Roseheart

by Catherine Dehdashti

  “He died,” Goli Joon tells the nurse, with just the right touch of sadness to be appropriate without inviting further questions. Naveed translates this to the nurse in the same tone. He’s a top-level conspirator in this eternal lie. Goli Joon keeps her head high, but accepts the sympathy pat the middle-aged woman gives her high up on the arm, above the IV line.

  My mom comes to the hospital and brings apricot roses, knowing they’re Goli Joon’s favorite. When she arrives Goli Joon is reading a Victoria’s Secret catalog that was in a stack of reading material her nurse brought her. Goli Joon looks at my mom and gestures to the underwear models. “Bad, very bad, dirt to their heads,” she says to my mom in Persian while continuing to flip through.

  My mom doesn’t understand her; she says she wishes she looked like those models.

  Goli Joon can hardly stop tisk-tisking the Victoria’s Secret catalogs to thank my mom for the roses. Naveed teases her. “Do you want to take that catalog home when they release you?”

  My mom turns to me and says, “She looks pretty good. You know, she just may outlive us all.” We don’t think so. The doctors are saying that her time is certainly limited without surgery, but open-heart surgery would be as likely to kill her as it would be to make her better.

  And the doctors also say that Goli Joon’s days of providing daycare for our little girl are over, which seems suddenly obvious. We need to find a daycare center, pronto.

  I use Naveed’s cell phone to call Melinda in New Mexico, and tell her the end is near for Goli Joon. She tells me they thought that about her grandma two years ago and she’s still alive. “She could get better,” she says, and I don’t know if she means this as encouragement or just a statement of fact.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s amazing she’s made it this long. But she can’t babysit Simeen anymore.”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Melinda says. She’s sorrier for me about this than she is about the possibility of us losing Goli Joon. “The one thing you’ve been banking on all along to make it a little bit worth having her there!”

  Well crap, I think. I guess I have said that a few times, as if she’s just some sort of childcare commodity I trade in, begrudgingly putting up with her for twelve hundred dollars a month in daycare savings, which has not even lasted long. But it’s not like I really meant it.

  I hang up and come home with Simeen while Naveed stays with Goli Joon. He calls Darab, Firoozeh, and his aunts and uncles.

  My job is now to start calling around for daycare rates. But first, walking into the house, I look straight ahead at the pocket door to Goli Joon’s dining-bedroom.

  I slide the door open slowly, as if she might surprise me like I surprised her that day when she went to snoop in our bedroom not knowing I was there. On the shelf is Goli Joon’s gauzy prayer cloth. I don’t dare touch it—it seems sacred. But I sit down, crossing my legs, on her prayer rug.

  First, I tell God I’m sorry because my recent indulgence in evil thoughts about Goli Joon might have caused this. I tell God it was just supposed to be like a soap opera, and I felt terrible as soon as I let those thoughts enter my mind. I wonder if I might be a terrible witch, and if I should leave, and if they should burn the wild rue seeds after I’m gone.

  For a few minutes, I just sit there and think about Goli Joon, wondering why it has to be so hard for me to live in harmony with her when I really love her. I do. I love her. She’s like my other mom—she’s my Rosie, my Rosewater Dear.

  My Roseheart.

  I wonder why I get so upset about little things, like the crocheted kitchen towels. I promise myself and God that I will be better, if only she can get better and come home.

  And it occurs to me that I was wrong when long ago I considered it a “loss” to not have the nuclear family I expected. Not wrong, really. It did feel like a loss to me. But, I guess what is dawning on me is that if extended families were the norm for my ancestors until the generation right before mine, that extended family was what was “lost” for this upper-middle-class American culture of my peers. And what I have been given is a chance to recover something priceless.

  It feels like a small revelation, something to feel grateful about. Not that I want any more of our parents to move in here.

  Buzzing with this feeling of warmth and gratitude, I seat myself cross-legged on the prayer rug, looking more like some school kid on the classroom rug than like a pious woman. But then I turn my palms up, and hold them open to whatever or whoever is above—I will call that God, I guess.

  I don’t say any prayers really. I just hold my hands open to God and feel the air on my palms until I can’t hold them up anymore and I fall prostrate to the floor with them in front of me.

  Two days later, Goli Joon gets out of the ICU and we’re told she just needs to stay on another floor for a few days of observation.

  Goli Joon, in her hospital room, can’t stand at her window to watch for Naveed to come home. So she uses the phone. A lot. Half the time our phone rings it’s Goli Joon. She calls to ask if I made dinner, what I made, if we are eating yet. Checking up to see if I'm feeding her son and granddaughter or if we’re all starving to death in her absence.

  Tonight Naveed is on a Mississippi River paddleboat ride for a parking ramp engineers event. I was invited, but rolling down the river with thirty engineers and a handful of spouses didn’t appeal to me for a Monday night. I’d rather stay home and watch the CBS Monday night line-up, with my baby cuddled up to me after her first full day at the daycare center that we chose for her, the most expensive one in town, so it hardly even pays for me to work. But it was the only one with caregivers who seemed as kind as Goli Joon. It was the only one that didn’t smell like dirty diapers and canned green beans.

  The phone is ringing. I’m betting it’s Naveed’s mom (there’s always a fifty percent chance). It’s Goli Joon and she’s telling me we should all go to our basement because there’s a tornado.

  Apparently Naveed didn’t tell her he’s on the Mississippi tonight and I don’t want to tell her because she will start crying if she knows he’s out on a boat when the end is nigh. So I say he’s at work, and that anyway the tornado is two hours away and we’re not even under any warning in Hennepin County.

  But my Persian language skills fail me. To Goli Joon, a tornado touching down in Mankato is no different than Minneapolis, and I’m reminded of when she got off the plane in Michigan instead of Minnesota. All those M places in the Midwest.

  It must be hard for her, not knowing English better. Like whenever she hears the words “war” and “Iran” in close proximity on the news. She knows the word “war” means jang to her. Jang is a word, and the thought and the memory that strikes fear in her heart. And she hears the word often—in English and in Persian—because the possibility is never too remote. She doesn’t always know if it’s just political commentary or if George Bush is about to drop a nuclear bomb on Darab and his family.

  Tonight when she hears tornado, she wants to call Naveed at work, so I say he isn’t at the office—that he’s working somewhere else. Now she’s suspicious and I know she won’t sleep until he calls her. I say he will be working late and she shouldn’t worry because the tornado is far away. She thinks I’m lying because she can see right on her T.V. that there’s a tornado and they are telling people near Mankato to go to their basements.

  I can tell she thinks I’m lying by how she keeps asking the same questions over again, rephrasing them slightly to see if my story will change. I learned that trick in a journalism class I took for my mass communications degree and realize it’s probably just an old trick that some journalist picked up from the parenting part of his or her life.

  Luckily, the other line clicks in and it’s Naveed. “I’m off the boat and on my way home,” he says.

  “Your mom is freaking out. Call her!” I say. I hang up with both of them so they can get in touch.

  Just three minutes later my phone is ringing again. It’s Goli
Joon and she’s in a hilarious, happy mood. “Thank you, Valerie Joon,” she tells me. “Thank you and thank God the tornado he sent did not eat up Naveed.”

  I don’t know why I get any credit—maybe just for putting them in touch, and because she’s so happy. She asks me if I can visit tomorrow and bring her Googoosh and Marzieh music cassettes.

  “I will come home from the hospital soon to take care of the baby,” she adds. I remind her about what we had to break to her already, that the baby has daycare now, but that she can still watch her for us when we’re working on projects at home.

  “When I come home, I will teach you the secret to cooking the potato chop, your favorite meal,” she says.

  “Oh, I think I know the secret. Angelica powder, right?” I say. I’ve been working on figuring it out, and it came close when I added the powder of the ghostly angelica seeds I found in the old pillowcase Goli still keeps in the pantry.

  “Ha ha ha ha! Angelica powder? You mean Golpar? No, no. Well, not only golpar. But you are getting close! I will show you.”

  “I knew there was angelica.”

  “Also,” she adds. “I want you to take my turquoise jewelry.”

  “Goli Joon,” I say. “Stop. Let’s not go overboard here.”

  “The turquoise is from a cave near the place my mother was born, and I want you to have it and pass it on to Simeen when she is grown.”

  I can hear the strength coming back to her in her voice. Her mind is made up.

  I protest, not because I don’t love the jewelry, but because she’s talking like she’s ready to divest and leave this earth. And anyway, I say, she should give her jewelry to Firoozeh.

  She says no, it’s for me and Simeen, and she will also give Simeen her silver candelabrum and other things she begins to list. Firoozeh will inherit her condominium on the Niahvarin mountainside, so she may always return to Iran—so she may always come and go as long as governments allow, living between worlds.

  She talks for a while longer about what she’s going to cook when she can—God willing—be done eating this hospital food. Suddenly I hear her laugh and cry out, “Naveed Joon!” Naveed has decided to pay her a surprise visit, charming his way past the nurses because it’s outside of visiting hours.

  Snooping is still in my nature. I’m not so different from Goli Joon after all. I’m all alone and Simeen is sleeping when I feel the urge. Not because I want to be nosy. Let’s call it curious instead, like Goli Joon and her curiosity about my underwear drawer. The sliding door to Goli Joon’s bedroom glides effortlessly. I turn up the light, a circular dimmer switch befitting the room’s original dining purpose. Inside the room to the right is the closet, with its shelves meant for dishes. On one shelf is her collection of purchases she plans to distribute to relatives on her next trip home to Iran. Another shelf holds a bin of yarn and knitting needles. On the top shelf is a set of boxes.

  My own mother had these same boxes, and she kept them on her top closet shelf as well. They’re clear plastic, with colored plastic lids, and they’re meant for shoes. My mother stored her old love letters from my father in them, from when they were newly wed and my father yearned for her while away on business.

  Goli Joon stores letters in these boxes too, I find, by standing atop the chair that belongs with her sewing table. It’s hopeless to read them because I still have not learned to read very much Persian, and the handwriting may even be difficult for the well-trained language learner. Still, I thumb. One envelope calls to me. I look at the clock. Even if Naveed only stays for a few minutes, certainly I have enough time for one envelope.

  And then, for one more, and one more after that. There are old photos in some of them, and each photo tells a story.

  But what story is this? A photo of Yasmin Noury?

  Why does a wallet-sized portrait of Yasmin Noury tumble out of the last old envelope in the box? I stare at it as if any second the woman in the photo will morph into someone else that I don’t know, who doesn’t live across the street.

  I glance over the letter accompanying the picture. Indecipherable. The sound of a car pulling up outside causes my heart to race, and I shove the photo and letter back in the envelope and into my front pocket. I slide the box onto the shelf, and move the chair back in place. But the key is turning in the lock, and the front door has a direct line of sight to Goli Joon’s door.

  Panicking, I grab the only excuse to be in there I can think of. As Naveed walks in, I turn off the light and walk out of his mother’s room with a bundle of yarn and two needles.

  “Hi!” I say. “Thought I’d give knitting another try.”

  Naveed tilts his head, surprised, but comes to give me a kiss. “Put that down,” he says, taking the knitting supplies from my arms and casting them aside. “Last night with the house to ourselves. Maman is being released tomorrow.”

  While Simeen sleeps innocently in her crib, Naveed loves me slowly and completely. But all the while, I’m thinking that I have to hide that letter that’s in the front pocket of my pants, which are on the floor at the end of our bed, as soon as he falls asleep.

  And I’m biting my tongue, because I need time to think before I ask him, Why does your mom have a tiny portrait photo of Yasmin Noury?

  Mourning

  At the end of this work week, I didn’t think I’d end up in Atlanta on Saturday night to be with relatives mourning Uncle Andy’s death. But remembering how he used to speed and swerve around on that motorcycle, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’d ridden on that motorcycle with him, and somehow that is the only part of this that is real to me now—that the motorcycle is gone. I can’t imagine Uncle Andy is gone too.

  They said he was coming up on a clover leaf ramp and a car was stalled at the top of it. He was going too fast to slow down or to change lanes, if even there was an open lane. He flew off his bike and kept flying.

  He wasn’t really talking to any of us for the last year, either because he was so angry after his fourth wife had left him or because he was just fed up with his and my mom’s whole family for bugging him about his failed marriages.

  It didn’t seem fair for him to quit talking to me, his niece, but I guess that’s how it goes when people stop talking to somebody. You stop talking to one sibling, and then you have to stop talking to their kids and everybody else connected with them. A rift between two people becomes a rift between families, and people take sides. I don’t even really know what it was about.

  Andy was thrown from his smashed-up bike and a couple of ribs punctured his lungs. His spleen bled inside him. He asked those who arrived to help him as he gasped for breath. He was taken to the hospital where he died on the operating table at eleven-thirty at night with his separated wife and Grandma Viv there beside him.

  I flew out with my mom and Bruce and Courtney. Laura and Ty were closing on a new house, so Laura couldn’t come.

  While Courtney shares a guest bed at Uncle Percy’s with Grandma, I stay at the house of a neighbor woman I don’t know. Uncle Percy and his second wife Lorraine have two big dogs I’m allergic to, so I can’t stay there. It’s late and it has been a hard weekend, so I fall asleep quickly in this stranger’s house. I miss my little girl already. She’s not a baby anymore.

  Grandma was at Percy’s when I arrived there, but I hardly saw her before I moved across the street. It was midnight two nights after Grandma’s baby boy was killed and yet she was more beautiful than ever.

  She’s gotten more beautiful every year of her life, but I didn’t expect it tonight. She wore a lilac skirt and a taupe silk sweater, house shoes with little kitten heels, perfume, pink lipstick, and full make-up. Her eyes, a brighter teal than ever, brimmed with tears that couldn’t fall. Percy said she’d cried a lot already, that she was beside herself.

  The second night, my cousin Izzy invites me to stay with her and we wonder why we didn’t think of that in the first place.

  With Izzy, I take my first hit off of a joint in such a long time. And like back then,
a rerun of Cheers is on. Izzy and her boyfriend, who has provided the pot, and I are staring at the television and not believing how funny it is. It’s an episode I’ve seen a hundred times before.

  It’s not like the scare anti-drug campaign of years ago, where the guy offering the pot is an evil conspirator lurking around a corner. Izzy’s boyfriend is just a tired young guy who says he has to relax from his horrible job. Izzy doesn’t frequently smoke pot, but tonight she says we should smoke one for Andy.

  Uncle Andy would be pretty mad about this, since he was a straight arrow of a cop, but we smoke one for him anyway.

  Translations

  Niloofar sits waiting for me at the Dinky Kebab. I called her to ask her for a favor, some help with translation, I said. When I arrive, she has my work cut out for me: filling the sumac shakers. She’s emptied and washed them and they all sit on the table next to a half-gallon jug of sumac powder and a funnel.

  I pull the letter and photo out of my pocket, looking around to make sure we’re alone. The only customers are two elderly men. “What’s this say?” I ask.

  “Hello, how are you, and nice to see you too,” Niloofar asks rhetorically, reminding me of my poor manners. “What am I, the CIA? You want me to translate from Farsi—why can’t Naveed do it for you?”

  I look at her, sitting pretty in her white shirt and perfect lipstick. I realize that Niloofar keeps her white shirt clean and crisp all the time, while I used to have fried eggplant or butter on mine after the first few minutes of every shift. And regardless of the omnipresence of her perfect lipstick, I have never witnessed her applying it.

  She sees the photo, and takes the letter from my hand. She begins to read to herself. “I know about this woman,” she says, flicking her finger at the photo. “She’s a lawyer. I’ve read a couple of articles about her—she helps torture victims.”