1977
Together, Mehrdad and I crossed York Avenue at 66th Street and went through the main gate of The Rockefeller University.
Mehrdad talked with pride about the campus. “The laboratories are connected by a labyrinth of underground tunnels, for when the snow is heavy, Ellie! For transfer of the chemicals. They’ve thought of everything!”
It had been three weeks since we moved into our apartment across the street from campus and it was the first day Mehrdad was taking me to meet his coworkers and boss.
In the elevator up to his lab, I attempted to calm my nerves with a vain, insecure mental review of how I looked. Gone were the beehives of my university days.
Determined that I should grace the streets of America looking like our Queen Farah Pahlavi or international star Farrah Fawcett, Mother had given me a set of pink, bristly rollers, and I had used them for this auspicious day. My hair turned out successfully bouncy with big waves. I wore a sapphire-blue dress with a band neckline, full skirt, long sleeves, and one-button cuffs. In the days of skinny eyebrows and super-shiny lip gloss, I was on point with both.
The elevator dinged, and Mehrdad led me into a dimly lit corridor lined with open and closed doors. Through one of the open doors, I saw men and a few women in white coats standing at rows and rows of long tables with benches. I felt I was watching an American movie where brave scientists work around the clock to save the world from a virus gone wrong.
Mehrdad led me into the second room on the left. The air inside was sour, but large windows and a view of the East River made the space surprisingly bright. Mehrdad pointed out his bench with pride. Tiny syringes were lined up on the table. “Pipettes,” Mehrdad said.
One by one, he introduced me to his colleagues: the world’s best and brightest, recruited to work together on experiments. There was a petite woman named Ling Fei. A redheaded man named Thomas. A smiling woman with flipped black hair named Gabriela. They were from China, Germany, and Brazil respectively, experts, Mehrdad had explained over dinner, in “chemical reaction efficiency,” “particle aggregation,” and “solid-phase peptide synthesis.” I still didn’t fully understand what they did.
As we left the lab, a young woman in the corner inserting the small syringes—pipettes—into trays filled with holes waved at me with her blue-gloved hand.
We moved down the hall until Mehrdad stood in front of a frosted glass door. He opened it. Inside the small, cramped room, a coffee machine balanced on a filing cabinet. A window in the back was half blocked by a teetering pile of papers. And in front of us, a young, brown-haired woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two sat at a cluttered desk. Her messy ponytail made her look busy and slightly sad.
When Mehrdad asked if he could briefly introduce “the boss” to his wife, the young woman sighed. “Dr. Kohler prefers appointments.”
She mumbled into a receiver, then motioned to a door on her right as she looked up and down at my sapphire-blue dress, my bouncy hair, and super shiny lip gloss. I should not have come to this laboratory looking like a knockoff of a Persian queen. I cursed my mother. Following her absurd advice to avoid looking like a dahati left me feeling like an overdressed immigrant. I cursed myself for being so wrong in this country.
Dr. David Kohler’s office was enormous and clean, with an even better view of the East River than from Mehrdad’s lab. Rising from his desk, Dr. Kohler was tall, unbelievably so. Between his white hair and salt-and-pepper mustache, his blue eyes drooped with weariness and the burden of what I assumed was too much knowledge. He motioned to two leather chairs across from his desk and asked us to sit.
“How do you like New York?” Dr. Kohler asked, loudly and slowly. “How is the apartment?”
“The apartment is wonderful,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
After I spoke, Mehrdad sat a little taller at the sound of his wife’s good English.
Dr. Kohler, with a small raise of his eyebrows, registered surprise.
“We are delighted to have Mehrdad with us,” he said, no longer speaking too loudly or slowly. “His research is incredibly promising. His background is stellar. He has already settled in. Nicely.”
Now it was my turn to puff with pride. Dr. Kohler had pronounced Mehrdad’s name in a comical way, making it all blurry “r”s for no reason, but no matter. My husband was a rising star.
“And how about you, if I may ask?” Dr. Kohler said. “Have you found ways to spend your days?”
I had cried every single morning after Mehrdad left for the lab—not because my new city wasn’t exciting or energetic or filled with possibilities for adventure. It was all those things. I had cried simply because in this new city I was very much alone.
Once I’d dried my tears, I got to work. I cleaned our two-bedroom apartment (really, a one-bedroom plus a tiny room for Mehrdad’s study) furnished with an orange floral-patterned sofa. I had shopped at the closest supermarket, puzzling over the abundant variety of boxed, prepackaged food and neon-yellow mustards and cheeses. In our avocado-green kitchen, I learned to prepare avocados and how to use the coiled-wire electric stove to cook.
I had walked, between 59th and 79th streets, up and down York Avenue. First Avenue. Second Avenue. Even Third Avenue. The array of stores and restaurants, kiosks and newsstands, reminded me of Tehran sometimes. I had bought the New York Times three times. I had bought the Daily News five times. The New York Post twice.
When Mehrdad came home, sometimes I couldn’t help but burst into tears again. I felt blind in this new country. And as though the people in it were blind to me. I was invisible. I could never have existed and it would make zero difference in the thrum and rhythm of the vast, great city. I wasn’t ungrateful for this opportunity to be in a new country with the wonderful amenities Mehrdad’s post-doc position afforded us. But I knew no one. I understood the language, yes, but I didn’t understand much else. I missed the familiar routines of home, even missed the ladies at the beauty parlor with their small-minded gossip and petty competition over who best carved a radish into the shape of a rose. I telephoned Tehran every few days just to hear Mother’s voice. I walked the streets like a ghost.
Sometimes I thought of my old friend, Homa. Imagined walking these streets with her. What would she think of these tall buildings? Would she like New York? I would think of Homa and again feel blanketed with guilt. If I could ever see her again, how would I word my apology? Make my confession?
But I did not need to worry about how to apologize to her because she was not with me. In those New York streets I walked alone. Friendless, just another immigrant face among the masses.
Were it not for the way I felt when Mehrdad was home, I might have fled. But once he walked through the door and we had dinner, once he shared with me a few details of his day, he would hold me and kiss me and take me to bed, and there in his arms with his body intertwined with mine, my every woe was lifted and momentarily I floated, I was in bliss. With Mehrdad’s voice in my ear, I was whole again, myself again. Until the next morning when seven forty-five rolled around and I faced a day of nothing.
“I keep busy,” I said in my best American accent. “New York is a lovely city.”
Dr. Kohler studied me with his droopy eyes. “That it is,” he said. “But I tell you what. Might you be interested in joining other spouses of post-docs and our doctors and fellows from all over the world for a get-to-know-you? There is happy hour every Friday afternoon at Caspary Auditorium.”
It sounded adorable for the Americans to have designated a specific hour as a happy one. And I was in no position to refuse my husband’s boss’s suggestion. He was the reason we had traveled across the world to be in this strange and fascinating laboratory. I tried to muster a look of excitement at the prospect of happy hour.
Dr. Kohler proceeded to speak to Mehrdad about amino acids and reagents. As they discussed the science, I looked at Dr. Kohler’s desk. Among the objects on display were three snow globes, a few amethyst rocks, and a large cowbell with a Swiss flag. In a framed family portrait, a much younger, brown-haired version of Dr. Kohler and a woman with a huge-toothed smile posed standing behind two little boys wearing bowl haircuts, orange shirts, and brown vests. And there, in the corner of his desk, was a familiar decorative plate. I had chosen the elegant design of the hand-etched bird the day I ran into Homa and Bahar in the bazaar. On Mehrdad’s very first day at The Rockefeller University, I had told him to give it to Dr. Kohler as a gift from our country.
After the meeting, Mehrdad walked me to the main gate and said, “You’ll meet people soon. That Delightful Hour sounds promising.”
He kissed me. And in that kiss, I felt the salty familiarity of his scent, the comforting landing, the buzz that his proximity still elicited in me after all this time.
I walked back to our apartment, well aware of the reason I was in this country. I was in it for him. I chuckled at how he said “Delightful Hour.” Dear, dear Mehrdad.
The buffet table in the corner of the Caspary Auditorium held a tray of cubed, bright yellow cheese.
A blond woman about my age wearing wide-legged red pants and a white button-down shirt walked over and took a plate. She looked at me. “This cheese is the pits,” she said. “Here, try the chips.” She dipped her hand into a big bowl of potato chips and plopped some onto my plate. As if she knew me, as if we were already on familiar terms. The chips were ridged and large and all the exact same shape.
I bit into one and it shattered into tiny pieces. I must have made a face, because she laughed.
“I’m Angela.” She held out her hand. “I moved here from California last year.”
“I’m Ellie.” I took her hand and shook it. I’d learned to use the shortened version of my name in this country. “Ellie” was a lot easier for Americans to pronounce than “Elaheh.”
She picked up a chip and bit into it and smiled.
It was Angela who took me shopping for a pair of high-waisted, wide-legged polyester pants in a soft lavender. She wanted me to buy the canary yellow, but I wasn’t quite ready for that. It was Angela who showed me how to use the subway and how to avoid being splashed by puddles as cars drove by and how to hail a cab in Midtown.
Angela’s husband, Ryan, worked at the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at The Rockefeller University, and they were our neighbors in the building at 1175 York Avenue. We lived in apartment 17C and they lived in 20D.
Angela loved to cook. She took me to Gristedes and helped pick out linguine and clams and sauce, and then took me to her apartment to show me how to “throw it all together.” Sometimes we cooked dinner for four, or our husbands met us at nearby restaurants “for a bite.”
It was Angela—age thirty-seven to my thirty-four—who campaigned for me to apply for a part-time job at Bloomingdale’s, where she worked at the cosmetics counter.
“What do I know about makeup?”
She stopped and looked me up and down. “Honey, you know plenty!”
I was able to get the job with the visa we had. It helped that the language I had studied for years was the language of this new country.
When people from The Rockefeller University found out I was from Iran, they would often recite a verse of Omar Khayyam or Rumi or talk to me of Persian rugs and kittens. The associations Americans had with Iran were mostly positive at that time. Sometimes there were strange questions. At Angela’s Christmas party, I stood next to a bowl of red liquid “punch,” when a young man asked if we had electricity in Iran.
“Yes,” I said, making no effort to hide that he’d offended me. He blushed and walked away. A few minutes later, a professor’s wife asked if there were seven days in a week “over there” in Iran. I assured her that we did in fact have seven days in a week, but that we followed a solar calendar.
On December 31, 1977, Angela, Ryan, Mehrdad, and I celebrated New Year’s Eve together. We watched the news, transfixed. President Jimmy Carter was in Iran. He had raised a glass with the Shah and said, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”
Our countries were the best of friends. Allies in a dangerous world. We could not have imagined the friendship between our nations ever being severed. We could not imagine that they would ever become adversaries.
The friendship between Iran and America seemed like it would last forever.
But I should have known that some friendships fracture and rupture beyond belief.