I started crying again, waiting for Naveed to answer the phone. Goli Joon answered. She was watching Simeen while Naveed ran to Byerly’s, even though it’s against doctor’s orders for her to babysit.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked in Persian, alarmed at my tearful voice. I had to tell her something, so she wouldn’t worry it was something worse.
“KHa-har …Dava,” I said, meaning sisters…fight, in Persian, but she didn’t understand me. I always get the word for fight mixed up with the word that means medicine. That made Goli Joon more alarmed, so I yelled it in English, “Sisters! Fight!”
She understood immediately. Thank God for all of her daytime T.V. and Jerry Springer. “Khoda nakone,” she said in Persian, a saying asking God not to allow such a thing.
“Sisters are like that. I know!” she said. “Laura is good. Courtney is good. You’re good. It will get better.”
After we hung up, Laura came out. Amazingly, the finger wasn’t broken, according to the L.A. doctors, but I didn’t believe it because it looked purple and dead (and because I don’t trust doctors who aren’t from Minnesota). At least they put a splint on it anyway.
So now, with a day to go before flying home, what would we do to kill the time if not go to Pasadena? My head hurts from crying, and Laura’s finger doesn’t look better. But Courtney drives us there, and walking around Huntington Gardens, we see blue ponds with koi fish bigger than Minnesota walleyes. The gardens and the fresh Pasadena air calm us, and again we’re just three sisters out exploring Southern California, two of us with puffy reddish eyes to take in paintings by Belgian masters, and me with a peace sign wrinkle engraved in my brow because I’m squinting in the sun.
Once we enter the art collections, we find the painting The Blue Boy, by Thomas Gainsborough, which Ty had told Laura not to miss. Across from that we notice Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence.
The two paintings are always displayed together, even though they’re from different artists and time periods. We probably saw them on episodes of Leave It to Beaver. We’re told they, or maybe just reproductions, were used as props in the home of Ward and June Cleaver and their two boys—prop art for the perfect American family.
Pinkie, Sarah Barrett Moulton, was the English girl of a Jamaican plantation family. There’s something about her that disturbs me, and it’s not only that I learn she died young and I’m still heavyhearted about Parvaneh and missing Simeen. Maybe it’s a little bit because of that, but Laura and Courtney feel it too. She beguiles us, and she upsets us.
We’re all taken with Pinkie, and we gaze at her for the longest time.
International Arrivals
Firoozeh landed yesterday. It must be so weird for her to live in Tehran one day and Minnesota the next. The plane landed at twelve-thirty in the afternoon. We sat and waited for her to come through the International Arrivals gate, Goli Joon knitting a rainbow-colored sweater for her grown daughter who will need warmer clothes.
At three-thirty, we still couldn’t get any information from immigration/customs about Firoozeh’s status. KLM confirmed she had been on the flight, but the customs policy is to release no info. We asked travelers and employees as they came through the opaque custom doors if there were any people left and were told no, unless they were in the "small rooms where they do interrogations."
Naveed's mom put away the knitting and started crying. She harassed the travelers who came through the gates long after Naveed and I had given up on that tactic. Since she still doesn’t speak much English, it was fruitless. But she couldn’t stop herself from playing charades with the poor, tired travelers.
By four, she was flagellating herself repeatedly. That disturbed other people around us, and I took Simeen away because I didn't want her to see her grandmother hitting herself. We went home. Goli Joon, wailing, said she was going to throw away all the food she had prepared for the welcoming feast and break the dishes on her head.
When Firoozeh called at six, Goli Joon launched into thank-you-heavenly-father prayer mode. She had been interrogated the entire time, with the officers using all the tricks, like, "We know who you are and why you are really here," and threatening to send her back “unless you give us the information we need.”
So finally Naveed went back to the airport, and it was a good thing we didn't all go back because her giant suitcases took up most of our new Toyota Sienna. It would never have fit in a regular car, and neither will our newly expanded family, so I guess it’s a good thing I finally gave in on the damn minivan.
Firoozeh brought us way too much stuff, including some small Persian carpets, tons of dried foods, gold jewelry sized for a baby, and a big furry nomad vest for me and one for Simeen. The tot-sized version is ultra suede, but mine is real suede and fur and it stinks like they didn’t scrape out all the meat from the hide.
Today she should rest and sleep, but it’s Naveed's only day off this week so they need to spend the day doing things like apartment searching. Firoozeh will sleep in our basement for now, but she’s very independent and wants to have her own place as soon as possible.
While we were at the airport yesterday, I saw someone from long ago.
It was when we were at the end of our rope waiting, while Goli Joon was beating herself and we were all tired and stressed. Only Simeen was having fun, pulling my sweat jacket hood over my head and laughing and acting like a monkey. It was while I was thinking, What kind of crazy life am I living with this whacked-out family?
It was then that I saw Quentin.
Quentin, the rich stockbroker boyfriend with the house on Lake Minnetonka, the cleaning ladies, and the vacations to Paris. Quentin, with the Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe. I still miss that Marilyn Monroe.
He was at the baggage carousel next to the custom doors, with his very young-looking girlfriend, and it was for a flight coming from Florida. I realized right away it couldn’t have been Dori because Dori would be older now. This woman wasn’t older than twenty-four.
We barely caught each other’s eyes, and did not even say hello. I remembered when he and I went to Florida. Quentin and the young woman looked like they'd had lots of free-spirited fun, and they looked tanned and relaxed, and free of whacked-out relatives and rambunctious kids. They looked like all they had to do was go back to his house on Lake Minnetonka and have more sex.
It was like looking back in time. I went to the bathroom with Simeen, and walked right by the girlfriend on the way back. She had a hard look, even though she was pretty. She’s in it for the free travel—I can tell. Back in our airport seats, I observed them together for just a minute, even as Simeen was pulling my hood over my face. The hood, with its perforated fabric that I could see through, was the perfect disguise.
Quentin and his companion grabbed their baggage from the conveyer belt and left. As Goli Joon paced the width across the forbidding customs doors, slapping herself silly, I let Simeen pull the hood over my face and laugh again and again.
I played along with her, making her laugh all the harder as I yelled, "Hey, where is everybody? Somebody turned off the lights!"
Running
“I just ran a whole fucking mile,” I tell Savi. I don’t swear around her like this usually—this is more my talking-to-Melinda language, but I deserve this f-bomb. I had forced myself to do something, to get out of bed and try to act more alive.
Savi seems distracted. “Your family will be proud of you.”
“Yeah, well. One mile is about a third of Laura’s usual cool-down, but still. I didn’t even plan to do it. I was just walking around the track. I bent down to tie my shoelaces tighter, and when I stood up I suddenly just took off. Zoom!”
Savi stirs her coffee. I had told her that sometimes I think I might have depression, and felt surprised she wasn’t giving me advice (and books) like she usually does. “Walking is just as good as running,” she counters.
“To be honest, I’m not sure I was running. I thought I was, but everybody passed me—old
people, a bow-legged man, even a Somali woman in a long skirt and head scarf.” The Somali woman used to walk at the same time I do, but she started jogging last month.
This wakes up Savi. “Why do you assume that the Somali woman would be slower than you?”
“Because of the skirt, as I said,” I answer. A lot of people are coming to Minnesota from Somalia lately. “But they’re tall, so I guess the long legs make up for it.”
“Oh my God,” Savi says. “The woman probably survived a war and still you assume you should be superior to her. Do you ever even think about other people’s realities?”
Stung, I take a sip of my tea, but I have to try a couple of times before I can swallow it.
“It’s not my fault I’ve never had to survive a war,” I say. “Don’t you think I could?”
I try to change the conversation to ask Savi about the book she has peeking out of her bag. But a shadow passes over her face. I notice she looks older now; it’s as if it’s the first time I’ve really looked at her in five years. “You really don’t ever think about other people. Did you even know I suffer from depression too?”
“No,” I say, “because you didn’t tell me.” Now is the moment when I should ask her about that, obviously. But instead, I get up to leave.
The next day, I call Savi and tell her I’m sorry. That maybe we could go walk, or run, and that I want to hear about her depression too, not just tell her about my suspicions about my own mental health.
“Of course you have it too,” she says, and again I feel stung by her insinuation that I turn everything back to myself instead of caring about others. She adds that she has a writing project deadline looming, but maybe another time.
I go to the community center with my mom instead. She runs strong laps, achieving a state of flow, so it doesn’t look like it’s even difficult. There’s no sign of her former knee injury. Her right hip gives her trouble now, but she keeps going and passes me more than every ten minutes. I repeat my magic moment from the other day, walking a few laps and then bending down to tighten my shoelaces before taking off.
I wonder how many miles I would have to run to get the runner’s high.
Beating Hearts
Goli Joon goes home to Iran, staying in Darab’s house. Her long-separated husband lives in the gardener’s cottage, around which he grows the tarragon, mint, and basil with which they begin every lunch and dinner. She lives there for three months with all this family, her son and his wife, the grandsons, Darab’s wife’s parents, and her so-called husband, Mahmood. She survives well enough with her grape-skin heart to assist with dinner every night.
Darab emails Naveed a photo of Goli Joon and Mahmood, Mahmood’s arm around Goli Joon as she tosses a salad in the kitchen and smiles like a school girl enjoying the attention.
Naveed shows me the photo, and I say, “There is so much I don’t understand.”
“Me too,” he says. But then he tells me, “It’s not what you might be thinking, though. Actually, they have agreed to put the paperwork through to officially end their marriage.”
“That’s not what it looks like to me,” I say, “because they look sort of flirty in this picture.”
Naveed looks at the photo and then he blows his nose into a tissue. “It looks to me like forgiveness,” he says.
When Goli Joon comes home to us, she looks healthier. Even though we know she’s very ill, we begin to take her for granted like before because she seems young again.
One Sunday morning, Naveed’s sister is at our house for brunch. Naveed has invited her, and even though I’m tired and feeling very heavy and low, I get up to cook because I feel shame that I have not been a good host to her. Firoozeh’s apartment, naturally, is right in the neighborhood. Maybe this is still Little Iran. Firoozeh’s arrival has rejuvenated the dinner and tea party circuit. Today we have people coming for afternoon tea, and then later we’re all going to have dinner at somebody else’s house. Although I might weasel out of it.
I’m in the brightly lit kitchen, making omelets with the bacon, onions, and green peppers. I’m frying the bacon separately to keep it out of Goli Joon’s omelet. I keep it out of Firoozeh’s too, just because she thinks it’s gross—not because she’s religious. She’s not—she’s only “spiritual.”
Goli Joon has been looking out the window from her perch on the couch. As I go to tell her that brunch is ready, she gets up and peers through the glass, then begins gesturing wildly to something outside the living room window. “Where is the phone? Call 911,” she says. “It’s the neighbor!”
I see the old man, Mr. Noury. He’s almost in his usual post-jog position out in the road, but he looks like he has been doing his knee bends and arm rotations when his left side fell. He’s still standing, but as I watch he slowly moves into a crouched position on the ground.
As usual, the cordless phone is nowhere near its charger, but Goli Joon quickly finds it on our fireplace mantle as Firoozeh and I yell for Naveed. I have not seen Goli Joon move so fast before, fast enough to make me worry about her heart.
Naveed turns the knob of the front door and yanks hard to open it. We run to the man. He smiles up at us, trying to shake his left arm, which seems glued to his side.
“Goli-am ku?” he asks—where is my Goli? Goli Joon leans out the front door with the cordless phone and I run back to her, taking the phone and explaining that we need paramedics, that our neighbor might be having a heart attack.
Naveed motions for me to come and sit with Mr. Noury while he finds Milad Zand. They come back together and help him to our lawn. Yasmin runs out of the house with a bottle of pills and a glass of water. She helps him take two pills, and then she rubs his left arm as if she could make it come back to life and fend off the attack.
Goli Joon is watching from our door, trying to direct Naveed and the neighbors from a distance, which almost makes it look as if she’s in control, except that she’s hitting herself at the same time. Firoozeh gently takes her mother’s hands and makes her stop, and then tries to pull her back into the house.
“Goli mikhaum” the man tells his daughter—I want Goli.
Yasmin looks toward the house and sees Goli Joon and Firoozeh there at the door, Goli looking ready to sprint over but hesitating for some reason. Since losing Parvaneh, Yasmin looks twenty years older. She has no effervescence, and yet she doesn’t seem weak either. She stares ahead, but when the ambulance arrives and the emergency responder asks who all is coming along with the patient, Milad and Yasmin look at each other.
Yasmin suddenly lifts her chin up and hollers at Naveed, “Call over your maman!” Then she checks her manners and adds, “Please!”
Goli Joon comes over as quickly as she can, not waiting for Naveed to ask. She climbs in, and off they go, red lights twirling atop the boxy emergency room on wheels.
“There’s still so much I don’t know,” I tell Naveed, baffled. I still don’t understand how the falling out between the families, caused by Goli Joon’s damaged pride over Yasmin’s rejection of Naveed, fits with this—I don’t know what to call it—relationship? between Goli and Mr. Noury.
“I don’t even think I want to know,” he says. When we go inside he tells me in an unnecessarily quiet voice that the other day he came home and his mother had six grocery bags from Byerly’s to put away.
She told him she’d walked there, as she often does while we’re at work, but he knows she can’t carry more than two bags by herself. “There were even Idaho potatoes,” he adds, and then shakes his head again, repeating that he doesn’t even want to know.
For now, all I really know is I need to cancel our afternoon tea party and dinner plans too.
When Yasmin Noury brings Goli Joon home late at night, Goli acts as if the events of the day were no different than her usual days of cooking or watching T.V. But everything has changed, and when the older man returns to his daughter’s home, a new unspoken agreement will have formed among all of us.
There will be tim
es ahead when Naveed and I will bring Simeen to my mom’s house and go out to a movie, or even to walk around Lake Calhoun and eat dinner in Uptown.
I suspect that Naveed somehow lets the neighbors know they should plan to go out too. They don’t go out to have fun by themselves; they are to be forever mourning for Parvaneh. But they go somewhere with their other daughter, maybe just to buy groceries with her, maybe to go shopping for pretty things for her. Or maybe they go for a visit to pour rosewater on Parvaneh’s grave at Lakeview Cemetery like Goli Joon did on the fortieth day after her death.
I imagine this isn’t easy for Yasmin Noury, but I don’t ask her. We still are not friends, but someday I hope we will be—if she ever has the time, that is. I know she’s still working on putting one foot in front of the other after losing Parvaneh, but she’s back to work now. I see her leaving the house in the morning in her crisp white blouses and black everything else. She looks tired and angry and sad, and yet I see determination in her eyes as she heads off to another day of getting justice and preventing torture.
I understand now how the falling out happened because of Goli’s pride and worry, and also how Yasmin had probably not been ready for her father to move on and love a woman besides her mother. But I still don’t know how Mr. Noury and Goli Joon initiated their affair, or when, and they keep everything so very decorous and their reputations as pure as the driven snow on a Minnesota Thanksgiving.
I guess there are some things that are just meant to stay private in their culture, and not all secrets are bad.
Naveed and I ask Goli Joon to come with us when we go out, but we will not ask three times on some evenings. I imagine the same ritual happening across the street. When the elders stay behind, we will only smile and not tease if, when we come home, the good teapot and two glass teacups, or a book of poetry and a purple ring from a glass of wine, are left on the fireplace hearth.
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