A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (35 page)

Nineteen eighty was the year Reza kissed Ponneh in an alley behind the Hafezi house. The twins saw it. Everyone did. It was Suri Wednesday, celebrated all over Iran on the Tuesday night before the start of spring
.
On this night people build big bonfires and jump over them in the old Zoroastrian way. They chant to the fire, “Your red to me, my yellow to you,” and so they pour their illness and frailty into the flames, and take from it strength, passion, and renewal. It is well known that during this ceremony, charms and magic spells are extra effective. That night, with all the celebration, my Reza must have thought that no one would notice him kissing Ponneh over and over behind the house. But we saw.

For the rest of the time, those cruel sisters refused to play with Ponneh. They took blankets and pillows outside under a mosquito net and, though it was cold, stayed up talking evil about her. Did Reza love her? Did she love him? What would this mean for them (selfish girls), for Saba’s marriage to Reza, for Mahtab’s friendship with Ponneh?

“She didn’t jump over the fire,” said Mahtab. “Maybe she’ll get sick.”
“Maman says that’s all rubbish,” responded Saba. “Stop believing every superstition people say.”
“Stop believing everything Maman says,” Mahtab shot back. “I think you should just find someone else. Reza’s not worth it.”
On the day of Norooz, the first day of the New Year, all the families were gathered for a party at the Hafezi house. A still-depressed Bahareh was wandering around with her new dress and the two girls both in new dresses with their hair back in fancy clips. Ponneh’s family didn’t have money for new clothes. No one else did. But that didn’t matter to the Hafezis with their fancy
bazi
. And if you ask me, it didn’t matter for Ponneh either. She had the so-so-white face, and the extrared lips, and eyes that every week someone compared to a different kind of nut. “Oh, those almond eyes are made for early marriage.” “No, no. They are like hazelnuts, so round.”
During the party, the girls spied on Reza and Ponneh to see if the kiss was just a one-time thing or if they were engaged. And, yes, my Reza did play with Ponneh that day. And here’s the part where Saba and Mahtab got the best of me. They heard Ponneh complain of a tomato spot on the rim of her dress, and when Reza took a red marker and put matching spots all over the hem of the skirt so that people would think it was a pattern, the jealous little girls told on him. And I dragged him away and scolded him for ruining the poor girl’s best dress. If I had only known what he was trying to do . . . such a good heart. Later he played with the Hafezi girls too, because Reza is a caring boy. It was the same game all the boys liked to play: trying to tell them apart, closing their eyes and asking them to switch places.
I spied him once more with Ponneh. They were sitting across from each other in the yard, feet touching, so that the space between them was a diamond made of skinned knees and marker-stained skirts tucked under downy thighs. And when she asked him to tell her a story, he did, and he put her name in all the best parts. Then he played football until Mahtab pretended to faint and he came running to play rescue because my Reza has a fascination with rescuing people. The boys built a pretend hospital out of throw pillows and Reza played the doctor and brought her back to life. Suddenly Saba called out that she was dying and needed all the attention, and Reza was conquered for the afternoon by twin witches and their thousand jinns.

hat is Mahtab doing now? Is she married? Is she dreaming about being a mother? Probably not. Most likely she is too busy with her career. The bleeding has returned. On her free days Saba visits the university in Rasht where a friend of her father’s, a professor, allows her to browse his medical books and journals full of jargon—phrases that she looks up in his frayed, pencil-marked Latin, English, and Farsi dictionaries. He doesn’t ask her what she’s researching. He offers tea and closes the door behind him so she can be alone. She sits on the floor and reads about pregnancy and unscheduled blood, obscure disorders and medical opinions. She reads other women’s stories in journals. After a while, their collective suffering takes its toll and she moves on.

She spends much time thinking about her legacy. What if she never has one?
They live in Abbas’s house. It is the first time Reza has slept in a Western bed. He fits it nicely, she thinks each time she wakes up and stretches herself across him as she once dreamed of doing. When he opens his eyes, smiling with the first realization of where he now lives, she feels happy to be able to give him so much—something of her own, as in childhood days when she offered him her music tapes.
No,
she thinks.
Money will never come between us. It never has
.
In the mornings Reza brings tea for them and he studies his farming textbooks while she listens to her Walkman and reads or writes. They sit in bed for hours while Reza studies for the college exams he should have taken years ago and only now has the means to pursue. He no longer does odd jobs, but he still sells his mother’s handiworks to please her. If accepted, he will study agricultural engineering at Gilan University in Rasht. He will become a man like Saba’s father, and he will do this because of Saba. How wonderful it feels. Sometimes in her daydreams of Mahtab and James and Cameron, she wonders if her sister knows this feeling of helping someone so beloved.
Mahtab will never feel this small pleasure because the men around her can make their own way. But Mahtab will also never have to wonder how it might suit her to be a journalist darting around an office in a pencil skirt, collecting passport stamps, boarding planes to shadowy places to find stories that interest Western readers.
On most days she visits the bathroom before Reza wakes. Some days the bleeding won’t stop. It’s become more erratic since she started sleeping with Reza, who frets about it and brings her herbal remedies and concoctions he claims should be inserted inside her. He begs her to see a doctor, but she is afraid. Sometimes she snaps at him, tells him she will go when she’s ready. He gives annoyed shrugs and moves on. It is the first bud of a deep gloom that he hides from her the way newlyweds do.
“Saba, come and help clean the fish.” Khanom Basir’s voice floats in from the kitchen. She lives with them now, in Abbas’s old room, because Saba cannot stand to sleep there. Allowing her mother-in-law to live here has been part of the slow process of winning back Khanom Basir’s love by relinquishing the position of matriarch in all but name. Saba thinks it’s going well. She likes the way Reza worships her generosity with his kind eyes and never says anything to invite the lingering memory of Abbas’s death here. His thankfulness is a source of contentment in their young marriage.
Saba finds her mother-in-law bent over two buckets full of Caspian bream. “Caught an hour ago,” she says, delighted. “Some are still bouncing around in there.” She picks up each shiny gray fish by its tail and chops off its head with a swift motion of her wood-handled chopping knife. She wraps them in paper from a pile near the sink and throws them in a clean bucket. “For the freezer.” She points with her chin and continues her work. “I already started. Young brides should have rest.”
Each time Khanom Basir utters something remotely kind, Saba’s desire to find her own mother in America returns with a new vigor. Now that she is older, twice married with her own home and family, she considers all the mothers she has been offered, each good for a handful of things: Khanom Basir for household tricks, Khanom Mansoori for mischief, Dr. Zohreh for educated advice, Khanom Omidi for wisdom. Together they have failed to replace her mother, who was good at none of these things.
Khanom Basir has mellowed since the wedding. She is often confused, and each time she has a meltdown, Saba’s anger and hurt are dulled by the nascent suspicion that her mother-in-law may be losing her grip on reason, that she might be legitimately ill.
Sometimes when the older woman thinks she is alone, Saba catches her sobbing into her tea. “Oh, blessed Mohammed. I don’t know . . . I don’t even know anymore.” Sometimes she brings her hands down on her own head in the unconscious way people do when trapped under falling debris, and Saba thinks that maybe Khanom Basir really doesn’t know what to do, or what is right, or even true.
When she sees Saba, she usually apologizes and shuffles off. She mutters, “I’m very tired, I think,” and leaves Saba to ponder this odd new emptiness all around.
Now Saba watches her wrap fish with discarded papers and recognizes a page from an old travel guide. “Don’t use that one,” she says, and takes it from her mother-in-law.
“Why?” asks Khanom Basir. She reaches for another sheet in the pile.
“It’s California,” says Saba. “Who knows, we might want to go one day.”
If Khanom Basir knew about her former plans for America . . . Saba can only imagine what she would do. How she would try to sabotage her—the overly educated girl with her fancy
bazi
who one day might run off to a life of Western debauchery like her mother has done. Saba can almost hear her mother-in-law making one of her epic declarations:
I will keep her where she belongs and protect my name even if it causes me to lose every last fingernail and all my hairs go gray and I am bald with grief!
But Reza’s mother only laughs, mumbles, “Crazy
bazi
,” and continues with her work.

Her doctor’s office in Rasht has not changed in the past ten years. Green shag carpet. Bright red plastic swivel chairs that squeak at the slightest touch. Cheap wood paneling in an unnatural shade of toffee curling near the floor and ceiling. Bulky fluorescent lamps that are too dark and too harsh at the same time. A rotary phone next to a relatively new IBM computer that sits tentatively at the edge of a desk, trying to belong.

“Khanom Hafezi,” the stout nurse in a white manteau and black headscarf calls. It takes Saba a moment to realize that her name has been called. She follows the nurse into a small room with a flat bed covered in sterile-looking white sheets. She has been in this room before. In fact, she has been called back twice in the past two weeks, because her doctor, a very young woman, probably a recent graduate, with Trotsky glasses and a slight mustache, likes to double-check “every small thing.” These are the doctor’s own words, delivered in a voice that belies her lack of enthusiasm for the profession.

In Iran, medicine is the most respectable career choice. If Saba had gone to college, she might have become a doctor, but she was saving herself for American journalism. Maybe she still is.
My path and yours in this world are so long,
says a memorable line from the old song “Sultan of Hearts.”

When the doctor enters, Saba notices that her mustache is gone.
She must be engaged now,
Saba thinks,
or in love
. Then she notices the doctor’s nervous expression and roaming eyes and her thoughts turn to her own health.

“Should I change into a gown?” Saba asks.
“No need,” says the doctor. “But thank you. Very kind.”
What strange politeness,
Saba thinks, and begins to worry. Like the monstrous love child of
tarof
and
maastmali
. A sort of hybrid fake generosity and fake innocence that has no name and appears when people use over-the-top manners to mask their discomfort at knowing something they shouldn’t.

“I have your results. I called you only so we can talk.” She rubs the reddish spot where her mustache used to be. Then suddenly her eyes stop roaming and fix on Saba and she blurts out in what sounds like one long word: “What have you done to yourself ?”

Her tone and eyes are accusing, the way only the young can be. She must be twenty-five at the most, only a few years older than Saba, who sometimes feels a hundred. She fixes the doctor with what she hopes is an authoritative stare
.

The young doctor consults her notes, flips a page in her chart. “You said last time that your cycle is irregular, sometimes painful.” Saba nods. The doctor scowls again, and when Saba doesn’t flinch, she adjusts her white coat and looks away. “Do you ever bleed outside your cycle?”

Saba tries not to snap. “How would I know that, if my cycle is irregular?” She breathes out. “Yes, yes, I do.” She begins to add,
I had an accident once,
but doesn’t.

The doctor clears her throat and launches into one-breath attack. “Have you ever tried an abortion, Khanom?”
“Excuse me?” Saba almost laughs. She reaches for her neck, feels an old tickle coming back out from deep hiding. She tries to look natural as she massages her throat.
“An abortion. Have you tried removing a child illegally?”
“Is there a legal way? No, no. I’m trying to get pregnant. You know that.”
Saba shakes her head and exhales, fighting back embarrassing tears. She already knows what’s coming; has always known it, every morning when she checked her body for blood, and each time she and Reza tried to make a baby—a child that would be her new Mahtab, her tie to Iran, her reason to stay. Now the black-clad women are back, hovering above her and in the shadows cast by the equipment across the doctor’s floor and walls.
“Well, Khanom,” the young doctor says, “the chances of a baby aren’t very good. You have an infection that has gone undetected for a long time. It can be cleared up with antibiotics so you might conceive, but your uterus is very damaged, full of scars. I don’t think it will hold a pregnancy for very long, even with surgery.”
Saba begins to drift. She stops listening, allows the dark figures to carry her to places she hasn’t dared to go in many months, back to the spring day almost two years ago, struggling on the bed, the crude instruments, the weeks of bleeding followed by short respites. Then that day in the shack when Reza first saw the blood—that was the day she began to hope for a baby, despite all the signs, because she wanted so badly to stay. Something inside rages. Floating beside her, the young doctor continues to ask questions. How heavy is the bleeding? How often? Does she have fevers? Is she certain that she has never attempted an abortion? What has she been doing? Has she slept with dirty men? Maybe some more testing is in order, though, to be honest, maybe not.
“I’m putting you on birth control,” she says. “And Khanom Hafezi, you should never stop taking these.”
“Why?” asks Saba. Now she sounds young and naive, and the doctor takes her hand. She has the faintest remains of baby-pink polish on her thumb and Saba wonders about this woman’s life away from the office. Though, if she thinks hard enough, Saba already knows. The young doctor is here because she has no choice. A brilliant female student can get away with only so much excellence before she gets coerced into becoming an ob-gyn. This girl looks more like a research scientist, or a business owner, or a frustrated poet.
“Because, Khanom,” says the doctor, her voice soft like a teenager’s, “you don’t want to bring dead babies into the world. It isn’t right.”