The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

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For my mother and grandmother

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many friends, family members, and colleagues have supported, guided, and (more than occasionally) prodded me along in the writing of this book.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin gave me the courage to begin and for this I owe her my first thanks. In addition to leading me to Linda, Book Passage in Corte Madera, California provided me a wonderful community in which to read, learn, and write, and it’s impossible for me to imagine
The Good Daughter
without that community.

Kelly Sonnack devoted early enthusiasm and unwavering attention to this memoir. I am grateful also to David Groff for his astute guidance. Sandy Dijkstra and the whole Dijkstra team—Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Natalie Fischer, Elisabeth James, and Taylor Martindale—have been enormously helpful to me at every turn.

For her uncommon patience and keen insights, I thank my editor, Caryn Karmatz Rudy. Thanks also to my publisher, Grand Central, and to Amanda Englander, who helped me send this book into the world. I’ve been very lucky, too, in my editors at Random House UK, Vanessa Neuling and Drummond Moir, who read draft after draft.

I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful organizations that supported this book: The Marin Arts Council, San Francisco Foundation, Intersection for the Arts, A Room of One’s Own Foundation,
Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and the Steinbeck Fellowship Program at the Martha Heasley Cox Center. In addition to the financial resources they extended for the project, they put me in contact with many of the mentors and fellow writers I’ve mentioned here.

Endless thanks go out to Rebecca Foust, whose friendship makes me believe in fate. She and my friends Shahdeh Shooshdary, Amy Motlagh, Sue-Ellen Speight, Mahta Jahanshahi, Marie Ostby, and Eileen Kane were my first devoted readers. Jahanshah Javid, editor of
iranian.com
, gave me my first writing “gig.” Persis Karim and the members of the Association of Iranian American Writers continually inspired me with their camaraderie.

I am also particularly grateful to my son, Kiyan Darznik-Banaee. His inimitable spirit gives me joy every day.

And thanks, finally and profoundly, to my mother for the honesty, wisdom, and generosity with which she shared her story with me.

Prologue

L
ike all the photographs that came with us when we left Iran, this one was as supple and as thick as leather. Its edges were tattered and a long white crease coursed through the image. I might easily have mistaken it for just another old photograph, but this one was nothing like the others.

The girl in it was my mother, Lili, and though she couldn’t be older than fourteen, someone had rimmed her eyes with kohl and darkened her mouth with a lipstick so deep it looked black in the picture. Her dress was satin, pulled taut across her torso and pinched at the waist, and her shoulders turned in awkwardly where a wedding veil skimmed her body. The man at her side was not my father. I’d never seen him before. He wore a gray fedora with his tuxedo and his right hand encircled my mother’s waist with surprisingly elegant fingers.

A bride, I realized with a start, she’d once been this stranger’s bride.

Nearly as astonishing as this revelation was my mother’s expression in the photograph. Eyes fixed on the distance and lower lip pouting, she looked as if the next shot would have shown her crying. I had never known my proud Iranian mother to look like that.

I sat stunned, gripping the photograph between my thumb and forefinger, unable to look away. I was sitting in my mother’s house,
a house to which I’d never imagined I’d return. It was late in the afternoon, five weeks after my father’s funeral; I was helping her go through his things and this photograph had fallen from a stack of letters whose Persian script my eyes could no longer follow. A photograph hidden, forgotten, and now found.

Iranians would likely shrug at such a discovery, lift their eyes toward the heavens, and sum up its meaning as
qesmat
, or destiny. This was a word I’d hear often in the days following my father’s death.
Qesmat
, my mother told me, had brought me back to California. I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year when she called to tell me my father was in the hospital and that I had to come home…
now
. I left my apartment on the East Coast without even packing a suitcase. He died before my plane landed in San Francisco, but I returned to my parents’ house still unready for tears.

My mother and I grieved at a distance, each of us in her own way. Lili’s friends encircled her, crying with her and soothing her and praying with her day after day. I kept to myself. I did not cry. Then, three days after the funeral, I drove my mother to the airport. Together we watched my father’s body, housed now in a black-ribboned coffin, being hoisted onto the plane that would carry him across the ocean to Germany, the home he’d given up when he moved to Iran in the sixties to marry my mother. The sky that morning was a rare December blue and nearly cloudless. “
Qesmat
,” she whispered as the plane arched out of sight, and at this, finally, I cried.

We’d been a world of our own once, my mother Lili and I, a constant, intimate twosome beyond which I could imagine nothing, least of all myself. Then we came to America and I started turning into an American girl. That’s when she began telling me about The Good Daughter. The Good Daughter lived in Iran. She didn’t talk
back—as I had learned to do in this
kharab shodeh
, this broken-down place. Actually, she didn’t talk much at all. The Good Daughter listened. She understood—always—about manners and modesty. She didn’t wander off to play in the streets by herself. The Good Daughter sat by her mother’s side and heeded her mother’s words. When a man looked at her, she lowered her eyes at once. And she was very, very pretty, with a sweet face and long, flowing hair just like the maidens in Persian miniatures.

Over the years The Good Daughter became a taunt, a warning, an omen. When I spoke immodestly, when I wore my skirts too short or let boys flirt with me, I was not my mother’s real daughter, her Good Daughter. “If you become like the girls here,” she’d say, “I’ll go back to Iran to live with my Good Daughter.”

The Good Daughter I knew back then was just a story she’d made up to scare me and make me into a good daughter, too. It was like my mother to tell such stories to keep me close and to keep me good. But I didn’t want anything to do with The Good Daughter of my mother’s Iranian world. The less I resembled her, the better it suited me. By the time I found the photograph of my mother as a young bride, I’d left home, as girls in this country always do and no true Iranian daughter ever would.

And yet for forty days after my father’s death I stayed in my parents’ house, smiling and nodding like The Good Daughter of my mother’s stories while her friends dropped by in the afternoons in their lace-trimmed veils and carefully made-up eyes. “What will she do now?” they whispered to each other, and for forty days I served them tea and quietly watched them eyeing her for clues.

The house was finally empty the day I found the photograph, the funeral rites complete and the visitors gone. The platters of dates and pastries and fruit had all been cleared away and cardboard boxes lay scattered on the floor of every room of the house. I worked long into the afternoon, packing up my mother’s clothes, bills, letters, and
leather-bound photo albums. In one of the spare bedrooms I came across my father’s books of Rilke, Kant, and Khayyám and also my grandmother Kobra’s prayer shawl, rosary, and gilt-trimmed Koran. In my old bedroom closet I found the Gypsy dolls my grandmother sewed me years ago in Iran and a Persian picture book defaced by my own childish scribbles.

My mother and I were alone in the house where she could no longer afford to live, and when the photograph slipped loose from a bundle of letters she was upstairs sleeping with an open bottle of Valium on the table beside her bed.

I carried the photograph to the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor for a long time, staring up at the large black-and-white portrait of my parents on their wedding day. Tehran, 1962. She, raven haired with Cleopatra eyes, plays Elizabeth Taylor to my father’s blond and slightly sheepish Richard Burton. I grew up with this portrait and all the stories my mother loved to tell about her wedding to my father. Every pair of eyes, she’d told me, had trailed her on the day she married her
damad farangi
, her European groom. As proof of who she’d been, of what our country had once been, she hung this picture in every home we ever owned in America: the tract house in Terra Linda, the five-bedroom house in the Tiburon hills, the villa on Richardson Bay. If, for many years, someone had asked me to tell them about Iran, I would have pointed to this photograph of my parents, as if every story began there, in that moment.

Now I’d found a photograph that had survived revolution, war, exile, and something else besides: my mother’s will to forget the past. Although I couldn’t yet imagine the stories it would tell, I slipped it between the pages of a book and carried it three thousand miles away.