. It is how I too would feel—that fear of doing something wrong, of losing it all. She has always harbored the dread that at any moment the person holding the rope will give it a good yank and pull her away. But now, when she is with James, her very own pale prince, she sometimes forgets about that invisible thread pulling her toward her other self.
“My Saba, those parts make me very sad.”
Don’t be sad. I have made my bed. I will be happy even if it was a mistake. What are the chances, after all, that a perfect man like James will ever find me here? I cannot have what Mahtab has. But who knows, Khanom Mansoori, it
is
possible that Mahtab will abandon him for other things. Can you imagine it? An Iranian girl rejecting such a man when I was forced to accept one who is so much less? I like the idea . . . but let us see.
Mahtab often wonders what more James will do for her. She asks him for little things, small favors she doesn’t really need. He brings her ice cream on his way to her room. He Super Glues her broken high heels. Each time, that confident sensation grows and becomes more addictive. Sometimes she thinks it’s a little like that day she got into Harvard. It gives her a feeling of accomplishment.
Harvard wouldn’t take just any girl. James wouldn’t pick up just any girl’s dry cleaning
. Until now, Mahtab has felt out of place at Harvard, as if someone left the windows open in the admissions office and some benevolent wind picked up her application from the trash and placed it onto the “yes” pile. But James’s gestures do more to eradicate such thoughts than all the good grades from Baba Harvard. See what power I have over this man who isn’t ordinary at all—who, in fact, may rule the world one day? See what power I carry in my small body, in my blood, and therefore in the blood of my sister? Because fate, and every personal triumph and talent, is not a matter of location but is carried in the veins.
Over coffee, James holds her hand and tells her that his mother has come to visit. He invites Mahtab to meet her. But James knows nothing about Iranian manners. He insults her by giving her a gift— a leather handbag to carry to the meeting, one that looks exactly like the one Mahtab already owns. At first she is confused. “It’s just like mine.”