Digging to America (18 page)

Susan and Jin-Ho spent the afternoon building Moosh a house out of a cardboard carton. They begged a bath mat from Maryam to pad the floor, and they scrawled windows on the walls with a felt-tip marker. For a bed they lined a shoe box with one of Maryam's scarves, although she warned them that most likely Moosh would refuse to use it. Cats are too willful to sleep where you tell them to, she said. Jin-Ho said, Okay, the shoe box can be his bureau, then, but Susan who was fairly willful herself said, No! It's his bed! I want it to be his bed!

Well, I guess it won't hurt to try, Maryam told her.

And we're going to have a cupola, too.

Maryam laughed and went back to her cooking.

Around six o'clock, Ziba called to let her know they were more or less moved in. At least the furniture's in place, she said. So Maryam wrapped the rice pot in a towel and rounded up the girls and put them in the car. When she dropped Jin-Ho off at the Donaldsons', Bitsy came out with a Styrofoam cooler of food for Sami and Ziba. This can be for tomorrow, she said, and then I thought the day after tomorrow I'd invite them for supper at our house. Would you like to join us, Maryam? I could ask Dad to come too.

Oh, thank you, but I have plans, Maryam said. She didn't want Sami and Ziba to think she was overly involved in their lives.

On the way to the new house, she tried to orient Susan. See, when you're old enough to walk home from Jin-Ho's on your own you would pass this big house with the trellis, and then you would cross the street looking both ways first, remember and then at this next street you would turn right, at the yard with the bird feeder in it ...

Susan listened in silence, studying each landmark as if committing it to memory. She had the most beautiful posture. She sat in her seat like a miniature queen, perfectly composed.

Ziba met them at the door in one of Sami's old shirts. Her face was shiny with sweat and there was a smudge on one cheekbone. Come in! she told them. Welcome to your new home, Susiejune! She swooped Susan up in her arms and showed her the living room. See how nice it looks? Do you like it? See where we put your rocking horse? Maryam, holding the rice pot, took a right instead of a left and headed toward the kitchen. She had planned to send Sami out to her car for Bitsy's cooler, but he was nowhere to be seen and Ziba was carrying Susan up the stairs now, chattering in a rather anxious way about how pretty Susan's new bedroom was; so Maryam went back for the cooler herself. She saw when she unpacked it that Bitsy had supplied not just a casserole of some sor
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and a container of salad, but also a dessert a homemade pie. She set the pie on the table next to her pot. The pot contained Sami's favorite dish: rice with fish and mixed greens, a meal complete in itself; but now she wished she'd provided something on the side.

Ziba came into the kitchen, holding Susan by the hand, and said, Will you stay and eat with us?

Maryam had assumed all along that she would stay, but the fact that the question had been asked made her doubtful, suddenly. She said, Oh, well, I know you must have work to do.

You're more than welcome, Ziba said, not denying that she had work.

So Maryam declined again and took her leave.

Slipping back into her car, waving at Ziba and Susan, who stood watching from the porch, she wondered if she had done the wrong thing. Should she have offered to help, to put the meal on the table and share it with them and clean up afterward? Or was Ziba glad to see the last of her? It was so hard to tell. She could understand, sometimes, why Sami lost his patience with these elaborate old-country courtesies that concealed everybody's true feelings.

She cast a final glance at the two on the porch and then pulled away from the curb, feeling unsettled and dissatisfied.

The new house changed their lives, and only for the better. Susan could join in the neighbor children's outdoor games no more complicated playdate arrangements. It was a ten-minute drive to her preschool, and less than that to the grocery store, and just a short walk to the Donaldsons'. When school let out for the summer and Maryam resumed her Tuesday-Thursday babysitting schedule, she sat on Sami and Ziba's front porch contentedly hulling strawberries while Susan rode her tricycle, or she puttered with Susa
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and Jin-Ho in the tiny backyard garden they had planted. The first slim carrots were ready in late June, and both girls were beside themselves. They ate them raw for lunch with a dill-and-yogurt dip. Even Susan, who usually spurned all vegetables, polished off three.

Maryam worked at Julia Jessup just one day a week in the summer. She paid a few bills, saw to correspondence, made a couple of telephone calls to order supplies or arrange for routine maintenance. Often the only other person in the building was the janitor, pushing his wide broom down halls that were already gleaming. The school's director, Mrs. Barber, spent her summers in Maine, but she would phone from time to time and ask how things were going. Oh, fine, Maryam would tell her. The men are here to resurface that place underneath the jungle gym, remember? And the Windham twins' father has been transferred to Atlanta, so I've written to the next two families on the waiting list. She was aware of sounding busier than she really was, as if trying to demonstrate that she was earning her pay.

Even during the school year this was an undemanding job, carried out at a measured pace among people long familiar to her. She worked in a kind of trance, sitting at an immaculate desk in the center of the so-called goldfish bowl that she shared with Mrs. Barber and Mrs. Simms, the assistant director. It soothed her, somehow, to perform the most trivial tasks to perfection. At the end of every day she emptied her computer's recycling bin, and she defragmented her hard drive exactly once a month.

In July she went to Vermont to visit her double first cousin, a daughter of an uncle on her father's side and an aunt on her mother's side. Farah was several years younger than Maryam, and different from her in almost every way. Living in an area wher
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everyone else was a native, married to an ex-hippie she had met while she was studying in Paris, she had chosen to become exaggeratedly Iranian. She met Maryam's plane in an outfit so exotic that even in Tehran, people would have gawked: a maroon satin tunic over tight white leggings, curly-toed sequined slippers straight from a Persian miniature, and a bib of golden chains that all but covered her plump bosom.

Maryam jon! Maryam jon! she shrieked, jumping up and down. Everyone else at the gate pale and drab by comparison
turned to stare at her. Salaam, Mari june! she cried. For a moment Maryam wanted to pretend she had nothing to do with this woman, but then when they were face-to-face she saw Farah's Karimzadeh eyes, long and narrow with pointed corners, and the Karimzadeh nose as straight as a pin. Unlike Maryam, Farah was letting her hair go gray, and the gray hairs frizzed and corkscrewed up from the black just as their grandmother's used to.

During the drive from the airport (in a dusty beige Chevrolet with a back seat full of machine parts), Farah spoke Farsi in such a rush that it seemed to have been bottled up inside her. She relayed all the news from home, quoting telephone conversations not just word for word but in the appropriate voices their cousin Sholeh's thin whine, their second cousin Kaveh's bullish bellow. Farah kept in much closer touch with the family than Maryam did. Oh, a dozen times a week, she said, one person or another will be wearing me out with complaints, and at my expense, too. Which implied it was she who placed the calls, but why, if she found them so tedious? Some form of survivor guilt, perhaps. They go on and on about the difficulties of current conditions their entertainment so limited, almost no films allowed, almost no music, no liquor except what the smugglers deliver in bleach jugs after dark. They imagine my own life is sheer pleasure. They have no idea how hard it is here!

To look at her, encased in satin and glittering with gold, their relatives might have laughed, but Maryam knew what she meant. It was hard, harder than the people back home could possibly imagine, and sometimes she wondered how they both had lasted this long in a country where everything happened so fast and everybody else knew all the rules without asking.

My sister reads off lists of items she wants me to send, Farah said. Athletic shoes and cosmetics and bottles of vitamin pills. There are vitamins in Iran! Perfectly good ones, but she believes that the vitamins in America are more powerful. I sent her a bottle of Vigor-Vytes and the first pill she took, she told me, 'Already I feel so much younger! I have so much more energy!'

Uttering the phrase Vigor-Vytes led Farah to change over to English, probably without meaning to. It was a phenomenon Maryam had often observed among Iranians. They'd be rattling along in Farsi and then some word borrowed from America, generally something technical like television or computer, would flip a switch in their brains and they would continue in English until a Farsi word flipped the switch back again.

I suppose you have less of that because your brothers can ask their children to send things, Farah was saying. Or Parviz can, at least, with his two up there in Vancouver where all the stores are excellent. (This last sentence flipped back and forth lickety-split, triggered first by Parviz and then by Vancouver.) And besides, you're so much stronger. You would just say no. I should be stronger. I am a, how you say, floormat.

Doormat, Maryam said.

Doormat. I am a push-off.

Maryam held her tongue.

They had been traveling through the New England countryside at a speed that was surely illegal, passing small, tidy farms that could have lined the tracks of a toy train set. Now they swerve
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onto a gravel road, with a clanking of metal from the back seat. A few minutes later they parked in the yard of the Jeffreys' gray clapboard house. Oh, good, Farah said. William's home.

He was sitting on the front porch steps a wiry man in faded jeans. When he saw the car he rose and ambled over, grinning. Salaam aleikum, he said as Maryam stepped forth, and then, in English, It's good to see you.

It's good to see you, she told him, pressing her cheek to his.

William was one of those men who had never quite managed to leave their adolescence behind, in her opinion. His jeans were patched with bits of the American flag, and he wore a wisp of a goatee and a single long braid which, now that he was bald on top, made it seem that his hair had somehow slipped several inches backward on his head. His enthusiasm for all things Iranian struck her as adolescent, too. Guess what! he told her now. I've made fesenjan for dinner tonight in your honor.

Exactly what I'm in the mood for, she said.

William was in full charge of the cooking and the housework. He was also the breadwinner; he taught creative writing at the local college. Maryam couldn't imagine what Farah did with her time. They had no children hadn't wanted them, evidently and she had never held a job. When she led Maryam upstairs to the guest room she said, Now, I think the bed's made up ... oh, yes, good. The wildflowers on the bureau, jammed clumsily into a cruet, were probably William's doing as well.

Once Maryam had unpacked they met for cocktails in the parlor, which had the hollow, barnlike feel of a bare-bones New England farmhouse but was decorated with Persian rugs and Isfahani enamelware and jewel-like paisley fabrics. William talked about his newest invention: he was working on an executive toy that he felt sure would make them rich. It's kind of on the order of a lava lamp, he said. You remember those. Only this is much classier-looking. H
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brought it out to show her: an hourglass shape, in clear plastic, filled with a viscous liquid. See, he said, inverting it, how the liquid sort of squiggles down, spirals clockwise awhile and then changes to counterclockwise, builds up on the surface in a pyramid shape and then all at once decides to flatten ... Doesn't it just grab you?

Maryam nodded. She did find it oddly mesmerizing.

What gave me the idea was, we were coming to the end of a bottle of McGleam shampoo and so I turned it upside down over a new bottle; you know how you do. Propped it just so in order to get the last few drops out. And I was watching the drip and suddenly I thought, Man! This could be some, like, Zen-like thing that would center people and focus them. We could market it as a device to lower people's blood pressure! So I worked out this design; figured out the most attractive shape ... only I haven't got the liquid quite right. I mean, it has to be the proper consistency. Thick like McGleam but not too thick, of course, and clear like McGleam because I believe clear is more calmin
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Why can't you just use McGleam? Maryam asked.

Oh. Use McGleam.

Wouldn't that be the obvious solution?

But ... shampoo? Besides, McGleam's about the most expensive brand in the drugstore. He gazed fondly at Farah. Nothing but the best for Farah -june, he said.

Farah gave him a languid wave and told Maryam, What can I say? I have that tanglesome Karimzadeh hair.

Over dinner that evening (a real Iranian meal from start to finish, everything authentic), Farah reminisced about their shared childhood. She had a sunnier vision of the past than Maryam did. All her memories seemed to involve hilarious parties, or wagon rides at the family's summer place in Meigun, or daylong picnics with every single relative on both sides in attendance. Where were the quarrels an
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the schisms, the uncle who took opium and the uncle who embezzled, the aunts' endless, bitter competition for their father's grudging notice? Did Farah not remember the cousin who killed herself when they forbade her to go to medical school, or the cousin who was refused permission to marry the boy she loved? Oh, those were happy, happy times, Farah sighed, and William sighed too and shook his head as if he had been there himself. He loved to hear talk about Iran. He would prompt Farah if she skipped a detail. And the coins! he said. Remember them? The brand-new gold coins that they used to give you children every New Year's? Maryam found this presumptuous of him, although she knew she should feel flattered that he was so interested in their culture.