The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (40 page)

Over time my mother would furnish every room of that house in Tiburon with antiques; adorn the windows with folds of real silk; decorate my bedroom with a white canopied bed and her own with a king-size waterbed, purple velvet coverlet, and piles of purple cushions; and line the living room mantel and all the walls with black-and-white photographs of herself as a young woman in Iran.

Of all these photographs, the most prized would always be the one in which she stands beside a vase of white gladiolus on her wedding day. With one hand she holds the train of her wedding dress. Her other hand is set jauntily at her waist. Her dress is pulled taut across her torso and seems of a piece with her chest. In this picture her face is turned away from the camera and she smiles graciously, as if to a crowd of admirers. She is exceptionally beautiful.

In Tiburon Lili would recover some measure of that beauty, though never with the same effect.

For her first PTA meeting, she pulled on her best outfit: a fuchsia skirt suit, silk ivory blouse, and black open-toed pumps. She painted her lips pink, pinned her hair into a chignon, and dabbed perfume behind her ears and her wrists. She pulled on a black broad-brimmed hat and looped a string of pearls around her neck. She would have worn gloves, but the day was warm and so, thinking twice, she’d left them behind.

Most of the other mothers—the American mothers—present at that day’s PTA meeting wore polo shirts, jeans, and penny loafers. A few, however, wore pleated ankle-length flower-print dresses, and the most lithesome among them flashed taut, tanned thighs from underneath tennis skirts. They were lawyers’ wives, doctors’ wives, executives’ wives. In just ten years these Marin moms would survey their ranks for the few Chinese American, South Asian, and, eventually, even Iranian families, all of whom they’d suddenly embrace according to a
new ethic of “cultural diversity.” But not yet. This was 1981, Ronald Reagan was president, and “immigrants,” when these women thought of them at all, were the brown-skinned “Mexicans” who loitered in the canal down in San Rafael. Iran was “Eye-ran” and hospitality, where Lili found it in Tiburon, extended no further than a thin-lipped half smile. Here her fine clothes were absurd, her pleasantries incomprehensible. In consequence, there would be no invitations to their cocktail parties or their sailing cruises or their ski cabins up in Tahoe. And for her part, Lili would never forget their barely perceptible but still unmistakable cruelties, or, for that matter, their stunning absence of style.

My father had a habit of suddenly leaving his post behind the plastic window at the Casa Buena and disappearing. Usually he’d just slip over to the Italian diner next door for a few hours in the middle of the day. When she finished cleaning the rooms, Lili would make her way back to the office only to find the manager’s suite abandoned and the cash register empty. She’d storm over to the diner and find Johann slumped over the bar with handfuls of bills spilling from his pockets. In the beginning, her cheeks burned with the shame of it and she’d lower her eyes and speak softly as she took him away by the arm, but eventually she’d haul him back to the motel so many times as to be cured completely of shame.

Sometimes, though, he’d disappear for nights or even weeks and she could not easily lure him back to the motel. One time it was to Hawaii, another time a hundred miles up the coast to Gualala, where he drank until his money ran out and he had no choice but to come back home. Whenever he disappeared like that, my mother and I just threw our clothes into some plastic shopping bags and moved into the Casa Buena.

“We’ll go back home soon,” my mother would tell me then, setting her mouth in a smile. “He’s just gone on a vacation.”

At the motel, odors from the Italian diner mixed with the candied-eucalyptus scent of the disinfectant Lili used to clean all the bathrooms. The only window of the manager’s suite faced the highway, and the curtains were always drawn against the whizz and hum of cars on their way to San Francisco. The shower stall in the bathroom was lined with pale pink tiles, and over the years a leaking faucet had etched thick brown lines in the sink. Cockroaches lurked in every corner of the kitchenette. They terrified me until I learned to scare them away by banging on the cabinet doors before reaching inside for a bag of cookies or crackers.

In the afternoons, just before three o’clock, Lili hung the “Will Return By” sign in the window of the motel office, changed her clothes, and drove to Tiburon. As all the Mercedes and the BMWs filed out of the school parking lot and the other girls went off to soccer practice and play dates, I’d sit cross-legged on the curb, head buried in a book, until Lili pulled into the lot and honked the horn.

Now it was time for my after-school classes.

There were ballet lessons, piano lessons, art lessons, French lessons, and Persian lessons. Ice-skating lessons in the winter and swimming lessons in the summer. I had at least one class and often two every day of the week, Monday through Friday, and on Saturdays, from eight until noon, I went to a German-language school where the only other half-German girls were two green-eyed, coppery-skinned sisters with a Guatemalan mother.

“I hate after-school classes!” I whined, but Lili would have none of it. None at all. She could do without her beautiful house in the Tiburon hills, her tea parties, and her dinner parties, but she’d never give up my after-school classes. “You have to make yourself something in this country!” she’d tell me, lifting her chin and waving
toward the window to indicate America. “Or else you are nothing, nothing at all!”

We’d sleep in the back room of the manager’s suite, Lili and I, in a double bed with a scratchy, flower-print comforter like the ones in all the motel rooms. “I’ll stay until you go to sleep,” she’d whisper. Some nights she fell asleep before I did, and I’d stare at the twinkling asbestos ceiling and listen to noises in the parking lot or else watch her as she slept.

She was always so tired, my mother. I had never known her any other way, but still it confused me and scared me sometimes, too.

Once when the Cadillac was in the repair shop, she hung the “Will Return By” sign in the window and took a taxi to pick me up from school. Usually she wore her hair pulled back in a low bun, but that day it was loose about her shoulders and very frizzy. Even from a distance, she looked exhausted. And sad.

When we returned to the motel that afternoon, Lili pulled me into the back room of the manager’s suite and locked us in the bathroom. She sank down to the floor, leaned her head against the sink, and closed her eyes.

I looked out the window toward the dumpsters of the Italian diner.

“Why are we in here?” I asked her.

A deep crease sprang up between her eyes. I was afraid I’d made her mad, but suddenly her expression softened and she smiled. She pulled me to her, hard, and held me against her chest. I raised my head, and when I saw that she was crying I tried to brush her tears away with my hand. She started laughing then, and crying, too, and kissing my hands, one and then the other, again and again.

Suddenly, she stood up, washed her face, and pinned up her hair. “No more crying now!” she told me as she pulled the door open.
She moved the clock hand on the “Will Return By” sign and hung it in the window. She held my hand tightly as we crossed from the parking lot to the sidewalk. She was quiet now, very calm. When we reached the pizza parlor with the triangle roof at the end of the street, she bought me a personal-size pizza and an extra-large Coke. She smiled at me as I ate.

The next morning at school the principal called me into her office.

“Did your mother pick you up yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“In a
taxi
?”

I nodded.

She raised an eyebrow. “Where do you live?” she asked me. Her voice was kind, her eyes were kind, but I would only shake my head no.

“You can’t tell me where you live?” she asked.

I shook my head again and round, hot tears spilled from my cheeks until finally she let me go.

Back in Iran, when the worst of the
shoolooqi
was over, Kobra drew on her veil with as little fuss as she’d put it aside twenty years earlier. Veiled or unveiled, women’s vanities, she predicted, could be counted on to survive every calamity. She reopened the Lady Diola and once again she set about her work.

Every Friday morning she took a taxi to our apartment on the onetime Avenue Pahlavi (now the Avenue of the Revolution). She cracked open the windows, laundered the sheets, dusted the shelves, cleaned the white leather couches with a special cream, watered the geraniums on the balcony, said a prayer for our homecoming, and then, with a last look about the rooms, she’d lock the door and leave.

No sooner had the revolution ended than Saddam Hussein began to pitch rockets, missiles, and bombs into Iran from Iraq. Kobra took to sleeping fully clothed, with shoes on her feet and her identity card in her coat pocket, so that when the sirens sounded she could spring from her bed and huddle in the basement with her neighbors until the walls stopped rattling and the lights flickered back to life.

The borders were sealed, and after that the only way out of the country was by foot, or donkey, or some bandit’s truck or motorcycle, over desert plains and across gorges, but still thousands of Iranians escaped, or at least contrived to send their sons out of the country.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand died that time, in that war. They died by bullets and rockets and grenades; by poisonous gases that seeped into their lungs and laid their bodies to waste; by mines that ripped flesh from bone as easily as it ripped soil from earth. Kobra would hear that somewhere in the city, in a cemetery called Zahra’s Heaven, there was a fountain that ran red with martyrs’ blood, and it was said that the tulips that sprang from the earth there were red, too.

Eventually Kobra cleared out our apartment. She began selling off what she could. The white leather couches had long since gone out of style and would not fetch a good price, but she managed to sell them anyway. She strung up our clothes, Lili’s and Johann’s and mine, on a clothesline along one wall of her bedroom, and she sold them, too, piece by piece by piece, over the course of many months. By such measures, Kobra would survive, the Lady Diola would survive, and for this she thanked God because to Kobra the
sabr
, the forbearance, God bestowed on her would always be a blessing greater than all the blessings she’d lost and would lose yet.

The war lasted eight years. In that time cousins and acquaintances carried back news of our house with its view of San Francisco, our kidney-shaped swimming pool, and the antiques Lili had piled in every room. We were rich; everyone in America was rich. “Send
money,” Kobra begged Lili late at night on the telephone. “Send whatever you can!” Lili bought dresses, pants, and coats and filled all the pockets with hundred-dollar bills; she stuffed the toes of shoes with toiletries and jewelry and medicine; and she packed it into two separate piles, one for Kobra and one for Sara.

When these remittances reached Iran, Kobra would open the box or the envelope, and finding their contents disturbed or gone, she’d furrow her brows and bite her lip. Voice quavering, she’d inform Lili of the losses. From then on Lili sent money and suitcases only through friends or acquaintances or relatives.

“God keep you for us,” Kobra told her, “but next time could you please send more money?”

“But did you give it to her?” Lili would ask. “Did you give her what I sent?”

“Of course, of course,” Kobra always assured her, but in these years Lili could be sure of nothing.

But for Lili the worst of the Iran-Iraq war were the calls that came for her late at night from Sara. Sara had no phone at her home in the countryside, but whenever she visited Tehran she’d telephone Lili. Her voice was a woman’s voice by then, with a rich timbre, but it was always a child’s plea that Lili heard when Sara spoke.

“Why did you leave me?”

“But the
shoolooqi
,” Lili told her, “and now this war…”

“No, not now. I mean before. When I was little, when I was a baby. Why did you leave me then?”

In time Lili would tell Sara the whole of it. About Kazem and the beatings and the divorce. About her father, Sohrab, and the terrible years that had followed his death. “I was no one,” she told Sara. “I had nothing….” Lili told her more than she’d ever told anyone, more even than she herself could stand to remember, but no story she could tell would ever quiet Sara. “Why did you leave me?” she’d ask each time. And: “When will you come back to Iran?”

“Where are you people from?” people would ask Lili at the Casa Buena. Each time she heard this question, she would think of the skinny Iranian boy she’d once seen on television, the one who lay huddled on the ground while a group of men took turns kicking him. “Germany,” she’d answer in the most German accent she could muster, because there were dangers everywhere then and this was the way she knew to keep us safe.

She wasn’t always successful.

One day a pretty blond woman drove into the parking lot in a silver BMW, swung into the office, and asked if she could look at a room before renting it. Lili shrugged and slipped her a key. Half an hour later, Lili spied the woman walking back to her car with freshly washed hair.

“Room’s no good,” the woman muttered when Lili caught up with her in the parking lot. Then, with a shove, she added, “Goddamn spic.”

Lili, for whom this slur was new and unfamiliar, staggered and fell. Before she could pull herself up, the woman fell on her and straddled her chest. Lili’s backside and legs dug into the concrete. Her dress, she realized with horror, had ridden up to her waist. Lili raised her hand to strike, but despite her slight frame the woman was astonishingly strong. She gripped Lili’s wrist and bit it, hard enough to break skin, then scrambled into her car and out of the parking lot.

What my mother really feared, though, was that something would happen to me. There was a small bell above the office door that rang every time someone came looking for a motel room. Whenever she heard it, she’d tell me to move farther back into the manager’s suite so that no one could see me. She watched the news every night; she knew what could happen to little girls in this country. “Hide yourself!” she hissed at me in Persian whenever the bell rang at the Casa Buena.