Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  We begin taking Simeen out of the house, and one of her first outings is to visit her almost same-age new little cousin. Laura gave birth to Bella six days ago. Ty has made a standing rib roast for dinner, and Laura serves her apple pie. I can’t believe she’s already up baking apple pie so soon after giving birth, but that’s Laura. She will be running again by next week, and back to work at the PR firm in just two more weeks, on the hook for twelve hundred dollars a month in daycare.

  My mom is over there too, trying to keep up with having two grandbabies to visit and spoil rotten. Simeen falls asleep on her grandma’s shoulder and sleeps for the rest of the night.

  Simeen has been good at night lately. She had been so hard to get to sleep that we’d had her in our bed every night. I finally followed some advice I read in a magazine. I let her cry herself to sleep in her crib, just checking in at certain timed intervals to let her know I was there but wasn’t going to pick her up.

  The first two nights she cried for an hour before falling asleep. Goli Joon said, “I’d heard that Americans don’t comfort their babies when they cry, but I never believed Valerie would be like that." She went down to the basement and ran water so she wouldn’t have to hear. Naveed stood outside the door to the nursery and watched through the crack because he was worried that such intense crying could hurt Simeen.

  But once the hard-core let-‘em-cry advice works and she snuggles into her crib without a peep, they rejoice because we all get a little more rest.

  Life

  We’ve been trying to teach Simeen to say “Baba” forever—like since the day she came home from the hospital, because we want her to call Naveed the Persian word for dad. Well guess what she said today? Dad. She said it this morning and then she said it all day long. “Dad. Dadadadada.”

  Then suddenly she starts saying Mama, and Na-gee for Naranji, the cat. We always thought the cat’s name would be one of Simeen’s first words since she loves him so much. She crawls to him to grab his fur, but he usually gets away, which is good because every time Simeen touches Naranji, Goli Joon carts her off to the bathtub. She doesn’t like us to let her touch him, and she washes her all over with wet wipes or water every time she manages to pet him.

  Goli Joon spends her days crocheting and knitting baby clothes and blankets. My mother also knits an afghan for Simeen. It’s a Cinderella theme, and it is so detailed. Mom is not such a prolific knitter, tying herself to us with skeins and skeins of yarn like Goli Joon, but when she does make something it’s always a masterpiece.

  Both of these women have tried to teach me how to knit, but I just couldn’t get it. Like trying to learn how to drive a stick shift on a hill, I found the knots kept coming undone and my rows unraveling as soon as they had climbed to any respectable height.

  The first two days of my return to work have been rough for me and I cried even more today than yesterday. I’m tired.

  My certainty that I had avoided postpartum depression is fading. I’m still crazy in love with the baby, but I need more sleep. Simeen still nurses late at night and early in the morning. But Goli Joon is in her element, nuzzling and coddling Simeen all day and happy to be in charge of her.

  I’m a mess at work. Even now that I’ve come so far in this organization that I have a skyline view and a door, I still don’t have focus, and being a tired mom makes me even more scattered. I’m a business advisor now, because my male boss thinks I have a very solid business sense. (When I tell Melinda this, she says that it is impressive because she remembers me as incapable of paying bills on time even when I had the money.) The other business advisors tell me that continuing to watch All My Children in the lounge at lunchtime is career suicide. So I work through lunch at my desk and never take a break at all, except to email with Melinda and glance at the Star Tribune online.

  When I get home from work, the tireless Goli Joon doesn’t always want to give back the baby, so sometimes I just play with her for a little bit and then hand her back so I can work on my novel about the farm family. The main character is a kid in an ag program at the community college. He reads publications like the ones I produce at work. It’s sort of a mystery. A barn explodes, and it looks like it was caused by the methane from all the manure, but there’s a culprit. Maybe it’s one of the farm hands. Maybe it’s the Amish neighbor. Maybe it’s someone nobody would have even imagined.

  Unlike Shoedog, which is still sitting on my computer and a printout still sits in a drawer, this ag story writes itself. A first draft is done in two more months. Since I know I need some feedback, I sign up for another class with the tuition benefit offered by my company. Naveed is annoyed that I’m doing something so frivolous when we have a little baby at home. But the class is just once a week for four weeks and, as Laura says, new moms need to get out of the house sometimes and do something for themselves.

  Mother Mary

  Simeen likes to grab her cousin Bella’s face and stick her fingers in Bella’s mouth. She tries the same thing with my Grandma Vivian, who is here for Simeen and Bella’s double Christening. Simeen loves being with this beautiful Grandma who brought my mom’s christening gown for Simeen to wear. Bella is wearing Ty’s gown, which looks just like a girl’s.

  Naveed feels fine about Simeen being a Christian, mainly because he thinks she’ll feel more like she belongs in the community. I know this because we have to attend a quick meeting with the pastor right before the ceremony. He asks Naveed if he’s a practicing Muslim.

  Naveed says no, he doesn’t like organized religion. He laughs at our pastor’s standard deadpan response, “We aren’t really all that organized.”

  I groan. I’ve been hearing that one since I was a kid.

  Naveed is then slightly taken aback when the pastor says, “I commend you to join the faith.”

  Even though his English is really great, the word “commend” sounds like “command.” I too have to think for a second to remember that commend means ask. They quickly get it sorted out, though, and Naveed is relieved nobody is commanding him to do anything when it comes to religion. Because that sounds all too familiar.

  Simeen gets a gold Mother Mary necklace from Goli Joon for her Christening. It looks more Catholic to me than Lutheran. Naveed doesn’t want her to wear it for the party because it’s valuable, but Goli Joon looks disappointed, so I insist.

  Garage Sale

  Our first year with our baby is going fast. Spring came and went in a heartbeat, with just one or two Persian New Year parties and we didn’t even host one. Summer was over before we even had a chance to plant anything other than Goli Joon’s herbs. I wish we could have summer all over again, but we promise ourselves that fall will be better, and we’ll take more walks around Lake Calhoun. Where does our time go?

  With all of the Iranians in the area, and all of their relatives moving in with them or nearby, I’d always thought of this border area between South Minneapolis and Edina as Little Iran. Since having a baby and going back to work though, we’ve been so busy and so tired that we’ve started to lose touch with Iranian-American families—well, actually, with almost everybody. It takes more effort to get together. I don’t have any energy.

  I have to stop when I’m feeling sorry for myself about being so tired and never getting to sit down. Simeen is a healthy baby, and we take that too much for granted.

  Little by little, in undeniable pieces of unwanted information, I find out something terrible. Little Parvaneh, my flower girl, has cancer. I’ve been pretending it’s a miscommunication. Now the Zand/Nourys are trying to raise enough money to pay their bills.

  I learn about this by overhearing bits and pieces of Persian going back and forth between Naveed and Goli Joon and putting it together, until one day Parvaneh comes across the street to tell me about her trip to the children’s hospital.

  “The doctor’s are funny, but the medicine made me throw up on my teddy bear,” she says.

  I see she looks both gaunt and puffy at the same time, with dark circles u
nder her earth-toned eyes.

  “Do you have any more flower girl jobs lined up? I would be happy to act as a reference,” I say, giving her a hug. She shakes her head and skips away, but her skipping isn’t as high as usual and only lasts a few steps before she slows to an overly mature gait.

  Naveed says he doesn’t want me to think about it. It’s unthinkable. And I don’t need to worry, he says, because the prognosis is excellent. The girl is going to get cured. It’s an easy form of leukemia.

  One day, I get the idea to have a garage sale at our house to raise money for a foundation funding childhood leukemia research. I also have the ulterior motive of getting rid of some of Naveed’s piles of stuff because it’s hard to find space for all of the baby’s things.

  We sell the bread machine, and all the other crap that Naveed bought at Bank’s, and a lot of tools and things he has kept around here for years. We collect things from our friends, donations at work. My dad gives twenty-five dollars. Naveed takes care of Simeen while Savi and I staff the sale for three days. Savi rolls her eyes when Naveed has trouble parting with a few things—a broken vice-grip and a couple of college engineering textbooks—and he takes them back inside. She doesn’t see him when he puts them back out.

  But everybody is there when he sells his 1982 Yamaha motorcycle. We have to hold his hands while the buyer lifts it up into the pickup bed (because it doesn’t drive) and hauls it away. But that brings in four hundred dollars, and he didn’t ride that motorcycle anymore anyway. He holds Simeen, bundled in her cardigan zip-up sweater even though it’s a warm fall day. He sells things he would never have sold, in order to be able to write a check that’s supposed to help cure sick children. And I come into the house and breathe a sigh of relief because now there’s space for some of other people’s things too, and space where I can rest my eyes.

  But before long, new things—freebies, clearance finds, dumpster-diving treasures—find their way into the house, and with the cold weather comes a whole new season’s worth of junk.

  And the little girl’s cancer doesn’t go away.

  Soap

  On Christmas Eve, Simeen received a gold cross from my dad. On Christmas morning, she opens lots of toys and clothes from everyone else. And teddy bears. She loves teddy bears. We’re at my mom’s house, where Simeen has lined up all my mom’s collectible Santa bears from Dayton’s department store and her new teddy bears on the floor next to each other. She cuddles each one, pressing her face to its face. Then she sees there’s a polar bear on the cover of one of my mom’s National Geographic magazines. She takes the magazine and puts it on the floor next to the other bears. She kisses all the stuffed bears in a row, and then she presses her face down on the magazine cover to give the polar bear a kiss too.

  My mom makes a big brunch while the rest of us lollygag around her house and play cheerfully with the girls. Grandma Viv and Uncle Percy call while we’re opening gifts, and I’m annoyed because this isn’t the time for Uncle Percy to be complaining to my mom over the phone that Uncle Andy won’t talk to him anymore because they had a big stupid fight that involved Andy’s fourth wife. Percy is just sick about it, but I say they should talk later because we were having such a good time. After we’ve all worn ourselves out with the gift getting and giving, we take naps—on the floor, on the couches, on the reclining chair. Even Goli Joon is crashed out on my mom’s leather couch with two fleece blankets.

  The day after Christmas we’ve promised to take Goli Joon to Southdale Mall to return most of her gifts. Before we go, all the good cheer from Christmas disappears in an instant.

  Now, Goli Joon is downstairs in her room, knocking back and forth frenetically in her glider chair and crying. I must go apologize and make it all better.

  A skillet fell from atop our cabinets and hit me on the head. “You yourself put it there like that to copy Martha Stewart! So dangerous!” she yelled in Persian as I lay on the ground half-dazed with a throbbing lump on my head.

  I narrowed my eyes at her and said, “Shut up.” She watches enough T.V. to know what that means.

  She turned to stone, but one tear escaped and coated her single gray eyelash. It was that one eyelash of hers that I always want to put some black mascara on, or tint, because it bothers me that it doesn’t match. Or maybe because it makes me think I might get a gray eyelash myself someday. That one tear was just the beginning, but she waited until she got downstairs to open the floodgates to the rest of them.

  Now she’s begging Naveed to send her home. Even though part of me thinks that’s a great idea, I realize her reaction was her way of caring for me without crossing the boundaries that I put up. What did I want her to do? Come running to me with an ice pack and administer tender loving care? I’d have shooed her away. I can’t believe I told her to shut up, and right after such a nice Christmas, and when she takes such good care of my baby for me every day. I must be evil.

  It’s lunchtime in the lounge at work, a week after the skillet fell on my head. During commercials and during the boring filler parts of All My Children (which I refused to stop watching) I confess to a co-worker that I think I’m evil. Or a sociopath, at least. She thinks I just need to lighten up and be more creative in my coping methods. She says I’m not evil, but I just made a lazy choice in saying “Shut up.” Instead, she says I should pretend the whole thing is a soap opera, and let myself see such scenes unfolding as through the set camera. I should experiment with different roles, perhaps start by playing the role of somebody who is actually evil.

  Goli Joon is pretty much acting normal with me now at home, but I don’t know how she’s changed inside from these two words I have uttered. Shut. Up. We’ve been upset with each other before. We’ve cried before. But this Shut Up has changed something. Something that can’t go back.

  So I try to be more creative when I’m unhappy. I use my imagination to calculate and manipulate, like we’re on the soap opera set. I talk nicely to Goli Joon about the taste of her homemade pickles. Then I turn my head to an imaginary camera and my face turns cold and sinister. The imaginary camera pans to a meat mallet. The studio audience is asking, “What will she do?” I imagine, then, something less vicious—pouring the pickles over her head.

  This is Minnesota and I’m a stereotypical reticent Minnesotan. This home is also Iran, where elders must be revered and respected.

  I must stay within the boundaries of both of these cultures, but this soap game is a pressure valve. It works better for me than the advice in The Dance of Anger. But even though I’m not religious, I attended Sunday school, and I know my co-worker is wrong about this creative game. I know that it could send me straight to hell because bad thoughts are as sinful as bad deeds.

  Roseheart

  The medications Goli Joon takes for her heart got terribly out of whack, and she’s in the ICU at Fairview Southdale Hospital. She cried out in the night, but then she was unresponsive, and that’s when Naveed called the ambulance. She said she died and came back—came back because she had to take care of our baby.

  Today, her third day in the ICU, she’s showing improvement, waving her thin arms around and saying she isn’t ready to die. But the cardiologist is not so encouraging. Her congestive heart failure is getting worse, he says.

  Naveed argues this point with him, “She keeps up with our baby all day, she cooks, and she’s knitting scarves and hats for our whole neighborhood.”

  The doctor pulls up a computer screen image of Goli Joon’s heart and the look on his face is as if he’s looking at a photo of the walking dead. The wall of her enlarged heart is as thin as a grape skin. In the pericardium cavity is a mess of leaky and old artificial valves and irregular pumping.

  The doctor asks how Goli Joon is doing mentally, if she’s been forgetful lately or doing anything unusual. “No,” Naveed says. “She doesn’t have any problems like that. It’s just her heart.”

  Then the doctor tells Naveed that it’s actually a little more than that. When the heart isn�
�t circulating the blood properly, it can trigger small strokes, so small that—he says—nobody should blame themselves for not having noticed. I study Naveed closely for his reaction.

  “Did my mother have a stroke?” he asks. I see a giant tear well up in the corner of one of his beautiful brown eyes. He takes a quick breath and the tear doesn’t fall. It defies gravity and orbits around the outside of his eyeball, like a teardrop in space, until it disappears somewhere.

  Of course he will blame himself for not knowing that his own mother, whom he sees every day, has had a stroke.

  “It looks like she’s had several, but they were very, very small. Nothing catastrophic to have alerted you she was having one. Just enough to cause some problems with memory and the senses.”

  Naveed thinks back, trying to remember if there has been anything unusual. She’s been perfectly attentive with the baby.

  And then, we both think of it at the same time.

  Last week, one night, there was sand in her khoresht, so Naveed had asked her if she had forgotten to soak the dried herbs. She got angry and swore that she had been cleaning dried herbs for fifty years. She asked how he could even imagine she had forgotten. We all sat at the table and chewed on the sandy stew together, and Goli Joon had finally blamed it on the fact that Naveed had bought the ingredients from the Arabic store instead of the Persian market at the Dinky Kebab.

  As she gains strength, one of the nurses tries to talk with her a little bit. They’re good with her here, unlike another hospital where they were quickly exasperated with the language barrier. This nurse asks her if she has a husband, even though it’s pretty obvious that if she does he isn’t in the picture.