The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

by Jasmin Darznik

  We had long-term lodgers, too. One man stayed the better part of that first year at the Casa Buena. Every morning Lili would find the carpet in his room covered in strange white flecks. “What is it?” she finally asked him one day. “Skin condition,” he told her. “It’s not contagious, I swear. I’ve even been to a doctor.” He lowered his voice. “My wife’s put me out,” he confided, his eyes filling with tears. There were out-of-work migrant farmers who spread blankets on the floor and slept their families six or eight to a room. There was a rail-thin, bent-backed elderly woman who rented three or four times a year. She arrived on foot, her long, gray braids messy and oily. She carried no bags, not even a purse, stayed one or two nights, and then disappeared. It was a long time before Lili discovered that Americans had a name for such people. Homeless, they were called here, and she could never stand to turn them away.

  Our first home in America was a tract house in a working-class neighborhood of Terra Linda. A small box of a house, it sat on a winding street of brightly colored houses—green, yellow, pink, and blue—each with an identical eight-by-eight-foot lawn in the front and a single cherry tree in the backyard. We wouldn’t stay long (of this Lili was sure), but it was here that she unfurled her best carpet, a pistachio green Tabriz that had taken up most all the space in one of the two suitcases we brought from Iran, and hung it from the wall like a tapestry. With the first earnings from the motel she bought a pair of green velvet couches to match it, but apart from the carpet and couches, for a long time the only other pieces of furniture in that house were the mattresses in our bedrooms.

  It was Lili’s house and mine, really, because my father always slept at the motel, in the manager’s suite, and he spent most of his days there, too. He sat at his desk behind the plastic window, his small portable radio tuned to a classical music station, and he left the office only to make repairs around the motel or to nap in the back room.

  Every few weeks, though, he’d take me to the bookstore in town. When we walked together in the street, he clasped his hands behind his back and lifted his face to the sun. “I’ll only buy as many as you can carry,” he’d tell me before letting me loose. I’d pile books up to my chin, two and three bags’ worth, and present myself to him. “Sure you can carry them?” he’d ask me. I never could, but it only made him smile to see me try.

  Those first few months in America, my mother Lili and I walked everywhere together: to my school, to the mall, to the community pool. Terra Linda was hot and dusty. We were the only pedestrians for miles. I dragged my heels and kicked up such a fuss that one day she had just had enough. We got on a bus and headed straight for the DMV.

  The day she passed her driving test, we walked to the car dealership just down the road from the motel. Lili circled the lot, taking careful measure of the inventory, and I trailed along behind her. She settled finally on a pale yellow Cadillac convertible with tan leather seats, chrome details, and windows that went up and down at the push of a button.

  “Ready?” she asked me before pulling out of the lot that day.

  “Ready!” I squealed.

  We’d gone no farther than a mile when black plumes began to drift up from the hood. Lili’s Cadillac would spend at least one week out of every month at the repair shop, and then we’d have to go back to walking, the two of us on those empty California sidewalks, she in her denim bell-bottoms and huge tortoiseshell sunglasses, me in my flounced summer frocks and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

  When Lili first narrowed her eyes at San Francisco Bay, turned to my father, and said, “Here,” she could not guess that many other Iranians had already staked the same claim. But by the late seventies there were already hundreds of Iranians in the area. Many had arrived several years before the revolution with substantial fortunes in several countries. Some claimed close ties to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran. They filled the walls of their homes with photographs of fathers, uncles, and grandfathers in heavily decorated military costume, receiving medals of honor from the king’s own hands. Others traced their lineage to the Qajars, the previous—and they would have said true—dynasty of Iran. Their green-eyed wives and daughters had been known for centuries as the most beautiful of Iranian women, and they could be identified easily even in exile.

  These were the “good” Iranian families, the ones whose names were firmly planted in the roster of the Iranian elite. They did not think of themselves as immigrants, but as émigrés, and they called themselves Persians, not Iranians. The wives of such families could be found every day at Nordstrom, immaculately dressed in pencil skirts and twinsets, pearls at their necks and Chanel sunglasses perched on their heads. Their husbands often didn’t work in America, as it was understood that here there were no positions commensurate with their pedigree.

  We were not that kind of Iranian family, but with American money and a certain guile we would soon take on many of their airs. It was a performance in which we were hardly alone; it was a way, common to so many Iranians back then, of imagining new lives in this country.

  “Irooni!” my mother Lili would whisper whenever she saw Iranians at the grocery store or at the mall, and then give my hand a squeeze. “Do you see them? Irooni!” In those days a phrase of Persian overheard from a distance could fill her with terrible longing, and she’d follow them with her eyes until they disappeared.

  It was in springtime, on SeezDeh Bedar or the last of the New Year’s celebrations, when she finally found her way to them. Tehroonis always spent this day by the streams and rivers north of the city. Families packed their carpets and water pipes, their pots of rice and stew, piled into their cars, and drove, caravan-style, up through the mountains. All day they picnicked on the riverbanks. They played music and they danced. At dusk young girls knelt in the grass, knotted two blades together, and wished for suitors in the coming year. Before leaving for the city everyone always tossed their swatches of sabseh, or greens, into the water for good luck.

  Lili had started her greens late that year. The lentils had barely sprouted, the shoots were just tender white curls, but it would be bad luck not to throw them to the waters. Here there were no rivers, or any rivers we knew, so Lili packed a picnic for the two of us and drove us toward the ocean.

  She saw them as soon as we climbed out of the car and reached the shore: dozens of lush, round swatches of greens bobbing along the waves. Many more had gotten caught in the eddies or lay tangled in seaweed. Lili turned and looked about her and there, in the shade of a eucalyptus grove a hundred feet from the beach, she found the source of the miracle. “Irooni!” she exclaimed, and gave my hand a squeeze. Not one or two, but numerous Iranian families. Grandmothers and aunts hauling pots of rice and stew still warm from their ovens; fathers and grandfathers and uncles playing backgammon at the picnic tables; and wives sitting cross-legged in a circle, taking tea and cracking sunflower seeds between their teeth. They’d spread their silk carpets on the grass, and to Lili it seemed as if the beach were theirs and had always been.

  “Salaam!” she called out to them, a smile breaking across her face as she made her way forward.

  “Salaam, salaam!” they called back.

  “And when,” they asked her after the preliminary pleasantries had been exchanged, “did you come, khanoom? Before or after?”

  This was the question no two Iranians failed to ask each other when meeting in America back then. It was a nearly discreet way of discerning who hailed from the “best” families in Iran. The “best” Iranians were almost always the ones who’d left months or years before the revolution; everyone else was presumed to have escaped the country in various states of economic and legal hardship. It might not seem that such things could matter here, so far from Iran, but they did—mostly because in America Iranians were suddenly thrown together in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in Iran.

  “Before,” Lili answered quickly. “We came before.”

  They passed her a fresh cup of tea and sent me off to play with thei
r daughters. “Tell us, khanoom,” they entreated her. “Tell us your story.”

  They were kind, they were generous, but neither eight thousand miles nor all the privations of exile would ever be sufficient to loosen Lili’s tongue in their company. “Vah, vah, vah!” she imagined they’d say of her. “A divorcée?” By the time her story circulated among these women, she’d have abandoned not one husband, but three, not one child, but ten. Lili took her tea gratefully, found a place at their picnic that day and later on their leather couches and Louis XIV settees. They’d invite her to their tea parties and their dinner parties, their No Rooz celebrations and their children’s weddings. She’d fall in with their gossip, grow familiar with their rivalries and losses and aspirations, and even confide some of her own. A few of the women she met on the beach that day would eventually become as close to her as sisters, but from the moment she took her place among them she knew she would never tell them anything about her first marriage or her daughter in Iran. For thirty years, she would tell them nothing at all.

  What she’d tell me she dismissed as another day’s trouble.

  It was the new language that led me astray, cut off my mother tongue and carried me off in a jumble of strange but wonderful words. “Whisper,” “marshmallow,” “tumble.” I shaped my mouth around each one, finding my way to its cadence. Slowly I learned to look at the world backward, trained my eye to move left to right instead of the Persian way around the page. The lines of my first penmanship—a script that flows down and across every boundary—fell to waste. In their place I traced stocky letters easily contained between dotted lines. When I finished, I’d hold the paper up and admire my handiwork.

  My mother prided herself on the ease and speed with which I picked up English. In public with Americans, she’d nudge me and whisper in Persian, “Show them how well you can speak! Even better than they can speak their own language!” At home, though, I could expect nothing but reprimands for speaking “that” language instead of “ours.” “Don’t use your big English words on me!” she’d chide.

  When she dragged me along to the mall or the grocery store, I’d stand by mutely as she struggled to communicate with Americans. Very soon I could tell that hers was not a fashionable or exotic accent but rough and ugly to these strangers’ ears. One word out of her mouth and Americans would stare her down, hard and long. “What’d you say?” they asked her. My mother seemed not to notice or care; if anything, she pitied those shopgirls for their apparent stupidity. But not me. Whenever my mother spoke English, even a word of it, I cringed. I’d inch away from her and quietly disappear behind a rack of clothes or scramble down the next grocery aisle.

  When I was a child, shame was my first, true, and native instinct. Nothing about me was right in America; nothing about me “fit” here. In Iran I’d been coddled and fussed over as a “two-veined child,” but here my “gold” hair and “honey-colored eyes” were just plain old “brown.” Worse, in America my mother’s ways were strange and shaming. Day after day she sent me off to school in party frocks and two-piece suits in miniature. She filled my lunch box with cucumbers and sliced quince fruit. I’d peel off my jacket, hitch up my skirt, and toss her offerings into the trash before school even started. Shy and sullen among the swarm of blond ponytails in the schoolyard, I took to hiding out in the library at recess and lunchtime. If I could not be ordinary (and already I knew I could not), then I would be invisible.

  Still, my shame in these years inspired in me certain abiding talents. Shame gave me English. At school I filled my writing primers and earned my teachers’ praise, and in the afternoons I sat on the floor of the manager’s suite in my parents’ motel with the heaps and heaps of books that made the hours there bearable, or nearly so.

  When the news from Iran came on the television now, there was always a number that ran across the bottom of the screen. Ten days, forty-two days, a hundred days. The number rose and rose. The shoolooqi had a proper name by then—the Islamic Revolution—and the blindfolded men on the screen were called hostages.

  The news was always on at our house in those days, but for me the Hostage Crisis only really began with a girl named Ziba.

  “We have a new student,” my teacher, Miss Stevens, called out one morning. She gestured for the new girl to come forward. The girl hesitated, then walked slowly to the front of the room and faced the class. Her cheeks were bright red and very big and she had black eyebrows that met in the middle of her forehead. “Ziba is from Iran,” Miss Stevens told the class.

  I cringed. She pronounced Iran the way they did on television. “Eye-ran.”

  For a moment everyone in the class seemed to consider Ziba. Then the first paper airplane of the day arched over our heads. To my relief, no one seemed to care much about Ziba or Eye-ran.

  When I walked into the classroom the next morning, I saw that Miss Stevens had pulled Ziba’s desk so close that its edges touched mine. “It’ll be so nice for her to have a friend from her own country,” Miss Stevens explained.

  Ziba sat down next to me. She turned her face toward me and smiled. It was a pretty smile, trusting and kind, but I didn’t smile back.

  Ziba’s English was awful. She couldn’t even say “the” properly, she was always mixing up her pronouns, and her penmanship was worse than a kindergartner’s. Just as I started to think she’d get sent back a grade, or maybe even two, Miss Stevens discovered that Ziba was very good at math. She was, in fact, a math genius. Every time Miss Stevens called on Ziba with a math problem, Ziba would cup her hands under her dimpled chin, chirp out, “I tink…,” and then give the perfect answer.

  Somehow this high-pitched “I tink” became Ziba’s trademark. The class seemed charmed by it. All day long kids begged her to say it. Ziba always obliged and laughed along with them.

  Then one day they forced her to say it over and over until her eyes welled up with tears. “Hey, listen to unibrow!” someone called out, and everyone burst out laughing.

  Within a few weeks kids stopped calling her unibrow. Instead they called her a sand nigger. Nazi. Smelly A-rab.

  The news from Iran had finally reached our elementary school.

  Ziba and I made it through the next months of the Hostage Crisis together. We stopped eating in the schoolyard with the other kids. Instead we ate our lunches on the bench outside our classroom. Ziba’s mother always packed her things like dried garbanzo beans, but Ziba didn’t seem to care. She’d swing her legs under the bench and smile at me as she crunched on her dried beans, and I’d sip my Capri Sun and wonder just how long it would be before Ziba was sent out of the country.

  But before the Hostage Crisis ended I managed to ditch Ziba for a tall, kinky-haired American girl who wore a silver cross around her neck and Ziba had befriended two other, much kinder Iranian girls from another class.

  Kindness, my mother taught me when Mutti, Elsa, and Maria came to visit us in America, depended on certain fictions.

  On their first day in this country, Mutti, Elsa, and Maria woke at five o’clock, dragged the table from the kitchen to the office, draped it in one of the embroidered tablecloths they’d brought as a gift, set a large ashtray in the center, and began smoking cigarettes. At seven thirty they walked down the road and across the freeway to Safeway and returned with several bags of groceries, two cases of beer, and a bottle of vodka. By nine o’clock they stood in the kitchen in their matching aprons, cigarettes dangling between their lips, and started in on the day’s cooking: pots of goulash, cauliflower, and potatoes, pans of sausages and pork loins. By nine thirty the windows had all steamed up and the manager’s suite smelled of onions.

  When Lili finished cleaning the motel rooms, she’d find them smoking in the office and speaking their language to one another while Johann stretched out on the couch with a bottle of beer in one hand and another bottle already open and waiting for him on the table. The lunch plates would already be drying by the side of the sink and not one potato had been put aside for her.

>   She’d press her lips together, toast a slice of pita bread, and eat it standing over the sink.

  “You have a lot of work here,” Mutti told her on the third day.

  Lili rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “Yes, Mutti.”

  Mutti waved at the walls. “It’s not so good here for a child.”

  “No, Mutti,” Lili sighed.

  Lili drew a deep breath and prayed for sabr, forbearance. It did not come. At the end of the week she pulled Johann into the back room of the manager’s suite.

  “No more,” she told him. “If they want to stay here, they have to stay in the house.”

  Johann hung his head and nodded. “I’ll tell them in the morning.”

  But there would be no need of that, because when Lili opened the door they fell, one on top of the other, onto the floor. They’d heard every word.

  “Hexe!” Elsa shouted as she scrambled to her feet. Witch!

  Again Lili prayed for forbearance. Again it did not come.

  In the second week, they moved into our house and took me with them. They walked me to school in the mornings. They waxed the floors and filled the cupboards with jars of herring and pickles. They planted tomatoes and sunflowers in the garden. They trudged down the street in their flower-print dresses and kerchiefs, plastic shopping bags swinging from their hands, and walked me back home from school. Whenever I asked after Lili, Mutti would pat my head and bring me a plate of Linzer cookies from the kitchen or reach into her apron pocket and give me a handful of lemon drops.

  Every few days Mutti pulled me onto her lap and they’d all search my face for any resemblance to my father or to themselves.

  “Her nose?”

  “Her forehead?”

  “Her cheeks!” they finally decided, and immediately began pinching my face.