Chapter 8
“You look like hell,” Nezam said, handing Mitra a Starbucks latte across the console of his SUV.
“Thanks, and I don’t mean for the coffee. It’s five a.m. where I’m from, you know. You’re lucky I’m conscious.”
“Take a nap. We have a ways to go.”
“I might, if the caffeine doesn’t work.”
Once they were out of the city and on the thruway, Mitra said, “So, give me some gossip.”
Nezam glanced in his sideview mirror and swung into the left lane to pass an Asian woman so low in her seat that she looked at the road from beneath the top of her steering wheel. “Gossip? In the family or at the office?”
“What’s the difference?” Mitra said.
Nezam chuckled and finished off his cappuccino.
“Start with your parents,” Mitra asked. “How are they?”
“Doing well. My dad’s teaching part-time now—basic physics to undergrads. I don’t think he’ll ever retire completely; he loves those kids. And my mom’s still managing investment portfolios—quietly.”
Mitra laughed at quietly. Her Auntie Golnaz’s clients were mostly Iranian exiles, overproud men who’d been unable to find work that was anywhere near as prestigious as their jobs in Iran. Even those who took jobs—in banks or engineering firms—wound up leaving them; their egos incapable of bearing the diminished status. Twenty years later, these men spent most of their time in front of cable news, letting headlines propel their hopes that the mullahs would fail and their previous lives would be restored. Auntie Golnaz had tapped those very men who wouldn’t work, whose wives had swallowed their pride and gotten sales jobs in Neiman Marcus and Madison Avenue boutiques, and offered to help them invest the money they’d managed to get out of Iran before the regime confiscated everything.
“Hard to believe our moms are sisters. Sort of like Ana and me, huh?”
“Nah, I just think my mom had more choices because she went to university, and our grandparents were less strict by then.”
“Yeah, lucky her.” Mitra pointed out the window. “Wow, some of the foliage up here is already changing color.”
“Last October, we brought the twins to a farm near here and picked apples. Your old friend Layla invited us. Remind me to show you the photos. I’ve never seen the colors so vibrant and varied.”
Mitra smiled. “Well, Layla; she can take photos.”
“Did you see the ones she took of the renovated ceiling in Grand Central? I can’t remember which magazine they’re in.”
Mitra hadn’t. She’d completely forgotten about the renovation that had been going on for five years, a project she once would have dreamed of being a part of, when those dreams had seemed realistic. She felt a pang of regret and anger. If she’d waited one year more before pissing her father off, she would’ve completed her architecture degree. Everything would have been different. “I’ll definitely go see it soon,” she said. And she meant it, because she knew that regret could grow into a poison. She’d seen too much of that in the people around her who’d come out of Iran and spent their days and nights so absorbed in their regret that they couldn’t do anything but go to parties, even death anniversary parties.
Nezam leaned in to change the radio station, which was playing Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” only to light on LeAnn Rimes singing “How Do I Live Without You.” This was why Mitra had taken a hiatus from listening to music altogether. Nezam settled on a jazz station. “Oh,” he said, “Pirooz and Melinda had a baby boy a couple of days ago. Almost ten pounds.”
“Jeez. Ouch.”
“And Rana’s pregnant again. The fourth. Like she wasn’t already losing her mind.”
Mitra yawned. “What you get for marrying an Irish guy.”
“Take a nap, Mitti. We still have a ways to go.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The caffeine’s wearing off.” She reclined her seat and closed her eyes.
She woke when the motion of the car slowed. Nezam was taking an exit called Marvelous Lake, the name of the company’s newest suburban project. Mitra rubbed her eyes; she’d slept deeply but had no idea for how long. They merged onto a two-lane road, recently paved and marked with a sharp yellow line down the middle. It cut through dense woods and reminded her of the Saturday trips her parents used to arrange with the few Iranian immigrant families in the area (before the Revolution) to the Bear Mountain picnic grounds, a caravan of cars, trunks packed with heavy pots of precooked rice and marinated kebab, baskets of fruit, charcoal, and blankets to be used as tablecloths and for playing cards.
“I thought this project was in the suburbs,” Mitra said.
“The suburbs,” said Nezam, “are wherever people are willing to commute from. In a few years, this place will look like Devon when your parents first bought there.”
“Who buys this far from the city?”
“Cops, teachers. They can’t afford anything closer. And they want the American Dream for their kids.”
Mitra shivered. “So isolated.”
“I’m with you,” he said. “No way I’m ever moving out. Your father thinks I’m crazy, makes jokes about us living in the ‘inner city.’ As if Manhattan hasn’t changed since the seventies.”
“He doesn’t have a clue. Honestly, Nez, you need to move on. This job was supposed to be temporary.”
About ten years ago, Nezam had quit his job at a multinational law firm to work for her father. It was the late 1980s, and their enormous family, which had fled Iran soon after Khomeini took over in 1979, had finally come to terms with the idea that they weren’t going back to Iran anytime soon. Many of them were stuck in other countries, in Istanbul, in Hamburg, in Stockholm, some even in the Emirates. Visas to the US had slowed to a trickle. Not only were Iranians pariahs because of the Hostage Crisis and the mullahs’ Death to America bullshit, but once Iraq invaded Iran and a full-blown war broke out, any male family member under the age of thirty-five would have been immediately drafted in Iran. There was no going back, and money was running out. Yusef, basking in this chance to exhibit benevolence, needed a full-time attorney to fill out asylum forms, present the cases, deal with the INS and the courts. Nezam already had his green card because of his law firm job, and Yusef knew how to woo his nephew: Was it fair to abandon the others to some cheap, shitty attorney? Nezam, like Ana, was easy to guilt.
“Don’t you miss the law?” she prodded.
“I’m still practicing law, Mitra.”
“Right. The company’s taxes, contracts, leases, and petty lawsuit threats from townspeople. It’s not international law, not intellectual property, or economic sanctions. For chrissakes, you passed the bar at twenty-three. My father’s using you, Nezam, and you’re letting him.”
“I make a decent living.”
“Oh, please. It’s not about that.”
“Mitra, I don’t want to talk about this now. Maybe another time, but not now.” He pressed hard on the brake. “I need a pit stop. You?”
“Might as well.”
He turned in to a two-pump gas station that looked like something out of The Waltons, with a faded Fill ’er Up! sign nailed above the door of a weatherworn garage. The bathroom was around the side. “You go first,” Mitra said. He smirked but hightailed it, and for a split second, they were eight years old on summer vacation and his mom was scolding him for not using the toilet before they left.
Back on the road, Nezam said, “Are you sure your dad never brought you up here? He’s had this property since the 1960s.”
“I’m pretty sure. If he did, I don’t remember.”
“Back then, the area was a hot summer vacation getaway for city people. He was going to build a hotel on it, but the market went bad, so he just held on to it, and now—” Nezam braked hard again. “Shit, I missed the turnoff.”
Mitra swallowed a twinge of carsickness as he turned the SUV around and steered them through a barely visible opening in the forest marked by a small cardboard sign planted on a post in the dirt: Marvelous Lake Estates. They bumped along on a narrow, pitted track, the woods surrounding them, dapples of sunlight splashing through leaves and branches onto the hood.
“Shit,” Nezam said, stopping the car. Dust kicked up by the tires clouded around them. Ahead, the muscular face of a semi truck wobbled toward them. Nezam put the car in reverse and twisted in his seat.
“What are you doing?” Mitra asked.
“Backing up to the main road. No way that guy’s gonna get around me.”
“Chicken.”
Nezam stopped the car, looked at her. “What?”
“You heard me.” She smiled and felt a tightness loosen in her chest. “What’s the point of having a four-wheeler if you never go off-road?”
He smiled back and pushed his glasses up on his nose, a nervous gesture. “Are you challenging me, twerp?”
She laughed. “That old word!” She opened the door, stepped out, and gestured to her empty seat. “Climb over, dweeb. You wouldn’t want to get your Ferragamos dusty.” She went around, opened his door, and gave him a little push.
“You get one scratch on my car, Mitra, and I’ll slaughter you,” he said.
She took the wheel, feeling its perforated leather, and headed straight for the lumbering semi. Warmth rushed into her fingers. She looked to her right for an opening in the trees, found one, and scanned for obstructions—a boulder, a tree limb, a stump. A berm separated the road from the forest; this, she knew, would scare the shit out of Nezam. “Hang on,” she said just before turning the SUV sharply, bouncing it over the berm, and lifting them both off their seats, forcing a frightened “Fuuuuck!” from Nezam. She manipulated the vehicle to align it parallel to the road and brought it to a halt between two tree trunks in the forest mulch. Nezam exhaled.
“What a rush!” Mitra said.
After catching his breath, Nezam said in a barely controlled tremolo, “Happy to accommodate.” He looked at her. “Nice to see some color in your cheeks, cousin.”
* * *
Marvelous Lake Estates had her father’s mark all over it. In the first place, the lake was fake, barely deep enough to hide a massive drainage pipe that the town inspector wanted extended beyond the property line to a nearby stream; Nezam was trying to assure the neighboring farmer that the runoff would be so minimal there was no need to worry about it flooding his adjacent corn crop. Mitra was dubious about that, but said nothing. She figured her father didn’t give a damn about the adjacent farmer because he expected to buy that land too. In the second place, the “estates” were split-levels, larger than their forebears, but still in an outmoded style that Mitra (and Nezam) felt doomed them to be hard sells.
Blacktop already meandered through the cleared land, and Mitra couldn’t help but be reminded of the cemetery. Over a hundred houses were planned. The first five were in the process of being framed; the semi had brought lumber, and the sharp scent of fresh-cut wood filled the morning air.
“You go to your meeting,” she said. “I’ll just wander around.” Nezam was meeting with one of the subcontractors and the town inspector over the water issue.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” he said. “And then we can go for lunch.”
“No rush.”
The high white cement curb that edged the blacktop lanes took Mitra back thirty years or more to weekends spent with her father at one project or another. When she wasn’t riding on his shoulders, reaching up to touch the I beams (Watch out for es-plinters, Mitra) or tagging behind him past dangling electrical wires (Never touch; you kill us both), she would plant her small bum on a curb and rest her chin on her bony knees, waiting impatiently for him to finish with some contractor or other. He always warned her to stay away from the sewer drains that abutted the curbs; they were frightening enough with their iron grates, gaping rectangular mouths, and water-swooshing sounds, but she remembered wanting badly to know how the tunnels below connected.
As she got older, she wandered. Outside, she’d run her hands over the hard raised tread of bulldozer tires and pick at the dried mud that came off in satisfying chunks. She squatted and stirred wet mortar and cement, enjoying the purling sound as much as Anahita enjoyed mixing flour and water for muffins. She shadowed Bob, a black man who’d been the first person her father hired when he came to America; Bob had a face as creased as his old leather tool belt. He taught Mitra the name of all his tools even before she could pronounce them properly. He would test her, stand there while she craned her neck to look up at him as he took each one out for her to name—Flips swoodwiver, pickask, hamner, stwaight scwoodwiver, pwyers, wench—and when she got old enough, he’d let her use them if her father wasn’t looking. Bob’s son, Adam, three years older than Mitra, had shown her how to climb a banister-less staircase without fear: You gotta imagine the railing’s there so’s you can grab it and save yourself. Worse thing is to think about it not being there. You’ll fall for sure. Adam, last she heard, had dropped out of high school and moved away. Bob had been diagnosed with cancer when Mitra was in college, but her father didn’t mention it until he was near the end in the hospital. Vivian told her that her father had gotten Bob into a clinical trial at Sloan-Kettering, using his contacts and his money, but Bob had passed on anyway.
When she was too big to sit on her father’s shoulders, she sometimes held his hand as they toured houses or apartment buildings, and once an office building with ten floors, but she didn’t like the constraint of this. Baba’s hand was always dry and twitchy, and Mitra always saw something she wanted to inspect closely: the innards of an unexpected trench, brickwork in a fireplace, pipes like petrified boa constrictors in the walls. In the site trailers were the models under glass, and her fingers itched to touch the little houses, the miniature trees, and the grass that looked more like moss. She wanted to wrap her hand around a building, a King Kong hand, and dip it in the blue watercolor of a stream and imagine rearranging it all in different configurations that she would think about at night before she fell asleep.
On the slope above the “lake” was a charred rectangular area. “The farmhouse,” Nezam said, approaching Mitra, his meeting over. “We let the local fire department practice on it.”
Mitra’s shoulders folded in. “How old was it?”
“Late 1800s. The posts in the basement were tree trunks. The windowpanes were the original glass, wavy.”
“The floors?”
“Chestnut.”
Mitra sighed and shook her head. Her father had no understanding of restoration, no heart for the past. It was easy for him to destroy it. To him, this was very American. You make things modern and you make them better. Ironically, her father’s idea of modern was now passé.
“Look here,” Mitra said, pointing along the weedy ground. “There must have been an outhouse here before. You can still see the desire line.”
“The what?”
“Desire line. The most convenient way to get from one point to another. People find them naturally, without consciously thinking. My father called them donkey paths, like from the old country. He hated them, especially when people made them over the grass between the concrete paths he’d already put in place.”
“You mean shortcuts, right?”
She tilted her head. “Not always. Sometimes it’s a more beautiful route or a quieter one or maybe what feels like a safer way. Before I renovate a property, the first thing I do is look for the desire lines so I can design the landscaping around them. People know best how they want to get from one place to another.”
“That’s so sweet.”
“Are you mocking me, little cousin?”
“Never,” he said, winking.
* * *
After cheeseburgers at a local diner, Nezam met with the architect in the site trailer while Mitra strolled the property away from the construction. The racket of crickets in the tall grasses and a light humidity made it feel less like fall and more like summer. Mitra tied her sweater around her waist and dialed Julian’s mobile.
“I see you remembered to call me when you got in,” he said.
“Sorry. I almost did, but you would’ve been asleep, and then things here got a little hectic.”
“Just wondered if you were in one piece, darling.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Great.”
“Well, darling,” she said, imitating his British accent, “I conked out once I got here. The red-eye was brutal. Again, I’m sorry.” If he wanted to argue, she was ready.
He yawned loudly. “No worries as long as you’re all right. How’s it going over there?”
It always surprised her that he needed little more than an apology to move on. Lately, she’d been wishing he’d stay mad so she could take a defensive posture: Don’t tell me what or what not to do.
“I wouldn’t call it fun,” she said. “How about you?”
“Your bed feels a bit large, if you get my meaning. I might stay at my place tonight. I’m on call. Can’t remember the last time I slept on that bloody futon.”
“I like your futon.” She remembered the night they met, both drunk and miserable, she for Ana and the children, he for an eight-month-old he couldn’t save from a carbon monoxide coma. Sober, they would not have wound up on that futon staring at each other across a down pillow at 4:00 a.m. Julian didn’t agree with this assessment; he thought they would have found each other eventually. He was idealistic and romantic, the kind of guy who might use the word destiny if he didn’t know it would make Mitra cringe.
“You’ll remember to feed the cat, right?”
“Of course.”
“And not too many treats. You spoil her.”
“Aww, she deserves them, don’t you, Jezebel?”
“She slept with you?”
“She did. She spoons better than you do.”
“Very funny.”
“How’s your mum?”
“Older.”
“Huh? You’re breaking up, couldn’t hear.”
“She looks a lot older than her years. Hello? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, but it’s not a great connection. Sounds like you’re outside.”
“I’m in the boonies, visiting one of my father’s housing projects.”
“With your father?”
“Of course not. With my cousin.”
“The one you like best, I presume. Nezam, right?”
“That’s the one. What, have you been memorizing my family tree? You can hardly remember the names of the residents at the trauma center, and they mostly have three-letter Anglo names.”
“What? You faded. Are you moving around?”
She sat on a slab of glacial rock and turned so the sun was at her back. “Can you hear me now?”
“Better. What were you saying?”
“Nothing important.” She was glad he hadn’t heard her snide remark. She worried that he was becoming attached to her family, who knew nothing of him. “Anything new in the last two days?”
“Not much. The mail is mostly junk. A little problem with the refugees, though. How on earth do you get them to stay in the dungeon? A magical Persian phrase you can teach me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Akram and Salimeh,” he said, his syllabic pronunciation all wrong, but cute. “Haven’t left me alone since you took off, the mum especially.”
“Shit. Like how? In what way?”
“Always sending the girl with a tray of tea in one of those little glasses and a bowl of lump sugar. Brings a fresh one every few hours. Christ, can she blush! And you know I’m not fond of tea.”
“I still don’t get that. What Brit prefers coffee?”
“Watch out for stereotypes, darling. I keep telling you I’m special.”
“That you are. So what else are they doing?”
“When I came home last night, there was a plate of oily orange stew and a mound of rice waiting for me.”
“They’re cooking in my kitchen?”
“Cleaning too. The mum makes the girl scrub the floors. I found her washing out the half-bath toilet with a rag yesterday. Pretty nasty.”
“Julian, you have to tell them to stop.”
“You think I haven’t? They don’t understand me.”
“Are you that challenged in mime? Shake your head. Thrust your chin up and click your tongue. Make forbidding hand gestures. Anyway, they understand the word no. Salimeh understands more than that; she’s been in ESL for a month now.”
“I’ve done all that. Trust me, they don’t want to understand. Besides, they’re trying to be nice.”
“Julian, don’t let them in.”
“No can do, M. If they’re at the back door, I can’t ignore them.”
She groaned. He was such a pushover. Part of his charm, but not in this instance. “Well,” she said, “if you’re not staying there tonight, they’ll have the run of the house.”
“I thought about that. I’m going to sneak out. I’ll get my coffee at the hospital. If I don’t go into the kitchen, I can’t let them in.”
Mitra sighed. “And Jezebel?”
“I’ll come by after dark. No big deal. It’s just a few days until you come back.”
Mitra remembered what her mother had said the day before about the women stealing things. Luckily, she wasn’t a jewelry person; Ana had fully compensated for Mitra’s lack of interest in gems and precious metals. Mitra’s valuables were considerably larger to manage: Persian carpets, some antique furniture and art that Akram, the “mum,” would consider cheap. What mattered most was the violation of her space by strangers. Julian, of course, thought of them as her compatriots, simply because they were Iranian. It was the kind of ignorance that made American tourists laugh derisively when a foreigner asked, “Do you know so-and-so? They live in America too.” But she forgave him because of what she knew—about his childhood, his family, his aloneness.
“It’ll all be fine, M. Don’t worry. Focus on your family. When’s the party?”
She’d made the mistake of describing the One Year gathering in a way that led him to imagine it as a party, like an Irish wake, she supposed. She let it go not to embarrass him. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to it.”
“I know. Wish I could be there.” He said this as if it might have been a possibility, as if his responsibilities had prevented him from going with her. The truth was that she hadn’t asked him.
She hoped he understood, or rather that he misunderstood: the One Year wasn’t the kind of event you took a date to, certainly not for the purpose of introducing him to your family. She couldn’t imagine ever introducing him to her family, even in the best of times. Boyfriends had never been welcome unless they were sanctioned marriage prospects, and though norms had changed for the younger generation since the family had immigrated, she preferred her privacy. And the idea that her father might be rude to or dismissive of Julian, that others may pester him with questions about their relationship and pass judgment was not something she wanted to risk. Julian didn’t deserve that.
“Listen, I’ve got to jump in the shower,” he said.
“Okay. Thanks for taking care of Jezebel.”
“Of course. Call me after the party. Love you, M.”
“Me too,” she said quickly, her throat constricting with guilt.
As she walked back to the site trailer, she thought back to that first morning she woke up next to him, that moment when she could have left him as she’d left others after a brief romantic encounter. In her grief and loneliness, she’d been weak about Julian, keeping him in her life for this long, taking what she needed: companionship, sex. They’d become a couple, and she was afraid that he’d begun to imagine a future with her that she couldn’t give him. Oh, she’d been aboveboard to a certain extent, making sure he knew she wasn’t the “marrying kind,” but beyond that she’d said nothing. Yes, she’d selfishly kept Julian for way too long.
Mourning
In the time of our history when our nations were between wars, a young man lost his life uselessly, taking in his heart a crazy flying bullet during an army training exercise. The boy’s mother bore the news first with rage—when there is no war, why must there be games of war?—and then with enviable stoicism. On the first anniversary of her son’s death, family and friends came to reminisce and sympathize with her in the customary manner. We have always gathered to mourn our prophets and saints and kings, our matriarchs and daughters and sisters. With each new death, we remember old deaths. At each death anniversary, we weep for all who have been lost. We have laid wreaths and balanced stones; we have keened and beaten our chests; we have swallowed tea after tea after tea, refusing all things sweet to show respect for the Heartbroken. We have acknowledged the weight of their grief while lightening the load of it with memories and jokes and gossip sprinkled with tears salty as blood. No mourner shall endure alone.
And yet, sometimes the Feast of Mourning ends in misery.
The mother who lost her soldier son so long ago hosted her guests flawlessly. But when an old friend of her son’s presented her with a pencil drawing of her child’s boyhood face, she slid into a catatonic sorrow from which no one could lure her back. That evening, she tried to pull out every hair on her head, and finally, in a frenzy, she set her braid on fire. What remained was her scarred head and her shriveled ears, the lobes soldered to either side of her jaw. She wore the injustice of her son’s death on her skin for the world to ponder.
And now, this old story is remembered by the mother who has lost her daughter and grandchildren as she prepares for her own One Year gathering. The story slithers like a snake between her thoughts. Inexplicably. Unwelcome. Certainly not portentous. After all, this is the diaspora. We continue with our traditions, but there is wine, and there is sugar. We binge on sorrow with crystal carafes and silver spoons. Drunkenly, we gorge on grief as if it were a crater of ice cream: Chocolate Chip Anguish, Vanilla Bean Sorrow, Strawberry Despair. But the Feast of Mourning does not end so histrionically. Or so we believe.