Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  I also know she will be too hot and won’t stop complaining. I can see her now, complaining about Minnesota again—so cold most of the year and then so hot and humid that you nearly melt. In between my ears this conversation rages on and I’m saying, Well, you wouldn’t be so hot if you weren’t wearing a dark wool suit! I get so worked up perseverating over this conversation in my head that I finally have to insist that Naveed take her back to Dayton’s. I want him to get her in something pastel and summery, something not marked down eighty percent, and I remind Naveed that she’s probably going to return it after she wears it anyway.

  Our wedding is at a big public garden on Lake Minnetonka, just to the east of Quentin’s home. My bridesmaids, my beautiful little flower girl, and my ring bearer—Savi’s boy—are hidden away because the bride should not be seen yet.

  We’re in a white gazebo overlooking the lake when I briefly imagine that Quentin is going to have heard of the wedding and drive his speedboat up to the garden’s shoreline. He’ll make off with me like a masked man on a horse in some Harlequin Romance novel, even though now it has been more than two years since I last heard from him. I imagine Parvaneh doing her little flower girl steps over to the people seated in their garden chairs to tell them I have gone.

  Everybody looks good. Naveed’s beautiful and successful cousins from his father’s side come, rebelliously wearing black designer gowns for a summer garden wedding. They make all the other women look frumpy in their flowery garden frocks.

  Seeing their sultry Persian beauty, I remember the time I dyed my hair brunette in college when I worked at Dayton’s. A man who worked there with me noticed and said, “There’s a place in a man’s heart no blonde can go.” I know he was only being kind by applying this truth to me—my brunette dye job couldn’t really get me into that place. But Naveed’s stunning cousins are all the way in that place. Every man there gawks at their beauty.

  Grandma Vivian is staying at my mom’s, and Goli Joon has copied her dramatic drawn-in eyebrows. Melinda admires my grandma, how she knows how to hold her wine glass daintily by the stem instead of holding it by the bowl of the glass like the rest of us ogres.

  Savi is my maid of honor, much to Melinda’s disappointment, but she’s sure that I chose Savi only because Savi lives here. I hadn’t even asked Melinda to be a bridesmaid at all when she started asking me what her dress would look like. Then she insisted that I not make my bridesmaids wear those hideous satin shoes dyed to match, which I did anyway, mainly because she asked me not to.

  Melinda feels she has done her gracious best by being a regular bridesmaid, but she makes sure everybody knows that she’s known me longer, and better, than Savi. Laura and Courtney are bridesmaids too. My father looks handsome when he comes to the gazebo ready to walk me down the brick path aisle to give me away to Naveed. As soon as Parvaneh, in her pink dress, starts her step/step-together/step along the path in front of us, and tosses out the first rose petals, my father starts to cry. But he quickly wipes his tears, and our march is on.

  My mom does a reading, the one I’d chosen about how a man leaves his mother and cleaves to his wife. There’s an awkward feeling in the air as she reads it, because everybody knows that we have cleaving going on in different directions in our house. My mom reads it beautifully though, and it’s a wonderful concept, that leaving and cleaving.

  After our reception at a Persian restaurant that is fancier than the Dinky Kebab, we carry out a few little Persian wedding traditions, like having some cones of sugar rubbed together over a cloth over our heads to sweeten our lives together. Also, the bride is supposed to make cookies to serve at the wedding, so I did that and everybody is impressed because I made five kinds of Persian cookies and I’m not even Iranian.

  I’d also read about this funny little tradition in which some colorful threads and a needle are placed by the cookies. It’s supposed to symbolize the sewing shut of the mother-in-law’s mouth. But when one of Naveed’s cousins comments to Goli Joon about it, she says she’s never heard of this symbolism and she exclaims to God that she has done nothing to deserve such disrespect.

  “It’s right there in my New Food of Life book of Persian recipes and cultural information,” I tell Naveed, but he says he doesn’t know what I was thinking.

  “Don’t talk to me about it,” I say. “It’s your tradition. My mom thought it was cute.”

  The rest of the reception goes better, except that it takes an hour and a half to serve all the kebabs. When our limo drops us off at home, Naveed carries me over the threshold in my wedding gown. His mom has forgotten about how I have symbolically attempted to sew her mouth shut and ululates like a joyful human noisemaker. Naveed’s cousins have been staying here for the last three days while I spent my last days “single” at Laura and Ty’s. One cousin’s husband gives us the Islamic blessing to supplement our Lutheran ceremony.

  My wedding gold is twenty, twenty-two, and twenty-four karat gold. There are pieces that are chunky, pieces that are dainty and filigreed, and pieces with palm trees and griffins etched into the gold. Some of my new gold bends because it’s soft, unlike the strong but impure gold alloys that we have in the United States. A few weeks later I will show Naveed and Goli Joon a crunched bangle and a bauble that has become loosened from the gold. Goli Joon will cluck and say it’s better than the “fake” (fourteen karat) gold we have here, and hers never bends. She’s been wearing her Persian turquoise necklace and earrings for forty years and the turquoise has never fallen out. I’m probably not taking good care of my jewelry.

  But today, everything is perfect for me. I didn’t know we would have another party after the reception, and nobody has invited my family and friends, but that’s fine with me. I can tell them later how I was showered with gold jewelry, and how we ate and danced until it was time for us to go to the hotel room we’ve reserved for our wedding night, which Savi surprised us by filling with fresh flowers.

  I know that one person’s wedding day is always the day of another person’s death. It’s always this way, I tell myself when Princess Diana dies on our wedding night, with her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed.

  Other things happened on our wedding night too—I learn later from Naveed (and not from Melinda) that his best man spent the night with Melinda and that she was “wild in bed.” His best man had bite marks.

  Fishing Opener

  I always imagined that my first year of being married would be so memorable, but the time goes so fast and I won’t end up remembering very much of it. We work a lot and life gets busy. Not much seems different from the past couple of years, except that now my name is Valerie Shushtari. I have finally shed the name that has an embarrassing meaning in Persian for another name that hardly anyone knows how to pronounce. I don’t change my name to his to be old fashioned, and Naveed doesn’t ask me to because it isn’t even a Persian tradition. I change it because Shushtari sounds cool, and I’m ready for a change.

  I guess things are pretty good. Naveed still surprises me with things he knows how to do, like carve a radish into a rose, weld pipes, and repair my broken jewelry. He’s always buying me flashlights and safety gadgets like pepper spray. The tea delivered to me in bed each morning is another steady example of his thoughtfulness.

  But, I don’t know, I just thought we’d be a little more romantic one year in. Naveed hasn’t been himself. I asked him if he was seeing somebody else once. He pulled me into his lap and said never, that I would always be his and he would always be only mine, but that he’s stressed out at work. He doesn’t feel like himself either.

  Lately, he’s had to start doing the sales proposals and “relationship management” more than the engineering work he was built to do. If not engineering, he would have been a forest ranger, or a professional fisherman, not a “relationship builder.” He spends hours at night on the proposals, and thinks the people he’s pitching to are jerks. When he’s not working or taking his mom to the doctor, he also needs time with the guys, like lunch a
t the Dinky Kebab with his Iranian buddies or fishing with American friends.

  I might spend weekends reading in bed, or baking pies in the kitchen with Goli Joon. Naveed has become friends with Matthew, and now they even spend more time together than I do with Savi. I think this might be because Naveed likes to fish but doesn’t have a boat, and Matthew likes to eat fish and his sailing catamaran is great for fishing. Meanwhile, Savi is always running in a hundred different directions with her kids, volunteering, and covering stories—not to mention with all of her Caribbean community stuff that doesn’t involve me.

  Also, Matthew needs help fixing the catamaran, and Naveed likes fixing things. Because of all his collecting, Naveed has every tool known to man, large or small, power or hand. He has not only every tool, but every kind of glue, every kind of string or rope or line or cord, every wheel, every winch, jack, or pulley. If he can ever find any of them in the garage. He lets Matthew come over and dig through the stuff, and he finds a few things he needs to get the old boat in shape for the fishing opener.

  So, once it’s all fixed, Naveed goes up to Fish Trap Lake with Matthew and his parents, while Savi has stayed home with her kids. I’m spending the weekend reading in bed, trying to motivate myself to write but not actually writing, and watching T.V. in the living room with Goli Joon.

  So this...this is my marriage. And yet, even though it’s not what I expected, I’m not really complaining. Not about the marriage itself. Maybe, though, about my life, thinking it would be a little brighter—and have a more special vibration—if I could take a bong hit just once in a while.

  Blue Dress

  Goli Joon has been at home all day watching the news while Naveed and I were both having long days at work. The change of scenery, in going out for dinner, does us all good. I have two glasses of garnet-colored wine before our kebabs arrive.

  We’ve starting eating at the Dinky Kebab now that I don’t really feel ashamed anymore about dating my customer. We’ve been married for a whole year, so I imagine I’ve proven that it wasn’t just me being a slut.

  Finally, I’m getting more into wine, and it hardly even makes me feel sick anymore. The Dinky Kebab got a beer and wine license and they carry one label that’s made by some Iranians in California. It’s meant to taste like the wines of ancient Shiraz.

  Because of this marketing and the Persian wine label, I’m able to convince Goli Joon to take a sip, even though it’s against her religion and illegal in the Islamic Republic of Iran. She claims she never drank wine. I know this isn’t exactly true. Long ago, the Kashani rose estate had wine grapes. By long ago, I mean like 5400 B.C., but also only fifty years ago when she was a kid. Naveed is sure she drank the wine, but only her sister drinks it now. Naveed says Goli’s sister grows just enough grapes to make wine in secret to drink as “ancient Persian medicine.”

  At first, she makes a sour face. “What it says on that label is clearly just lies because real Persian wine couldn’t possibly taste this bad,” she says.

  “It’s a good thing you don’t like it, because you shouldn’t drink more than a sip without asking your doctor first,” says Naveed. But when Naveed isn’t looking, she drinks the rest of my glass except for the last sip, swallowing it down like lemonade on a hot day.

  After a few minutes, Goli Joon leans in toward Naveed over her chicken kebab, which a waitress I do not know has just delivered. “Tell me why the man wants the blue dress.”

  I look around and notice that I don’t know any of these new waitresses. Naveed shrugs. Goli Joon leans diagonally across to me. “Ken Starr. Why does he want Monica Lewinsky’s dress?”

  “I don’t know. What are they saying on the news?” I take my last sip of wine.

  Goli Joon strains to try to think what she can remember from today’s news. “I understand half only.”

  While I’ve been reading about President Clinton and his intern-mistress on my computer at work, Goli Joon has been watching the news about it on T.V. constantly. She’s quite excited about the whole thing. Each day, there’s another juicy tidbit in the news about it and Goli Joon desperately wants to know the whole story. This business about the blue dress is a piece Goli Joon doesn’t understand. She asks Naveed again.

  “Maybe President Clinton bought it for her,” he says, “and that proves they had an affair.”

  “No,” she says. “On the news they say Monica Lewinsky bought it herself at The Gap.”

  “She wore it on their first date,” I say, taking a sip from Naveed’s glass of wine, which he is drinking too slowly, “in the Oval Office.”

  I’m laughing inside. I’m kind of enjoying the conversation. It’s much better than what we usually talk about.

  “But why does Ken Starr want to test it?”

  “To prove that it’s the same one she bought at The Gap,” Naveed says, even though he knows that doesn’t make any sense.

  Goli Joon gets louder. The wine is having its effect. “Why do they have to test Monica Lewinsky dress?” she shouts. I see Niloofar coming from across the room, with the pot of amber-colored tea. “I do not understand why you do not tell me.”

  “Maybe Ken Starr’s a creepy perv,” I say, but she looks at me blankly, not understanding these words.

  “Maybe Ken Starr wants to try on the dress himself,” Naveed adds, not being able to stop himself from enjoying this a little bit too.

  I sprinkle salt and sumac powder on my kebab and cut it with a fork and knife, then I hold up a piece of it that I’m about to eat. I’m going to tell her. I don’t know the Persian word for sperm though, but I could take a guess.

  “Why Ken Starr wants the dress?” she yells in English. People glance over at her, then look away.

  “They have to test the dress for President Clinton’s seeds,” I yell back in Farsi. Good Farsi, apparently. It’s taken me until this moment to get it right.

  Stainless steel cutlery drops at the table behind us. Conversation stops. Goli Joon shrieks, draws in a loud breath, and holds it. My linguistic guess of seeds for sperm was spot on.

  Niloofar turns on her heel and heads to the other side of the room with her teapot, then looks back at me shaking her head. Goli Joon is both offended and delighted, her eyes full of life. “Dirt to her head!” she says.

  “President Clinton is the one who is married,” I say. “Dirt to his head!”

  She slaps the table three times and takes a sip of Naveed’s wine. “Yes, dirt to his head! Dirt to his head!”

  The other customers at the restaurant are looking at us, but then they try to go back to their food. Niloofar goes back to pouring tea. Naveed doesn’t take us back to the Dinky Kebab for the rest of the year.

  Three Bedrooms Upstairs

  It didn’t hit me that I could be pregnant, even when I was puking my guts out until two-thirty yesterday. I had called in sick, then slept and threw up all day.

  It seemed like flu, but when Goli Joon started looking at me funny the idea occurred to me. I went out and bought a pregnancy test during her afternoon nap, but waited to take it until this morning. I didn’t even have to wait the full three minutes because it turned purple right away. Fortunately, today is Saturday and I don’t have to go to work.

  As I bound outside to show Naveed the purple pee stick, he announces that our chickens have finally laid eggs. We’d given up on eggs a long time ago, thinking our chickens must be infertile and still unsure about the sex of Nala. He holds them up; one egg is green and one is brown, so he thinks they each happened to lay at the same time. He’s busy cleaning out their coop, but finally he sees me holding up the stick and dancing around him.

  He hugs me, but I think he’s scared. When he tells his mom, she tells him not to let me lift heavy things because my back has to stay good and strong. And that (for all her love of the female Persian greats) she’s wishing for a boy.

  Now that we’re going to be a family, I want to move to another house because I want us to have a place that wasn’t Naveed’s before, so
that I will feel like it’s “our” house. Also, lots of families move out of South Minneapolis and over to the Edina side or to another suburb because South Minneapolis has more and more crime lately.

  “But this house is perfect for us,” Naveed says. “Everybody wants a house like this, with three bedrooms on the upper floor. And this part of town doesn’t have that much crime.”

  “Well, technically…” I say, “two bedrooms plus a dining room with a pocket door.”

  “Plus a basement,” he says, “with more bedrooms.”

  “Which none of us want to sleep in,” I answer.

  “Still,” he argues, “three functioning bedrooms upstairs.”

  I know, I think…three bedrooms for the couple and two kids, the perfect family. Not three bedrooms up for the couple, a baby—I will lose my extra upstairs bedroom, and a mother-in-law.

  So we start looking at houses with three bedrooms upstairs and one decent guest bedroom on a main floor instead of in a basement, since Goli Joon refuses to live in a basement. It’s my dream to have my little family in a space of our own, and I picture an upstairs that is like a little nest in a tree for my nuclear family, with Goli Joon staying down below. But the nice houses that fit the bill, the few we can afford, are not in Edina but further out in the direction of the airport.

  Goli Joon goes with us to look at one house, but she panics when she hears the planes overhead. “Voy!” Goli Joon exclaims. “That airplane is very loud. Look, the whole house is shaking—this house is under the path for airplanes, very bad.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I say.

  “It reminds me of the war,” she says of the times when Iran was under attack by the U.S.-backed Sadaam Hussein and her family was in harm’s way. “Of course I was grateful that Naveed was safe and sound over in America, but I will never forget the fear of bombs dropping on the houses all around us.”