“The saffron mixed with water is like liquid gold. No? We call it liquid gold.”
He looked confused.
“Because saffron is so expensive, you know?”
“I see.”
“It’s all still here?” She laughed and tapped her head just as Walter had done.
“Yes.” He was staring at her. Then he placed his hand on his chest. “And right here. It’s all right here.”
The steam from the pot condensed into droplets of water on Roya’s face. She felt the droplets roll down her face, her neck. This had to stop. She could not fall for a man again, even though this Walter was so very different from the boy who had betrayed her. She grabbed a Persian lime, placed it firmly on the counter, and stabbed it hard. A large jagged gash pierced its skin.
“Whoa!” Walter stepped back from the stove and from her.
“Sometimes you have to cut hard,” Roya said sharply, “to get flavor out.” She turned away from him. “Now we make the rice.”
They sat in the dining room as night fell. “Go ahead,” she said, as she served him a plate of the chicken and eggplant khoresh they’d made together. “Try. Please.”
It was a dish she had learned to cook at her mother’s side in Iran. Kazeb always selected fresh vegetables at the market; sometimes she slew the chicken right in their own backyard, the limes drying in the sun next to the watering can in the garden, her mother on her haunches mixing the advieh spices. They would sit together—her and Baba and Maman and Zari—with their legs under the korsi on winter nights and share stories about their day as they ate.
Walter lifted a spoonful of her khoresh, her past. It should, if done right, be a mixture of sweet and tart, a fragrant, delicate combination of flavors.
She waited for him to try it.
“Wow,” he said. He took another bite. “My God.”
With each bite he took in the dining room of Mrs. Kishpaugh’s boardinghouse, another layer of Roya’s sturdy shell slipped away.
Chapter Twenty
1957–1959
To-Do
Walter’s presence at the dining room table tasting her dishes became a mainstay of Roya’s Saturday nights. When Zari heard of their ritual, she slapped the side of her mouth. “Akhaaaay! So cute! You cook for him and he devours it.”
“Something like that,” Roya mumbled.
The Tintin look-alike who had sauntered into that California café, who said to her “Sound like a plan?” whose memories of lobster summers and sledding winters seemed like they’d come straight out of an American film at Cinema Metropole, soothed her. Their courtship wasn’t even supposed to happen; it was based on a feeling of goodwill, centered on feeling safe—it was just supposed to be a cooking lesson in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s kitchen. She wasn’t supposed to cautiously crave his calm.
When he asked for her hand, over extra-crispy tahdig rice served with ghormeh sabzi on a Saturday night about a year after the first cooking lesson, Roya felt again that dissociation, as if she was floating above the scene at hand, watching a girl in a movie play her role. She found it hard to breathe. She let Walter’s proposal hang in the air for a moment, the smell of melted butter, saffron, and rice on his breath.
All of it—their gentle courtship, their growing affection for one another, the promise of a new life in New England—was a script for someone else’s life. Someone better equipped for a relationship, someone less broken and foreign. She had somehow discovered the blueprints for things that happened to American people.
“Will you, Roya Joon . . .” She had taught him the term of endearment in Farsi, and he said it perfectly at the dining room table that evening. “. . . marry me?”
Her cheeks and ears burned. She was on alert, even alarmed. These were words said in the movies. Similar to words said to her in another language a lifetime ago.
“Think about it: Roya. Archer.” Walter said the two names slowly, methodically, as though he had practiced saying them one after the other. “We could move back east. I got accepted to BU!”
“Beeyoo?”
“Boston University. You could work at a lab while I go to law school. There are so many hospitals and universities there. You could get the job you want. Roya. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If you need time . . . look, maybe I’m being—”
“Yes.”
It was as quick as a second.
Later she would replay the scene in her head. He had asked to marry her, and she had said yes. And to think she had faulted Bahman for jumping so quickly into the life his mother had scripted for him. Maybe they were both just following the fate invisibly etched on their foreheads.
Walter’s breath on her neck was warm, Walter-ish. How excited he was when she said yes! Jittery, flushed. He almost tripped at the doorway when he turned for one more hug. After he drove off that night, Roya sat motionless in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s living room with all the lights off. The other boarders, including Zari, were still out on their Saturday night dates. Mrs. Kishpaugh hadn’t yet returned from visiting her daughter and grandchildren.
“Such a beautiful moon out there!” Zari said when she finally came home. She entered the living room, her voice giddy from her date with Jack. Roya could always sense the after-Jack aura around Zari.
“You should have heard Jack tonight, Sister!” Zari’s lipstick flashed ruby red in the small stream of moonlight coming from the window. “Why are you sitting here in the dark? Oooh, smells so wonderful in this house! You made your ghormeh sabzi?”
Roya nodded, but she wasn’t even sure if her sister could see that.
“These pumps are killing me.” She heard Zari kick off one shoe and then the other. “Did you know Jack wrote a poem where every line starts with p? Every line except the third-to-last line, which then starts with z. Isn’t that clever?”
“Genius.”
“How was your night with Walter? Did you teach him how to cook ghormeh sabzi?”
“I’m marrying him.” To anchor herself and not evaporate from the light-headedness that came from the enormity of what she’d agreed to, Roya clasped her onion-smelling hands on her lap. She had stumbled upon the role of fiancée to Walter, as though she’d been roaming the studios of a Hollywood lot, been mistaken for the lead actress, and then been asked to say the lines that someone else had written.
“What?” Zari stood still.
“You heard. Correctly.”
“Vaaaaay! When?”
Roya shrugged.
Zari pranced over to her in stockinged feet. When she came in for a hug, she smelled of Jack’s cologne. Of course her sister wanted details. Zari would have liked nothing more than for the two of them to talk into the night and process every moment of the evening: how Walter had proposed, what he’d said, breaking everything down word by word. But what was there to tell her? He had asked, and Roya had said yes. It was as simple as that.
“Good night, Zari.” Roya patted her sister’s back awkwardly. She wasn’t ready for Zari’s gushing. She felt drained.
“Oh my goodness, Sister! Married! Can you believe it? We have to tell Maman and Baba. Have you spoken to them? Did you ask their permission? Will you go back to Iran to have a wedding? How will they come here? What will we do? When will it be? I can help you. Do you want to have it here, in California? Should we tell Mrs. Kishpaugh? Will you move with him to Boston after graduation? Sister, what will I do without you? We’ll be apart for the first time in our lives. You know I’m staying here, right? Mrs. Kishpaugh said I can stay even after graduation. I mean, I don’t know what will happen with Jack. He wants to write poetry; he says San Francisco is too expensive. Sister, you will need a dress! You will have to speak to Baba. Oh my goodness! Walter! American! You should make a list of all that you have to do. You need to make a list. I’ll write it up for you.”
“Yavash, yavash—slow, slow,” Roya said. Her head was spinning. Zari talked too much. It was happening quite fast. Walter’s breath had smelled like saffron and butter. The t
ahdig rice had turned out golden and crispy that night. It was the perfect complement to the ghormeh sabzi stew. She’d been surprised. She had worried it would burn in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s old pot and get stuck, but it had slid out perfectly. She hadn’t thought about a dress. Or a list of to-dos. She wanted to lay her head on the back of Mrs. Kishpaugh’s armchair and weep. She was tired. Zari was saying something about an engagement party, whether she would have one, and if she did then maybe they could invite the friends from chemistry class, and on and on. Roya didn’t need an engagement party. The moonlight fell from the window in one small band. The rest of the room was dark.
“Sister, it’s late, go to sleep, we’ll figure it out eventually,” Roya said.
Zari said a few more things about flowers and phone calls and petticoats and Jack. Then she got up, walked to the doorway in the dark, and fumbled on the floor first for one shoe and then the other. They dangled from her fingers as she walked out. Before she left the room, she whisper-shouted, “You know what this means? We are done with that boy for good!”
Shadows quivered like lace on the living room floor after Zari left. Roya couldn’t force the to-do list out of her mind. How many boxes would she need to pack for New England? A heavy coat would have to be bought, of course. She would have to telephone her parents and let them know that a wedding was in order. Baba would want to meet Walter—he was supposed to approve first, they had done it all the wrong way, she had said yes before her parents’ agreement. But everything was topsy-turvy in this country, and with Baba and Maman so far away, what choice did she have? Maybe they’d be relieved to hear she was engaged. Of course they had worried she would never marry after the breakup with Bahman. She wasn’t considered as damaged as if she had been a divorcée, God forbid. But still. They had written off marriage for her—at least, she had. It had been a public mess of a broken engagement. In their social circles, it was talked about for a while. But Walter was American; he lived here, in this country. It was different here. Maybe it was all in the script. The forehead-written fate.
She would need a dress, of course, Zari was right. She added that item to the to-do list.
Sweet, dear Walter. He was very kind, wasn’t he? He would never betray her. She liked his mother—when Roya had met her at homecoming weekend, she’d been reserved but polite. She kept saying how much Walter’s father would have loved to have been there. His sister, Patricia, was cold, but Walter had merely shrugged and whispered, “New England,” as an explanation for her demeanor. Roya willed her mind to focus only on Walter and her to-do list.
But the lump in her throat wouldn’t go away.
We are done with that boy for good.
She’d take Walter’s lobster-roll life. A hundred times over.
We are done with that boy for good.
Roya held on to Mrs. Kishpaugh’s armchair with her oniony hands and waited for the lump in her throat to disappear and allow her to swallow. With time. With time, it would go away.
Cream-colored roses covered banisters and tables in the hotel on Cape Cod. It was midsummer, and the sky in New England was gloriously blue. Roya walked down the aisle almost faint. Zari had helped her find the dress at a shop in San Francisco. It was long with a big poufy skirt that made her feel like a doll. The bodice was made of lace, the skirt of creamy satin. Maman and Baba had flown to America. In their embrace she had taken a quiet refuge, dissolving into their arms at the airport. All this time she had missed them—more than she could admit. Their letters from Iran on airmail paper, their shouting on the phone long-distance, their making her promise that she and Zari would look after each other, could not take the place of holding her parents in her arms and smelling Maman’s lemony scent. Baba had lost almost all his hair and was much smaller now, hunched. Maman still stood straight, but her hair was much more gray than Roya remembered. Inside the large American hotel, her parents were tiny, inconsequential: nodding and smiling at Walter’s mother, shaking hands with tall, gargantuan, blond relatives of Walter’s, looking a bit lost and needing constant translation and explanation.
“Smile, Sister, smile!” Zari flounced around the ballroom in a pale-pink organdy dress that cinched in the middle and showed off her figure. She tightened sashes and straightened tablecloths. She waltzed through and inspected each dish. Throughout the night, she pulled Roya to the dance floor and made sure that Walter’s tie never got crooked.
“You look beautiful, dear,” Walter’s mother, Alice, said. “My, you are beautiful. Oh, Walter. How I wish your father were still alive.”
Roya kissed Walter during the ceremony as was expected and waved at the clapping audience on cue. When they asked her if she was the happiest she’d ever been, Roya nodded and posed for photographs, keeping very still.
After Roya and Walter graduated from university, she from Mills College, he from UC Berkeley, Roya was supposed to go back to Iran. Years earlier, over breakfasts of barbari bread with feta cheese and sour cherry jam, Baba had said she would be the next Madame Curie or Helen Keller. But maybe now she could be a “lady scientist”—one who held beakers up to the light and solved problems and made steady discoveries that shifted the plates of the earth’s knowledge—in New England.
In a suburb outside Boston, she and Walter purchased a small white colonial house with dark-green shutters. He was still in law school, but his mother helped with the down payment for the house in a very matter-of-fact way. Walter commuted to Boston University, and on weekends he showed Roya around her new town. Their home was a mile from the green where the American Revolution had begun, where minutemen fell to their deaths on the morning of April 19, 1775, where British redcoats antagonized the brave colonials and forced them to revolt. Walter relayed all of this with great pride. He took her to the spot of the shot heard around the world and pointed to stone monuments memorializing the dead. Roya stood on that pristine green grass wondering if one day, ever, there would be a memorial for those shot in the square in Tehran on that hot August day in 1953. Probably not. On the very green where her new country had started, Roya spread a picnic blanket and ate lobster rolls and drank ginger beer with her new husband. The spice of the ginger beer burned the back of her throat. She would have preferred water, but Walter told her that his swell girl would learn to love the taste. She nodded yes, she would.
Of course, her parents had gone back to Iran after the wedding. Roya could not talk to Maman and ask her how much tomato she should add to the loobia polo she was making—she could not dash over and pick up her mother for a quick run to the market. She could not read for her father the newspaper headlines or sit with him and laugh at the antics of this silly Lucille Ball who stuffed her face with chocolates. She wanted her parents to see the television set that Walter had bought. She wanted to be able to walk down the street to Maman’s house and touch Maman’s cheek and say, “Put on your shoes, let’s go for a walk.”
When Zari and Jack got married, Maman and Baba didn’t even come to the wedding. Zari planned it in such a very quick three weeks and did not give guests enough notice. Besides, the trip for Roya’s wedding had been expensive for Maman and Baba; they couldn’t afford to come again so soon. Under the redwood trees of the Berkeley campus, Jack insisted that they exchange poems he had written while high. Roya flew out and watched the spectacle and hugged her sister and hoped that she and Jack didn’t starve.
“Is he really going to be just a poet? That’s not a reliable position.”
“How harsh you sound!” Zari said. Then she whisper-shouted, “Don’t worry, Sister! I’ve decided to introduce Jack to advertising. I think he would like it very much. He is so creative. Those poems? They can be advertising-product poems.”
“If you say so.” Roya was still worried.
The sisters started their married lives on opposite coasts and wrote letters and occasionally made phone calls to keep in touch. Roya settled deep into her Northeast life. Zari floated through California with Jack, at first camping out with his friends he
re and there. And then news came in a letter: Jack has agreed to cut his hair. He’s agreed to apply for a job in an advertising firm. He has to start from the bottom. But a creative genius like him won’t stay at the bottom long, will he?
Everybody waited for Roya’s stomach to swell, for a baby to arrive. Walter’s mother, Alice, smiled hopefully at Roya’s waistline as though willing it to expand with life. It was very difficult to disappoint them.
One night, Walter’s sister came to visit from her apartment in downtown Boston. Roya served meat loaf and boiled carrots, not wanting to bother Patricia with Persian cuisine. The last time she had served her chicken and prune khoresh, Patricia had moved the food around on her plate and sighed. It had annoyed Roya to scrape all that food off the plate into the garbage afterward. What a waste. Patricia clearly did not like her food, which was fine. But what hurt Roya more was that Walter’s older sister clearly also did not like her.
“And what is new in the world of our lovely couple: Walter and Roya?” Patricia asked tentatively now at dinner, after sniffing the meat loaf on her plate.
“Walter is studying very much these days. And nights,” Roya said.
“Well. It’s completely understandable that he’d have to do so in law school, isn’t it? You can’t take it personally, Roya. He has to study hard. That’s how it works over here.”
“No, what I mean is that—” Roya started to say.
“Walter, are you getting enough rest? Enough to eat?” Patricia cut her off. “I can bring you a roast, if you like. Might be a nice break from . . . from the rest of it?”
“Oh, Roya is giving me everything I need. I’m all set. Thanks though, Patricia.”
“Well then.” Patricia smiled tightly. “Pardon me.”
They continued to sit and eat in silence. After a few minutes, Patricia raised her fork and then said, “So?”
“So, what?” Walter responded wearily.
The Stationery Shop of Tehran Page 17