Chapter 6
Mitra found Kareem and Anahita in the unfinished part of the basement behind the blustering metallic dragon of the boiler. Ana was twelve, an immature twelve. She still watched cartoons, played with her dolls, sucked her thumb in her sleep. She wouldn’t get her period until she turned fourteen. Kareem’s back was to Mitra. He had long hair then—his pride—and combed his fingers through it constantly. At the moment, he paid it no mind as it fell forward, exposing the back of his neck to Mitra’s view, a sliver of gold chain catching her eye. Anahita was propped on an old barstool against the wall. All Mitra could see of her sister were her white-stockinged legs from the knees down, swaying to the rhythm of Kareem’s grind. He was nineteen.
The collar of Kareem’s flannel shirt in Mitra’s fist was a sensation she will never forget; his strangled gasp as the front of the shirt slammed against his throat, his head snapping back, and the skitter of popped buttons on the concrete floor as she yanked the collar harder, mercilessly. He went to his knees. Still she yanked, then let him fall onto his back. The contour of his erection pressed at his jeans. She kicked him in the side, stepped over his leg, and kicked his testicles. She was wearing Frye boots.
His sweaty face was constricted in pain, and yet he kept from crying out. Self-preservation.
Anahita covered her face with her hands. Frozen. Mitra held her trembling wrists, talked to her dimpled fingers. “Upstairs. To our room. Act normal. Pretend. Can you pretend? Everyone’s in the living room. Take your hands off your face! Let’s go now! Ana, nod. Do you hear me? Nod. Take your hands off. Pretend.”
Mitra lifted her sister off the stool. Shaking. Face ashen. Eyes wide and frightened at Kareem writhing. “Hold my arm. Pretend. You can. I’m with you. I’m here.”
Words she’d never spoken.
Upstairs, they sat on the floor with their backs against Mitra’s bed, the side near the wall as if they were hiding.
“We have to tell Mom,” Mitra said.
“I already told Mom,” Anahita said.
“What? What did you tell her?”
“I told her that Kareem kissed me all mushy like in the movies. She laughed and said he was playing with me. I told her no, it wasn’t like playing, but she doesn’t understand.”
“Then we should tell Baba.”
“No! I can’t tell Baba something like that. I’m embarrassed. Please, Mitra, don’t make me tell Baba.”
Mitra knew Ana was right; she knew it before the suggestion came out of her mouth; it would never do to talk to Baba. Sex was a subject he only alluded to, and always in the context of their purity. The very idea of uttering sexually descriptive words to their father was unthinkable. Anyway, he wouldn’t want to believe such filth had happened, not in his family. He would want to investigate, like he always did, whenever they told him something disagreeable that he didn’t know about. Tattling. A million questions, all intended to trip them up, all with the intention of dispelling an incident that might prove uncomfortable to address or damaging to his image of the family.
“That bastard Kareem,” Mitra said.
“It’s not his fault. He loves me. He thinks I’m beautiful.”
“Is that why you let him kiss you and touch you? You think you owe him for loving you and thinking you’re beautiful?”
“No,” Ana said, her eyes downcast, then suddenly looking into her sister’s face. “I can’t believe you kicked him, Mitra. He’s going to be mad.”
“Fuck him.”
“He’s going to be mad at me.”
“So?”
Ana shrugged and looked down. “But he loves me and—”
“And he thinks you’re beautiful. Dammit, Ana. Did you like him kissing you and touching you?”
“No.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I let him do it.”
“You let him do it because he wanted it, because you thought if you didn’t let him do it, he wouldn’t love you anymore.”
“Well, he won’t.”
“So?”
“I don’t want that. One time I told him I didn’t want to and he stopped talking to me; he didn’t invite me to go to the movies or play charades with Mariam and Bita and Majid. I hurt his feelings.”
Mitra grabbed Ana’s arms roughly, brought their faces close. “Listen to me, Ana. It’s not your job to make Kareem happy or to keep him from feeling hurt. You understand me? If he really loved you, he wouldn’t make you do something you didn’t want to. Besides, he knows you’re just a kid; he’s not supposed to be doing stuff like that to you.”
“But he didn’t take my clothes off. He didn’t try to have sex with me.”
“Believe me, Ana, he will; he definitely will if you keep letting him do what he’s doing, which is part of sex.”
“He probably won’t talk to me now anyway.”
“Good.”
Ana began to cry, the usual stifled hiccoughs. “What if I can’t stop myself?”
“Are you kidding? Why do anything you don’t like doing?”
Ana looked Mitra in the eye and sniffed. “But I always do things I don’t like doing. I’m not like you, Mitti.”
Mitra’s lips trembled with anger and frustration, but she said nothing. Anahita hung her head and sobbed softly. Mitra saw the part in her hair, the fine wiry waves falling away from it like a paper fan to the bottom of her neck. Her hands were suddenly against those waves on either side of her sister’s head, and she gently pulled Ana to her chest, where she nestled her face and wet Mitra’s shirt with hot tears that seeped into her skin, and deeper.
“Don’t worry,” Mitra said. “I won’t let you do anything you shouldn’t do.” And Ana’s arms went around Mitra’s waist.
* * *
If Shireen had given her a choice, Mitra would’ve spent the night on the couch in the family room. Not in here, certainly not after telling that story.
The pink shag rug had been replaced by a cream Berber, but the rest of her childhood bedroom was the same, though a bit faded. Pink walls with a picket fence ceiling border, the ceiling itself also covered in wallpaper—a sea of roses that had spun Mitra’s head when she was stoned. White ruffled curtains swagged across the windows, sills adorned with Delft statues of children. Furniture white with gold trim, twin beds with brass headboards. A framed poster above Ana’s bed: the lower legs and slippered feet of a ballerina on point, ribbons perfectly crisscrossed up white-stockinged calves. Anahita’s dream: to be a ballerina.
Twice a week until she was eleven, she attended Mademoiselle Valerie’s Ballet School in Alpine, where she practiced harder than any of the other girls, most of them skinny and supple, and present only because their mothers insisted. It was the opposite in the Jahani family: Yusef thought the performing arts unseemly for proper girls. But Ana was a dancer. She could imitate any kind of movement. Mitra cringed when she did the splits, but was impressed; she dared her to perform all kinds of bodily contortions, hoping she’d get stuck. When Olga came to live with them, she indulged Anahita’s dancing, encouraged her to learn Persian and Arabic movements, which involved a great deal of wrist-twirling and hip-thrusting, and Azeri dancing with its quick Cossack-like knee bends—Up! Down! Up! Down! Hey!—that Ana’s muscular thighs were made for. In the evenings, Ana could often be found in the maid’s room dancing to a cassette player, mixing the different styles and movements to make Olga drop her knitting and laugh like a hyena. Yusef would stand at the top of the basement stairs and growl at her to come up and do her homework.
Everyone but Anahita realized that she did not have the body of a ballerina. Yusef’s pet name for her was “my little fatso,” meant as a compliment. Shireen dubbed both herself and Anahita full-figured—fool-figoorrd like Lizbet Taylor. But Ana eagerly sought the approval of the prune-faced Mademoiselle Valerie until at last the Frenchwoman blatantly informed her that she was too short and shunky to be a ballerina and she should stop wasting her time. I sujeste that you take up field ’ockey, my dear. Mitra could close her eyes and remember the stifled sobs coming from Ana’s bed during the night. She had felt sorry for her sister, but that was before she knew how to admit it.
She sat on her old bed and touched her finger to a cigarette burn on the bedside table. In the top drawer, Mitra had kept a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, along with a stash of rolling papers under a pile of Architectural Digest magazines. The bottom drawer had been Ana’s, and Mitra was surprised to find several of her sister’s charms and keepsakes stowed there: a rabbit’s foot, a pillbox holding a few of Ana’s baby teeth, a Russian painted wooden box containing a black-and-white photo of a young Olga wearing enormous hoop earrings. Shireen must have gotten these things from Ana’s husband, Bijan, before he left for London. It was eerie, like a shrine at which offerings of centuries past remained untouched and decaying. Mitra was surprised that her mother had known and remembered where everything belonged.
She slid open the closet to hang her jacket. The shoe shelf was lined with vintage Barbie dolls, each carefully suffocated in thin plastic; the last time Mitra saw them, they were living on a shelf in Nina’s bedroom. Against the back wall leaned an easel blackboard Mitra had gotten for her ninth birthday. Shireen had saved so many of their toys for her grandchildren. Mitra ran her palm over the slate surface; it was slippery, and she remembered spraying it with Pledge, hoping to make it shiny. She’d ruined it, of course, which was a boon for Ana, who no longer had to act as Mitra’s student, made to sit and be taught arithmetic, her worst subject, ushered up to the board to write out the answers to problems far beyond her level so Mitra could frown and snort disgustedly at her. And when Ana could no longer hold in her tears, Mitra would stop—You’re no fun, such a sissy—and find something else to occupy herself.
Wincing at the memory, Mitra turned quickly and unzipped her suitcase, changed into pajama pants and T-shirt. In the bathroom, she heard the flush of her mother’s toilet on the other side of the wall. She imagined Shireen, still bewildered and stunned, going through the motions of brushing and washing, her thoughts all about how she had failed to protect Ana from Kareem, how she would never be able to apologize. Mitra felt terrible about telling her the story. Once again, she’d let her anger trump everything. She was still the shock jock in her family. Wasn’t age supposed to mellow a person? And Shireen, she realized, had acted with uncharacteristic spunk tonight when Mitra first challenged her about Kareem. You are just like your father, she’d said. Mitra groaned. And then: I am not stupid. I have wisdom. Mitra smiled.
Back in the bedroom, she peered at herself in the mirror, rubbed her bloodshot eyes, then lifted the top of a jewelry box on the dresser, a gift she’d received at one of the annual Christmas parties at the Faridi family’s house in Teaneck. What was weirder than a group of Iranian immigrant families using a Christian holiday as an excuse to dress up and give presents to one another’s children? Mitra had never been interested in jewelry, so she’d grudgingly given the box to Ana, who loved jewelry so much she’d swallowed one of Shireen’s pinky rings when she was five. The box still tinkled out “The Blue Danube,” but the pop-up dancing ballerina was headless; Mitra couldn’t remember if she’d been the one who perpetrated that crime. Probably.
She absent-mindedly opened what used to be her underwear drawer. Empty save for a gnawed-at pencil and a small picture frame lying facedown. She picked up the frame and turned it over, sucked in her breath: a photograph of her and her father, taken when she was twelve, the two of them standing like conquerors on a mound of excavated earth, his arm around her shoulder, brown fingers obscured by her thick waves, both of them smiling identically at the camera, she in a yellow sundress, suddenly too tight around her blossoming chest, he in his usual weekend khakis, and between them they held—equally possessively—the rolled-up tube of blueprints for the new apartments in Fort Lee. More like father and son, like patriarch and scion, like mentor and protégé than like father and daughter. The last time they were together like that.
With trembling fingers, Mitra removed the photograph from its frame and ripped it into tiny pieces that fell into the drawer. In the mirror she saw her lips pressed into a line, and a flash of pain leapt to her temple from her clenched jaw. She slammed the drawer closed, peered at her angry face, and knew she wasn’t really seeing herself, but rather using the mirror, as she had so often as a teenager, to spit venom at her father for casting her aside, and at her mother for pretending that it hadn’t been a big deal. Her hot breath created a fleeting circle of fog on the mirror, and Mitra drew back as if waking from a trance. She turned and reminded herself that she was here for only a few days, not long, just a few days.
She climbed into her childhood bed and switched off the light, burrowed into the pillow that smelled like her mother’s lavender sachets. She breathed deeply to calm herself and imagined the fog rushing silently through the Golden Gate, the muffled foghorns you could hear all over the city, and before long she was drifting and Ana was behind her on the floor, pasting teen magazine cutouts of Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy into her scrapbook, humming off-key. Mitra’s eyes snapped open, and it was all she could do not to jump up, dress, and leave the house quietly. No. It wouldn’t be fair to her mother, not after telling her that story. She closed her eyes and visualized Ana in the other bed, older and miserable, daydreaming about a marriage that their father forbade. And then she let herself smile through tears, because hadn’t she, Mitra, found a way to redeem herself for all her sibling brutality, almost eighteen years ago when she’d made it so that Ana got what she wanted? It’s okay, Mitra, she told herself, it’s okay; at least you did one good thing for her.
* * *
Shireen threw the bedcovers off and gazed into the dark. She could take a sleeping pill . . . but she didn’t deserve such an easy solution, did she? She wanted to cry, but that also seemed improper. She had a terrible urge to beat her chest the way the public mourners did on the Death Anniversary of Saint Hossein. God help her, she wanted to bleed, to be in some kind of physical pain. Was this how the young people who cut themselves felt? Guilty? Ach, how could she do penance for what Mitra had told her?
She had no memory of little Anahita telling her that Kareem was kissing her “like in the movies.” There was so much she had forgotten about those long-ago days when the house teemed with visitors and Kareem was the quiet one who was such a willing babysitter. Perhaps she had blocked it out. And what if she did eventually remember it? Would she also remember that she had dismissed such a thing? Oh, yes, she thought, pressing her face into the pillow and moaning, she would have dismissed it! Wasn’t that how such things were handled? She remembered the touch of hot fingers beneath her party dress, the smell of cigar smoke close enough to make her eyes tear, the burn of the molten shame that filled her veins; she remembered nothing else—not the man, not the place, not her age. Such things happened. They were meant to be forgotten. Mistakes. Lessons a girl learned about propriety, modesty, and the compulsions of men.
She sat up, leaned back against the headboard, drew her knees up to her chest. Forgive me, Ana-joon. I was not the kind of mother who would have saved you. I preferred to avoid family feuds—your humiliation, Kareem’s denial, your father’s doubts, people talking. But Mitra had rescued her sister. Thank God for that! Mitra had done so much. And yet her life was incomplete. Shireen got up and put on her robe and slippers. She took two certain steps toward the door, then stopped and retreated to sit on the edge of her bed. Finally, she went down the hall to the room her child-daughters had shared so long ago.
Mitra was on her side, facing the wall. Shireen sat carefully next to her and laid a delicate hand on her shoulder. “Mitra-joon, forgive me,” she whispered in Farsi. “My intentions have always been good.”
Mitra rolled onto her back and looked up at Shireen’s silhouette against the weak hallway light. She gently squeezed her mother’s arm. “There’s nothing to forgive, Mom,” she said. “Everything worked out. I didn’t mean for you to feel responsible, just to understand how I felt about Kareem. Please forget about it. I’m the one who should apologize.”
Shireen’s eyes glistened and she smiled sadly. “Mitra-joon, you know that all I want is for my children and my husband—for you and your father—to be happy. I want to give you what you need. But I am not a very clever person and I am easily confused by which side is right or wrong. I am a mother; I want to be on all sides. Please never think I am against you. I am just trying to do what is right for my family. It was the way I was raised. It is the way I am.”
“I know, Mom. You don’t have to explain.” A yawn overcame her. “It’s okay. Go on to bed, Mom. It’s late.”
Shireen wiped her tears. “Turn over, my daughter. I will play with your hair like when you were a child.”
Mitra thought, That was Ana, Mom, but she turned her cheek into the pillow, closed her eyes. Shireen ran her nails lightly through Mitra’s hair and along her scalp; Mitra shivered with pleasure and found herself relaxing.
“Shall I tell you a little gossip I heard?” whispered Shireen. “A bedtime story?”
Mitra sighed amicably.
“At the hairdresser last week, my friend Gitti—you remember Gitti who almost married the Shah until he found out she did not speak French fluently, or so she claims, and she married the uncle of your father’s cousin who had a very successful textile business until—” Shireen’s sibilant words began to fade in and out.
“So Gitti has fourteen grandchildren . . . always showing pictures . . . bragging . . . overly fat . . . some cross-eyed, poor things . . . I pretend they are cute, but it is—”
Mitra was headed for the edge of sleep.
“Another grandchild coming,” Shireen’s far-off whisper rustled. “. . . her daughter . . . same age as you, Mitti . . . two grown children, tubes tied ten years ago, but the doctor was able to reverse.... Mitra, my daughter, have you heard me? He was able to reverse the procedure.”
Mitra had heard very well, but she didn’t move.
“Just a little gossip for you, Mitti, something to think about. Mitti? Are you asleep?”