A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (37 page)

inanimate protectors she has created, Mr. Scarret has never tempted
the lonely daughter inside her, and that is quite a statement from a
girl who watched longingly as Jose did dishes and Mr. Arganpur
drank tea.
She wonders what her mother would say and picks up the phone,
because this is a privilege that Mahtab still has—calling her mother
instead of trying to imagine.
“Why so sad, Mahtab jan?” Maman croons. “Be thankful. You
are a girl from Gilan! Look at where you are now. You can do anything you want, and a baby is the best thing. A baby will make you
immortal.” When Mahtab is silent, she adds, “Leave it in God’s
hands. Try. If you are not able, that is your answer.”
And there it is, the moment the idea emerges and takes form.
If
you’re not able, that is your answer.
In this vague appeal to a higher
power Mahtab finds her solution things, this directive given by a
mother who believes in the power of simple answers. She dreams up
the big Lie now, but you mustn’t hate her for it. She does it only for
the most Iranian of reasons—to satisfy everyone and give them what
they need, a cool sip of yogurt. She may be educated by Baba Harvard, but she is still a wild creature. It isn’t her fault. It is written in
her Caspian blood.
“Okay,” says Mahtab, before hanging up the phone. “Love you.
Miss you.
Zoolbia
.” They laugh at the old joke, because
zoolbia
is a
syrupy pastry, a word we used to say as toddlers instead of
zood-bia
,
which means “Come soon.”

It is a Sunday when Mahtab first utters the words out loud.
I can’t have children—
it’s so easy. Done. Finished. Free. Now it is up to James and his family to accept it or decide blatantly to violate every possible Eastern and Western rule of goodness and decency. Because who can blame a woman who is willing but unable? She doesn’t feel guilty over what she is doing. She is escaping the way her mother escaped from Iran. She feels heroic, virtuous, noble. Also maybe a little less scared. She breathes deeply once or twice. It’s the freedom of abandoning her twenties and being fourteen again. The freedom of having—not becoming—a guardian. It feels good. When James smiles sympathetically and takes her hand, a wave of relief and affection washes over her.

Now she is released from this conversation. She can go back to documenting the injustices in the world, back to impressing Baba Harvard with her post-graduation talent.

What power she has! That is the thing about Mahtab. She chooses all that happens to her. She doesn’t want babies and so she doesn’t have them, and in doing so she gives me such hope. A legacy can be so many things besides children. I will have a legacy one day that has nothing to do with Cheshmeh or Reza or Ponneh. It will be something entirely from within me. A piece of Saba Hafezi left in the world.

Mahtab is a skilled journalist, so naturally she has plenty of re search to back her story. Last week, as she rifled through facts and figures and the language of disease, she realized something: that she could create any fiction and wrap it in a cloak of verisimilitude, using the world’s collective knowledge. These moments of authorial power have given Mahtab a thrill ever since we were young and she made up stories about the Sun and Moon Man. Her story is flawless: Infections. Scars. Damage and more damage. She is getting into some bad business now—Mahtab the taker of risks, controller of her own destiny. Mahtab the dreamer, the sleeper, the abandoner of lonely sisters.

“Don’t worry,” James whispers. “We’ll just adopt. We’ll adopt a little girl. Maybe one from Iran.” He cuts a piece of his own breakfast pastry and places it on her plate, as one would do for a sad child. Mahtab picks at the bread and makes room in her heart for the torrent of guilt that will remain with her from this instant, for the rest of her life.

She tries to make out the expressions on her in-laws’ faces. Mrs. Scarret is sympathetic, obviously looking for something positive to say. Finally she settles on the noncommittal. “There are always options, dear, in this day and age.”

Mr. Scarret looks at the table, pokes his bacon with his fork. His jowls hang in a gray, deflated sort of way that clashes with the carefree pastel pattern on his sweater. “Can’t they operate?” he asks so loudly that the couple at the next table looks up. “I’ll research it,” he breathes. “You kids can have whatever resources you need.”

Now Mahtab throws herself into her work as a reporter. She is good at it, a star. For months she lives with the daily expectation that something will happen, and one day it does. She picks up the phone and it is Dr. Vernon, her ob-gyn, asking that she come in. (“Yes, it is urgent. Yes, today, please.”) She enters his office, situated in the center of a cul-de-sac of private offices in an upscale neighborhood, with all the trepidation of a child being summoned to a special convention of a dozen furious principals. She sits in the waiting room for ten minutes before giving her name. When her turn arrives, the doctor himself comes to get her. He is a kind-looking man in his late thirties, blond and gray-eyed, quick and petite in his crisp slacks and white coat.

“Mrs. Scarret,” he begins, without asking her to sit or change into a gown or fill out papers. The sound of her new name briefly distracts her. “This is a bit delicate.”

“Is something wrong?” Her barely audible voice seems to confirm his suspicions.
“It’s just that . . . my wife is in the So-and-So Women’s Club. . . . Do you know it?”
“Yes,” she whispers again, “my mother-in-law is chair of—”
Dr. Vernon interrupts with three forceful nods. “My wife ran into her there. And they got to talking, and . . . I’m sorry to interfere, Mrs. Scarret, but is everything okay with you? Why have you told your family that you can’t have children?”
Mahtab breathes out, because Dr. Vernon’s voice isn’t the condemning, hateful one she expected. “I . . .” she begins, unaware that she is crying now, ruining her lady-journalist makeup.
“It really isn’t any of my business,” Dr. Vernon assures her. “I wouldn’t even be prying, if—and by the way, when Katie told me how bad she felt for you, I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t true. Patientdoctor confidentiality—but I’m worried, Mrs. Scarret, because if you said something like that . . . well, you know that it’s not even a good story, right? I mean, besides the obvious fact that you are totally normal, the disease you cited does not cause definite infertility. A simple medical journal will tell you that.”
“I know,” says Mahtab, almost silently.
The doctor leads Mahtab to a chair, hands her a Kleenex. He lowers himself into a swivel chair and blurts out the rest of his prepared speech. “Mrs. Scarret. May. Can I call you May? You aren’t doing anything more drastic, are you? According to my records, you are not on birth control because, well, you said you were trying to start a family. So I just need to make sure. It is my
job
to make sure.”
“What would I be doing?”
Dr. Vernon shrugs. “Pills that haven’t gone through me, home remedies, and such. It’s the nineties, but you wouldn’t believe the things that go on.” He coughs and adds, “Mostly with teenagers of course . . .” He clears his throat, waiting for Mahtab to release him from this chore.
“Thanks, Dr. Vernon,” she says, and gets up, “but you don’t have to worry.”
The lobby is empty. The doctor shakes her hand with both of his and tells her to “be well and please do call if you need us,” before disappearing into his private offices.
Who’s “us”?
she wonders as she surveys the room. She decides to sit for a minute, just to get her thoughts together. Her hands are shaking. She doesn’t trust herself to drive. Outside the sky is turning gray and the cul-de-sac looks dismal and ordinary. Women’s magazines are fanned out on the generic wooden tables that sit on ugly shag carpeting. Then Mahtab begins to weep loudly into her sleeve. She knows it’s unseemly, that it makes her pathetic and weak, but she finds that she can’t help herself.
She doesn’t notice the receptionist running over to hold her hand or Dr. Vernon rushing back out and picking up the phone. She doesn’t register his lame attempt at lifting her mood by changing the CD from classical to jazz, the only two options in the office. She sees only the wet blur of brown and pink and white where the tables and the magazines and the carpet used to be. She recognizes the feeling of not knowing what to do and of things unraveling, a caravan overturning and crushing her chest; the vague lonely notion that if she called Cameron right now, he would explain away all her failures with a masterful quip about poetic license and lunacy.
Where is Cameron? Where is my friend? Another outsider to look in on the world?
And then, minutes later, she spots the Scarrets’ royal-blue minivan slicing through all that endless gray concrete outside.
James and his father burst into the office. Mr. Scarret shakes hands with Dr. Vernon. Through the window, Mahtab spies Mrs. Scarret waiting in the car, tapping her long fingers on the dashboard and probably chewing the lipstick off her lips. She feels sorry for her mother-in-law, for all the trouble she has brought into this peaceful American family, a family that has probably never seen a day’s worth of real drama.
“What’s the matter?” she hears her father-in-law whisper. His voice is coarse and sympathetic, and she resents him for empathizing with the inconvenienced doctor.
“I’m sorry to have called,” Dr. Vernon stammers. He is intimidated by James’s father, a much older, more prominent man. “She just . . . she needed some help.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Um . . . look, sir, about the fertility problems . . .”
But James’s father cuts him off. He puts a hand on the doctor’s forearm and shushes him like a subordinate. “We already know,” he says sadly, and Mahtab realizes that James has found her research. Maybe his father has done his own, as he said he would do when she told the Big Lie. He jokes awkwardly, “Kids and that damn research library, like giving a pistol to a monkey,” and laughs twice—up and down.
Mahtab shuts off her mind, turns her attention to the kind receptionist, as James and his father and Dr. Vernon discuss her in a far corner of the room. She notices James avoiding her and tries hard to hate them for their hushed whispers, tries to imagine them wearing turbans and passing cruel judgments, but she fails. She tries several times.
Then, as she rests her head on the receptionist’s shoulder, Mr. Scarret comes over and kneels down beside her. The way he does that, the way he squats down so they can be face-to-face—like fathers do to their children on the first day of school—draws the tears out of Mahtab again. Beneath the salty droplets dripping over her lips, her skin feels thin and cracked, like rice paper or brittle seaweed. She tries to say “I’m sorry,” but Mr. Scarret shakes his head. He puts an arm around her shoulder and helps her up. When she tries again, he says in a tired voice, “It’s okay now, sweetheart.” In the background, Otis Redding sings a song that he sang at her wedding, and Mahtab walks in step with her father-in-law, thinking what a funny way to dance.
But it’s nice, letting go of the last and the worst of the Immigrant Worries, that pesky fear that when you enter a new country, you will be forever alone.
No, she is not frightened now—of being an outsider, or a failure, or poor, or unimportant. Her refugee skin is shed and gone. Her father-in-law says, “It’s not all that bad, now, is it?” and she shakes her head, unafraid of being alone. I too am no longer terrified of loneliness in strange lands. How nice, Mahtab thinks, to shed the skin of an immigrant. To do wrong and be forgiven like a true daughter, to be adopted into a new country with its own flesh-and-blood fathers. And to relive all the moments she missed.

he whole town knows the story—the real one—though no one talks about it, because that’s our way. We prefer pretty lies to ugly truths. But we remember it every time Agha Hafezi sighs, and we replay it in our minds every time Saba mentions Mahtab.

In 1981, when the girls were eleven, the family went for a week to a beach house on the Caspian Sea. It was only a short drive from Cheshmeh, but in those days Agha Hafezi didn’t want to go far from his own house. “If you pretend it’s a long journey,” he told the girls, “it will feel that way. Pretend it’s a pilgrimage, like in your stories.”

“A pilgrimage to Mecca?” Saba asked, wiping summer dew from her face.
“No,” Bahareh snapped, because she hated all mention of Muslim things.
“Hush,” said Agha Hafezi. “No more of this talk.” They fought a lot in those days, though the girls never noticed. They probably went back to making up jokes, eating raisins and smoked chickpeas, and pretending they were going to see the mismatched carpet-weaving girls in Nain. Oh, these Hafezis and their trips! To the sea for freshcaught fish, to Qamsar to smell the rosewater from the highway, to Isfahan, the center of the world, to Persepolis for culture, to Tehran for visiting family.
I envy them, riding in a car in the early morning, especially into the mountains! Watching the thick forest appear out of nowhere. Strapping a full, steaming meal in thermoses and towel-covered pots to their backs and climbing a peak for breakfast.
Before they left, I remember telling the girls that seaside villas have Western toilets, a foreign devil’s work that rises up out of the ground like a throne. They squealed and fell on top of each other, laughing at the impossibility of it, daring each other to go first.
How I wish I had asked to go along on that trip. In those days the Hafezis neglected the girls and, yes, I’m not afraid to say I blame Bahareh a little. They might have paid me for my services and I did love the Caspian villas, the dewy beachside towns reserved for the rich, with their pretty tributes to village life all around—houses on stilts and tiny wooden shops sprouting every kilometer or two, with their wicker baskets hanging outside, jars of preserves, brined garlic, and orange-flower jam stacked by the door. And, best of all, huge branches that jutted out from the walls covered with olives and garlic cloves. In the spring the north of Iran smells like orange flower. In the summer it smells of newly caught fish. Shomal is a sort of heaven.
That summer the Hafezi villa was close enough to the water so they could fry fish while wading in the sea, and share their meals with the gulls, and stumble back nearly blind through the fog and humidity and still find the house in minutes. Bad omen, being so close to the sea. That night they ate a dinner of local specialties, olives beaten with hogweed powder, pomegranates, garlic, fresh herbs, and walnuts. Kebabs on skewers. Green tomatoes and cucumbers dipped in herbal chutney. When a beggar knocked, a cheerful Agha Hafezi gave her a pot of kebab because he said that vagrants are often angels coming to test the faithful, like the ones that visited Lot. If you ask me, that was another bad omen, because Agha Hafezi was tempting Allah with his homage to Christian prophets.
Later, after dark, the girls ruined everything by taking a swim in the black waters.