I need to talk to someone though, because to be completely honest, I wish Goli Joon would go home. Maybe somebody can tell me how to make her go. A woman, but I don’t know who would understand. I momentarily think of Yasmin Noury across the street, but although she always returns my hellos and waves back to me, I don’t think we’re going to get chummy.
Not Savi—she already advised me months ago about not getting too close to a potential mother-in-law. I don’t want to hear an I-told-you-so. So I’ve been telling Savi things are going pretty well.
All I get is praise from Savi for living with her. “Your place in heaven is assured. You’re a real saint.” This reaction doesn’t make me want to tell her that I don’t know if I can do it. Savi saying that I’m a saint insinuates that Goli Joon is difficult to live with, which isn’t technically true. If things like dishtowels buttoned onto drawer handles bother me so much, I’m probably the difficult one.
Even though I want her to go home, sometimes I get defensive about Goli Joon. “I get a lot out of her being here,” I tell Savi. “She cooks for us, and does so many nice things. She folds our laundry. So, I’m not a saint—Goli Joon is the saint.”
Really, I hate it when she folds my laundry, her papery hands folding my private things that are too small to need folding, and serving them up to me in a stack.
Melinda just thinks I’m insane, now that I’ve told her all about it over email, including how Naveed spends a couple of days a month taking his mom to all of her doctor appointments, and many more hours with all the shopping. Last week, I got a letter from her. A long letter, even though we’ve been emailing. I think it was her last ditch effort to show me that she was serious about wanting to convince me to move out as soon as possible. On the stationery, which had a Hopi Indian design border, she wrote:
I just have a feeling there’s somebody else out there for you, and you’re preventing yourself from finding true happiness. If you’re living with him because you can’t afford a place, maybe your dad or Kurt could lend you some rent money until you get a better job. Or you could call Quentin.
I’d told Melinda about Quentin asking me to go to Paris with him, and she thought I was crazy for not going. She’s brought that up a few times now. Even though she didn’t think Quentin was right for me, she says that in retrospect I could have probably had five or six nice trips with him if I’d taken him back.
As if she couldn’t resist including some bragging points with her letter, she enclosed a few more photos of her adobe townhome and the Navajo-style fireplace she had forgotten to tell me about when she told me about her fabulous blue door and the Santa Fe vistas and spiritual vibe.
Melinda is very absorbed in her new job, Santa Fe culture, her expense account, and Roger, who is apparently making a boatload of money at his job in the arts. That last part sounds unlikely, I know, but people seem to be giving Melinda and Roger money when it doesn’t make sense. I mean, Melinda must spend one or two hours emailing me from her tech job every day, and she’s not even a techie. So now Roger is raking it in working in the arts and he’s not an artist. I didn’t ask how.
Clearly, Melinda isn’t going to be a good listener, but I try—over email—to explain it all to her anyway. She writes back that the worst sign about Naveed is that he doesn’t care as much about what I want as he does about what his mother wants. I type, delete, and retype my reply several times before sending.
The thing I cannot explain to Melinda is that an Iranian man who isn’t willing to take care of his mother is not a good man at all, regardless of what his girlfriend wants. Anyone who can grow up in that culture and still turn his mother out of the house to please his girlfriend must be immoral by nature. The paradox then is that the more I love him and want to marry him, the more I hope that he will find somewhere else for her to live; but the more I see how good he is in caring for his mother, the more I love him.
Melinda would say the solution to this is to give up the man who comes from this impossible culture and find someone more like us. Someone who would think letting his mom move in on him and his girlfriend would be the immoral idea in the first place.
Greetings
Naveed brings hot tea—the caffeinated kind—to me early every morning. He leaves the house just after five-thirty each weekday morning, and props me up in bed by putting two pillows behind my back and pulling me up to lean against them. He places the teacup in my hand, helping me to rest it on my chest and take a sip as if I’m a sick child. Then he kisses me on the neck and lips, and he leaves.
But today, Naveed has left even earlier than usual to catch a plane for Kansas City, where his newest parking ramp customer awaits him for a design consultation. My alarm clock sounds, and I crane my head around to see if tea has been delivered. No tea. It’s seventeen minutes after six, and no caffeine. I push the snooze button six times, the caffeine withdrawal headache coming on and getting a little worse with each nine-minute snooze.
At seven-thirty, the headache is unbearable. I must go and get tea. I hope there’s some made.
I exit the bedroom and hear the tea kettle whistle for just a second then stop just as suddenly. Goli Joon must be in the kitchen, and has just taken the tea kettle off the burner. Goli Joon will now steep the boiling water with two teaspoons of the loose-leaf black tea. While it steeps, she will be simmering the milk, and then removing the skin. Once the milk is properly simmered, its lactose sugar properly concentrated until the milk earns a sweet scent that it did not have when cold, Goli Joon will fill her teacup halfway with it and then add the tea. No need for sugar when the milk is naturally sweetened and condensed on the stove.
Here in the flagstone hallway, I freeze, and I consider going back into the bedroom I share not so secretly with Naveed. But then the kitchen’s pocket door rumbles open and Goli Joon, in her zip-up house robe, slowly comes into view.
Because I know how pathetic I look, how unbalanced I feel, I do not want to see Goli Joon. So I will wait. I take a step backward toward the bedroom, and wait for Goli Joon to go back into her room before I go into the kitchen to pour my drink of life. I hope she returns to her room, rather than sitting down at the dining table with her tea and flat bread with feta cheese breakfast that I find so unbreakfast-like.
To my relief, Goli Joon leaves the kitchen’s pocket door open, then opens the pocket-door to her dining/bedroom, goes in, and slides it closed. I dart back out of the shadows and into the kitchen, but then suddenly Goli Joon is there behind me.
“Salaam-et koo?” she asks.
My sleepy head takes a few seconds to compute a translation, but when it comes to me I’m taken aback. It means “Where is your greeting?” I feel scolded, too stung to give Goli Joon the salaam I now owe her. I quickly pour my tea, shake two Tylenols out of a bottle, and hustle back to my room. She goes back to her room too.
When after a while I decide that I’m going to call in sick and possibly stay in bed for the whole day, I leave the bedroom again just to get the newspaper. I open the front door, grab the Star Tribune, and close the door. It slams a little too loudly, and then I tiptoe back into my room. The warm waterbed welcomes me in, and I drink tea with the newspaper, reading only the Taste and Variety sections.
I deserve this sick day, I tell myself, and then I drift back to sleep.
Later, my doorknob jiggles open. I’m under the blankets, but I peek out through a fold, wondering what time it is and if Naveed’s trip got cancelled. But it’s not Naveed. It’s Goli Joon. She’s now three or four feet into the bedroom. I’m fully awake now, realizing she must think I left for work when I got the newspaper. She makes it to the black lacquer dresser, scans the top of it, and then carefully slides open a top drawer. My underwear drawer. She pulls out my Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra, pinches the cushioned part that’s strategically placed on the outside of each breast to shove them more toward the center, creating miraculous cleavage. My heart is pounding.
I sit up in bed. She freezes, drops the bra ba
ck into the drawer, and cries, “Valerie Joon!” as she spins in my direction.
“I’m putting away the laundry,” she tells me in Persian, a quick excuse. She carries no laundry with her, but looks at her hands as if she might be able to conjure some. She picks up the bra again, folds it, and pats it back down in the drawer, as if she’d just washed it and put it away.
I look at her with my mouth open for several seconds, and then I slowly ease back into my sick-day position. And I decide not to let this become a scene, not to ask her why she’s snooping in our room and in my underwear drawer.
“Salaam,” I say instead. Here is your greeting.
Someone to Talk to
Dropping in at the Dinky Kebab, I see Niloofar piling sugar cubes into the little red bowls on each table. I ask her to sit with me. But before I start talking, I ask one of the Mexican cooks to scoop up some saffron-rosewater-pistachio ice cream for me. While the ice cream softens enough to taste, I ask Niloofar, “How can Iranian women stand this live-in mother-in-law thing?”
Instead of answering me, Niloofar gives me the jug of tart, red sumac powder to refill the sumac shakers for each table. As long as I’m here, she says, I might as well be useful. I start filling all of the jars, and I ask her again how this kind of situation can be normal for Iranians. It doesn’t feel normal.
“Your situation isn’t normal,” she says. “Consider how progressive Goli is. For one thing, she has not made an issue of the fact that you are not Iranian, and that you are not even married.”
“Of course, I know Goli Joon isn’t my mother-in-law, but it’s similar,” I answer.
“Extended families have been normal for most of the people of the world throughout all the ages, probably including your own ancestors. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” she says. “One of my friends has a live-in mother-in-law and father-in-law who come barging into the bedroom anytime they want to talk to their son. And I mean anytime. No knocking. And her husband refuses to install a lock on the door for fear of offending his parents.” She adds that Goli Joon’s quick peek into my underwear drawer doesn’t even come close to what her friend’s in-laws walk in on.
“I know it could be worse,” I say, “but the closeness is just too much for me, and there are things about her that really bug me. Like the way she says ‘no.’ She says ‘nah!’ I used to get in trouble for saying ‘nah’ when I was a teenager, and she also juts her chin up in the air and makes a ticking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. It burns me up!”
“Um, Valerie, ‘nah’ is the word for ‘no’ in Farsi,” Niloofar says. “Everybody says ‘nah.’ It’s our language.”
“Well, I don’t like the way she says it,” I insist. “Isn’t there a more polite word, ‘nakheir’ or something? Because, in America, you know, ‘nah’ is very rude.”
When I say “in America” like that, I sound like one of those right-wing pundits on AM radio, and Niloofar’s beautiful doe eyes almost roll back into her head, but then she aims them right at me.
I avoid the eye contact, swirling my spoon around in my softened saffron-rosewater-pistachio ice cream.
After a moment of silence, and in a litany of diplomatic but firm arguments, Niloofar makes me see that it’s just the idiosyncrasies and loss of control that are bothering me. She knows it’s hard, but I need to try to be more tolerant. It sounds to her like Goli Joon is very tolerant, especially considering my girlfriend status and that she probably expected her son to marry some Iranian woman chosen for him by the family.
“I’m sure you are profiting from having her there in many ways,” she says, appealing to my own selfishness, “so perhaps the problem is really with you and Naveed. Are you sure he’s really the right one?”
“Maybe I’m not explaining it very well,” I say. “It isn’t just a few idiosyncrasies. It’s constant. Our freshly picked apples aren’t good enough for her. She complains that American fruit doesn’t have any taste. Our apples don’t taste like apples. I get out the cherry jam in the morning and she says that our cherry jam doesn’t have any flavor. I made that jam with cherries from Bayfield, Wisconsin! The jam has the perfect balance of sweet and sour, the hint of almond, the aroma of Lake Superior air.”
“They smell like air?” she asks, seemingly taking Goli Joon’s side. “But do they taste like cherries? It’s hard to beat Iranian cherries for flavor.”
I continue, “She makes Naveed take her to JC Penney all the time, and then take her back so she can return everything she buys! She returns everything. She even tries to return things from garage sales. Just last week we had to take her to a house and ring the doorbell to see if she could return a serving dish.”
I tell Niloofar that it bothers me that I don’t know how long Goli Joon plans to stay, and that I think it’s a few months, but I don’t really know. She gulps and looks away from me. “What?” I ask. “What is it?”
“If she doesn’t have a non-exchangeable return ticket and date already arranged,” she says, “I’d be really surprised if she doesn’t stay for at least nine or ten months.” I just stare at those incredible doe eyes, and Niloofar pats me on the arm, breaking into a smile.
“You’ll learn how to cook,” she says. “And she can take care of your babies when you have them. All of my friends who have their mothers-in-law living with them save tens of thousands of dollars on daycare.”
That does give me pause, even though we aren’t even married, and aren’t close to having children. Tens of thousands of dollars in free daycare—even if only someday—that’s something.
“You’ll be fine,” Niloofar says, interrupting the calculations in my head: two children perhaps, five years of full-time daycare… “I’m here for you any time. You know I’m always here.”
“But are you sure I can trust you?” I ask, remembering. “You didn’t even tell me the horrible meaning of my last name in Farsi.”
She covers a giggle, as if to say that it had just been too good of a little joke around the restaurant to ruin. “We accepted you for who you are, embarrassing name and all,” she says. “And so has Naveed’s kind mother. You can become more accepting too. Even if she goes home tomorrow, expect her to come back and to live here a lot of the time for the rest of her life.”
I drop my ice cream spoon onto my napkin and get up to put the sumac shakers on the tables. A plotted chart forms in my mind, comparing on one axis how many months or years Goli Joon might live, and on another axis how many I might be able to last at being accepting, at least of the free daycare. But the two plot lines never meet. I give up this computation, partly because both are unknown quantities, and I’m not good with charts.
I have taken over Naveed’s extra bedroom (of course, Goli Joon’s room is really the dining room). I don’t sleep in there, but I do have my clothes, books, and my own antique iron bed. This room was stuffed with Naveed’s things that he’d bought at auctions and had no use for but wouldn’t dispose of. I implored him to the point of tears when I’d read about places like this being fire hazards. Then I found a family of mice living in a box of string in there. I wish we could have the basement, but the renters are still down there. Finally, he spent a few days working on the mess. But he hasn’t stopped bringing home his “good buys,” so the mess is building up again.
Writing in bed is more comfortable than sitting at a desk, and I can’t write while sitting on Naveed’s wavy waterbed. My room is my favorite space in the house, even with Naveed’s piles. My antique iron bed is spray painted gold, something Melinda had helped me do. I remember that day. Melinda and I went through four cans of gold spray paint to get the job done. We got so much on our hair, skin, and clothes that we looked like Oscar award trophies.
Now I stand before my closet, trying to decide between blue and black jeans, and also wondering why I’m getting dressed so early when it’s the weekend. But of course it’s because I want to be presentable for Goli Joon, even on weekend mornings. Otherwise, I might not have even
woken up this early.
I wonder how I ended up in this kind of living arrangement, which does not marry well with my personality as an introvert who has never liked to spend time with boyfriends’ mothers. I could have moved in with my mom, and maybe I would have if not for her weird boyfriends and Bruce. Is this situation something that I subconsciously willed upon myself? To move in with someone else’s mom?
Adolescence
My mom has had flirtations for as long as I can remember, and it used to be almost impossible to believe some of them were not affairs. But now I understand that, for the most part, she just needed people who would listen to her.
When I was twelve she went back to college to become a nurse. For three whole years she studied with a Russian student named Pavel. That name became the most heard word in our house. Pavel would listen to Mom talk for hours on end, and in return, my mom would listen to his advice even though she never listened to anyone else’s. She would come home from nursing school and say to me, “Pavel recommended this book about emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children,” or to my father, “Pavel said the experience of helping others is better than working for money,” or to me again, “Pavel says I’m stupid if I don’t think that short marble pipe I found in your purse is for smoking marijuana.”
My mom found my pot pipe in the zipper pocket of my purse one Saturday when I was thirteen. It was my first purse, and I thought the zipper pocket was some kind of double-top-secret compartment nobody would find. I denied that it was for pot, explaining that I had been smoking cigarettes in it. So she made me show her. I pulled out the pack of Merits that was also in the zipper pocket, broke one open and piled the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe. I smoked it. I was used to filters, and the cigarette tobacco filtered only through the pot resin made me dizzy. But Mom believed me, at least until Pavel set her straight again.
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