A Handbook to Luck

by Cristina Garcia

  How could she tell them that she was barely sleeping from the anticipation? Enrique had written that he was married and had three children—three!—but he was eager to see her again and hadn’t stopped thinking about her. He’d quoted a line from a Cuban poet: “‘Love happens in the street, standing in the dust of saloons and public squares: the flower dies the day it’s born.’” Then he’d added, “I look forward to resurrecting our flower.”

  “I’ll be taking my daughter with me. Mehri was born in the States, but we moved back home when she was a baby.” Leila could feel the envy and excitement in the room. “We’re going to Disneyland.”

  “Ahhh!” the women exclaimed. They knowledgeably compared the merits of the original theme park in California with the vast Florida compound. Every woman at the beauty salon had relatives in America. They told of uncles and cousins who’d gone there to study and had stayed, or returned for visits only to criticize life in Iran. Often, the men changed their names to Mike or Fred, short names like the bark of a dog. How could these compare to their beautiful Persian names?

  “There’s no respect for women there,” the wife of a wealthy bazaar merchant complained, stubbing out a contraband cigarette. “College girls go drinking and whoring with no one to look after them. Where are their fathers and brothers?”

  “I hear so many lies I don’t know what to believe anymore.” A middle-aged woman frowned, her head rattling with foil packets of highlights. “But everything they hear about us is also untrue.”

  “Things have changed so much,” sighed a thick-browed woman with shimmering nails. “We used to drink in public and pray in private. Now we pray in public and drink in private.”

  Everyone laughed, although the joke was familiar.

  “Now, ladies,” Farideh interrupted. “We need to get started on our new customer. Eshkal nadare? Come this way, dear. Some tea, first?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Leila sat on a flowered sofa and accepted a steaming cup from the samovar. She noticed a woman at the far end of the salon, her hair done up in braids and pink ribbons. She wondered if her husband liked her this way.

  It hadn’t been easy convincing Sadegh to let her go to California. She had had to agree to his conditions. In fact, he’d had a lawyer draw up a contract, with a smattering of seals and signatures. Above all, Sadegh wanted an unlimited number of temporary wives for the duration of their marriage. Leila pretended that this was a great sacrifice on her part. Of course, she knew her husband wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. He would be too embarrassed by his impotence.

  Sadegh demanded that Leila go to California for no longer than seventeen days, that she was not, under any circumstance, to visit Disneyland—referred to in the document as “a cesspool of American degeneracy”—or to wear shorts or bare her arms above the wrist. Leila was also contractually obligated to purchase for her husband a long list of American products, including boxer shorts, chunky peanut butter, Pop-Tarts, and instant mashed potatoes with packaged gravy.

  At first, Sadegh hadn’t wanted to let Mehri travel. He said he would miss her too much and didn’t want her corrupted by Western ways. Leila knew that Sadegh loved their daughter. Not once did he mention Mehri’s weight (she was growing quite plump) or her increasingly unsightly nose. He brought her chocolate ice cream every night and took her for visits to his nuclear facility, where Mehri got to wear what they affectionately called her “space suit.” Leila was worried about radiation contamination but her husband dismissed her concerns.

  Sadegh tried bribing Mehri to stay with him in Tehran instead of going to the States. He promised her a brand-new rifle and a trip to a shooting range (something she was longing to try) but in the end, the chance to go to Hollywood proved too alluring. Leila wished they could leave Iran for good, but this was impossible. Sadegh would track them down in California, kidnap Mehri back. Then he would make certain that Leila lost all maternal rights.

  Her husband didn’t discuss his years in the States except to say that they were the worst years of his life. “Nobody should live with their enemy” was his only response to questions about his studies abroad. When Sadegh referred to America at all it was as that ruined country, mamlekat-e-kharabshodeh. He never mentioned their trip to the Grand Canyon or returning home to find his twin brother dead in their dining room. Sadegh had stuck to his lies for so long that the lies had become the truth, even for him.

  Leila secured a sugar cube between her teeth and sipped the scalding tea through it. Sugar was not on her diet, but surely one tiny cube couldn’t hurt. In the United States, she would need to remember to drop the sugar cubes in her tea. She looked around and felt a kinship with the women here. Why hadn’t she sought them out before? Trying to look good in this country was a radical act. To show a bit of ankle or a polished nail was the height of subversion. Unfortunately, this obsessive preoccupation with appearance left little energy for more serious pursuits.

  Who would she miss, Leila wondered, if she left the country? So many of her relatives had already fled—to Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, France. Her Uncle Kazem and his second wife, an Italian biologist named Claudia, had shocked everyone by declaring themselves Marxists and moving to the Soviet Union. Aunt Parvin had left, too, after Uncle Masood died. Nowadays she was living in London off the largesse of her former archenemy, Leila’s own mother.

  Last year, Maman had finally married the horticulturalist, in a wedding that made the society pages of every British newspaper. She and Mr. Fifield owned a town house near Hyde Park and a country estate in Sussex with award-winning gardens, a showpiece for prospective customers. Maman continued painting her watercolors, distributing them among her friends and family as gifts. Even Mehri had received one of a basset hound for her birthday.

  Leila worried about her daughter learning to become a woman in Iran. Once she’d overheard Mehri praying to God to change her into a boy. Who was she to discourage her? Worse still, she feared that her daughter was turning into a younger version of Sadegh—serious, impatient, forever dissatisfied. Mehri revered her father and wanted to be just like him. If she wasn’t the best at everything she did, she threw a tantrum. Her teachers had sent her home from school on numerous occasions for fighting with her classmates. Leila suspected that her daughter shared her father’s disdain toward her.

  Besides Mehri, there were only two people Leila would miss if she left: her father and Yasmine. But Yasmine wasn’t long for the country either. Since she’d been caught drinking and dancing at a private party (the local komiteh had been summoned by a jealous neighbor), she was plotting her escape. Yasmine had been charged with decadence and spent a week in jail. Her friend was lashed so viciously that her back looked like a butcher’s display of ground lamb. And she was one of the lucky ones. Hundreds like her disappeared every day and were never heard from again.

  Only Baba remained steadfast in his support of the country. He was like a stubborn captain who would go down with his ship. It was a question of loyalty, not to the government but to the land, to his land, which he refused to abandon. Dr. Nader Rezvani was condemned—yes, that was the word—to Iran like thirst to a desert. Leila decided that there was something self-serving about her father’s stance. Hadn’t Baba always done what he believed without regard for the consequences to his family?

  When Leila had confided to him that she was thinking of divorcing Sadegh, he’d joked, “Elizabeth Taylor has nothing on my daughter!” Then Baba had grown serious. “Here, my light, real virtue is admired but not practiced. You must do what you believe. Whatever your decision, you can count on my support.” He hadn’t said another word about it. Why hadn’t he asked her more questions? Didn’t he care how she felt? Her father, she concluded, was a man first. One man didn’t interfere in the marriage of another.

  After Leila finished her tea, Farideh led her to the masseuse. Leila stripped off her clothes and let the sinewy woman—she introduced herself as Bita—coat her body with an amber oil that smelled of oranges and mint. B
ita massaged Leila’s neck and shoulders, then methodically worked down her spine, popping two vertebrae. As Bita pushed against her lower back, Leila’s nipples tightened. It had been so long since anyone had touched her with the slightest intention of pleasure that she began to cry.

  “I’m so sorry. Am I pressing too hard?” Bita asked.

  “No, no. It’s fine.”

  “The body is intelligent,” Bita said softly. “It tells you what it needs. Eyb nadare. Cry all you want. This often happens the first time.”

  “Please continue,” Leila said, wiping her eyes.

  She tried to imagine Enrique seeing her naked again after so many years. Would he still find her beautiful? Trace his hands along her waist? Gently rest his head on her breasts? What did his wife look like? Enrique had written that Delia had been born in Cuba, like him, but grew up in the States. Leila knew all too well the pull of the familiar. In a contest for his love, who would win?

  “Now breathe deeply and we’ll have you relaxed and ready for the rest of your treatments. When you leave here today, nobody will recognize you.”

  “Motashakkeram,” Leila said. “Kheyli mamnum.”

  Recently, Sadegh had been acting more kindly toward her. Not warm or loving, just less angry and violent. He hadn’t hit her since the day before New Year’s. That beating had left bruises that took nearly a month to heal. Leila attributed the change in his behavior to his health worries. Her husband wasn’t old or overweight but at his last checkup Dr. Banuazizi had told him that his blood pressure was a little high for a thirty-four-year-old. Now Sadegh was convinced that a heart attack was imminent.

  Since then he’d stopped having sex with Leila, claiming that it overtaxed his circulatory system. His bluffing about temporary wives hadn’t diminished, a contradiction Leila found amusing. At least she was no longer forced to embrace him. More and more, Sadegh dispatched her to their villa on the Caspian Sea on the pretext that he needed a few days’ peace. She welcomed these retreats from the city. Sometimes she stayed away for weeks.

  Leila settled on a squeaky swivel chair to get her hair dyed chestnut brown. She’d been using a packaged coloring product made in Austria, but it turned her hair dry and brittle.

  “You’re too young to be all white,” the hairstylist said, picking at Leila’s roots with the long handle of a comb.

  “It’s hereditary,” she lied.

  Would her brother’s hair have turned prematurely white if he were alive? It was impossible to picture him any older than he’d been on their last day together. She still visited Hosein’s grave and felt his presence beneath the rotting figs. But she was no longer comfortable speaking to him aloud. There was no privacy at the cemetery. With the war still raging, people were paying respects to their dead day and night.

  A customer wearing cropped pants and a bright orange top waved around a cassette that she’d bought from a Turkish vendor in the alley behind the salon. “He told me it was the latest hit in Ankara,” she announced, slipping it into Farideh’s tape deck. A lively pop song filled the air. Several customers clapped along to the rhythm.

  Last year, the prayer leader in Tehran had denounced all forms of music as evil. Leila had been forced to stop Mehri’s piano lessons on the grounds that Mozart was too provocative for a good Muslim girl. In the ensuing confusion, Sadegh had managed to buy a Steinway grand piano for next to nothing. (He easily rationalized breaking the government’s rules when it suited his interests.) But it wasn’t just the musicians who’d become refugees. In Iran, nearly everyone was a refugee in one way or another.

  With a mischievous look, Farideh turned down the lights, thrust out her small breasts, and threw back her shoulders. She began to dance, eyes hooded, lips parted, hands twitching and sweeping like a pair of butterflies. As she undulated her way among the customers, her bangles tinkled and her prominent buttocks lifted and dipped. The women hooted as if she were a belly dancer. Two more got up, including the bazaari’s wife, who sensuously shook her round belly. Leila longed to join the women, but she couldn’t force her body to move.

  When the music stopped, the women clapped and cheered. But the sound of a distant explosion stopped their merriment. The war with Iraq was dragging on. So many young martyrs were dying with “keys” to heaven—cardboard cutouts, in fact—pressed to their chests. Thousands of ordinary citizens were also dying. Funeral processions ensnarled the already nightmarish traffic in Tehran. People were moonlighting as professional mourners to make extra money. (There was no shortage of this type of work.) Red tulips, symbol of the martyrs, were planted everywhere.

  Others lost their minds from the blasts. One bomb had leveled an apartment building in Leila’s father’s neighborhood. Baba’s colleague and close friend Dr. Ali Houshmand had been killed, along with his entire family. Baba was inconsolable. A week after the attack, their dog, Zozo, who’d been lost on a trip to the mountains, reappeared. Zozo stood guard at the rubble, whining and growing thinner, waiting for the Houshmands to return. Nobody had the heart to take the dog away. Leila didn’t understand its persistence. She understood much better the pull of the grave.

  Silence fell over the beauty salon like the sadness of winter. These past few days, the winds had blown red dust everywhere, upending trees and knocking out the electricity in the southern part of the city. Odd blue centipedes were infesting the flowering trees. People nervously predicted an earthquake but the winds kept howling and the earthquake never came. Leila looked around at the other women in the salon, partly obscured by the cigarette smoke. By next summer, she decided, her life would be nothing like theirs.

  (1987)

  May 25

  Marta

  Marta changed the bandage on her son’s forehead. Part of the oozing crust of the wound was stuck to the gauze, but at least it wasn’t bleeding anymore. Yesterday José Antonio had fallen in preschool during a game of hide-and-seek and broken open his forehead. The nurse showed Marta how to change the dressing and bandage his forehead, not too tightly or it would cut off the circulation. Marta took her son home early and put him to bed. She wanted him strong for today. Today of all days, because José Antonio was becoming an American citizen.

  “Does it still hurt, mi amor? Let me get you some breakfast. You hardly had any soup last night.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat something. I don’t want you fainting in front of everyone. What will people say? That I’m a bad mother and don’t feed you breakfast?”

  The swearing-in ceremony was at ten o’clock. For the occasion, Marta had bought José Antonio a linen suit, two-toned shoes, and a miniature Panama hat. The outfit had cost $61.34 with tax. Exorbitant, but Marta decided it was worth it because from this day forward they could live their lives in peace.

  Marta had gotten permission from Señora Delia to take the day off and Frankie planned to close the factory early to prepare for the festivities. The women from Back-to-Heaven were coming over with casseroles (Vilma Colón was making her famous beef-and-plantain stew) and Dinora had promised to bring along her collection of records from the 1940s and ’50s. With a couple of drinks in her, she might be persuaded to serenade them with a bolero. Marta had invited everyone she knew to the party: the Florits, José Antonio’s classmates, the nannies from the park, her neighbors, the many vendors she’d befriended over the years. This would be a celebration that no one would soon forget.

  A breeze stirred the kitchen curtains. Marta made herself a cup of coffee, sweetening it with a wedge of sugarcane. For breakfast, she fixed quesadillas and served them to her son with black beans and cream. For a while, they’d tried those overpriced American cereals but they turned out to be made of nothing but sugar and air. An hour later, they were hungry again. The same went for that Wonder Bread, which left them all constipated. So much of the supermarket food here was like that—colorful packages with only emptiness inside.

  “Hurry up. We need to go to church before the ceremony.” Marta yawned as she
pinned an evil eye charm inside her son’s jacket. It was important to take precautions against any possible misfortune. Though she’d slept soundly last night, Marta still felt tired. No doubt all the emotion from yesterday had left her spent.

  “I want to watch Mary Poppins.”

  “We don’t have time now.” Marta loved the movie as much as her son. After renting it twice, she’d finally bought a copy of the video. She finished dressing José Antonio, then rubbed lightening cream onto his neck.

  Señora Delia disapproved of Marta using lightening cream but how could she understand what a difference a few shades of brown might mean? There was no hiding the prejudice in Los Angeles. At school, one of her son’s playmates had told him that nobody but maids spoke Spanish. Then his teacher had instructed Marta to speak only English at home so José Antonio wouldn’t get confused. It surprised her that a teacher could be so ignorant.

  Outside, the neighborhood was quiet. The German shepherd had trapped the same alley cat up the oak tree. That crazy Mr. Haley was painting his porch a bright yellow. A bird Marta hadn’t seen before fussed on her gate. It reminded her of the tortolitas back home, cinnamon-colored with their white-striped wings. They liked to flutter in the tamarind trees, making a rumm-rumm sound like a motor running, calling to each other from great distances to warn of danger.

  On the eight-block drive to church, Marta let her son sit in the front with his seat belt fastened tight. “This is a special day, hijo. Don’t ask to sit up here tomorrow, or the police will put me in jail.”

  On ¡Salvado!, the tearful testimony of Evangelina Huerta, a former Costa Rican beauty queen, was under way. Evangelina confessed that she’d tried to hold up a doughnut shop with her young son’s toy gun. In the middle of the robbery—the clerks were so scared that they gave her all the money in the cash register, plus a sack of chocolate glazed doughnuts—she heard the voice of the Lord ordering her to put down the gun. Evangelina fell to her knees in fear and remorse. After handcuffing Evangelina, the arresting officer, who was also Costa Rican, asked for her autograph.