Chapter 17
Mitra put Salimeh in the guest bedroom across from her own. Trying to hide her trembling rage and shock, she told Sali that her mother was upset, but that was to be expected. She needed time alone to adjust to the news. But she would, of course she would! “She’s your mother; she loves you.” And Mitra believed this. She believed it, but she didn’t sleep a wink that night.
In the morning, she called Julian to ask him to get Sali an appointment with an obstetrician. He was thrilled, but that was because he assumed too much. When she told him it would be just her and Sali going to the appointment, that Akram was sulking in the apartment, his tone dropped and Mitra pictured him slumping with disappointment. Yeah, well, join the club. All they could do now was wait for Akram and Kourosh to come to their senses. Of course he offered to come over, bring dinner, cheer Sali up, tell her a little about the doctor he was recommending, answer any medical questions, but Mitra managed to dissuade him. “Let’s wait for Kourosh to get back to you.”
Julian agreed, but he wasn’t sure Kourosh would ever get back to him. He’d left multiple voice messages, each one more edgy than the last. Finally, he went to Kourosh’s office, only to find out that he’d taken a last-minute vacation to Tahoe with his wife and would be back after the weekend. Julian had a mind to drive out to Fremont and blow the story open, demand action. He wouldn’t, of course. That would be like throwing Sali to the wolves. And Mitra would never forgive him. So he left a note and a stern message with Kourosh’s receptionist saying that Dr. Julian Stevenson would be waiting for him in the pediatric clinic Monday evening to discuss a case they were working on together.
When Kourosh finally appeared after patient hours while Julian was finishing off his notes, he stood sheepishly at the exam room door and admitted that he hadn’t yet broken the news of Salimeh’s “trouble” to his mother or his wife. Julian lost his usual cool and found himself spouting a line he never thought he’d hear himself say: “What is wrong with you people?”
Kourosh sat down on the exam room stool, rolled himself close to Julian, and clasped his shoulder in distress. “Listen, man. You don’t know what these Persian women are capable of. They’ll skin that girl alive, man. It’ll be all her fault. And my wife, she’ll freak. She’ll probably want to adopt the baby, and my mother will want to crucify her. I’ve got enough problems with these women in my house, every one of whom has some imagined ailment and wants to visit a doctor or be prescribed some ridiculous snake oil medication; I’ve used all my professional courtesy points. You’ve got to give me some time, man.”
Julian resisted the urge to lift his foot and shove Kourosh across the room. Instead, he yanked free of the sweaty palms, onion breath, and seventies man-language by getting up and crossing the room to the window, which looked out across an alley onto another window, this one dark. Julian saw a blurry aura-laden reflection of himself, white lab coat and angry eyes. He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and sighed. “You’re a coward . . . man,” he said.
“Yes,” Kourosh said. “Yes, I am. But you don’t know Persian mothers. I’m telling you, the girl is better off with you and Mitra. I promise I’ll figure out something soon.”
“How about finding the fucker who raped her? That might help.”
Kourosh’s reflection lifted its hands in a helpless gesture. “Aw, come on, buddy,” he said. “We don’t know for sure that she was raped. I can’t start questioning my neighbors. There must be ten boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty on my block. What am I going to do? Knock on everybody’s door and ask them if some guy in the house could be the father of my mother’s cousin’s daughter’s child? I mean, they’re my neighbors; I don’t want to antagonize them.”
Julian whipped around. “She’s a child! Someone has to take responsibility.”
Kourosh bridled and rose stiffly. “She’s fourteen. My mother was already married at that age. Americans coddle their children. They think writing a law that says a person isn’t an adult until they’re eighteen makes it so. But that’s not the reality. You and I both know girls are just as horny as boys, and I don’t have any evidence that she wasn’t happy to accommodate. She didn’t even tell anyone that it happened, for God’s sake!” He held up his hand to forestall Julian’s interjection. “Anyway, what does it matter? It’s her word against whomever, and she won’t tell us who it is. Even if she did remember and we confronted that person and/or his parents, we’d be throwing ourselves into the middle of a legal battle with paternity tests and restraining orders and custody issues.”
“What are you, a Judge Judy fanatic?”
Kourosh chuckled. “My wife can’t get enough of that show,” he said, as if Julian had made a joke. Kourosh looked at his watch. “Shit, man, I’m late. Look, I promise I’ll figure this mess out. I just need more time.” He grabbed the doorknob, turned back, and actually winked. “Thanks, man. I owe you one.” His finely tuned American accent slipped on the last word: I owe you von. Julian winced with the force of his own fury.
He went home and got stoned. He couldn’t bring himself to call Mitra just yet.
* * *
Mitra forced herself to smile as she and Sali drove back from the obstetrician’s office. “Looks like your due date is in the month of Yalda,” Mitra said, trying to sound upbeat. “The longest night of the year is good luck, I think. The Zoroastrians believed that the next day’s sunrise had special healing powers.”
Salimeh nodded, looking out her window as if she found the sights interesting. The examination had been rough on her. Mitra stayed in the room, translated everything the woman doctor said, and added a few explanations of her own—“She’s not harming you, but I know it feels like she’s opening a tunnel big enough for a truck to go through”—while she held Salimeh’s hand and patted her hair. Salimeh cried silently. Mitra was at a loss as to how to persuade her that what was happening to her wasn’t a humiliation. Thankfully, the ensuing ultrasound had done the trick: a grainy image of the fetus with its pattering heart made it clear that Salimeh was going to have a baby boy.
“Do you celebrate Yalda?” Salimeh asked.
“I do. Besides Norooz, it’s the only Iranian holiday I celebrate. They both make sense to me. The Islamic ones don’t. Like Ashura; I don’t observe Ashura.” She recalled a conversation with Julian about this most fervent of Shiite holy days, the seventh-century Death Day of Imam Hossein, Prophet Mohammad’s grandson, he and his family killed by Sunnis. Julian was trying to understand—and maybe find a justification for—the armies of boys and men in the streets carrying black banners, beating their chests, bloodying their backs and foreheads with chains and razor blades. She told him to combine what he knew of two extremist factions of Christianity—Opus Dei and Pentecostal, the cilice and hysteria. She also told him not to be fooled that it was solely a religious commemoration; for centuries, regimes had used it as a political tool to rally the masses.
“But my mother says you are a Moslem, Mitra Khanoom.”
“I was raised a Moslem, but I am not anymore. I don’t like any religion.”
“So you don’t believe in God?” Salimeh asked, head down, clearly afraid to hear the answer.
Mitra chose not to say that indeed she didn’t believe in God or heaven or hell, that the world alone was large enough to hold all such concepts if you looked closely enough. After Ana’s death, she’d wavered, but not for long. It was less cruel to believe that death was nothingness, that only in life could you feel the pain of separation and loss, that once death came, one could truly rest.
“I believe we all belong to a larger thing. If you wish, you can call it God, but God is different from religion.”
Salimeh nodded again. “It has lots of rules, and the mullahs change them all the time. People don’t like them, the prayer-singers; they’re big-headed and mean. I’m glad there aren’t any in America.”
Mitra chuckled. “Mullahs are everywhere, Sali. Some of them are good and don’t bother anyone; they help and comfort people. The priests and ministers and lamas and gurus and rabbis—” Sali was concentrating on the English words. “I’ll teach you about these mullahs of other religions. Some of them are bad and mean, like you said, just like some ordinary people are. They think they know what’s best for everyone, or they only care about what’s best for themselves, and if you give them power over you, they will use it.”
Mitra turned the car off and unbuckled her seat belt, but Salimeh didn’t move. “So we have to fight the prayer-singers, right, Mitra Khanoom? Everyone says just ignore them, find a way around them, but don’t fight. People are tired of fighting, first in the Revolution and then in the war.”
Mitra wished her father could hear these words; he and his friends thought Iranians needed just a little nudge and some American military support to rise up and make another revolution. She smiled at Salimeh. “Fighting is good, but little by little maybe, so not too many people get hurt.”
“Back in my village, I have a friend whose parents sent her to school in Shiraz, and she wears her scarf way back on her head so her hair falls over her forehead. I think this is a little-by-little fight, Mitra Khanoom, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.” Mitra reached over and lightly grabbed Salimeh’s ponytail. “And maybe one day all your friends and all the girls your age will take their scarves off like you have and wear their hair like you do, and if every girl does it, the police won’t be able to stop them all at once. Little by little.”
* * *
For a week, and then two weeks, Akram didn’t show herself. Mitra wondered if she was running out of food, and would have wondered if she was still alive but for the smell of burnt toast and the sound of water running through the pipes. Every time Salimeh made to enter the kitchen, she peeked at the back door and quietly sighed in relief that her mother wasn’t there. She also asked after “Doctor Julian,” but Mitra told her it was a busy time for him.
Mitra said nothing to Sali about Julian’s encounters with Kourosh. When Julian finally told her about their last discussion at the clinic, she found herself unsurprised. It was typical; she realized she’d expected it. Even Kourosh’s reluctance to search for the father of Sali’s baby didn’t faze her much. Anyway, the guy was a rapist; why should he have any rights? Julian was stunned by her reaction, and for a moment, she wondered if she had become numb or perhaps callous. But no. She simply understood more clearly how such things worked. Justice was never assured, rarely attained, and often not worthy of pursuit. All Julian’s intentions—finding the guy, thrashing the guy, calling the police, demanding compensation or child support—they could do more harm than simply letting things be, at least for the moment. Julian was baffled, but Mitra’s hope that the solution would present itself to her was solid. She simply had to give her thoughts time to coalesce, and sometimes that simply meant not thinking too hard.
Mitra taught Salimeh how to use the washing machine, what products to use in cleaning her room, how to vacuum and scour the toilet bowl with a brush instead of a rag. They made brownies from a supermarket box, and Sali learned how to read measurements—a cup, a tablespoon, oven temperatures. They bought maternity jeans and flowery baby-doll tops, a pair of pink flip-flops. Mitra warned that the weather would soon turn colder during the day and the rains would come, but neither of them could imagine it. The periwinkle sky of San Francisco in autumn, the abundance of sails in the Bay—like seagulls bobbing on their wingtips—kept their spirits high. Sali’s caramel arms turned darker, and Mitra found herself happy just to watch the girl taste cookie dough ice cream for the first time. On Pier 39, Mitra imitated the honking sound of the sea lions the way she’d done for Nina and Nikku, and Sali doubled over in laughter. For Mitra, it was a bittersweet respite that she knew wouldn’t last but was eager to accept just for a little while.
There was one ironclad rule: Sali must never miss her afternoon ESL class. While she was there, Mitra tried again to tend to the affairs of her business, if she could still call it that. She owned three properties that needed renovation, an Edwardian in the city, a bungalow in Sausalito, and a property down on the Peninsula. When she opened the files pertaining to these properties, her gut clenched with distaste. Her mail was piled high, fax machine out of paper, email box overflowing. When she sat down to work, she wound up attending only to the junk: fliers and coupons into the recycle bin, penis enlargement offers and chain letters deleted. The rest—essential stuff—she found herself leaving for “later.” The phone would ring and she let voice mail answer. She called Carlos and again rescheduled a meeting to discuss lifting the work stoppage she’d put on the properties, but he knew her too well to believe that she was ready. Inevitably he would say, “The rental market is very hot, Señora. It is a shame to be missing it.” Carlos was too polite to state his true concern: that without the rent from the downstairs apartment or the sale of at least one property, her income was dwindling. There was just so long she could go on with her self-imposed sabbatical. Carlos was on salary; he made sure the properties were maintained, that they were not vandalized, and if a pipe broke or a wall seemed about to collapse, as in the Sausalito house, which had survived the 1906 earthquake and a long-term renter with ten cats, he would fix the problem as economically as possible. Mitra resisted renting her properties; it reminded her of her father. She preferred to buy, restore, and sell to someone who would appreciate her work and take care of it.
When Sali was at class, Mitra often sat at her desk doing nothing, acutely aware of the ticking clock, the orange-streaked morning sunlight at the southern-facing window, the nearly invisible wisps of cobwebs strung like suspension bridges between the arms of the iron chandelier. She could hardly conjure up the woman she used to be—hunched over her drafting table (folded now against the wall) or pacing with the telephone headset clamped to her head or creating timelines and punch lists for her projects. Instead, she kept an ear to the door for the sound of Sali returning, then sitting at the kitchen table to do her homework—an occasional flip of a page, the tinkle of a teacup meeting the saucer, the tap-tap of a pencil against the table, a stifled yawn. Sometimes the girl would pad into the office to ask Mitra the meaning of a word that could not be found in her English-Persian dictionary.
Once Sali was home, Mitra felt right about being in her office. The chair felt downier, her neck less stiff, her life less cluttered. Not that she suddenly became productive; she was simply not bothered by her lack of productivity. She would flutter her fingers along the spines of her tall books until she found one of her favorites, one that contained photographs of Iranian gardens with arched arbors and blue mosaic pools. She’d memorized these photos over the years, but now, each time she studied them while aware of Sali’s hushed presence, she climbed into them—built herself into them—and she rested. Sometimes she brought Nikku and Nina with her, sat with them on a kilim in a shady corner of an inner courtyard, one on each side, while she read to them from The Book of Persian Fairytales. She couldn’t bear, however, to imagine Anahita by her side. When she thought of her sister now, she thought of what she would say to her about Kareem, about Aden, about how Mitra had failed her, about never having the chance to hold her and tell her how sorry she was.
* * *
October weather in San Francisco always took Julian by surprise. The night temperature plunged into the forties and people put out their Halloween pumpkins, then the fog parked itself offshore and the air became crackling hot. Fire weather. Rotting pumpkin weather. He found himself kicking the bedclothes off during the night, angry not only to be awakened by the heat, but to realize once again that he was in his own apartment alone.
When Mitra finally phoned and invited him for dinner—Sali misses, um, Sali and I miss you—he pretended to check his calendar, then said Sure in a measured tone. After he hung up, he went to the gym and lifted weights to stave off any hopeful imaginings. It was just dinner.
He arrived at Mitra’s as Carlos, her contractor, was on his way out. “Ms. Mitra is more herself these days,” he confirmed. Carlos’s boy, the little one with the lazy eye, held on to his father’s belt loop as if he might otherwise lose his balance in the world; Mitra had charged Sali with babysitting him while Carlos and she discussed business matters. And for the first time, Julian learned from Carlos how Mitra always arranged informal daycare for the children of her workers, many of whom had wives who were housekeepers or nannies. When Julian peeked into Mitra’s office and told her how great he thought it was, she dismissed it as nothing special, smiled, and told him to open a bottle of wine and she’d be done in a minute.
He felt different in her house, not exactly like an interloper, but also not like someone who lived there, as he’d come to feel. He no longer felt the heaviness of sorrow and paralysis in the air. In fact, he hadn’t realized how present those had been before. Over the last year, he’d done what he could to unleash Mitra from her grief. Often, he’d stop by in the middle of the day and find her stationed in a chair on the deck next to a half-empty bottle of wine or napping on the sofa, tangled in a chenille throw as if she’d been fighting snakes in a dream, the television tuned to an inane celebrity game show. Sometimes he succeeded in lifting her mood, catching glimpses of her fiery spirit, her biting dry humor and forthright grace. Tonight, he couldn’t read her. It didn’t help when she came into the kitchen and greeted him with a kiss on the cheek.
“Where’s Sali?” he asked, pouring the wine.
“Washing up. She got back from class late.” Mitra pointed to a small, lidless cardboard box on the counter. “Oh, Jules. Can you do me a favor before Sali comes down and take this box to Akram? You can just leave it outside her door.”
Julian peered inside: teabags, sugar, toilet paper, eggs, soap, a small electric fan. Staples, because as far as he knew, the mother had never ventured outside Mitra’s property alone. “Sure,” he said.
As he descended the deck stairs to the ground floor, he couldn’t help thinking how long this collective sulk had gone on. Akram was going into the third week of being holed up downstairs and still, neither mother nor daughter had made an effort to see each other. Julian could understand the girl’s fear of a confrontation, but the mum’s behavior was a mystery to him. And Mitra’s too. She wasn’t talking to the woman, but she was feeding the woman. The woman wasn’t talking to Mitra, but she was taking Mitra’s charity. Bizarre. Why not just hash it out until a solution was found? It’s not what Iranians do, at least not until and unless it’s absolutely necessary. Apparently, this was the common way Iranians conveyed hurt and anger, the way they disciplined their children, the way they instilled guilt. It even had its own single word in Farsi, which Julian made a point of not memorizing. My father and I have been doing this for the past seventeen years.
He decided he wouldn’t leave the box outside the door, knocked on it instead. When it opened, he wasn’t surprised to see Akram’s swollen eyes and red nose, and he could smell that she hadn’t bathed in some time. He moved to take the box inside, but she didn’t retreat or open the door wider, just took it from him. As usual, what passed between them in place of words were mostly self-conscious bowing gestures. He asked her in several ways if she needed anything, hoping she would understand a word or two. Finally, she thrust her chin up in that way that meant no, then closed the door quickly. He was reminded of the way the elderly women in Africa had behaved toward him when he was a young health worker—gregarious, then reserved; trusting, then suspicious. He wanted to believe she was capable of forgiving her daughter and coming to terms with the situation, but until this sulking charade ended, they were all in limbo. Frustrated, he shook his head and went back upstairs.
Sali had put a cloth on the long kitchen table, set out plates and glasses Julian had never seen, and was lighting candles. She wasn’t wearing a scarf, and for the first time he saw that her hair was wavy and to her shoulders. She wore a maternity tunic that Mitra must’ve bought her. It still shocked him that she’d been able to hide that swollen belly. When she saw him, she smiled widely. Well, he thought, someone’s happy to see me.
Mitra placed several steaming dishes on the table, then sat down at the head and waited for Julian and Sali to sit on either side of her. This sit-down meal was noteworthy; the only formal dinners he and Mitra had ever had were in a restaurant. She’d once let it slip that she didn’t have good memories from her childhood dinners; her father used it as a time of interrogation and pontification. Clearly, however, she cared enough about Sali to tolerate it.
It took a few minutes before Julian realized that the dinner was takeout, dished nicely into serving bowls. At least this was in keeping with the Mitra he knew. Soon, he became aware that the dishes were his favorites—moo shoo this and kung pao that—circled on a menu that was stuck to the front of the refrigerator with a Greenpeace magnet. He found himself saying, “You shouldn’t have,” and “You’re spoiling me.” He reached over to give Mitra’s arm a quick caress. She smiled and said, “Our pleasure,” then reached for her glass so his hand was displaced, intimacy vaporized. The gesture made him think of his mother, which was weird, not only because sons rarely want to compare their girlfriends to their mothers, but because he wondered how he hadn’t thought of this before. Mitra was like his mother, especially in the restrained way she managed a crisis: calm, almost dispassionate, until a solution came to her. He relaxed a bit. Maybe he’d been wrong to assume that her trip back east had reopened her wounds. That One Year mourning event had sounded like another funeral, though he’d encouraged her to go because the idea of a family coming together so resolutely, bound by tradition, felt right to him. But what did he know about family?
As they ate, Sali was the center of attention. Julian didn’t mind. The girl was sweet; he felt sorry for her. And it was interesting to see her adjusting to Mitra’s more liberal way of thinking. He was sure she could barely fathom a future in which her life might not be a horrifying mess of being ostracized, ridiculed, dependent, and helpless. But Mitra did her best to disabuse her of these notions. Of course you’ll go back to school. Of course your mother will love the baby. Of course you’ll eventually get married. Julian nodded and smiled and interjected appropriate words, but it all sounded a bit fantastical. Maybe, he surmised, this was a way for Mitra to feel in control of her life, by pretending to be unfazed by the confusion and unpredictability Sali’s situation had wrought. A controlled state of limbo. Had the mere proximity of Sali’s pregnancy been a catalyst? He’d seen it in the camps, how the birth of a child, the urgency of taking care of a new life, could knock the grief out of a person.
Sali began talking about her ESL teacher, but Julian couldn’t concentrate. He realized his plate was empty and went in for seconds. The kitchen was pleasantly warm from heating food and from their bodies. The candlelight gave everything an intimate glow. He hadn’t had this—a family sitting around a table—since his adolescence, before his grandmother died and his mother began going on assignment more often, leaving him and his grandfather lost without their women. There were things women were better at than men; home was one of them. They carried it with them like an ancestral perfume. He and his grandfather could build cozy fires in the hearth and arrange tulips in vases and keep the house as neat as a pin, but none of this could replace the virtual embrace their hearts felt when his mother was home. And Mitra was no exception, though he knew he would never be able to tell her this, just as he would never tell his mum. They both loved him—he couldn’t question that—but the way they loved, was that enough for him?
He tried to imagine a future right here, in this room, at this table. Sali faded, and in her place was a smaller child; next to her, another child; Mitra dishing out portions to each of them. Mitra as Mommy, wearing an apron. He almost laughed out loud. Is that what he wanted? Some version of Little House on the Prairie or The Waltons? Sure, he could imagine Mitra doing all of the proper motherhood things without complaint, but also without relish. Three a.m. feedings or first days of school would be tasks, and she would do them out of love, but they would not be the things that made her feel loved. She didn’t need that. She knew her own worth.
He was thinking too much; he had to stop. This limbo was temporary. Mitra would come around. Couples went through things; this was just a bump in the road. Once this mess with Akram and Salimeh was over, they would have space and time to talk. There had always been more between them than romance. He just had to have patience.
Sali was asking him what kind of ice cream he wanted. Apparently, she’d given him a few choices. “A little bit of each,” he said, making her laugh and pull an armful of pints out of the freezer. Mitra had stacked their empty plates and put them in the sink. Julian started to get up. “Sit. We’ll do them later. Let’s enjoy.” He let her face come into focus. She was beautiful to him, despite the dark circles around her eyes and an insouciant expression that made him feel unseen.