I sigh to have been reminded of this, and I wish so much it wasn’t true.
But it is.
In my life, and in my family’s life, it has always been true.
At the intersection of Speedway and Tucson boulevards, Ike turns left onto Speedway. When we get to Country Club Road, where he should turn right to go to my sister’s house—that had been the plan, to see first Ike’s family and then mine—he keeps driving straight.
“Did you forget to turn?” I ask.
“I want to show you something.” He continues to Magnolia Avenue, the next big intersection, and pulls into the shopping plaza on the right. He parks in a spot in front of a corner store with a sign in the window that says AVAILABLE
.
He turns off the ignition and stares through the windshield at the vacant storefront. “Here she is. My perfect anchor spot.”
“Is this—? Oh, Ike! Is this it? Is this going to be your coffee shop?”
“That was the plan.” But instead of sounding happy, he says this like he just lost his closest friend. He takes a huge, miserable breath. “I did
not
see this coming.”
“Ike?”
He keeps looking straight ahead. From the side, I see that his swallow comes hard. Then, finally turning to me, he says, “Want to get out and see it?”
“Of course!” I climb down from the truck, approach the store, and peer in the window. It looks to have been a restaurant, as there’s an ordering counter and some food display cases. “It looks nearly ready to go.”
He comes up, wraps his arms around me from behind, and looks over my shoulder into the abandoned restaurant. I lean back into him, feeling like a puzzle piece that has just been connected with its rightful partner. “There’s a ton of work to be done. It’s kind of a dump. But the location’s perfect.” He tells me how when Starbucks looks for locations, it looks to open them in shopping plazas where there’s already a grocery store, and he points out the Trader Joe’s directly across from this space. He goes on to describe how he’d change the layout, what sort of furniture he’d buy, what sort of lighting he’d have.
“I always thought I’d go modern with the design,” he says. “But then—well, remember how you said I could use your ‘capturing freedom’ photographs as my artwork? That made me want to go cozier. And then I thought, maybe classier, too. So I’m going metal, wood, and glass, with a big wall fountain right there.” He points out the spot against the far wall.
I hardly heard anything beyond the mention of my photographs. “You really want to use my pictures?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “And I want you to sign them, and I’d like to sell them, too, if you’re okay with that.”
“If I’m okay with that?” I repeat. “Of course I’m okay with that!”
When I first arrived in America, Ardishir gave me his camera, and I took so many pictures. I took a picture of a teenage boy with three earrings in his ear and one in his lip. I took another of a barefoot, shirtless black man with crazy braids riding a unicycle and playing a flute. One of a car with pink daisies painted on it. Still another of my friend Eva from the waist down—of her miniskirt and thigh-high boots. Girls’ bare shoulders. Front doors open to the world. Public hand-holding between gay men. Line dancing at a country-western bar. Cheerleaders doing cartwheels across the campus lawn.
You’re looking for freedom in all its often overlooked details
, Ike had observed.
You’re photographing tiny acts of everyday rebellion.
He was right. And even after three months, I still see freedom best that way, in its small, everyday forms.
I look once more through the window of the coffee shop and visualize all that he has described for me—the high-class coziness, the wall fountain. But mostly, I imagine my photographs on the walls. I will have them enlarged and very nicely framed. I’ll make them grand, very professional.
I will be an official artist.
I turn back to Ike and throw my arms around him. “Thank you!”
He accepts my hug but not my thanks. “There’s one big, deal-breaking problem. My parents were supposed to match my investment dollar for dollar, to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars. I’ve spent the last three years of my life remodeling and flipping houses with my dad to earn my share, and that was in a rising housing market. God knows how long it would take me to earn the rest, but after tonight . . .” His eyes contain acute pain. “There’s no way they’re going to give me the money now.”
“Oh, Ike.” I did this. I caused him this pain. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t ever say you’re sorry for marrying me.”
“But I am if it . . . What can we do to make things better with your parents?”
He considers that for a moment. “I don’t know that we can do anything.”
“But this is your dream, Ike. You can’t just give up on a dream.”
He gives a halfhearted shrug. “There’ll be other locations. Other opportunities.”
He doesn’t sound like he believes this, though, or that he can stand the wait.
I step away from him and go around the corner of the store, as if I want to look inside it from a different angle. But what I really want to do is kick the plate-glass window, or knock over one of these chained-down, leftover wrought-iron tables, or . . . or
something.
Something violent and destructive on purpose, because in marrying Ike—in making
my
dream come true—I’ve done something unintentional and yet vicious. I’ve ruined his.
I steady my breath and then look across the abandoned café and study my new husband. He leans against a concrete pillar on the covered patio with his arms crossed, staring through the window that separates him from the dream he was so close to realizing. That he
would
have realized, had I not come along. He catches my gaze and gives me a smile that’s so sad I simply can’t bear it, and so I go to him resolutely. “Maybe your parents are right, Ike.”
He looks at me as though he’s not at all surprised by what I’ve said. As though he knew I’d say such a thing. “My parents mean well,” he says. “But they’re not right.”
“If you want to have our marriage annulled, I’ll understand.” I say this firmly, but inside I’m quivering, for this is
not
what I want.
Thankfully, Ike doesn’t either. “Are you crazy, Persian Girl?”
“You didn’t know this was going to happen,” I say. “You would’ve made a different decision if you had.”
He shakes his head no. “I don’t think so.”
“This is your
dream
, Ike. You can’t give up on it.”
We’ve been holding hands as we’ve talked, but now he grips my forearms. “Listen carefully. I’d also like to go para-sailing. And bike across the country, and hike the Appalachian Trail. I’d like to buy a Harley, and live in Spain for a year. Opening a coffee shop isn’t a dream, Tami. It’s just one of the many things I’d like to do at some point in my life.”
“
All
those things are dreams, Ike. You’re a man of many dreams.”
“But they’re not—” He stops, frustrated, and looks away, struggling to find the right words. When he looks back at me, his eyes are earnest. “When you said good-bye, when you told me you were going back to Iran and would probably never come back, I thought I’d lost you. I felt so . . . hollow. Nothing meant anything anymore. You call them dreams, and maybe they were at some point, but after losing you, they all just became things on a list. Even opening the coffee shop didn’t mean what it used to.”
He takes my breath away, Ike does.
“Once I met you, my dreams changed,” he says. “Everything I want to do in my life, I want to do with you by my side. That’s my new dream.
You’re
my dream.”
“Ike.”
My eyes fill with tears, my heart with wonder. I’m twenty-seven years old, which I realize is a little late in life to have fallen in love for the first time, but that’s the situation I’m in. When I’ve imagined going back to Iran, part of me has thought I’d feel as if Ike were still with me, like an angel on my shoulder, whispering love into my ear, and another part of me—the more realistic part—has thought that I’d mourn his absence every day for the rest of my life. This love—it’s overpowering. I’m so glad to know I’m not alone in it.
But still.
“I know how much your parents mean to you,” I say. “And they’re right that we hardly know each other.”
“We know enough.” He touches his finger to my lips to silence me. “We know we belong together.”
I kiss the finger he has pressed against my lips and then with my hand move it aside. “Let’s at least live together to show them our marriage is for real. Let’s at least do that.”
“Taking things slow was the one condition you had when it came to marrying me,” he says. “You can’t just drop it now.”
One of my dreams is to live alone. All by myself. I know this may not seem like such a big dream, and maybe it’s only a silly little dream, but there it is. I want to live alone.
These words popped out of my mouth in the hotel room in Las Vegas. I had no idea how badly I wanted it, until Ike proposed and I found myself saying it to him. It seemed right at the time.
He was confused at first, thinking I meant I didn’t want to marry him, but that wasn’t the situation at all. There’s no one in the world I’d rather be married to than him.
I want for us to date
, I’d said.
Really, truly date. Go to dinner. See a movie. Maybe even dinner
and
a movie.
That last part was a joke from a conversation we’d once had, but otherwise I was serious—because Ike had been forbidden to me. All we’d had were stolen moments between the time my English class let out and the time my sister got home from work. Maryam was afraid Persian men would think I was immoral for spending time unsupervised with an American man, or not serious about marriage. And so seeing Ike—loving him—was my secret. And as thankful as I now am to be his wife, the fact remains that we skipped over the whole boyfriend-girlfriend part. The fact remains that we have yet to go on one official date together.
For three months, we met for coffee after my English class and day by day, we’d flirt. We’d tease. We’d look at each other with yearning in our eyes. But we never dated. Ike asked, but I couldn’t say yes. I was looking for a husband, not a boyfriend, and dating—an American man, no less—was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Instead, I’d leave him and go home to meet one Persian man after another, trying to find one suitable for marriage, all the while dreaming of Ike.
I want to hold your hand and walk down the street with you and not be afraid of showing the world how I feel
.
To treasure every moment of falling in love. To learn to kiss you without fear. . . . And I want to live with you someday, when we’re ready. When I’m ready.
I’d said all this, just yesterday. And I’d meant it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But now, with Ike’s parents against our marriage, thinking I have somehow tricked him, I realize that living alone is not only wrong, but selfish, too.
“I have no idea where that all came from,” I say. “The words just came out of me.”
“They came from that place in the soul that knows you best,” Ike says. “That place you’re never supposed to ignore.”
“But, Ike—your parents love you,” I say. “And if there’s anything we can do to help them not be so upset, we should do it.”
He shakes his head. “Our marriage is between you and me. What we do and how we do it is nobody’s business but ours. We create our own path. That’s what this marriage is—it’s our path. Others can join us, or support us—or they can get the hell out of the way. Time will prove, in the end, whether it is, in fact, the right path.
But we don’t change the path
—unless and until we decide
on our own
that we want to and that it’s the best thing for our marriage.”
He sounds perfectly sure of himself and he looks it, too. As he’s talked, he’s straightened his shoulders and puffed out his chest and raised his chin. He’s so strong, this new husband of mine.
“You really don’t mind having your parents be so upset?”
“Of course I mind,” he says. “It hurts like hell. But I have to believe they’ll come around eventually.” He shrugs. “Ideally, when you get married, everyone’s happy. But that’s not always the case, and so then you’ve got to make a choice about who you’re going to keep happy. For me, it’s a nobrainer: You choose your spouse. That’s what marriage means: I choose you above all others.”
I squeeze his hands, trying to press my love into him. “I choose you, too, Ike. I just . . .” I sigh and look to the available storefront. “I want you to have your coffee shop. I don’t want you to have to sacrifice it for me.”
“Never mind the coffee shop,” he says. “This is larger than that. We can’t let anyone ruin things for us,” he says. “Nothing and no one.” He brushes a lock of hair off my shoulder. “The world’s going to try and break us, Tami. It tries to break everyone. We just can’t let it. That’s how we win, right? As long as we stick together, as long as we fight for each other, we win. Even if we lose, we win. Right?”
Even if we lose, we win. As long as we fight for each other, we win.
He’s a philosopher, too, my husband. “Right, Ike.”
“So . . .” He pulls me close. “Are we together in this?”
“Yes, Ike. We’re together in this.”
“Are we united?”
I’ve only been married to him for a day, but already I can’t imagine not being with him—together, united. Being in love is new to me, but this feeling of camaraderie, of shared purpose—well, this is something even better than being “in love.”
This is love itself, and to me it feels as old as time and as necessary to life as food or air or water. There are lots of things I don’t know very much about, but one thing I do know: This kind of love
is
worth fighting for.
“We’re united,” I say. “Absolutely.”
Chapter 5