Digging To America Part 9

Pardon? A woman. My friend Kari.

Mama. Mama. Mom. Can me and Susan I'm having a conversation, Jin-Ho. So, Maryam, is there ever an occasion when you have dinner with just a man?

Maryam felt taken aback. She said, Are you talking about a ... date? Goodness, no.

I don't know why not, Bitsy said. You're a very attractive woman.

I'm past all that, Maryam said flatly. It's too much work. But you surely don't think my father would be work, Bitsy said. Your father?

Mama, can me and Susan make popcorn?

I am talking, Jin-Ho. Bitsy set a gla.s.s of iced tea in front of Maryam. She hadn't filled her own gla.s.s, but she didn't seem to realize that. She sat down opposite Maryam. My father thinks you're wonderful, she said.

Well ... and I think he's very nice.

Would you ever go out to dinner with him?

Maryam blinked.

He doesn't know I'm asking this. He'd be mortified if he knew! But you're so ... Well, face it, Maryam: you can be fairly daunting. If we waited for him to get up the courage to ask you himself, we'd be waiting forever!

Maryam said, Oh, I He's been mooning over you for months, Bitsy said. She leaned forward, clasping her hands on the table. Her eyes had grown round and shiny. Don't tell me you haven't noticed, she said.

You must be mistaken, Maryam said, at the same time realizing that Bitsy was probably right. All those coincidental encounters, the way he kept hanging about, the goodbyes that took forever ... She sighed and sat straighter in her chair. Let's talk about your new baby, she said. Ziba says you've heard from the Chinese adoption people.

Bitsy said, Oh, yes, the . . . But clearly her mind was not on the adoption people. She stayed frozen in her earnest pose, fingers still interlaced and her gaze fixed on something inward.

They have a child picked out for you, I understand?

Yes, a ... girl. She appeared to collect her thoughts, finally. Well, of course a girl, she said. That's almost always the case. But still we have a long wait. Probably till next spring, can you believe it? Our daughter's going to be ten or twelve months old before we set eyes on her, and meanwhile there she is! All alone in that big orphanage!

And so on and so forth, all the niggling requirements and rules and regulations. Maryam took a sip of her iced tea. The girls were on the back porch now, playing with a toy that tinkled out a tinny version of Old MacDonald. The afternoon sun sent a dusty slant of gold across the tiles, and the kitchen seemed safe and peaceful once again.

At dinner that night, Maryam asked Kari, Do you ever feel exposed because you're not half of a couple?

Kari said, Exposed?

I mean, oh, not threatened; I don't mean that, but vulnerable? Unprotected? Anyone can walk up to you and just ... invite you out on a date!

Horrors, Kari said, and she laughed. But then immediately she grew serious again, so that Maryam suspected she understood what she had been asked. She must; she was a beautiful, fine-boned woman with hauntingly shadowed eyes. Men surely invited her out all the time, although she had never mentioned it. I tell them my culture forbids it, she said.

Maryam said, You don't! because she'd always felt that Kari was about as liberated as a woman could get.

I say, 'Pardon? Go out? With a male person? Oh, my goodness!' I say, 'It's clear you don't know I'm a widow.' They say, 'Oh. Uh . . .' because of course they do know, but now they're wondering if there's some primitive Turkish taboo that they weren't aware of.

I should do that, Maryam said, only half joking.

It was probably too late, though. Oh, why had she labored all these years to appear so a.s.similated, so modern and enlightened? Take up wearing a veil, Kari suggested.

But she was laughing again, and so Maryam laughed too and went back to studying her menu.

It was Sami and Ziba's turn to host the Arrival Party. Ziba had grand plans, it emerged. I'm thinking about a whole roast lamb, she told Maryam after work one day. Wouldn't that be impressive? You know our Greek friends, Nick and Sofia: they did that for their Easter. Nick dug a hole in their backyard and their auto mechanic made them the spit. We could borrow it, they say. Don't you think?

That sounds like a lot of trouble, Maryam said.

I don't mind the trouble!

And a lot of food, too. How many people are coming?

Oh, tons of people; you know how it is. Well, only two of my brothers this year, as it happens; but also their wives, and three of their children, and my parents. And all those d.i.c.kinsons and Donaldsons or Mac and Abe, at least, and Bitsy's father ...

Still, a whole lamb! Maryam said.

But Ziba seemed to be following some other train of thought now. She was gazing at Maryam with a speculative expression. In fact, she said, I think her father would come even if you were the only one here. A dimple showed up in one cheek. Especially if you were the only one here.

It sounds as if you've been listening to Bitsy, Maryam said drily. I don't need to hear it from Bitsy! Any idiot can see how he feels.

Well, this is not a subject that interests me, Maryam told her. She took her handbag from the couch.

Ziba said, Oh, Mari -june. He's such a kind man, and he always seems so lost. Besides, think how convenient this would be for our two families. Couldn't you just go to dinner with him?

Maryam stopped digging through her bag for her keys. She said, For heaven's sake, Ziba! Why would you suggest such a thing?

Why wouldn't I suggest it? You're alone; he's alone ... I'm Iranian; he's American . . .

What difference does that make?

You should have been at Farah's with me, Maryam told her. Then you wouldn't ask. Such a point her husband makes about her foreignness! It seems she's not really Farah at all; she's Madame Iran.

Dave wouldn't do that.

Oh, no? 'Tell me,' she said, putting on an earnest tone of voice, 'what are your people's folktales, Maryam? What are your local customs? Tell me your quaint superst.i.tions.'

He did not say that.

Well, almost, Maryam said. She had her keys in hand now. She said, Anyhow, I'm off. Susie -june? Susan? I'm going.

Susan didn't answer. She was singing a song from Sesame Street as she rode her rocking horse.

See you Thursday, Maryam told Ziba.

But this Ziba was so stubborn. Following Maryam to the front hall, she said, I'm not asking you to marry him.

Ziba! Enough!

Or to have a romantic relationship, even. Why, people go to dinner all the time in this country! It doesn't have to lead anywhere. But you don't understand that, because your own marriage was arranged and you never had the chance just to see a movie with a man or grab a hamburger with him.

There was a great deal that Maryam could have said to this, but she merely waved a hand and stepped out the door. Ordinarily they would have kissed cheeks. Not today. She clicked down the front walk. She could sense Ziba watching after her but she didn't turn around.

What she could have said to Ziba was: her marriage may have been arranged, but it was nothing like what everyone imagined.

She had been the most Westernized of young women, the most freethinking and forward-looking. She attended the University of Tehran but she hardly had time for her cla.s.ses because of her political activities. This was when the Shah was still very much in power the Shah and his dreaded secret police. There were terrible, terrible stories. Maryam attended clandestine meetings and carried tightly folded messages from one hiding place to another. She was thinking she might join the Communist Party. Then she was arrested, along with two young men, while the three of them were distributing leaflets around campus. The young men were kept several days but Maryam's Uncle Ha.s.san arranged for her release within the hour. She wasn't sure how he accomplished it. No doubt there was much head-shaking and cluck-clucking and offering of cigarettes from his flat silver cigarette case. Money changed hands too, probably. Or maybe not; Maryam's family had influence.

But not influence enough, they told her not if she went on behaving like this, endangering herself and all of them as well. Her mother took to her bed and her uncles stormed and shouted. They talked about making her drop out of the university altogether. They considered sending her to Paris, where her second cousin Kaveh was studying science. Maybe she could marry him. She would have to marry someone.

Then their neighbor, Mrs. Hamidi, mentioned her friend's son. He was a doctor in America, a pathologist with a good-paying nine-to-five job and no on-calls, and he happened to be home right now for a three-week visit. His mother thought it was time he got married. She had been introducing him to various young women even though he said he wasn't interested.

Mrs. Hamidi came to tea, bringing her friend and the friend's son, Kiyan. He was a tall, stooped, serious man in a dark gray business suit, and to Maryam he had seemed quite old, it amused her now to recall. (He'd been all of twenty-eight.) But she liked his face. He had thick eyebrows and a large, imposing nose, and the corners of his mouth gave away his thoughts, mostly turning downward at the older women's insinuations but once or twice twitching upward when Maryam made some caustic response. She could tell that Kiyan's mother found her impertinent, but what did she care? She was planning to marry for love, perhaps when she was thirty.

The women discussed the weather, which was warming up early this year. Maryam's mother announced that her rosebushes had begun to send out green shoots. Everybody's eyes traveled to Maryam and Kiyan, who had been nudged into adjacent chairs at the start of the visit. Maryam jon, her mother said in honeyed tones, wouldn't you like to show Agha Doctor the roses?

Maryam sighed audibly and stood up. Kiyan made a grumbling noise but he stood too.

As in every living room that Maryam had ever seen, the dozens of straight-backed chairs lining the walls framed a giant square of empty s.p.a.ce, and she and Kiyan had to cross this s.p.a.ce in order to leave. When they reached the center, some demon seized her and she stopped short, turned toward all those staring women, and performed a s.n.a.t.c.h of the Charleston the part where the hands crisscross saucily over the knees. Not a person moved. Maryam turned and walked on out, followed by Kiyan.

In the courtyard, she gestured toward the scratchy bare shrubs and said, Notice the roses.

The corners of Kiyan's lips were twitching upward again, she saw.

Also the fountain, the jasmine, the full moon, and the nightingale, she said.

There was no moon, of course, and no nightingale either, but she flung one arm toward where they might have been.

Kiyan said, I'm sorry about this.

She turned to look at him more closely.

It wasn't my idea, he said.

He had the faintest difference in his speech. It was not a real accent, and it was certainly not an affectation. (Unlike the speech of her cousin Amin, who had returned from America pretending such an unfamiliarity with Farsi that he had once referred to a rooster as the husband of the hen.) But you could tell that Kiyan was out of practice with his native tongue. This made him seem less authoritative, and younger than she had first thought. She found herself warming to him. She said, It wasn't my idea either.

Somehow I guessed that, he said, and this time the corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.

They sat down on a stone bench and discussed what had happened to the country since he had been away. I hear there have been demonstrations against our mighty Shah of Shahs, he said. My, what bad, rude people, and the two of them dissolved in silent laughter. They exchanged their views about politics, and human rights, and the status of women. On every issue they agreed. They interrupted each other to spill out their tumbles of thoughts. Then after half an hour or so Kiyan c.o.c.ked his head toward the house, and she followed his eyes and saw three of her aunts cl.u.s.tered at a window. When the aunts realized they had been noticed, they shrank hastily out of sight. Kiyan grinned at Maryam. We've given them quite a thrill, he said.

Maryam said, Poor old things.

Let's go to a movie tomorrow. They'll be in heaven.

She laughed and said, Why not?

They went to a movie the next evening, and to a kebab house the day after that a university holiday and that evening to a party at the home of one of his friends. This happened to be a period when young women had more freedom than at any other time before or after, in spite of Maryam's complaints, and her family thought nothing of letting her go unchaperoned. Besides, it was understood that Kiyan's intentions were honorable. He and Maryam would almost surely be getting married.

But they had no interest in marrying. They agreed that marriage was limiting and confining, a state that people settled for when they wanted to reproduce.

At night she began to feel his presence in her dreams. He never physically appeared, but she caught a whiff of his nutmeg scent; she felt his looming height beside her as she walked; she was conscious of his particular grave, amused regard.

It was unfortunate that by the time they first met, he had already been in the country for five days of the twenty-one planned. The end of his visit drew closer. The women in Maryam's family became more anxious, their questions more pointed. A hopeful-looking uncle or two began popping into view any time Kiyan paid a call.

Maryam pretended not to notice. She acted breezy and unconcerned.

One day after her English cla.s.s she was descending a long flight of steps with two friends when she caught sight of Kiyan waiting at the bottom. Spring had backed off somewhat, and he wore a casual brown corduroy jacket with the collar turned up. It made him look very American, all at once; very other. He was gazing away from her toward some people boarding a bus. The sight of his strong, p.r.o.nounced profile sent a knife of longing straight through her.

He turned then and saw her, and he watched without smiling as she approached. When they were face-to-face, he told her, Maybe we should do what they want.

She said, All right.

You would come with me to America?

She said, I would come.

They set off walking together, Maryam hugging her books to her chest and Kiyan keeping his hands deep in his jacket pockets.

As it happened, there was no way she could go with him when he left, a mere four days later. They had a long-distance ceremony that June Kiyan in Baltimore on the phone, Maryam in Tehran in her Western-style floor-length wedding dress with guests from both families surrounding her. The next evening, she left for America. Her mother held a Koran above Maryam's head as Maryam walked out the front door of the family compound, and all the women were crying. You would never guess that they had been praying for this to happen since the day she was arrested.

She had not been one of those Iranians who viewed America as the Promised Land. To her and her university friends, the U. S. was the great disappointer the democracy that had, to their mystification, worked to sh.o.r.e up the monarchy back when the Shah was in trouble. So she set out for her new country half excited and half resistant. (But underneath, shamefully rejoicing that she would never have to attend another political meeting.) The main thing was, she was joining Kiyan. Not even her closest girlfriends knew how Kiyan had grown to fill every inch of her head. When she stepped into the Baltimore airport and saw him waiting, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that showed his unfamiliar, thin arms, she experienced a moment of shock. Could this be the same person she had daydreamed of all these weeks?

She was nineteen years old and had never cooked a meal, or washed a floor, or driven an automobile. But clearly Kiyan took it for granted that she would somehow manage. Either he lacked the most basic sense of empathy or he had a gratifying respect for her capabilities. Sometimes she thought it was the first and sometimes the second, depending on the day. She had good days and she had bad days more of the bad, to begin with. Twice she packed to go home. Once she called him selfish and dumped a whole crock of yogurt onto his dinner plate. Couldn't he see how alone she felt, a mere woman, undefended?

Telephoning overseas was not so common back then, and so she wrote her mother letters. She wrote, I am adjusting very well and I have made several friends and I am feeling very comfortable here; and in time, that became true. She enrolled in driver's ed and earned her license; she took evening courses at Towson State; she gave her first dinner party. It began to dawn on her that Kiyan was not as acclimated to American life as she had once supposed. He dressed more formally than his colleagues, and he didn't always get their jokes, and his knowledge of colloquial English was surprisingly scanty. Instead of disenchanting her, this realization made him seem dearer. At night they slept curled together like two cashews. She loved to press her nose into the thick damp curls of hair on the back of his neck.

That part, the most powerful aunts on earth could not have arranged.

Sami said he was dubious about roasting a lamb on a spit. He worried it would disturb the neighbors. So Ziba added more dishes to the menu, and her mother came for a week and helped with the cooking. Afternoons, Maryam joined them. They peeled eggplants and mashed chickpeas and chopped onions until the tears were streaming down their cheeks. Susan was given the task of washing and soaking the rice. It touched Maryam's heart to see her standing on a chair at the sink, no bigger than a minute, wearing an ap.r.o.n that fell to her toes and concentrating importantly on stirring the rice about in its bath of cold water. While she worked she practiced the song that Bitsy was teaching the girls. Evidently Bitsy had given up trying to dissuade the welcomers from their eternal darned 'Coming Round the Mountain,' as she put it, and was focusing instead on the arrivers. She had sent away for a CD of Korean children's songs, which to her dismay turned out to have not a single word of English on either the label or the case. For all we know, these are dirges, she had complained to Ziba. But the song she had selected seemed anything but a dirge, with its jaunty, perky melody and its chorus of Oo-la-la-la-la's. Maryam found it charming, although Susan told her that she and Jin-Ho had preferred another one. She sang no more than a line of the other one Po po po, it sounded like before collapsing in a fit of giggles, for some reason. Maryam smiled at her and shook her head. She was struck by the ease with which Susan had picked up this music, as if her Korean roots ran deeper than anyone had guessed. And yet here she stood, tossing her colander of rice with the efficient, forward-swooping motion employed by every Iranian housewife.

In the intimacy of the kitchen, Mrs. Hakimi timidly ventured to call Maryam by her first name. Maryam, I don't know, does this have enough mint? she asked in Farsi. Unfortunately, Maryam couldn't think fast enough to remember Mrs. Hakimi's first name in return, but she compensated by saying, Oh, you would know far better than I using the familiar you. She wasn't sure why they were still so stiff with each other. By rights they should be as chummy now as sisters. She suspected that the Hakimis considered her too independent. Or too unsocial. Or something.

Ziba was discussing the guest list now. I wish we had more guests from our side, she said. I wish Sami had brothers and sisters. There are always so many Donaldsons! Could you invite Farah, maybe? Oh, Maryam said, well . . . And she let her voice trail away. The thing was, Farah would probably accept. And William would come with her, as long as Mercury was not retrograde or some such New Age prohibition. They would stay with Maryam for a week or more and she would have to involve herself in their many group activities. Farah got along famously with the Hakimis. The last time she was in Baltimore Maryam had had to ferry her to Washington for three separate dinner parties, in addition to giving a dinner herself to pay everybody back.

It was true that she was unsocial.

She went home that afternoon happy to be on her own, grateful for the quietness and neatness of her life. For supper she had a gla.s.s of red wine and a slice of cheddar cheese. She watched a television program on the habits of the grizzly bear.

In the middle of the program, Dave d.i.c.kinson phoned. He said, I was thinking about this weekend. Could I offer you a ride to the party?

Thank you, but It seems silly to take two cars.

But I'll have to be there early, she said, helping with the preparations.

Couldn't I help too?

No, I don't believe you could, she said. Besides, you live right there in the neighborhood. It makes no sense for you to drive over here.

He said, I guess I was just thinking it would be nice to have your company.

Thanks anyway, she said.

There was a silence.