by Sara Saedi
Aside from my uncle, there were four other people who bonded my cousins and me together. Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were the members of a little-known Swedish band from the 1970s called ABBA. Here’s the thing. When you’re raised by immigrants, they don’t introduce you to American pop culture. As kids, we usually listened to Iranian musicians. My sister and I would always groan that we much preferred to dance around the house to Madonna or Michael Jackson, but my parents were too busy rocking out to Persian singers like Googoosh or Ebi. There was only one English-singing pop group that played on our family boom box, and that was ABBA. Not everyone fully understands the true power of ABBA, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find an Iranian who doesn’t love their entire catalog of music. To us, they were right up there with the Beatles. They had songs we could dance to at family parties, and ballads that could send you into a black hole of sadness. Their lyrics were about love, heartbreak, guys named Fernando, and places called Waterloo.
Even though ABBA was famous years before I was born, I listened to them religiously as a teen. I didn’t exactly advertise this to any members of the opposite sex. Certainly not Evan Parker, who only listened to respectable classic rock bands. But I turned my American girlfriends onto ABBA, and they became totally obsessed. Izzy and I were the queens of falling in love with guys who didn’t love us back, and nothing else quite captured our heartbreak the way songs like “The Winner Takes It All” or “One of Us” did. If our cousins club was one of our most tried-and-true traditions, then ABBA was a close second. “Dancing Queen” plays at every family wedding, and my female cousins and I push our way onto the dance floor to link arms and sway in a circle together. Sadly, ABBA doesn’t tour anymore—they even turned down a billion-dollar offer for a concert. Both couples divorced in the eighties and the end of their marriages marked the breakup of the band. But their music lives on, thanks in great part to Iranians everywhere.
It’s no coincidence that the biggest die-hard ABBA fans among us were also my greatest role models growing up. Neda and Mitra were best friends who were cut from a very different cloth, and I wanted to cherry-pick their greatest qualities so I could be the perfect combination of the two of them. My cousin Neda is eight years my senior, but she always spoke to me as if I were on her level. She had a way of making me feel like we were the same age, even though I was still in high school and she was a workingwoman in her twenties. She was also one of the kids hiding in the back of a truck headed for Pakistan. After living near each other our whole lives, I was gutted when Neda’s parents moved their family to Colorado, but Neda lasted only a year in another state before she decided to return to the Bay Area. Samira had gone away to college, and we had an extra bedroom in our house, so my parents let her stay with us until she found her own place.
Hanging out with my cousin Neda before my high school formal.
(This dress will be important later.)
With Neda temporarily living with us, it felt like I had an older sister again. When she learned that I took the public bus home from school, she insisted on picking me up every day. She always arrived promptly in her blue Ford Escort, with a Cappuccino Blast from Baskin-Robbins waiting for me in the front seat. I sucked it down even though the high caffeine content gave me serious anxiety and terrible diarrhea. My group of friends loved Neda. She listened to stories about the boys we loved and the girls we hated, and offered sage and thoughtful advice. Neda was mature beyond her years and had a maternal side even as a child. She was polite and well mannered, and at family dinners was the first girl cousin up from her seat to clear the table and wash the dishes. The rest of our parents looked at us kids and wondered why we couldn’t be more like Neda. Who could blame them? She was a perfect human.
If Neda was considered the “good girl” in the family, then my cousin Mitra was the rebellious black sheep. She and Neda were only a few years apart in age, and even though their personalities were wildly dissimilar, they were inseparable. Mitra was my dayee Mehrdad’s daughter, and half-Iranian. With her fair skin, bright green eyes, and auburn hair, you’d never know she wasn’t just another white girl. All through high school, I referred to her as my “cool cousin.” She always had a string of hot skater boyfriends, an adorable nose piercing, and a shoe rack full of Doc Marten boots. Just like Winona Ryder, she could totally pull off a pixie cut. So what if she had a tendency to run away from home and go missing for days with her boyfriend? The girl marched to the beat of her own drum. She didn’t care what the elders in the family thought of her. I felt cooler just by association. I smoked cigarettes with Mitra. I ditched family parties with her so we could drive to a nearby park and listen to her boyfriend play guitar. She promised me that when I graduated from high school, I could skip college altogether and move in with her. I knew my parents would never go for it, but it was nice to know I had options if my undocumented status meant a bachelor’s degree wasn’t in my future.
But Neda had her rebellious moments, too. She was just better at hiding them. When I was thirteen, they both decided it would be really fun to get me drunk. I suppose corrupting me was everyone’s favorite pastime in my family. My parents were out of town, so Neda and Mitra came over to our house with a bottle of vodka and a two-liter of 7Up. My sister was a veteran drinker by then, but I’d never had more than a few sips of wine and beer. I’d certainly never had hard liquor before. It was Saint Neda who introduced us to her favorite drink: vodka poppers. The recipe was simple: two parts vodka, one part 7Up. You’d stick your hand over the shot and bang it on the counter, and once it started fizzing, you tossed it back. I could barely taste any of the booze on the way down. I was tipsy and happy and seriously shocked when virginal Neda confessed to me that she’d been sexually active for a while (Samira, our cousin Leyla, and Mitra were already in the know). It hurt to know that for the past year, she’d made comments about being inexperienced for no one’s benefit but my own. But I was glad that with high school just around the corner, I was deemed mature enough to know my cousin’s biggest secrets.
In the photo below, taken that night, you can’t see the image of the guy on my T-shirt, but it’s a picture of a young Ethan Hawke. My sister knew I had an enormous crush on him and had my favorite magazine photo of him put on a T-shirt as a birthday present. You may know him as the guy who played the dad in Boyhood, but he used to be a Gen X icon. As far as I was concerned, no other actor could play vulnerable quite like Ethan Hawke, and I fell madly in love with him. I read every interview and saw all his movies. When Reality Bites came out, I was almost angry that other girls were now jumping on the Ethan Hawke bandwagon. My devotion to him started during his Dead Poets Society days. I loved him so much that I named my beloved goldfish after him.
My sister on the left, me in the middle, Neda on the right.
Poor Ethan (the fish) wasn’t very well taken care of. We’d bought him for our Persian New Year altar known as the haft-seen.* Goldfish represented the end of the astral year. Once the holiday passed and the altar was put away, Ethan lived in a small glass mixing bowl that we kept by the sink on our kitchen counter. Izzy was always bewildered by Ethan’s survival. Her mom had bought her two fish, with a gorgeous aquarium to house them in, and they’d both died within months. Despite serious neglect on my part, Ethan had been alive for two years.
“It’s because he represents my enduring love for Ethan Hawke,” I would explain to my friends without a hint of irony (which I can define, because I’ve seen Reality Bites).
As much as I loved every one of my cousins and had significant relationships with each of them, I have Mitra to thank for one of the best days of my life. It was my junior year of high school, and Mitra persuaded my parents to let me play hooky for the day. She refused to tell me where we were going, but after driving for a half hour on 280 North, I suspected we were headed into San Francisco. With no knowledge of our plans for the day, I st
ill decided to wear an outfit worthy of Mitra’s coolness. An old pair of Levi’s that Izzy had given me from the 1970s, a black tank top, black Doc Marten lace-up boots, and the pièce de résistance: a maroon velvet blazer that I’d found on the rack of a thrift store. Trust me, velvet blazers were all the rage.
We had a few hours to kill when we arrived in San Francisco, so Mitra took me out to lunch and we roamed the crowded city streets. We stopped at her boyfriend’s tiny apartment, where I bravely pretended to inhale a little pot, and then we continued on our way. We strolled down Market Street and approached the massive Virgin Records (a place that used to sell cassette tapes, CDs, and books) on the corner. Mitra pretended like there was a CD she wanted to pick up, but when I followed her inside, she pointed me toward a sign and said: “What if I told you this is what we were doing today?”
I nearly fainted. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to burst into tears. The sign had a photo of Ethan Hawke, along with the cover of his debut novel, The Hottest State. He was going to be there in a mere hour to read a chapter from his book and sign copies. I was about to meet the love of my life. I was nearly shaking as we walked up to the register, and Mitra bought us each a copy of Hawke’s book. The cover was a beautiful watercolor of a dripping green heart, with one symbolic drop of red paint. Some critics rolled their eyes at Hawke’s efforts to become a writer, but I just thought it made him even sexier. He was more than just a guy who recited other people’s lines of dialogue. He was thoughtful and intelligent and quite possibly the voice of an entire generation.
“I can’t believe this,” I whispered to Mitra as we waited for the reading to start.
We were among the first to arrive, so we snagged seats in the second row. The chairs began to fill up, and finally, after what felt like several tortured hours, Ethan Hawke walked down the aisle and took a seat in the front at a microphone. I can still remember what he was wearing: a forest-green suit with a black T-shirt underneath. Back when there was no Twitter or Instagram, you had no clue what your favorite celebrities were doing at any given moment, but I remember watching him and thinking, “I know exactly where Ethan Hawke is right now.”
The moment became even more surreal as I scanned the rest of the audience and noticed a beaming Uma Thurman on the sidelines. I’d never been so jealous of any human being before in my life. I knew everything about celebrities (in fact, Izzy’s mom referred to me as the “information superhighway”), but news of the Hawke-Thurman pairing hadn’t reached the magazines yet. Gossip columns had not found their way to the Internet, so we relied solely on monthly magazines for the latest on whom our favorite celebrities were dating.
I tried to stay in the moment and focus on Ethan’s raspy voice as he read a chapter from his book, but I was way too nervous. Once the reading wrapped, we were told to form an orderly line to get our books signed. Mitra stood in front of me. I tried to think of the perfect, most memorable thing to say to Ethan, but my brain had turned to mush. I stood in awe as Mitra casually greeted him and told him how cool it was to hear a writer interpret his own words aloud. I watched as Ethan’s face lit up, and he agreed. There was nothing sixteen-year-old me could say to him that would sound as smart and perceptive. I finally approached the table, and Mitra hung around nearby to observe the moment. All I could think was that my parents were right. In America, anything was possible. In America, dreams really did come true. I opened my mouth and carefully uttered, “I hope I can write like you one day.”
He looked up from the book and said, “Thank you. Thanks so much for coming.”
If you think my memories of the day might be inaccurate more than twenty years later, here’s the moment described in my diary:
October 29, 1996
Finally, he walked in. He looked so beautiful, but skinnier than I thought he was. His hair was short and messy, and he had facial hair. He looked really nervous, and it was so cute because he couldn’t get the microphone to work at first…then he read aloud chapter 19 of his book, which was so cool…Then we got in line to get our books signed…I was so nervous when I went up to him. I told him I thought it was really good, and that I hope I can write like him one day…I want him so bad.
The next day, I checked on my goldfish, Ethan, but to my dismay, he was floating on his side in his small mixing bowl. Ethan was dead. He’d served his purpose. I had met my number one celebrity crush, and now my fish could peacefully swim across the rainbow bridge.
I was sad to see Ethan the fish go, but meeting his namesake had been the perfect send-off. From then on, spending my days at school would feel like a total waste of time. There was a great big world out there, and I wanted to explore it. I knew I was lucky to have older cousins to take me on adventures that included meeting my literary heroes and drinking tasty vodka concoctions. As far as I was concerned, my dayee Mehrdad had already succeeded at his life’s purpose. My cousins and I were thick as thieves, and we would stay that way even when we grew up and started our own families.
Cousins and spouses piled into an elevator on a cruise ship, 2015.
* * *
* Haft-seen literally translates to “seven s’s.” The altar includes seven items that begin with the letter s, all with their own symbolic meaning. It also includes a bevy of other non-s-related objects. For instance, “fish” is mahi in Farsi.
I just feel like I’m not good at anything. I know I’m probably just being too hard on myself, but I’m a little annoyed at myself, my personality, everything—except for my family. That’s one thing I’m always thankful to have.
—Diary entry: May 13, 1995
Here’s a scenario I frequently witnessed during my adolescence: My dad, at the wheel of the car, with my mom sitting in the passenger seat. Me, in the back seat, usually in the center so I could lean forward with my seat belt on to control the radio and turn up the volume anytime a good song came on. Apropos of nothing, my mom’s and dad’s hands would meet somewhere near the air conditioner unit, and they’d hold on to each other until my dad had to make a tricky turn or merge onto the freeway and needed to keep both hands positioned on the wheel. Inevitably, over the course of wherever we were driving to, their hands would find their way back to each other again. It never occurred to me that those brief displays of affection between one’s parents were rare or special or that they even required hard work to achieve. I took these moments for granted, but from where I was sitting, I got to observe a stable, functional, and joyful relationship. And that’s precisely why it was so shocking when I learned my mom and dad had gotten a divorce. I may have buried the lead, but I need to give you twenty years of epically romantic context before we revisit the end of their marriage.
From the day my parents were reunited in America after the Iranian Revolution, they never spent much time apart from each other. They co-ran their luggage business, which meant they spent their days at work together and then spent their evenings at home commiserating over dissatisfied customers or certain suitcases that were damaged beyond repair. My dad generally got home a few hours later than my mom, but as a rule she never ate dinner without him. Even though we had a dining table, my sister, brother, and I would plop place mats on the floor and eat our dinners while watching sitcoms. By the time my dad got home and my parents ate, it was sometimes close to ten at night. We rarely ate dinner around the table as a family. In fact, I remember being confused anytime I went to dinner at my childhood best friend Megan’s house and realized they (a) ate dinner at 6:00 p.m., which was considered early for foreigners like us; (b) had rituals like asking to be excused from the table; and (c) drank milk with dinner instead of water or soda. A creamy beverage with savory food? Had Americans lost their damn minds? Milk is meant for cereal and desserts. As a bonus, I also learned there was a difference between napkins and tissues. In our home, we used Kleenex to wipe our mouths. Megan and I met in second grade, but her family would eventually move to Massachusetts
and I would visit her during the summers. Her parents were among the first to know that my family was undocumented. When Megan’s dad told my mom that they wanted to take us to Canada for a few days during one of my visits, my mom had to politely decline and explain that I wasn’t allowed to leave the country.
Compared to those of Megan’s family, our family rituals were either less rigid or nonexistent. I loved that my siblings and I got to watch the TGIF lineup while we ate dinner. I also respected the fact that my mom never let my dad eat alone. Apparently, this was one ritual she’d started in the early days of their marriage. I didn’t quite understand how they still had so much to discuss over a meal of zereshk polo,* considering they’d spent the entire day together, but theirs was not the kind of relationship that was filled with comfortable silences. They never seemed to run out of things to say to each other, which made it all the more astounding that they’d known each other for a total of two weeks before they got married.
I used to flaunt this fact to my friends at school. I thought it was so romantic. “It was love at first sight,” I would tell everyone. “When you know, you just know.” But there was one minor detail I left out every time I told the story of how my parents met. I conveniently forgot (or refused) to mention that they had an…arranged marriage. I was embarrassed by this detail. Maybe I had bought into the Western depictions of what it meant to fall in love. All my favorite movies started with “boy meets girl.” They did not start with “boy’s parents and girl’s parents think they’d be a good match and then boy marries girl.” And while my parents never liked to dwell on this particular aspect of their courtship, they didn’t just stumble across each other in a freak thunderstorm or at a costume party or at a friend’s disastrous wedding. Instead, their families introduced them to each other.