The second forwarded letter includes the photos of her door and other architectural details of her Santa Fe townhouse. It also describes the restaurants in Manhattan, in course-by-course detail of the meals that she gets to charge to her Platinum Visa card, which gets paid by the company.
I’m not sure I’m going to write back. But then she writes “P.S. I know you probably don’t have an email account yet, but if you ever get one email me at [email protected].” Her email address is also printed on her business card, enclosed with the letter.
As if I couldn’t possibly have an email account. I’ve had one almost since I started temping at the insurance company. I probably got it the day she moved, maybe before she moved. I got mine before she got hers! Now I will have to email her to prove I have one.
I email her from work the next day. After a few icebreaker exchanges we start trading advice about what cool things we’ve found on the World Wide Web. I tell her about recipes.group and she tells me about cooking.group, which she says is much better.
We email each other for a lot of the day, even though she says she’s so busy preparing to lead her first training by herself in Manhattan the next morning, and I have a stack of fraud status reports to enter into the national database.
Salt
I know I’m not as good of a cook as Melinda or Ty, but my lasagna is always a hit. I think I’ll trot that out tonight and impress Goli Joon.
She doesn’t seem to know what I’m making. I’ve seen lasagna appear regularly at Iranian parties, so I don’t understand how she couldn’t have ever eaten it. But this gives me an opportunity to show off, to be the one to introduce lasagna to her and open her up to a whole new world. I labor over it all afternoon, and serve it with buttery garlic bread and a salad.
I serve her a piece, using the spatula, but I need her help to cut away the strings of cheese connecting her piece to the whole dish of lasagna. She can’t do it, and it just gets stringier and stringier until I finally set her piece on her plate and then cut the strings. Then she gets annoyed because the same thing happens when she tries to separate a single bite from the rectangle on her plate.
After finally, with much effort, eating barely half of her lasagna, some salad, and a bite of bread, Goli Joon says she’s full and tired. She goes to her room after nodding to me and saying, “Thank you, Valerie Joon.” It feels nice to have Joon put after my name too. We’re all Joon in this house. We’re all Dear.
A couple of hours later a commotion wakes us. Naveed jumps out of bed so fast that the waterbed waves send me crashing into the headboard. The black onyx panther on the shelf almost falls on my head. Goli Joon has a stomachache and she feels dizzy. Her ears are ringing.
Naveed runs back to her room, exclaiming, “Maman thinks it was that lasagna! She can’t have salt!”
“I didn’t use any salt!” I swear. It had been hard, but I’d resisted using any salt at all, knowing about her problem.
“Then that stringy cheese must have had too much salt! And it was too heavy for her,” he insists. He steps into his bunny slippers and runs back to her room.
I get up to go see her too. She moans and groans, and every time she stands up she falls back down into her bed, holding her hands over her ears to stop the ringing. She can’t stand to look at me—when she looks in my direction she begins to heave.
She thinks she’s going to die, and Naveed is looking at me with frightened eyes as if to ask, “What were you thinking?”
On the one hand, I’m worried that I made her eat something that could have killed her. On the other hand I think she’s being overly dramatic. I mean, isn’t the feta cheese she had for breakfast saltier than those Italian cheeses?
If she’s like this much longer, Naveed will take her to the ER, but she eventually calms down and goes back to sleep. I can’t fall back to sleep so easily, though. She’s been here for merely a week and already I’m crying in bed. Naveed puts a hand on my back. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault. You made a great meal.”
“I hope you’re going to help eat the leftovers.”
“Happy to help.”
I stop crying and wipe my eyes on the fishing resort T-shirt Naveed has been wearing to bed lately. It got a big grease stain on it, so he can’t wear it out of the house, but he didn’t want to throw it away.
“How long do you think she will stay?” I say, even though by now I know it isn’t nice to ask. Naveed doesn’t answer, but keeps his hand on my back until I fall asleep.
The Welcoming
Naveed’s friends come out of the woodwork—more friends than I knew he had—to pay formal visits to his mother. It turns out that many of them live close to here, on either side of the Minneapolis-Edina border. Some immigrant groups congregate in the cheapest, most urban neighborhoods, but Iranians who come here are usually a little richer. Or a lot richer. The Iranians in the Twin Cities metro area, it turns out, mostly live here in the nicer part of South Minneapolis and spread over the border into Edina. Edina is the other place in Minnesota, besides Wayzata, mentioned in The Official Preppy Handbook.
The friends who come to visit are chemical and geological engineers and an orthopedic surgeon with his dentist wife. They say just a polite word or two to me, taking care not to mention if they recognize me as their former waitress at the Dinky Kebab, as they hand Goli Joon flower bouquets and fill up whole evenings chatting with her. Paying visits to elders is a part of their culture of civility and traditional respect, plus I think they really like doing it.
I serve the fall stews Goli Joon has cooked and insisted they stay to eat. I refill teacups and keep the sugar cube bowl looking like a treacherous mountain, just as Niloofar taught me at the Dinky Kebab.
We watch the videos Goli Joon brought, again, and see the videos the friends have brought from their Iran trips. This year, four of Naveed’s friends went back for the first time. Others will soon go too. Suddenly, everybody is ready to go back and see how things have changed. Everybody, from Iranian-American memoirists to the people we know. Even Jamsheed and Kaveh, who just a year ago said they would never spend a red cent in an Iran run by mullahs. Everybody who can afford to go is going. Except for Naveed. He could scrape together the money, but he isn’t moving on it. Maybe he will never go.
For now, we settle in before the VCR with these neighbor-friends (except for the Zand/Nourys, who are still not part of our circle). In the years ahead, I will watch hundreds of hours of filmed trips to Iran, expertly edited as if celluloid strips of Iranian life can be sewn together like clothing and packed into a suitcase for wearing again somewhere else.
An American wife of one man tells me how she had to officially convert to Islam, get married again by a mullah here, and take a Muslim name even though she doesn’t plan to use it. She did all that just to get the paperwork needed to get into Iran with her husband. She shows me her Iranian passport, asking me if we’re going to go to Iran, and if we get married am I also going to become “Iranian by marriage.” It’s something I’ve never thought of, that a Lutheran girl from a picturesque lakeside suburb of Minneapolis could gain a whole new nationality by simply reciting the shahada and signing some papers.
Provisions
Our kitchen is an earthy brown cave. Goli Joon is our clan’s gatherer. In preparation for coming to America, she gathered all of the ingredients she uses in bulk and stuffed them into a king-sized white pillowcase, which took up half of one of her huge suitcases. She’s brought out her treasures little by little to show them to me and start cooking.
Many of these ingredients I saw in the market section of the Dinky Kebab, so I’m not as horrified as I could be about the shriveled-up brown limes. This petrified citrus fruit from Oman is as dry and light as a ping-pong ball, so it can be stored for ages. Dried limes are dropped whole into autumn-winter stews.
Goli Joon shows me how she grinds the dried limes for some dishes instead of putting them in whole. She cuts them open, and removes
the seeds before grinding them and putting the powder in a glass jar.
The pistachio nuts are way better than the California kind, but I’ve had these before too. They’re tastier inside and out, the shells glossed with lime, salt, and saffron. Sometimes a shell doesn’t have that split open part that Naveed says is called its smile, and those we crack open with a kitchen mallet.
Almost everything Goli Joon has pulled from that pillowcase is dried—a shriveled fraction of its former self, whether flower, herb, fruit, nut, or bean. I try to imagine what the bounty would look like fresh, especially the wild Mohammadi roses from her family’s acreage, and the deep purple flowers called zaboonay gav. I know that word, I think—gav. I remember Naveed teaching me that word when we went to Stillwater before Goli Joon came. It means cow, and I know zaboon too; it means tongue. So the flower is called cow’s tongue. I’m starting to understand things here and there.
Cow’s tongue flowers make a mood-improving tea. I’m going to need that tea later. But right now I’m enjoying this time with Goli Joon, discovering strange new things, like the ghostly white angelica seeds she calls golpar. I don’t know yet what those are for. They seem mysterious, truly like little angels.
I watch Goli Joon tuck her ingredients into every drawer and shelf and cabinet in our dark kitchen. She finds just the right jar—my antique Ball canning jar that I bought at a garage sale—for saffron rock candy. The jar looks like it has been waiting its whole life to hold these crystal rock formations colored golden by fire-colored saffron stamens. These saffron rock candies, along with cardamom candies, will flavor our afternoon teas.
I watch Goli Joon start every one of her recipes, which she’s known by heart for decades, by chopping and sautéing onions. Or grating onions for some things. She never uses a food processor, not even my mini-chopper—just a knife or a grater. She always starts with the onions, and she ends by crushing a dried rosebud over many a dish. When she grates the onions, she always has a good cry. And when she crushes the tiny rose, she whispers a prayer of thanks.
Stillwater Redux
We bring Goli Joon everywhere with us. She came on our trip to Stillwater to see the fall colors. She’s been here before during fall, but she still seemed impressed.
I’m still impressed with the colors year after year too. I love to go on the paddleboat ride on the St. Croix and see the autumn colors on both banks of the river. It’s the pinks and reds I can’t get over, while Goli Joon went crazy over all the colors. She thought the paddleboat ride would be too chilly though, so we didn’t go.
Now that the weather is cooling down, Goli Joon is making lots of khoresht. Khoresht pretty much means stew. She needs apples for her apple khoresht.
We take her to an apple orchard an hour away after she complains that the apples we buy at the store taste old; she needs fresh apples, and she’s sure the grocery store is just clearing out last year’s apples to make way for the bumper crop at the orchards now.
At first she says she doesn’t want to go, and that we can just go pick apples without her, but Persian manners require we beg her three times to come with us. She relents on the third try. It starts raining when we get there, so she stays in the orchard’s store, drinking hot cider and perusing the shelves of apple chutney and apple butter while Naveed and I get drenched picking the apples she wanted.
Goli Joon comes with us to all stores—the grocery store, Target, Southdale Mall. We invite her to all the gatherings at my mom’s house, and naturally she’s always present when my family gathers over here.
As the weather gets cold, we stay inside together more often. Naveed and Goli Joon have taught me a new card came, called Geesh-knees. That’s the Persian word for cilantro, which is what they call clubs. Now when I look at the club card, I see it. It does look like cilantro. I’ve never liked playing cards before, but it’s fun when somebody gets to shout out, “Geesh-knees!”
And the apple khoresht, khoreshte-seeb, is just the right amount sour and hot, sweet and brothy over rice. But it still isn’t just perfect to her. The apples are sweet and tart enough, and fresh enough, but she complains that they don’t taste the same as the ones in Iran. They don’t taste enough like apples.
Crevice
My parents’ divorce had been in the air and spoken in jest so much that they didn’t think they had to reveal it when it became official. I mean, we had heard, “If your father hasn’t left me by then…” and, “if we make it another year” so many times that we were supposed to just know.
But, “Your father is really done this time” sounded more concrete.
I told Mom I wanted to hear it officially, from the both of them together. They didn’t get together to deliver the news, but Dad came out on the deck, where I was reading with the sun in my eyes. He said, “I hear you want to hear it officially. We are going to get the divorce.” He actually said the divorce, not a divorce, acknowledging the prediction that has been floating in front of us for all these years. This is going to be the divorce, like the T.V. we had been visiting for months at the local Sears before we bought it to replace our T.V. that got struck by lightning.
I didn’t think it bothered me that much. I mean, it was their life. Not that I thought my mom had so much of a life. Even when I was in college I wasn’t mature enough to think of my mother as a separate person because she existed for us kids for so long. We had inklings of a life beyond us, like when she took up running and left the house to jog with a male neighbor every morning. But for so long, we’d thought she existed to run the family errands, and watch our ballet lessons. She existed to help us with our sequined costumes and the make-up we got to wear at the recitals, as far as I knew.
I was starting my last year of college by the time of the divorce, but Courtney was just starting high school and I worried about her. She started cutting the skin on her arms, and she started smoking pot too, which I really couldn’t lecture her about.
Anyway, it was just a phase for Courtney. She learned to cope with it in record time with an eight-pack of counseling sessions our mom bought for her. Now she wants to be a child psychologist.
Laura and I didn’t get offered any counseling sessions. Laura was already out of college, and I guess my mom figured I wasn’t living at home full-time either any more. (I’d only been there the day of the announcement to do my laundry for free.) Our role was to be supportive, not to care about the divorce for our own selfish sadness.
I remember Kurt didn’t think he cared about his parents’ divorce either. Then one night we tripped out on psychedelic mushrooms. I was sleeping over with him at his dad’s house while his dad was away at sex-addiction treatment, which he was finally submitting to after his problem of visiting prostitutes had broken up his marriage with Kurt’s mom. The mushrooms hit Kurt in a different way that time than they had before. I had to hold him while he cried through the night like a little boy.
The time of my parents’ divorce was when the crevice appeared between my mom’s perfectly shaped auburn eyebrows. And although I’m twenty-two years younger than Mom, it was about the time when mine appeared too.
Paradoxes
It sinks in that my boyfriend’s mother is, for all practical purposes, living with us rather than visiting. And that I’m not really the woman of the house as long as she’s here.
I love the meals she turns out in the kitchen, but I don’t like how she’s moved my olive oil to the rim of the countertop around the stove, and taken out Naveed’s ugly place mats I had put away. I bury the place mats in the linen closet and move the olive oil back to its proper corner, which Martha Stewart insists should be away from light and the heat of the stove.
Goli Joon clicks her tongue about this Martha Stewart person. One day, I decorate the tops of the kitchen cabinets with antique baskets and other rustic-looking things. I balance an old iron skillet up there, copying Martha’s kitchen décor in a recent magazine spread.
Goli Joon clicks her tongue at me. “Dirt to Martha Stewart’s
head,” she says. “That skillet could fall on us.”
Goli Joon also has half of the main refrigerator shelf constantly spoken for with her vats of homemade plain yogurt. I think of it as a sort of revolving science experiment. Every week, she boils milk in an old aluminum pot. When the milk has cooled just enough not to kill the yogurt culture, she stirs in a dollop of the yogurt leftover from her last batch. It sits out for a bit so its acidophilus micro-organisms can multiply and transform all of the milk into yogurt. Then it finishes culturing in the refrigerator, where the pot takes up half a shelf. The pot of plain yogurt comes out of the refrigerator for every meal. I don’t know why it should taste any better than store-bought yogurt, because it all started out months ago with a gallon of Kemps milk and a dollop of Old Home yogurt from Byerly’s.
Goli Joon has crocheted button tops onto country-style dishtowels she bought at JC Penney the last time we took her to the Southdale Mall. The crocheting is so that she can button the dishtowels onto drawer handles. There’s a dishtowel buttoned onto almost every drawer, some with apples on them, some with gingerbread men, and some with roosters. They don’t go with my Martha Stewart decorating ideas at all.
I know those are just picky things, but they add up. And, now we have to be proper with her living here. For example, I have to wear a bra in the house if I don’t want to feel self-conscious. We have to keep the T.V. volume very low after nine at night when she goes to bed. And yet we have to keep the T.V. on in our bedroom so Goli Joon doesn’t hear the movement of the waterbed mattress sloshing from shore to shore in its black lacquer frame.
When I’m around her I try to smile a lot. My cheeks hurt sometimes from smiling. My Persian language is a joke and I’ve lost the will to work on it. I’ve only learned the food words. I like the food, so I speak the food.
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