Digging to America (21 page)

Ziba was discussing the guest list now. I wish we had more guest
s
from our side, she said. I wish Sami had brothers and sisters. Ther
e
are always so many Donaldsons! Could you invite Farah, maybe? Oh, Maryam said, well . . . And she let her voice trail away. The thing was, Farah would probably accept. And Willia
m
would come with her, as long as Mercury was not retrograde or some such New Age prohibition. They would stay with Maryam for a week or more and she would have to involve herself in their many group activities. Farah got along famously with the Hakimis. The last time she was in Baltimore Maryam had had to ferry her to Washington for three separate dinner parties, in addition to giving a dinner herself to pay everybody back.

It was true that she was unsocial.

She went home that afternoon happy to be on her own, grateful for the quietness and neatness of her life. For supper she had a glass of red wine and a slice of cheddar cheese. She watched a television program on the habits of the grizzly bear.

In the middle of the program, Dave Dickinson phoned. He said, I was thinking about this weekend. Could I offer you a ride to the party?

Thank you, bu
t
It seems silly to take two cars.

But I'll have to be there early, she said, helping with the preparations.

Couldn't I help too?

No, I don't believe you could, she said. Besides, you live right there in the neighborhood. It makes no sense for you to drive over here.

He said, I guess I was just thinking it would be nice to have your company.

Thanks anyway, she said.

There was a silence.

Goodbye now! she said.

She hung up.

The bear shambling through the woods had a matted, rough coat that made her sad, and she pressed the off button on the remote control.

The Chinese orphan was ready at last. (Like a muffin, Dave pictured when he heard.) Brad and Bitsy packed baby clothes in three different sizes, gift toys for the orphanage, money in red gift envelopes, disposable diapers, nursing bottles, powdered formula, strained prunes and peaches, zinc ointment, scabies medication, baby Tylenol, a thermometer, antibiotics for both infants and grownups, granola bars, trail mix, vitamin pills, water purification tablets, melatonin, compression kneesocks, electrical adaptors, a dental emergency kit, and pollution-filtering facial masks. Dave was the one who drove them to the airport, and he had some difficulty fitting everything into his car trunk.

He stayed with Jin-Ho at her house rather than his, because her parents felt three weeks was too long for a not-quite-five-year-old to be uprooted from her home. He slept in the master bedroom
an intrusive-feeling arrangement, but Bitsy had insisted. (It was closest to Jin-Ho's room.) Every morning when he awoke, the first thing he saw was a photograph of Brad and Bitsy hugging on
a
beach somewhere. The second thing was Bitsy's earring tree, hung with big, crude, handcrafted disks of copper and wood and clay.

It was early February, so Jin-Ho had preschool every weekday morning. That was a help. And most evenings they were invited to supper at Mac's or Abe's house, or the Yazdans', or a neighbor's. But the rest of the time it was just the two of them, Dave and Jin-Ho on their own. He told himself that now they could really get to know each other. How many grandfathers were given such a chance? And he did enjoy her company. She was a lively, inquisitive child, full of chatter, fond of board games, crazy about any kind of music. But he never completely lost an underlying sense of nervousness. She wasn't really his, after all. What if something happened? When she went outdoors to play he found himself checking through the window for her every couple of minutes. When they crossed even the narrow, untrafficked street she lived on he made her take his hand in spite of her objections. My mom lets me cross without holding on, she said, as long as she's beside me.

Well, I'm not your mom. I'm a worrywart. Humor me, Jin-Ho.

Sometimes in the evening she would grow the least bit tremulous, once or twice even tearing up. What do you think they're doing now? she would ask. Or, How many more days till they're back? And occasionally she showed some impatience with his unBitsy-like ways. He didn't brush her hair quite right; he didn't cut her toast right. For the most part, though, she adapted very well. She knew her parents would be bringing her a sister something she very much wanted. She talked about how she planned to feed Xiu-Mei her bottle and push Xiu-Mei in her stroller. Xiu-Mei was pronounced something like Shao-may, to Dave's imperfect ear. (He'd first heard it as Charmaine.) He found the sound a bit harsh, but Jin-Ho was more accepting. It was me and Xiu-Mei this, me and Xiu-Mei that. Me and Xiu-Mei are going to share the same room as soon as she sleeps through the night, she said.

What if she gets into your toys? Won't that bother you? he asked.

She can play with my toys all she likes! And I'm going to teach her the alphabet.

You'll be the perfect big sister, he said.

Jin-Ho beamed, two little notches of satisfaction bracketing her mouth.

It amazed him that she had no definite bedtime no schedule whatsoever, almost. Modern life was so amorphous. He thought of the leashes people walked their dogs with nowadays: huge spools of some sort that played out to allow the dogs to run as far ahead as they liked. Then he chided himself for being an old stick-in-the-mud. He rubbed his eyes as they sat at an endless game of Candy-land. Aren't you sleepy, Jin-Ho? She didn't even deign to answer; just efficiently skated her gingerbread man four spaces ahead.

While she was in preschool each day he'd go home and check on his house, pick up his mail, collect his telephone messages. He missed his normal routine. The trouble with staying at somebody else's place was that you couldn't putter; you couldn't fuss and tinker. Although he did his best. He bled all of Brad and Bitsy's radiators and he planed the edge of a door that was sticking. He brought some neat's-foot oil from home and spent an evening rubbing it into the scarred leather knapsack that Bitsy used for trips to the farmers' market. What's that? Jin-Ho asked him, leaning on his arm, giving off the licorice smell of modeling clay.

It's neat's-foot oil. It's good for leather.

What's a neat's foot?

You don't know about neats? Ah, he said. Well, now. There's the shy brown neat, and the bold brown neat. This particular oil comes from . . . He picked up the can and squinted at it, holding it at arm's length, . . . comes from the shy brown neat.

It was the kind of tale he used to tell his own children; he wa
s
famous for it. They would take on a look of suppressed glee and prod him to go further. But Jin-Ho knitted her brows and said, Did they kill the shy brown neat?

Oh, no. They just squeezed its feet. Neats' feet are very oily, you see.

Does the squeezing hurt?

No, no, no. In fact the neats are grateful, because otherwise they would slip and slide all over the place. That's why they don't make good house pets. Their feet would ruin the rugs.

Her expression remained troubled. She stared at him in silence. He was sorry now that he'd started this, but he didn't know how to get out of it. Maybe she was too young to know when someone was pulling her leg. Maybe she lacked a sense of humor. Or maybe
this was it, really they needed an audience. Another grownup, whose snort would give away the joke. In the old days, that had been Connie. Connie would scold him good-naturedly: Honestly, Dave. You're terrible. And she would tell the children, Don't you believe a word of it.

He set down the can of neat's-foot oil. He wished he could fall into bed now.

Maryam telephoned to invite the two of them to supper. I'll ask Sami and Ziba too, she said, so Jin-Ho will have someone to play with. But of course, her real reason was that the presence of other people would make the occasion less intimate. He could read her like a book.

She did not have the slightest romantic interest in him. He had come to accept the fact. It helped a bit to know that she didn't seem to have an interest in anyone. At least he couldn't take it personally.

He had begun to look around lately and wonder who else might be out there. On his latest birthday he had turned sixty-seven. He might have a good twenty years left. Surely he wouldn't be forced to spend all those years on his own, would he?

But other women seemed lackluster when he compared them with Maryam. They didn't have her calm dark gaze or her elegant, expressive hands. They didn't convey her sense of stillness and self-containment, standing alone in a crowd.

This evening she wore a vivid silk scarf tied around her chignon, and it streamed down her back in a fluid way as she turned to lead them into the living room. Sami and Ziba were already there, settled on the couch with the cat curled between them. Susan was upstairs; she clattered halfway down in enormous high-heeled pumps and summoned Jin-Ho to play dress-up with her. Mari -june's piled a whole bunch of clothes in a box for us, she said. Lace things! Satin! Velvet! From her shoulders, a full red skirt billowed out like a cloak.

The girls disappeared upstairs, and Dave took a seat and accepted a glass of wine. The subject at first was the news from Brad and Bitsy. Brad had sent out a group e-mail from China. They had collected Xiu-Mei, he reported, and she was perfect. They were traveling now with the other parents to a city with a U
. S
. consulate, and once they had Xiu-Mei's papers in order they would be on their way home. Everyone had seen this e-mail but Maryam, who didn't own a computer. (Her house was so spare that it took Dave's breath away. No cable or VCR or cordless phone or answering machine; no tangle of electrical wires everywhere you looked.) Sami had printed her a copy, and now she placed a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on her nose and read it aloud.
'Xiu-Mei is tiny and she doesn't sit yet, but every day we put her on our bed and pull her up by the hands just to give her the idea. She thinks it's a game. You should see her laugh.'

Maryam lowered the letter and looked over her glasses at the others. Eleven months old and doesn't sit! she said.

They lie on their backs all day in the orphanage, Dave explained.

But isn't it a natural drive to sit? Don't babies always struggle to be vertical?

Sooner or later they do. It's just that it takes them longer if nobody pays them attention.

Maryam said, Ah, ah, ah a series of brief sighs and took her glasses off.

Dinner, to Dave's surprise, was entirely American: roast chicken and herb-roasted potatoes and sautTed spinach. He felt oddly discouraged by the competence of it. Did she have to do everything well? It pleased him to discover that the potatoes were the slightest bit too crusty on the bottom. Or maybe that was deliberate; these Iranians, with their scorched rice and such ...

Perhaps he'd been wrong in thinking that he didn't take her lack of interest personally.

Jin-Ho attended dinner in a lady's black silk blouse and a pair of needle-heeled ankle boots. Susan wore a T-shirt as big as a dress with FOREIGNER printed across it. Foreigner? Dave said. He assumed the shirt had been Sami's. You used to be a Foreigner fan? he asked him.

Oh, no, that was Mom's.

You were a Foreigner fan? he said to Maryam.

She laughed. It's not the singing group, she told him. It's just the word. Sami had that shirt printed for me as a joke when I got my citizenship. I was so sad to become American, you see.

Sad!

It was hard for me to give up being a citizen of Iran. In fact I kept postponing it. I didn't get my final papers till some time after the Revolution.

Why, I'd have thought you'd be happy, Dave told her.

Oh, well, certainly! I was very happy. But still ... you know. I was sad as well. I went back and forth about it the usual Immigration Tango.

I'm sorry, Dave said. He felt like an oaf. He hadn't even known it was usual. He said, Of course, that must have been difficult. I apologize for sounding like a chauvinist.

Not at all, Maryam told him, and then she turned to Ziba and offered her more spinach.

He always did this with Maryam said something clumsy or dropped something, spilled something. In her presence his hands felt too big and his feet seemed to clomp too noisily.

The topic of citizenship led Sami to his cousin Mahmad. He's a citizen of Canada, he told Dave. This is the son of Mom's brother, Parviz. He lives in Vancouver now with his twin sister. And last month he was invited to speak at a medical meeting in Chicago. Seems he's some kind of expert on liver regeneration. But just before he boarded the plane, he was stopped by the officials. September eleventh, of course. Ever since September eleventh, every Middle Easternulooking person is a suspect. They took him away; they searched him; they asked him a million questions ... Well, end of story: he missed his flight. 'Sorry, sir,' they said. 'You can catch the next flight, if we've finished by then.' All of a sudden, Mahmad starts laughing. 'What?' they ask. He goes on laughing. 'What is it?' they ask. 'I just realized,' he tells them. 'I don't have to go to the States! They're the ones who invited me. I don't have to go, and I don't want to go. I'm heading back home. Goodbye.'