They spent a lot of time smearing blood on the walls, these people. Darya had volunteered to help decorate Mina’s classroom for the Halloween party. One afternoon is all they asked of her and the other mothers. One afternoon, two and a half hours, the missed pay would hurt, but Darya wanted to contribute, wanted Mina to know that even in this new country she was engaged with her child’s activities. Darya’s assigned job was to take the red paint and make it look like blood. She managed to do that without actually vomiting. It was too close to the description Parviz had given her of the puddles near her mother’s and all the other people’s dead bodies. Blood was not a game.
Mrs. Beck, Mina’s sixth grade teacher, smiled and patted Darya on the back. “You’re doing real good,” Mrs. Beck said extra loudly. In this country everybody talked loudly to her, sounding out the words as though they were speaking to a toddler, assuming her English was sketchy.
Darya smiled and nodded. For the sake of her daughter she resisted the urge to slap this painted woman across the face. “Thank you,” Darya mumbled.
“AND YOU SEE, WE TAKE THE COTTON AND SPREAD IT OUT LIKE THIS SO IT LOOKS LIKE A COBWEB!” Mrs. Beck shouted to Darya and another foreign mother, Mrs. Kim. Yung-Ja Kim and her daughter Yooni had arrived from Korea just a few weeks ago.
“FOR A SPIDER! FOR HALLOWEEN WE DO SPIDERS!” Mrs. Beck joined her thumbs together and alternately twisted them and her forefingers together as she mimed the movements of a spider. “YEAH?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Yes,” Darya said. She and Yung-Ja Kim held opposite ends of a large cotton pad and pulled to separate the soft fibers.
“WE STICK IT WITH GLUE!” Mrs. Krupnick handed Darya a white plastic bottle with an orange cap. “MAKE SCARY!!!”
Why is she using incorrect grammar? Darya thought as she glued cobwebs onto Mina’s sixth grade classroom wall. She thought of the costumes she had to finish for the kids. Mina wanted to go as a fairy. Hooman wanted to be an Adam Ant, whatever that was, and Kayvon insisted on going as Ronald Reagan.
Mrs. Beck talked about their classroom-decorating goals and made the noise of ghosts howling. The sound effects were for the benefit of Darya and Yung-Ja. She showed them cutouts of skeletons and graveyards, as though such things were fun. For the life of her, Darya couldn’t understand why so much effort was spent in scaring the children. She shuddered at the skull and bones pasted on the classroom door. She dipped her hands in pretend blood with the other mothers.
Some of the parent volunteers prepared a huge bowl of blood-colored Kool-Aid, pouring red crystals into a punch bowl and stirring with a wooden spoon. “How about we scatter drops of paint, washable of course, from the classroom door to the Kool-Aid bowl, and the kids can follow the blood and get their ghost cookies?” one of the other mothers said.
Yung-Ja Kim and Darya looked at each other, horrified.
“My apologies, but I must pipe in here and assert that I do believe that is a dreadful, albeit creative, proposition!”
Darya turned to see who had spoken up. One of the mothers emerged from the group standing by the Kool-Aid bowl. Her dark hair hung in a braid down her back, and she wore a beautiful sari. Other than Yung-Ja Kim and Darya herself, she was the only mother who had taken care with her makeup and dressed well for the occasion.
“Allow me to introduce myself.” The woman in the sari walked past Mrs. Beck and extended one hand out to Darya and another to Yung-Ja. “Kavita is the name. Kavita Das. Mother of Pria.”
“I am very pleased to meet you.” Yung-Ja bowed her head. “I am Yooni’s mother.”
“And my daughter is Mina,” Darya said. “Nice to meet you.”
“So glad you guys met!” Mrs. Beck said. “Now, let’s get back to work, ladies! We can ditch the blood drops, okay? We don’t need to go overboard.”
The mothers got back to work. As they picked up scissors and glue and decorations, Kavita lowered her voice and said to Darya and Yung-Ja, “Don’t worry. Halloween is actually quite good fun. You’ll get used to it.”
Darya and Yung-Ja must have looked skeptical because Kavita then said, “You know what? I would like to invite you to my humble abode for a proper welcome to our coterie. Would you like to join me for tea after this?”
Yung-Ja nodded and said thank you. Darya looked at Yung-Ja and then at Kavita and felt a little better about the whole scary ghost/skeleton holiday. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”
ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, MINA WORE Darya’s home-sewn glittery pink fairy costume and purple wings. Hooman pranced around the living room in tight pants, playing air guitar.
“You are an ant?” Parviz asked. “You don’t look like an insect.”
“Oh, Baba, I’m Adam Ant! A rock star! Come on, everyone knows him!”
Kayvon tightened his tie and practiced his politician handshake on Darya and Baba. When he put the Reagan mask on, Darya squealed in fear.
She glanced at Parviz. He shrugged back at her. Something was slipping away from them. Something new was taking shape. It was a familiar feeling; they’d experienced it many times before as parents. Children changed all the time, phases came and went. It was impossible to keep up with all their tastes and interests. But this time, the very territory was an alien one. Autumn, Darya thought, meant pomegranates. Pomegranates seeded by your mother, eaten with a teaspoon with some echinacea powder. Autumn meant getting ready for the korsi. Heating up the stove as the nights grew longer and taking out the heavy quilt and throwing it over the heater and sticking your legs inside. None of this dressing up, sugar-eating, blood-smearing, spidercobwebghostsandgoblins stuff. So much time and effort and money spent on making things frightening. Why would they want to feel horror? Why would they look for it, make it up, create blood where there was none, play with graves as though they were toys? Darya watched her children get revved up for a night of fear and sugar. Who are these people?
THE FIRST AUTUMN FELT STRANGE. And then, year after year, the autumns came and went. From their very first one that arrival year when Mina dressed as a fairy to the ones in junior high, high school, and later in college when she dressed as a cat, Madonna, and Frida Kahlo among other characters. The autumns came and went.
Mina, age sixteen, her Halloween costume that year a polka-dot black and white dress, which, she explained to Darya, symbolized a Zen zebra.
“A Zen what?”
“Oh, Maman!” was all Mina said.
Mina the teenager. Her closest friends: Michelle, Heather, Pria, and Yooni were often at their house during those years.
“Hi, Mrs. R.,” the girls would say and plop sleeping bags on the floor.
“We brought The Breakfast Club,” Michelle said.
“Emilio Estevez is so cute!” Mina ran her fingers through her hair. Darya wondered why she kept doing that. It was a new habit of Mina’s that she found annoying.
For the fall formal her senior year, Mina went with a certain Julian Krapper. Darya and Baba waited outside the building where the dance was held, ready to drive Mina home as soon as the party was over. It was bad enough that Mina had a date. That much they tolerated. But there’d be no “after-party” or whatever it was these American kids called it. Julian walked Mina to the car after the dance and shook Baba’s hand. He waited on the curb and watched as Mina and her parents drove away. Darya saw him standing there under the streetlamp in his tuxedo, waving to Mina. Mina waved from the backseat of the car for as long as he was in sight, then turned around and sulked the rest of the way home. Persian rules in New York City were “so not fair,” she whined.
The autumns came and went. Darya learned that autumn meant wearing costumes, eating candy, and carving pumpkins. Parviz mastered the art of cutting the best jack-o’-lanterns. Darya strolled through the huge supermarkets, looking for a pomegranate. They gave up on having a korsi to warm their legs. They didn’t need to sit in a circle, their legs under a quilt thrown over a heater. They blasted the central heat instead.
With each coming winter Darya felt a part of herself die. It took four seasons to feel at home. That’s what Parviz always said. But for her it would take four hundred. The years rushed at them. And this country—the one they were supposed to stay in until things got back to normal back home—became the one in which her children grew up. Darya sucked in her stomach and fingered her thinning hair. She was growing old in the Land of the Teacups. Parviz excelled at his work, the pizza shop was left for the corridors of a hospital after he passed his medical exams and got his American license. He was back at the work he loved again. Darya no longer had to bend over the sewing machine at Wang Dry Cleaning. She became a rightful stay-at-home mom for several years. Then Parviz’s rousing speech, his support and enthusiasm, propelled her to math camp, and she even had the guts to apply for the job at the bank. She got promoted. Progress.
Their children were at the top of their classes. Michelle, Heather, Pria, and Yooni giggled in Mina’s bedroom. Hooman made out with his blond girlfriend in the back of Parviz’s car—Darya pretended she didn’t know, but oh, she knew. Kayvon ran for Student Union president and got elected. Certificates of achievement filled their kitchen walls, the family room shelves were crowded with the boys’ sports trophies. After college, Mina agreed to business school. Progress.
One day, Darya woke up and looked at her children as they slapped on sunscreen for their fifteenth Fourth of July barbecue and realized they were Americans.
But I will never be one. The children, maybe, with their slurry accents and soft-soled sneakers and the way they slurped creamy American milk shakes through straws. And Sam in her spreadsheet class, the man she felt pulled toward. But I will never be. The math notebooks from her university days, she hadn’t even brought them over. They were still stuffed in a box under a bed in Agha Jan’s house. What happened to the bed? Did Agha Jan sell it? Was he able to take care of himself? Was he lonely?
She’d watched July freedom fireworks on TV. Every year, she’d seen the colors explode, and every year it felt as if the fireworks and celebration weren’t for her. She’d seen the lights reflected on her children’s faces as they looked up with wonder at the night sky in those early years. She never had the heart to tell them that every burst, every loud explosion still filled her with heart-stopping fear. She instinctively felt the need to crouch, to fall on her knees with her hands on her head.
Now, in 1996, as she sat on the sofa after Mina had announced her desire to go back and visit Iran, she looked sideways at Parviz. He was reading the paper, a bowl of pistachios in his lap. Was he still upset about Sam? Was he hurt by that coffee/tea that was nothing? Darya sighed. It was just the two of them now. Hooman was with his wife in their Upper West Side apartment. Kayvon was probably still working at this late hour in his law offices in Midtown Manhattan. Mina was, hopefully, studying for her business school exams. Darya watched Parviz place pistachios in his mouth.
Had they made it? Were they almost there? Would they ever be?
She thought of Mr. Dashti and all the charts and graphs she’d ever made. She thought of the hours spent (wasted) on those men. Something about how her heart tightened when Sam was near her. It made her doubt all the graphs and charts she’d made for men. Maybe it wasn’t so clear-cut. So black-and-white. She loved Parviz. She liked that Sam. It wasn’t as simple as sheet rows and columns. It didn’t add up that way. Now she knew.