Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  Fruition

  In July and August, thickets of herb foliage complement the flowers and vegetables springing up among them. But even in June, the radishes are ready. Goli Joon pulls them up from the earth. They’re as bright pinky red as the tight shirt Melinda used to wear out dancing at the Minneapolis nightclubs, hoping Prince or somebody would notice her.

  There’s a rhyme. There’s always a rhyme.

  Torobeche, familet ki ast? Subziche digeh.

  Little radish, who is your family?

  The other little vegetables.

  Goli Joon pulls weeds every day, and the landscape is transformed into something out of a storybook, except for the ugly chicken wire Naveed has surrounded the vegetables with to keep out the rabbits, which he chases away from our yard early every morning. Eventually, he builds a giant frame for the biggest section of garden and extends the chicken wire all the way over it, letting our two illegal chickens range freely in there.

  The cucumbers Goli Joon seeded are sweeter than any I’ve ever had. I realize that cucumbers are more like melons than the gourds they’re really related to. Give them a hard rind and they would be melons. Goli Joon picks and serves platters of our raw herbs, which we shove in our mouths between bites of other summer food. It feels so healthy. My skin clears up by August.

  In September, the basil and thyme produce a million tiny iridescent florets. You wouldn’t believe how they look at night, under the moon. Our nighttime garden is a perfect reflection of the starlit sky.

  Uncles

  Goli Joon’s tongue clicks against the back of her teeth as she stands at the living room window. I glance outside, where her two brothers smoke at the end of the driveway. Uncle Hami flicks his cigarette butt out onto our curb. She clicks again, and then she clucks her tongue too. It’s not the first time I’ve heard her do the click-cluck today—they are her little brothers, even if they’re nearly senior citizens, and she’s just being a concerned eldest sibling.

  I had worried when I heard Naveed’s uncles were coming for a “visit,” but Naveed assured me that these men have busy lives. They’re not planning to move in with us for the season.

  Uncle Hami is a geological engineer who lives in Dallas and travels all over the world inspecting the insides of the earth for mining and petroleum companies. Uncle Omid lives in Iran on family property on the Niahvarin mountainside near Goli Joon’s condo that she lives in when she’s there but not at the ancestral estate in Kashan. Omid has a business, and a much younger girlfriend, to get back to.

  We’ve spent the last few weeks preparing for the visit. I’ve noticed the house looks better and better with each holiday or visitor. We framed some old black and white photos to hang on the wall next to our drawings of nudes. Naveed has done the back-breaking work of building raised garden beds and filling them with flowers. We’ve cleaned, and organized, and Naveed has even moved some of his packrat stuff into the small laundry room downstairs that we share with the renters. It’s hard to get in and out of there with a laundry basket now, and the renters complain.

  Goli Joon gave me a piece of hot pink, gold-embroidered sari silk that her grandfather gave her upon his return from one of his Indian business trips so many decades ago. She’d been hanging onto it for years and said we should do something with it. I made it into a little lampshade for my ninety-nine dollar floor lamp that I bought at the Bombay Company. A lot happens when visitors are coming.

  One of Naveed’s family’s oldest friends knew that Uncle Omid and Uncle Hami were coming—they had told only one friend, but word travels fast around here. The friend and his wife are having a dinner party at their house twelve blocks west in Edina. Their house is very rich looking, but especially so because of all the antique gilded gold furniture. This is the look Melinda and I had been going for during our gold spray paint phase, if ever so pathetically. This home is filled with real gold gilt, silk Persian carpets and millions of antique dishes and collectible figurines.

  “Hurta-purta,” Goli Joon whispers to me behind the hostess’s back, the rhymey Persian term for useless knickknacks.

  I hear lots of advice from everyone at the party, like if a good woman believes in her man she will ensure success for the man, and thus they will be happy. Like how if she always makes sure her husband packs everything he needs for a business trip then he will have a successful trip and that will be good for them both. I know this philosophy from women’s study class: It’s Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Yet these women have careers. Maybe they’re just a special breed of superwomen who can do even more than all the other superwomen.

  And since they know Naveed is good and believe I’m a woman with a heart of gold, certainly Naveed will become very successful. Certainly, he will get out of his “stalled” career designing parking ramps. I laugh at the “stalled” part, thinking it’s a parking-stall pun, but nobody else is laughing. Goli Joon drinks tea off in a corner with another older woman, holding her chin high as she drinks it. She won’t argue with anybody, but in her book, her son has done great even though he’s not the owner of the company.

  I’m relieved at the party when the talk turns to politics and off of Naveed’s career. One of the women talks politics too and I’d like to hear what she has to say, but the hostess takes me aside to make small talk, like asking me where I like to go shopping. She’s probably trying to be polite by taking me aside to speak with me in English. I half-listen to her and half-listen to the political discussion going on in Persian. I know these Iranians all despise the conservative mullahs. None of them are very religious, except a few who go to the Sufi mosque in town. Naveed is quiet. He doesn’t participate in that conversation very much. He doesn’t like politics.

  Goli Joon tells me, Naveed, and her brothers on the ride home that those old friends, as successful as they are, don’t have any class. “For one thing,” she says. “The woman put so much rosewater in her basmati rice.”

  “But Goli Joon, I was sure you must have loved that,” I say. “Maybe her rosewater comes from your family’s business.”

  But no, she tells me, “Low-quality rosewater—the kind for pouring to cleanse a headstone at a grave. And the rice wasn’t steamed right. You can’t pour rosewater over everything and expect it to cover up bad cooking.”

  She and I are in the backseat together, with her youngest brother on the other side of her and her other brother in the front passenger seat next to Naveed. High on too much tea and saffron, I make her give me a high-five. She and I bond for a minute over defending our parking-ramp engineer, the subject of too much advice at the party. Who knows what those so-called friends would have said if Naveed had realized his true dream job, forest ranger in a forest with trout streams.

  When we get home late at night, Naveed goes outside to check his leaf pile where he’s composting and collects worms for fishing. He likes to check it at night, with a flashlight. That’s when the worms are most active.

  The next day is spent outside, from the time our tall Indian Summer sunflowers face the rising sun to the east until they have turned their giant gold-orange heads west to say goodnight. All three meals are taken in our garden chairs, not far from the chicken coop. More than once the uncles mention that the fatter hen, Nancy, would make good chicken kebab.

  Come evening, after the sunflowers have hung their heads in repose, Naveed drives Omid and Hami to the airport for their flights.

  Always after having lots of company, it feels like less of a burden to have just Goli Joon. And perhaps she thinks of it as less of a burden to care for only me and Naveed. We’re full from so much dining, so for the following days we eat only what we can gather straight from the garden. We’re too tired to go to the grocery store, so when we do start to feel hungry again, we joke that we really could cook our good-for-nothing hens. If only they would at least lay some eggs.

  Nancy and Nala have learned to fly short distances, and to take dirt baths in the garden. They’ve been acting strange lately and sitting
a lot. I wonder if they’re just hot and tired, or if they’re going to start laying soon.

  They’ve become very beautiful, but very different, and we won’t be entirely sure that Nala is a hen until she starts laying. For one thing, her comb is getting so big. And for another, she acts very butch, always strutting around and trying to control poor, sweet Nancy.

  Nancy is your typical fat hen. She’s tan and white and looks straight out of a nursery rhyme. Nala is black and white speckled, tall and lean, with a beady hardness to her eyes. Naveed feeds them corn cobs all of the time. Their crowns are always yellow and sticky because the pieces of kernels fly up and get stuck there when they peck at them, but they don’t care.

  “What a life,” Goli Joon says of them. “What must it be like to have no worries?”

  Pomegranates

  Now that Melinda knows I’ve been cooking a lot too, she emails me recipes and sends me big packets of food articles. I can spot them from fifteen feet away when I walk into the house and see them on the dining table. Melinda’s round, flourish-y handwriting stands out among the other pieces of mail. And I think, maybe the reason I’m cooking more now, and starting to develop a style of my own, is that I’m away from her. Her moving has taken that dominant influence off of me. Not that I don’t have other influences now. When her packets and recipes arrive, I flip through them and then throw them in the recycling basket. No Melinda, I think, I am not going to make your roasted fennel salmon bisque or your hazelnut cannolis. I’m not going to make your Italian wedding soup or your Cajun turkey. Well, maybe the Cajun turkey. I pull that one out of the basket.

  Suddenly, pomegranates are all the rage, and Martha Stewart shows how to juice them on her show. This is a new concept for me, since I usually see Naveed eating them over the sink. He cuts them into sections of their ruby juice-filled beads, puts a section in his mouth, sucks out the juice, and spits out the fiber. Bottled pomegranate syrup goes in khoreshts, and meatball sauces. But the food world has decided to put the pomegranate on a pedestal. Before long, we’re making our own juice from fresh pomegranates, and serving it on everything from ice cream to salad. The seeds bejewel our pomegranate-walnut fesenjoon sauce now when we have company. Goli Joon says pomegranate juice cleans your blood.

  Lazy Squash

  There are so many characters in the book I’m reading, called Moo, by Jane Smiley. I can hardly keep them straight, but I’m glad the author has included them all. It’s more real.

  There are so many people in all of our lives, and it must be really hard for writers to cull out so many characters when they write more focused novels. I’m learning that lesson with Shoedog. I can’t fit in all the weirdoes who worked with me in Women’s Shoes at Dayton’s in downtown Minneapolis, so I’m focusing on fictionalizing a few of them, especially Megan. She’s a little bit like me, except a major invention being that Megan secretly had a co-worker’s baby and gave it up for adoption. I’ve been watching All My Children with some of the other women at work over lunch, and that kind of thing happens all the time on that show.

  Moo takes place on an agricultural college campus in the Midwest, which has a lot in common with where I work now at Agricultural Education Consultants, so it’s given me an idea for another novel.

  Putting aside Shoedog for a little while will allow it to marinate and get better, I tell myself, because this is the kind of thing that writers say. And I start my new novel, about a dysfunctional farm family, incorporating some of my new obscure knowledge from work, like Best Practices for Managing Soybean Nematodes.

  I go to make milky tea and bring it back to my quiet room to read and write. But instead of reading and writing peacefully, I’m disturbed by Goli Joon waking up and fussing as soon as she enters the kitchen. Apparently, last night I must have put a big dirty pot in the dishwasher instead of rinsing it out first or washing it by hand.

  Goli Joon is loudly muttering, “Kheili tanbaleh!”

  I know that this means, She is very lazy, and that she’s talking about me. Goli Joon wouldn’t think I would know a word like tanbaleh. But she forgets—I do know it—because the word for pumpkin—kadoo tanbali—means the lazy squash. I’ve learned to make lazy squash khoresht from watching Goli Joon.

  How can she think I wouldn’t comprehend that word? Does she even care if I do? I should recognize my fault of being like the laziest of all the squashes, refusing even to roll unless given a hard push. Only finding its use at Halloween, scaring people with sober triangle eyes and an angry mouth.

  Our little bond we’ve been forming falls away, and I pull out my journal and write furiously—like an angry letter to myself, I write how:

  it’s so horrible to live with my boyfriend’s mother

  I know that I’m lazy, or depressed, or depressing

  I hate being guilted about it

  But, of course, something in Goli Joon’s criticism reminds me of when I lived with Melinda and she complained about me too. It’s me. I’m messy and lazy and I still don’t squeeze the water out of the sponge or wipe down the counters. What is wrong with me?

  When Naveed pokes his head in, he sees me crying, tears smearing the ink in my journal. He comes over and sits next to me on my gold spray painted iron bed, which wobbles because it isn’t really strong enough for two adults. He puts his arm around me, and I ask him if he also hates me because I’m lazy.

  “No, but you know, you do take a lot of shortcuts,” he says.

  “Like what?”

  “You leave crumbs and the dripped cheese in the toaster oven whenever you make your cheese bread. It flames up for the next person who uses it. It could start a fire. Why don’t you put some foil under the bread to catch the cheese?” His mom must have been complaining about that too.

  “Because then the bottom of the bread wouldn’t get toasty,” I say. “But do you and your mom hate me because of that?”

  “You wonder if we like you less for not cleaning the toaster oven?” he asks. And then I remember all of Naveed’s piles of pack-rat stuff taking over the house and feel a little better.

  “Why do you still always find it impossible to believe that I love you? You’re the most beautiful woman in the world to me,” he says. “Just don’t burn down the house.”

  “Okay,” I say, “And you with all your pack-rat piles, you don’t burn down the house either.” We agree. We will both do what we can to avoid burning down the house.

  After that day, Naveed affectionately calls me his kadoo tanbali, his pumpkin—his lazy squash, just like he calls his mom Gol-ab instead of Goli sometimes for all of her rosewater. And although I know it’s because I’m lazy, I like it. Because nobody has ever called me pumpkin.

  Kitty Cat

  Just in time for me to be saved from some horrible crime borne of my own frustration and impatience with living with Naveed’s mother, she goes to Montreal for three weeks because Naveed’s brother Darab is visiting there. He’s left their father in the care of a nurse and his wife’s parents who also live with them. Maybe Darab needed a break from all of these elderly parents, but instead he got his mother. Naveed would never say it, but I think he needed a break too because he asked Darab to invite her.

  Oddly, I miss Goli Joon in a way while she’s gone. Like when I happen to catch a good Oprah show or eat some really sweet fruit that might prove to be as good as the fruit in Iran and I just want to see if she agrees. Or when I’m cold and wearing my fleece stocking cap that she sewed for me to wear around the house. She sewed one for Naveed too, and even one for Courtney.

  The yard is full of weeds when Goli Joon is not there to pull them. I look around at all the weeds and think, if Goli Joon were here this would be all herbs.

  While she’s gone, we take in a stray kitten. I know Goli Joon doesn’t like cats, and I know that Naveed knows this too, so I’m not sure why either of us agreed to take the kitty.

  When she returns, she seems insulted that we have done so and she starts complaining more about all kinds of
things. She seems more easily aggravated since returning from her trip.

  One day, Naveed drops me and Goli Joon off at Minnesota Fabrics and says he’ll pick us up in forty-five minutes, and then doesn’t come back for two hours. He’s at Home Depot and doesn’t look at his watch. Goli Joon, after almost two hours, waits at the glass door for him, and begins crying. I try to get her to look at the pattern books with me, but she thinks Naveed has been killed in an accident. She begins hitting herself, right in front of the other customers, who then stare at both of us. When he still hasn’t come back after another half hour of this embarrassment, I feel like hitting myself too. Instead, I pinch the skin between my index finger and my thumb, which is much more discreet.

  When Naveed finally pulls up in his CRX, I climb in back and Goli Joon collapses into the front passenger seat. She cries to him that he doesn’t care about her, and that he doesn’t want her to live with us, because otherwise why did we get a cat and why would he forget her at the fabric store? She cries that she knows I don’t want her there either.

  Naveed just lets her vent, and tries to explain that Home Depot is like another dimension to him. He wasn’t wearing his watch and they didn’t have any clocks in there. Of course we want her to stay with us for as long as she will honor us with her company. And, he adds in the rush of the moment, we will kick out the renters so the cat can stay downstairs.

  Agricultural Science

  My mass communications degree, my PR work for the Gypsy human rights guy, and my productivity as Editorial Assistant have paid off. I have already been promoted to Production Editor at Agricultural Education Consultants.

  I somehow almost fit in at this job, where I write in bullet points all day long. Now that there’s the internet, my bullet point writing skills are in high demand. Nobody wants to read anymore, but only to scan for information, my boss says. Also, it’s a good fit because all the women here and two guys watch All My Children in the employee lounge at lunchtime. Along with my promotion, I’m now eligible for the company’s tuition reimbursement program, so I start looking at the university’s course catalog. After all those tuition checks, my dad won’t believe I get to take classes at the company’s expense instead of his.