Because I Said So (34 page)

“Be thankful you don’t have to wear a
chador
,” I mumbled under my breath. “It’s not that bad,” he replied. I wanted to remind him that his mother had wanted to burn her scarves in the garden. But as a “good Iranian wife,” I felt I couldn’t complain. I had begun to feel stifled: I’d been grinning and bearing a lot, and because I hadn’t spoken up, Farhad assumed I was as happy as he was.

As we walked toward the mosque, it was all I could do to move forward without becoming completely unraveled. These Muslims clerics clearly fear the power of women. Why else would they tie them up in robes, scarves,
chadors
, and long skirts and send them out in the heat? How could anyone fight back when they were doing all they could to grasp fields of cloth around their middle and keep their damn hair from showing? The
chador
is a ridiculous contraption, meant to be draped over the head, then gathered up in each arm, swept across the front of the body, and secured under an armpit. With any luck, one arm will be free. The whole operation is destined to fail, which is why even the most devout, experienced Islamic woman is constantly adjusting and
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readjusting the layers of fabric binding her. I was fairly competently draped when I left the house, but getting into and out of the car had undone me. Each time I tugged the
chador
forward, the head scarf underneath slipped farther and farther back. Unsure of the consequences of taking it all off and starting over, an action that would expose my hair in public, I clutched the
chador
under my chin in desperation to preserve my modesty.

We entered the mosque through separate doors. A man wearing thick white woolen gloves took our shoes and stuffed them into a little cubby. A high wall separated the women’s section from the rest of the mosque. In this small alcove, women in black robes lounged about on the floor and leaned back against elaborate mirror-tiled walls. Some held babies. Others leaned forward to pray, ignoring the toddlers who climbed all over them.

Mahine said a prayer, and I stood awkwardly beside her, wishing I were invisible. There were no foreigners inside, and everyone stared at me. When Mahine was finished we walked through an opening in the wall, out into the arched and mirrored space of the greater mosque. Farhad stood there in his socks, waiting for us. In the center of the great open space was a large tomb covered with thousands of mirrored tiles. People—mostly men but some women—walked up to the tomb, ran their fingertips over the pressed metal decoration, touched their lips to it, and put their foreheads against it to pray. Mahine ordered Farhad to say a prayer, and he stood awkwardly next to the tomb, making minimal contact with his fingertips. We walked to an adjacent wall. “This is where my father is buried,” Mahine said to me. She prayed for several minutes. Farhad stood still, looking down at the ground. I looked around at the incredible architecture and tried to keep my
chador
on. We walked over to a corner of the mosque. Against the wall was a bookcase containing tattered copies of the Koran. “This is where my mother is buried,”

Mahine said. There was no obvious indication of either tomb, though given my ignorance of religious symbols and inability to read the language, I might have been missing clues. In that holy, spiritual place all I could think about were my slipping scarves.

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• • •

On our way home to California,
we stopped once again in Tehran to see Parvoneh, Afsaneh, and Mastoneh. In the presence of these gregarious women, I felt a renewed energy. The cousins included me with ease, translating the gist of conversations as they unfolded. This was so jarringly different from what had transpired in Shiraz and Esphahan that my resentment began to surface. Not that I had expected full translation of every nuanced detail. There were many times in Shiraz when I was content to be excluded. But this new wave of hospitality reminded me that my feeling slighted had not been just a matter of being left out of the conversation. My husband had been inattentive to me. After so many years with Farhad, I knew that this was in accordance with Iran’s culture of hospitality toward others; the comfort of one’s self, and by extension one’s family, is considered last. Special attention is reserved for guests and outsiders. For the most part I’d become used to this. But during those last days in Tehran, I realized the frustrating irony that Farhad had neither helped me fit in nor granted me outsider status.

With the cousins giving me special guest treatment in Tehran, my husband’s neglect grated on me.

Late one afternoon we took a walk to do some last-minute shopping. I followed Farhad and Mastoneh down a busy road—

the sky getting darker, the sidewalk more and more broken up, the crowds around us thicker—until we got to a massive, con-gested traffic circle. Leyla slithered here and there, unafraid of the cars and unfazed at the prospect of being separated from us. Kian rode on Farhad’s shoulders, and I tried to keep Leyla safe while pushing the empty stroller over potholes and up and down steps. I finally declared, “I really don’t like it here.” I’d hit a wall. It was hot, crowded, dirty, and I wanted out.

We ducked into a shop, where Leyla, eager to take home something that was typically Iranian, found a small kilim she liked—though it didn’t compare to a seven-hundred-dollar tapestry of an Iranian princess she had hoped to buy earlier in the trip.

While Farhad paid, she turned to me to say, “This doesn’t mean
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that I don’t still want to get a tapestry like the one we saw in the Shiraz bazaar.” I summoned all my reserves of patience, taking her chin gently in my hand to tell her, “When someone is giving you a present it is unbecoming to start talking about something else you want.” I wondered remotely if the same rule should apply to me, too. Now, at the end of our trip, I struggled to contain my irritation. Her behavior was understandable given her age and the difficulty of traveling. But my greatest urge was to yell,

“Just get over it!” even as I felt I couldn’t.

When I finally got Farhad alone, I boiled over. He was surprised and a little disappointed that I was so upset. He wanted me to be happy just to be in Iran, absorbing the culture and basking in the foreignness of it all. But I was cut off from so much, I told him, and he hadn’t done much to help me. Just as Farhad shifted easily between Farsi and English, he took for granted how effortlessly he moved between the two cultures that were both part of him. I, though, had only my Americanness to rely on. “What can I do?” he asked. I couldn’t even articulate what I wanted because I didn’t know myself. The truth was that I hadn’t had a terrible time. It had mostly been very interesting, if mysterious, and having the kids connect with all of the extended Iranian family had been incredibly gratifying. But the liberation I felt earlier in not having any responsibility had morphed into frustration with my lack of freedom to do anything for myself or on my own, being reduced to a dependence so opposite my life at home.

I wanted to be a woman in America again, not his wife in Iran. After I spilled all this, Farhad was empathetic and appreciative. “You’ve been great,” he told me and hugged me tight. “I love that you kissed my father every morning, and took care of the kids. You’ve been such a good sport and so easygoing. I haven’t had to worry about you.” I felt worlds better. His acknowledgment and appreciation of my efforts dissolved my aggravation. My husband, the one I’d known before this trip, was back.

Suddenly, it seemed, we were at the airport again, and it was time to say good-bye. Guity wept as we cleared security and
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walked up the stairs to our flight. Leyla, overcome with emotion, ran back down the stairs to give her one last hug.

The good-bye in Shiraz had been just as emotional. Out in the garden, Dr. Farzaneh held a Koran over the heads of the children and said a prayer for a safe journey. At his request, Kian kissed the book while I had tried to fight back tears. When Firoozeh, the housekeeper, threw water and rose petals out the door toward the car to ensure our safe return, I broke up completely. Having lost all composure, I climbed into the car and hugged Kian close on my lap. Before he pulled away, the driver gently told Farhad to remind me to cover my head.

After about a month
at home, most things had returned to normal. Leyla’s celebrity at school had faded; her “My Trip to Iran” shelf had been replaced by curriculum material on bones.

Kian had turned two and refused to wear anything but corduroys.

Farhad had resumed his hectic travel schedule and American ways. But I resisted slipping too easily into my old routine. The trip to Iran lingered in my consciousness as I picked up my life where I had left it.

Walking Leyla to school one day we saw a paper bag on the sidewalk labeled FREE BOOKS. Inside, in a coincidence that could only be attributed to fate, I found Geraldine Brooks’s
Nine Parts
of Desire
, a book about “the hidden world of Islamic women.” I devoured Brooks’s book and headed to the library for more. I searched out books by Iranian women, laying my life alongside theirs, observing the dramatic differences and subtle similarities.

Their stories filled in gaps left by Farhad, and gave context to my experiences—both in Iran and at home.

I was struck by one woman’s description of her extended family “that loops around and around itself, never letting anyone be alone.” This was Farhad’s family—the one that enveloped him as a child, the one he had turned his back on as a young man. This family is woven into his very being, despite his attempts to struggle free. For their part, they never entirely cut him loose, and they
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have looped me in as well. It began long before our Muslim marriage; it started at our first wedding, when the Iranian women sheltered us under the silk cloth. Unknowingly, then, I inherited the woman’s work common in so many cultures: that of interpret-ing and creating family traditions—some that were not mine to start with. Rather than cutting me off from the wisdom of my mother-in-law, my sister’s stitches bound me more closely to Farhad’s family and his culture.

I realize now that our trip to Iran completed my initiation into that culture. It is mine as well, whether I wanted it or not.

Like my daughter struggling to be satisfied with her gifts from the bazaar, I have been given something I must learn to love.

Understanding that culture and weaving it into my family’s life—and into mine as a mother and a wife—is something that will come over time, from an accumulation of details. I’ve come to understand that those little Iranian elements in our lives that previously seemed so inconsequential—from Farhad’s customized Persian appetizers to Guity’s hand-knit sweaters that Leyla wears so proudly to school—are each uniquely important, like the individual threads in a tapestry.

Our family tapestry will always be a hybrid, one with an Iranian warp and an American weft, woven from the fabric of our family life: my opinionated half-Iranian toddler obsessed with corduroys; my whimsical half-American daughter, wrapped in her grandmother’s scarves; my husband, so thoroughly Iranian beneath a patchwork of American mannerisms, and me, an American mother finding my way in foreign terrain. I, too, will wander into the Iranian delicatessen, wondering what sweets to buy for
Noruz.
And I will drag the family along to pick out the perfect fir tree in early December. At some point I will hand over our family’s unfinished weaving to my children, with all its complicated threads. It will be theirs, then, to interpret, to pick apart, to reweave, and to embroider with details of their own.

Survivor

A n d r e a L a w s o n G r a y

We were finally doing
everything we had dreamed of doing to our house. We had put a fresh coat of pastel paints inside and out. Big, beautiful slabs of dark green granite were being laid for the kitchen counters, in place of the old tile that had always trapped grime in its grout. Now it would be a kitchen to really cook in, with its Viking stove and sleek new appliances. My office, along with that of my two assistants, was being turned into the master bedroom suite I had always envisioned, complete with French doors, a new duvet, and luxurious throw pillows of every size and coordinated print. The room of my daughter, Cienna, would have cottage-white furniture and a fluffy pink quilt; my son Armand’s room would have cowboy curtains and a toy train table. Getting the garden professionally landscaped was a finishing touch I had never had the time or the money to do.

We had come a long way in our eleven years in San Francisco.

When we first moved to the city, we had big dreams, one child, and a one-bedroom furnished apartment. We shared a bath in the hallway with several other renters. I bathed our four-year-old, Andre, in it only after scouring the tub thoroughly. Most of the food in our tiny refrigerator was leftovers from the café I managed at the time. My husband, Chris, had just been officially declared disabled for a nervous system disorder, so I was going to be the breadwinner for our family.

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With what limited help Chris was able to give, I established a small advertising agency in 1991. Seven years and two children later, we finally could afford to put down eighty thousand dollars in cash on a house. Of course, in order to afford the house, I had to be gone from it half the time, traveling on business more than a hundred thousand miles a year. While Chris took care of the kids during the week, I was often home only on weekends. How I ever had time to get pregnant, never mind to bear two children, I can’t even remember now. I traveled with each baby until they were too old for free seats on the plane, nursing them in airports, hotel rooms, even business meetings.