Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  I don’t know why my dad put up with all this talk of Pavel. The guy never even met anyone else in our family, but from the tidbits Mom told him, he felt able to diagnose all of our problems. Maybe he could. He was the one who got Mom to finally submit to alcoholism treatment at Hazelden.

  I don’t like drinking very much because of those memories of how Mom acted when she was drunk. And I always associate how her hair went from auburn red to pure white with her drinking. Nowadays, I appreciate a good glass of wine or two with dinner, but that’s usually about all. The only time I used to like drinking was when Melinda and I went out dancing. Prince was out at the Minneapolis clubs every weekend, and we liked to get a glimpse of him. Melinda fantasized that he would admire her dancing and ask her to be in his band—the new Sheila E. I had to be drunk to dance, even though I had twelve years of dancing lessons.

  When my mom went back to school and started working or drinking in all her spare time, I rarely saw her. I was thirteen when she started working the late shift. The hospital ward where she worked had the sickest of babies, those with the rarest and least understood disorders. There were three-year-olds who looked younger than one, and others who looked like old men. Dad couldn’t get how she could stand it, but she loved those kids and would talk about them all the time to anyone who would listen. She showed pictures of those sick and dying babies to her friends.

  Mom blamed herself for the day I drank until I ended up in the hospital. She guilted herself that maybe being in the hospital was the only way I could get her attention. It wasn’t because of her, though. She was wrong.

  A girl had written “Valerie Kjos is a slut” in big, purple marker on the bathroom wall at school and started a rumor about me. I came home that day with a plan to get drunk. I didn’t know how much I’d have to drink to feel it, so I just kept filling up my red juice glass with gin from the cupboard until the room started to spin.

  Dad found me in a pool of vomit, face down, luckily, so I didn’t choke on it. I’d peed in my Guess jeans. I woke up in the hospital without any headache, thanks to whatever medicine and glucose they were feeding me intravenously.

  “I’m still mad about that,” Mom said last time we talked about that day. She suffered hangovers each time she overdid it (which was every time she did it). Then her middle child goes and drinks herself nearly to death and wakes up feeling great. And gets a therapeutic massage from a muscular male nurse’s assistant.

  At least once I became a known bad-ass at school, I dropped the whole airhead Suzanne Somers routine, the one in which I wore my Sun-In streaked hair in fountain ponytails out the sides of my head and acted like Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company. “Airhead” had been a compliment, because it went along with “pretty.”

  Mom knows all of this about me, but I shouldn’t take it for granted that I really know my mom. There must be things about Eugenia Randolph that I don’t know. Like, for example, why did she drink so much in the first place?

  Little Things

  Naveed says that Goli Joon told him I’m “pleasant-faced,” and she likes how I’m always smiling. I have not told Naveed about Goli Joon snooping in our room, and maybe she’s being extra flattering since I have not betrayed her by sharing her secret.

  But being liked—if it’s truly that—goes a long way with me, and I make a note to myself to keep smiling. Over the next weeks, my cheek muscles will build up from so much smiling, and a smile will become my permanent expression just like my Grandma Kjos. Maybe she smiled a lot because she was a Minnesotan. Or maybe it was because she’d had electroshock therapy in the 1940s.

  Goli Joon has many different expressions, one being a little Mona Lisa smile she uses anytime she seems to pity me for my ignorance. Like when I say that Marzieh can’t sing. Or that I’ve never heard of the female poets Simin Behbahani and Forough Farrokhzad. That subtle smile comes with a little click made by touching her tongue to the back of her front teeth.

  “Those women are lionesses, but American women think they’re the only clever ones,” she says with a click. “They hardly even know about Googoosh. So sad.”

  When she’s less pitying and truly put off, she juts her chin up in the air and clucks her tongue. I think it’s way less refined than my Grandma Viv’s way of indicating disagreement, which is a movie-star-like and elegant little raising of one penciled-in eyebrow.

  But I follow Niloofar’s advice and learn to appreciate these little tisks, clicks, and clucks of hers most of the time. I like it that she isn’t as refined as she appears in her coiffed hair and her elegant gold and turquoise jewelry. And I like how Goli Joon smells of fruit and rosewater instead of department store perfumes like my mom and Grandma. I like to tease her sometimes like Naveed does and call her Gol-ab Joon—Rosewater Dear—instead of Goli Joon.

  We call her Roseheart now too, whenever she’s acting scrappy with us, because we just watched the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart at home with her on DVD.

  And she’s always cutting up fruit for me and forcing me to eat it between meals instead of Butterfingers and Cheetos, which she says are the cause of my acne. Gummy bears are also to blame, she says, because of the food coloring. When I eat gummy bears, she looks at me like I’m crazy. She calls them lasteek, as in elastic, or maybe plastic—I’m not sure. She says a bit of rosewater on some fruit will satisfy my sweet tooth.

  I feel healthier eating all this fruit, and I do have fewer pimples. So now I feel guilty when I eat Butterfingers, Cheetos, or gummies, and I do it in my own room with the door closed. I store them in my nightstand drawer next to my gold spray painted bed.

  Goli Joon bugs me sometimes, but we have some things in common that make the other clashes more bearable. Unlike my mom—a runner—Goli Joon will never bemoan that she hasn’t “worked out.” Neither of us likes to exercise too much, although Goli Joon can walk, albeit slowly, all the way to Byerly’s to pick up a bag of onions if we aren’t around to drive her. I like people who don’t feel bad about just doing the normal activities of life and then sitting in contemplation, reading poetry, and listening to music for the rest of the day.

  I’m even guilty of some of the things that bug me about her. For example, I’ve returned things at Dayton’s after I’ve worn them. Yesterday Naveed took Goli Joon to Dayton’s because she wanted to return the winter coat she bought there the last time she was here, which was years ago.

  She expected that Dayton’s would take it back and she could get a different one. There was nothing wrong with that coat—except that it was about four years out of style. Of course they took it back. When I sold shoes at Dayton’s during college I once accepted a return for a pair of white go-go boots from 1970. There was nothing in the policy against it. The woman had her receipt.

  Hard Candy

  Goli Joon’s English may not be improving, but I’m learning how to understand her better. I know that I can find her in the kitchen when she yells, “I’m in the chicken!”

  I’m not trying to make fun of people who are learning English. It’s hard for anybody to learn another language, but you have to admit sometimes the mistakes are funny. Just the other evening at dinner, I accidentally asked Goli Joon if she could please pass the salty penises.

  Goli Joon tried to let it go, but she couldn’t. Her laughter built, and pretty soon she and Naveed were both slapping the table while I sat there bewildered. They finally calmed down, but Naveed wouldn’t tell me until after dinner when we were alone.

  I had been asking for the pickles, which in Farsi are referred to as salty cucumbers. The word for cucumber is khiar, but I have such a hard time with their sounds so I had said keer. I had not known the word for penis was so close to the word for cucumber.

  Normally, we communicate by plugging in a Persian word and an English word, then by some charades, until we understand each other or give up until Naveed comes home. I’m learning tons of food words and cooking verbs like fry and boil, chop, and grate.

  There’s a half-hour between t
he time I get home and Naveed gets home. Sometimes I run errands in this time, but usually I just go home. I find Goli Joon peeking out the window when I drive up. With a swirl of the curtains, she moves away from the window. By the time I come in through the front door she’s on the couch watching reruns of The Love Connection and pretending she was never peeking out.

  She loves to watch The Love Connection and is titillated by the parts she understands. “He said they took a shower together,” she says one day of a new contestant.

  I say, “No, they never get that raunchy on this show. You must have misunderstood.” Goli Joon jerks her chin up in the air at me and clucks her tongue to the roof of her mouth. I hear the woman giggling and confessing to Chuck Woolery that the guy was telling the truth—they did take a shower on their first date.

  Goli Joon says “see?” with her gleeful eyes. She’s both thrilled and disgusted, and says in Persian, “Dirt to her head!” about the free-loving woman.

  Whenever I hear Goli Joon using this expression, I think of people throwing dirt at a woman, but Naveed explains that it probably means something about dirt being shoveled into her grave. Goli Joon shuffles off to the kitchen to check on our dinner. This has been the most exciting moment of her day, I realize.

  We know Goli Joon noses around in our bedroom and in the extra bedroom where I keep my stuff, but Naveed defends her right to do this because she’s just bored, he says. While we’re at work, Goli Joon’s winter days consist of cooking; folding our laundry; coloring her hair with L’Oreal; reading unapproved biographies of the former Shah’s wife, Queen Farah, and their children; and reading poetry that I will someday learn was more subversive than I’d imagined.

  Oh, and watching T.V., of course. Goli Joon understands the T.V. news just enough to misunderstand and worry. Every time there’s a storm warning she thinks it’s for our area and she cries and worries about Naveed being on the road. Every time a car accident is reported she thinks it’s Naveed who was hit and is dead. This is part of why she’s always watching out the window when I drive up. She’s sick with worry, and waiting for her oldest son to come home.

  If he’s really late, or if she’s worried because the news has reported an earthquake in Iran or a plane crash during a time when her brothers or other children might be traveling, she will hit herself again and again. With one hand, she will hit her other arm, and then alternate hands to hit the opposite arm. The more worried, the harder she hits herself. (I’ve asked Naveed if something is wrong with her because of this self-hitting, but he says not to worry—it’s a Shiite thing.)

  When I come home, it isn’t enough to stop the worry, but at least it’s someone to tell the day’s news. Goli Joon doesn’t know that I check the news on AP wires on my computer about five times a day at my new job at Agricultural Education Consultants Inc. I don’t have as much free time to surf the web and email Melinda as I did at the insurance company temp job, but I do stay up on current events throughout the day.

  I just act like I have been in a bubble all day and let her think she’s telling me the world’s events for the first time. On slow news days, she tells me about today’s rerun episode of The Love Connection, or The Oprah Winfrey Show. This storytelling ritual gives her some relief from her constant worrying about Naveed’s perpetual lateness.

  Goli Joon plans her cooking, snooping, reading, and hair coloring around The Oprah Winfrey Show. She asks about going to the show, and when we see a magazine at the checkout line at the grocery store featuring a story about Oprah, she buys it with change from her little coin purse. She can’t read it, but she likes to look at the pictures of Oprah. I call the Oprah hotline for tickets to the show in Chicago, but I never get through.

  “Oprah got thin again,” she says in Persian. “Will she get married now?” Then next time, “Bueyy! Oprah is fat again—so fat!” And months later, “Oprah is too thin now, she went too far.” And each time, “Is she married yet?”

  The O.J. Simpson trial is also on, but Goli Joon tires quickly of this case that has far too much that she doesn’t understand in between the courtroom shenanigans. She’s voyeuristic enough to want to watch, but the forensics are too time-consuming. So she just asks me every day when I come home, “O.J guilty?”

  While we wait for Naveed to get home we try small talk and Goli Joon tries to push some pre-dinner fruit on me.

  Lately, a woman at work has been setting out those little Halloween-sized candy bars every day. I eat so many that I’m not ready for dinner at the early hour Goli Joon serves it, much less fruit before dinner. This colleague’s husband is a dentist and I suspect she’s trying to drum up business for him by giving us all cavities.

  But this woman proclaims her innocence by explaining how candy bars aren’t so bad for your teeth—it’s the hard candies that cause the problems, because you suck on them for so long.

  Naveed’s Father

  Cards have started coming from Naveed’s father, who writes in English. Since I have so often told the lie that his father died of throat cancer, these cards are like mail from the grave, written by a ghost. But Naveed’s father is very much alive, and living with Naveed’s brother in southern Iran so that Darab can make sure he takes his medicine regularly.

  Naveed thinks his intention is that I will read the cards and be charmed by the beautiful way he writes of his love for Naveed, thus I will sway Naveed (in womanly fashion) to reconnect with his father.

  Goli Joon was arranged to marry Mahmood when she was twenty-four. Mahmood was five years older and the son of a family business connection. He was not sick when they married, but after four or five years, he began to show the signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Those first years together before his sickness took over were good, and they had one girl and two boys. Naveed was the first boy, and that almost is as if to say he was the first child. But he was the second. First was Firoozeh, then Naveed, then Darab.

  They were married for twelve years when Mahmood married a second wife. He tried to have the best of both worlds for awhile, but when his second wife got pregnant, he left Goli with their three children.

  I have only told my mom and sisters. I can never refer to the half-sibling Naveed does not know. I’m sworn to secrecy. Goli Joon doesn’t like how Iranians gossip, and asks me never to tell people about this until she is dead. Even to her best friends, she says that Mahmood died. Nobody knows that he had a child with his second wife, who died recently, and that he’s now living in Iran with Darab and Darab’s wife and children.

  Darab makes sure Mahmood takes his medications to control the schizophrenia. When he doesn’t take his medications, chaos ensues. Darab has taken this responsibility to care for this father who was hardly a father to him after he left.

  After Mahmood left, Goli Joon was lucky to be allowed to move herself and her children in with her parents. They weren’t any more thrilled with the idea than parents here in the U.S. whose kids boomerang back home with kids in tow. But Goli Joon put herself back in school and learned how to run a sewing business with three kids to take care of and no husband.

  Naveed doesn’t return any pleasantries to his father through the mail, although when Mahmood includes a P.S. asking for a certain type of American eye drops, and a certain brand of American vitamins, Naveed will run out to purchase a generous supply and ship them with insurance.

  Cooking with Goli Joon

  Goli Joon is not all old-school. She sometimes deviates from her usual feta, pita, and jam breakfast to our Frosted Flakes. She puts the whole box on the table in front of her, and I get a kick out of seeing her eating with Tony the Tiger. I want her to stick her finger in the air and say, “Theyyy’rrre…GREAT!” and let me take a picture. But she isn’t game for that.

  Goli Joon and I are prehistoric cave women from different clans, developing a simple babel together. We gesture and stumble over simple concepts, like melting. I charade a big pile of something, sinking and spreading out all over the place. “Melll…ttt…ing!” I cry, as
I spread out on the kitchen floor like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

  Naveed plays soccer or basketball with the neighbor, Milad Zand, most Sundays, now that they’re friends again. Sometimes I meet my sisters at a bakery and coffee shop in Wayzata, or I go somewhere myself or with Savi, but I feel guilty when I go somewhere and don’t invite Goli Joon. So, then I get into a habit of going shopping with her on these days. We come home and I watch Goli Joon cook. I ask her to teach me how to make the rice like she makes it.

  “Rice good?” I ask her in Persian, turning my head. She’s just six inches behind me. I want her approval of my latest attempt at making the basmati rice that I have got to get as perfect in flavor and texture as hers. I grew up making the Uncle Ben’s boil-in-the-bag rice, and Persian rice is quite a bit more complicated. If you’ve grown up making it, you probably don’t realize all the little steps there are that you just do without even thinking. There are tricks, and between Goli Joon and my former job at the Dinky Kebab, I should have them down pat by now.

  “Good,” she answers, with a lilt at the end of the word and a ducking of the head. She almost clucks her tongue. Good, but not even near perfect, she means. Basmati only really tastes like basmati when it’s cooked right, and then it’s so good you can eat it with just some butter and sumac and never want to stop. When it’s not quite right, it’s only grain.

  There are many dishes to go with the rice (or with bread), but only eight or ten that we make often. They’re simple enough, and being apprenticed rather than relying on a written recipe, I learn to make them quickly by heart. There are stews, patties, pilafs, stuffed vegetables, quiches, and dips. There’s a citrus-y tang from limes, and some heat because their family likes to add chili peppers to many of the dishes.

  They’re not to be varied too much. You may substitute black-eyed peas for the red beans in the herb stew, or you may choose dried grape powder instead of lime for the eggplant stew, or if you have any, fresh unripened sour grapes. One may choose cubed lamb over cubed beef for any of the stews, but Naveed and Goli Joon don’t like our lamb here. They say Iranian lamb is different, and better. The lambs in Iran have a tail like a pillow, full of fat that tastes good enough to cook with. They say our lambs’ tails are shriveled up and curled like pig tails.