Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  “Saba, why say such a horrible thing?”

  Don’t blame me. These are Mahtab’s words. For as long as she lives, Mahtab will never welcome a Persian man into her bed. But who knows, maybe she will change her mind. American girls are allowed that and so much more.

  “Do you want to come out with us?” James asks Mahtab. Simone raises an eyebrow at one of the boys. Mahtab sits on the edge of the couch, waiting for the eyebrow to shoot off her head and fly away. James makes a pleading face and mouths Please? and Mahtab finds that her feet are tapping out an eager rhythm of their own—what a beautiful surprise. Oh, how I love telling you about my sister’s elation, her happiest moments.

  “Why not?” she mutters—an American way of saying God, yes!—a reverse tarof.

  Two weeks pass and Mahtab has a boyfriend. James has phoned every day since the night at the Fox, when he walked with her all the way to the club, stayed with her the entire evening, brought her drinks, even took her out for food when she got hungry in the early morning. He commented on her careful walk, the color of her hair, her pretty feet. Once he touched her neck with his rough lacrosse hands and told her she was very soft, even for a girl. “A girl like you should never set foot in a gym,” he said. “It would ruin you.” The shy, uncertain compliment was an unexpected delight that made her unconsciously caress her own neck now and then for the rest of the day.

  “Where are you from?” he asked one day early in their cautious romance.

  “California,” she said.

  “And ‘May,’ that’s just a nickname, right?” he said. “You don’t look like a May.”

  “No? Okay, June then. My name is June.” James laughed, so she told him the story of her mother sending her a birthday cake to Harvard. Happy Birthday, Mahtab Joon, the frosting read. And the delivery boy, not realizing that joon meant ‘dear,’ told her she had a cake from a person called Joon.

  Mahtab Joon. May June.

  They played a game where he tried to guess her country, and even her city. Then he kissed her in the street and she thought of how easy it was. She made careful note of his warm, tomatoey breath, his thin lower lip, and the way he kept his hands away from the parts of her she knew he was desperate to touch.

  “Saba jan,” says Khanom Mansoori, “how do you know about such things? Maybe we should talk about what comes after a wedding . . . or better yet, let us call Khanom Omidi! She will tell you stories that will make you grow horns from shock, though, from what I hear, no man ever complained with that one. Yes, you’ll need to learn these things now that you’re married.”

  What’s the matter? Do you think I know nothing? I don’t believe people need lessons the way you think they do. Take Mahtab, for instance. She wonders how she understands this or that. Who taught her what to do with James at such a time? I don’t have to experience it myself, Khanom Mansoori. I can pretend. God knows, when my time with the old man comes, I will be shutting off every such instinct, imagining myself in another place, another time. I have already prepared the story I will play in my mind and the song that will transport me there. But I don’t need lessons. I know a lot of things. I have read a thousand books, a sea of magazines, and I watch American television.

  Two weeks later Mahtab sits in a café, waiting for James to bring her coffee. She wonders what people in Cheshmeh would think of that: a preppy American boy bringing her coffee. She watches him stop by the sugar station, pouring exactly the right amount of milk and brown sugar into her drink. The elation rises and pops inside her chest, like a soap bubble from a television ad, clearing out so much of the bitter heaps that are lodged there. She has the feeling that she is important now, because someone like James knows how to make her coffee, knows what she likes for breakfast and that she eats with spoons instead of forks, that she is never full until she’s had rice. These small corners of James’s mental space are tangible places that she owns and occupies; they somehow make her more real. Rare now are the moments when she imagines herself hanging on the edge of every scene, pulling and struggling to stay put while someone far away holds her by a taut rope. You see, like any immigrant who has been offered the best of a new world, Mahtab is costantly afraid that it will be taken away. It is how I too would feel—that fear of doing something wrong, of losing it all. She has always harbored the dread that at any moment the person holding the rope will give it a good yank and pull her away. But now, when she is with James, her very own pale prince, she sometimes forgets about that invisible thread pulling her toward her other self.

  “My Saba, those parts make me very sad.”

  Don’t be sad. I have made my bed. I will be happy even if it was a mistake. What are the chances, after all, that a perfect man like James will ever find me here? I cannot have what Mahtab has. But who knows, Khanom Mansoori, it is possible that Mahtab will abandon him for other things. Can you imagine it? An Iranian girl rejecting such a man when I was forced to accept one who is so much less? I like the idea . . . but let us see.

  Mahtab often wonders what more James will do for her. She asks him for little things, small favors she doesn’t really need. He brings her ice cream on his way to her room. He Super Glues her broken high heels. Each time, that confident sensation grows and becomes more addictive. Sometimes she thinks it’s a little like that day she got into Harvard. It gives her a feeling of accomplishment. Harvard wouldn’t take just any girl. James wouldn’t pick up just any girl’s dry cleaning. Until now, Mahtab has felt out of place at Harvard, as if someone left the windows open in the admissions office and some benevolent wind picked up her application from the trash and placed it onto the “yes” pile. But James’s gestures do more to eradicate such thoughts than all the good grades from Baba Harvard. See what power I have over this man who isn’t ordinary at all—who, in fact, may rule the world one day? See what power I carry in my small body, in my blood, and therefore in the blood of my sister? Because fate, and every personal triumph and talent, is not a matter of location but is carried in the veins.

  Over coffee, James holds her hand and tells her that his mother has come to visit. He invites Mahtab to meet her. But James knows nothing about Iranian manners. He insults her by giving her a gift—a leather handbag to carry to the meeting, one that looks exactly like the one Mahtab already owns. At first she is confused. “It’s just like mine.”

  “Well, it’s not just like yours. This one’s leather.”

  “Mine is leather.”

  James gives her an aren’t-you-delightful smile. “Yours is not leather.”

  Khanom Mansoori nods. “Yes. They say Americans judge each other this way.”

  Annoyed, Mahtab makes a face. “Yes it is. The man at the flea market—”

  “Will you just carry it for my sake?” he asks, and Mahtab thinks that this must be the kind of thing that impresses his mother.

  “Fine.” She smiles. “But I bet yours doesn’t have a clasp shaped like a shoe.”

  “Made of solid gold, right?” He winks. He isn’t funny.

  “Exactly,” Mahtab says, unable to decide if she is mocking herself or James. She doesn’t care right now. She is only just discovering her power. And as you know, Khanom Mansoori, no outcome is certain until 22.5 minutes of an episode have passed.

  You also know this: Mahtab tends to overthink things and place herself into all sorts of made-up situations. Well, she spends the entire week anticipating what James’s mother will be like. She imagines—hopes even—that she is a stereotypical society maven, an underfed, sour-faced, racist woman who will pretend to be nice to her while advising her to stay away from her son. She is hoping for an experience similar to the picnic scene between Rose and her boyfriend’s so-white mother in The Joy Luck Club, which is a book I promise to tell you about later. She imagines herself standing up to her nemesis, pulling her shoulders back, and towering over her, saying that she didn’t leave a country full of
pasdars and akhounds and mullahs only to bow down to a middle-aged princess. She giggles as she sees herself storming off triumphant, with James as her prize.

  Despite her bravado, Mahtab practices what she will say. She is ashamed of her life before Harvard—at least the American portion of it, which includes her mother’s factory job and their unsophisticated house. She decides to leave that part out. In Iran, her family is educated. In Iran, Hafezis are rich and respected. It will take too long to explain that doctors and engineers and scholars there rarely achieve the same heights in America—not with degrees from Iranian colleges. It will be too frustrating to make this woman understand that, instead of learning French, Spanish, and business, they signal their mental powers by quoting Ferdowsi, Khayyam, and Hafez. They swallow up volume after volume of impossibly complex verse. They learn it so well that it comes out on its own when they are drunk, slurred and incoherent, but correct to the last word. And so these proud academics come to America and drive taxis. It isn’t their fault. Because what other American job makes such good use of ancient Iranian prose, hour after hour, day after day, in a muggy cab with strangers, force-feeding them poetry in all its feverish singsong melancholy?

  As it turns out, Mahtab gets no opportunity to champion her people, no satisfying and dramatic win to add to her credit. James’s mother seems to share her son’s fascination with the exotic.

  “I absolutely love the rugs, dear,” she says as she touches Mahtab’s arm. She is shorter than Mahtab expected, but thin, with a Diane Sawyer haircut and three strands of pearls. “We have four in our house. The Nain ones are best. Have you been to Nain?”

  Mahtab shakes her head, then changes her mind and nods. She wants to say something about exploited child workers, but she isn’t sure if that happens in Iran. This woman is nothing like the mothers she has known—neither the California teachers nor the Khanom Basirs and Hafezis of the world. James’s mother is dainty, kind, probably hiding something. Maybe she is striking from some unknown angle. Mahtab prepares herself, recalling the voracious guile of Persian women who can carry on four conversations at once, keeping a lulling ebb and flow while digging into your unsuspecting soul with garlic-covered fists and yanking out the slimy secret parts of your carefully crafted story. For later. They tuck it away in their apron pockets. They dry their hands and ask more questions.

  Once she described the women of Cheshmeh to José from the diner where she used to work, but he nodded and said, “That is all women, mija.” He had no idea.

  “This diner man sounds very wise,” says Khanom Mansoori, then drones to herself, remembering, “diner man from South Mexico . . . hmmm, yes, go on.”

  In any case, Mahtab doesn’t blame the women. It is the sea that does it to them, the malice of the Caspian. Mahtab hates the sea. She hates to swim and she doesn’t like the smell of algae and fish. The women from home wade through this wicked water and it gets into their bodies. It floats through the air, a spiteful milky fog. They drink it, breathe it, and cook their food in it. But Mahtab isn’t scared. She believes now that if she put all the evil inherited from her fore-mothers to good use, she could do many impossible things: stir mischievous jinns, wake sleeping ghosts, govern hordes of unwilling men. She wants dominion over a boy like James—and over his spoiled, white-pearls mother.

  James’s mother continues. “I love everything about Persia. Do you prefer calling it Persia or Iran?” Mahtab shrugs. “I’m sure you’ve read Ferdowsi and Rumi and Hafez. I read them all in college”—she names a second-rate one—“I brought you the Rubaiyat.” She hands her the famous FitzGerald translation, which Mahtab knows is the best.

  Mahtab is a little disappointed. She loves a good challenge. She was hoping for just a bit of racism. Just the faintest amount of class superiority. She feels cheated. James’s mother, Mrs. Scarret, continues. “I have a Persian cat, you know.”

  Okay, that does it. Another self-important connoisseur with a handful of random facts. The Persian-cat, Persian-carpet variety is the most grating. “Actually, Persian cats aren’t from Iran,” she says. At least she’s never seen one there.

  James’s mother taps her chin. “Oh, yes they are, dear. They originate in some plateau . . . around the Hindu Kush Mountains, which is technically Afghanistan, but of course, we know that that was all part of Persia at one point, don’t we, dear?” She finishes her sentences with long sighs that start with a high-pitched expulsion of air and settle into a soft buzz, like an airplane starting up. “Hmmm . . .”

  Now Mahtab feels foolish. She plays with the boring, no-frills clasp of her leather bag. James is smiling reassuringly. But that’s not the kind of assurance she wants just now.

  “James, can you get me a cup of tea?” she asks, trying to get back some control.

  James, who has been thumbing through one of Mahtab’s books, looks up.

  Mahtab doesn’t notice the color leave his face. Doesn’t see him first glance at his mother, who raises an eyebrow and begins to examine a nail, then at the long line in the tiny coffee shop, then at the full cup of tea in front of Mahtab. He gets out of his chair and throws an embarrassed look at his mother.

  “James?” Mahtab says, distracted. When he looks back, she adds, “And two sugars, please?” He gets in line without a word.

  I’m sure you don’t know yet what Mahtab has done wrong, Khanom Mansoori, because your own husband lives to serve you. Reza too is a man who likes to rush to the rescue and will do whatever we ask of him. I wonder what Abbas will be like in this regard. Will he be chivalrous or brutish? Mahtab’s Harvard athlete is neither of these. He doesn’t live to serve. He hasn’t been raised on a diet of romantic folklore and tragedy.

  This will be trouble for Mahtab. And we must concede that in every life—even the best magazine lives—there are obstacles and issues to face. Even Shahzadeh Nixon has troubles to her name, if the news media are to be trusted. What big scandals a girl with a thousand dresses can have! Well, Mahtab’s first-ever boyfriend is about to discover that Persian women aren’t easy to handle compared with the rest. I have heard it over and over from tourists who pass through my father’s house, and this is why our men have created a new world that keeps us firmly under their feet. In America, though, an Iranian girl can rail and rant and make demands. She can be selfish in her choices. She can fling every hated garment to the wind and discard men like flyers in the street. She can unleash the wild creature within for just one day and be forgiven.

  Have you ever wanted that, Khanom Mansoori? To give yourself up to madness in front of the world and have it forgotten? I read a book called The Bell Jar, in which a girl does the most unspeakable things, toys with a man who loves her, sleeps with a stranger who makes her bleed, refuses to follow any rule at all, and moves on with no consequences. She is even allowed back into college! How it fills my entire body with longing to run—far away, or up into the mountain, or into the sea.

  Oh, but to see Mahtab so free! A part of me wants to witness this perfect American boy unhinged for sport. Don’t laugh, Khanom Mansoori. You know my meaning well.

  Mahtab and James don’t see each other the next day. She doesn’t worry. She isn’t the kind of girl who wastes precious time fretting about men. Secretly she wonders if she should not have corrected his mother. Maybe it would have been more respectable to have her facts straight. On Saturday night she decides to go for a walk by herself—all night if she wishes, because there is no curfew. Just before ten o’clock, she wanders into a pub near her dormitory. It is perfectly normal for a girl to enter a bar alone on a Saturday night.

  In three hours she samples all of the following movie drinks you can’t find in Baba’s pantry: a Dutch beer, a whiskey sour, an old-fashioned, a sidecar, and a martini. She doesn’t finish them, of course. She is in full control of herself—though if she wanted to, Mahtab could get drunk and vomit in the street with no more than a slap on the wrist and a hea
dache the next day. The bartender doesn’t say no. You see, Western bartenders are permissive, slick-haired ex–medical students who specialize in the subconscious mind of beautiful women. They have crooked half-smiles and rolled-up shirtsleeves where they stash cigarettes, and they respect Mahtab’s right to do what she wishes. That’s the rule. Trust me. They know not to toy with the rules. Bartenders are good, reasonable people.

  When some time has passed and happiness returns, she notices James sitting in a booth with someone. She slips from her stool and walks over. Caught off guard, he stumbles through a greeting before glancing at his drinking companion—it is Simone, the unhappy New York princess. She wears a long white nylon coat that looks like a plastic bathrobe. Mahtab finds it bland and ugly, but she compliments it all the same, because this is one custom the women of the world share.

  “Hey there,” says Simone. “I don’t think James wants a big discussion tonight.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” Mahtab asks.

  Simone takes her hand lovingly. Mahtab cringes. “Look, Mah-tab, I know this is your first relationship, if you want to call it that. But sometimes men just need to talk to someone who isn’t the ‘girlfriend,’ you know?”

  “What a wicked girl,” drones Khanom Mansoori. “From what diseased womb does a snake like that spring up?”

  Yes, indeed, women like her exist everywhere. But don’t worry, James doesn’t want her. She is just the kind who likes to be involved.

  He looks tired, a bit disheveled. He sips from his oversized beer mug and gives Simone a cruel look. “What are you doing, Simone? I told you to stay out of it.” Mahtab has never heard him speak that way. It seems cowardly, the way he snaps. She has never seen him ugly with drink, his face scrunched up in confusion and annoyance.

  She drops into the booth beside them. The smell of his breath is overwhelming, and she wonders if she likes this boy after all. Simone shrinks into her corner of the booth, folds her legs under her, and wraps up tighter in the coat. James waits and watches Mahtab with an increasingly miserable expression.