“Really?” I ask. “She lives across the street. I found this letter in Naveed’s mom’s stuff.”
She keeps reading. “You should really ask your husband if you want to have any trust between you. But I’ll tell you this: The letter is from your husband’s mom’s sister. She’s trying to arrange a marriage between this woman, Yasmin, and Naveed. It’s a letter to sing Yasmin’s praises. And there’s plenty to praise.”
When she says, “and there’s plenty to praise” I imagine she’s looking at me and thinking, He could have married her and he married you instead?
“Anything else you want to tell me?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Nope. Just some advice: Talk to him if you’re worried. He should be honest with you. Married people shouldn’t keep too many secrets. And you should be honest with him if you have anything you need to come clean about too.”
Naveed isn’t the forbidden fruit, or the bad boy, or the millionaire. He’s just this parking ramp engineer who wants stability and to go fishing and to collect stuff. Who loves me. I don’t know though—maybe he wouldn’t have wanted me in the first place if he’d really known me.
Except that he says he does want me. But that he’s very mad at me, because I promised I would never use drugs again, and I put myself in a very vulnerable situation. Niloofar’s advice to come clean and be honest is what convinced me that I should tell him I smoked a joint with my cousin Izzy and her boyfriend in Atlanta.
“Wait a second,” I say. “Nothing bad happened. We watched Cheers. Oh my God, how dangerous.”
“Nothing happened? You broke a promise, and you risked your safety, and now I don’t know if I can trust you not to do it again and possibly even risk our daughter’s safety.”
I roll my eyes. He just doesn’t get it, I think. He thinks pot is like meth. I would never make light of drugs like meth or coke or pills, but pot is therapeutic for me and not that dangerous.
“You know,” I say, “when pot eventually becomes legal, which it will, you can look back on this day and realize you were doing the equivalent of nagging me for just drinking a beer.”
“It’s not the substance, it’s the addiction,” he says. “What if your mom were to drink a beer? You know it wouldn’t be just a beer then.”
I pause at this—at how he has hit a little below the belt by bringing up my mom and her alcoholism. I’m not an alcoholic, so it’s not relevant. I return to arguing about the promise.
“Holding me to a promise to never, ever smoke pot again is like how my dad held my mom to the decision not to go to movies anymore since they’d bought a seven hundred dollar T.V. in 1972. They agreed at the time they wouldn’t go to movies if they bought the T.V. But Mom didn’t think that would mean that he would never take her to a movie for the rest of their lives.”
“I’m worried for you,” he says. “And for Simeen. I have to hold you to your promise, or maybe you should get some help if you can’t stay off of drugs.”
“Oh my God. It’s not drugs, it’s just pot,” I say.
And then, the thing I’ve been holding back since the night before my uncle died comes out. “And, I know you are keeping something from me, so you are not perfect either.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“You were going to marry Yasmin Noury,” I say. After all this time living across the street from her, I still tend to call her by her first and last name. The distance between us requires it. Yasmin by itself would be too casual.
“Oh,” he says, looking at me. “So you know. Did Maman tell you?”
“I found her picture in a letter in your mom’s closet, and Niloofar at the Dinky Kebab read it to me. But I still don’t understand what happened. It sounds like you were to be engaged.”
I have no good reason to cry now, but it’s stressful, and I’m embarrassed about my snooping. A few tears fall on the letter as I pull it out of my purse.
Naveed invites me to sit on the ivory damask sofa, and I sit, waiting to hear what I hope will be the truth, and what I fear will bring out the horrible jealousy I always have inside of me.
“You know I love you, right?” he asks. “And you know I hardly even know Yasmin.”
“I’d never seen you even talk to her that I can remember, until Parvaneh got sick,” I say. “Except maybe at our wedding.”
“Let me tell you the story,” he starts. “My mom’s sister knew the family. Everybody knew Yasmin’s mother and father were divorced.”
“The divorce brought a lot of shame on the family because the mother was so open about it—she was seen as a prostitute because she had an affair with an American businessman after the divorce, and then people started gossiping that she was having affairs with all the foreign men in town.”
“Was she?” I ask.
“Probably not. She was just more worldly than the city of Kashan was ready for, and she was bored with marriage and life there. She and Yasmin moved to Tehran, and then later Yasmin moved to California for school. Divorced women didn’t normally have custody of their children, but Yasmin’s father didn’t want to force them apart.
“My mom’s sister, the one who runs the business in Kashan, hired Yasmin’s father as a salesman when he lost his attorney job after the Revolution. Everybody had been trying to get him to remarry, but he never did. He knew Yasmin would never forgive him—she was always hoping her mother would come to her senses and go back to him.”
This fashionable neighbor who lives across the street, coming and going in her professional attire, now coming from and going to medical doctors with her sick daughter, comes into better focus for me.
“Why would you have married her?” I ask. “You didn’t even know her. I thought you were too modern to accept an arranged marriage.”
“I would have accepted the match. But she married Milad instead,” he says. “And that was okay. I was happy for them.”
“But, did you love her?” I’m looking at him like he’s a stranger. He’s always seemed so Americanized. If he would have married her, it seems like he must have wanted her.
“I liked her right away. She had this incredible strength and passion about fighting for justice. I thought the love would grow later. I’ve seen it happen many times. You have to know some of the happiest marriages I’ve seen are like that.”
Relief—wanting to believe that he didn’t want her in that way, that he was not still harboring feelings for her—combine with another realization. “But your mother…”
“Maman was hurt and upset. She thought she had been on the progressive moral high ground, proposing her son to the woman other families didn’t want anything to do with. Yasmin was seen as the daughter of a damaged woman, but Maman felt sorry for her. And she was educated. My aunt had helped out and she had been able to go to California and get into law school.”
“So your mom thought she was doing Yasmin a favor by setting her up with you?”
“Yeah, you know, she thinks I’m such a good catch because she’s my mom.” He grabs my hand, and I hold his.
“You are a good catch,” I say.
“My mom was also scared that I would be marked by being rejected by Yasmin and I would never be able to get married. She didn’t know if she was going to live or die from her heart problem. She wanted to see that I wasn’t going to be alone. And she wanted the chance to spoil grandchildren.
“But there were more important things to Yasmin than what kind of a catch I was or wasn’t. She flew here from California with another relative, but it was mainly just to satisfy the old ladies who thought she needed a mate. She wasn’t looking for a husband, and she knew her mother hadn’t been happy in an arranged marriage.
“It seemed like she was open to the idea, though. She liked me. We were getting to know each other. But before we even had our final gathering to drink tea together and decide if we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, she was introduced to Milad. They fell in love at first sight.”
I ask him if that’s why he and
Milad had a falling out. “It wasn’t over Yasmin,” he says. “Like I said, I was happy for them. Holy cow! They had such chemistry. But my mom was so upset about Yasmin rejecting me, her son. So my mom said bad things about Yasmin to make it seem like I was the one who rejected her. Milad got angry at my mom, and then Milad and I got into the mix. It got big.”
I knew that things happen like that sometimes among families, and of course I’d seen those rifts in my mother’s family in Georgia. Someone’s pride gets hurt, and that person hurts another person out of their own pain and fear, and then everything falls apart.
“So then what about Yasmin’s father, Mr. Noury?” I ask. “What’s going on there?”
“It seems like Mr. Noury has been interested in Maman since the first time she was here for heart surgery, but I don’t know the details. He comes and goes from Iran, but they’d been here at the same time once before. I’d come home early from work one day and they were drinking tea together in the garden. Yasmin drove up early too, and he pretended like he had been visiting me, not her. I think Yasmin has just never gotten over the divorce and doesn’t want him to see any other women. She sees him as too old, anyway.”
“Well, yeah. Isn’t your mom too old for that too?”
“I don’t know. We just don’t talk about things like that. And right now, I think that all anyone is really worried about is little Parvaneh.”
I’m tired and not ready to absorb all of this. Being reminded of Parvaneh is too much on top of what has already been a heavy conversation.
Only an hour before, I was feeling so harassed about having smoked a joint in Atlanta. I’d wondered if maybe Melinda was right: I had the chance to have the luxury life with Quentin, who wasn’t so judgmental. I’d been thinking about how I’d be sitting out at the pool with all the cake eaters if I hadn’t married Naveed. And yet now here I am remembering that I’m in love with him and it’s only the beginning. It must be only the beginning if I’m still only learning about him.
So we sleep, but I’m not off the hook about the pot. I know Naveed thinks I was one of his do-it-yourself fixer-upper projects, his labor of love, and he doesn’t want to see me fall to pieces. But for now he takes my new promise to heart, and I give in to his love for me as he rescues me from all of my exhaustion, touching me and assuring me deep into the night.
Sister-in-law
An official-looking letter arrived from the INS today, addressed to Naveed. I gave it to him and he tore it open. A smile polkaed across his face. Firoozeh is being approved for immigration. She can come in a couple of months. She’s very independent, so she will stay with us for just a few days if she can find an apartment. There are plenty of beautiful old apartment buildings close by, reasonably priced. One of them will be perfect.
The Unthinkable
Goli Joon hits herself over the head with a candelabrum. I rush to take it away from her, but don’t reach her before she hits herself two more times. Her head bleeds before Naveed takes it away and washes her wound. I make her drink a half a glass of wine—ancient Persian medicine—which is now officially doctor-approved for her. And then I drink a glass too.
Parvaneh Zand—daughter, sister, flower girl, butterfly—has died from her “easy form” of cancer. Goli Joon hardly knew the little girl, but she cries that it might be our fault because we let the little girl kiss our chickens when they were brand new baby chicks and maybe she got the germs from them. And that she never should have let me plant so many yellow flowers in our garden. Now sickness has come to the neighborhood.
Naveed tells her that he knows she knows better than that. He has to practically yell at her to get her out of this state.
“I thought you said it was an easy kind of cancer to cure!” I yell at him, crying and holding Simeen tight.
Naveed takes Simeen from me and nuzzles her. “They were trying to be positive,” he says.
Disbelief sets in, but the family follows the Muslim tradition of burying her within twenty-four hours, before anyone can even imagine it’s true.
When Parvaneh is buried at Lakeview Cemetery on Lake Calhoun, the harsh reality of the pine casket forces unripe acknowledgement of her passing.
Women wail as genuinely as ever I’ve heard. Yasmin Noury faints and is almost taken away. But then she revives and tries to jump into the grave. Her other daughter is taken away to the car, looking lost without her baby sister. The men try not to cry, but they do cry. Co-workers and friends who are not Iranian try to comfort them so they will all stop the wailing and crying, but they only get louder.
We cry too, all of us. By the time we leave the cemetery, we’re about as wet as Lake Calhoun, with eyes as pink as the rose petals Parvaneh tossed at our wedding.
The next week Naveed goes and buys three Lakeview Cemetery plots for me, himself, and his mother. Because he’s realized that’s where all the Iranian people get buried. After little Parvaneh was buried, we’d walked around and looked at all the graves in that section of the cemetery. There are rows of headstones with Persian script on them, and some with English-Latin letters but Persian names.
Lakeview is filling up fast with all the old mothers and fathers who have come to live with their grownup children, and even now with some of the early arrivals themselves, those doctors who came in the 50s and 60s, and those few who died far too young. Parvaneh isn’t the only Iranian-American child buried here; she’s in the company of another little girl and boy, which is sadly comforting.
And I realize, this little section of Lakeview Cemetery—this is the real Little Iran. I know I call our neighborhood that, but it isn’t really. There aren’t that many of them here in the Twin Cities—only a thousand or two. There’s no physical community of Iranians here like in Los Angeles. “Little” places are usually pockets of low-rent for refugees. Then the people rise out of poverty and move out and the next wave of refugees moves in.
Not so with Iranians. They move in sprinkles. Some in this area, some in that. They move to the best place they can afford. Sometimes very nice places.
The only place there are several of them all close together is right here in the cemetery. And this is where I will be buried too, right next to Naveed and Goli Joon, and all of the other Iranians and people who are Iranian by marriage. In this sepulchral Little Iran.
None of the graves in this section of the cemetery are too ostentatious, just flat slabs. Even the graves of the rich doctors are simple. Those who were ostentatious in their homes are simple in their deaths, wrapped unembalmed in a white cloth, placed in a pine box, and buried within twenty-four hours.
Families like it here at Lakeview because it’s pretty and well-kept, and the neighborhood is like Shemiran, a beautiful old neighborhood of northern Tehran. One of the guests points this out to the family—that the neighborhood around Lakeview Cemetery is just like Shemiran. Shemroon is how they pronounce it in the typical colloquial, like how joon comes from the proper jan. This Shemroon-like neighborhood overlooking Lake Calhoun is a good resting place for Parvaneh.
The way they say Shemroon sounds so magical, like the Persian version of Hanalei. For just one moment, the Zand/Nourys seem to pull themselves together.
Sisters! Fight!
It’s the morning after my big fight with Laura, on a sister-trip to southern California. Courtney came up with the idea because she thinks she might want to move out here before the next horrible Minnesota winter. I didn’t want to leave my baby for four days. Parvaneh’s death has scared me so much that I hardly ever want to let Simeen out of my arms.
Contrarily, though, some part of me needed to get away.
Laura and Courtney have gone for a jog. Courtney isn’t a runner, but she goes along anyway while I sit in our hotel room wishing I had some pot to smoke. This is California. Aren’t there supposed to be marijuana dispensaries on every street corner? You know, places called “Puffin’ Stuff” and “Kite-High Kafé”? Not that I would actually go into one. Just dreaming, because being high goes well wit
h crying.
When they come back everything is still so tense from the fight, but we’d planned to drive our rental car to Pasadena to visit the Huntington Gardens. Ty had recommended the Huntington to Laura, and it was also in the Let’s Go book Melinda had mailed to me when I told her we were going to take this trip. She’d bookmarked it with a Post-it, also marking pages telling me where we could find women-owned restaurants serving achiote pork in banana leaves and art galleries where we could buy signed prints by our favorite artists we’ve never heard of.
The fight was the first we’ve had since we were teenagers and could fight comfortably without feeling ashamed about the fact that we don’t always get along. Now that we’re adults, we’re supposed to be reasonable and mature. That’s not always easy for me because of how I’m “angry and cynical all of the time,” which is how Laura put it.
All I want to say about the fight is that it involved:
Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor-elect of California, whom we wish well, or wish to fall flat on his face, depending on whose perspective
me, accidentally slamming Laura’s finger in the car door after mentioning said Terminator-elect
Laura falsely accusing me of crushing her finger on purpose, and me calling her a dumbass for putting her finger in the door hinge (followed by sister-trip to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center of Los Angeles emergency room)
Courtney getting whiplash trying to pick a side or not pick a side
At the hospital while I was waiting for Laura to come out, I’d gone into the bathroom and seen in the mirror that the crevice between my eyebrows, that gash of a wrinkle that I have inherited from my mother, had branched off with a smaller diagonal wrinkle on each side of it. My crevice is now a little peace sign in the center of my face that will now appear every time I furrow my brow, as if to make fun of me for not being as peaceful as I claim to be.
I came back out and sat five seats apart from Courtney, who was watching the news about some minor celebrity who died after being mauled by his own tiger that he kept as a house pet. I don’t own a cell phone yet, so I asked Courtney if I could use hers to call Naveed.
Roseheart Page 22