Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  Mina’s sneakered feet hit the tarmac. How would she tell her parents about her decision to return to Iran? They would be so worried about her safety. She hadn’t been back in fifteen years. What if she was accused of being an American spy and detained? The political situation there was unpredictable. Anything could happen. But Mina had to go. She wanted to know what Agha Jan was doing every day without Mamani to cook him his meals, talk to him, sing for him Googoosh’s songs and recite Rumi’s verses. She needed to know where Bita was. What was she doing? Over the years, Mina had put that world out of her mind. Stuffed it away, just as she had shoved her oil paints into plastic storage boxes and slid them under her old bed in her parents’ house. She hadn’t had time for reflection as the dean put it. To reflect on the place where her mother had grown up in her element. Because Mina was busy building, busy striving, busy making.

  After her run, she practiced the karate kicks that her brothers had taught her when they were children. After all these years, she still loved doing those kicks. She raised her leg, put it in chamber position and leaned back the way Kayvon had taught her. Then she kicked out. Imagine getting Bruce Lee in the knee, the groin, the “precious place” Kayvon had drilled into her. Don’t be afraid. Kick! Mina kicked over and over again at her imaginary opponent, then jump-switched to work her other leg.

  Back in her apartment, she showered and got ready for bed. But she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she was crazy for wanting to go. What if she could never come back to her life here? She turned on the TV. A late-night talk show host swayed in his suit and made fun of the president. The audience laughed. Mina still felt a twinge of danger when Americans said negative things about their leaders. But you could get away with it here. And now she was going to go someplace where the rules were vastly different. She had to call her brother.

  “How did your lunch with the latest greatest suitor go?” Kayvon asked.

  “Ridiculous. Embarrassing. As always. I can’t keep doing this, Kayvon,” Mina said.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo. Mom will find a new hobby soon. This spreadsheet thing is getting absurd.”

  “I know.” Mina sighed. It was a relief to talk to Kayvon. She had always been closer to him than to Hooman. Maybe it was because she was only three years younger than Kayvon and six years younger than Hooman. But it was also because of her brothers’ different personalities. Kayvon was more easygoing, more relaxed. He could usually make Mina, or anyone for that matter, see the lighter side of things. Hooman was more serious. And now that they were all adults, Hooman’s schedule as a doctor didn’t leave him much time for small talk. Ever since he got married, he had even less time.

  “She never did this with Hooman. Or you. Right? I mean, Hooman’s married to an American. Your girlfriend’s from Brooklyn. Why do I have to be matched with the perfect Persian? It is such a double standard.”

  “You’re her favorite, that’s why. She just wants to see you settled. Happy. She’s obsessed.”

  “Isn’t it enough that I’m in business school? You know, Kayvon, I’ve been thinking. I have this idea. I really want to . . .”

  “Oh no, not this again,” Kayvon said. “Mina, you know you can’t be an artist. Don’t sweat it so much. We all have childhood dreams and then we grow up. I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I’m a contracts lawyer! That’s life. We all make choices, but it’s for the best, you’ll see. Now get some sleep.”

  Before Mina could even tell Kayvon about her plan to go to Iran, he’d said good night and good-bye.

  So much for her buddy brother. Mina sighed and reopened the photo album she’d taken out before her run, the only one they’d brought from Iran. Darya had cleverly hidden photos of herself behind pictures of the kids so that the customs inspectors wouldn’t confiscate the photos with no hijab. Darya in her bikini was hidden behind Hooman in a high chair. Darya with long flowing hair, her arm linked with Baba’s, was stuck behind a shot of Kayvon playing soccer. And photos of Darya at university, in her cotton blouse and billowing skirt, books hugged to her chest, were behind snapshots of Mina’s early artwork.

  The album helped link Mina to a past that felt almost glamorous. There was the mother she’d once known. Her hair black, not red. Her hazel eyes bright, hopeful. Darya looked happy, confident. Not tired and foreign. The Darya dressed in Jackie O jackets and pillbox hats was such a very different woman from the Darya of Queens. There she was standing by a fountain in Isfahan, her black hair blowing wild, a tiny Hooman and Kayvon by her side. There they all were on a London double-decker bus, waving. They didn’t need visas back then. The world at that time didn’t confuse them with terrorists. Mina pulled out an older photo: Darya in a hospital bed holding a scrunched-up newborn wrapped in a Mamani-knitted receiving blanket. It was their first moment on camera together. When Mina held the photo close, she noticed that Darya looked completely exhilarated and overwhelmed.

  In America, the mother, father, brothers, and previous self that Mina had known before the revolution slowly melted away and evaporated. They became like characters she’d read about in a book, people who lived in a different land, long ago.

  “You know we’re going back,” Baba would say some mornings in those early years as he ironed his pizza apron. “As soon as this revolution thing dies down.” Hooman would concentrate on his cereal and mumble, “That’s what you said a year ago.” Mina would think of her blue suitcase under her bed, ready to be filled with her clothes and paint set so she could return home to Bita and Agha Jan and Aunt Nikki and all the rest of her family and friends at any given moment.

  When the TV host delivered his punch line, the studio roared with laughter and Mina was jolted back to the present. Young women in the audience clapped and flipped back their hair. Big men in baseball hats guffawed and hooted. What had she missed? What was so funny? What did those girls in the air-conditioned California studio do after the show? Go to a bar and sit on skinny stools and order drinks? Mina knew about the ancient Persian poets: Saadi, Rumi, and Hafez. She knew about bombs in Tehran in the 1980s. But she couldn’t name more than one cocktail. She had never been comfortable inside bars. Darya and Baba found the bar culture unseemly. Wouldn’t want her sitting on a skinny bar stool swinging her legs. Mina knew how to study and work very hard. She knew how to swing her legs on that hyphen that defined and denied who she was: Iranian-American. Neither the first word nor the second really belonged to her. Her place was on the hyphen, and on the hyphen she would stay, carrying memories of the one place from which she had come and the other place in which she must succeed. The hyphen was hers—a space small, potentially precarious. On the hyphen she would sit and on the hyphen she would stand and soon, like a seasoned acrobat, she would balance there perfectly, never falling, never choosing either side over the other, content with walking that thin line.

  But to now jump off the hyphen and return to Iran required vaulting over a few hurdles. She had to get her paperwork straight and trust that despite some horror stories of Iranian exiles going back and being imprisoned, she’d be safe. More important, she had to convince her parents that their daughter’s going to the Islamic Republic for winter break was an absolutely brilliant idea.

  Chapter Nine

  Coffee Shop Nothings

  Grab a coffee?” Sam asked.

  “I am sorry?” Darya replied, taken by surprise.

  “Wanna get coffee? After class.” Sam shrugged. “Now that we’ve . . . we’ve . . . taken our spreadsheet knowledge to another level.”

  He was trying to seem relaxed, Darya could tell. Mimicking their teacher to make her laugh. He liked it when she sighed in the middle of class, when she found Miranda Katilla a little too ridiculous. She could tell he enjoyed her reactions. It felt like they were teenagers. It felt like the beginning of something, when really, if one thought about it, what beginning was left for her? Except maybe the beginning of an ulcer or a tumor or gout.

&n
bsp; “I know a coffee shop around the corner . . .” Sam continued.

  “Please do not say it starts with ‘S’ and ends with ‘bucks’ because . . . that place is not my cup of tea,” Darya blurted. She didn’t mean to be rude but the Americanization of traditional Italian coffee into something so commercialized had always bothered her.

  “Oh, this place does not start with ‘S.’ It’s a small mom-and-pop coffee shop. They serve other hot beverages too, you know.”

  Parviz was expecting her. What would she tell him? Is this what it had come to? Going to coffee shops with Sams from basement classes?

  “I must call my husband,” she said. “To let him know I will be late.”

  “Sounds good,” Sam said. Cool dude, guitar man, laid-back Sam. Nothing seemed to rile him.

  The pay phone receiver on Queens Boulevard was cold, and Darya didn’t have a quarter so Sam had to dig deep into his front jeans pocket for one. She watched his hand, then looked away. She blushed as she took the quarter. She dialed the number, then heard Parviz’s loud “ALLO!”

  “Parviz Joon, it’s me. I will be a little late coming home tonight. I’m going out with, with some classmates,” she said in Farsi. Sam waited outside the pay phone booth, rubbing his hands together in the cold.

  “Isn’t that wonderful, Darya Joon? You’re making new friends. I told you you would. Go. But I will pick you up. It’ll be too late to walk home.”

  “No, no, don’t pick me up.”

  “I will not have my wife walking home late in the cold. I will pick you up. How much time will you and your friends need? Nine thirty? Is that good? I will pick you up at nine thirty. Where are you going? To Starbucks, probably, no? I will pick you up at nine thirty at Starbucks?”

  “Yes,” Darya said because Parviz was so protective, and she knew he’d worry if she said she’d walk home and because her head felt dizzy and she didn’t know what else to say.

  SAM ORDERED SOME COFFEE THAT had about six names using the Italian words that seemed required in this godforsaken place. He’d only said “cool” when Darya told him that her husband insisted that they go to Starbucks and that he’d pick her up at 9:30. He ordered Darya some tea, and she pretended not to be disgusted by the leaf-filled bag floating in lukewarm water. They sat by the window, and part of Darya felt as if she were in a movie. It’s just coffee. It’s just tea. It’s just time after class with a classmate. Parviz is picking me up soon.

  Sam asked her a lot of questions. About her children, about Iran, about how they left, and even about the Shah. He seemed to know a lot. He obviously read a lot. He said his favorite poet was Omar Khayyam and that he’d had Persian food many times. “So delicious, so real,” he said.

  “Yes, real,” Darya said. That lumberjack shirt was growing on her. Part of her brain felt guilty for liking his shirt, another part was wondering when Parviz would show up (he tended to be early), another part wondered why she’d said she was with “friends” and not “a friend” to Parviz on the phone earlier, another wanted to know what Parviz would say when he noticed there were no “friends” other than Sam. A small part of her brain surprisingly thought the tea was hitting the spot.

  Was this what fun was? Sitting in a chain coffee shop with this man, listening to him tell her that Persian food was real? Why hadn’t she done this before? Why hadn’t she had a million coffees with Sams? A spreadsheet came to mind. She couldn’t hang out with the Sams of the world and be Parviz’s wife. It didn’t work that way. It just didn’t add up.

  When the door opened, a huge blast of wind swept through the room. Parviz stood there in his hand-knitted scarf and hat, both the color of turnips. Mamani had knitted them.

  “Allo, hello!” Parviz almost shouted. Darya saw him scouring the tables near her and Sam, obviously looking for the rest of her friends.

  Sam turned around and paused at the sight of the bundled-up figure in the doorway. Parviz looked as if he had stepped out of A Christmas Carol. Darya felt both embarrassed by and protective of him. Her Parviz, in the doorway, all lost.

  Parviz strode over to them and extended his hand in Sam’s direction.

  “Parviz Rezayi,” he almost shouted. Darya wondered if he’d make his handshake extra firm, the way his self-improvement tape advised.

  “Sam,” Sam said. After an awkward pause, he added, “Sam Collins.”

  Parviz looked at Sam, then at Darya, then at Sam again. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.” Sam got up and brought a chair from a nearby table.

  Darya could not form words. Here was Parviz. Here was Sam. Here was a teabag in lukewarm water. There was the scarf her mother had knitted for the son-in-law she adored. He hardly ever wore that scarf. Why was he wearing it tonight?

  “I am early, I know,” Parviz said. He looked at Darya. “I just thought I’d give your other friends a ride too if they needed one.”

  She looked at her husband of over thirty years and felt ashamed. “It’s just me and Sam tonight,” she said finally.

  “I can see that.” Parviz forced a smile.

  It was only coffee. It was only tea. It was nothing, really.

  But it was, in that smelly, busy place, a moment when Darya felt chopped off from Parviz’s love for just long enough to make her wish she could turn back the clock and not come here at all.

  Persian politeness dictated the rest of the interaction. Parviz could not, would not, be small about this. He even went to the queue and ordered himself a whipped cream–laden cup of calories masquerading as “coffee.” Darya could no longer bear to swallow her tea. Sam, though initially caught off guard, soon regained his relaxed cool dudeness. How could someone not like Parviz? It was what made his patients adore him. It was what made even the postal workers smile at him. Parviz was a genuinely kind person who did not think ill of others and who treated all people with respect. His behavior toward Sam was no different. He asked Sam questions, a lot of questions. First about the spreadsheet class. Then about his work. Then about his instrument.

  It was as though Sam were one of the men that Darya had graphed for Mina. Darya realized that Parviz was so accustomed to talking with potential suitors that he was perfectly comfortable making conversation with strange men. Only this wasn’t a potential suitor for Mina, and they both knew that. This was different. An air of awkwardness cloaked their table, their chairs, the way the knitted scarf cloaked Parviz’s neck. They could chat and laugh and drink together and pretend it was all perfectly normal.

  But it wasn’t.

  ON THE DRIVE HOME, PARVIZ was uncharacteristically quiet. He wasn’t positive. He wasn’t excited or zealous or passionate. He didn’t spout his self-help guru psychobabble phrases like “the universe is unfolding as it should.”

  He just said, “I’m tired, Darya,” when they returned home and brushed his teeth and went to bed. There was no honeyed milk, no long lectures, no reprimands, no questions.

  Quiet Parviz, Darya realized, was worse than all the other self-help, positive, overbearingly silly Parvizes she’d ever known.

  Quiet Parviz took her by surprise.

  Chapter Ten

  No, Na, Non, Nein, Nyet

  No. Na. Non. Nein. Nyet. How many ways would you like me to tell you?”

  Baba rubbed one hand on his bald head, a glass of tea in the other. Mina sat in her parents’ living room. Baba paced and took deep breaths. Mina knew he was using “Stay Calm!” techniques from his latest self-help tape. He smiled extra widely at Mina as he handed Darya an estekan of tea. Darya sat perfectly still in the big armchair, her legs crossed.

  “See now, Mina Joon.” Baba spoke as if he were talking to a mental patient who could attack him at any moment. “See now, joonam. What you’re suggesting is ludicrous. First of all, you’re in school. Second, the political situation there is unpredictable at best. Third, I think you’re just really tired. So let
’s just focus on the present.” He stopped pacing. “You OWN today!” he said, but his voice shook. “The past is not your dictator!”

  “It’s for a visit, Baba. People go back all the time now. I just need to see it again. To be there . . .”

  Baba laughed a high, nervous laugh. “Mina Joon, is it the stress of your graduate program? Are you worried about finals? Look, your mother—” He pointed to Darya who sat sipping tea serenely. “Your mother will talk some sense into you.”

  Why wasn’t Darya more alarmed at Mina’s announcement that she wanted to go back to Iran? Why was her mother so calm all of a sudden?

  “Stay focused. On the task at hand. No crazy trip ideas.” Baba took in a deep breath.

  All day, Mina had rehearsed the conversation with her parents in her head, anticipating all the derailments. But even as she’d played out their inevitable discouragement, she’d still felt strangely energized. As if she had just finished skiing in the Damavand mountains. Or had chased Hooman and Kayvon screaming and giggling through their old garden. Or had smelled again the lemon trees at Mamani and Agha Jan’s house. Just the idea of physically being back there again was exhilarating. She couldn’t let Darya and Baba talk her out of it.

  “Go ahead, Darya Joon, tell her,” Baba said, nodding.

  “Tell her what?” Darya asked.

  “What do you mean?” Baba stopped pacing and studied his wife carefully. “Darya, what has gotten into you lately? Your daughter wants to visit the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hello? Tell her, Darya, why this is a ludicrous plan!”