The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (44 page)

“But would you have asked?”

“But would you have said yes?”

A dozen coy, arch answers came to mind. Inexplicably, I told him the truth. “Yes. I would have said yes.”

It was an honest but belated declaration and it belied another
truth. I hadn’t made a proper Iranian marriage and that had made everything else—graduate school, work, boyfriends, my daylong treks through New York—possible. I was not my mother’s Good Daughter or even merely a good Iranian daughter. For days at a time no one in the world, and certainly not my mother, Lili, knew where I was. I’d go home only at school holidays, just like all my American classmates, and often not even then.

The distance was a calculated one and more hard-won than I would have admitted to anyone in those days. For all the ease with which I passed as American, I hadn’t unlearned my shame or my guilt or my anger. Whenever my mother called me on the phone, we invariably bickered. Why, she’d press me, didn’t I come home to California more often? This I translated as: “When will you come home and get married?” I wasn’t always quick to call her back, even when I missed her and wished I could go back home, if only for a time.

Then one day she called to tell me my father was in the hospital. “Come,” she told me, her voice ragged. “Please come home now.”

I spent a week in my apartment in Princeton, curled up on the futon, staring at the deep green New Jersey woods and listening to my mother’s tapes. I listened as she spoke of Kobra and Sohrab, of her grandmother Khanoom and her aunt Zaynab, of Kazem and of Sara. I listened with an attention I’d rarely ever given my mother’s stories, but I still couldn’t square the tapes with the stories or the people I knew.

Then, as my mother began to tell me about Sara and the years at the Casa Buena, my memories began to thread through hers and I began to set her stories beside my own memories. Sara. She’d been the girl who’d played with me at my grandmother’s salon, the girl my grandmother had once chased from the Lady Diola with her
shrieks and her cries. Sara was the daughter my mother had lost, not once but many times, until she finally became a story to tell me, her strange American daughter in a strange, broken-down place.

I skipped classes and played my mother’s tapes a second and even a third time through. The thin, broken voice that I’d scarcely recognized as hers grew more familiar, for a time, than her “real” voice and more familiar, really, than even my own voice. Very slowly, I began to understand that when my mother had sheltered me so fiercely as a child and then later as a young woman it was because of this daughter, the daughter she’d left in Iran and had never been able to forget in America. The Good Daughter.

Still, there was so much I couldn’t understand. I called my mother once, intending to ask her questions about Sara—how it had felt to leave her behind in Iran, whether they’d spoken in recent years, and if she wished she could see Sara again—but the truth had made us shy of each other and when we spoke on the phone afterward it was as if all her words had already been spent and she just couldn’t tell me any more.

I didn’t press her. I’d begun to feel a strange new tenderness toward my mother. It would make me kinder, if not always kind enough, and for now this kindness meant I’d have to make sense of the story without her.

I decided to call my grandmother in Tehran. She listened quietly as I told her about the tapes. When I finished, Kobra said, “You should come to Iran.” By then my grandmother was too old to travel to America anymore. I hadn’t seen her in almost ten years, and after so much time I couldn’t tell the difference between sadness and old age in her voice. “You should come here,” she told me that day. Sara, she continued, had a son and two daughters of her own. Her husband was kind and she was happy. “You should see your country,
madar-joon
. You should see your family.”

I didn’t know how to answer. It still seemed incredible that I had a sister. If I saw Sara on the streets of Tehran, I wouldn’t know her
from all the women there. What claim could we have to each other after all this time? What would she think of me if we met now? These thoughts overwhelmed me and I pushed them from my mind. Nearly as unsettling was my grandmother’s notion that Iran was “my country,” a place I could still call home. In all these years of living in America, I’d never really thought about going back to the place where I was born. “There’s nothing left to see,” my mother often told me when I was growing up, and I’d always believed her.

For years my Iran had been a place in California, a place made up of women and their stories. When I thought of my family’s first years in America, it was mostly the sadness of these women that I remembered, the sadness that clung to them and then trailed their daughters as they made their own way in this country. That was Iran to me, and I wanted no part of that Iran.

But even if I did not want to think of it, there was always another Iran, an Iran as far away as the shrouded, angry figures on our American TV screen and as close as the sounds of my grandmother’s and mother’s voices waking me late at night.

Some years—like the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war—it was impossible to get a call through to Tehran. Night after night Kobra and Lili stayed up long past midnight, dialing and redialing an endless stream of numbers. When they finally managed to reach someone “over there,” they always shouted—as if this were the only way their voices could be heard across such distances.

Their voices would often wake me, and I’d stumble into the living room and settle onto Kobra’s lap. I’d listen as she cried into the receiver, her voice brimming. I didn’t know what lay on the other side of those late-night calls, but what I could see even back then was the quiet grief that hung about my grandmother’s eyes the next morning. Sitting with a glass of tea cupped between two hands or working a knife over a pile of herbs, she’d look out the window and fix her eyes on a place I couldn’t see.

In the end my grandmother Kobra preferred to go back to Iran rather than to stay here looking across that emptiness. But my mother Lili was never like that. Her eyes never fell away to the distance. When her friends began making trips back to Iran in the early nineties, they’d come back invigorated by their returns and eager to tell her about their time there. My mother remained unmoved. Her eyes simply didn’t look toward what she had left behind.

But now, after listening to the tapes, I began to remember other things about my mother Lili. I thought back to all the nights when the house had been completely still and I’d fumbled downstairs and found the light from her bedroom spilling out into the hallway carpet. Behind the door I’d hear her sobbing. All that time, she’d been crying for her daughter, her Good Daughter, and I had not known.

That summer, the summer after the tapes, my mother began to show me her treasures.

First came the
sheleeteh
, the flounced apricot-colored skirt her grandmother Pargol had worn the day she left her village and moved to Tehran in the early 1900s. I spread it across my lap and smoothed its pleats. The hem was frayed, the clasps were missing, and the cotton had grown thin and even transparent in places.

A few days later my mother handed me the antique Chinese bowl her father, Sohrab, had filled with honeydews and tangerines for her wedding to Kazem. More than forty years had passed, yet it was still exquisite but for a nick along its rim.

She brought me a cloth-bound journal. She lifted the cover, revealing split seams, yellowed pages, red-lettered poems, and entries written in black.

She showed me a half-gold, half-turquoise fountain pen, a gift from the boy who’d once written her beautiful letters and shaved
his hair off like Yul Brynner and who now lay buried not four hundred miles away from where we were.

Next came the photographs.

“Look,” she told me one day in early June. She fanned them out on the table and then she handed them to me one by one. The first was a black-and-white photograph of a girl. Hair bobbed and face in shadows, she stood on what looked to be a rooftop. At her feet, bundled in blankets, there lay a baby in a
nanoo
, a simple metal cradle. I studied the girl in that photograph. She was so young, barely fourteen years old, but already she knew everything she would need to know: how to swallow a cry before it came.

The next photograph, also black and white, showed a young woman. Her hair was long and straight with a fringe. She did not smile. My mother said nothing, but I knew her. Sara.

If my mother and I had stayed in Iran, our lives would have been folded together eventually—somehow I was sure of this—but when we came to America Sara became The Good Daughter and I became an American girl and now I wondered if I would ever know her apart from that divide.

“Look here,” Lili told me, interrupting my thoughts.

The last photographs she showed me—glossy studio portraits of a bride and groom, a picture of a young man standing on a beach in a black T-shirt and aviator glasses, and a photo of a girl on a busy city street—were much more recent. “Sara’s boy,” Lili said with a smile as she handed me the photograph of the young man. “And that’s her youngest one,” Lili told me, pointing to a girl with dimples and black ringlets peeking out from her green head scarf. “They always told me she looked just like me, and I suppose there is something there….” She touched the photograph very gently, tracing the girl’s face with her fingertips. “You know, she called me last year and asked my permission to marry.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I wished her happiness,” Lili said quietly. “What else could I do?”

She studied the photographs for another moment and then quickly cleared them from the table and shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Enough of this, enough of the past.”

I said nothing more, but the pictures of Sara and her children unsettled me. Until that moment, I’d imagined that Sara belonged to my mother’s memories and not at all to me, just as I believed that Iran itself did not belong to me. Now, suddenly, I began to picture myself descending on the streets of Tehran, alone and veiled, to seek out Sara and her family. We’d find a way to each other. We would know each other after all.

But I never returned to Iran. I never sought Sara out. I told myself I was too busy with my studies and then, later, with work. I told myself I’d go just as soon as the political tensions between America and Iran eased. Really, though, I was afraid. Besides, Sara had always known about me and yet she had never tried to contact me. If I tried to find her now, I’d only be intruding on the life she had made for herself. It was childish of me to think I could feel at home with her in Iran after all this time. Still, I couldn’t quite give up the possibility of returning to Iran and meeting her.
Next year
, I’d promise myself,
next year I will go back
.

Later, Lili would tell me that for thirty years, as the divide between Iran and America deepened, she had made the same promise to herself. Even when she was long past believing it, she would continue to promise herself she’d return. That promise, the occasional, strained late-night phone conversation with Sara, and a handful of pictures of the grandchildren Lili had never met had, finally, become her Iran.

The truth was that my mother Lili didn’t believe the past could be recovered, no matter how much time had gone by. For years she had wanted only to forget, to make a new life in this country. In this, and so much else, I realized, we’d always been the same.

I’d wonder, though, why she’d decided to send me the tapes. No one in America, not even one of her friends here, knew about her first marriage or her daughter in Iran. Maybe, I thought, the burden of her secret had grown too heavy over the years and in telling it to me she’d hoped to free herself of its weight. Or perhaps she did it as a way of claiming me back. After all, it was just the two of us left in America after my father’s death and we’d never been further apart.

That truth came out only some years later, when I at last began to make sense of my mother’s stories by shaping them into my own words. I learned that she’d always meant to tell me about her life and Kobra’s and Sara’s, but she’d waited until she guessed I was ready to listen. Some stories, my mother taught me, only happen like that. They wait for the one who can hear them before they let themselves be told.

“Tea?” Lili asked me when she’d slipped the photographs of Sara and her children back into an album that day.

I nodded. “Yes,” I answered.

When she left, I looked about the room. The old marble-topped buffet from the living room now served as a makeshift desk. It was piled high with bills. Without a proper kitchen she’d taken to burning her wild rue over a hot plate. All her fine silk Persian carpets, I saw, lay heaped atop one another, three and four deep. She’d most likely have to sell them off soon. But when she brought me a cup of tea, the scent filled the room and I knew at once that its leaves had been steeped in the old way, the Iranian way, with rose essence and cardamom pods, and I knew that whatever else she’d had to give away, she’d managed to keep her beautiful brass samovar.

My pleasure in these familiar Iranian gestures—and also in the honest, if tentative, new intimacy between us—would surprise and soothe me that summer. I felt safe in that small, crowded, makeshift house of hers. Safer than I’d felt in many years and grateful for the first time to have come back home.

“Thank you,
maman-joon
,” I told her as I reached to take a cup from the tray.

She smiled gently at me. “You’re welcome,
dokhtaram
, my daughter.”

I tucked a sugar cube into my cheek, held the cup in two hands, and took a sip of tea. It was then that I looked out the window and noticed the flowers. All along the garden wall she’d planted vines for herself. Morning glory and honeysuckle, nasturtium and jasmine. She hadn’t bothered with pots. No, my mother Lili still had too much faith in her for that. The vines would soon outgrow the pots—she’d been absolutely certain of it—and so she’d just planted the seeds straight into the ground, from one end of the garden to the other. And she’d been right. The roots had taken well, all of them. It wasn’t quite summer, but already the sun had coaxed blooms from the vines and sent their beauty tumbling clear over the garden wall.