The Stationery Shop of Tehran

by Marjan Kamali

  “Oh, do I have to spell it out for you two! So. Shall I be stitching initials on a baby blanket anytime soon?”

  Roya’s body went slack.

  “See now, Patricia. What you need to understand is that Roya here is a modern woman. It’s 1959, for the love of God.” Walter took a gulp of his gin and tonic. “Roya wants to work,” he said. “As a scientist. And she’s very well qualified. You know that. She’s been sending out her applications and looking for a position ever since we moved back east.”

  Patricia’s fork stayed suspended in midair. Then she put it down and said, “Don’t patronize me, Walter. As if I don’t work! But if you are married, it makes sense to have children. That is all.”

  Patricia had never married. Five years older than Walter, she was employed by a bank in the financial district. She was known to be quite a whiz with numbers, and increasingly resentful of the secretarial work that she was relegated to doing.

  “May I get you another drink, Patricia?” he asked.

  Patricia glared and said something incomprehensible under her breath. Walter took that as a yes and went to the kitchen.

  “I just want to work for a year or two,” Roya said meekly when left alone with her sister-in-law. The things Patricia had said unnerved her. A wedding, a husband, a house in the suburbs: these things were easier to accomplish and had already been neatly checked off the list. But children terrified her. She was not ready for the role of mother.

  Patricia took a bite of meat loaf, chewed, and swallowed. She carefully dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “You can’t have everything fall into place for you just because you’re in America now. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Oh, I know,” Roya said. “I sure do.” She couldn’t resist saying it in an exaggerated American accent.

  Patricia just stared at her for a few seconds. Then she muttered, “Poor Walter.”

  Patricia had always made it clear that it was bad enough that her little brother had chosen a Persian bride over the many established WASPs in their social circle. To now have this little Iranian girl insist on working, for no good reason, seemed to truly rattle her.

  “Not something you can control, now, is it?” Patricia said. “And there’s Walter to consider.”

  “Pat, here you go!” Walter came back and handed his sister a fresh martini. His forced good cheer stopped when he saw Roya’s face. “Did I miss something?”

  “Nothing, Walter dear.” Patricia took the drink. “Some people just think they control their own destinies, that is all. Too naïve and foolish to know better.”

  A few weeks later, Walter came home from law school and gave Roya a kiss as she stood at the stove cooking. “You know, one of my classmates has a sister who works at the business school. She’s leaving her job to have a baby.”

  “Good for her,” Roya said. After the disastrous dinner conversation with Patricia, she had repeated in private to Walter that she just wasn’t ready for kids. He knew, he said. No rush. Don’t let my sister mess with you.

  Why was Walter bringing up somebody’s baby now?

  “Well, this fellow says that his sister’s position is going to be available.”

  Roya stopped stirring the sauce on the stove.

  “Look, I know it’s in the business school, and that’s not what you want. But it’s a job, Roya. And—well, you may want to apply before others do. Soon it’ll be officially opened up and loads of applications will come in.”

  “I don’t want to be a secretary.” She thought of Patricia in her pencil skirts and tight sweaters typing for men at the bank, seething with thwarted ambition.

  “I know it’s not a laboratory job. But, Roya, it’s a good position.”

  It had proven far more difficult to get hired at a laboratory than even Roya had expected. Positions for women were few. She was willing to start at the bottom, as a technician. But laboratories didn’t want her. One lab offered her the position of bottle washer: beakers and test tubes had to be washed by hand carefully, the interviewer said. Roya showed her transcripts of her near-perfect grades and her bachelor of science degree in chemistry. It was practically 1960, but it seemed that everywhere she went, male applicants got preference. And she was still—forever—the foreigner. She was in the minority of women who even wanted to work. Most of her cohorts in the Boston suburbs were happy to stay home and keep house for their husbands.

  “Well, congratulations,” Patricia said when she found out that Roya had gotten the secretarial job at the business school. “Now who will cook for and take care of poor Walter?”

  “I will continue to cook for him, as always, Patricia. Don’t you worry.”

  She chopped parsley, cilantro, spinach, and mint. She made the thickest aush soup, and she and Walter raised their glasses in celebration.

  Despite Patricia’s disapproval and the sad looks from Alice, Walter stood his ground with his sister and mother and respected Roya’s desire to wait before trying for children.

  Over the next year, every now and then, Walter gently asked if Roya had changed her mind. Roya didn’t want to tell him that she was scared of creating another life and growing attached to it. She could not remove from her mind the ugly question: What if something happens to the baby?

  Mrs. Aslan’s strange refrain from a lifetime ago sometimes came back to her at the oddest moments. Babies die, she had said. What crazy wife thought like Roya? Patricia was right. Poor Walter, indeed!

  For years she thought that her biggest loss in life would be her first love. Or the stationer who had died at her feet. Little did she know that her future held a bigger loss: a loss that would make the summer of 1953 look like child’s play.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1958

  Births

  I did not expect a son and a daughter at the same time! It’s a specific kind of joy blended with exhaustion: an attachment that overwhelms. We are consumed by them. We are blessed and in awe. May God protect them.

  The other night I came home from work and the cook had made a special egg and garlic dish popular in her village up north and both of the twins started to cry at the same time, and I could tell that had it not been for the servants and the nurse, Shahla would have been at her wits’ end. Mother came to visit and she sat quietly and retreated into her corner.

  I don’t for a second forget any one of the number of things she said to you that were cruel. I felt shame at her lack of an emotional filter, at her forceful and cutting words. I remember when you were at my parents’ house and my mother said things to hurt you. Cut you. Scare you. I was so convinced that she was being cruel. And I can understand, on my best days, why that would scare you away.

  But here is the history you do not know:

  I was not my parents’ first child. I was not their second, nor their third. I was not my mother’s fourth. I was the fifth child my mother had, and the others who preceded me all died. Two were stillborn, one died in my mother’s eighth month of pregnancy, and one died in the first year of life. That my parents kept trying was a testament to their desire and the times. I don’t know if my parents had more children after me. Maybe they did and I was too young to remember another one dying. My mother only told me about these other lost babies in a moment of extreme duress, on a day I’d rather forget. It was the day that changed everything for us. For you and me, you could say.

  Of course, my mother wasn’t alone in losing babies in those days, but others seem to have borne it better. Maybe it was that she lost so many in a row.

  I attributed her melancholy to the loss of those babies. I attributed her depression and mood swings and instability—all of it—to that.

  How was I supposed to know there was a loss that preceded all the others, that hung over everything?

  I hope that you are well over there in America. Be good. Be safe. I hope you are healthy, happy. My children keep me going. Do you know of what I speak?

  Chapter Twenty-Two
r />   1962–1963

  Marigold

  Sister, Jack and I are expecting our first child. Also, I have learned how to make eggplant khoresh without the eggplant!

  Roya read Zari’s letter and filed it neatly on her desk in the pile of to-dos. She wrote back in Farsi and added “Congratulations” in English in block letters at the bottom of the page. As she licked the envelope and sealed it shut, Roya reminded herself of her goals. She was working hard as a secretary at the business school. Her typing speed had soared. It was not the kind of job she had expected to be doing, but compromise was the name of the game in her new adult life. She simply had been unable to get a good (or any) job in science, and it was not for lack of trying. This was what it was to be a woman, she knew. She was already pushing boundaries by even insisting on working. And in science there was always the assumption that she would be taking the job from a well-qualified man. And as a foreigner—well, shouldn’t she just be grateful to be in this country? That was the underlying message she often received from well-intentioned friends and neighbors. Roya scaled back her ambition.

  At the back of her mind, a question nagged. Patricia was right: she should be starting a family. What was she so afraid of, for goodness’ sake, why did she think something bad would happen? Roya walked to the post office and mailed the letter to Zari. She would call her later in the week, send a present, of course. Of course. She walked home quickly, remembering all she had to do. She was happy for Zari and Jack. She really was.

  She was busy though, boy, wasn’t she! So busy.

  Sometimes in her dreams, Bahman would appear. His smile, the musky scent, the eyes filled with hope, his touch, how he leaned into her against the books at the Stationery Shop, the taste of that first espresso, the sweet pastry, the slope of his back next to hers . . . She willed herself to forget it all when she was awake. She could not allow it to interfere with the present script of her life. In the dreams he was always young, sometimes happy.

  On the phone at Persian New Year, Jahangir told her that Bahman and Shahla were busy with their children now. Twins. Twins! The once-a-year phone call with Jahangir was the only way Roya ever heard news about Bahman. Maman and Baba certainly never talked of him. During her first two years in the US, she had exchanged letters with a few of the girls she’d gone to school with in Iran and with two of her cousins. But as months wore on, they stopped writing each other. Too much distance. Too much time. The only people she exchanged letters with anymore were her parents in Iran and Zari in California. But the annual phone call with Jahangir kept her connected to a past she couldn’t bring herself to abandon, no matter how painful.

  Walter studied hard, and Roya was happy—well, content—well, settled at her job at Harvard Business School. HBS, they called it. Everyone loved acronyms in America. Her coworkers were efficient and sometimes kind. It was satisfying to insert the paper in the typewriter every morning, to type letters to the dean and other professors, to take notes, file papers, put things in absolute order. She liked being on top of things. Everything was in its place: the files, the letters, sharpened pencils, manila folders. She controlled her world with precise care.

  “So!” Patricia said when over for another dinner. “How is everything with you two? Anything exciting on the horizon?”

  “May I get you a drink, Patricia?” Walter asked through gritted teeth.

  “I’m holding one, but thanks.” Patricia smiled. “Walter, remember Richard from the Cape cottage when we were growing up? His family and ours were very close.” Patricia said the last bit to Roya in an explanatory tone as if bringing her up to date, even though Roya knew Richard. She and Walter had dinner with him and his wife regularly. “Well,” Patricia went on, “he and his lovely wife—oh, I love Susan! she is so elegant!—are expecting their third child! Third!” Patricia sipped her drink.

  Roya went to the kitchen and fried some onions for no reason at all. She sprinkled mint on them and ate them out of the pan as her body shook. She and Walter were in their midtwenties now. Most of their friends and acquaintances had at least one child. But it was not too late for them. Patricia was rude. Direct and interfering. It was none of her business. They had managed to wait, and wait they would.

  She came on her own schedule. She was born in Mount Auburn Hospital on January 11, 1962, and when Roya held her, when she looked into eyes that were strangely alert, held the tiny milky, cheesy body pressed against her own, she was terrified. But Roya was also, in a strange way, real again. She was not an actress in an American movie. She was delirious and dizzy—yes—but amazingly grounded at the same time. For the first time in a long time, Roya was fully herself again.

  When they came home from the hospital, Alice took care of the three of them. Alice, who smelled of potato salad and lotion, who was matter-of-fact with Roya and enchanted with her granddaughter. Roya missed Maman sorely but was grateful for Alice’s presence, boiling everything in sight as a hedge against infection, providing good cheer, and making endless quantities of baked potatoes with sour cream.

  Alice’s face crumpled a year later when their baby stopped breathing. Alice cried in the car as they drove to the hospital in an icy panic.

  The baby gasped for air. Marigold. Her name was Marigold. She’d landed in their lives, and for almost twelve months, Roya had lost layers of her reserve. She had never given Walter complete access to herself; she had a part of herself always locked away. He’d accepted it (he was Walter!), grateful just to have her there, to see her every morning. But Marigold—with her light brown hair, her gray eyes, her soft mewls as she breastfed, grabbing onto Roya with startling strength—Marigold broke through every single glacial wall Roya had built up and melted it with her toothless smile. For twelve months, Roya, exhausted and exhilarated, was purely herself. Even the romance of her youth fizzled in comparison; nothing had ever meant everything to her the way this baby did.

  On the drive to the hospital, Walter clutched the steering wheel, silent. Snow steadily fell; snowbanks hardened and grayed. The sound of Alice’s prayers filled the car: verses from the Bible and entreaties to God. Alice had driven from the Cape to visit them; they had been having Sunday dinner when Marigold’s bad cough wouldn’t stop, when the fever she’d had for days flared higher, when she wheezed and gasped for air. As Roya sat so still in the backseat with her burning baby in her arms, she felt like she might crack and splinter into pieces. Just let my child be all right, please let the doctors bring down her fever, she will be better, of course, she has to be. Marigold wheezed, and then out of desperation Roya sang her an old Persian folk song. Alice stopped praying and listened, and Walter just drove as fast as was possible on the ice.

  The nurse who took Marigold from Roya’s arms had a blond beehive under her white cap. Her breath smelled of cigarettes. Roya didn’t want to give her daughter to this woman, she wanted to keep her close. The doctor who arrived had a pimple above his lip, ready to burst. Years later, as Roya walked the blocks around her house, she’d be furious for remembering the doctor’s pimple and the nurse’s cigarette smell—they had come between her and her baby, they had inserted themselves into the tragedy of her life, and they would forever haunt her memories on a loop.

  Marigold was pronounced dead forty-three minutes after their arrival at the hospital.

  On the linoleum floor, beneath the fluorescent lights, Roya’s legs went numb. The doctor’s voice was garbled. He was speaking through mud. Just like when she’d first arrived in America, English was incomprehensible. Beside her stood Walter; he hovered next to her, tall and silent, and in her peripheral vision she saw his huge hands shaking. Alice was diagonally across from her; everything about her mother-in-law was motionless except for her tears.

  The three of them went home at dawn. There was no avoiding it, though Roya had considered simply staying in the hospital and not leaving and maybe starving to death on its linoleum floor. In that building, with its beeping and noise and a million other emergencies that could never
have been as important as Marigold’s life, in that place that smelled of death, they had sat for hours and Walter had signed paperwork and then they were told to leave. During the ride home, the snowbanks loomed. Limbs she did not have, she could not feel her arms or legs or her fingers; Roya knew it was someone other than herself in the car. She missed more than anything else Marigold’s face against hers. Her grief would have no end, of this she was sure.

  It was Walter, finally, who made her tea. It was Walter who got out of bed first every morning and made the hard-boiled eggs. He didn’t whistle anymore. Something sour was always in the air now, rotting in the crater left in Marigold’s wake.

  “You didn’t need to come,” Roya said a few weeks later when Zari showed up, suitcase in hand, two tiny kids in tow. Roya stood at the doorway of her darkened house, dirty dishes in the sink in the kitchen behind her, laundry piled up, mustiness in the air.

  “Oh, but I did, Sister.”

  Zari’s son, Darius, was four now. His little sister, Leila, wriggled in Zari’s arms. Leila was two. Twelve months Leila had lived that Marigold would never have. Everything—every detail, every word, every second, every person—reminded Roya of Marigold. Except that reminded wasn’t the right word. Reminded meant that she had to forget to remember again. But she never forgot. Everything was linked to Marigold; nothing, really, could be separated from her ever. Not even words uttered by a crazy woman in Iran a lifetime ago. Babies die.

  Here was Leila in Zari’s arms. Here was her niece, chubby, happy, breathing, alive, a knitted pink bonnet on her head. A bonnet that Zari would have wrapped and placed in a package and mailed to Roya with a note saying, Maman Joon knitted it and sent it. Leila’s outgrown it. Marigold should wear it now.

  Marigold should.

  If.

  Darius squealed and ran to the kitchen. Zari took her shoes off and shouted at Darius to not run through the house with wet boots. Roya stared out at the snow as her sister and niece and nephew rushed past her. The world dared go on in cold, spiteful glee.