Coming Soon
I’d blocked it out of my mind, but now it’s real. I’ve only lived with Naveed for one month, and his mother has a plane ticket in hand, with no known return date. I’m afraid, but Naveed is sure everything will be fine.
I go back to his photo album. I looked at pictures of his mom before, but I barely noticed what she looked like. Now I find them and study her. In one photo she’s here in the driveway of Naveed’s house. It was after her last open-heart surgery, and this carefree photo must have been taken after her recovery. Goli is sitting in the driver’s seat of Naveed’s blue Honda CRX. She looks a little wind-whipped, like she was out driving with the windows down. Except that she doesn’t drive because of her bad heart, and she’s just having fun posing as if she was just pulling up into the driveway.
I’m relieved to know that she has fun sometimes—that she has a sense of humor. But I don’t know how she really is.
Maybe it is she who drove away the old American girlfriend, or the Iranian almost-fiancée. Maybe those women had a friend just like Melinda, who comforted them by saying, “I’m so sorry—but you know, I was afraid it would end badly.”
Shoes
My writing teacher is a peace and environmental activist, a friend and groupie of the author Carol Bly, which is why we’re using Bly’s text for this class instead of a regular textbook about fiction writing. Our textbook is called Changing the Bully That Rules the World: Reading and Thinking about Ethics.
My teacher knows I feel angry about “The Bully” like she does, especially still angry about Desert Storm, a war that seems to have never ended, although I’ve confessed to her that I’m not an avid war protester. Nor am I a very good environmentalist.
The class actually ended last month, but the teacher had arranged this time for some of us to get together for readings. Some of them are really good and she leans forward, giving encouragement to the writers.
While I read to the class, she chews on her fingernail.
Shoedog
A lotioned, tanned foot slipped into the soft pearl leather pump Megan held open with both hands. When the young customer’s exquisite foot was half in, Megan slid her silver shoehorn between her heel and the back of the shoe. Her foot settled into the shoe and arched a bit. She smiled a spoiled smile, her blushed cheeks glowing with pleasure. Looking at Megan sitting on the stool in front of her, she turned open her thigh and inspected the shoe from the inside. She sighed with pleasure at the pretty shoes. "I'll take them," she said, thigh still open and looking Megan full in the face. In one graceful, ponylike movement she slid her pretty foot out of the pump, swung back her long sandy hair, and produced her Visa card from a small pink clutch. Megan accepted her teasing blue-green gaze with a thump-thump to the shiny Stuart Weitzman shoebox.
My class is seduced by my writing, except for the teacher, who takes her fingernail out of her mouth and asks, “Now how can you use that wonderful talent you have to tell us what we know you really care about? How can you juxtapose this spoiled girl in our materialistic American society with your concerns about how U.S. sanctions are killing six thousand Iraqi children per month?”
This kind of question is the reason I registered for a writing class taught by this highly regarded teacher, so I could deepen the political and moral meaning in my writing.
But at the moment all I can say to her is, “It’s really, at this point in the story… just about the shoes.”
Stillwater
I don’t have much time before Naveed’s mom is here, so I try to do things to prepare for her arrival in between working at the insurance company and applying for better jobs. I want to impress Goli, so I study Persian. I knew a little bit from working at the Dinky Kebab, but mainly just the words that were on the menu and a couple of swears.
I don’t have a textbook, so I’m learning the language by bugging Naveed to translate everything. One Saturday we’re riding in the car, just taking a drive to Stillwater.
I ask for the Persian word for everything I see out the window along the way and write it on the blue lines of my spiral notebook. “What about cow?” I ask.
“Gav,” he says.
“Gawv?” I ask.
“No, Gaav,” he moos. We get out of the car on the main street of Stillwater, strolling leisurely, buying old-fashioned fudge, and checking out the antique stores. We take a short paddleboat ride and make out in our seats when nobody is looking.
I learn another handful of new words on the drive home, and every day after that. By themselves, some of the words are ugly sounding. But when people speaking the language, the words all weave together like a colorful silk shawl with silver bells sewn on. It’s prettier than French. Not more romantic, but more musical.
I imagine I will be able to speak Persian well enough by the time Goli arrives. And her coming is really an opportunity for me to learn a language because Goli’s English is not good—I should have Persian nearly mastered in a few months.
“What does your name mean?” I ask.
“Shushtar is a place in southwestern Iran, so Shushtari just means ‘from Shushtar,’” he says. But he doesn’t know what Shushtar is supposed to mean.
“No, I mean your first name,” I say. “What’s the meaning of Naveed?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Valerie means strong,” I say. “And it’s also the name of an herb. And Kjos means ‘bay’ in Norwegian, not ‘fart.’ I hope you tell your mom that.” He says he’s already warned her about my last name.
One of the things Naveed has told me about his mother is that she walks slowly. I need to be sure not to walk fast with her because she might have heart failure or something.
They didn’t know she had rheumatic fever when she was six, so nobody did anything. They just thought she was sick for a long time and made her stay in bed until she felt better. She was always weak after that. Finally a doctor figured out what had happened and found the damage to her heart. After that, she wasn’t allowed to do much outside of the home, but that didn’t stop her parents from expecting Goli to help raise all the younger kids, as long as she was home anyway.
Naveed tells me more about her, only because I insist. Her name is Goli Kashani, because Iranian women keep their own last names when they marry, which is also why the neighbors Milad Zand and Yasmin Noury don’t have the same last name. Kashani means that they’re “from Kashan,” where her family has been harvesting wild roses and whipping them into various products for hundreds of years. Naveed grew up helping during the rose harvest. All the family members were given sacs to tie around their necks and sent out before dawn to gather the pink blooms—the gol Mohammadi—with the morning dew still on the petals and the fragrance at its peak. They would bring them straight to the family’s factory, where most of the roses were simmered and distilled into rosewater, perfume, and soaps. Other roses were cooked into jams or dried for culinary use.
Goli was the oldest child of five. All the kids went to school, and she helped them all with their homework. Her father’s mother lived with them and also helped raise the kids. She said girls shouldn’t go to college, so Goli didn’t go. Her younger sisters were allowed to go, though. One of them got her business degree and took over the family business, living a life permeated by the scent of roses while Goli was teaching sewing classes and raising the children of the man who would eventually take a second wife. Now the sister reinvests profits and funds family vacations to the island of Kish while Goli spends her share of the family money on doctor bills.
“How do you say sister?” I ask.
“kHa-har,” he says. I’m not good at saying that kh sound, so I repeat it as ‘ha-har,’ like somebody laughing mockingly. I think that my own sisters would like that word.
Goli Joon
We go to pick up Goli at the airport, but she doesn’t get off the plane. There’s a message for us. She got off the plane when it stopped in Detroit, mistaking “Michigan” for “Minnesota.”
; Her daughter in Iran, Firoozeh, had written her destination on an index card and tied it around her neck just so that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. At least the emergency info she’d written on the backside came in handy.
We wait for her to arrive on the next plane, and I get more nervous as we wait.
Finally, she steps off the plane and kisses Naveed three times on each cheek, holding him by his jaw with both of her little hands and crying with joy. When she stops crying, I see where Naveed gets his dancing smile.
Goli looks sharp in a black silk blouse, cut low as if to show off the pink track marks of her two open-heart surgeries. She wears a gold necklace and earrings beset with intense Persian turquoise. Her black hair is perfectly coiffed in an updated Jackie Kennedy Onassis style. She’s tiny, and she smells like she’s just applied rose perfume.
Her two suitcases are the largest pieces of luggage I’ve ever seen, more like steamer trunks than suitcases, and I can’t believe KLM has allowed these on their flight.
I try to say, “Hello, how are you?” in Persian, addressing her as Goli, but apparently I can’t even pronounce her name correctly. I’m stressing the wrong syllable, saying it like she’s a hockey goalie. She can’t understand what it is I’m trying to say and Naveed translates my Persian into the real thing.
She tells me I can call her “Maman” as we walk to the car, but I decide to call her Goli Joon, which Naveed suggests because it means “Goli dear.” Joon means life or soul or spirit, but it’s just like saying “dear.” It’s respectful and affectionate without presuming that she’s going to be my mother-in-law anytime soon—although I’m honored she offered “Maman.” It makes me feel like she’s accepting me already.
It’s a good thing we got a close parking spot—she’s walking very slowly, and Naveed and I are pushing the unwieldy cart with the giant suitcases.
Naveed opens the front car door for his mom, and waves me to the back seat of the CRX before he wedges the biggest suitcases into the hatchback trunk. Then he piles all of the smaller pieces of luggage in back next to me. The road hums under me while I sit silent, listening for a word or two I can decipher as they catch up in the language I don’t understand.
On the way home from the airport, Naveed decides to stop at Byerly’s for “a few things,” which for us usually means pastries and deli meat. He tells us he will only be a minute and we should wait in the car. I’m nervous, but try to see it as another chance to try out my Persian language skills.
I begin confidently, with a few questions to which I already know the answers, like “How many children do you have?” and “How old are your grandchildren?”
But my Persian is apparently so deformed and defective that she can’t understand a word of what I am saying. Her attempt at English is equally incomprehensible. We play charades for a few minutes in a last-ditch effort to communicate, but our charades don’t match up either. So we stop talking. And we wait.
Goli Joon is not trying to hide her hopes that Naveed will soon return to the car and save us from this failed social interaction. She sighs and gesticulates what seems to mean, What in the hell is he doing in there? Finally, we both breathe an audible sigh of relief. Naveed has returned to the car, with three bags of fruit.
Goli Joon needs to rest, but first things first. I learn quickly that she’s a bonafide fruitaholic. She eats a banana, a tangerine, and some cantaloupe splashed with rosewater as she tells Naveed about her mishap with getting off the plane in Michigan. Then they move on to talk about other things for at least an hour before she runs out of steam and goes into her room to sleep until dinnertime.
She seems pleased with her dining/bedroom, which I’ve worked hard to help Naveed transform from how plain it used to be to a lovely guestroom. My first preference was to kick out the renters downstairs and have Goli Joon live down there, but Naveed thought that would seem rude, and that she would have a hard time with the stairs, and that she would freeze down there. He said she gets cold easily. He also would have lost out on the rental income.
For dinner, Naveed and I have worked together to make an herb stew called ghormeh sabzi. The word ghormeh sounds a lot like gourmet and I don’t know if it means that, but this dish is eaten by everyone in Iran whether they’re into gourmet food or not. It’s the kebabs that they’re known for, but ghormeh sabzi is the true national dish. There’s rice and a little chopped salad too, and Goli Joon digs in.
She says something, and then Naveed translates for me: The flight attendants on Iran Air serve kebabs and rice, but Firoozeh got her the KLM ticket and those flight attendants don’t serve good food.
I’m getting tired from the long day and all of the not-understanding. I mumble, “As if the flight attendants do the cooking.” Naveed ignores me, and we go to bed and fall asleep.
The next morning Goli Joon gets up late and makes herself at home in the kitchen. This is her son’s house, and so it is her house. Naveed has already explained that to me. When he did, I reconsidered my move, but I didn’t have another good option, so I decided I could see how things went at least. I still have Melinda’s voice, haunting me, taunting, I was afraid it would end badly.
We have already eaten breakfast, and she doesn’t want what I offer. She drinks tea, warms pita bread, and puts chunks of feta cheese on her plate along with some fig jam she brought from home. The idea of feta cheese in the morning grosses me out, especially feta with jam. But this, with copious fruit and rosewater, will be her usual breakfast.
Naveed and I had some ideas of things to do with Goli Joon today, but she’s still tired. So it’s a day of sitting in the living room together, with her cassette tapes of female Iranian singers from long ago on the stereo. I go to look at the cassette covers—one is very famous; her name is Googoosh and I already know who she is. The other I don’t know—she’s named Marzieh. I will find out soon that Goli Joon worships Marzieh, who is still alive but lives in Paris now.
After several hours of talking and listening to the music while eating nuts, seeds, and rosewater-sprinkled fruit, Goli Joon needs some fresh air. She goes outside and walks slowly but determinedly around the house a couple of times, as if the perimeter of the house is a walking track. When she comes in, she tells Naveed that Yasmin Noury was outside with her youngest daughter, Parvaneh.
Naveed waves away the information. He turns down the melon she offers him, and teasingly calls her “Gol-ab Joon,” which means Rosewater Dear, because she puts rosewater on so many things.
Goli Joon has brought a professionally produced video of a cousin’s wedding in Tehran to show Naveed. We’re taken as viewers from the preparations of the bride and the home to a joy ride with the groom, then to the elaborate in-home ceremony. Then we’re back in the car on a joy ride to a botanical garden where the bride and groom release some doves. Then we’re drooling over a feast like nothing I’ve ever seen, and finally at a party where the women are dressed to kill in silky, spaghetti-strapped French and Italian gowns. One of Naveed’s cousins in the video is the most ravishing beauty I’ve ever seen, and her blood-red evening gown against her golden skin and long, black, glossy curls enchants me. Just four or five older matriarchs cover their heads with scarves and wear Chanel-like suits. No chadors here. There’s no scene like this in Not without My Daughter.
An hour later, Yasmin Noury rings the doorbell and presents Goli Joon with a small yellow cake, frosted with cream scented with rosewater that I can smell from six feet away. I think, She’s gonna love that cake!
Goli Joon expresses her gratitude profusely, and invites her in. Yasmin says no, and Goli Joon repeats the invitation. The woman declines for a second time, and Goli Joon thanks her and says goodbye. I know by now that Goli would have asked a third time if she really wanted her to come in because that is the custom. Yasmin backs away, saying niceties, while Goli Joon keeps replying with more pretty-sounding things until Yasmin has backed into her own yard.
Goli Joon closes the heavy door, walks straight to
the kitchen sink, shoves the whole cake down into the disposal and runs it. She takes some brown seeds out of a jar and burns them on an aluminum brazier, pours the seeds—smoking like miniature pieces of charcoal—onto a giant copper spoon, and waves the spoon around the foyer where the woman stood.
Later, I will learn that the seeds are from the wild rue plant, esphand, ancient Zoroastrian ingredient for smoking out the evil eye. But right now, all I know is that I would have liked to have eaten some of that cake.
Melinda’s Letters
I thought Melinda and I might never talk again, but she’s already written me two letters. The letters were forwarded to Naveed’s place from our old apartment—I hadn’t been on speaking terms with her to tell her I moved. I could just not answer, and she might never know where I am again. I could end our friendship as easily as forfeiting a game by not showing up. That’s called a bye in soccer, which I know because Courtney played Wayzata rec sports. I could give Melinda a bye.
The first letter was from Santa Fe. I wasn’t tempted at all to respond. The second is from Manhattan, where she’s already been sent on assignment by the tech firm. Melinda is no more technologically savvy than I am, but she has gumption, that’s for sure. She’s a trainer, she says. She only has to learn enough to be able to teach others, and for that she just has to follow the software manuals. It’s not like programming the software or anything.
The first letter describes her new place in Santa Fe, an adobe townhouse that she swears doesn’t look like what I think of when I think of a townhouse. She will send pictures, she says. It’s white adobe, she writes, with a Spanish door that’s the bright island-blue she knows is my favorite color.
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