Hadi, however, never relented. I had gone against his orders and his increasingly rigid values. My real conflict was not with Baba, who was showing more flexibility, but with my second father.
ANOTHER BATTLE AT HOME
The wind shook the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, and, as I walked up three steps to our front door, I could see my bedroom light was on. The moon’s lime-colored light wasn’t helping me to get my key into the front door lock. A cold wind kept blowing my scarf out of place, and my spine quivered.
The brother of an Iranian friend had given me a ride home after my girlfriend and I had spent the evening studying together. Because Hadi had been monitoring my behavior closely, I had asked my friend to drop me off a few houses down from ours, just in case the men in my family were home and looking out the window.
When I entered the room, I found Hadi lying on top of his bed covers, watching our favorite show, “Cheers.” He sat up and turned off the TV. “You’re fifteen and you were in a car with a guy? Alone? I give you rides everywhere. Why didn’t you give me a call to pick you up?”
“I didn’t want to bother you, besides my friend’s brother offered.” I took off my scarf. My knees would buckle around Baba when he was this angry, but I wasn’t going to take this from Hadi. “He’s my good friend’s brother. We’re just friends, and he lives up the street. What’s the problem?” I knew he was thinking about Zain and the blonde. This was not even close. “It was just a ride.”
“I’m older than you. I drive you to school. I solve your problems. I talk to you about your schoolwork. I tell you what to do. I do this for your own good. Going to work was bad enough, but what you just did is totally out of line.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “I did nothing wrong. Even Baba doesn’t act like this. You’re not my father, Hadi. Even Baba trusts me. Why are you questioning me?”
My ears rang and I saw a blast of white light. As the sharp pain and the high-pitched ringing in my ear began to clear, I shook my head and opened my eyes to the realization that I had just been hit. It felt like the wind knocked me over, and the bright light blocked my vision. I had never been struck by anyone before. Baba had never hit me, or any of us, since the day he slapped Abdollah.
My vision came back slowly and I was holding my cheek when the rage left Hadi’s eyes. I ran out of the house and refused to come back inside.
At 9:00 p.m. when I was still sitting in the family car, Baba knocked on the window. “I’ll talk to him. He’ll apologize. I’m not leaving the car until you come inside.”
“He won’t apologize, and I’m not coming in while Hadi’s there. He’s out of control.”
Maman’s voice was soft. “You can’t sleep in the car, azizam. Hadi only wants the best for you and he must have been scared to see you with a guy. He must have been worried about your safety.”
When I began shouting and sobbing that I hadn’t done anything wrong and that I would never talk to Hadi again, Maman admitted it was wrong of him to hit me, but she asked me to forgive him and allow him to explain.
I spent the night in the car. With Baba.
What Maman and Baba didn’t realize was that Hadi had no intention of explaining or apologizing. After school the next day, I arrived home to the sound of the vacuum. Baba, a man I had never seen hold a cleaning appliance, kept pushing the vacuum over the same spot.
“Baba what’s wrong? Chie?” He turned his face away and moved the vacuum to the other room. He was crying.
In the kitchen, Maman was crying too. “Hadi moved out today.” She offered me a kiss, but hugged me instead. “He said he doesn’t know when he’ll come back.”
Even though Hadi and Baba argued constantly about business, when Hadi found another place to live, Baba cried for three days. That night, I heard him on the phone: “When are you coming home? Why are you there? Who are these people you’re with? What’s your plan for work, for a living situation, for marriage? Come back and let’s work together again. The market is better now. Come back and do whatever you want. Just be under this roof with us. Come home. Please.”
Maman’s questions were different: “What are you eating? Do you need fried onions or dried fruits or homemade jam?” She had frozen bags of food to give him when he visited.
As angry as I was, I still found myself in the role of peacemaker, reassuring my parents that Hadi needed to have his own place. Hadi was twenty-one, past the launching age in America, and it was 1990. If he was going to become someone other than another version of Baba, he had to do it outside of the house. Meanwhile, when Hadi came by, I went into another room; if he called, I refused to talk to him. I missed him terribly, but I was determined to wait him out for an apology.
Eight months later, I had the best day ever in high school. First, a rose, then, a balloon and a note arrived in my classroom. In the note, Hadi had reconstructed his last eight months out of the house, how he had taken my hairbrush with him so he would remember me and be reminded of what he had done, how he had thought of me everyday, and wondered, could I ever forgive him?
After I finished reading the letter, I ran out of class, unable to control my tears. I left school early that day, and walked home, hoping to find Hadi waiting for me.
In front of our house, I stopped in my tracks. A shiny black VW Corrado with black interior was parked near our driveway. If I dreamed of cars, the Corrado was my dream car. There was a perfect new Corrado, with a big red ribbon on its hood and the driver’s door open. As I walked past it, my eyes glued to the shiny hood reflecting the bright sunlight, I wondered which neighbor had made the purchase.
“What do you think?” Suddenly, Hadi stepped out from beside the car. I jumped in shock, my mouth open, and then I ran into his arms and he lifted me up in a great hug.
“Thank you for my rose. It’s beautiful.”
Hadi kissed my cheek, and after lowering me down, guided me toward the Corrado. “Take a seat,” Hadi helped me sit in the car before he closed the door with a gentle click.
I inhaled the fresh car smell. The dashboard was beautiful, the leather steering wheel shiny, and the black striped fabric of the seat like velvet on my back. “Take it for a ride.” Hadi said.
“What?”
“It’s yours, baby sister!”
“No, no, I can’t take it. This is too much. And I don’t know how to drive a stick.”
“I’m going to teach you,” Hadi’s smile widened as he sat in the passenger seat.
The car was great, but the best news was that Hadi, who had now officially moved out and changed his name to Todd – a change I could not quite accept – had made some other changes, too. In the eight months that he had been gone, he had lived with a few different friends, started to date, and shaved off the black beard. When he visited on the weekends now, we were hopeful our real brother, not the dictatorial bully, was returning to us.
Now, thanks to Hadi, I had wheels; I was making money and I was on track to graduate from high school at sixteen years old, finally free from the torment of other teenagers and the gloom that followed me everywhere. I was going to college in the fall. Things were looking up.
With Hadi now living out of the house, Baba turned his attention to Zain, who was assimilating deeper into the Wild West. But, instead of leaving home as Hadi had done, Zain brought the West home to us.
The next crisis took an unexpected form, shapely and blonde.
When Maman and I snuck Shanna, Zain’s seventeen-year-old, blonde, American girlfriend into his room, we hid her from Baba as long as we could. Each day, Maman knocked softly and entered with a serving tray with sabzi, Persian hot tea, and turmeric chicken sprinkled with barberry rice, Shanna’s favorite. Maman had defended Zain’s mullet haircut, but defending this new secret was entirely different. Before I entered the kitchen where the yelling and screaming shook the walls and rattled the cups in their saucers, I paused for a deep breath.
“We have no choice. They want to be together.” Maman placed a cup of tea i
n front of Baba.
The chair screeched as Baba ignored the tea, pushed away from the table, and stood, staring into the yard. “This is a mistake. He’s eighteen. He doesn’t know anything. Today, it’s a blonde girl named Shanna, tomorrow it will be another. If he is not married to the right woman, his life will be ruined.”
“They love each other. We need to accept it.”
Baba slammed his fist on the table. “I will not. I cannot. I will not sell my son out to his hormones… It’s my own fault for bringing them here.” I could hear the pain in Baba’s voice. Not only did he carry the guilt for Abdollah’s death, but had that trauma not caused our exile to America, my brothers would have never been exposed to dancing, non-Muslim women and a host of other forbidden things. They would be good Muslim businessmen in Mashhad, married to women approved by the family.
“I am responsible for this.” Baba started pacing. “I have to put a stop to it.”
“It’s too late, Haji. They’re married.”
Baba stopped moving, and then he slammed his fist against the wall, causing a picture to crash and break.
After a long silence, Maman took a deep breath. “And they’re going to have a baby.”
The door to the kitchen shook as Baba slammed it on his way out. Maman put her hand on the shaking panel to settle it. Fear filled the house.
Maman and I looked at each other. We both knew Baba was right. Zain wasn’t ready. On Zain’s face was the same reflection I had seen in the mirror at Abdollah’s wedding: an unsure, unhappy adolescent. During Shanna’s pregnancy, Zain had denied the baby was his, fell in love with Shanna again for a few days, and then rejected her, claiming she was trying to trap him.
Later that afternoon, there was a strange sound emanating from under my parents’ closed bedroom door. I froze. Baba was wailing and slapping himself so hard that the clamor made the door vibrate. But his anger and pain didn’t last too long.
With the birth of Baba’s first grandchild, for a brief moment, our family was living a bit of the American Dream. Maybe Zain wasn’t ready for parenthood, but Baba was ready for grandparenthood. When baby Zahra’s tiny fist gripped Baba’s index finger, and he whispered a prayer of safety first in her right ear and then her left and kissed her forehead, our once totally sealed homogenous Iranian family was officially integrated. For a short time, Zain was like an American television version of a dad, smitten with Zahra and back in love with his young wife – briefly.
Meanwhile, instead of being married as many of my Iranian cousins had been at sixteen, I was gliding along in my Corrado to an American four-year college, the first in my family to attend university. Hadi was in his own apartment, establishing himself independently of our family, and, unbeknownst to any of us, already scheming to specialize in business and restore the family fortune in this land of opportunity. We weren’t completely assimilated into the host culture – Maman only spoke ten words of English: “I don’t speak English well,” “Please,” “Thank you,” and “Excuse me” – but there was progress.
THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
Our American dream was short-lived. In the middle of one fall night, there was a great commotion outside the house – it seem unreal. I looked out the window and saw a man towing away my new Corrado.
While America had seemed a land of opportunity in some ways – Baba’s swift rise in business, echoed by Hadi’s mysterious but lucrative dealings – it had equally swift crashes. The bubble of prosperity broke without warning, at midnight. As if in a nightmare, the metal claws snatched the car, and away it went.
The repo man had the legal repossession papers. Hadi‘s impulse had been just that: an impulse. He had no money for the payments. This was the beginning of a pattern for Hadi, who often hung by his fingernails at the edge of a financial cliff, a replica of Baba’s magical financing. Hadi mimicked our father in both in asserting his power and strictness, and in his grandiose dreams that would rise and then crash.
By the close of 1992, just before Zahra’s first birthday, my proud father, who had built an impressive financial base in Iran from his start as a street vendor and a profitable carpet business in his new country from being a penniless immigrant, went bankrupt.
He watched the fruits of all his hard labor disappear as his carpet business failed, and we lost our home to the bank. Frustrated and ashamed at having to accept help from the community, Baba began living paycheck to paycheck as an employee of the new owner of his former store, and we moved to the first of a series of rental properties.
When Maman wasn’t in despair over the loss of yet another home, my parents argued bitterly over Zain’s failure to take responsibility for his new family. Despite the initial bliss of fatherhood, once his life settled in, Zain felt that he was imprisoned forever. Worse, however, was the rollercoaster ride of violent mood swings that featured partying and prolonged disappearances.
Zain left the responsibility for taking care of his wife and daughter to us. Now with a son who was shirking his responsibility, Baba felt shame and disgrace in the community where he had preached the value of marriage and family.
And, although we were legal in the U.S., our green card application had been delayed for the sixth year, and Maman was deeply depressed, homesick for her mother and sisters in Iran. Unable to mourn for Abdollah at home with her family, or to realize her dream of placing her palm on his tombstone in Mashhad, Maman suffered renewed long crying spells that threatened her health and frightened us all.
Just when we believed our lives could not get any worse, they did.
History was about to repeat itself.
NOW – IN THE PAST
One bright Saturday morning, I heard a car screech to a halt in front of our house. Sirens blared while red and blue lights flashed on top of the car. From my second floor window, I could see a squad car – “Irvine Police Department” written on the side – and two uniformed police officers who alighted and stood outside. One officer had his hand on his gun, his posture rigid, as he called out, “Open the door!”
I ran downstairs without my scarf.
“Who is it?” Baba yelled with his thick accent, alarmed as he squinted through the peephole of our front door.
Baba, as usual, was calm, at first. “Rahimeh, come translate.”
The heavy knock now shaking our heavy, wooden door pushed me back a step. I wanted to yell for Hadi and Iman, but a weekend movie marathon of Clint Eastwood and Police Academy had kept them up all night and they had just gone to bed after their morning prayers.
“Is your son home, sir?”
Baba looked at me.
I grabbed Maman’s scarf and joined him. “I have many brothers, sir. Which one are you speaking of?”
“Your family owns the white Toyota Tercel that’s parked outside, right? The Tercel with the tinted windows and chrome wheels? I need to talk to the boy who drives that car.”
They were not here for Hadi for his unpaid speeding tickets or for Zain for driving under the influence. They were looking for Iman. Iman, who was the obedient and observant one who, at sixteen, never broke the rules, never called attention to himself, and was living the life Baba had wished for Abdollah.
I stepped forward and began to speak. “Our car doesn’t have tinted windows or chrome wheels; it’s the basic model.” A speed junkie like his brothers, Iman had been pulled over a few times for weaving in and out of traffic. I gathered that the Irvine police had already identified our white Toyota Tercel and its Middle Eastern-looking driver.
The first cop removed a notepad from his back pocket. “Do you know where your brother was last night at midnight?”
“Yes, he was with me and my other two brothers. We were watching movies at home like we do every Friday night.” I glanced toward the second floor. “What is the problem, sir?”
“Well, that’s not what I think he did last night. Is he home?” As I translated, Baba and Maman grew alarmed. They had never been this close to American policemen.
; “We just need to talk to him, ask him some questions. Okay?” A second cop spoke softly as he took his hand off his gun. “Just for a few minutes.”
They wanted to question Iman about a crime the night before involving two teenagers who had attacked and robbed two Caucasian kids behind the Albertsons grocery store near our house. Because it was dark, the victims had not gotten a good look at the attackers, but had identified them as Hispanic teenagers and the getaway car as a white Toyota Tercel with chrome wheels and tinted windows. It didn’t matter that our car did not match the description, and Iman was Iranian not Hispanic, the officers seemed sure they had come to the right place for the suspect.
When Maman walked down the stairs with Iman, I explained that it must be a case of mistaken identity. Besides, Iman also had an alibi; he had been with us. When the cop saw Iman walking toward him, he put the notepad away.
Smoothing his hair and rubbing his stubble on his face, Iman looked from the policemen to me, confused. He had never been in trouble before.
As the cop pulled out handcuffs, Maman screamed and the earth below our feet seemed soft. Maman and Baba cried out in Persian, “You can’t do this! Leave our son alone.” The policeman was undeterred, and began reading Iman his rights.
Now Hadi, wearing only his underwear, ran down toward us, getting dangerously close to the officers.
The cops pulled Iman by his handcuffed wrists, and shoved him in the squad car. When Iman turned and faced us in the rear window, his welled-up eyes took in the scene: Maman collapsed on her knees, and emitting earsplitting screams, as Hadi and I, yelling, chased the squad car. Baba, with his eyes closed, head cast downward, sat down; he was somewhere else entirely. Iman had been teary and frightened, his eyes lowered in shame.
The Rose Hotel Page 17
