Chapter 3

It was a rare morning when Shireen did not wake to the fresh memory of her daughter’s death and the death of her two grandchildren, but today she’d woken in glorious anticipation of Mitra’s arrival and had not shed the usual tears. Now she was crying because of Yusef’s infuriating behavior. No amount of concealer could hide the raw redness of her nose, and she had redone her mascara twice. Mitra should not see her like this. Poor Mitti; she had called and her father had probably hung up on her. It was all Shireen’s fault for suggesting that Yusef sleep late this morning. Even the small goodnesses she performed seemed to end up hurting people. Olga, dear Olga, used to praise Shireen for her guilelessness—You are such a pure woman, Madame—but Shireen knew what a fine line there was between pure and stupid.

After all these years, Shireen still hadn’t adjusted fully to Olga’s absence. Just last week, she’d woken from her nap and nearly called for Olga to pour tea so they could have their usual afternoon chat. She thought about phoning her now and resisted; they’d already had their weekly conversation. Anyway, the telephone was never as intimate as a person’s presence in the house. How odd she still found it that she’d become so reliant on a servant for companionship. Children were apt to do that with their wet nurses or their nannies, but it was unseemly in an adult, which was why Yusef had finally thrown her out and sent her back to Iran. No, she should never have been a housemaid at all, being literate and multilingual and modern thinking, but it had been the least complicated strategy for coming to America at the time.

Shireen gave up on her makeup and went into the bathroom to wash her face. Mitra would not arrive until noon to collect her for lunch; she had two hours to tame her tears and lift herself out of this ugly mood. She went into her closet, still redolent with Yusef’s lime-scented shower gel, and pulled on her usual ensemble: black below-the-knee skirt, black blouse, black sweater, black-tinged pantyhose. The color of mourning, but Shireen had never worn bright colors. She slid into her leather slippers; she would come back for her pumps later. In the floor-length mirror, she inspected the lay of the fabric on her body, looked for wrinkles, snags, stains. She’d long ago stopped being critical of her figure; it was well-proportioned for her average height. Never a beauty, not willowy or voluptuous like her husband’s mistresses, she was aware that having less prettiness to miss as it crumbled was a blessing. At family gatherings, she wanted to scream at her friends and relatives who talked endlessly about the maintenance of youth and beauty. It was a game that a woman ultimately lost badly. Best not to participate at all. As Olga used to say (and Olga had experienced more in the way of men and lust than anyone else Shireen knew): In the end, a woman is better off being admired for her dignity than for her appeal to men or the appraisal of women. That was a road taken by fools. And with a husband like Yusef, Shireen had had to grasp the straws of dignity early. It had taught her appreciation, she thought proudly. Appreciation for her home and her garden, for her children and grandchildren. Tears welled up again, and she turned her face from the mirror, rearranged several of Yusef’s hanging suits so that the grays and blacks were together.

Back in the bathroom, Shireen unpinned her dark hair and ran a large-toothed comb through the wavy tresses that reached the middle of her back. She always pulled her hair into a bun, but when Anahita was a child—even when she was older, bless her heart— she would sit behind Shireen in the evenings and braid it while they watched TV. What joy and comfort that touch had brought her! Anahita had frizzy hair that she could not stand to grow out long enough to braid. All through adolescence, she kept it at chin-length and ironed it so that when Shireen kissed her cheek the odor of singed hair struck her. Mitra had inherited Shireen’s hair, and she let it fly free, no buns for her, and certainly no sense of responsibility where lusty men were concerned. That’s their problem, Mitra would retort. Shireen still wondered where her oldest daughter had learned to think like that. Anahita had innately understood that it was a traditional woman’s responsibility to refract unwanted male attention, a concept Mitra once denounced as a direct offshoot of the idea of hejab, invented and perpetuated by men who didn’t want to take responsibility for their own lust. Not that Mitra flaunted herself. She simply had no use for such values; she was too busy with what was going on in her mind. They have opposite natures, Olga used to say when Shireen would fret about her daughters. Nothing you can do, Madame, but accept it.

It was Anahita who had begged to hear the stories Shireen had heard in childhood from her own mother and grandmothers. Tell me the andaruni stories, Anahita had pleaded, and though Shireen would sigh with exasperation because she had no time to engage in such frivolities, she was secretly delighted to talk about the days before Reza Shah forced men to bring their women out into the open unveiled. Shireen’s family had been large and traditional, an established clan of textile manufacturers whose forebears had traded along the Silk Road, and who, when Shireen was a child, lived together in a compound behind ten-foot walls in the center of Tehran. Of the several buildings in the compound, one housed the women’s quarters—called the andaruni, or inner chambers—where many women spent their whole lives, cloistered from the outside world. Surrounding them was the biruni—the outer chambers—which was the domain of men, including those who were trustworthy enough to act as liaisons between the outside and the inside. Shireen barely remembered this bifurcated world; in fact, soon after she was born, the andaruni became part of the main house, and by the time Shireen was a young girl, it had disappeared altogether. Her younger sister, Golnaz, couldn’t imagine it. All that remained were two distinct parlors for entertaining female and male guests separately on the infrequent occasions when the elderly and old-fashioned came to visit. Still, an Iranian home carried the suggestion of the andaruni—its communal warmth, its safety, its collective industry—and these were as alluring to Shireen as the Hollywood films she saw in Tehran’s movie theaters. And later, Anahita’s fascination with that bygone era gave Shireen a connection with Iran that helped to soften her homesickness and her sense of otherness in America. Oh, the andaruni! Its floor strewn with intricate Isfahani carpets, its purring samovar lit with a flickering flame visible through a cloudy little window next to the spout, its neat piles of rolled mattresses against the walls. The doughy arms and breasts of its mothers and aunties, their rosewater scent and sibilant murmurings. The tangy aroma of slivered orange peel awaiting transformation into marmalade, the shoo-shoo sound of uncooked rice against a metal tray. Winter days gathered around a quilt-covered brazier, toes brushing calves, napping and waking like the tides. Games never played alone, kisses and food shared like secrets, herbs and tinctures prescribed for every ill, prayers offered for good fortune. Advice never from just one. Such a safe life! A hidden life untouched by strangeness. A sheltered freedom.

Shireen reached into the wicker laundry bin and collected a small bundle of dirty clothes: two pairs of Yusef’s briefs, plaid pajamas, a sleeveless undershirt, four gold-toe black socks, her own underwear. Certainly not enough for a load, yet she took the bundle down to the basement laundry room, her backless slippers slap-slapping against her heels in the quiet house, and arranged the smelly light-colored fabrics evenly in the machine. Her nose was still leaking, and she dabbed at it daintily with the corner of a napkin she’d already ironed, then dropped it into the machine as well.

For a moment, she stood staring at the wall, mentally going over the long list of necessary tasks for the One Year gathering on Friday. The final shopping for fruits and vegetables could not be done until Friday, but everything else food-wise had been prepared; her freezer and refrigerator were stocked neatly with Tupperware containers of eggplant khoresh, lima bean and lamb polo, saffron rice pudding, dolmeh, Russian potato salad, green stuffed peppers, and two cheese casseroles. She’d cooked all this last week. The walls had been washed, the bathrooms disinfected, new shell-shaped soaps and scented candles purchased, the grout between the foyer tiles bleached with a toothbrush, the carpets vacuumed and fringes tucked under. She couldn’t think of a thing that hadn’t been done or that could be done just yet. She looked at her watch: 10:25. Time slithered like a snail.

Upstairs in the kitchen, she poured herself another glass of tea, very light, the color of American honey, so as not to risk the jitters that would surely make it impossible to apply her eyeliner smoothly. She resisted a piece of fattening halva and gathered a handful of white raisins to sweeten the tea in her mouth. In the family room, she sat in the middle of the long sofa and turned on the television. She jumped at the sudden loudness; Yusef’s hearing was definitely going. She donned her reading glasses so she could see the markings on the remote control, then lowered the volume and found her channel: HGTV, a bathroom remodel—such marble! Ana sometimes used to come over and they would watch together, Ana with her yellow writing pad making lists of decorating ideas for her house; then they would go buy fabrics or paints or hardware—and once some castoff outdoor chairs—to work on at Ana’s house, transforming areas large and small into what they had seen on the television.

Yusef rarely allowed Shireen to make any adjustments to their house that didn’t involve professionals. It had always been like that. Before they moved to New Jersey almost forty years ago, Yusef and Shireen lived in Manhattan in the East Sixties in a two-bedroom apartment Yusef had begun renting in 1953, before he married Shireen, who came over from Iran three years later. Just remembering that place made Shireen roll her eyes and slap her cheek. Terrible. All big brown furniture smelling of pipe smoke. It had taken her a whole week after her arrival to work up the nerve to ask Yusef if they could use some of her dowry money for drapes to “complement” the Venetian blinds, and perhaps an understated quilted bedspread and maybe a set of drinking glasses that were not tinted a masculine gray. She was eighteen. He was thirty. The second time she’d laid eyes on him was on their wedding day (the first was when he came khastegari with his two aunts and she’d served tea as was expected of her when a suitor visited). To her redecorating requests, all Yusef had to say was no in a mild voice and the matter was closed. Luckily, Shireen became pregnant quickly. Still, Yusef insisted that the crib and changing table match the dark wood and bulgy style of the guest room headboard and bureau; nothing Shireen purchased, including the baby’s layette from Bloomingdale’s, was left to Shireen alone. This was Yusef’s way, and Shireen told herself that she was fortunate to have a husband who cared so deeply for his home. Marriage could be much worse.

Mitra had spent her first year in that apartment. Shireen often thought this was why her eldest daughter preferred to live in cities and was unperturbed—actually lulled, it seemed—by the background noises of traffic and sirens. But Mitra’s arrival had cluttered the second bedroom, and it became ever more difficult to accommodate friends and family who visited from Iran. And there were many, some who stayed for weeks to sightsee or shop or install their children in boarding schools and colleges. Yusef, as gracious and effusive a host as he was an aloof and restrained husband, finally proclaimed to his young wife that it was time to build a house.

Shireen pressed the remote for the Food Network. Another pasta dish. She sat back and sighed. Her nose was finally dry and clear; she felt her eyelids with the tips of her fingers; still a bit swollen. But no more crying, she ordered herself. It was always an effort. If Olga were here, she would help, tell a joke from her repertoire—about the cuckolded Rashti husband, about the miserly Turk, about the lecherous Arab—or she would shower Shireen with compliments, sitting cross-legged as always on the floor with her back against the sofa (despite Olga’s more modern upbringing, she liked the floor as much as any servant), and state a case for Shireen’s measured goodness as a mother, a wife, a friend, an employer, as if she were a vizier defending the virtues of a slandered empress at court. Shireen had drunk Olga’s praise and respect like a suckling infant, but of course the quench was never permanent. Like a barren woman—like Olga and poor Mitra—Shireen couldn’t make her own milk.

Abruptly, she stood and walked toward the dining room. It was pointless to torment herself with such thoughts. She opened the bottom drawer of the mahogany credenza and removed a pile of tablecloths. Setting the pile on the table for twelve, she went back down to the laundry room and lugged the ironing board up to the family room, pulled it squeakily up to waist height, and went to retrieve the iron. Yes, the tablecloths had been ironed after the last washing—a year ago, the funeral—but the fold lines needed to be pressed out. How had she forgotten to place this important task on her list? But she knew how; Olga had always been in charge of the ironing. Shireen looked at her watch again, with clear intent now, determined that if she worked swiftly on the tablecloths, she would have time to do her toilette and finish dressing before Mitra arrived.

Olga

In the time of our history when the Soviets retreated from an untamed Afghanistan and the terrorists in the news were Irish and Italian, there was an Unconventional Woman who returned unwillingly to the country of her birth. She settled in the capital and pined for her adopted family in America, praying for its patriarch’s absolution that would take her back there, even to the monotonous suburbs she loathed. Soon, however, her watery eyes could not ignore the misery wrought by the dictator Ayatollah and the dictator Saddam during eight years of war. For the nation, nothing was gained and nothing lost—the borders remained intact. The cost, however, was borne by the wailing women robbed of their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers—hundreds of thousands returning, not in glory, but in burial shrouds. Those who survived trickled home, maimed, traumatized, wheezing from the gas.

The Unconventional Woman did what was in her nature. She cooked.

Aromas wafted from her apartment, flooding the hallways and elevators with the scent of basmati rice softening in boiling water and belching its floral scent, of saffron and dill, of mutton and mint. The neighbors were lured, and she welcomed them with piroshki and eggplant omelets and noodle soup; halva and chickpea cookies and saffron ice cream. Food was a balm, and to it she added her flair for telling stories from the old days when the people could dance in cabarets and buy Coca-Cola and watch a French film in a movie house. Stories also of America, of the children there she still pined and prayed for. There was hope, she told them; the war was over. She felt useful and appreciated.

But then the Summer turned Bloody. The dictator Ayatollah sent his guards to Purge the disloyal, the US Navy launched a Mistake missile that plunged three hundred innocents into the Gulf, and the militia marked and followed the artists and intellectuals. Now the scent of Suspicion took the place of everything else in the air. The Unconventional Woman wanted to fold inward, to surrender to old age and aloneness. But it was not to be. The chefs and the storytellers become known to the Underground through whispers. Writers, artists, filmmakers, journalists, teachers—their soft, desperate knocks came at her door. She fed them, and more.