Dreaming in English (13 page)

“ ’Alo?”
It’s my mother’s soft voice.

“Tami! We’ve been waiting for your call. Congratulations on your marriage! Your sister filled us in on all the details. It sounds like it was quite romantic! We’re so proud of you, Tami Joon—so glad everything worked out.”

My throat swells with the relief that comes from knowing I’ve fulfilled her greatest wish. I have to clear my throat before I can speak, for the mother’s love in how she says my name is something no one else can ever replicate. It’s a love I couldn’t bear to lose. I have to be careful how I go about convincing them it’s time to summon the courage to, if nothing else, start the process of filing the paperwork to leave Iran. Baby steps are okay. We all started with baby steps.

“You’d love Ike,” I say. “I wish you could meet him.”

“Will you send pictures?” she asks.

“I have a better idea. You and Baba should come.” I say this quickly, before I lose my courage. “Come here. Meet him for yourself, not just in pictures.”

After a pause, Maman says, “You know that’s not possible.”

“I don’t know what’s possible,” I say. “I only know what I’ve been told.”

I’m sitting at Rose’s kitchen table. Rose is at the stove, slowly stirring the soup she’s making for someone in her church who is ill. At my words, she looks up at me and smiles her sympathetic smile. I’m sure she heard the ache in my voice; yearning sounds the same in any language.

My mother asks, “Are you all right, Tami Joon? Is anything wrong? Didn’t everything work out well?”

“I miss you,” I say. “I wish you were here.”

“Maybe someday it will be possible,
inshallah
,” she says.

“Inshallah.”
I swallow over the bitterness that comes when I say that word. I swallow over my bitterness as years of stories run through my head: We were happy, once upon a time. Iran was a beautiful place to live, once upon a time. It will be again, someday.

Someday, our family will be together in America,
inshallah.

Inshallah—
God willing, God willing, God willing.

But what
, a voice whispers inside me,
what do
we
will?
Where does God’s power leave off and our own personal power begin?

These stories, these beliefs, this silly wistful word
someday
, have kept my parents stuck—paralyzed—for far too long. If they truly do not need to remain in Iran, then they mustn’t accept it as their fate. It’s my duty as a daughter to help them see this. But my mother—I fear she never will. I fear she believes the best is far behind her, that it’s been beaten out of her.

“Is Baba there?” I ask. “Can I talk with him, please?”

When my father gets on the phone, we exchange greetings and I accept his congratulations on my marriage. I don’t have to tiptoe with my words to him like I do with Maman, so I repeat to him what Maryam told me and ask if it’s true—could they, in fact, potentially come to America? My father falters in his reply.

“Maryam should not be talking of such things at such a happy time.” Baba’s voice is lowered, and I know he has walked away from my mother to hide his words from her ears.

My heart falls and hardens at the same time. “It’s true, then?”

He clears his throat. “You are our little black fish,” he says. “You go where your parents cannot and swim in the larger, happier world.”

“Is it true, Baba, that possibly you could come? Please tell me.”

“You’re a newlywed,” he says. “You should worry about your husband’s happiness, not ours. We’re happy enough.”

But they’re not. There’s no way they are.

“It’s amazing here, Baba. I know you haven’t forgotten what freedom feels like.”

“Of course not.” There’s a sad silence, and when he speaks again, his voice is full of yearning. “Once freedom is in your soul, it never leaves. But to pursue freedom, one needs both courage and hope. Your mother has neither. She’s a bird unable to fly. She wants you to have everything she lost by coming back. For her, that’s enough.”

“Baba, it’s
not
enough. What will she live for now? What dreams will carry her forward? Maryam says not to bother, that there’s no way Maman will ever be willing to even try. But you and I—”

“You can’t force a person to be happy. Sometimes people grow comfortable with their sorrow,” he says.

“You and I must not give up hope for her happiness,” I insist. “We have to make this happen.”

He sighs, and I wonder how many conversations he and my mother have had over the years about this topic. The subject must exhaust him. But he’s tougher than Maman. I can’t allow him to give up.

“Do you remember that little blue perfume bottle you gave me, Baba?”

“Of course,” he says.

When I was five years old and we were back in Iran—Maman would already have been imprisoned and released by then—my father gave me for my birthday a small blue perfume bottle filled with grains of sand. In fact, it might have been the same one I’d been playing with when my mother came home from prison that day.
This
, he said when he gave it to me for my birthday,
is sand from America. When you are older, you have a special job to do. You are to take this sand and return it to where it belongs. You are to return it to America.

He never says the word
America
without a tone of reverence. Like my mother, he loved it here. Unlike her, he never wanted to leave. Yet he had, for her.

And now she won’t come back, not even for him.

When my father gave me my visa and airplane ticket to America three months ago, he put them in a gift box, and along with them he included that little blue bottle of sand and reminded me of the promise I’d made to him when I was five: I was to return the sand to American shores.

“I want you with me when I sprinkle the sand back onto the shores of the San Francisco Bay,” I say to him now. “So hurry up and come. I’ll wait for you.”

Again, there’s silence on his end, and in the silence I grow panicky that he’s going to tell me not to wait, to go ahead without him, and I know that if he says it, my heart will break. To prevent this, I say, “Maryam said you have the visa applications already filled out. Is this true?”

In a soft voice, he tells me yes, they are in his dresser drawer.

“Mail them, Baba.”

“I can’t,” he says. “I made a promise to your mother.”

“I made a promise, too, Baba, and I have no problem breaking it. I’m going to tell you a secret I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Maybe you sh—”

“Maryam’s pregnant.” At my father’s joyful gasp, I add, “You can’t tell Maman! Maryam doesn’t want her to know yet. But Baba—you’re going to be a grandfather! And wouldn’t it be great if—”

I stop, for I can’t even say it.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could hold that baby? And if my mother, too, could hold Hope in her arms?
To Ike, maybe I could say this dream. But to my father, it’s too big to say out loud—because if he gets his hopes up and it doesn’t happen, I really worry it might destroy him.

I clear my throat and continue. “Do you see why I broke my promise, Baba? Do you see why you have to break yours, too? It’s within our grasp, to have our whole family here. Three generations! It’s so close we can almost touch it.”

“I don’t know, Tami.” But along with his uncertainty, I hear a new hope, and because of this, I know I’m right to persist.

“God doesn’t give us the pain without also giving us the medicine, Baba.” This is a Persian proverb. “We can fix this. It’s time for our family to be happy again, and the way to do that is by mailing those applications. If they’re approved and Maman still says no, well, then at least you’ll know for sure what you’re giving up. But you’ve got to try. At least, you must do that.”

He sighs, like this is too difficult a request.

“Please, Baba. I miss my kind father.” Tears stream down my face, for I do miss him, so much. “Come, Baba. Together we’ll go to San Francisco and return our special sand to where we took it from all those years ago.” I can
see
this happening. I can smell the salty air and feel the ocean breeze. And my father’s strong hand in mine—I can feel that, too, as together we hold the little blue bottle and together we sprinkle out the sand. It will be an ending for us, and a beginning, too. “Please, Baba. We need you here. We need our father.”

He clears his throat. Perhaps he’s imagining the same thing I am. Perhaps he smells the same ocean air as me.

“You’re a good daughter,” he says finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

My heart gasps with hope when he says this. We say our good-byes, and for the first time in my life when it comes to my parents, I hang up the phone feeling better than I did at the start of the conversation.

“Sorry,” I say to Rose. “I’m sorry for crying in your kitchen!”

“It must be hard to have your parents so far away,” she says.

“It is,” I say. “I just really want . . . well . . .” It’s difficult for me to say what I want out loud. What I want is for my parents to see me happy. For them not to have to wonder, or to ask, but to see with their own eyes that I am, in fact and finally, simply, hugely
happy.
Is it selfish to want this? Maybe not, because I think if they were here and could see this, it would make them happy, too—happy all the way into their souls.

“Nobody knows you like your parents, for better and worse,” Rose says. “That was probably the hardest thing about losing mine.”

I don’t ask, because maybe no one does, and if this is true, it must be something she longs for. I don’t want to put sad thoughts into her head.

“It seems like in America, people almost . . . create their families,” I say. “Do you think this is true?”

She smiles. “I think so, yes. I have my church, my bridge club, my knitting circle, my book clubs. My sister, my nieces—and you, of course!”

“Thank you for letting us live here,” I say. “It means so much to be close to you and get to see you so often. No more just when I walk by on my way to school!”

“But don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll make sure you two newlyweds have your privacy.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that!” I’m blushing to think of her thinking of
us
having sex in her guesthouse. That’s not an image I want in her head!

Back in my casita, I pull out from my suitcase the few photographs I have from our family’s time in America and sit on my new bed and sort through them. There’s one of me eating French fries at McDonald’s, sitting on my father’s lap. I’m about three years old, and my father’s young eyes glow with happiness. There’s one of me being pushed from behind on a baby swing by Maryam at the children’s playground at Golden Gate Park. There’s one of me naked in the Pacific Ocean, running from the cold waves and squealing in delight.

There’s another from that day at the ocean.

In this one, I’m wearing a pink one-piece swimsuit with a big yellow daisy in the middle. My mother holds me. My legs are wrapped around her waist, and my head rests on her shoulder. A wave washes over her feet. She looks straight into the eye of the camera. My mother’s skin is tanned, her long hair windblown. She knows nothing yet of segregated beaches and confiscated passports and shrouding oneself from the sun’s warmth and men’s eyes. All she knows is the beauty of this day. The sun. The waves. The sound of the ocean. The sexy confidence of a bikini top and cutoff shorts highlighting the strong-muscled legs of an able woman. Bare feet. The wind dancing through her hair. Big gold hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. Red nail polish, too. Remarkably beautiful, she looks so happy. So happy and so free.

This is not the mother I know.

The mother I know has always worn
hejab
, has always covered herself in the regime’s mandated head covering. She has always ducked her head and averted her eyes when passing men in the street, walking with the gait of a broken, defeated woman.

I don’t remember the carefree, unburdened mother in the photograph at all, but I’ve missed her every day of my life, even so.

The mother I know has always been sad.

But now, after my phone call with my father, I look at that photograph and think,
Maybe again.
Maybe, if everything works out exactly right, I might come to know a happier version of my mother, rather than merely the ghost of who she used to be.

I call to her, across the ocean:
Come, Maman.

T
hat night, Ike and I drink the entire bottle of champagne and eat the entire box of chocolates. He doesn’t ravish me—we’re still working our way to that—but the evening passes very pleasantly in every regard. I sleep well—so well, in fact, that the next morning, when I half hear heavy breathing next to me in the moments before I’m officially awake, I assume it’s Ike.