Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  “Fireworks!” Mr. Hakimian had said. “Wait till you see the fireworks.”

  Mina had been especially looking forward to the fireworks.

  Fireworks comprised the colors of summer. Kaleidoscopic colors, magical colors, colors that literally burst and splattered, then vanished, leaving Mina to scratch her head and wonder if they were ever really there. Summer was season three. Baba said it took four to feel at home in a new place, and here they were 75 percent of the way there, three-quarters of the journey done.

  The hot air hung heavy and humid all day long and curled the edges of leaves on hedges, dampened the paper on Mina’s sketch pad, and stunned the spiders into slow demise. New York baked that summer. Baked and sizzled and roasted as its cement sidewalks seemed to melt. Mina and her brothers mopped their foreheads and fanned their faces and reapplied glossy shiny deodorants from American drugstores to their underarms as though that could prevent them from being cooked right through. Like the naked, unmarinated sausages sizzling on their Fourth of July barbecue, Mina and her brothers swiveled and turned and hissed as their skin grew darker and thicker in the heat. All of winter and spring (season one and season two), Mina had tried to avoid going to the dry cleaner’s where Darya worked, and now here, in season three in the midst of New York’s summer, the dry cleaner’s had come to her. The hot stifling air, the suffocating heat, the feeling that she could barely breathe; it was everywhere now. Stepping out of the front door was like stepping into Darya’s dry-cleaning shop. And how was it for Darya? Mina wondered. To walk from the steamy dry cleaner’s into a steamy world, to never really escape the all-encompassing invisible blanket of heat.

  The promise of an air conditioner kept them hopeful. Baba hinted that they’d get one soon. That’s how it was now. You waited. Money wasn’t like before. You waited and worked and saved your dollars. And then maybe, you went and bought the desired item, most likely secondhand. “Get with it, Mina,” Hooman said. He was quick to pick up American slang. “Get with the program.” Air conditioners did not grow on trees in Queens. Mina slept in her white nightgown, the bedsheets sticky against her skin, nightmares free to roam and lodge in her newly American brain.

  Mina’s top-ranking nightmare of season three: NYPD chases eleven-year-old girl for lack of proper Islamic hijab.

  Scene one: Mina is standing outside, leaning against the brick wall of their apartment. She’s bouncing a small blue rubber ball or holding on to a crocheted orange bag or snapping pink bubble gum. Minding her own business. Footsteps. Mina turns around. Heavy footsteps. Approaching her. Clean-shaven, muscular, red-cheeked NYPD policeman approaches from behind. The faintest glimmer of panic begins its travel from the tips of her toes through her calves, up her thighs, to her wibbly-wobbly stomach. BAM BAM her heart starts to beat louder and louder. Panic, panic rising from fear. Mr. NYPD walks closer and closer to Mina. And then within seconds the metamorphosis occurs, the clean-shaven, rosy-cheeked NYPD man morphs into a dark-bearded, sallow-eyed, scowling Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Mr. NYPD is gone, and in his place stands the judgmental, scornful man in his heavy black boots who hated every strand of hair on her head, who deemed illegal and immoral the bumps forming on her chest, who thought sinful the curve of her lower back (too seductive), and who would get her for not covering her schoolgirl thighs. The thought that somehow her lack of proper covering would have a ripple effect and get her family into trouble engulfs her. Because the Revolutionary Guards work like spiders in a web, all they have to do is pull at one strand, and soon the family is found: mothers and fathers implicated, questioned, arrested, tortured, raped, killed.

  Mina’s lungs fill with dark, thick black oil. She wants to breathe, wants to find the energy to run, to escape, but her lungs are clogged. If only she could cover herself. If only she had the hijab now, the long baggy billowing roopoosh to cover her legs, the coarse thick headscarf to cover her naked head. She looks for cloth to cover herself. She grabs at her T-shirt, wants to tear off a piece, find something, anything, with which to cover her head and lessen her crime. When she finally does manage to rip the T-shirt, the piece isn’t big enough. She breathes faster, and suddenly her lungs are free of the thick black oil and she can run. She runs and runs and runs, looking over her shoulder. The Islamic fundamentalist is right behind her, running in his heavy black boots, catching up with her, his rifle by his side, his face filled with disgust. Mina’s heart pounds against her chest, her hair flies everywhere as she runs. He mustn’t catch her, he can’t get her, can’t corner her. But when he does, when the thick-bearded, sallow-faced, black-eyed guard finally catches up with her and grabs her arm, she turns to see her grandmother’s face, scattered with bloodred pomegranate seeds.

  Mina woke up screaming. She clutched at her hair, wished she’d never exposed herself, never taken her headscarf off, never ventured to endanger everything and everyone she loved. She sat shaking in her bed, sweating from the nightmare and the New York summer night.

  Darya ran into Mina’s room. She sat by her bed, holding Mina tight. Over and over and over again she whispered, “You don’t have to be afraid. It’s okay. They are not here. We left. You don’t have to be afraid of them anymore.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Spidercobwebghostsandgoblins

  They spent a lot of time smearing blood on the walls, these people. Darya had volunteered to help decorate Mina’s classroom for the Halloween party. One afternoon is all they asked of her and the other mothers. One afternoon, two and a half hours, the missed pay would hurt, but Darya wanted to contribute, wanted Mina to know that even in this new country she was engaged with her child’s activities. Darya’s assigned job was to take the red paint and make it look like blood. She managed to do that without actually vomiting. It was too close to the description Parviz had given her of the puddles near her mother’s and all the other people’s dead bodies. Blood was not a game.

  Mrs. Beck, Mina’s sixth grade teacher, smiled and patted Darya on the back. “You’re doing real good,” Mrs. Beck said extra loudly. In this country everybody talked loudly to her, sounding out the words as though they were speaking to a toddler, assuming her English was sketchy.

  Darya smiled and nodded. For the sake of her daughter she resisted the urge to slap this painted woman across the face. “Thank you,” Darya mumbled.

  “AND YOU SEE, WE TAKE THE COTTON AND SPREAD IT OUT LIKE THIS SO IT LOOKS LIKE A COBWEB!” Mrs. Beck shouted to Darya and another foreign mother, Mrs. Kim. Yung-Ja Kim and her daughter Yooni had arrived from Korea just a few weeks ago.

  “FOR A SPIDER! FOR HALLOWEEN WE DO SPIDERS!” Mrs. Beck joined her thumbs together and alternately twisted them and her forefingers together as she mimed the movements of a spider. “YEAH?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Darya said. She and Yung-Ja Kim held opposite ends of a large cotton pad and pulled to separate the soft fibers.

  “WE STICK IT WITH GLUE!” Mrs. Krupnick handed Darya a white plastic bottle with an orange cap. “MAKE SCARY!!!”

  Why is she using incorrect grammar? Darya thought as she glued cobwebs onto Mina’s sixth grade classroom wall. She thought of the costumes she had to finish for the kids. Mina wanted to go as a fairy. Hooman wanted to be an Adam Ant, whatever that was, and Kayvon insisted on going as Ronald Reagan.

  Mrs. Beck talked about their classroom-decorating goals and made the noise of ghosts howling. The sound effects were for the benefit of Darya and Yung-Ja. She showed them cutouts of skeletons and graveyards, as though such things were fun. For the life of her, Darya couldn’t understand why so much effort was spent in scaring the children. She shuddered at the skull and bones pasted on the classroom door. She dipped her hands in pretend blood with the other mothers.

  Some of the parent volunteers prepared a huge bowl of blood-colored Kool-Aid, pouring red crystals into a punch bowl and stirring with a wooden spoon. “How about we scatter drops of paint, washable of cou
rse, from the classroom door to the Kool-Aid bowl, and the kids can follow the blood and get their ghost cookies?” one of the other mothers said.

  Yung-Ja Kim and Darya looked at each other, horrified.

  “My apologies, but I must pipe in here and assert that I do believe that is a dreadful, albeit creative, proposition!”

  Darya turned to see who had spoken up. One of the mothers emerged from the group standing by the Kool-Aid bowl. Her dark hair hung in a braid down her back, and she wore a beautiful sari. Other than Yung-Ja Kim and Darya herself, she was the only mother who had taken care with her makeup and dressed well for the occasion.

  “Allow me to introduce myself.” The woman in the sari walked past Mrs. Beck and extended one hand out to Darya and another to Yung-Ja. “Kavita is the name. Kavita Das. Mother of Pria.”

  “I am very pleased to meet you.” Yung-Ja bowed her head. “I am Yooni’s mother.”

  “And my daughter is Mina,” Darya said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “So glad you guys met!” Mrs. Beck said. “Now, let’s get back to work, ladies! We can ditch the blood drops, okay? We don’t need to go overboard.”

  The mothers got back to work. As they picked up scissors and glue and decorations, Kavita lowered her voice and said to Darya and Yung-Ja, “Don’t worry. Halloween is actually quite good fun. You’ll get used to it.”

  Darya and Yung-Ja must have looked skeptical because Kavita then said, “You know what? I would like to invite you to my humble abode for a proper welcome to our coterie. Would you like to join me for tea after this?”

  Yung-Ja nodded and said thank you. Darya looked at Yung-Ja and then at Kavita and felt a little better about the whole scary ghost/skeleton holiday. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”

  ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, MINA WORE Darya’s home-sewn glittery pink fairy costume and purple wings. Hooman pranced around the living room in tight pants, playing air guitar.

  “You are an ant?” Parviz asked. “You don’t look like an insect.”

  “Oh, Baba, I’m Adam Ant! A rock star! Come on, everyone knows him!”

  Kayvon tightened his tie and practiced his politician handshake on Darya and Baba. When he put the Reagan mask on, Darya squealed in fear.

  She glanced at Parviz. He shrugged back at her. Something was slipping away from them. Something new was taking shape. It was a familiar feeling; they’d experienced it many times before as parents. Children changed all the time, phases came and went. It was impossible to keep up with all their tastes and interests. But this time, the very territory was an alien one. Autumn, Darya thought, meant pomegranates. Pomegranates seeded by your mother, eaten with a teaspoon with some echinacea powder. Autumn meant getting ready for the korsi. Heating up the stove as the nights grew longer and taking out the heavy quilt and throwing it over the heater and sticking your legs inside. None of this dressing up, sugar-eating, blood-smearing, spidercobwebghostsandgoblins stuff. So much time and effort and money spent on making things frightening. Why would they want to feel horror? Why would they look for it, make it up, create blood where there was none, play with graves as though they were toys? Darya watched her children get revved up for a night of fear and sugar. Who are these people?

  THE FIRST AUTUMN FELT STRANGE. And then, year after year, the autumns came and went. From their very first one that arrival year when Mina dressed as a fairy to the ones in junior high, high school, and later in college when she dressed as a cat, Madonna, and Frida Kahlo among other characters. The autumns came and went.

  Mina, age sixteen, her Halloween costume that year a polka-dot black and white dress, which, she explained to Darya, symbolized a Zen zebra.

  “A Zen what?”

  “Oh, Maman!” was all Mina said.

  Mina the teenager. Her closest friends: Michelle, Heather, Pria, and Yooni were often at their house during those years.

  “Hi, Mrs. R.,” the girls would say and plop sleeping bags on the floor.

  “We brought The Breakfast Club,” Michelle said.

  “Emilio Estevez is so cute!” Mina ran her fingers through her hair. Darya wondered why she kept doing that. It was a new habit of Mina’s that she found annoying.

  For the fall formal her senior year, Mina went with a certain Julian Krapper. Darya and Baba waited outside the building where the dance was held, ready to drive Mina home as soon as the party was over. It was bad enough that Mina had a date. That much they tolerated. But there’d be no “after-party” or whatever it was these American kids called it. Julian walked Mina to the car after the dance and shook Baba’s hand. He waited on the curb and watched as Mina and her parents drove away. Darya saw him standing there under the streetlamp in his tuxedo, waving to Mina. Mina waved from the backseat of the car for as long as he was in sight, then turned around and sulked the rest of the way home. Persian rules in New York City were “so not fair,” she whined.

  The autumns came and went. Darya learned that autumn meant wearing costumes, eating candy, and carving pumpkins. Parviz mastered the art of cutting the best jack-o’-lanterns. Darya strolled through the huge supermarkets, looking for a pomegranate. They gave up on having a korsi to warm their legs. They didn’t need to sit in a circle, their legs under a quilt thrown over a heater. They blasted the central heat instead.

  With each coming winter Darya felt a part of herself die. It took four seasons to feel at home. That’s what Parviz always said. But for her it would take four hundred. The years rushed at them. And this country—the one they were supposed to stay in until things got back to normal back home—became the one in which her children grew up. Darya sucked in her stomach and fingered her thinning hair. She was growing old in the Land of the Teacups. Parviz excelled at his work, the pizza shop was left for the corridors of a hospital after he passed his medical exams and got his American license. He was back at the work he loved again. Darya no longer had to bend over the sewing machine at Wang Dry Cleaning. She became a rightful stay-at-home mom for several years. Then Parviz’s rousing speech, his support and enthusiasm, propelled her to math camp, and she even had the guts to apply for the job at the bank. She got promoted. Progress.

  Their children were at the top of their classes. Michelle, Heather, Pria, and Yooni giggled in Mina’s bedroom. Hooman made out with his blond girlfriend in the back of Parviz’s car—Darya pretended she didn’t know, but oh, she knew. Kayvon ran for Student Union president and got elected. Certificates of achievement filled their kitchen walls, the family room shelves were crowded with the boys’ sports trophies. After college, Mina agreed to business school. Progress.

  One day, Darya woke up and looked at her children as they slapped on sunscreen for their fifteenth Fourth of July barbecue and realized they were Americans.

  But I will never be one. The children, maybe, with their slurry accents and soft-soled sneakers and the way they slurped creamy American milk shakes through straws. And Sam in her spreadsheet class, the man she felt pulled toward. But I will never be. The math notebooks from her university days, she hadn’t even brought them over. They were still stuffed in a box under a bed in Agha Jan’s house. What happened to the bed? Did Agha Jan sell it? Was he able to take care of himself? Was he lonely?

  She’d watched July freedom fireworks on TV. Every year, she’d seen the colors explode, and every year it felt as if the fireworks and celebration weren’t for her. She’d seen the lights reflected on her children’s faces as they looked up with wonder at the night sky in those early years. She never had the heart to tell them that every burst, every loud explosion still filled her with heart-stopping fear. She instinctively felt the need to crouch, to fall on her knees with her hands on her head.

  Now, in 1996, as she sat on the sofa after Mina had announced her desire to go back and visit Iran, she looked sideways at Parviz. He was reading the paper, a bowl of pistachios in his lap. Was he still upset about Sam? Was he hurt by that
coffee/tea that was nothing? Darya sighed. It was just the two of them now. Hooman was with his wife in their Upper West Side apartment. Kayvon was probably still working at this late hour in his law offices in Midtown Manhattan. Mina was, hopefully, studying for her business school exams. Darya watched Parviz place pistachios in his mouth.

  Had they made it? Were they almost there? Would they ever be?

  She thought of Mr. Dashti and all the charts and graphs she’d ever made. She thought of the hours spent (wasted) on those men. Something about how her heart tightened when Sam was near her. It made her doubt all the graphs and charts she’d made for men. Maybe it wasn’t so clear-cut. So black-and-white. She loved Parviz. She liked that Sam. It wasn’t as simple as sheet rows and columns. It didn’t add up that way. Now she knew.

  PART III

  1996

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  You’ve Come Home to Us

  People crept and muttered quietly as they inched their way through the passport check line. Small women swathed in chadors appeared out of nowhere. Bearded men in army fatigues stood in doorways. Darya and Mina had exited the plane, going down the metal stairs that had arrived on wheels, and they smelled the dusty night of Tehran once again. They hit the ground, and fifteen years evaporated. People spoke Farsi, the night air caressed their faces, the hustle and bustle and busy sounds seemed the same. Darya smiled her high school smile, the broad, chubby-cheeked version Mina had only seen in black-and-white photos from long ago. In those initial moments, it felt like coming back to something they knew. Maybe you could go home again.

  It was the posters that jolted them out of their giddy feeling. Immense pieces of fabric and huge rugs draped over the airport walls, cascading from staircase rails. Faces of the regime leaders, larger than life, looked down at everyone. Everywhere she looked, Mina saw them. The deep lines on their foreheads, the painted eyes and scowling expressions were far more jarring than the sight of real young men who peppered the airport in army fatigues, holding rifles. Mina didn’t dare look directly at the faces of the guards, but it was clear from a stolen glance that these guards whom she’d dreaded years ago and who had featured in her nightmares for so long, were now younger than she. A few looked like teenagers. Mina recognized the uncomfortable stance of adolescence. She noticed acne sprinkled across one of the guard’s faces, peach fuzz above his lips. The guard looked back at her, then looked quickly away, as if embarrassed. Mina almost felt sorry for him. But then she remembered that with a simple nudge of his rifle and a word to one of the airport bureaucrats, he could prevent her from entering Iran or keep her stuck there indefinitely. And then her pity returned to fear.