by Nayeri, Dina
When it seems that the two are distracted by memories—she talking about old days and he nodding and shelling pistachios into a bowl—Saba moves to turn off the television, but Agha Mansoori objects loudly. “Aieee. Wait. We are watching the story there. It’s shameful, Khanom . . . shameful.” Then he leans over and drops a handful of naked pistachios into Saba’s hand. He waits for her to eat them, as if they were medicine.
In seventy years maybe Saba’s own husband will call her “Mrs.” instead of her first name. Maybe he will have a sweet, gummy smile, shell nuts for her, and worry about how many she eats. If she married Reza, she is sure he would do all these things.
They watch for three hours, never skipping the commercials, until the tape cycles through six episodes, including an episode of Growing Pains and half an episode of The Wonder Years. Saba likes American high schools. She wonders what it would be like to go to one every day—to have a locker for her banned books, to have a boy occupy the locker next to hers. She takes in the details of the shows—the slightly uncomfortable look of suburbia, the layout of kitchens, women’s haircuts, the ubiquitous pancake diner. She misses her sister. At the same time, she wants to be alone. Funny thing about television shows, she thinks. They cover so many worries and crises and hurts. Yet somehow they wrap them all up in thirty minutes or less. What a beautiful world where all of life’s aches are wiped away with one group hug after exactly 22.5 minutes of visual storytelling. Saba wants to live in that world. She imagines that her sister already does.
The sky outside grows dark and Khanom Mansoori has fallen asleep. Her husband continues to sit ten centimeters from the television and comment to no one. Then something jolts the old lady and she sits up and calls out, “Saba, come here.”
Saba moves to the other side of the room, sits on the carpet beside Khanom Mansoori. She adjusts the pillows behind the old woman so she can be more comfortable.
“Saba jan, what happened to all that business about Mahtab and America?”
Usually a mention of her sister makes Saba’s throat constrict. But something in the old woman’s tone makes Saba lean closer. Is Khanom Mansoori dreaming? Has she confused the year? But then her withered lips whisper something that Saba knows is not a dream. “Are you still too grown-up for stories? You remember . . . the kid and the coping?”
Saba smiles, recalling the day they read Zanerooz magazine with Ponneh. It is impressive that Khanom Mansoori remembers a conversation from so long ago. Saba smooths back the strands of henna hair that have escaped the old woman’s scarf. “I’m not too old anymore,” she whispers, and rests her head on Khanom Mansoori’s shoulder.
“Tell me a story then. Something Mahtab wrote in a letter.”
“There was no letter,” she says, hoping that someone will challenge the lies she has learned to tell about Mahtab. Across the sea, she whispers over and over in her dreams to pasdars holding knives to throats and forcing truths out of reluctant lips.
Khanom Mansoori shakes her head. “Don’t tease an old woman,” she says, her voice birdlike. “At my age, you learn that true things are different from things your eyes can see. I want to know what’s in the letter before I judge that it’s not true.”
Saba lets out a laugh because she doesn’t know what to say to such a request. She appeals to the old woman’s husband. “Agha Mansoori, can you help me, please?”
There is a moment of silence, and she thinks Agha Mansoori didn’t hear her. But he says without looking away from the television, “What help? Just tell her the stories or the letters or what have you so she can tell you if they’re true. What’s the difficulty?”
Saba sighs, “But there are no—” She stops because it is useless to argue with them. Besides, why is she fighting? She saw Mahtab get on a plane to somewhere. There is no denying that. And she hasn’t told a story about Mahtab—except to herself alone in bed, or a few details to Baba—since that day in the alley behind the Rashti post office.
The Mansooris won’t judge her. They are creative with the truth, not only because they are Iranian and realize that good stories must be embellished, and words of praise must be exaggerated, and half of all invitations must be lies, but also because they are old, and it seems to Saba that this is what happens at the end of life, as in the beginning. People enter and leave this world trying to understand what everything means, how easily the costliest possessions can break, and what is theirs to keep. When they discover the bitter truth that everything is fragile and eventually gone, they make up a new reality in which the best of what is lost waits for them somewhere they are too busy to go. Where is Uncle Koorosh? you ask. He moved to France (died). The beautiful neighbor boy? He is in college (jail).
“All right,” Saba says, and takes a breath. Why not honor Mahtab in this way? Besides, unlike all the rest, Mahtab’s story could be true by some magic available only to twins. Didn’t Khanom Mansoori herself say that the bond between twins is unbreakable? That each will always know the truth about the other’s days? She is the one person who will understand all the possibilities following that day at the airport, and all the promise of the elegant mother in the terminal holding the hand of a girl with Saba’s own face.
“Good girl,” Khanom Mansoori sighs.
Here is how this will work. You both must promise that you will tell no one about Mahtab’s life. I will tell you her stories as on a television show, and each episode in the series will be about a day when she released one of the bondages of being an immigrant. You see, if there is one thing I have learned from books, television, and friends in exile, it is that the American way of life is so overwhelming, so grand, that outsiders are infected with a whole set of Immigrant Worries. In time, Mahtab will overcome the greatest of these fears, one by one. I know this because I know my sister; and in America, problems are solved in small bite-sized increments—just like you see on television.
Taken together, these episodes will be the story of Mahtab’s life. I have some of them hidden away on paper—maybe, as you say, these are my sister’s secret letters to me. Immigrant Worries: the narrative of how she releases her old life and leaves me to mine. By the end, she will no longer be an immigrant and she will no longer be a twin.
To begin, you should know that, like Alex P. Keaton and both my parents, Mahtab is obsessed with university. She wants to go to Harvard because that is the best one, the only one Iranians know. It’s a Friday afternoon in April—the one that just passed—and Mahtab sits on the curb next to her mailbox in California, waiting. She watches the panther lilies—because, you see, panther lilies grow in California, and they are verdant and vibrant, if you care to describe them in English. A fly buzzes around her face. A pari, a pretty, luck-bearing fairy, the kind that ignores all but faithful drinkers of old lore, sits atop the peeling fence post, unnoticed by passersby, her faint buzzing mistaken for a bee.
“Ah, a pari! That means good fortune,” says Khanom Mansoori.
“I saw a pari once,” says Agha Mansoori. “On the very day my mother died.”
Mahtab is aware that she has been very lucky, with her fine life and her strokes of good fortune. She tries not to think about Saba, her unlucky twin, because why remind the pari about the unfairness of it all? Fortune isn’t always so black-and-white, after all, and blessings can sour. Maybe one lucky day at the age of eleven can consume her life’s allowance of fortune. Maybe she is standing at a peak and it’s time to tumble down.
“Hmm,” says Khanom Mansoori, “is that what she worries about now? Sad.”
As a precaution, she appeases the immigrant gods with hard work and sweat, toiling at a pancake diner every day after school. On slow afternoons she talks to José, the middle-aged dishwasher, who she suspects is an illegal immigrant from Mexico—that’s in the South. Instead of talking, José passes the days with songs. He sings along to Otis Redding tapes in the kitchen, which is how Mahtab can tell that h
e speaks English. She likes José. He has unruly salt-and-pepper hair and kind eyes. He is never clean-shaven and he has thick black sideburns that peek out from beneath a dingy baseball cap. He peels carrots and makes sandwiches for her, leaving them on the counter after work. In return, she tells him her secrets when she’s bored or anxious—that she has Harvard-sized dreams, that she loves martial-arts movies and has seen American Ninja three times.
Today she’s late for work again, waiting next to her suburban curb as she has done all week. Finally she spots the mail truck in the distance. It drives past the Changs’, the Hortons’, the Kerinskis’, and the Stephanpouloses’—because American streets are filled with names like these—until it arrives next to a peeling fence post and a lazy pari. It pulls up in front of the Hafezi house and a disembodied hand reaches out the window. Like a mail-truck genie, the hand stuffs her mailbox with five thick envelopes and four thin ones.
“Is that a good thing? These thick and thin envelopes?” says Agha Mansoori.
Oh, yes. You see, in America, people like to sue. And so universities try to mitigate admissions-related heart attacks by hinting at their decision with the thickness of their envelopes. It is very much like the thickness of a stew—hefty ones signal success.
Later in life, when Mahtab tells the story of the college-acceptance genie, no American believes her. She doesn’t mind. Even now she knows not to get technical with Americans. They are a logical race, these Westerners. They don’t have spirits and body parts floating around in everyday life. They will never understand Mahtab because they are used to happy blond princesses like Shahzadeh Nixon who keep their fingers out of the garlic and their hands folded in their laps.
“Way to go, kiddo!” a voice from inside the mail truck shouts at her—because that is what American genies call children whose names they don’t remember. “Good schools!” Mahtab can barely feel her legs beneath her. She lifts her feet, kicks off her sandals, and swims through the thick haze to her mailbox, now crammed full of thick and thin, knocking the lounging pari off her pedestal with one flail of her soaring limbs.
Before we open the envelope from Harvard, I must be sure you understand. You see, Khanom and Agha Mansoori, this isn’t only about education. Mahtab needs a father. Can you imagine how much she must miss Baba? Maybe as much as I miss Maman. But unlike me, Mahtab fills the holes in her own heart through the strength of her will. She is clever, and she doesn’t sit around and suffer. So, as she tears open the envelope, she is imagining herself in the warm, secure arms of Baba Harvard—the world’s perfect father, with his deep pockets and endless erudition and mild discipline and visionary philosophy. She turns it over in her hand, examines the Cambridge postmark, runs her fingers over her own address. It’s neither thick nor thin. She rips it open, hands shaking, and scans. Sadly, I don’t have the knowledge to re-create this letter for you, but it says basically this:
Dear Ms. Hafezi,
Something something . . . WAITING LIST . . . Some other things.
Sincerely,
Harvard College
“Well, I don’t believe this!” says Khanom Mansoori with a huff. “Who is this Agha Harvard who thinks he can make our Mahtab wait? Does he know she can chatter all day in English? She must know a thousand big words!”
Yes, thousands! Well, by the time Maman comes home, Mahtab is already immersed in the mourning process: hair rumpled, pajamas askew. Mahtab never does anything without conviction—so she doesn’t notice all the wonders of having a mother who returns home every night to witness her tragedies. Look at our maman sitting by my sister’s bed, the way she smooths her hair, the way they look so alike now that Mahtab is grown. They are no longer the woman and child at the terminal. Now Maman’s elegance has been worn away by exhaustion and factory work, and her bob is full of gray. But see how Mahtab and I have inherited her dark looks? Jet-black hair. Sleepy eyes. Tall, curvy bodies. Are Mahtab and I still identical? Maybe not for long. She has been begging for a nose job, a rite of passage for many Persian girls in our circle—for the ones in Iran, because the head scarf leaves them no outer beauty but the circle it draws around their face; and for the ones in America, because of so many lonely Immigrant Worries.
By May, when no new letter comes from Harvard, Maman begins to feel a strange fear—a special breed of exile panic that comes from standing at too many borders with dangerously thin piles of paperwork. Mahtab is inconsolable. She spends her days alone in her room, misses school, flies into rages. She rants about becoming a postal worker, or a professional gardener, or a middle-class wife, like the women in TV shows. Maybe she will have to go back to Iran and marry a mullah, she says.
Despite her own fears, Maman begins to consider the surgery as a way of appeasing Mahtab. What else can she do? She has been through too much on her own. She has worked her way up from factory laborer to factory management, has delivered her daughter from a meager apartment to a modest house. She has already lost one girl, and has built calluses in her heart where that daughter used to live. Though she loathes change in all forms—though she doesn’t want her own mark to be removed from her child’s face—she relents for the sake of Mahtab’s happiness.
Of course, I can only guess at her thoughts. I know my mother must be different now—because people change, so slowly that they are blind to it, in the same way that yellowing teeth go unnoticed until one day ten years have passed and you remember that it’s been a long time since anyone complimented your smile. I imagine that my mother misses her old life, her old friends. She is probably the lonelier of the two by far. Unlike Mahtab’s, her losses are impossible to overcome. Her immigrant curse is a tangible, breathing thing. It lives and eats with them, like an unwanted stepparent.
Afraid for her daughter’s future, which has already cost her so much, she takes out a loan to pay for the new nose. See how she helps my sister discard me? I can still picture her standing in the airport, holding Mahtab’s hand, refusing to look back when I called to them both. Even though I was screaming their names, they boarded that plane without even a good-bye. And now they abandon me again and again, in new and more imaginative ways every day.
“Don’t be sad, Saba jan. I’m quite sure noses grow back with age.”
But maybe it has all been for the best, because look there:
On a doubly lucky morning in late May, Mahtab wakes up from surgery to find the good-luck pari lounging at the foot of her bed. A blurry three-headed version of her mother is waving a letter and jumping up and down. “You’re off the waiting list! You’re going to Harvard, Mahtab joon!” And so she is transformed. A Harvard girl with a sleek nose, long and thin with a slight upturn.
Before she leaves for university, Mahtab dyes her hair auburn. I would never choose that color. And later, at Harvard, when she changes her name to “May,” she won’t even think of me. With each deviation from her original looks, she feels a bit freer, a bit less bound to us—to our twin world. No one will ever stop her in the streets and say, “Hey, you, I just saw you in some village in Iran. You don’t belong here.”
When Mahtab still was in that village, when that village was the only place she belonged, she used to listen to you, my dear Khanom Mansoori, explain how carpets are made and how to judge them. The three base colors, the quality of the fibers, the number of knots, the neatness of the fringe. One day you gathered the two of us into your lap and showed us the back of a carpet. “You see how messy it looks? All those strands in the back? You don’t see them because it’s their job to be invisible, but really they are holding it all together.” There is an Unseen Strand that holds together sisters across the world. No matter where they travel and how much earth and water come between them, even if one of them leaves this world altogether. And though you can’t see it, it’s the reason that you can never really run away, just like the right side of a carpet can’t cover the living room if the left side is in the hall. “And twins,
” you said to us on that day, “see how the pattern in the carpet has perfect symmetry? Both sides exactly the same? How can you possibly separate the two halves? People would always know that a piece is missing.”
Ever since Mahtab moved to California, the Unseen Strand has felt like a noose around her neck. And now, with each physical change, she feels it loosen so she can breathe. As she looks at herself in the mirror at night, she feels sad for her sister, with her Persian nose and unshaven legs, with her Gilaki head scarf and village-girl chores.
A week before she leaves for Harvard, Mahtab craves some company—feels that she should say good-bye to someone. Maybe she regrets never saying it to me. Maybe that’s why, when she can’t think of anyone to talk to, she goes back to the diner and sits in a corner, watching her classmates eat pancakes and tease each other with private jokes.
How will she ever make friends at Harvard?
But Mahtab never approaches. She just sits and waits. None of them is the person she wants to speak to. She spies on them for an hour and then, as her classmates finish their food, gather their backpacks, and drop green bills on the table, Mahtab thinks maybe no person will fill the void. Maybe in this new world she will have to toil and wait for me to join her—like a sort of purgatory. Maybe she will have to sweat to appease the gods who dole out luck—the ones who choose one sister over another though they are exactly the same in their blood—because she has already had more than her fair share.
Still, she is desperate to belong here. Will she ever be anything like them? Will Baba Harvard be all that he promised to be? Will he reject her because of her foreignness?
If her real father were here, Mahtab thinks, she wouldn’t need to fit in. She wouldn’t want to change the features she shares with him. She would bring him her grades every semester and wait for that slow smile that spreads like a thick dye over his face and reveals his cream-colored teeth one by one. She would never rebel or date boys he didn’t like. She wouldn’t ask to drive or wear short skirts, and she would make him tea in the afternoons—watch him sip it through a sugar cube between his teeth.
