Now, at age thirty, her friends from school were either married or in serious relationships. They were scattered all over the country and even the world. Her link to them was through social media, not through phone calls or that ancient ritual of actually seeing one another. She followed their colorful, happy, but oh-so-careful-to-be-self-deprecating lives online. She read status updates of “Yes, it’s true, we have a bun in the oven!” and pressed “like” even though she sometimes felt empty and jealous. She saw the photos of her pregnant friends on beaches with their husbands’ arms around them and pressed “like.” She opened her laptop to see the babies born—small, scrunched-up newborns in hats—and read all the comments: “So happy for you, Jenna!” “OMG—he is GORGEOUS!” and pressed “like” and added her own “Congrats!” She scrolled through selfies of her former classmates vacationing in Costa Rica and Hawaii with their kids and was mired in a strange stew of envy and happiness for them. Then she turned on the TV and watched families drink hot chocolate and have fights and make up and fathers give car keys to their newly licensed daughters. And all she could think was just how much she missed her mom.
Her room was lined with books written by gurus and advice-givers who told her that she should look within and meditate and be grateful and count her blessings and write in a gratitude journal. Claire did. But once it became clear that her English literature degree from a small liberal arts college in Connecticut qualified her for administrative jobs and folding clothes at retail stores, once she realized that she was never going to have the courage to apply for a PhD program in English and become a professor, she took the money from her mom’s life insurance, rented an apartment in Watertown, floated from retail job to administrative job, and found herself, one day, at age thirty, working as the assistant administrator at the Duxton Senior Center.
She liked her job. She liked being with people day in and day out who were close to exiting the stage, so to speak. She appreciated that they did not have, for the most part, the fake humility and the need to prove that they were happy happy happy. She loved that the old, grumpy men coughed and spat and snarled and made no pretense that life was good. She enjoyed helping the older ladies apply bright-pink lipstick with religious regularity, as if skipping that one act alone would mark complete surrender to their age. She helped Miss Emily roll her nylons up her blue-veined legs and she buttoned Mr. Rosenberg’s cardigan with care. The ladies and gentlemen at the Duxton Senior Center were the only reason Claire hadn’t given up. They were all she had left. Her friends from elementary school and high school and college were now simply “Friends on Facebook”—a new category, it seemed, in her mind: FOF—who existed only as digital images, whom she hadn’t seen in years (she skipped the reunions), and who scrolled through life in happy, occasionally messy, but always exclamatory moments. Her father wasn’t even a memory because she’d been too young to know him. Her most vivid image of him was from a photo her mother had attached to their fridge with an eggplant magnet: a tall, grinning man with blond hair standing by a picnic basket next to her mom. There had been no fancy wedding. Just a justice of the peace visit, her mom had said.
For years she’d had a mother, beautiful and kind—a mother who told her stories about her father and who lamented being an only child who’d given birth to an only child and how little family they had but they had each other, didn’t they, and that’s really all they needed, and her baby was her everything, her beautiful baby who gave her life meaning. She was her gorgeous little girl, wasn’t she, I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you, sweetheart, but it’s true—you are my life—and you and me, girlie girl, we’re going to take on the world, aren’t we, Claire, and oh, how your father would’ve loved to see you now, sweetheart, and we can make it on this planet, girlie girl—we can—you are so smart and so talented and you just wait—you’re going to be a big deal one day, you already are my pride and joy. And then cancer had wiped her mother from the world and Claire felt desperately, inexplicably, painfully, permanently alone. No mom to come home to, call on the phone, cook a favorite dish with. No mom to tell her that everything would be all right. And the strange, horrifying realization that things wouldn’t be all right. Ever. Even if her FOF scaled mountains in Asia and raised perfect children and celebrated romantic anniversaries in faraway resorts. Everything wasn’t all right for Claire. At thirty, she grasped this, owned this, knew this—she did not feel the need to pretend otherwise. The husbands and babies and romance and oh-my-gosh-look-at-my-messy-but-oh-so-full-and-beautiful-life! status updates were not in her future. Hers were nights of reality shows and days spent in the reality of people nearing death.
She loved her senior residents at the center, even the ones so close to going that every morning hearing them say “Well, hey there, Claire!” felt like a miracle. Mr. Rosenberg told her tales of his life in Queens, New York, “back in the day,” and Mrs. Ventura was about to “step over to the other side” every single week, or so she said. Claire’s favorite was a Mr. Bahman Aslan, who had been there for two years. She called him “Mr. Batman.” He was always kind and she loved to hear his tales of his youth in Iran, his political adventures, the years he spent during the war. His great love. People like Mr. Batman—his jokes, complaints, sorrows, ailments, regrets, perspective, memories—were the reason Claire woke up every morning, ate a dry, stale-tasting protein bar, and drove in her seven-year-old Honda from Watertown to Duxton. The Duxton Senior Center was a combination of a senior center and a nursing home. Seniors could just visit to partake in activities or be boarders under a more traditional nursing-home model. Claire threw herself into the concerns of her seniors and residents. Thanksgiving was with them. Christmas was with them. Her life was with them. And outside of that, life was simply FOF and the damn shows and commercials on TV.
She would take the stories of her residents any day over all of that. Especially the memories and life anecdotes of Mr. Bahman Aslan.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1978–1981
Dispatches
August 1978
Cinema Rex was lit on fire the other day. More than four hundred people killed. People trapped and stuck, people running and striving to get out of that place only to find that they never could. I couldn’t help but think of our dates at Cinema Metropole. It was twenty-five years to the day of the coup. And now, here we go again. Every day there are more and more demonstrations in the streets. My children believe the answer lies in Ayatollah Khomeini, the exiled religious cleric who has a huge following all of a sudden. I just don’t know. The young here these days need something to latch on to, something to believe in, and for that something to not be the Shah.
History repeats itself. To watch these young students pour into the streets again, convinced that if they rid themselves of the Shah all problems will be solved, is painful. Yes, he was complicit in Prime Minister Mossadegh’s ousting, and the West then propped him up. But the youth today think all their problems will be solved if the Shah just goes away. I worry about what may follow. We want democracy but never seem to get it. What if what follows is worse?
I wonder about you over there in America. I get some news from Jahangir, and for that I’m very grateful. I’m glad the two of you still talk. Amazing to think that in this modern world we can communicate across oceans just by picking up the telephone! Jahangir tells me that you are working, that you have a job at Harvard? Bravo to you, Roya Joon.
You were always destined to do great things.
March 1979
Now the Shah is gone. All I see in the faces of those of us who remember 1953, who can feel under our skin that awful disappointment of having the world plummet in one day, is the return of trauma. The youth are so hopeful. They think we got it right this time. They are glad the Shah is gone. He’s trying to get to America, but I hear your new country won’t let him. How, after everything he did for the US, is your country not letting him in?
Maybe this time we’ll get a true democratic government.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Do you remember the twilight on the evening when I proposed, the purple of the sky? Do you think I have not looked at the sky on a hundred other nights remembering your kiss?
August 1981
Since Saddam Hussein attacked Iran last September, the war has only gotten worse and worse. We spend our nights in the basement bomb shelter. My children are frightened all the time. You would not recognize parts of this country now. We have been blown up. At night we cover our windows with aluminum foil so Saddam’s planes cannot find our city and its lights. We live in perpetual fear. My children are in their early twenties, and I do not want my son to be drafted into the army, to be told to fight and kill Iraqis. For what? For this new Islamic government to feel powerful and rally us around the flag? And my daughter is forced to wear the hijab when she steps outside. What have we become? I can barely recognize my country anymore.
Roya Joon, Jahangir joined the army as a doctor. My dear Roya, he was killed at the front. His place is so empty here.
Chapter Twenty-Five
2013
Big Box
Zari’s nose on the cell-phone screen was strangely magnified. One of the few reliefs left in life was phoning people without being seen, but Zari insisted on FaceTiming Roya every week. Call her old-fashioned, but Roya couldn’t stand having her face shown on the phone. Just made no sense. But she had to admit it was a comfort to see Zari, even on a gadget. Her little sister was a grandmother now, had had hip replacement surgery, and engaged in almost daily arguments with her daughter-in-law.
“Walter needs paper clips and a shredder. I have to go, Zari.”
“Okay, Sister. You know, it’s amazing: you have the skin of a young lady. At seventy-seven! Thank God for our genes!”
“Say hello to Jack and Darius and Leila and all the grandkids.”
“Will do. Hope to see you for Nowruz! Big hugs to Walter and Kyle from me.”
The years had had the audacity to pass by. It had been decades since Marigold had died of the croup, and decades since Mossadegh was overthrown in the coup. The world was something else entirely. Iran had had its Islamic Revolution in 1979—now her country was no longer ruled by the Shah but by religious clerics. The losses mounted, and Roya didn’t have time to mourn them all. Walter followed the news carefully, but Roya would rather stick her head in the oven than watch the garbage that masqueraded as “news” on cable television these days.
But babies could not die. They could not disappear and just leave their belongings behind. Her baby wasn’t dead. At the hospital, they’d wanted her to believe that a one-year-old child could die when minutes ago it had been breathing in her arms. Marigold wasn’t just with her every day and night; Marigold was a part of her. She carried her daughter with her at all times. Babies do not leave you.
But, Sister, think of Kyle! Marigold died, but you have Kyle!
At the age of forty-two, after Roya had been working forever at her administrative job at Harvard Business School and had accepted never being a mother to another child—she was clearly not meant to be a mother—Kyle came along. What was considered impossible happened again. A surprise, an accident, a child. She and Walter felt that tiny soft face against theirs again. Again, they were overcome with joy and terror.
Kyle became her new world. On him she pinned her dreams. He brought out Roya’s deep laugh again, woke her up. He was her purpose. For him, she made sure the world did not crumble.
After Kyle was all grown up (a doctor!), Roya’s morning walks kept her sane, kept her moving. Cleared her head. She didn’t walk with friends. Friends talked too much and Roya needed to be alone with her thoughts. Sure, there were neighborhood women who met up to walk at the mall when it was too cold outside. Roya received e-mails from the town Listserv inviting everyone to join in the fun: Let’s meet outside Cinnamon Station! they read. In front of a stall that sold flavored, greasy fried dough. No thank you. Roya didn’t want to go back and forth in a big box of a building, inhale stale air, pass bright stores that sold unnecessary merchandise. The vastness of the junk in the mall overwhelmed her. She’d stick to nature as long as she possibly could. As long as she was still able to move.
And she had to move. Some things stay with you, haunt you. Some embers nestle into your skin. Shots cannot be forgotten. And neither can that force of love.
Sometimes she could sense his breath on her ear at night. He could not have been the man she thought she saw almost always here and there in New England or even in California in the early years, when a rush, a person going past made her body buzz and from her peripheral vision, for a flash, she’d be sure it was him. Once at Filene’s in Boston, while she was browsing through shirts for Walter, a man on the other side of the rack looked like Bahman. She felt sure it was Bahman, but of course it wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Another time, at an airport stopover, a young man had looked and walked exactly like Bahman. She had to lean on a pillar to catch her balance. That man was about twenty. As she caught her breath in the airport, she remembered she was in her forties. So Bahman was in his forties as well. Of course that young man couldn’t be him. It was impossible not to always imagine him as young, impossible to muster him up as old. Would he have lost his hair? Gained weight? Walter hadn’t lost his hair. He was “a stunner,” Patricia liked to say, a verifiable Jimmy Stewart. What was Bahman? Which movie star did he look like? What had life served up for him? It was not her business to know.
When Kyle arrived, a small pocket of air had been let into their tightly wrapped bubble of privacy and pain. Soon that pocket of air expanded and let in the world again. Because of Kyle, Roya had tea with the other mothers. Because of him, she attended PTA meetings and sprang up when he hit the ball at baseball games. She accessed joy again, moved with ease again, made the scrambled eggs in the mornings and discussed soccer scores and pored over textbooks and report cards. Because of him, she learned about the world again.
“What happens when the blood in our veins runs out?”
Kyle’s questions never stopped. He was endlessly curious. She took him to the library and sat him on her lap and read him book after book. In the early years, Kyle had her Iranian accent because her voice was most of what he heard. It disappeared once he started school. Other mothers complained that their children didn’t pay attention, but Kyle listened. His appetite for understanding how the world worked was immense. When he was little, they were the two musketeers. The third musketeer—his older sister—was in Roya’s heart always. Her Marigold.
Roya was thankful that they could afford for her to quit her job and be with Kyle. She wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. If only she could carry Kyle’s heart in a padded tea cozy and protect it so it would not break. If only she could somehow shield him from danger, from loss, from grief. But she knew that the fate on his forehead was written with an ink she could not see and no amount of mothering or hovering or worrying could keep the dangers at bay.
She showed him tadpoles in the pond on Merriam Hill, learned the distance of the stars and moon just so she could teach him, traced the outlines of his favorite TV characters on sketch paper for him. With Walter’s steady presence, she carved a life in New England for the three of them and stuffed all that mattered into a colonial home with shutters on its windows.
Each year when Kyle blew out the candles on his birthday cake, Roya’s mingled relief and anxiety wafted in the wisps of smoke that rose. They nestled into the baseboard molding of their dining room. They landed in every strand of their hair. Another year. Another year, and he was here.
The stationery store was 2.7 miles from their house; she knew because she liked to set the odometer to zero sometimes just for kicks. The big-box store was huge and overlit, a warehouse really. Part of a national chain. Stepping in with Walter, Roya steadied herself inside. The aisles smelled of chemicals and cheap carpeting, of corporate gluttony and weariness. Row after row of notebooks, Post-it notes, antiseptic wipes, pla
stic boxes, folders, envelopes, markers, crayons, popcorn. (Popcorn? Why?) It was what she used to love: stationery and sharpeners, pens and pencils. But nothing she wanted anymore, not like this, not spread out in this cavernous space without even an owner present. Pimply teenage boys wearing uniforms ignored her “excuse mes” until Walter had to blurt “Excuse us!” as though he were scolding them. Only then were they directed to the correct aisle for paper shredders. (Walter was determined to go through their old files and shred what wasn’t needed so “when the time came” Kyle didn’t have to do it: “Best we organize and get rid of all that paperwork we’ve saved over the years. We should do it now. While we still have our wits. Make it easier for when we’re gone. Kyle doesn’t need to be burdened with going through all our things.”)
He picked out the shredder after much comparing and contrasting, and then led Roya through the chemically carpeted aisles until they found the correct place for paper clips. So much to choose from in various packaging. Just for paper clips. They finally selected a clear jar filled with clips of cheerful blue, grass green, bright yellow, and deep red.
In line for the cash register (one of eight—so many!), Roya picked up a small vessel of hand sanitizer from a bin. It had a rubber loop that allowed it to attach to a purse, a key chain, anything. She could ward off colds and flu and pneumonia and the latest diseases with this. Could Marigold have warded off the croup? she thought. With this little plastic vessel of antibacterial gel?
When they finally reached the front of the line, Roya grumbled, “This shop is so big and not one of those teenagers knows what he’s doing.”
The cashier’s head bobbed up. She was probably in her late sixties, not that much younger than Roya. She had dark-blue eyes and soft gray curls. Roya worried she’d offended this woman by denigrating her fellow employees. But the cashier smiled.
The Stationery Shop of Tehran Page 20