Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A Box of Crimson Red

  It takes four seasons. To feel at home in a new country,” Baba said. “That is the rule. Once you pass four seasons, then you’re home free.”

  They had arrived in snow. They rented a room in a tiny hotel in Manhattan, using savings from the old country. Darya leaned against the iron bars of the clunky gated elevator as Mina and Kayvon tap-danced their way up and down, pretending to be characters in an old Julie Andrews movie they’d seen in Tehran. In their hotel room, the buttons on the TV remote commanded seemingly endless channels. Thirteen TV stations in all! Mina never knew there could be so many.

  On the street outside their hotel, small kiosks spilled over with newspapers and magazines and row after row of pink, green, and orange candies. They walked in the snow and bought the newspaper and tried to keep pace with the brisk energy of the city. Baba circled ads in the paper, got on the phone, and contacted the few Iranian expats he knew. He spoke to former colleagues, professors, scholars—the ones who’d left before them. One of Baba and Darya’s old university friends, now a chemistry professor at New York University, gave them the most important piece of information: the top ten school districts.

  Number one goal—good school. A good enough school, in an affordable neighborhood. “What matters is the school. Once we have the school, we have our neighborhood,” Baba kept saying. Mina nodded. She knew that school was the key to her and her brothers’ future in freedom. There was a growing, gnawing feeling in Mina’s gut that they would be in America for more than just a year or two. Despite what Baba said. Mina and her brothers were now grateful that Darya had dragged them to Mrs. Isobel’s English lessons in Tehran.

  In their first few weeks in New York, there were no sunny days. But then one morning, Mina was awakened by a warmth on her face. Apricot rays shone through the hotel window, straight into her eyes. She sat up, got out of bed, and rushed to the window. Sunshine lit up the slush on the street. Up until now, they’d had to wear hats outside—woolen beanies bought from the Pakistani man who sold hats, gloves, and small black umbrellas from his wooden table on Lexington Avenue. But today was bright, clearly warmer. While Hooman and Kayvon snored and Baba dreamed his Farsi dreams, Mina tapped Darya awake. She pointed to the sun and Darya understood. It was warm enough to go outside without anything on their heads. They were dressed in minutes.

  Inside the clunky elevator, Mina tapped her feet. She practically ran out of the hotel, with Darya right behind her. Feeling their scalps warmed by the sun was new again. They laughed as the rays soaked into their hair. Mina’s thick mane swung down her back, black and lush, as she held Darya’s hand and they walked down Lexington Avenue. Mina noticed that Darya’s dark hair looked tea-colored in the light. How ordinary they must have seemed to others, mother and daughter strolling down the street. But no one knew their private joy. Was freedom just tiny moments like this? Simply knowing that no one cared if the sun shone on your hair?

  Loud buses drove past, splashing slush onto their legs. No matter. The smell of burnt nuts and smoke was in the air; a man who looked as if he could be from central Tehran sold peanuts by the bag at a kiosk. The wisps of women’s hair blew in the wind. A grumpy young woman in a gray suit and sneakers held a briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. She looked impatient and stressed, waiting to cross the street. Mina almost tugged at the young woman’s suit. Hey listen, it’s not that bad. Don’t look so upset. You can do whatever you want, wear whatever you want! Do you know how incredible that is?

  The sign changed from “DON’T WALK” to “WALK” and the woman ran. Coffee spilled out of her paper cup. She cursed. Mina watched the woman sprint down the blocks in her sneakered feet. Of course she had work to do. Places to be. Everyone was so busy here.

  The sun cast black shapes onto the pavement, covering forgotten pieces of flattened gum. Cars sputtered and coughed in the street, stopping more than they moved. Darya and Mina took in a lungful of the exhaust fumes as litter swirled around their feet.

  “Do you think they’re happy here?” Mina asked Darya suddenly. She wanted to hear yes. It would be wonderful if they’d landed in the Land of the Happy.

  “Happy?” Darya repeated the word as though it was completely irrelevant. “Well, nobody’s happy everywhere. I mean, not everybody’s happy in any country. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Oh.” Mina was disappointed.

  “Then again, maybe they’re happy and don’t even realize it. It’s like that sometimes.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re happy. Because you’re not even thinking about it?”

  “Something like that,” Darya mumbled. “Though in my opinion, happiness isn’t the goal of life. Happy, happy, happy! Who needs happy? They’re too concerned with being happy in your America.”

  From the very first day of their arrival in New York, Darya referred to the U.S. as “your America” when she talked to Mina, Hooman, Kayvon, and even Baba. As though it already belonged to them but not to her.

  Darya slipped into a place called Woolworth’s. Mina followed. Darya hovered in the hair-care aisle for a moment, then scooped up a box of crimson red dye. When they got back to the hotel room, Darya locked herself in the hotel bathroom and did not come out for thirty-five minutes. When she finally emerged, her hair was wet and red. Hooman, Kayvon, and Mina were confused. But Darya shook her newly red hair, and Baba clapped and cheered. Then Baba went in and scrubbed the bathroom walls clean. The colors that always remained of that first winter were the white of the snow in the early morning, the gray slush it soon transformed into, the red on the walls in the bathroom, and—an eternal memory—the dark crimson of those pomegranates dancing in Mina’s head, the ones her grandmother had gone to buy for her when the bomb came down. But dominating all the new colors was the jarring red of Darya’s hair, an unfamiliar defiance that screamed silently at the start of their American life.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Pizza with Dave

  Good morning, Mina!”

  That’s how they sang it out. The words were dictated by Mrs. Krupnick and repeated by her new classmates in the fifth grade classroom. Mina stood in the front of the room on her first day, feeling strangely naked in her jeans and Mamani-knitted sweater. Mrs. Krupnick was tall and thin with a tanned and wrinkled face. Her blue eyes were outlined by waxy green eyeliner. For a minute Mina thought Mrs. Krupnick had crayon on her face. Black mascara clumped her eyelashes together and crayon-red pencil defined her lips. The whole classroom smelled of Mrs. Krupnick’s citrusy perfume.

  “All righty—grab a seat, sweetie,” Mrs. Krupnick said.

  Mina looked up. Close to thirty pairs of eyes were watching her. Girls and boys sat behind stand-alone wooden desks. They were dressed in jeans and sneakers and T-shirts and sweatshirts. Their hair was brown, black, blond, red. Posters of apple trees and zoo animals covered the walls. Mina turned to look at Mrs. Krupnick and saw behind her, hanging from the top wall, a huge American flag.

  “Over there, sweetie, next to Michelle.” Mrs. Krupnick pointed to the one empty desk. Mina walked as if in slow motion, sweating, heart beating, under the eyes of the other children. She slid into the chair, brittle and perspiring while attempting to look confident and casual.

  Tinny musical notes rang out. A voice came from a speaker somewhere. Then, as though lifted by an irresistible wave, the girls and boys rose to their feet. Mina sat still for a second, then got up too. Her classmates placed their right hands on their chests and faced the flag. Then Mina heard, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

  When the chant ended, everyone burst into song. They sang about a star-spangled banner and the flag being still there. There were bored faces, passionate faces, faces proud and faces still. The last notes o
f the song were long and high. A girl in blond pigtails sang the loudest, not stopping her high note till everyone else had sat down. Just a few weeks ago in assembly, the chant the headmistress had Mina and her classmates recite was called “Death to America.”

  “Hey, want some gum?” The girl next to her, the one the teacher had called Michelle, held up a tiny rectangle wrapped in pink paper. The glittering horn of a smiling unicorn shone on her sweatshirt. Mina noticed the elastic rainbow belt around her waist, and the rainbow-patterned cloth that covered her jeans from the knees down.

  “Leg warmers,” Michelle said, caressing the wool on her calves. “My mom got them for me at Macy’s.”

  “Thank you very much,” Mina said in her best, most articulate English, as Michelle handed her the gum, making a mental note to look up “leg warmers” and “Macy’s” in Darya’s dictionary. Mina looked at the gum uneasily. Was gum allowed here? Was chewing it in front of the teacher okay? And the bright glitter of Michelle’s sweatshirt and the careless way a boy behind them had propped his feet up on the back of Michelle’s chair. So relaxed! Mrs. Krupnick didn’t mind any of it. The huge purple earrings on a girl in front, the piercing tangerine headband of the girl two rows up. Enough colors to make Mina’s head reel, more colors than in the paint set, the colored pencil set, and the crayon set put together.

  Mina unwrapped the gum, stuffed it into her mouth, and bit into a gush of flavor. An unfamiliar sweetness. A newfangled brand-new taste.

  THE LIGHTS IN THE PIZZA SHOP were blinding. Mina held her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the bright fluorescent lights. She squinted up at the blackboard to read the scribbled pizza choices and their prices.

  “Regular Cheese slice—75 cents. Sicilian—85 cents.” Regular was the thin slice, the chewy, stringy one. She knew that now. Sicilian was thicker, richer. Hooman usually liked Sicilian sprinkled with oregano. Kayvon always added lots of red pepper flakes. Mina preferred regular cheese. When Darya joined them, she didn’t order any pizza. Just tea: a Styrofoam cup filled with lukewarm water and a stapled tea bag floating inside.

  “May I please have a slice of cheese,” Mina said quietly. She often went to the pizza shop alone now, to do homework after school.

  The man behind the counter ignored her. It was Thursday afternoon, and all the kids from the local schools seemed to have descended on this very pizza shop. Girls cackled as boys teased them. The pizza man behind the counter drummed his fingers impatiently. “You gotta speak up!” he shouted.

  “May I have a slice of cheese, please,” Mina said louder. Did she have an accent? She thought she had managed to iron out most of the Iranian-ness from her speech over the past few months. She had almost mastered slurring her “r”s in that luxuriant American way.

  The man behind the counter slid her a slice, its grease oozing onto a paper plate. Mina gave him three quarters in exchange and a smile. This man was probably new, she thought, he didn’t know that she was “Dave” Rezayi’s daughter. Her father worked here, after all. He was the one who made the pizza. When he had first applied for the job, after they’d moved from their Manhattan hotel to their Queens rental, he’d told the owner his name was Parviz. “How about I just call you Dave?” the owner had said. Baba always told the kids this story with a mixture of disbelief and wonder. “He wants me to be a Dave!”

  After Mina organized her textbooks and notebooks at a table by the door, she flipped open her American history book and took a bite. The tip of her tongue burned from the hot pizza. The teenagers around her joked and squealed. Someone from the kitchen shouted to the man behind the counter to “dump anotha bucket intha sink.” It was almost six o’clock, that blurry time between day and night. For a minute it seemed as though the sun would last and the sky would remain blue, but in the next minute, everything was gray and violet. Soon night took over. Mina felt a draft each time the door to the pizza shop swung open. She read under her breath, sounding out the increasingly easy English words. The hot cheese and tomato sauce filled her cheeks. Baba sure knew how to add just the right amount of tomato sauce.

  “Yes, please?” She heard Baba’s voice. He was behind the pizza counter now. She watched Baba from behind her pile of textbooks. He looked smaller here than he used to back home. He’d lost more hair. When he spoke English, he sounded uncharacteristically unsure. In Farsi, his voice came out strong and authoritative. But in English, he faltered and paused, as if trying to catch the right words as they randomly passed through his brain. His hands were always caked with flour now, or stained with tomato sauce, or smelled of onions. The colors were similar to the colors he’d worked with before. Dough like skin, tomato sauce like blood. Skin and blood—a doctor’s everyday colors.

  “Can ya hurry up?” A teenager in a Yankees baseball cap yelled at Baba. “Por favor?” He grinned through his braces.

  “Please . . . yes,” Baba said and shuffled back and forth.

  Mina concentrated on her textbook.

  The chapter described how Americans had staged a revolution in the eighteenth century. Mina wondered if all the American girls back then had felt the same gnawing uncertainty she’d felt during her revolution. But the American Revolution seemed different. Mina studied the black-and-white sketches of stocking-clad, long-haired men galloping on horses and women in long billowing skirts and bonnets marching with banners.

  Amidst the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the shouts from customers, the tinkle of change, and the whir of the soda machine—Mina studied. Hooman and Kayvon were probably at the library, crunching through algebra and The Catcher in the Rye. Hooman was acing his algebra exams these days. Kayvon kept telling Mina that Holden Caulfield was one of his favorite book characters ever. She and her brothers had gotten used to keeping one another up to date on their schoolwork. Academics were their solace and purpose, the one thing in which they had to excel. Mina preferred studying in the pizza shop to studying in the library. Even though it was overly bright and loud, there was something comforting about knowing Baba was right there. And he really did make good pizza.

  Mina played with a brass key on a green piece of yarn that hung around her neck as she read. The key to the front door of their two-bedroom apartment. Darya had said that their new home was the size of Soghra the housekeeper’s lounge room in Tehran. When Mrs. Krupnick had seen the key around Mina’s neck, she’d murmured, “Another latchkey kid!” as if it were an amusing yet sad thing. Half the kids in her new fifth grade class had keys around their necks so they could open their front doors in the evening while their parents worked. Mina didn’t necessarily miss the red sliced apples placed neatly on china plates, the slices of banana and oranges that Darya used to prepare for them after school back in that other country. Spoiled is what they were. Spoiled with a perfumed mother cutting up fruit for them in the afternoons and a father marching down hospital corridors in his white coat and stethoscope, listening to heartbeats and reading medical charts.

  Her mother was busy now. Her father too. America was a busy place, with people working hard all the time, extending themselves with all their energy, drinking coffee in paper cups as they ran to the bus instead of sipping tea by a samovar while relaxing on carpeted cushions. Now that she was here, she realized there were no huge teacups in which people sat and laughed, but the people still spun endlessly. Her other country now seemed slow and lazy, with days that must have contained more hours than the days here. She couldn’t imagine having all that time back.

  Mina’s mind wandered to Darya, who was at work at the dry cleaner’s. It was only a few blocks down from the pizza shop. Mina could just as easily sit at the back of the dry cleaner’s and do her homework. The owner’s own kids often did their schoolwork back there. But the smell. That pressed steamy smell of water hanging in the air. And the clang of presses and the sound of the owner and her husband yelling at each other and the whir of the racks starting and stopping all the time. And the lig
hts. The lone lightbulb over Darya’s sewing machine and the white-hot electric beams hanging from the ceiling. Mina’s eyes hurt just thinking about it. She preferred the smells and sounds and lights of the pizza shop because, hard as it was to see Baba pushed around by teenagers, the sight of her mother bent over that sewing machine was harder for Mina to see. Darya wasn’t supposed to bend. Her perfect-postured mother, who always used to hold her head high, the one who seemed to be connected by an invisible string to the sky, the no-nonsense, couture-wearing, chic mother from the northern hills, the “lady doctor,” as doctors’ wives were called back in the old country. Now sewing clothes for fat, blue-haired ladies of Queens, squatting near the old ladies’ ankles, pins between her lips, as she balanced on her haunches, measuring the rims of their pants.

  Mina bit into her father’s pizza and began to commit to memory the accomplishments of the founding fathers.

  WHEN SHE WALKED OUT OF THE PIZZA shop an hour later, a cool breeze lifted Mina’s hair and whirled the strands around her face like a fan. A delicious, exhilarating sensation. To think that only a few months ago, she’d thought the wind might never lift her hair again.

  Mina walked quickly down the street. She had to get home. At the pizza place, Baba had nodded at her and raised his eyebrows toward the door as he took a customer’s order: his signal that she needed to get back before it got too late. Mina pressed onto the sidewalk in her new American sneakers. In twenty minutes she’d be home, just in time to set the table. Kayvon most likely was already at home, washing rice, and Hooman was probably browning the meat. The basic steps of the khoresh would be done so all Darya needed to do when she got there was finish the vegetables and add the spices. Mina pulled the collar of her jacket up around her mouth and kept a good pace. Some shops had already closed, but their lights were still on, glaring indulgently into the night. Mina passed lit-up mannequins, their oversize nipples sticking out under striped T-shirts and sailor tops. What details the Americans created! The scent of sausages and pastrami wafted from the European-style delicatessen as she passed by. Near the deli was Wang Dry Cleaning. Mina buried her face deeper into her upturned collar and kept on walking. Mina didn’t want to look as she passed by, but at the last minute, her eyes shot up.