The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (38 page)

“She’s changed her outfit again!” Zaynab would call out breathlessly. “Come see; come see!” she’d call, and from time to time Lili and Kobra would poke their heads into the room to admire Googoosh’s latest look.

A light snow had begun to fall earlier in the night. By the time we reached Mehrabad Airport, it was four in the morning and large, heavy snowflakes filled the still-dark sky. We trudged across the icy tarmac. The plane’s engines roared and hummed and the lights on its wings began pulsing.

“If you don’t hurry,” a woman called out to us, “it will be too late for you to board!”

At this, Lili, Kobra, and Zaynab fell into each other’s arms, crying. I caught a snowflake on my tongue and ate it, then caught another and another.

Zaynab broke free from Lili’s and Kobra’s embrace and brushed her tears away with the edge of her veil. “America,” she said suddenly. “It’s a wonderful place, they say. Everyone says it’s a wonderful place….”

This only made Lili cry harder. For weeks she’d been telling everyone—her cousins, aunts, colleagues, and neighbors—that we’d soon be back in our apartment on Avenue Pahlavi. “We’re only taking two suitcases!” she told them. “How long could we stay away with just two suitcases?”

But in these last minutes a terrible apprehension overtook her. She turned to her aunt and clasped Zaynab’s hands in her own. “What if we can’t come back?”

“But of course you’ll come back!” Zaynab and Kobra cried out together.

Lili nodded and drew in a deep breath. “But you’ll keep an eye out for her, won’t you? Just sometimes, so I know—”

“Yes, yes,” Kobra said quickly. “You just watch out for that one,” she said with a nod toward me. “And your husband, too.”

“But I’ll have no one to talk to over there!” Lili wailed.

“You’ll have her!” Zaynab exclaimed, giving my cheek a pinch.

“Her? What will she understand? She won’t even remember any of this. She won’t remember any of you!”

This would prove just as true as her dream. Until Lili told the story in the tapes twenty years later, I’d forget almost everything about that last night in Iran. The two suitcases, the pretty lady in the golden carriage on television, all the cries, prayers, and promises, Kobra as she held the Koran over our heads, and Zaynab burying her face in Lili’s chest and then wrestling herself free and walking away
so that there was no choice for us but to go. One by one my memories of that last night in Iran fell away until finally I remembered nothing but the snow.

Later it would be called the Islamic Revolution, but for a long time the hopes and furies that gripped Iran in the late seventies would be known to Iranians only as the
shoolooqi
, “the busyness.” In the first months of the
shoolooqi
, when the streets of Tehran were overrun with mobs, tanks, soldiers, and snipers, Kobra would sit in the dark back room of the Lady Diola until the cries of “
Allahu Akbar!
[God is great!]” rose from the rooftops of the city.

My mother, father, and I landed in New York with two suitcases. Lili and Johann bought a silver Buick sedan and headed south and then westward across the United States. I sat cross-legged on my mother’s lap in the front seat, chattering to myself and playing dolls. Lili, lost in her thoughts, braided and unbraided and rebraided my hair. From time to time her eyes would seize on some detail of the landscape and she’d point out the window and tell me to “look at America.” I was five years old and “America” meant nothing more to me than the plush maroon seats and gleaming hood of that Buick. Persian was just the sound of my mother’s voice and German was my father’s.

We stayed at roadside motels, slept three to a bed, woke early, and drove all day. In New York, in Fort Lauderdale, in Houston and Las Vegas, Lili stayed up long past midnight, dialing Kobra’s number and then Zaynab’s. No answer. Lili would let the phone ring ten, twenty, thirty times before setting down the receiver. Sara had no telephone in the countryside. She might be safer there than with relatives in the city, but Lili couldn’t be sure. She paced the motel room, cursing or crying or both. Ten minutes later she’d dial Kobra’s and Zaynab’s numbers again. No answer. Every night Lili lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, desperate for sleep. It rarely came. By the time we reached
Texas, her eyes were ringed with dark circles. When we stopped at gas stations she bought packages of pink doughnuts, and when she felt her waist start to thicken she found she did not care.

In Tehran, meanwhile, Kobra began to hoard flatbread, beans, and nuts. Twice a day she moistened a sheet of
nooneh sangak
with a sprinkle of water, pressed some feta cheese and walnuts on top of it, and ate it in one bite. Whenever she came by an orange or an apple at the marketplace, she’d wrap it in a sheet of newspaper and bury it deep in her refrigerator. Just before the fruit reached the point of rotting, she’d pull it out and eat it as a treat.

The shah left the country with a small box of Iranian soil tucked under his arm. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to kneel on the ground and kiss the source of that same soil. “
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
” came the cries across the rooftops of Tehran night after night—God is great! God is great!—and all through the
shoolooqi
Kobra, too, put her faith in Him.

We crossed into California and spent an entire day circling Los Angeles, looking for Hollywood. Failing to find it, we settled for a tour of Universal Studios. The Santa Ana winds set the palm trees swaying, mixed the scent of the desert with the scent of the sea. My father took me to Disneyland and Lili, alone in a motel room in Anaheim, watched the news from Iran and wept.

From Los Angeles we continued north along the California shore, down Highway 1, until we reached San Francisco. When we crossed over the Golden Gate, my mother narrowed her eyes at a strip of coast just beyond the bridge. The light brushed the slate gray water silver and the hills that skirted the ocean were unlike any she’d ever seen, blond and rounded and endless.

“Here,” she told my father, because by then she understood that there’d be no going back to Iran, or no going back yet.

Like most immigrants, my parents found their degrees and work experience did not count for much when they came to America, and so they used their small savings to buy a run-down motel on a frontage road off Highway 101 ten miles north of San Francisco. The Casa Buena, the Good House. It had twenty rooms, doubles and singles, on two floors, and a small cottage, the “manager’s suite,” attached to the motel on one end. The parking lot was pitted with potholes, the beds all sagged and creaked, and the carpets and curtains stank of mold and cigarettes, but in those ruins they willed themselves to see their future. To begin again.

They worked in shifts, day and night, seven days of the week. My father took the night shift, snatching at sleep on a tattered powder blue couch in the office. His eyes, too, would soon be ringed with dark circles and his face would soon take on a look of permanent confusion but in the beginning he held fast to his gentlemanly ways. At six in the morning he rinsed his face, splashed on some cologne, then combed his hair and set it with hairspray. He wore dress slacks, not jeans, dress shoes, not tennis shoes. He boiled himself a full pot of coffee—twelve cups’ worth to last him through the day—fried two sausages in a pan, and ate them with a knife and a fork, and then he returned to his desk behind the plastic window of the manager’s suite.

At noon—checkout time—Johann napped in the back room and Lili began her own shift at the Casa Buena. She piled the day’s clean sheets and towels onto an ancient, battered olive green trolley, checked her supply of bleach and Windex, and began making her way through the motel rooms. She emptied and polished the plastic ashtrays, then collected the beer bottles, soda cans, and pizza boxes from the floor. She stripped the beds, taking care to air out the mattresses before pulling on the new sheets, dusted the nightstand and the television, and vacuumed the carpet. Then, with one ear to the parking lot in case someone came looking for a room, she splashed the tub and the toilet
with bleach, and to save time she threw rags on the bathroom floor and mopped with her feet as she wiped down the sink.

Mostly we rented to truckers on their way to Los Angeles. They’d stay the night and leave before dawn, and though they could be gruff or outright rude, it was the locals who always gave the most trouble. They’d stagger into the office when the bars closed, hollering and cussing and slamming their bills onto the counter. When they got to their rooms they’d send the lamps and tables crashing against the walls. Once a man dragged a half-naked woman into the parking lot and began whipping her with his belt, and by the time the police came the woman’s face and shoulders were covered in bloody welts and the man had made off into the dark.

We had long-term lodgers, too. One man stayed the better part of that first year at the Casa Buena. Every morning Lili would find the carpet in his room covered in strange white flecks. “What is it?” she finally asked him one day. “Skin condition,” he told her. “It’s not contagious, I swear. I’ve even been to a doctor.” He lowered his voice. “My wife’s put me out,” he confided, his eyes filling with tears. There were out-of-work migrant farmers who spread blankets on the floor and slept their families six or eight to a room. There was a rail-thin, bent-backed elderly woman who rented three or four times a year. She arrived on foot, her long, gray braids messy and oily. She carried no bags, not even a purse, stayed one or two nights, and then disappeared. It was a long time before Lili discovered that Americans had a name for such people. Homeless, they were called here, and she could never stand to turn them away.

Our first home in America was a tract house in a working-class neighborhood of Terra Linda. A small box of a house, it sat on a winding street of brightly colored houses—green, yellow, pink, and blue—each with an identical eight-by-eight-foot lawn in the front
and a single cherry tree in the backyard. We wouldn’t stay long (of this Lili was sure), but it was here that she unfurled her best carpet, a pistachio green Tabriz that had taken up most all the space in one of the two suitcases we brought from Iran, and hung it from the wall like a tapestry. With the first earnings from the motel she bought a pair of green velvet couches to match it, but apart from the carpet and couches, for a long time the only other pieces of furniture in that house were the mattresses in our bedrooms.

It was Lili’s house and mine, really, because my father always slept at the motel, in the manager’s suite, and he spent most of his days there, too. He sat at his desk behind the plastic window, his small portable radio tuned to a classical music station, and he left the office only to make repairs around the motel or to nap in the back room.

Every few weeks, though, he’d take me to the bookstore in town. When we walked together in the street, he clasped his hands behind his back and lifted his face to the sun. “I’ll only buy as many as you can carry,” he’d tell me before letting me loose. I’d pile books up to my chin, two and three bags’ worth, and present myself to him. “Sure you can carry them?” he’d ask me. I never could, but it only made him smile to see me try.

Those first few months in America, my mother Lili and I walked everywhere together: to my school, to the mall, to the community pool. Terra Linda was hot and dusty. We were the only pedestrians for miles. I dragged my heels and kicked up such a fuss that one day she had just had enough. We got on a bus and headed straight for the DMV.

The day she passed her driving test, we walked to the car dealership just down the road from the motel. Lili circled the lot, taking careful measure of the inventory, and I trailed along behind her. She settled finally on a pale yellow Cadillac convertible with tan leather seats, chrome details, and windows that went up and down at the push of a button.

“Ready?” she asked me before pulling out of the lot that day.

“Ready!” I squealed.

We’d gone no farther than a mile when black plumes began to drift up from the hood. Lili’s Cadillac would spend at least one week out of every month at the repair shop, and then we’d have to go back to walking, the two of us on those empty California sidewalks, she in her denim bell-bottoms and huge tortoiseshell sunglasses, me in my flounced summer frocks and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

When Lili first narrowed her eyes at San Francisco Bay, turned to my father, and said, “Here,” she could not guess that many other Iranians had already staked the same claim. But by the late seventies there were already hundreds of Iranians in the area. Many had arrived several years before the revolution with substantial fortunes in several countries. Some claimed close ties to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran. They filled the walls of their homes with photographs of fathers, uncles, and grandfathers in heavily decorated military costume, receiving medals of honor from the king’s own hands. Others traced their lineage to the Qajars, the previous—and they would have said true—dynasty of Iran. Their green-eyed wives and daughters had been known for centuries as the most beautiful of Iranian women, and they could be identified easily even in exile.

These were the “good” Iranian families, the ones whose names were firmly planted in the roster of the Iranian elite. They did not think of themselves as immigrants, but as émigrés, and they called themselves Persians, not Iranians. The wives of such families could be found every day at Nordstrom, immaculately dressed in pencil skirts and twinsets, pearls at their necks and Chanel sunglasses perched on their heads. Their husbands often didn’t work in America, as it was understood that here there were no positions commensurate with their pedigree.

We were not that kind of Iranian family, but with American money and a certain guile we would soon take on many of their airs. It was a performance in which we were hardly alone; it was a way, common to so many Iranians back then, of imagining new lives in this country.

“
Irooni!
” my mother Lili would whisper whenever she saw Iranians at the grocery store or at the mall, and then give my hand a squeeze. “Do you see them?
Irooni!
” In those days a phrase of Persian overheard from a distance could fill her with terrible longing, and she’d follow them with her eyes until they disappeared.