Female chicks, of course. The crowing of a rooster wouldn’t be cool in Minneapolis. “Where do your co-workers live?” Naveed asks. Clearly they must live out in the country, or an outer ring suburb.
“We’ll keep them out back,” I say. “Nobody will know, except for the renters.”
Naveed says I’ve clearly never been around chickens. People will know. But I bring them home anyway and Naveed builds a little coop for them. I name them Nancy and Nala.
Goli Joon calls out one of her rhymes when she sees them. She’s always calling out rhymes—she has one for everything. It’s just part of the everyday poetry of the Persian language.
Joojeh joojeh taliyeh, khoonet kojast? To baghche.
Golden chick-chick, where is your home?
It’s in the garden.
We keep a lid on it. None of the neighbors find out about Nancy and Nala. Except for the Iranian neighbors, Milad and Yasmin. Somehow, they know.
Their youngest daughter, Parvaneh, flies over to our house like the butterfly she is named after to see the chicks, and instantly falls in love. She stands there over the coop in a little purple tutu and kisses them again and again until Yasmin Noury comes to get her. She yells at her that she should know better and that she’s going to have to disinfect her mouth for kissing the chicks. But Yasmin’s eyes are full of laughter and love for Parvaneh as she leads her back home.
Jogger
Since the weather has warmed up a little and the streets aren’t icy, there are more joggers running by our house. Watching the female joggers, with their suits that get skimpier with each day that the weather warms, becomes another of Goli Joon’s favorite pastimes. “They have no shame! Dirt to their heads—why would their mothers let them go out that way?” she asks, especially about those who are the youngest and in the best shape.
But one bright day, I see Goli Joon peeking through the curtains and she’s silent. Her whole body contorts as she cranes her head to follow something or someone that is moving out of sight. “What’s out there?” I ask.
Goli Joon jumps out from her hiding spot in the curtains.
“Nothing. It wasn’t anything.” But fifteen minutes later I come back in the room and she’s contorted again. I move into the curtains myself and see him: A man at least sixty years old who is not quite jogging and not quite walking. He’s olive-skinned and tall, very tall, and handsome. Even I see the appeal.
“He’s pretty,” I say in Persian. The word for handsome is different, but I don’t know it yet so I just say pretty. This is how I always make do with the language. I look out the window again just as the man finishes up his calisthenics and then walks up to the front steps of the house across the street. Yasmin Noury comes outside to bring the man a glass of water.
“Is he Iranian?” I ask—for I can often tell now, even from a distance. “Is that her father?”
“Who—what are you saying?” Goli Joon asks, her olive face turning as pink as the hyacinths we had not long ago on our Noh Ruz altar. And that’s the end of the conversation.
The distant cousin has not called since the Noh Ruz party, even though she should have called to thank Goli Joon the next day, and to invite us—or at least Goli Joon—over for dinner in reciprocation.
“Your cousin wore too much gold jewelry! It’s not necessary to wear all of one’s gold at the same time,” Goli Joon says to Naveed after several days of the phone not ringing for her. “She looked like a fat Mexican lady.”
“She shouldn’t say things like that,” I whisper to Naveed. “It sounds prejudiced.”
“I know, but she feels hurt and disrespected,” he whispers back. Sometimes I’m glad she doesn’t speak enough English for people I know to hear some of the things she says when she feels hurt and disrespected.
I’m still learning the rules called taarof, which include particulars about inviting, and serving, and at what point you can accept something that is offered. In general, you have to ask three times to give a person the dignity of refusing your invitation twice before they finally accept or truly decline. But there’s so much more to taarof than that.
I’m still learning the manners of initiating every communication with an elder. Maybe this cousin and her generation struggle with the traditions too. After all, she’s young.
And the woman across the street from us? Yasmin? She doesn’t talk to Goli Joon as much as it seems Persian manners would dictate either.
Landscape Planning
Naveed and I are going to grow a garden. We’re obsessed with our garden layout. Plant and seed catalogs are strewn about our bedroom. Our first shipment has just arrived. The soil beds are tilled. It's going to be perfect.
This morning, Goli Joon saw us planning our garden at the dining table and bustled back into her room. She came out with her king-sized white pillowcase of mysterious items, telling us to forget those catalogs. From the pillowcase, she pulled huge brown paper packages. She had seeds of tarragon, cress, fenugreek, thyme, cilantro, parsley, onions and shallots, five types of basil, and a cucumber variety that Naveed tells me tastes sweet like melon.
We only have so much space. Now here she is with enough seeds to fill a park, and pretty heavily on the herbs if you ask me. She’s generous and thoughtful to bring these seeds, but I don’t appreciate it. Not only am I not thankful, but I’m pissed off.
The thing is, the garden has become a romantic endeavor. It’s almost the only thing we have just between the two of us. But I have picked the wrong thing to exclude Goli Joon from because she’s been gardening since before I was even born.
After some negotiating, some space is freed up for Goli Joon. Also, my yellow marigolds are sacrificed in the negotiations. Yellow flowers, she tells me, invite sickness into the home. I argue that yellow is the color of pure joy, the color of the sun itself. She argues that yellow, in a flower, is the color of death. I say that’s fine, I will give them to my mother, who’s always planted yellow marigolds. And her kitchen has always been yellow too.
Naveed is reworking our garden blueprint now, tightening up the spaces for all of our flowers, so that Goli Joon can tend her own section of tilled earth.
Horticultural Science
It’s early morning the next day and I’m looking out the window above our new bed. Will today be good planting weather or will it storm again? I look to the sky. The sun is out.
"Hey!," I say out loud, peering closer. Goli Joon is outside in her floral housedress, the one with the eyelet lace-trimmed front pockets. She reaches into one of the pockets and pulls out a brown paper bag, then squats over a garden bed that is supposed to be for old-fashioned perennials—purple coneflowers, forget-me-nots, and such. Her hand reaches into the bag, and then she flicks her wrist. My eyes follow a gust of tiny herb seeds flying across the freshly tilled soil.
She throws out another handful. A few more flicks of her thin wrist and she has filled up my perennial bed. And moved on to another flower bed. This short, sixty-something-year-old Iranian woman who has invaded my newly minted independent-American-woman-of-the-house life barely pauses before crouching down in the vegetable garden and seeding most of it too.
I wonder, should I make a scene in the yard now or just till her seeds two feet under when she's not looking? I mean, this is our garden! I may be overreacting, but this seems to confirm my fears that Naveed and I will never be just a normal couple. Normal to me means nuclear family, not this extended-family bull.
I don’t till her seeds under. But Goli Joon has broken our agreement, so I go outside and quietly replant the yellow marigolds along the walkway to the front door. They look cheerful to me, not like death. At first they look cheerful, anyway, but then I somehow lose my enthusiasm for yellow. I can see that it isn’t all sunshine, and thinking of Goli Joon’s words about sickness, I remember about the yellow plague and bile and Melinda’s scruffy chair that she left behind. That classic story I read in Women’s Studies class comes to mind too—The Yellow Wallpaper—about the 1800s hous
ewife whose doctor husband confined her for a nervous disorder until she really did go insane staring at the walls all summer long.
Still, the marigolds stand, a testament to my own stubbornness, not to be outdone by Naveed’s mother’s own desire to do things her way.
The rest of the day, I carom between resentment and anticipation. By dinnertime, we progress to talking about what else we could plant in our negative space and what we will cook with our future homegrown bounty. That discussion leads to an evening trip to the plant nursery, where I witness Goli Joon pinch off a sprig of portulaca rose to bring home and root. I glare at her, half expecting to hear sirens and be hauled to a security office.
“Free sample,” she says, a term she knows well in English, as she sticks it in her pocket.
A few days later, Naveed and I do our own planting exactly as we have planned. We plant our seeds and nursery plants just where we said we would, even though that space is already seeded to the hilt.
Naveed and I water morning and night, and who knows how much watering goes on while we’re at work. I’m sure the garden will drown when the unexpected flood rains of Gilgamesh pound the earth for the next several days. But I watch for signs of life against all odds. We all watch, getting our faces down to the earth several times a day to see if anything has poked up.
When we see the first sprouts, we know we have a jungle on our hands. The seedlings are coming in so thick that it looks more like a carpet, or a lawn, than a garden bed. The how-to books say to thin out crowded seedlings by decapitation. I stand out there and see how my garden plan is ruined.
One day, while I’m watching my plants get strangled by Goli Joon’s vines, I see that middle-aged man leave the house across the street for his daily jog. He begins to do his calisthenics in the middle of the road.
I go back inside, having decided not to pinch the heads off of Goli Joon’s plants, but to just complain over and over to Naveed instead. I turn the doorknob and give the door the firm kick it needs to open. Goli Joon walks quickly from the living room—probably from her post at the window—toward the kitchen, slides open the pocket door, and closes it behind her.
Naveed confirms to me, when asked, that the jogger is Yasmin Noury’s father who lives with them from time to time. I half-joke that maybe if he and Goli Joon got together, then we and the neighbor couple might actually be able to go out like normal couples sometimes instead of with our third wheels. We often see the three of them, with the children, heading out and I realize I have never seen Milad and Yasmin leave the house all alone. Naveed says, “We can go out as a couple whenever we want to. My mom doesn’t need a boyfriend to babysit her.”
“But we never do,” I say. That night, Naveed comes up with a James Bond movie date plan. We don’t do dinner out too because Goli Joon had been making the khoresht since right after breakfast, but at least we go out and eat popcorn out of the same bucket, and I can sit in the front seat of the car.
Duluth
The lupines are in bloom in the roadside ditches and fields around Lake Superior in Duluth, where my mom and Bruce are running in the annual Grandma’s Marathon. I’ve never seen lupines before, except on the photo on a seed packet. I bought some seeds last month and planted them in a garden bed as soon as it was safe to plant, but they never came up at all. It could be because of all Goli Joon’s herbs, or maybe I should have started them under lights inside.
There are broad fields of lupines here, hundreds of thousands of them. I wonder aloud if they’re native or not; they look like nobody had to do anything special to get them to grow and flower. But Laura and Courtney aren’t interested.
Mom and Bruce have a suite at Fitger’s, the good hotel that books up almost a year ahead of the marathon. Bruce had it booked long ago since he runs Grandma’s every year and practically has a standing reservation. Our mom registered late after treating it like the biggest decision of her life. My sisters and I decided just two weeks ago that we should cheer her on, so we took what we could get—a run-down motel room outside of town. Laura wiped down everything when we arrived and always keeps her slippers on when we’re there, which is as little as possible.
I’m not even in the race, but it’s the most exercise I’ve had in years, maybe ever. That’s because, in our role as encouraging daughters, we drive from one point on the route to another to cheer. We park the car, then we have to dash to the viewing section in time to be sure we see her go by. Then we have to dash back to the car to do it all over again. That’s hard for me not only because I’m out of shape, but also because the locals are holding lots of garage sales to make some cash on all the tourists. I’ve been spending too much time with Naveed and his mom, so I too now brake for garage sales. Laura and Courtney drag me from them, only once letting me stop to buy somebody’s old sweatshirt because even in the middle of June the Lake Superior air chills me.
We only see Bruce at the first cheering stop because he’s fast and has passed by the time we get to the others. But we see Mom at all five points along the route just as planned. We wave and holler, “Lookin’ good, Eugenia!” and, “You can do it, Mom!” even though by the third point she isn’t looking good and we aren’t sure she should be doing it.
When we arrive at the finish line, we wait for a long time. Courtney wonders if we missed her crossing, so she dives into the crowd to look for her. She comes back with Bruce, who is wrapped in a big silver reflective sheet that’s supposed to keep his muscles warm and prevent cramping.
A woman with a prosthetic lower leg crosses the finish line. I look at Bruce with concern, but he’s clapping for the woman. “Shouldn’t our mom get in before the lady with the artificial limb?” I ask.
“No worries, that lady’s an elite runner. She usually comes in a lot faster. She had a bad day.”
“So the lady with the artificial leg who had a bad day is done, but our mom is still out there? Should we go look for her?” I ask. There aren’t many people left now, mostly people who look like they ran the marathon on a bet or a dare, and one of them pukes in the middle of the road as soon as she crosses.
But then, finally, as if she’d stopped to freshen up, our mom comes into view and we cheer wildly as she crosses the white line. She waves and smiles nonchalantly just like Grandma Viv, as if she’s out shopping for a new dress in downtown Duluth, not like she just ran more than twenty-six miles. Somebody hands her a silver blanket as she crosses the finish line. She wraps it around herself like she was in fact just out shopping for a new dress, and this is it, and doesn’t it look lovely?
We all give her hugs and congratulate her. She pushes us away because she’s sweaty, but we keep hugging her anyway because we’re so proud.
“Did you see the lupines?” she asks, and I realize she’s in a state of runner’s euphoria, an earned high that did not come without intense effort. My mom ran Grandma’s Marathon, I imagine telling my friends and my colleagues at Agricultural Education Consultants. Of course they will be impressed.
I walk with her and then I hold her up from behind while Bruce helps her stretch her legs out in front. I’ll never be a runner, and maybe Mom and I don’t have a lot in common. But I notice she asked me, and only me, about the lupines. I nod enthusiastically. “Of course, how could anybody miss them?”
Behind Our House
Our kitchen’s back door leads outside to four steps and a concrete patio used by the basement renters. Naveed is thinking of kicking them out and letting us finally have the basement, but right now we need the money. This morning, the young women sit on the steps and smoke cigarettes. The chickens are bigger now. Nala squawks at the girls, as if complaining about the cigarette smoke.
Goli Joon, safe in her dark cave, peeks out the small window, craning her head sideways so she can see and hear the renters. “How bare they dress! They are almost naked,” she whispers to me.
Goli Joon cannot normally understand English very well, but she tries with all her might to make out what the girls are saying. E
ach morsel of these conversations not meant for her ears is delicious to her and she doesn’t care that I know she’s snooping. “Shhh,” she whispers. “The blonde-haired one is talking. She said she is going to sleep with her boyfriend tonight.”
Goli Joon revels in the warm weather and spends a lot of time out in the garden. But she still likes to spy from inside. Naveed claims not to have seen Goli Joon spying on the renters, and he totally denies my mention of her quiet but obvious interest in the man who jogs and stretches in the road in front of our house. I ask her in private if she’s met him, but she looks at me as if I’m completely out of my mind. For one thing, she’s—at least technically—married. But even without that, having any sort of romance at this point must be unfathomable to her, because—as far as I know—it’s been twenty-five years. Still, it seems as if there’s some interest.
As much as I pretend like I don’t understand why my mom needs a man in her life so desperately, I’m the same and I cannot understand how Goli Joon could go twenty-five years without one. I mention this thought to my mom because I tell her everything when she will listen, even things that are none of my business. She says, “You shouldn’t assume Goli Joon doesn’t have the same feelings as any normal woman.”
I know what she means is that I shouldn’t assume that a respectable Muslim woman doesn’t have the same desires as any other women.
“I wonder if she’s ever, you know, been with anybody else in all this time,” I say.
“I would,” my mom says, always seeing other people’s situation through the thought of what she would do. “I wouldn’t just sit around.”
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