The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

by Jasmin Darznik

  Lili would crouch beside the tub and then, as pomegranate juice dripped from my hands and my chin and the bubbles in the tub slowly turned pink, she’d tell me stories about a place she called Persia.

  “Have I told you the story of my wedding? Did you know they called me Khanoom Doktor—Madame Doctor—back then?”

  “Yes, maman,” I’d say.

  “And have I told you I wore no makeup at all?” she’d continue. “None at all! Just minutes before the ceremony began, my aunt Zaynab came running toward me with a stick of black kohl. Before I knew it, she’d swiped one line across each of my eyelids!”

  She’d pretend to line her eyes with two flicks of the wrist.

  “No other makeup at all!” She laughed. “I bought the flowers from the best florist in Tehran,” she went on, “Kobra prepared the food, Zaynab and Khanoom, my grandmother, assembled the sofreh, the wedding spread, and my cousin Nima, who was just a scrawny boy then—but already flirting with me, if you can imagine—played the tar while I danced.”

  She’d look at me to make sure I was listening.

  “Everyone, but everyone, said I was pretty as an aroos farangi, a foreign bride, but what they really could not believe, and still can’t believe, was that when I came back from Germany I brought them a damad farangi, a European groom!”

  By this time in the story I’d dropped the last of the pomegranate skins into a pot beside the tub. The red splotches disappeared into the bathwater, leaving not even a pink hint of my indulgence. Still smiling at the memory of her wedding, my mother would reach over and flip the drain open.

  I’d forgotten home, I’d forgotten Iran, but just as some memories linger in spite of our longing to forget them, there are some loves that will take in just about any soil. When my mother Lili lined my bathtub with pomegranates, she was giving me an appetite for an unearthly fruit and the stories and secrets encased in its many-chambered heart, and this, she knew, was a pleasure from which not even a small girl could be exiled.

  Ten

  The Good Daughter

  “Now you know there was no choice. I wanted to keep you safe. It had to be.” These are my mother’s last words on the tapes, but they come out with an odd inflection, like a question or even, I think, like a plea.

  FOR YEARS THE WORLD seemed split between two kinds of women. The first were my mother’s friends, the wives who stayed home all day, waiting for children who, as the years went on, would not answer them in Persian. In the afternoons these women dressed in pretty clothes, piled jewels around their throats and on their fingers, made up their faces, and gathered in one another’s drawing rooms. They gossiped endlessly about other people’s children and husbands and mothers-in-law, but they were always careful not to disclose too much about their own difficulties. If they worked, they didn’t talk about it. Instead they told tales about royal ancestors and abandoned riches and took turns reading one another’s fortunes in the patterns left in tiny white cups by thick potions of Turkish coffee. Each time they met, they parted with kisses, with the halting intimacy of estranged sisters.

  The other kind of women were the relatives who came to stay with us for weeks and sometimes months, long enough for me to know them in ways that I would never know my mother’s friends. They came between countries, marriages, and lives. Among them were wives whose husbands had found their reduced circumstances and diminished prestige in America unbearable. When their husbands left for Iran to take young wives and start new families, these women opened beauty parlors or turned their living rooms into day-care centers. One paid her son’s college tuition by sewing hospital scrubs and sent him off each week with Tupperware containers marked “Herb stew, my love” and “May I die for you, rice pudding.” I knew another woman who, after days spent hunched over the cash register of a small deli, stood over the bathroom sink at night, rubbing her husband’s socks with a bar of soap under hot water until her hands wrinkled and the socks were restored to a virginal white.

  And then there was my own mother, with her two homes and her two lives, and the unwavering pride with which she maintained the distances between them. One mother spent her days at a run-down motel along the highway answering the phone in a heavy accent and cleaning motel rooms on weekends and all the other days when the regular maid did not show up. The other wore a turquoise bathing cap and bright red lipstick when she went swimming in the backyard of our house in Tiburon. She reigned over dinner parties of fifty or a hundred guests. She coursed through rooms with marble coffee tables, gilt-framed armoires, and fields of Persian carpets. There was the woman who wrangled over motel bills with truck drivers and the woman who lined plump dates with almonds and passed them on sterling silver platters to her guests.

  But just as there were two kinds of women, there were also two kinds of girls: Iranian daughters and American daughters. Iranian daughters, like The Good Daughter of my mother’s stories, were shy, quiet, polite, and modest. Some, but not all, of her friends’ daughters were Iranian daughters. They addressed their elders with the formal shoma, never toh. They knew how to serve a proper tea. And when they laughed, they hid their sweet smiles behind their hands.

  The old ways were fading fast in America, but it was the loss of just such daughters that would reveal to Iranians the true measure of their exile.

  In the mid-eighties, when Iran’s borders were opened again—or opened, rather, for brief and uncertain intervals—Kobra began to visit us in California. She’d stay for six months or even as long as a year, but she never cared to stay for good. For Kobra, America was a very small place, much smaller than Iran. She didn’t speak English, she didn’t know how to drive, and she didn’t know anyone here whom she could call or visit. She spent her days alone in the house, puttering and praying, arranging and rearranging the contents of her suitcase, and then settling into an armchair to study the actresses’ hairstyles on Days of Our Lives until I came home from school.

  Apart from television and her namaz, cooking was her only diversion. Some Saturdays she’d wake up as early as six in the morning, tie her hair in a kerchief, and slip into the kitchen. She steeped the day’s first tea leaves with cardamom and rose essence and then she started rinsing and soaking the rice and trimming the day’s vegetables and herbs. When she was not working the night shift at the Casa Buena, Lili joined Kobra at the stove and they’d settle in for a full day of cooking. I’d drift into the kitchen between cartoons to make myself some frozen waffles and find the two of them in the kitchen with all the burners on at once, frying up pounds of chopped onions, armfuls of eggplants, and mountains of marble-sized meatballs. They’d joke and bicker long into the afternoon, stopping only for a makeshift lunch of flatbread, feta cheese, and a couple of fresh walnuts, too, if those were already done soaking in salt water.

  Labors of such scale, I well knew, signified just one thing: guests were coming to our house for dinner. Even a modest dinner party back then meant at least thirty or more people. The wives dressed as if for a state function and without exception only the men drank alcohol. There were always at least three kinds of stew, two types of rice with separate plates of tahdig, or thick crisped rice, alongside pilaf-stuffed grape leaves and bell peppers, potato cutlets, homemade yogurt, and, for dessert, bowls of a thick saffron-infused rice pudding and carefully assembled towers of fresh dates. By the time Lili and Kobra were done cooking, there’d barely be enough time for them to slip into their party dresses and swipe on some lipstick. Still, they always ushered guests to the table with apologies for the terrible simplicity of the fare.

  Such parties were increasingly rare, however. With Johann gone for days and weeks at a time, Lili and Kobra spent most weekends at the motel, working side by side. I’d have no choice but to go along with them. To pass the time I’d flip on the television as we made our way through the rooms.

  “For this you left your country!” Kobra would chide Lili, clucking her tongue and wringing her hands. “To be a maid!”

  “I have no choice!�
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  “In Iran they called you Khanoom Doktor,” Kobra muttered. “Why don’t you come back home? Why don’t you come back to your country?”

  Lili lifted her chin and nodded toward me. “And how,” she’d ask, “can I take her back there now?”

  At this I might look up at them. “Take me where?” I’d ask my mother in English.

  “You see!” Lili would say, and throw her hands into the air. “She doesn’t even know where anymore!”

  In the summertime they dragged blankets onto the balcony, strung up mosquito netting, and slept outside. The fog was always heaviest in the summer, but on those rare clear summer nights Lili would point toward the San Francisco skyline and ask, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “But do you remember when we slept on the rooftops in Tehran?”

  “Of course,” Lili answered, “but look how beautiful it is here!”

  Kobra would glance, reluctantly, toward the city. “Yes, but if I stay here I will get sick,” she swore, “and I will die in this place.”

  The sound of their voices, the roll and the lilt of Persian, and all their squabbling and confiding were never as close as when we were in the car on one of our road trips. Once a year Lili plotted a course to the relatives—the cousins and second cousins and fourth cousins once removed—who now lived scattered along the state. She’d load up the Buick (for such long journeys the Cadillac could not be trusted) and the three of us would head south toward Los Angeles.

  It was a style of travel well suited to my mother and my grandmother. Iranian pop music blaring from the tape deck, they gossiped and bickered their way through pounds of sunflower seeds and pistachio nuts. “I’m bored!” I’d holler from the backseat. My mother would hand me a sheet of lavashak, a kind of Iranian fruit roll-up, or else a handful of pistachios and tell me to look out the window at America. I’d sulk awhile and then go back to reading a book, oblivious, then, to the imprint of their language on mine and their country on the only homeland I recognized as my own.

  The summer of the salamanders, Kobra and I moved to the house in Tiburon and Lili moved into Casa Buena by herself. For some weeks—exactly how many I couldn’t be sure—Lili and I went home only to grab some clothes or collect the stacks of unopened mail. But now Kobra had come from Iran to stay with us and the house was hers and mine and Johann’s.

  On the day of our return, I left my grandmother in the kitchen and went to the backyard by myself. The grass had grown as yellow and dry as straw and it scratched my ankles to walk through it. I slipped off my sandals and sat at the edge of the pool and looked down into the water.

  Leaves had made a thick, brown carpet at the bottom of the pool, and so it took me a moment before I could see them. Dozens of salamanders, ink black, with rubbery bodies and long, thin tails, had gathered in our swimming pool. They wriggled and slipped and skidded over one another. Some lay still, as if dead.

  They taught me the essence of time and of deceit, those salamanders, because all at once I understood that we must have been gone from the house for a very long time. But I was my mother’s daughter; I didn’t turn away. I was eleven years old and already I understood shame and secrecy, pride and resourcefulness. I stood by the edge of the pool, staring into the brackish water and considering the salamanders for a long while. Then I rummaged around the backyard until I found the long pole with a net meant to catch fallen leaves. One by one I fished all the salamanders out of our swimming pool and hurled them high over our deck and into the neighbor’s yard.

  Those months were the longest I’d lived with my father since we’d left Iran, but I hardly ever saw him. He spent days in his office with the door locked. “Your father’s working,” my grandmother would tell me when I asked after him. “Don’t disturb him, madar-joon.”

  When she was busy in the kitchen or praying in her bedroom, I’d occasionally wander downstairs and linger by the band of light behind his door. He always had his radio tuned to a classical music station, but if I was very quiet I could make out the sound of a glass hitting the desk or a page rustling, and sometimes I’d hear him talking on the phone in a language that was not German and not Persian, a language I could not name, much less understand.

  The police brought him home twice that summer. The first time he’d been walking home drunk on the town’s main thoroughfare, a narrow, shoulderless two-lane highway. He stumbled to the center of the highway and sent a car swerving over the divider. It wasn’t long before a policeman caught up with him, hauled him into a police car, and brought him back home to us.

  “Danke schön!” Kobra told the policeman that night, trembling with gratitude. In her broken German and few words of English, she proceeded to ask him into the house for a cup of tea, an offer he politely but firmly refused.

  Then came the day when my father staggered into the cul-de-sac, stretched his arms out, and began spinning in a circle like a dervish. One by one the neighbors came to their windows to watch. He screamed, sometimes in German, sometimes in Persian, and spun in circles, from one end of the cul-de-sac to the other, until his knees buckled and he fell, face-first, against the concrete.

  When the policeman came for him that time, his forehead was wet with blood and he was weeping.

  “Can’t anyone cry in this country?”

  “Sir,” the policeman said as he led Johann out of the cul-de-sac, “you can cry all you want in your own house. But in this country nobody screams in the streets.”

  It was Kobra who finally saved him.

  One day when I was away at school, two tall, muscled young men came to the house in Tiburon. It was nearly noon, but Johann still lay dead asleep in his office, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, his pores rich with alcohol and the whole room sour with it.

  Kobra murmured a quick prayer and then knelt at the side of his bed.

  “You are my own dear son,” she cooed. “You are a good, good man, Mr. Engineer.”

  He groaned.

  “You love your family,” she continued. “You love your daughter.”

  One eye opened.

  “Do it for me, Mr. Engineer,” Kobra pleaded.

  He groaned again, turned away, and pulled the sheets over his head.

  For nearly an hour Kobra sat beside him, smoothing his brow, cajoling and pleading with him until at last he let himself be taken away.

  It was not called a hospital or a clinic but a rehabilitation center. A strange expression, Lili had thought when she first heard it on a TV commercial, but one that suggested homecomings. And beginnings.

  Johann would spend the next eight weeks in a room with a single bed, one plastic chair, and a window that looked onto a small redwood grove. For the first seven days he shivered and sweated and screamed, and for the next seven a succession of doctors drew his blood, held his X-rays to the light, and showed him death. His lungs had turned coal black, his arteries blocked. “You will die if you don’t stop drinking and smoking,” the doctors told him, and though for more than two decades Lili had told him as much, he only now beheld the proof.

  For Lili there would be a revelation of another kind that year. Once a week she went to visit Johann and afterward she’d sit in a room with the other patients’ wives. The women sat in a circle and one after another they told their stories. They wept openly, without shame, without apology. She had never known anyone to speak candidly of such troubles, and as she, too, wept and told her story, Lili would marvel at the honesty that is possible sometimes only among strangers.

  When, at the end of two months, Johann was released from the clinic, he’d gained twenty pounds and his hair had turned completely gray, but he’d been cured of his addiction. He’d never drink again. In this same time, Lili had managed, just barely, to avert bankruptcy. She’d sold the Casa Buena, but she’d lost the house in the Tiburon hills. We had less now, by far, than we’d brought with us to America, and no hope at all of returning to Iran. Still, what Lili saw when Johann returned to our new two-bedroom apartment on the edge of town
was her shy, blue-eyed suitor in his herringbone jacket and his crooked bow tie. What I saw when he returned was the kind, bookish, soft-spoken father whose solitariness was my own.

  Every time she came to visit us in America, Kobra arrived with a battered leather suitcase that smelled of mothballs and some other scent I could never place but that for me was the essence of the afternoons I had once spent with her at the Lady Diola. As soon as she got in from the airport, she’d unpack a sweater, two or three prim little house frocks, and a pair of rubber house slippers. Her fancier outfits—all her silk blouses and knockoff Chanel suits—would appear only on nights when my parents’ friends came to dinner, spending the rest of their stay in America in the same suitcase in which they had arrived.

  Over the next months, this suitcase would inexplicably expand to accommodate not only several more piles of girdles, sequined party dresses, and coats with matted synthetic fur collars but also huge stashes of toothpaste, razors, dish soap, shampoo, and every department store makeup sample she managed to fish out from the cabinet under my mother’s bathroom sink. By the time Kobra was ready to leave, the suitcase had grown so fat that it would not close with ease. Often she and Lili would spend the day of Kobra’s departure taking turns sitting on that suitcase in an effort to force its metal clasps shut. The Ritual of the Suitcase could go on for hours, and it became Kobra and Lili’s way of arguing about Kobra’s insistence on returning to Iran—and many other things I didn’t understand.

  “Why are you dragging all this back again?” my mother would start, bearing down on one corner of the suitcase while snatching vainly at its clasps. “I just don’t understand you! There’s nothing left back there, don’t you see?”

  “You don’t know anything about it!” Kobra snapped.

  “What are you going to do when you get really old? What am I supposed to do with you then?”