Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  “So, how did you like getting an MBA?” she asked.

  His eyes lit up, and he smiled. Well, one thing was right about what Darya said. He did have good teeth.

  “My MBA? Yes, well, I liked it, Miss Mina. It was a good program and very useful for me. I enjoyed it.” He looked in her eyes for the first time. “It’s a lot of work, but in the end, it is all worth it.”

  “Yes,” Mina said. She nodded unnecessarily. Something about the way he talked made her feel she should help him along instead of childishly making it more difficult for him. After all, who knew what kind of Darya he had back home? Who knew what busybody relative of his had talked him into getting on that plane and coming to Queens for lunch? They were both victims of the same curse. Mina knew they’d never see each other again, so she decided to try and make the remainder of their time together at least relatively pleasant. Poor guy. Wearing that beige suit and everything.

  “It’s quite a program!” Mina said, a little too loudly. “I’m learning loads!”

  “It’s true. You learn . . . heaps,” Mr. Dashti said.

  He nodded and looked again at the Persian miniatures on the wall. Mina studied the tablecloth.

  “Here is tea!” Darya bounced in holding a tray with four estekan, small hourglass-shaped glasses, filled with dark tea. Baba carried a silver bowl of sugar cubes in one hand and a platter of baklava cut into diamonds in the other.

  “May your hands not ache, Mrs. Rezayi,” Mr. Dashti said. “I apologize so much for the trouble I have given you.”

  “Oh, it was no trouble at all,” Darya said.

  “This baklava is divine,” Mr. Dashti said. “I am embarrassed at the trouble I’ve given you.”

  “Well, you see, the secret lies in the consistency of the almond paste.” Baba rubbed his fingers together to demonstrate how to achieve that consistency. “It’s all in the kneading, sir. All in the kneading.”

  Mr. Dashti leaned in and listened to Baba’s recipe. Mina knew that Mr. Dashti deserved someone decent and sweet. She wished him well and felt a small twinge of guilt that she couldn’t be that someone. Baba continued to talk about soaking almonds. And then, in a sliver of a moment—when Mr. Dashti broke his baklava in two and Baba’s glasses fogged up from a sip of tea—Mina exchanged a glance with Darya. She knew her mother could read her face, and instantly Darya registered that Mina would not be trying on bridal dresses anytime soon. There would be no sofreh bridal silk cloth laid out for a wedding.

  It was over.

  The tea glasses were empty now. Darya gave out a long sigh and folded her napkin into smaller and smaller squares on her lap. Mr. Dashti thanked everyone again for the wonderful food and the lunch and the tea and the baklava.

  “It was no trouble at all, Mr. Dashti. We hope you’ve enjoyed New York,” Darya said tersely.

  Now everyone at the table knew that Mina and Mr. Dashti would not be getting married.

  “We hope your trip back to Atlanta is comfortable and without hassles,” Baba said. And with this it was clear that Mr. Dashti would not be coming back. Darya raised her tea glass. “We wish nothing but the best for you, Mr. Dashti. God willing, you will find nothing but continued success in the future.”

  And they all sipped their tea and sucked on sugar cubes as the afternoon fell and sank around them. Mr. Dashti’s head was low and his shoulders drooped but he repeatedly thanked Darya and Baba for the delicious lunch and the tea. Mina noticed that his face was not so damp with perspiration anymore, even though he’d been drinking steaming tea. As Mina reached for the baklava, so did Mr. Dashti, and their eyes locked for a moment. Mina saw the expression on his face quite clearly. He politely withdrew his hand and smiled, showing his perfect teeth.

  When Mina got up to take the tea glasses to the kitchen, she knew that the expression she had seen on Mr. Dashti’s face was not one of dejection or rejection, but actually one of exasperated, glorious relief.

  Chapter Three

  A Puddle of Folders

  Fatty,” Darya said. “He was a fatty. He needs to exercise. God knows he has a PhD. You’d think he’d know not to eat so much baklava in one sitting. And what was that suit?” She crinkled her nose.

  “Basseh. Enough. Stop it, Darya,” Baba said.

  They were in the kitchen, putting away the lunch dishes. Darya’s forehead vein throbbed, the way it always did when she was upset. Mina noticed that her bun was coming undone.

  “It’s just that . . . well, it didn’t work out. And sometimes the information that comes to me from some of my sources is a little biased. All I’m saying is . . .”

  They had stood in the yard as Mr. Dashti’s sleek, silver car had backed out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. The three of them had waved perfunctorily, continuing to move their hands back and forth even after Mr. Dashti’s car had gone.

  “No matter!” Baba said as he dried a tiny spoon. “Onward!”

  “Yes, of course. On . . . with it, or whatever it is you say. You know it’s not at all important, right, Mina Joon? He was a fatty.” Darya picked up a frying pan to dry.

  “Please stop. Stop with the name-calling. Just stop with all of this. Stop inviting men, stop graphing them. Stop humiliating me. And them. Just. Stop. Please,” Mina said.

  “What on earth’s the matter?” Darya shoved the frying pan into Baba’s chest. “Come upstairs with me, Mina. Come on!”

  Mina felt as if all this were happening to someone else, in someone else’s family. Somebody else’s parents invited all these men over, not hers. Not the mother she had known growing up, who had driven them to English classes in Tehran and taught them ghazal of Persian poetry, not the father who had calmly tied her shoelaces on mountain hikes and taught her how to count tadpoles in the rain and play chess by a campfire.

  Pulled by some invisible rope between her and Darya that she wished she could slice in two, Mina followed her mother upstairs.

  The bedroom smelled of green apples and lotion. The bureau was freshly polished and shone. The desk was in perfect order. The only thing out of place was the filing cabinet: it was open, and Mr. Dashti’s yellow file stuck out. Darya must have done some last-minute reviewing this morning.

  “I really didn’t like the way he slurped his tea is all I’m saying, Mina. It was very peasant-like.” She crossed her arms. “Surely you can do better than that!!”

  Dear God above, help me, Mina thought. “He was your idea. Remember?” She tried to be calm. She tried to be reasonable and businesslike. “Aren’t your twenties supposed to be when you take time to figure things out, have fun, find out who you are? Why fast-forward to husband-and-kids. I’m already in business school, aren’t I? Crunching those equations that you love?”

  “Oh please, Mina, don’t give me this garbage. This extended childhood that you Americans glorify . . . ‘finding out who you are’? That’s psychobabble. Mumbo. Jumbo. You want to know who you are? I’ll tell you who you are. You’re my daughter!”

  Mina plopped onto Darya’s bed.

  “All this ‘adjusting to the real world’ charade that people here talk about. You know what it is? Laziness! A way to delay responsibility. It doesn’t take a decade to ‘figure things out.’ Figure what out? How long do these people expect to remain children?”

  Mina stared at the folder. Did Darya think that a man would be the last piece of the Mina math puzzle? The final variable to complete the spreadsheet? Was she after the perfect formula to solve Mina? What did it take to create Darya’s ideal of a “whole” Mina? If only Darya would just dump these folders. Mina would then ask her why she’d thrown them all away. Darya would probably say because it’s not worth the aggravation I go through to set up these meetings. You don’t cooperate. I give up! She’d give her martyr-mother sigh and Mina would be left swimming in her familiar pool of guilt.

  “We’re done with this setting-up
thing, right? It’s not worth it anymore, is it, Darya?” Mina asked out loud.

  “It’s not that it’s not worth it,” Darya said quietly. “It’s that you are worth more.”

  A car drove by on the street below, loud rock and roll blasting through Mina’s skull.

  “All of this.” Darya’s hand waved over the folders and filing cabinet. “It’s here that there’s so little I can do. There, I was in my element. We had dignity. A solid life. We were established. Not foreigners having to scavenge for foreigners. I could have given you everything.”

  Mina thought of Darya in her element. She couldn’t imagine herself in any element she could call her own. That other country, was it a dream? When Mina pressed her face to the plane window that first night when they were about to land in New York and took in the glittering jewellike city lights, did the other country cease to exist? Was Mina a foreigner here? She thought she was an American. Darya always called her one.

  The setting sun created pools of light on the Persian rug. Twilight fell. Mina and her brothers had to hold up the fragile web of the new life they’d created and make sure that not one thread got unraveled because they had left a place of horror and this—the secure house, the freedoms, the convenient food markets, the peaceful streets—this is what they had come here for, and they did not need to argue. They did not need to disrupt this safe American life that they had somehow pieced together and built from scratch.

  “I’ll set the table for dinner.” Mina walked carefully around the filing cabinet and went downstairs.

  THEY HAD LEFTOVERS FOR DINNER. The rice had lost most of its saffron grains and the tahdeeg, the crunchy bottom-of-pot rice, was gone. The phone rang.

  “It’s Yung-Ja,” Baba called out.

  When Darya took the phone, she mumbled “yes,” “no,” and “well, you know my spreadsheets do have a margin of error.”

  Mina knew she should go back to her apartment in Manhattan. She had a huge finance case to prepare for the morning. But she felt stuck. Imbalanced.

  She crept up to Darya’s bedroom after dinner. How could a person spend so much time trying to find a mate for someone else? Did Darya really worry so much about Mina’s spending her life alone? Or did she just get a thrill out of the charts and graphs?

  Mina pulled out folder after folder containing data on accomplished men. She spread the résumés on the floor. Darya’s handwriting was all over the CVs. “Mother forgot to give his brother the polio vaccine, brother got polio,” Darya had scribbled in the margin of Jahanfard’s résumé. Then in an angry red she’d written the word “CARELESS!!” In another manila folder Mina found notes about a thirty-three-year-old banker who, according to Darya’s handwriting, “smoked for ten years but has now quit.” Next to that note, in red, Darya had scribbled, “Check on this. Make sure.”

  When Darya appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, her bun had completely fallen apart. Even in the tailored suit, she looked defeated. She stepped over the folders that Mina had strewn on the floor. She said nothing, but just slid down and sat on the floor across from Mina. Darya drew her panty-hosed knees to her chest and blew her red hair away from her eyes, and for a moment she looked young again. In that minute, she looked like the mother Mina remembered from prerevolutionary Iran. The mother who would laugh at the idea of suitors being graphed and who had more important things to do with her time than drawing charts of potential husbands. That old young mother.

  Mina thought again of Mr. Dashti. He was actually a nice enough man, but the day felt as if it had revolved around a monster.

  “I used to laugh at people who set up meetings with suitors. Did you know that?” Darya lowered her head onto her knees, surrounded by the puddle of folders. “I used to laugh.”

  When Darya bent her head, Mina could see the gray roots.

  “Have you prepared your finance case, Mina? Don’t you have a big assignment coming up? You shouldn’t be wasting your time on suitors, you know that, right?” Darya’s muffled voice spoke into her knees.

  Chapter Four

  Pillow Talk and Adult Education

  Darya couldn’t wait for the day to be over. Her heart beat too fast against her drawn-up knees. Lately nothing worked out. And “lately” meant since the revolution. For fifteen years, her life had been on hold. For fifteen years, she’d been waiting for the regime in Iran to change. So she could go back to her normal life. To her green house in Tehran, just a few blocks away from where her father and mother had lived before her mother was killed. To go back to that life where it didn’t matter what an MBA stood for or where Atlanta was. But here she was. The kids were getting older. Sassier. Sometimes, she was convinced, even stupider. The lunch with Mr. Dashti hadn’t been all that different from the lunches and teas with other men. But there was something about his shiny face and perfect teeth and calm demeanor that made Darya feel embarrassed for having him over. It was as if he had telegraphed with his white smile the folly of the whole experiment. Darya felt done in. As if she’d had the last straw with this one. For what? What the hell was she doing typing up résumés and making graphs on some two-cent men who didn’t even deserve her daughter?

  Things had happened the way they happened. The revolution had changed her world. What is done cannot be undone.

  Parviz walked in then. Parviz now had on his sweatshirt and jeans, no more suit and turtle tie. Though he still smelled of Old Spice. Ever since they had moved to America, he’d smelled of that cologne. He hadn’t stopped splashing it on since the day he brought her to this country with its candy canes and carousels and carefree attitude about everything and anything.

  “Darya Joon, I’ll drive her home,” Parviz said.

  “You don’t need to drive me. I took the subway today. I can take it back,” Mina said.

  “It’s late,” Parviz said.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay then, just to the station.”

  “Go with your father. Let him take you to the station.” Darya lifted her head. “Off you go, then. Off you go.” Mina, sulky and sullen, waved, and Darya wished her daughter had more oomph. More confidence. Where had Mina’s confidence gone? And her gratitude. Say thank you to your father for driving you, for goodness’ sakes. Hadn’t she taught her anything?

  Once she heard her husband and daughter back out the driveway, Darya sank onto the floor. She stretched out her body and closed her eyes. In Iran, the ceilings of their home had been so high. Making them feel freer inside. Here, in this “cape” style house as Parviz called it, she always felt as if the walls were closing in on her. Her sons could barely stand up straight in this room. Even she felt as if she could bump her head if she stood on her nyloned tippy toes.

  She thought of her mother’s garden: the fat crimson flowers, the lemon trees, the smell of the leaves and the dust after her father watered the bushes, the sound of the beet seller’s wagon going by.

  “Khoobi? You okay?” Parviz reappeared in the doorway as if by magic. The ride to the subway had been so short. Or maybe she’d lost track of time.

  His familiar, warm hand folded over hers as he slid onto the floor and lay down next to her. The first time she’d touched his hand, back when Mamani presided over their courtship, she’d been surprised at the thick strong veins on the back of it. Now she loved those veins. They lay side by side on their backs, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Khoobam, I’m fine,” Darya said. Darya closed her eyes again and thought of their old life in Tehran. There it hadn’t been just Darya, Parviz, Hooman, Kayvon, and Mina. There had been Mamani, and Darya’s father, Agha Jan, Darya’s sister, Nikki, her children, Parviz’s parents, his four siblings, their children, Mamani’s five sisters, their children, all the cousins and aunts and uncles and the extended family that stretched from Tehran to Mazandaran by the Caspian Sea. Darya had loved that connected life. She would throw birthday parties, and about a hundred p
eople would show with gifts and kisses and kind words and gossip. There were friends too, the friends that Darya and Parviz had made at the university: a rowdy, jovial group who might as well have been family. She missed them all so much.

  Parviz grunted. Was he sniffling? Maybe he was missing their old life too, missing that stability that had vanished once the revolution and then war blowtorched their country and tore them all apart. Maybe he was remembering the day of that awful bombing that killed Mamani.

  Darya opened her eyes and looked at her husband.

  “Oh my God, Parviz, are you doing ab crunches? Is there ever a time when you’re not trying to optimize the moment? We’re . . . I thought we were talking!”

  Out of breath and slightly sweating, Parviz let out a puff. “Just a few pelvic . . .”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Darya got up. Her panty hose was cutting into her ever-expanding middle. What was the use? Parviz was happy to be here. He didn’t miss anything about Iran. He was always seizing the bloody moment.

  Darya couldn’t wait to rip off her tight panty hose. Couldn’t wait to just put on her pajamas and collapse into bed.

  “And fifty!” Parviz let out a triumphant exhale and bounded up.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, AS PARVIZ SNORED peacefully, Darya lay awake next to him.

  Parviz let out a long, satisfied snore. Darya turned toward him. How could he not ever want to go back? How could he not miss his parents’ home in downtown Tehran, where the bathroom was outdoors and Persian cats roamed by the pond in their garden?

  Darya nudged her husband gently. He made one loud snore, then startled awake.

  “Are you sleeping?” Darya whispered.

  “No, just doing scissor jumping jacks, dear. Of course I’m sleeping! What is it, Darya? Just forget about that Dashti fellow. Just let it go. Go to sleep.”