The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (41 page)

Usually I could entertain myself by reading or making up games, but one day I wandered out of the manager’s suite and walked to the far edge of the parking lot by myself. I was hunched over, inspecting a pothole, when she caught my arm, lifted me up, and slapped my face.

“You can never do that again!” she snapped. “You can’t wander off by yourself, do you understand?”

Tears pricked my eyes. “Yes,
maman
,” I whimpered.

“If you do it again,” she said, easing her grip, “I’ll go back to Iran. I’ll go back to my Good Daughter.”

The Good Daughter. My mother conjured her often in those days. The daughter who stayed by her mother’s side, the daughter who knew not to wander off by herself. I still believed in her back then. I believed she could steal my mother away from me. The Good Daughter terrified me, and my mother counted on that terror to keep me safe. She also counted on my silence. When she dropped me off at school in the mornings, she would remind me to tell no one at school about my father’s drinking, her work, or our stays at the motel. Only Americans spoke of those sorts of things, and it wasn’t for such betrayals that she had left her country and her Good Daughter and brought me to this
kharab shodeh
, this awful broken-down place.

But these were not the only stories she told.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings Lili and I would go from room to room at the Casa Buena, and while she stripped beds, emptied ashtrays, and cleaned toilets I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and watch cartoons. As a treat on the days when I hadn’t bothered her too much, she’d run me a bath and arrange wedges of pomegranate along the lip of the tub.

“A pomegranate,” my mother told me, “is not a simple fruit. Behind its leathery hide, it draws a veil over its seeds, and when you
eat it, it stains your fingers with a juice that’s stubborn as ink but twice as subtle.”

I loved to sit in the bathtub eating freshly quartered pomegranates and listening to Lili’s stories. I’d work my way gingerly through each section, peeling away the milky white membranes to get to the fruit. Sometimes I bit straight into mounds of seeds, as if I were eating an apple, and the bitter pith mixed with the sweetness. Other times I plucked the seeds out one by one with my fingers and then ground them slowly and delicately between my teeth.

Lili would crouch beside the tub and then, as pomegranate juice dripped from my hands and my chin and the bubbles in the tub slowly turned pink, she’d tell me stories about a place she called Persia.

“Have I told you the story of my wedding? Did you know they called me Khanoom Doktor—Madame Doctor—back then?”

“Yes,
maman
,” I’d say.

“And have I told you I wore no makeup at all?” she’d continue. “None at all! Just minutes before the ceremony began, my aunt Zaynab came running toward me with a stick of black kohl. Before I knew it, she’d swiped one line across each of my eyelids!”

She’d pretend to line her eyes with two flicks of the wrist.

“No other makeup at all!” She laughed. “I bought the flowers from the best florist in Tehran,” she went on, “Kobra prepared the food, Zaynab and Khanoom, my grandmother, assembled the
sofreh,
the wedding spread, and my cousin Nima, who was just a scrawny boy then—but already flirting with me, if you can imagine—played the
tar
while I danced.”

She’d look at me to make sure I was listening.

“Everyone, but everyone, said I was pretty as an
aroos farangi
, a foreign bride, but what they really could not believe, and still can’t believe, was that when I came back from Germany I brought them a
damad farangi
, a European groom!”

By this time in the story I’d dropped the last of the pomegranate skins into a pot beside the tub. The red splotches disappeared into the bathwater, leaving not even a pink hint of my indulgence. Still smiling at the memory of her wedding, my mother would reach over and flip the drain open.

I’d forgotten home, I’d forgotten Iran, but just as some memories linger in spite of our longing to forget them, there are some loves that will take in just about any soil. When my mother Lili lined my bathtub with pomegranates, she was giving me an appetite for an unearthly fruit and the stories and secrets encased in its many-chambered heart, and this, she knew, was a pleasure from which not even a small girl could be exiled.

Ten

The Good Daughter

“Now you know there was no choice. I wanted to keep you safe. It had to be.” These are my mother’s last words on the tapes, but they come out with an odd inflection, like a question or even, I think, like a plea.

F
OR YEARS THE WORLD
seemed split between two kinds of women. The first were my mother’s friends, the wives who stayed home all day, waiting for children who, as the years went on, would not answer them in Persian. In the afternoons these women dressed in pretty clothes, piled jewels around their throats and on their fingers, made up their faces, and gathered in one another’s drawing rooms. They gossiped endlessly about other people’s children and husbands and mothers-in-law, but they were always careful not to disclose too much about their own difficulties. If they worked, they didn’t talk about it. Instead they told tales about royal ancestors and abandoned riches and took turns reading one another’s fortunes in the patterns left in tiny white cups by thick potions of Turkish coffee. Each time they met, they parted with kisses, with the halting intimacy of estranged sisters.

The other kind of women were the relatives who came to stay with us for weeks and sometimes months, long enough for me to know them in ways that I would never know my mother’s friends. They came between countries, marriages, and lives. Among them
were wives whose husbands had found their reduced circumstances and diminished prestige in America unbearable. When their husbands left for Iran to take young wives and start new families, these women opened beauty parlors or turned their living rooms into day-care centers. One paid her son’s college tuition by sewing hospital scrubs and sent him off each week with Tupperware containers marked “Herb stew, my love” and “May I die for you, rice pudding.” I knew another woman who, after days spent hunched over the cash register of a small deli, stood over the bathroom sink at night, rubbing her husband’s socks with a bar of soap under hot water until her hands wrinkled and the socks were restored to a virginal white.

And then there was my own mother, with her two homes and her two lives, and the unwavering pride with which she maintained the distances between them. One mother spent her days at a run-down motel along the highway answering the phone in a heavy accent and cleaning motel rooms on weekends and all the other days when the regular maid did not show up. The other wore a turquoise bathing cap and bright red lipstick when she went swimming in the backyard of our house in Tiburon. She reigned over dinner parties of fifty or a hundred guests. She coursed through rooms with marble coffee tables, gilt-framed armoires, and fields of Persian carpets. There was the woman who wrangled over motel bills with truck drivers and the woman who lined plump dates with almonds and passed them on sterling silver platters to her guests.

But just as there were two kinds of women, there were also two kinds of girls: Iranian daughters and American daughters. Iranian daughters, like The Good Daughter of my mother’s stories, were shy, quiet, polite, and modest. Some, but not all, of her friends’ daughters were Iranian daughters. They addressed their elders with the formal
shoma
, never
toh.
They knew how to serve a proper tea. And when they laughed, they hid their sweet smiles behind their hands.

The old ways were fading fast in America, but it was the loss of
just such daughters that would reveal to Iranians the true measure of their exile.

In the mid-eighties, when Iran’s borders were opened again—or opened, rather, for brief and uncertain intervals—Kobra began to visit us in California. She’d stay for six months or even as long as a year, but she never cared to stay for good. For Kobra, America was a very small place, much smaller than Iran. She didn’t speak English, she didn’t know how to drive, and she didn’t know anyone here whom she could call or visit. She spent her days alone in the house, puttering and praying, arranging and rearranging the contents of her suitcase, and then settling into an armchair to study the actresses’ hairstyles on
Days of Our Lives
until I came home from school.

Apart from television and her
namaz
, cooking was her only diversion. Some Saturdays she’d wake up as early as six in the morning, tie her hair in a kerchief, and slip into the kitchen. She steeped the day’s first tea leaves with cardamom and rose essence and then she started rinsing and soaking the rice and trimming the day’s vegetables and herbs. When she was not working the night shift at the Casa Buena, Lili joined Kobra at the stove and they’d settle in for a full day of cooking. I’d drift into the kitchen between cartoons to make myself some frozen waffles and find the two of them in the kitchen with all the burners on at once, frying up pounds of chopped onions, armfuls of eggplants, and mountains of marble-sized meatballs. They’d joke and bicker long into the afternoon, stopping only for a makeshift lunch of flatbread, feta cheese, and a couple of fresh walnuts, too, if those were already done soaking in salt water.

Labors of such scale, I well knew, signified just one thing: guests were coming to our house for dinner. Even a modest dinner party back then meant at least thirty or more people. The wives dressed as if for a state function and without exception only the men drank
alcohol. There were always at least three kinds of stew, two types of rice with separate plates of
tahdig
, or thick crisped rice, alongside pilaf-stuffed grape leaves and bell peppers, potato cutlets, homemade yogurt, and, for dessert, bowls of a thick saffron-infused rice pudding and carefully assembled towers of fresh dates. By the time Lili and Kobra were done cooking, there’d barely be enough time for them to slip into their party dresses and swipe on some lipstick. Still, they always ushered guests to the table with apologies for the terrible simplicity of the fare.

Such parties were increasingly rare, however. With Johann gone for days and weeks at a time, Lili and Kobra spent most weekends at the motel, working side by side. I’d have no choice but to go along with them. To pass the time I’d flip on the television as we made our way through the rooms.

“For this you left your country!” Kobra would chide Lili, clucking her tongue and wringing her hands. “To be a maid!”

“I have no choice!”

“In Iran they called you Khanoom Doktor,” Kobra muttered. “Why don’t you come back home? Why don’t you come back to your country?”

Lili lifted her chin and nodded toward me. “And how,” she’d ask, “can I take her back there now?”

At this I might look up at them. “Take me where?” I’d ask my mother in English.

“You see!” Lili would say, and throw her hands into the air. “She doesn’t even know where anymore!”

In the summertime they dragged blankets onto the balcony, strung up mosquito netting, and slept outside. The fog was always heaviest in the summer, but on those rare clear summer nights Lili would point toward the San Francisco skyline and ask, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“But do you remember when we slept on the rooftops in Tehran?”

“Of course,” Lili answered, “but look how beautiful it is here!”

Kobra would glance, reluctantly, toward the city. “Yes, but if I stay here I will get sick,” she swore, “and I will die in this place.”

The sound of their voices, the roll and the lilt of Persian, and all their squabbling and confiding were never as close as when we were in the car on one of our road trips. Once a year Lili plotted a course to the relatives—the cousins and second cousins and fourth cousins once removed—who now lived scattered along the state. She’d load up the Buick (for such long journeys the Cadillac could not be trusted) and the three of us would head south toward Los Angeles.

It was a style of travel well suited to my mother and my grandmother. Iranian pop music blaring from the tape deck, they gossiped and bickered their way through pounds of sunflower seeds and pistachio nuts. “I’m bored!” I’d holler from the backseat. My mother would hand me a sheet of
lavashak,
a kind of Iranian fruit roll-up, or else a handful of pistachios and tell me to look out the window at America. I’d sulk awhile and then go back to reading a book, oblivious, then, to the imprint of their language on mine and their country on the only homeland I recognized as my own.

The summer of the salamanders, Kobra and I moved to the house in Tiburon and Lili moved into Casa Buena by herself. For some weeks—exactly how many I couldn’t be sure—Lili and I went home only to grab some clothes or collect the stacks of unopened mail. But now Kobra had come from Iran to stay with us and the house was hers and mine and Johann’s.

On the day of our return, I left my grandmother in the kitchen and went to the backyard by myself. The grass had grown as yellow and dry as straw and it scratched my ankles to walk through it. I slipped off my sandals and sat at the edge of the pool and looked down into the water.