One day, they will find lamb with that nice fat pillow tail, but it’ll require a two-hour drive to a farm each time we want to buy one. Naveed and the farmer will cut its throat and clean it at the farm. Goli and I will have to spend hours in the kitchen hacking the whole animal into pieces ourselves, and then she’ll spend more hours cleaning the kitchen with bleach.
One of my favorite stews is the pumpkin one. I watch Goli Joon make it—cutting up big cubes of orange pumpkin and sautéing them with a Persian spice mixture that is sort of like curry powder except that it also includes dried rose petals and a different mix of spices. I learn the name of the stew, khoresht-e kadoo tanbali, meaning stew of the lazy squash. The “lazy squash” is what they call the pumpkin.
All in all, Goli Joon sticks with the method, ingredients, proportions, and culinary techniques that she’s used for her whole life. She chops and chops until her tendons are sore, and grates onions until her eyes nearly melt out of their sockets.
It’s only in the presentation where she may get creative, and Goli Joon delights in her calligraphic artistry with garnishes, producing a different design with each preparation.
Christmas
It was nice of my mom, Laura, and Courtney to get Christmas presents for Goli Joon. They have accepted that she goes where we go and like having her here at my mom’s for Christmas. Logically, it doesn’t make sense since we don’t invite Ty’s parents or get them gifts. And speaking of logic, Goli Joon is a Muslim, and while they think Jesus was an important prophet, Christmas just isn’t their thing. But Goli Joon loves a holiday gathering and my mom’s Christmases are always good.
Goli Joon has received a beaded picture frame, a blue fleece blanket, and some aromatherapy lotions. She doesn’t seem embarrassed that she hasn’t brought gifts—after all she’s the deserving elder. Opening gifts at my mom’s takes a long time, and that’s after the leisurely brunch.
After brunch and gifts we do blessed nothing. Courtney wants to lie on the couch with me and massage each other’s feet. But I’m kind of embarrassed about doing that with Goli Joon here. And I can’t relax while seeing Goli Joon wear her coat because she’s cold in this house. She’s shivering and it makes me nervous. She did the same thing at our family Thanksgiving, but that holiday isn’t an all-day thing at Mom’s like Christmas.
Bruce is back living with my mom now, having broken up with the woman he’d been jogging and traveling with. Charlie, thank God, has moved on to deeper pockets. Now, Mom and Bruce are wearing matching Christmas turtlenecks, green jeans, and leather belts. They say they’re going to throw a small ham in the oven and boil some potatoes, and we’re welcome to stay. At Mom’s, staying for dinner is always optional on Christmas. Laura and Ty have already left—his mother is cooking a goose. I’ve never left before dinner, but finally, after Goli Joon unrolls her new fleece blanket to put over her coat, I say, “Let’s go.”
We gather all our Christmas booty and head out before the ham has even gone in the oven. In the car driving the short distance home, Goli Joon asks Naveed, “Why did we leave so fast? Her mother went to so much trouble and I was having such a nice time.”
When we get home I notice that the greenery Naveed hung above our front door for its festive spirit is turning brown. Naveed won’t take the greenery down, no matter how many times I ask him and make fun of his “Christmas brownery.” That brown mess will hang above our door until I finally get a ladder myself and take it down on a day in February when we’re having Savi and Matthew for dinner. We invited them partly so Matthew and his truck can help Naveed take apart and move Naveed’s black lacquer waterbed set to a faraway thrift store I found that will accept the donation. Goodwill won’t take waterbeds.
Prayer
The reason it’s rude to ask a guest how long they plan to stay is that you would never need to ask if you hoped, as you should, that they never leave. Most guests wouldn’t overstay, but mothers are special.
Goli Joon has had two heart valves replaced in the past, and now a third one is leaking. We bring her to her specialist who wants to start seeing her monthly once Naveed can nail down some better health insurance. Naveed starts talking about having her stay here, about her getting residency, and says if she stays forever she might get her own apartment and some kind of a job. But his one friend whose mother got her own apartment and a job is talked about behind his back. “Why would he pack her off to a little apartment and make her work when he and his wife have that big house?” they whisper. The answer, of course, is that his wife is American.
It’s hard to live with my boyfriend’s non-English-speaking mother in just the upstairs of this house with its single bathroom. Naveed is as happy as can be, but not oblivious to the tension. He translates and mediates the daily misunderstandings. He listens when I vent.
I think of what Niloofar said, that Naveed’s mom sounds like she’s as good as they come and it’s just the idiosyncrasies that bother me. It’s the loss of control. I’m lucky to have Naveed, a boyfriend who doesn’t watch ESPN while getting stoned and drinking eight bottles of Michelob (like Kurt), and who loves me with his whole body and soul instead of keeping me at arm’s length (like Quentin). Having his nice, helpful mom live with us for a while isn’t too high a price to pay, is it?
Even the idiosyncrasies are minor. I understand them more now, like that the reason Goli Joon leaves water splashed all over the bathroom is because of the necessary ablutions before her prayers. She must be ritually cleansed before praying. Wiping down the vanity after splashing water up her arms would undo the purification.
Even though she doesn’t seem religious, like the women who wear chadors and head scarves, she does pray. I accidentally interrupt her during her prayer time one afternoon. I’ve come to ask a cooking question, which can wait, but I stay a minute. I like seeing her in her gauzy prayer wrap. It’s white cotton and so soft, like the cheese cloth she uses to make the thick type of yogurt that Americans will someday discover only as “Greek.”
She’s prostrate on the floor and in a state that I wish I could learn to enter. I haven’t truly prayed since I was twelve, and it’s hard to believe I used to pray and pray like God was listening. When I was twelve, my God had a human ear and I spoke to him in my head. I didn’t worship him; he was just someone to talk to. But I never had ritualized prayer like Goli Joon has—I wonder if God is her confidant or her object to worship, or if it’s possible that he could be both.
I see how Goli Joon opens her hands when she prays to the above. I try it myself, just for a minute, in the privacy of the extra bedroom that I call my own. It feels not very Minnesotan, but it makes a difference. Praying with my palms up does help me feel more connected to the world, to something higher, and I realize that folding hands or pressing them together just makes me feel more clenched-up and repressed. I still don’t really feel God with my palms open to the ceiling—to the heavens, but I can see there’s potential for that. Maybe when I’m old like Goli Joon I will try it again.
Domesticity
Our kitchen and hallway floors are dark stone, which looks rich but hurts our feet and is cold in winter. I bear it or wear cozy slippers, but Goli Joon buys some Dr. Scholl’s sandals at Target for $14.99.
Although the foot beds are wood, she likes the support and the rubberized sole. She wears them on the stone floor and then kicks them off here and there around the carpeted house.
This is one of her very few habits of disorder. The shoes always trip me up. It’s usually I who am sloppy and Goli Joon straightening up after me, but in this one thing we reverse roles and I constantly pair the kicked-off Dr. Scholl’s. I point the sandal toes squarely to the foyer corner, with no small amount of satisfaction at proving her domestic imperfection.
Goli Joon still doesn’t like my lasagna, or my fish tacos and guacamole. The first time she bites into a “Jucy Lucy” she gives me that “dirt to your head” look. She’s offended by these burgers that are the specialty of a couple of rival bars
in Minneapolis and that I have learned to replicate. It’s an oniony cheeseburger with the cheese on the inside. It squirts out at you, burning your mouth, when you bite. It’s not nice to serve your boyfriend’s mother attack cheese.
Our stove is the color of the darkest red mineral clay. The oven is the same “Coppertone” color with a 1960s bubble design on the control panel. It’s the first gas stove I’ve ever used, having grown up in 1970s and 80s suburban homes and modern college apartments.
I don’t think I even knew about gas before, but I like controlling the flame. The flame here in our little cave scared me at first, but not Goli Joon. She’s probably always used a gas stove and she has tricks for controlling the heat. When she wants wider conduction, or just to keep something warm, she places a perforated hard aluminum circle over the flame and puts the pot on that. She brought that thing from Iran—I’d never seen one here. She uses a wok ring around the burner when she needs to raise the pot higher.
The cabinets are oak and the ivory Linoleum counters are flecked with light gold stars—I’d always thought of Linoleum as flooring, but apparently mid-century countertops were Linoleum brand too. Goli Joon wants the lights on at all times of day to supplement the tiny bit of light that filters through the trees into the small window. When she complains about the lack of light, Naveed brings home a ceiling fixture the size and shape of a small, florescent flying saucer. I keep the flying saucer turned off during the day when I’m alone in the kitchen. But I’m never alone in there for long.
We use few gadgets beyond the ancient implement of the sharp knife and a mini-chopper. There’s an old Black & Decker food processor pushed to the back of a cabinet, one of Naveed’s surplus store purchases that even he can’t figure out how to put together. There’s the robot-looking bread machine Naveed bought at Bank’s.
But for what we actually use, it’s mainly the big knife, with its sister the chopping board. We chop and slice and julienne and mince. When we make the herb stew from several big bundles of greens, the chopping board is stained green until Goli Joon bleaches it out.
The herbs have to be very finely chopped. Goli Joon’s thin arm goes at it and she can’t stop. So she chops extra and freezes them in Ziploc freezer bags. She’s a chopping machine. I can do all of the other chopping, but mincing the baskets full of herbs gives me tendonitis.
We have one counter space for chopping, but also a small table. Sometimes Goli Joon sits at the table to trim green beans or peel the waxy outer shell and the skins off the fava beans, while I might kneel on the chair across from her, rolling out pie dough. Eventually, like friends who have known each other a long time, we get comfortable with not keeping up a conversation all of the time while we’re working in the kitchen.
When we do talk, our conversation is usually small and shallow, partly because of our language barrier. But sometimes I muster up the Persian words and patience to get nosy and ask things—like why she sometimes burns wild rue, and why she doesn’t like the woman who lives across the street.
Then she gets annoyed with me and says things in Persian that I don’t understand until I give up and stop asking about things that are none of my business.
Persian New Year
Naveed’s distant cousin coincidentally lives here in the Twin Cities too. She lives not in the part of South Minneapolis where we live but just outside of it, where within twelve blocks the homes go from ritzy to decent to dangerous to live in. She and her family haven’t been here very long, and we only know they’re here because her grandma told Goli Joon. The cousin and her husband have two little boys, which they support on her husband’s taxi driving job. Maybe someday he can be an engineer again like he was in Iran, but this has to do for now.
Goli Joon, like a queen on her throne, waits for the woman to call. The younger should always call the elder. But Goli Joon is lonely at home and she finally bends the rule to call her a couple of times. She invites her and her family to the dinner party we’re planning for Noh Ruz, the Persian New Year.
To get ready for Noh Ruz, we get to do some major redecorating. We brush the brown brick fireplace with a wire brush until all the loose sand is out, and then we prime it and paint it white. To take advantage of all the renewal, I work hard to make that extra bedroom more my own.
The wild rue—the esphand—I learn, is not only to counteract the evil eye. It’s for cleansing, for a fresh start. To push out all of last year’s bad feelings, Goli Joon burns wild rue in every room of the house, insisting too on waving her smoking copper spoon of it over all of our heads.
Then, the three of us—Naveed, Goli Joon, and I—spend three solid days together in our little kitchen preparing the spring New Year’s dinner party for his cousin’s family and three of Naveed’s buddies and their families who live around here and in Edina. Some of them also have elderly live-in parents.
Goli Joon walks me through every step of the cooking, like the whole ocean whitefish that still has its eyes. I let her show me everything, even things she’s shown me several times before. I’m calm and happy about spring and the fragrant hyacinths filling our house, so I just nod my head and work as assigned.
Except for when she tries to make me soak everything, even the dried dill weed and the dried barberries for the three kinds of rice we’re going to make—I rebel at that. Iranians like to soak everything: dried herbs, rice, dried fruit, chicken. The Mohammadi roses are the only dried things that do not need to be soaked because they’re clean and pure, being from the family’s own estate in Kashan.
I soak the rice, but not the other things. They say they can have sand and rocks in them, but I haven’t had that problem yet. Cleaning dried dill in a bowl of water seems like overkill. I swear they would soak their salt before sprinkling it if they could—a little too obsessive on the cleanliness thing if you ask me.
“My mom and my Grandma Vivian have always said that everybody has to eat a peck of dirt before they die,” I tell Goli Joon.
Naveed translates it for me to her. “But we don’t want the guests to die at our house,” she answers.
When our guests arrive, we serve eggplant dip, cucumber-yogurt dip garnished with dried rose petals, and stuffed grape leaves. Our guests open pockets of pita bread and stuff them with fresh herbs, bright pink radishes, feta cheese, and walnuts. There are also green onions that Goli Joon cut vertically part-way up from the white part and shocked in cold water so the cut-ends curl up like they’ve had a perm.
We eat the appetizer spread and socialize before we will present the fish, the three kinds of khoresht, and the three kinds of rice. Goli Joon shows the parents of Naveed’s friends Naveed’s old photo album, which now has some photos of me stuck behind a plastic sheet on the back pages. I hear her say the words for “God willing” and “marriage” and I know she’s talking about him marrying me.
She’s saying nice things about me, and—I think—giving me all the credit for the cooking. “Valerie Joon made the dill rice, and even the barberry rice, and she didn’t even have any help from me or Naveed Joon at all,” she says. I’m a little puzzled about how emphatic she is about not taking any credit for the meal, but I figure she’s trying to make me look good to the others.
Finally, Naveed and I go into our little kitchen and move the fish onto a large platter. I take the large pot of dill rice off the stove and start spooning the rice into mounds on other platters. I take a little taste of the dill rice, and right away I feel the gritty crunch of sand.
Hoping it’s just the one bite, I take another and it’s fine. A third bite is gritty again, but I keep mounding the rice, praying that nobody will notice. Naveed comes back into the kitchen to gather more platters. The barberries have been sautéed in a pan with saffron and butter. It’s time to drizzle the fragrant mixture onto one of our two mounds of white rice. Naveed starts drizzling and mixing. It looks like little rubies on a bed of gold and pearls.
Then he takes a taste. “Did you soak the barberries?” he asks right away.
“You know, you can’t soak every ingredient in the pantry before you use it.”
“There’s sand in there,” he says. One more bite, and then he winces. “And rocks.”
Naveed spoons the barberry mixture into the garbage and we’re left with the second mound of white rice. He quickly mixes some saffron powder into water and garnishes the rice with that. Now we just have the gritty dill rice and the plain rice with a little saffron. “The dill rice is okay, right?” he says.
“I think it’s okay.” I’m doomed.
We bring the food into the living room and set it on the dining table, where everyone comes to dish up their own plates. I watch with horror as all our guests crunch as discreetly as they can on sandy dill rice until finally Goli Joon takes it off the table and throws it in the kitchen garbage. I’m red-faced, but defensive. If we bought our dried dill in little glass Schilling jars at Byerly’s instead of big plastic bags at the import market, it would not have dirt in it.
Still, there’s plenty of food that does not hurt our guests’ teeth. Everyone is stuffed before we even pour the tea and bring out the desserts: saffron-rosewater-pistachio ice cream and baklava, and big bowls of fruit.
Golden Chicks
Nobody has chickens around here. It’s illegal. Sure, later it will be legal “urban farming,” but right now it’s still unheard of. But since I started my new job at Agricultural Education Consultants, I’ve met lots of people who have chickens. The secretary has been selling chicks to other people in the office this week, and I put in my order for two.
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