Chapter 14
Mitra did spend much of the next five days in her home office, curled up on an overstuffed love seat, Jezebel next to her. She screened her calls, ignored the doorbell, and avoided the family room during the day, when Akram tended to show herself at the back door.
Her office was the room she loved best—the smallest in the house, tucked away behind the kitchen, a maid’s room in earlier times. Mitra had designed it to be dark. Julian called it the Womb, much to her disgust. The walls were sponged a deep red over brown, bamboo window shades blocked out the daylight, and low-slung velvet drapes puddled onto the Tabrizi carpet Shireen had shipped to Mitra without Yusef’s knowledge (he thought it was in storage). Two walls were outfitted with floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookcases lined with art and architecture books. It looked more like a writer’s office than an artist’s, but from the beginning, this was her vision for the room and she hadn’t questioned it. It had something to do with blocking out stimuli and provoking imagination. When she needed natural light, she raised the shades or set up her drafting table at the picture window in her family room.
Work had always been Mitra’s joy and escape. But since the accident, a crushing fatigue gripped her when she came into her office. Across the room, her desktop was so neat it made her angry. When she worked for real, it was a mess. Over the last year, her weekly housekeeper had managed to make it look staged, like a photograph in a home decor magazine. All of its items—laptop, black mesh pen/pencil holder, sleek cordless phone with headset lying at the ready, mini-printer, halogen lamp with movable arm, square wooden tray with compartments for paperclips, rubber bands, stapler, and stamps; black coil file holder with two manila folders standing upright, one labeled Kitchen Remodel, the other Landscaping—seemed to be waiting for someone other than Mitra.
On the love seat, which she’d found at a garage sale and had reupholstered by an old Chinese man whose fingers were as small and lithe as those of the little girls in Iran who wove carpets, she slept in fits and starts, her face against a scratchy pillow. Waking was difficult, a kind of mind assault: about what words she would use to break up with Julian; about calling Olga to offer a real apology, not a drunk one; about writing to Aden about Ana’s jewelry. Each issue came at her muddled and filled her chest with anxiety. She would get up briefly for a glass of juice or a handful of almonds or to splash water on her face.
Finally, it was Friday evening and she sat in her family room waiting for Julian to arrive from the airport. She’d showered and put on a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, made a salad and cut up a watermelon for a light dinner. She was nervous, still unsure of the words she would use. She’d set the kitchen table, all the while wondering if the evening would end sadly or angrily. She’d thought hard about whether to have the conversation tonight or wait until the morning. It seemed cruel to drop such a bombshell when he was sure to be tired and clueless, but wasn’t it more cruel to share her bed with a man she no longer desired? Not that she intended to spell it out; not that she could, but she would try.
She looked at her watch—he should be here by now—and grabbed the phone to check for delays. Sure enough, the fog at SFO was thick and Julian’s plane was still on the tarmac in Vegas. ETA: midnight. At least tomorrow was Saturday; he could sleep in. She put the salad and fruit into the fridge and sat to watch TV, determined to stay alert.
Using the remote, she stopped at the first movie she found. The sound was too low to hear, but it took her only a few seconds to figure out the genre—square-jawed actor in military uniform before a blip-lighted map of the world, speaking seriously to a dew-faced actor in a politician’s suit. So many shows about war. Propaganda in the form of entertainment, Julian would say.
She turned to HGTV and raised the volume. House-hunting. Stupid show: never revealed the price of the homes. The Learning Channel panned a condo packed to the ceilings with the junk of hoarders who would soon be persuaded to part with it all so that a team of designers could organize and redecorate tastefully, though Mitra knew all bets would be off once the cameras were gone. CNN had a turbaned guy defending the Islamic world’s indignation over a Danish newspaper’s “blasphemous” cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad wearing a bomb on his head. The anchorwoman was trying desperately to be empathetic—almost apologetic—about her guest’s point of view. She had no idea that the depiction of the prophet was a debate that had been going on between Muslims for centuries. And when had it officially become Muslims instead of Moslems? She could hear her father’s disapproval at this Arab-centric articulation.
No. She didn’t want to think about her father. She turned the TV off, but the afterimage of the turbaned man lingered. Her father was just like that man, despite his secularism. Extremists, both. Righteous manipulators whose beliefs were simply a way of enhancing their own power. Heaping ignominy on others to draw praise for themselves.
She got up and opened the cabinet to search for a music CD, something that wouldn’t stir memory or emotion. She settled on a classical piano mix. On the shelf above the stereo was the usual bank of family photos. She straightened Anahita’s black-and-white senior yearbook photo—the very one that the Bulletin had used—enlarged to an eight-by-ten and set in a simple silver frame. Two smaller frames sat on either side, one of Shireen next to a yellow rosebush, the other of Olga with hair teased up and eyelashes curled. She wondered: Was it time to bring out the kids’ photos she’d placed in the drawer below? Could she bear it now? Shouldn’t she try? But she turned around and on her way back to the sofa picked up the new John Grisham novel Julian was reading. A distraction, she hoped.
When she opened her eyes, it was morning. She leapt up in a panic. Bleary-eyed, she walked through the family room as she checked the phone for messages. None. On her way out of the kitchen, she nearly tripped over Julian’s suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. She’d slept through his arrival? She felt terrible. And relieved. She looked up the staircase. The door to her bedroom was closed. Asleep or not, he would be expecting her. She turned away and used the powder room, then grabbed her cigarettes—this will be my last pack—and headed out onto the deck.
The temperature outside had already risen, and Mitra reminded herself to water the container plants, especially the impatiens, later in the day. She sat in one of two folding camp chairs she’d bought a little over a year ago as temporary outdoor furniture; the sun had faded their canvases from a hunter green to a dirty pastel. It was the perfect time of year to shop for some good outdoor furniture; past Labor Day, anything that was left would be marked down by more than half. But she didn’t have the energy. Or the interest, really. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone shopping just for the pleasure of it.
A burnt smell that wasn’t from her cigarette caught her attention. Akram had charred her toast again. Even the temperature gauge on a small appliance addled the woman. She didn’t trust it, turned it up to “dark” (which she couldn’t read) when the bread didn’t pop up in due time. She reminded Mitra of a young maid her uncle Jafar had sent over from Iran in the seventies who told Olga that she thought there was a little man inside the washing machine who did the work. She smelled like those maids, too— of onions eaten raw and bodies washed only with water. Mitra had bought shower gel and shampoo and synthetic loofahs. Salimeh, the daughter, used them. Akram washed five times daily, in preparation for prayer—ritual ablutions that amounted to wet swipes on forehead, forearms, and tops of the feet. If she took a bath once a week, Mitra would have been surprised. She used dishwashing detergent, as if her body was an inanimate object. Her teeth were rotting. Her hair was so thin and damaged at the ends that it looked burnt. The calluses on her heels were like peanut brittle, her hands as rough as a scouring pad, cuticles like old grout.
Ugh, she thought, stubbing out her cigarette, I’m being so uncharitable. Mitra hoped Akram hadn’t heard her on the deck. Quietly, she returned to the kitchen and put on the tea. She jumped when the doorbell rang. Padding through the front hall, she glanced at her watch: nearly 9:30. Out of habit, she squinted through the peephole and was not surprised to see only the distorted view of a poplar tree and parked cars on the street. She opened the door wide, leaned against the jamb, looked down. “Two orphans begging for their breakfast, huh?”
Jacob, the little one, squinted up at her, unsure of her mood because she wasn’t smiling. He was wearing a baseball cap backward, and his fine blond hair stuck up from the cap hole in wisps. His cheeks were pink and shiny, his bottom lip red and wet from habitually grabbing it with his upper teeth. Scotty, the older one—all of seven and still wearing his plaid pajama bottoms—had no use for Mitra and tried to peer around her into the house. “Is Julian here?” he asked.
“He’s asleep. How about a ‘good morning, Mitra’?”
Scotty let his head droop a little and mumbled the words. “Good morning, Mitra.”
Jacob whispered the phrase, eyeing her through nearly white lashes, watching intently, carefully. This shyness in him was new, and she didn’t doubt it had something to do with her not seeing him as frequently as she used to. She hadn’t realized it until a few weeks ago when she and Karen found themselves putting the recycling out at the same time. “Hey, stranger,” Karen had called from across the street. Mitra felt immediately guilty; she hadn’t talked to her neighbor friends in weeks, it seemed, as she’d been too preoccupied by worries over her upcoming trip for the One Year. And now Jacob was stepping backward down one step. Scotty was turning, his head drooping lower.
Mitra said, “Julian’s pretty lazy today. He’s hard to wake up, you know.” Scotty looked up, swiped at his too-long bangs. “But I bet you guys could get him up,” she continued. “Like, jump on him maybe. He’s very ticklish, you know.” She was still trying to look serious, let them figure out her intentions from the language. Scotty was already getting it. He grinned and said, “Yeah! Let’s go, Jake!”
Jacob didn’t really get it, but from his brother’s excited voice and because of his natural propensity to follow him without question, he bounced his knee thrice and took a step up. Mitra turned her body sideways to allow Scotty into the house, and he took off toward the stairs. Before Jacob could follow, she squatted directly in front of him. “Pay the toll,” she said. “One hug.” He was reluctant and antsy. She smiled and poked his belly; he laughed and twisted away. Finally, she grabbed him. His arms went around her neck and he squeezed briefly. She resisted pressing her lips into his cheek; the shampoo and sour sleep smell of his nape made her dizzy with longing. She let him go, remembering why she visited them less now. It was just too hard. After the accident, she’d tried to return to the pre-auntie Mitra who barely noticed children, sidestepping them as if they were ill-placed ottomans or a family pet, but it was impossible. From the moment Nikku was born, and then even more intensely after Nina came along, Mitra’s heart had expanded in a way she never could’ve imagined. For the first time in her life, she’d understood infatuation.
Back in the kitchen, the sounds from upstairs—the thumping, the child laughter, and the mock imitation of a growling bear—reminded Mitra of when relatives visited from Tehran before the Revolution, filling her parents’ house with uncles and aunts and cousins for weeks on end, every corner of the guest rooms piled with Bloomingdale’s shopping bags and kids’ bedrolls. The din of human beings—present and living—had transformed her life. If they couldn’t live in a city, that was the next best thing—a house transformed into a city. There was a lot of wrestling. Not only was professional wrestling an Iranian obsession (having roots in the mythology of the Zoroastrian strongmen), it was a family sport that fathers used as an excuse to hold and kiss and tickle their small children. Even Mitra’s father had once in a while played a weekend pajama game of catch and release with her and Ana on the king-size bed in her parents’ bedroom. She could still summon a memory of the tangy scent of his cologne and the near-tears laughter from Ana, who often couldn’t take the characteristic roughness of it all. One common trait of Iranian men was the physical attention they paid to their small children. A father who didn’t smother his child—kissing, sniffing, petting, nuzzling—was weird. It struck her suddenly that Kareem had wrestled with the little ones more than any of them. Of course he had. Did he still? And of course it had been easy for him to do what he’d done. This was what a taboo did; it created a dangerous ignorance, a vacuum of vocabulary, an inability to discern between a right or a wrong feeling—all because of a priggish anxiety to talk about sex.
Mitra poured two inches of ruby tea into her glass mug, then topped it off with boiling water from the kettle; it was just the right amber color. She blew on the hot liquid and heard her breath tremble. She popped a few golden raisins into her mouth as a sweetener and sipped, burned her tongue. She heard the kids and Julian bounding down the stairs, and then the room flooded with giggles.
Mitra put her glass on the counter and prepared to greet Julian, but before she could, he positioned himself behind her, slid one arm around her waist, and held the other out in front as if to set up a force field that Jacob and Scotty couldn’t penetrate. The boys’ faces were blotchy red, their hair sticking to their brows, as they breathed like demons and reached around Mitra for Julian, who jerkily moved the two of them as a unit to evade little grabbing fingers. In a high voice, Julian exclaimed, “Save me! Save me, Mitra!”
No wonder he was a pediatrician.
“Hey, guys, stop,” she managed to say, wanting desperately to be free of Julian’s warm chest against her back and the soft brush of his genitals against her buttocks. Sensing her irritation, Julian let go and used his serious voice to say, “Time out, guys. Time out.” That voice—what Mitra suspected was his quiet-now-I-have-to-take-your-pulse voice—could stop a kid in his tracks. “Take a deep breath . . . deep breath,” he said, doing it himself, the boys following as if this was Simon Says, their shoulders rising up to their ears and dropping abruptly. Mitra stifled a smile. Julian leaned over and pointed his finger at Scotty’s chest, only to catch his nose when he looked down to inspect the spot. Julian said, “Okay, good. Now quick to the table, in chairs, for . . . blueberry pancakes.” They did it in a flash, and Julian turned to open the cabinet, but first, to shoot Mitra a line. “Sleep well?” He clearly wasn’t looking for an answer.
Mitra leaned against the counter and found herself chewing on her cuticles, like when she was a kid; Shireen had polished them with a foul-tasting solution from the pharmacy that made her stop. She got busy setting the table, pouring two tall glasses of milk, microwaving the maple syrup, and returning unconsciously to her cuticles.
“Ready, kids?” Julian said, swooping two plates toward the table. “Here they come.”
The boys bounced up and down as he then dolloped each stack with whipped cream, poured the syrup, and gave them permission to dig in.
Acting in his own fatherhood skit. Mitra tasted blood as she tore through a cuticle. You selfish, stupid woman. She moved to wash the skillet.
The steam from the faucet curled her eyelashes and she realized she was practically scrubbing the shine off the pan. She rinsed and jerked her hand back from the scalding water. She and Julian had stopped using condoms long ago. He thought she was on the pill. It had been a natural segue from the fib she’d told him that first night when he noticed her pelvic scar and she’d taken on Ana’s ovarian cyst rupture as her own. After Ana’s surgery, her doctor had advocated she take the pill for several years to prevent ovulation until her ovary healed. Mitra’s throat swelled and her hand trembled as she reached for a bowl to rinse. Until now, she hadn’t felt a twinge of regret about the lie. She’d guarded her reproductive privacy the way she always had in her short and shallow past relationships. But she’d known it was wrong. She’d nearly said as much when Olga had asked her if Julian was in love with her—that it was unfair that he didn’t know she couldn’t have children. And yet this was the first time she’d allowed herself to admit the guilt. There’s a time, she thought, when a secret becomes a lie, when it has the power to harm.
The slam of the front door made Mitra jump, and she nearly dropped the plate she was rinsing. She’d been so in her head, she hadn’t registered that breakfast was over, the kids now off to soccer practice. The shuffle of Julian’s feet along the hallway sounded to her like a countdown. They were alone now. If she could compose herself and focus, it could all be over in a matter of minutes.
“I told Karen you’d gone up to take a shower,” Julian said. “She wants us to come for a barbecue later on; the boys want burgers.”
Mitra kept her back to him, loaded the breakfast plates into the dishwasher. “Okay,” she said, thinking he could go by himself if he wanted to; Karen would comfort him, and the kids too. Then again, Karen would probably be as upset about their breakup as Julian. Despite her situation—a husband who was so obsessed by his merchant banking career that he spent more time on planes and in hotels than at home—Karen was a ferocious advocate of marriage, of couplehood. She wouldn’t understand what Mitra had done at all. If only she, Mitra, were more like Karen, if only Julian had met Karen before she married Dave. Lives crossed at the most inopportune time, Mitra thought. She imagined Julian and Karen sitting across from each other at Karen’s kitchen table, their hands entwined in morning marital joy. She waited for a rush of jealousy to wash over her, but it didn’t come, and she realized that she did truly care about him—enough to let him go.
Finally, there were no more dirty dishes, cutlery, glasses, or pans, and she had to shut the tap, admit the silence, and say something. Without turning around, busying herself with wiping down the counter, she said, “We have to talk, Julian.”
“I should think so, luv, among other things.” She glanced up. He’d splayed the newspaper before him. Suddenly, he leaned left to peek into the family room and the glass door to the deck. “Um, Akram’s here.”
“Shit,” Mitra said. “Don’t let on that you saw her. She’ll go away.”
“You know she won’t. She’s sitting, waiting.”
Mitra didn’t have to look to know that Akram was squatting by the door. A flat-footed village squat that people who sat in chairs all their lives had trouble doing without toppling backward. A yoga pose. Elbows resting on her knees, butt hovering inches above the ground. Despite the heat, her body would be sealed with fabric: scarf, tunic, trousers, socks. Fortressed against Julian, who thought her ways were culturally interesting—respectfully, of course. All Mitra saw was the trick of organized oppression. She sighed. “Okay, let her in, would you?”
“You do it. She gets all flustered with me.”
“She needs to stop that,” Mitra said, reaching into the cabinet for tea glasses.
“She can’t help it,” he said. “I’m a man.”
“She’s been in America for eight months, Jules. She should get over that.”
Julian reached for the soccer cleats he’d tossed under a kitchen chair when he came downstairs—on weekends, he played with a league in the park—and went to let Akram in while Mitra prepared two glasses of strong tea.
Akram followed Julian into the kitchen, having insisted that he walk ahead of her, not only because she couldn’t fathom the notion of equality of station, but because it was easier for her to shield her face from his eyes. He didn’t even glance at her face; Mitra had taught him this: woman’s duty was to cover up, man’s duty was to avert eyes. Still, Akram pulled the scarf below her eyebrows and stretched it to cover half her mouth. Mitra wondered if the woman could sense the strain between her and Julian, if she cared that she was trespassing on their intimacy, as she’d done over the past week by “playing house” in Mitra’s domain.
“Salaam Alaykom,” Akram said in her sibilant way, bowing slightly. “Welcome back, Khanoom.”
“Salaam,” Mitra replied. “Thank you. Sit, Khanoom. I’m bringing tea.” One could still use the polite honorific, Mitra thought; it was the tone that mattered.
“Please don’t bother yourself, Khanoom,” said Akram, still standing. “I have had my morning tea. I came up only to ask Julian Agha to give my regards to Kourosh Agha.”
Julian was pulling on his cleats. Kourosh was Julian’s teammate in the league; he was also Akram’s relative, the dermatologist who’d begged them to house the mother and daughter temporarily.
Akram smiled thinly. “And also to please tell Kourosh Agha that Salimeh and I would like to visit very soon.”
Mitra translated, but there was no need; Akram said the same thing every week. And Kourosh responded to Julian every week with a promise that he would arrange to come and get them one Sunday soon; he would talk to his wife and work out the logistics. But in three months, he’d collected them only once and had returned them just three hours later. Julian thought the problem must be with Kourosh’s wife, an American woman raised in Iowa, who liked to seem charitable but really just wanted the company of her nuclear family. Though Mitra had seen Caitlin only that one time when they’d gone to the house in Fremont, Mitra felt sorry for her. She was overweight and haggard, with dark roots and premature gray, desperately trying to make a cozy home out of a flimsy forties ranch with aluminum windows, self-sewn needlepoint pillows, and a saltwater fish tank that gave the house a perpetual seaweed smell. Kourosh had tacked a wall-to-wall carpet in the garage and turned it into an extra room for the ten unexpected relatives that his mother, once she arrived, begged him to vouch for as “mere visitors” to the immigration officials. No question Kourosh was experiencing the downside of becoming the first doctor in his family: perpetual relative encroachment.
Walking into that damp garage, Mitra had been transported. There was no furniture, just neatly bundled bedrolls against the walls. Women and children sat cross-legged around a rectangular tablecloth, eating from platters of lavash bread, goat cheese, and fresh herbs. An electric samovar sat in a corner. The women rose as she entered the room, and Kourosh’s mother, whose eyes bulged with what Julian later called “a definite thyroid condition,” led Mitra into the circle and began immediately complimenting her on her altruism, as if she’d already offered to take some of them in. And Mitra had been seduced—by the aroma of mint and basil, by the droopy eyes of a jet-lagged toddler, by the mingling of advice, superstition, and magical tales, by the language of her parents and Olga. But mostly by the wide-open face of Salimeh, a village girl who reminded her of Ana at that young age. Too bad she hadn’t taken a harder look at Akram that day in Fremont; she might have seen the ignorance in those raisin eyes, the intolerance in the fissured marionette lines. When Caitlin and Kourosh begged her to take the women “until we can get a handle on the situation,” which to Mitra and Julian meant until they could find permanent housing, it was Salimeh’s eager smile, smooth caramel skin, slightly sunken cheeks, and bony wrists that stirred Mitra to say yes.
Julian finished lacing up his cleats and looked at his watch. “I’m off,” he said, standing and pocketing his car keys. He gave Akram a quick smile. He glanced at Mitra. “See you later,” he said, before heading for the hallway.
“Have fun!” she called, hating herself.