“Yes, well, it’s a …” Eleanor laughed softly, a bit nervously, avoiding eye contact with the thing, pretending to be deeply engaged in petting Lola, while shooting a couple of glances to Al for help.
“It’s,” he paused, trying to smile, a bit embarrassed, until finally getting another glare from Eleanor to go ahead, “It’s, you know, a gas mask. An Israeli Army gas mask. The real deal. They’re hard to get … these days.”
Suzanne confronted it, horrified, stunned. She lifted the thing close to her head but couldn’t even bear a lighthearted trying it on. It was awful. It was not even funny. It was. … “Breathtaking,” she muttered.
“Now, now, Suzi, it’s like your father said, a joke!” Eleanor exclaimed, scrambling to liven the mood. “Kind of, at least! But you know, it’s also for just in case—and that’s like the silliest just in case ever, not even one in a hundred gazillion!—but let’s just be silly and say that just in case, darling, it does work!”
Al cleared his throat and added, “What your mother’s trying to say is that it’s not something you’re going to use, we know that. But good to have, no? You know, just pop it where the emergency kit is. … You live in Manhattan, dear, I know these things have been selling out like hotcakes, everyone has them. …”
Suzanne nodded. “Thanks,” she said numbly, and was quickly shoved the other gift. She opened it on total autopilot, mind still reeling with I can’t believe they got me a fucking gas mask. This one made sense: a large pink mohair bear with a pure silver Tiffany’s choker tight around its fat neck like a collar. She thanked them with a smile and nod. Yet another Tiffany’s necklace—but their latest design! as Eleanor reminded her, as it had been all the other years—it was her third or fourth at least. She could add it to the sell-on-eBay pile.
Suzanne couldn’t bring herself to complain—not about the necklace, at least. Her present for Al was yet another silk tie, after all—although this time a riskier grass green and from Saks, not Barneys—as it was every year. For Eleanor, too, it was yet another gift certificate to some trendy new downtown spa that she would never visit, but that Suzanne felt responsible for at least trying to expose her to. She found trying to be original or extravagant with the gifts embarrassing anyway—it was The Account that was dishing it out, after all, not her.
They all smiled and thanked and hugged and that was that. Eleanor revealed in a dramatic, hushed voice that Xerxes’s gift was an extremely high-tech fancy alarm clock, also special-ordered from Tokyo. “I mean, we don’t know him, so I thought the price of the thing could do the talking! Ha!” Eleanor laughed to herself.
Suzanne would have dry-heaved at that if she weren’t nervously staring at her watch. It was late. Presents done, small talk over, Anita shuffling, stomachs rumbling, shit. Still no Xerxes.
Eleanor, true master of pretension, pretended it was no big deal. “Oh, let’s just sit back, have some more mulled wine—Anita, can you get the fireplace going—and … talk! Tell us about him!”
“I hear he has something in common with seventy-five percent of your father,” Al added, with a wink.
“Suzi darling, what does he look like?” Eleanor asked.
Suzanne thought about it. What did he look like? She remembered thinking that exact sentence a lot in their first few weeks of still undefined partnership—what was it that attracted her to him? Certainly she had dated more handsome men in her life—that one country boy in Tuscany, the several charming nearsighted and pea-coated New England college boys, the older chain-smoking Upper East Side architect with his many dogs and many hats, the Midwest musician with all the quaint tattoos, hell, even that one burly street poet from Brooklyn! Xerxes was not visually, say … breathtaking. He was not unattractive either—there was nothing wrong with him. But he wasn’t … well, she could imagine her mother thinking he wasn’t up to par with her visuals. And she didn’t want the clichés to be true—Oh, but he’s so beautiful inside; oh, but you should see his heart; oh, but to my eyes he’s the most—but it had some true elements. She couldn’t judge anymore. She loved him. She couldn’t see him that way. He was hers. She’d started carrying pictures of them to show to girlfriends who’d always comment on them—Oh, you’re so cute together; oh, you guys look so happy; oh, he looks like he cares about you so much; oh, look at how content you seem with him—but never on what she’d be getting at. What did they make of him? She didn’t know and she couldn’t tell, and when she thought back to her first encounter with him for evidence of what impression that initial exposure left, she was alarmed to register him as a nothing, remembering him as downright faceless, invisible, in fact, a voice, a presence, but certainly not a man, not obviously her man—and especially a nothing when juxtaposed next to that evening’s historic black and bloody skyline.
“He’s tall and dark,” Suzanne said slowly. “And … handsome. Sure. He’s, you know, Father, you know, from Iran. He has that look.”
“Strong features, big eyes, curly hair,” Al rattled off. “Lucky if he’s not short and stocky, I’ll tell you that. Thank goodness for my other twenty-five percent!”
“Truuuly!” Eleanor laughed along. “Okay, well, that’s nice. He has that exotic thing, that’s fun. Although these days … my, he hasn’t had any … trouble?”
Suzanne could feel the conversation taking a bad turn. Eleanor on Race: it was always a doomed topic. She rolled her eyes. “We live in New York City, Mother!”
“Exactly!” she said. “Exactly my point. Of all cities, if any city had a right …”
“You know, she means people might take their anger and,” her father paused, “act out, say, discriminatorily.”
Suzanne moaned. “Please, can you not talk like this when he comes?” she blurted out and then, a bit ashamed by the silence that she had caused, added, “I mean, I know what you mean. And no, as far as I know, he hasn’t had any trouble.”
“Where do his parents live?” Eleanor asked, reaching absently for a glass, a glass of anything, anything alcoholic hopefully. “And what do they do?”
“Los Angeles,” Suzanne said, racing through the paperwork in her brain for their occupations. “The mother, she’s … I don’t think she works. And his father … I think teaches. Math and some science maybe, I think.”
Al nodded approvingly. “Ah, they’re probably one of those wealthy LA Iranians,” he chuckled to himself, “who don’t really need job-jobs. Jews?”
Eleanor eyed the Christmas tree in alarm. “Oh, no! Jew?”
Suzanne refrained from letting her annoyance take over and made do with a shake of her aching head.
More silence. Suzanne looked at Fyodor, Suzanne looked at Lola. The dogs ignored everyone. Al eyed Eleanor; Eleanor eyed him back.
“Well, okay. …” Eleanor murmured, gesturing to Anita to fill their glasses some more. “Then, so, one has to ask, what is he … is he. …”
“I mean, he has to be then, isn’t he. …” Al wondered, scratching his newly thick-fringed forehead over and over in a ticlike reflex.
Oh, they were nervous. She knew what they meant. And Suzanne was happy she could say, “Well, historically sure, they must have been. But Xerxes has always told me his family and he himself … well, they’re not Muslim at all.”
Eleanor broke into a smile, eyed Al, Al eyed her back, affirmative? But Al still looked unsettled. His own family had been like that—historically Muslim, in fact, was a term she had heard him use—but it was his twenty-five percent that had propelled the move to America earlier in that last century and converted them to the New Land’s unofficial religion. Al considered himself Christian—after all, you had to be something, which is why he couldn’t take it and had to ask, “Well, what the heck is he then?”
Suzanne thought about that. She really didn’t know. She didn’t think he was anything. It was always what he was not that they talked about.
“He’s not very religious,” she said, quickly adding, “but believes in God.” She couldn’t even say if that wa
s true, but it was very possible—and hopefully a means to cap the current conversation into complacency.
Eleanor smiled widely. “As long as Christmas doesn’t bother him, whatever he is doesn’t bother us!”
But later in the evening—as Anita’s rounds of mulled wine continued and then were followed by Eleanor’s request for spiked coffees, spiced rum Jamaican coffees, Just for the hell of it, Eleanor kept insisting, deep in the type of tipsy that demanded everyone be tipsier—Suzanne’s mother started singing another tune. Suddenly it was the old Mother she remembered and remembered dreading, no doubt about to bring out the old Father she remembered and remembered resenting.
“So, what does he make of Iran today? Appalling, no?” Eleanor continued with her inquiry, her red lips now drunkenly curling into her old classic cruel smile.
“Your mother means their government,” Al added.
“I mean, the country’s just another nail in the Mid East coffin!” she cried, one hand in a fist even, suddenly. “Do you know your father doesn’t know a single person in that dratted country anymore? Not a single! All the relatives, out! Paris, London, Stockholm, out! Thank goodness.”
Suzanne looked at Al and he nodded along, preferring to observe Fyodor and Lola over either of them. The dogs looked half there, bored, sick, tired of life.
Suzanne could feel the evening’s many exasperations heading to a boiling point inside her. Suddenly the many wasted hours and especially her mother, the ivory WASP sovereign, were getting to her, with her father as the almost exotic sidekick, and their warped morals and their pretty-sitting offenses—and their fucking Israeli Army gas mask, just in case! It was too much. She had to, for a second, be herself.
“You know, I would like to visit Tehran,” she dared toss into the already troubled waters.
Eleanor took a highly indelicate gulp of the hot caffeinated booze that burned her throat, making her gasp out with an exaggerated grotesqueness, “Excuse me—I don’t think so, Suzi, not so fast—oh, what, has your little boyfriend asked you to go to the motherland! Al, thank God, never ever—”
“There was never a chance, with the Revolution and all, and frankly I don’t know the place,” Al quickly, quietly, tensely interjected.
“No, in fact, Xerxes has never ever spoken of wanting to go,” Suzanne snapped back, her own voice rising a bit, too, the force of the caffeine and alcohol equaling a perfect belligerence. “In fact, I think he has no interest. But I … you do remember, Mother, I am half Iranian!”
“Almost half,” her parents corrected in perfect fucking unison.
It was true, but it upped the level of Suzanne’s pissedness even more. “Okay, fine! But I think one day I would like to see the land where I am almost half from, damn it!!”
Eleanor slammed her glass, rudely snapping Fyodor and Lola back to consciousness. “Pipe down, Suzanne!” she barked. “This is Christmas Eve!”
“Your mother is just thinking it’s not a smart idea to fantasize about the Middle East in times like this,” Al added, a bit frantically, “when, let’s just face it, there is no more dangerous region in the world.”
Suzanne could feel her anger making her about to flip her lid. She was ready to lose it the way she used to when she was a teenager, when there were no people in the world more despicable than Al and Eleanor. “No more dangerous place! Hello!!! Try New York City!!!”
Eleanor cackled bitterly. “Oh, good example, good example, Suzi! And why is that? Why oh why is that? Because your darling little Middle East came to us!”
Suzanne wanted to rip that gleaming bun off her stupid head. She hadn’t felt so violent in ages. “I want you to think about what you say, Mother, before you say it—September eleventh was not just about the Middle East—and certainly not Iran—and you can’t just clump everything together like that, it’s not right, it’s downright ignorant, and frankly when I said I wanted to go to Iran—which I do and which I assure you one day I will—I didn’t mean this month or soon, I meant one day! And I promise you I will and I promise you it will be fine and will resemble nothing like whatever your image of hijackers and fundamentalists and God knows whatever else is, goddamn it!”
“You can stop damning God right now, Suzanne,” Eleanor hissed, pointing to the tree as if it were Jesus in the room. But she was outraged and now she was shaking, shoving her empty glass into Anita’s stomach for more, Anita also shaking and shocked, used to nothing but Eleanor’s immaculate WASP reserve. And she went on, “Because, Suzanne, you will never change me—your father never did! I know what I know and I know it wasn’t me, it wasn’t us, we didn’t cause that hell, we didn’t ask for trouble, your darling little Middle East, it came to us …!”
And just as it was all happening—Eleanor suddenly standing tall in her heels, shaking, practically jiggling in the equal but opposite way of, say, a Santa, face redder than holly and flushed deeper than a Rudolph nose, madly ranting, like the clockwork of bells, like the mechanized tidings of a battery-operated angel, over and over, “your darling little Middle East, it came to us!” only further cartoonized with Al trying to interject, looking to Suzanne yet at the same time managing to nod when Eleanor’s eyes would meet his, and Fyodor and Lola suddenly tossing in every bark and whine known to canine in agreement/dissent, and Anita scrambling to the kitchen to prepare another highly complicated poisonous drink to obediently fuel her mistress’s fire, and Suzanne just sitting there looking up at her mother as she did when she was a child, in disgust and fury and a little fear—and just as the words “your darling little Middle East, it came to us” were volleying from wall to wall with the spirited acoustics of an encored anti-carol, just as the Cottage’s Christmas Eve had hit its all-time climax … the doorbell rang, and on the other side, indeed, it had come to them: a very tired, sweating, tall, dark, handsome-ish young man in an ill-fitting suit, holding potted grocery store chrysanthemums, automatically rattling off apologies.
And just like that the atmosphere in the Adam household turned upside down. Bob’s letter ushered in the first season of happiness that they could remember since Tehran. Another dull California holiday season suddenly transformed into the first spring of Lala Adam’s life—the next morning she called in sick, bought flowers, dusted and cleaned and scrubbed and polished, and instead of walking outside simply walked inside the length of the apartment, pacing barefoot on the carpet and laughing into the ceilinged heavens like a most blissful caged madwoman.
She referred to the episode only as My Miracle.
For days she even put off writing back. She let the letter sit there on her dresser and would wake up each morning excitedly to reread it as if for the first time. But when she finally decided after a week that she couldn’t delay it any more, the text came out quicker and easier—although more feverish and disorganized, she had to admit—than anything she had ever composed in English,
Dearest Bobak,
Hello it is your Sister Laleh—by the way, they call me Lala now, my Name is changed, but that’s okay, call me anything you wish! But WOW, what an amazing Gift, what a most great Surprise, what a thrilling thrill! I thought, how can this happen, it is a MIRACLE really! WOW is all I can say!
I have a family here in California and my Son, who is 26, lives near you in New York somewhere and you should see him! But maybe I will see you soon too! I will come, tell me when! Why are you in a Hospital?
Most important is what is your Phone Number? Mine is (626) 791-2135. We must call and talk! A LOT! We lost so many years!
Do you speak Farsi still? You must but I write in English in case!
You have always been in my head—as they say in our language, Khali Dellam Tang Shodeh: My Guts Has Been Made Very Tight Because Of You Not Being Around!
I LOVE YOU, MY AZIZ!
Your sister LALEH or LALA
PS. How did you find me? WRITE ME SOON!
She thought she might know the answer to the last question but she wasn’t sure. She remembered crying into Marvin’s
arms long ago and him assuring her the world was a small place and they would be reunited, but she could not recall how he thought he could help. Nonetheless she left a message on Gigi’s cell phone asking for Marvin’s phone number, since, to her amazement, Lala didn’t even know his last name to look him up. Without getting into it too much, Lala’s message to Gigi pleaded gently, Please call me back, even though it has been so long you may not want to, but I may need you to, because perhaps I need to thank Marvin, I don’t know. She was not surprised when she did not get a call back—she decided perhaps it was for the best, as, after all, the mystery would be unveiled when her brother and she were reunited. In a way, she preferred imagining it was the work of the gods, rather than some thuggish New York agents of Marvin’s. So she kissed the sealed envelope several times and gingerly placed it in the mailbox, as if without extreme love and care it would disintegrate and the whole dream would shatter.
Darius, meanwhile, was also better. He had his reasons: A) Of course, as her husband, he was simply happy for her and Her Miracle. B) It would no doubt mean a kinder, gentler Lala Adam, as he had always suspected that the tragedies of her childhood were what had made her so hard. C) Now she could focus on some other guy and leave him alone to obsess about his own messed-up life in peace.
And eventually D) came, just a couple of weeks after her letter was sent. Her Miracle became His Inspiration, as it suddenly set off a floating lightbulb over his head, so dazzling and pure that it could have been mistaken for a halo. Suddenly Darius, too, saw the potential for being saved.
It first came up on a particular night in their Season of Happiness, right after the first love they had made in a scarily long while. He was lying exhausted, entranced, amazed that her body could still feel familiar after so long. She was humming to herself like a schoolgirl, in a way he had never heard before, intensely alive. The world suddenly seemed safe, peaceful, loving. The darkness of night was suddenly nourishing and comforting, rather than torturous and demon-filled. Darius Adam was poised to be blessed, he decided. What’s the American saying again? he thought, smiling to himself. Something about how you get lucky when you get lucky?
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