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

by Jasmin Darznik

  Kobra drew herself up and placed her hands on her hips. “What will I do, you ask me? Well, what did I do all through the shoolooqi? What did I do through the war?”

  They’d spend the entire ride to the airport bickering and, in the most serious instances, swearing they would not even say good-bye to each other.

  When the time came to check her suitcase, Kobra always had a tactic for evading excess baggage fees. Confronted by a man, she would bat her eyelashes and smile a schoolgirl’s smile; confronted by a woman, she’d assume the pitiful posture of an invalid. She was difficult to resist in either case, and her record in evading the fees was nearly flawless.

  But one year, after a particularly heated Ritual of the Suitcase, Kobra hauled her luggage onto the scale by herself and looked up hopefully at the young male attendant only to be met by a stern look.

  “Thirty pounds over,” he said, shaking his head and frowning.

  Kobra turned to me. “What did he say?”

  “He says the suitcase is too heavy,” I translated. Even I could tell he would not be won by her usual strategy.

  “I’m not paying it,” Lili said. “I’ve had it with that suitcase and all the junk you keep dragging around!”

  Kobra reached into the depths of her scuffed handbag and pulled out two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills to pay the excess baggage fee. This would have been enough money to buy half a year’s groceries back in Iran. Nothing in her suitcase was worth that much, but she slid the bills onto the counter without flinching.

  “Please take me with you!” I’d once wailed in the last minutes before she disappeared behind the gate. After months of eating her treats and listening to her stories, I could not easily let her go. I’d clutch her skirts and tell her she could just take me with her in her suitcase and no one would ever know.

  My pleas would eventually become a joke between us. “I’d tuck you into my suitcase, but see how you’ve grown!” she’d say. Then, pinching my sides, she’d add, “Now that I’ve finally decided to put you in there you will never fit!”

  One year we would hear of an Iranian man who had done just this to smuggle his fiancée into the United States. He had taken the precaution of punching small holes through the fabric of his suitcase, but when he opened the suitcase in America his fiancée was dead.

  We could never tell our joke after that, but there was no joking at all this time at the airport. Kobra kissed me on both cheeks, whispered a prayer in my ear, and then she left America for the last time.

  Whenever my parents’ Iranian friends gathered for dinner parties and No Rooz celebrations, the men and women invariably parted ways just as soon as they stepped out of their cars and over the threshold of their hosts’ home. As a young girl, my place had always been with the women, perfecting a pleasing muteness as they gossiped over endless rounds of bitter black tea. With each year I’d grown more eager to join my father and the other men in their earnest talk of history, politics, and mystical Persian poetry, but very few women crossed that invisible boundary in those days and in those circles of ours, and it was unthinkable that I, a young girl, should pull up a chair next to grown men. It would have been indecent.

  There was so much that was indecent back then. Shorts and miniskirts, to begin. The tweezing of eyebrows and the wearing of all but the most discreet smudge of lip gloss. Sleepovers, school dances, parties, and any event for which my mother could not serve as chaperone were out of the question as well.

  To that eternal teenage wail (“But M-o-o-o-om!”) I routinely added: “This isn’t Iran!” This argument had no currency whatsoever with Lili. It didn’t matter that we’d never go back to Iran again. Even after ten years in this country, words like “boyfriend” and “dating” were as good as obscenities in our house. Those were American words, American ideas, and not, my mother Lili gave me to understand, meant for me.

  When I turned thirteen she informed me that when a girl “gave herself” to a man—the closest Persian equivalent for intercourse—she damaged herself. What’s more, the damage was immediately apparent. Intercourse changed a girl’s walk, her voice, her smile. And such “giving” before marriage cost a girl everything. “They use you and then…” Here her voice trailed off ominously. “Then they toss you aside like a sullied handkerchief!” Sometimes she preferred another, more distinctly Iranian metaphor: a worn and faded carpet. “Like so,” she’d demonstrate, stamping her foot and then bending down to smooth the silken threads. “Afterward they think of you as nothing but the worn carpet under their feet!”

  I knew that daughters of my mother’s Iranian friends were growing up in a similar way, with the same exhortations and prohibitions, but it wasn’t something I’d ever talk about with them. At the large public high school the Iranian girls formed cliques of their own, but at my small private school there were just three other Iranian girls and we kept to ourselves and did our best not to call attention to the Iranian parts of our lives. We did our best to pass as American. I, in any case, did my best to pass.

  Once I’d tossed cucumbers and quince fruit into the trash before school started. By high school I’d learned to duck into the bathroom before classes, trade my jeans for a miniskirt, and swipe on some blush, mascara, and lipstick. It wasn’t sufficient, really, to pass, and so whatever my mother forbade me I pretended to scorn. I couldn’t be bothered with boys my age and I had no time for high school parties; I’d devoted my life to higher intellectual pursuits. Said devotion mostly involved gorging myself on books. At sixteen I read all the diaries of Anaïs Nin, one volume after another, in quick, breathless, heady succession. I took to writing in my own diary. I wore black.

  “What’s all this?” my mother would say, throwing her hands up in the air. “Who do you think you are? Simone de Beauvoir? Can’t you at least put this junk aside and read some real literature? Shakespeare, say, or some Dickens…”

  I’d roll my eyes or pretend I hadn’t heard her.

  My father did not usually involve himself in these scenes. “Let her be,” he might, however, interject on occasion. “It’s perfectly harmless.”

  “Yes, harmless now,” Lili howled, “but where, I ask you, will it end?”

  Real trouble came in my senior year of high school. “Make something of yourself!” had been Lili’s injunction as she hauled me from after-school class to after-school class, but what this “something” should be, and how I might become it, grew less and less clear as my graduation date approached. With the sole exception of medical school, Iranian girls did not go away to college or graduate school. They lived at home with their parents until they got married. Smart, ambitious Iranian daughters went to one of the local liberal arts colleges or else the closest public universities; the others went to community college or didn’t go to college at all; and Iranian girls who left home under any other circumstances were considered members of a profession so shameful its name could not be spoken aloud.

  In ten years this regimen would become ancient history, but while everyone else from my high school went away on college tours and began mailing in their applications to campuses far and wide, I sat in a café in Mill Valley (strictly off-limits, Lili warned me, for in those years there were still “hippies” in Marin), read Kierkegaard, and wrote in my journal with a fountain pen. I’d have to live at home through college or I wouldn’t be able to go to college at all. It was useless to protest. I pined and ranted in my diary until the day my letter of acceptance came in from UCLA. Within weeks of its receipt, my mother packed up all our belongings and we all headed south, to Los Angeles, so that I could begin my college career.

  Tehrangeles.

  Some half million to a million Iranian immigrants had landed in Southern California after the 1979 revolution. From the rent-controlled apartments in Santa Monica to the high-rise condominiums on Wilshire Boulevard and the gated mansions of Beverly Hills, it was impossible to walk three paces in this part of California without seeing an Iranian face or catching a phrase of Persian. Irani
an grocery stores, Iranian bookstores, and Iranian furniture stores ran the length of Westwood Boulevard, from the Westside to the East-, their signs all rendered in bold Persian script. Even the air in Los Angeles, my mother observed with obvious pleasure, smelled exactly like the air in Tehran.

  I was expected home by sunset. I was not allowed to date. Still, Tehrangeles, I was determined, would have no claim on me. There were hundreds of Iranian students at UCLA and nearly all of them could be found on the southern edge of campus, poring over their organic chemistry textbooks and MCAT workbooks. I breezed past the future podiatrists, surgeons, and orthodontists and headed to North Campus, the artsy side, the side with the Romanesque architecture and landscaped lawns. From this picturesque venue I boldly declared my major: English. Fortunately, my mother approved the choice, and in this, at least, she proved more indulgent than most Iranian parents of her generation. For Lili the study of literature was permissible so long as it was cast off after the undergraduate level for a career in law.

  There followed then the period in which I traveled everywhere with my Norton Anthology, volume 1, tucked under my arm. In the center seat of the front row of Rolfe Hall I scribbled myself into ecstasies over the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It was not long before every one of my Norton’s three thousand tissue paper–thin pages was heavily annotated in ink. At night, in my parents’ house and in the same canopied bed I’d slept in since I was twelve years old, I detailed the agonies of my existence in the handsome French composition books I bought in a Santa Monica stationery shop.

  Between my passion for English literature and the severe restrictions on my social life, I’d manage to graduate from college in just over two years, but somewhere between the Romantics and all those tortuous journal entries I found my way into the college newsroom, and so it was with my newly minted, freshly laminated press pass swinging from my neck that I strode into the university hospital in pursuit of a story and ran into what was to me then the least likely object of desires, journalistic, intellectual, and otherwise: an Iranian doctor.

  In America, good Iranian daughters became doctors, the merely pretty ones married doctors, and the very best did both. I was hopeless at math and science, so there was never any chance I’d join the ranks of Iranian American doctors. For a long time, though, I seemed destined to marry one.

  I had no interest in marrying an Iranian doctor. I’d long since decided that if I ever married at all, it would be an artist—a sculptor, say, or a poet. And yet. This particular Iranian doctor possessed a vast knowledge of modern art. He’d actually lived in France. He wore round-rimmed glasses and he smiled a slow, lopsided smile. I was, from the very first latte he bought me in Westwood village, perfectly, lamely besotted.

  Amin was thirty-one. More problematically, he’d been married before. Childhood friends raised in the same small circle of Iranian Americans, he and his wife had married in their twenties and divorced a few years later. Suitors were not supposed to have ex-wives, because Iranians didn’t get divorced, so far as I’d ever heard, anyway.

  “Divorced?” Lili had shrieked at the news, and clutched at her heart. “You cannot imagine I would allow you to have contact with a man who’s been divorced?”

  “But Mom,” I whined, “this isn’t Iran—”

  “What exactly do you know about Iran?”

  For weeks the situation seemed hopeless. I made protracted, enfevered productions out of my misery. Deliberations were resumed. In the end my mother’s disapproval was mitigated by two factors: first, that Amin was a doctor and, second, that he could be called my suitor or khastegari.

  According to the many rules of our courtship, he was allowed to take me out only once a week. On Saturday nights Amin would arrive at our house dressed as I would never see him otherwise—in a suit and tie—and affecting a formal manner that faded as soon as he eased into his car seat and turned to me with a conspiratorial smile.

  The first night he took me to dinner in a French bistro in West LA. As votives threw shadows against the white tent he ordered chocolate soufflé in a French that would forever put my high school knowledge of that language to shame. The next week he took me to a gated white mansion in Bel Air to celebrate the birthday of a minor Saudi prince. “A patient,” Amin explained coolly as I struggled to suppress my awe. At the Hollywood Bowl one July evening I sought, desperately, to find transcendence in an interminable German opera. There were, in addition, a succession of cocktail parties and dinner dates with his medical colleagues and their eminently elegant wives. “What is your opinion of García Márquez?” an impossibly tall, impossibly thin blonde asked me at one such gathering, and I, the nineteen-year-old literary critic, proceeded to deliver a pithy assessment of his oeuvre, despite never having read even one of his novels.

  Summers in France had refined my suitor’s ideals of female beauty. He favored darkly lined eyes, pale pink lipstick, skirts, and high heels. I took a stick of kohl to my lids, painted my lips, and adjusted my black wardrobe to include pencil skirts and pumps. One day he took me to a Westside boutique and bought me my first very expensive purse, a small boxlike number with a handle and a tiny gold clasp. “Soigné,” he said as he assessed its effect on me, a word I understood to mean perfection.

  “I have to go,” I’d tell him, wrestling myself free at the end of the night.

  He always knew enough not to ask me to stay. “But do you know where you are going, little girl?” he’d tease, catching my face in his hands and kissing me one last time before letting me go.

  On the nights when I returned home after midnight, my mother would always be waiting for me in the living room, ready to take me in with a single glance.

  “Can’t you see that if you give yourself to him like this he’ll never marry you?”

  “But I don’t want to get married!”

  “Then he can’t take you out at all!”

  “But Mom, this isn’t Iran!”

  “Iran?” she’d say, narrowing her eyes. “You don’t know anything at all about Iran!”

  I’d stare dumbly at the floor, cheeks hot with shame and desperate to escape.

  I would on no account have told Amin about these late-night exchanges, and if he ever wondered what happened after I closed the door to my parents’ house he never asked. And if on the next day he and his parents appeared at our door, my mother—now calm and sweet—would usher them all into our living room and I would be called upon to serve everyone tea in tiny gilt-rimmed glasses.

  This was the hour of the virgin. Not a single person in the room believed in my fitness for the role, but it was still necessary to play the part. I therefore dressed carefully, in pastel skirt suits and modest makeup, and I crossed my legs at the ankles whenever I sat down. During these visits, Amin and I never sat next to each other. We were careful not to look too long in each other’s direction. Afterward, though, we’d laugh it all off, mocking the ridiculous customs of our parents and congratulating ourselves on yet another perfectly executed performance.

  “You can leave this house,” she finally told me one night.

  It was two o’clock in the morning. I pulled the door closed quietly behind me. She was standing in the hallway in bare feet and a bathrobe, her arms crossed over her chest. My eyes fell to the suitcase she’d set by the door. I looked up at her, confused.

  “You are not my daughter,” she told me. Her voice was strangely calm. “You are not my daughter and you should leave this house.”

  In the dark she took in the whole of me—tangled hair, chapped lips, wrinkled skirt—and then she did what always scared me more than anything: she started pulling at her hair and beating her chest and tearing at her clothes.

  “Look what my daughter has made herself into in this kharab shodeh, this broken-down place!” she wailed, turning her palms and her face up to the sky. “Leave your home and every last person who knows your name, and now… this daughter!”

  I kept my eyes down. I would not cry or say even a word�
��I knew better than that—but later, when she’d stopping crying and screaming and had gone to sleep and the house was quiet again, I sat cross-legged on the kilim in my bedroom, tracing its rough knots and thinking of the suitcase my mother had left for me by the door.

  She didn’t mean, really, for me to leave home; that was still inconceivable to us both. She’d only meant I should be more clever, that I should stop “giving” myself away so easily, “giving” myself as an American girl would. That was what she’d meant with that suitcase.

  Still, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Without a green card, I had no way of supporting myself. My student visa would get me as far as graduate school, but all the schools I’d applied to were far away.

  Do you know where you are going, little girl?

  I laughed easily whenever Amin teased me with that question, laughed as though I knew the answer and had always known. But I had no answer. And I did not know.

  Every day I’d scramble out of lecture halls and seminar rooms, drive to Amin’s studio by the beach, and sit cross-legged on his futon with my books while he cooked. He was a marvelous cook.

  By the second year of our “courtship,” I’d progressed to the second volume of the Norton Anthology. I traded Shelley, Keats, and Byron for Woolf, Plath, and Rich. I made my first forays into French feminist theory. While Amin stood in the kitchen stirring a pot of bouillabaisse or some such, we had epic arguments about feminism. Or rather, he cooked for us as I rehearsed my epic feminist arguments.

  “Marriage,” I informed him one day, “is an instrument of patriarchy.”

  Concurring, he gave the bouillabaisse or some such a stir.

  “Unjust!” I shouted from the futon. “Unnatural!”

  “Maybe so, but what exactly do you propose we do about it?”

  I had no proposition as of yet, but that exchange did inspire a game of sorts.

  “If you asked me to marry you…,” I’d begin.