Veil of Roses (2 page)

“But what about…?” I looked searchingly into my father’s eyes.
What about
Agha Reza, I wanted to ask.
What about him and the marriage proposal that seems to be coming?
But I stopped myself. There was nothing of
Agha Reza
in his eyes.

“Thank you,
Baba Joon.
Oh, thank you so much!” I threw my arms around him.

“Shh, shh.” He quieted my sobs, rocked me back and forth. “This is your chance. You go to America and make us proud.”

I stepped back, nodded at him, made sure he saw the resolve in my eyes. I would. I would do everything in my power to make them proud of me. I turned then to my mother, and we pulled each other close.

“I’ll miss you so much,
Maman Joon.
”

“I love you,
Tami Joon,
” she whispered in my ear. “I love you so, so much. And know that it’s a beautiful, beautiful world out there.” She choked on her words and did not speak again until she had regained her steadiness. She pulled back from my embrace to grip my forearms, to capture my gaze. “Go and wake up your luck,” she commanded me. “Promise me you will.”

I looked back at her, and for a moment, this is what I saw: America. Her America. My mother, my mother’s younger self, firmly rooted in California’s rich soil.

Long ago, she gave me some pictures from our time in America. I consider them my most treasured possessions.

There is one of me eating French fries at McDonald’s, sitting on my father’s lap. There is one of me being pushed from behind on a baby swing by Maryam at the children’s playground at Golden Gate Park. There is one of me naked in the Pacific Ocean, running from the cold waves and squealing in delight.

There is another from that day at the ocean.

In this one, I am wearing a pink one-piece swimsuit with a big yellow daisy in the middle. My mother holds me. My legs are wrapped around her waist, and my head rests on her shoulder. A wave washes over her feet. She looks straight into the eye of the camera. My mother’s skin is tanned, her long hair windblown. She knows nothing yet of segregated beaches and confiscated passports and shrouding oneself from the sun’s warmth and men’s eyes. All she knows is the beauty of this day. She wears cutoff denim shorts and a pink bikini top. She wears big gold hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. Red nail polish, too. Remarkably beautiful, she looks so happy. So happy and so free.

This is not the mother I know. The mother I know has always worn
hejab,
has always covered herself in the regime’s mandated head covering. She has always ducked her head and averted her eyes when passing men in the street. I do not remember the carefree, unburdened mother in the picture at all, but I miss her every day of my life, even so. The mother I know has always been sad.

The sun. The waves. The sound of the ocean. The sexy confidence of a bikini top and cutoff shorts highlighting the strong-muscled legs of an able woman. Bare feet. The wind dancing through her hair. She remembers it all. And she wants it for me. I am her dream deferred.

“I promise,
Maman Joon,
” I whisper back. “I promise I will go and wake up my luck.”

And then I grasp her to me and I cling to her because I miss her so much already, my sad mother who smells of rosewater. I try to memorize this moment, this embrace. I will need to carry it in my heart forever. I will need to be brave, for her.

For I am not coming back.

T
hree weeks later, that little perfume bottle filled with sand from the shores of San Francisco Bay is packed safely in my luggage. I am on an airplane, leaving my homeland behind. When the pilot announces we have left Iranian airspace, a cheer breaks out. Women on the flight unbuckle their seat belts and stand. They look around. They yank off their headscarves and run their fingers through their hair. They have left Iran, and the future is theirs, to make of it what they will. I remain quietly in my seat and watch them. I think of my mother. My chest is so tight I cannot breathe.

I watch the flight attendants serve peanuts and offer drinks, now that we’ve left the boundary of our country, where alcohol is illegal. One approaches me. He smiles and asks if I would like a glass of wine. This startles me, the fact that he is looking at me as if there is nothing wrong with an unrelated man and woman looking each other in the eye and chatting casually. In public, no less. And, of course, there
is
nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t happen where I am from.

And so I take a deep breath. I reach up and fiddle with the knot under my chin, and then I pull off my
hejab
. I press it into my lap, as far away from me as possible.

He nods at me in approval. In affirmation of what I have done. I look right in his friendly tea-brown eyes. Strange as it feels, I do not look away.

“Yes, please.” I nod back.

I want the peanuts. I want the wine. I want to look into the eyes of a man and feel no shame.

My name is Tamila Soroush.

And I want it all.

I
t is twenty-four hours since I left Iran, since I clutched my parents to me at Mehrabad Airport and we wept our good-byes. After three plane changes on three different continents, I am now ten minutes from Tucson, Arizona, where I am to depart the plane and meet Maryam.

And it is clear to me that the plane is going to crash.

It drops suddenly. Little bells ding politely but insistently, and the airplane attendants scurry to buckle themselves in. Their faces look nonchalant, but I know they are trained to put their faces this way in times of crisis. A man’s voice comes on over the loudspeaker. His English is fast and garbled, and although I have studied English all my years in school and my father spoke practically nothing but fast and garbled English to me for the past three weeks in preparation for my journey, the pilot’s words are too run together for me to make out what he’s saying. Perhaps he’s telling everyone to say their final prayers. I grip my hands on the armrests and begin a soft chant to myself:
“Baad chanse ma, Baad chanse ma.”

“Excuse me,” the woman next to me says, slowly and with careful enunciation. She has joined this flight from Phoenix. “Is that Arabic you’re speaking?” She wears a black T-shirt that says
Power Corrupts
in bold silver letters. She would receive forty lashes on her back for wearing this shirt in Iran. Forty lashes at the very least.

I shake my head. “It’s Farsi.”

“I thought so. I lived with a Persian guy for a while. Was that a prayer you were saying?”

I give her a rueful smile. The plane is clearly not going to crash. We’d just hit an air pocket. “I was a little frightened from the…mmm…how do you say,
turbulence.
I was saying how my bad luck follows me all the way around the world.” I watch her to see if she is able to understand me or if I’ll need to repeat myself. I really don’t know how good my English is, and I feel myself blush. It could be just awful.

But perhaps not, because she gets an excited look in her eyes and turns more fully to me. “You’re
just
coming from Iran?”

I nod.

“That’s awesome! Do you have family here?”

I nod again. “My sister lives here with her husband.”

Maryam has lived in the United States for almost fifteen years, ever since she married an orthopedic surgeon named Ardishir. On his yearly visits to Tehran to see his mother, he began courting my sister. My parents were proud he was a surgeon. That means a lot in my culture. But he was only a resident of the United States, not a citizen. That was not good enough. My parents would not permit the marriage until he obtained his U.S. citizenship, for then he could take my sister back with him to America and sponsor her for citizenship.

“How long are you staying?” Her smile is so friendly, I do not mind all the questions. Everyone in America smiles big and talks a lot. I have seen this in the movies.

“I am moving here.”

“Really? How did you manage that?”

My heart pounds. I feel myself blush. I tuck my hair behind my ears. I feel like I am lying. But it is true. I
am
moving here.

“I am getting married,” I say, as confidently as I can. I smile, knowing happiness is expected with such a statement.

“Congratulations! Did you meet him back in Iran, then?”

I shake my head, swallow hard. “I have not met him yet.”

“Oh,” my seatmate says. Her broad smile falters and her eyes darken. “An arranged marriage?”

“Yes,” I say. “In my culture, it is not so unusual.”

“How do you feel about that?”

How do I feel about that?
What, I want to ask, does that have to do with anything? I am here on a three-month visa. The sole purpose of my trip is to find a way to stay, and that means I must find a husband who will sponsor my application for residency. The choice is marriage here or marriage there, and for me this is an easy choice. Being married is a small price to pay if it means I can stay in the Land of Opportunity and raise my children, my daughters, in the freedom that would be denied them in Iran.

“Americans only get married if they are in love,” I tell my seatmate. “But in my culture, we try to choose someone we can grow to love over time.”

“Wow, I can’t imagine that.” She shakes her head, but suddenly laughs. “But then again, I’ve been divorced twice already and I’m not even forty. Who’s to say yours isn’t the better way?”

My eyes get big. I cannot help it. Divorced, twice! She must be the black sheep of her family, to have behaved so badly that not one but two men divorced her. This is why she is so chatty. This is why she talks to strangers on airplanes. Everyone else probably shuns her.

She grins at my shock. “But I’ll tell you what. That Persian boyfriend I lived with for a while? He was better in bed than both my husbands put together. He was
fan-tastic
. Maybe that’s a cultural thing, too.” She shakes her head at the memory. “
Mmmm-hmmm,
the things he could do with his tongue.”

The plane jerks to the ground. The rough landing prevents me from having to respond. I am stunned and horribly embarrassed by what she has said. I make myself busy gathering my things as the airplane taxis to the gate.

“Can you find your way out okay?” she asks.

“Yes, yes,” I assure her, not wanting my sister to see me with such a
badjen,
a disreputable woman. “Thank you very much for your kindness.”

“Take care, then,” she says, unbuckling her seat belt and pulling herself up before the plane has even come to a full stop. She grabs her backpack and heads to the front of the plane. I watch her walk away. She is the first American woman that I’ve spoken to at any length. I know I will remember her forever. She was friendly, and she was crazy.

And I can’t even begin to imagine what her Persian boyfriend did with his tongue that made her so happy.

A
lthough it has been fifteen years since I have last seen Maryam, my terror at seeing her again causes me to linger, so that I am the last one off the airplane. And when I do depart the plane, I hear her high, happy voice before I see her.

“Tami! Tami!” she shrieks. “Oh, oh! Over here,
Tami Joon
!”

I turn my head toward the voice, and my heart melts as a blur I understand to be Maryam grabs me and kisses me on both cheeks before enfolding me in her arms. Pressed against me, Maryam curls my hair around her fingers. I’d forgotten how she used to do that when we were children in the bedroom we shared for many years. That’s how she used to wake me up in the mornings, by weaving her fingers through my hair and singing to me. I laugh with relief and start to cry and hug her back very tightly.

“Shhh,” she says softly, smoothing my hair. “Don’t cry. We don’t want your eyes all puffy and red.”

When she steps back and takes my face within her hands, when she gives me another kiss upon both cheeks, I gasp. “You are so beautiful! How did this happen?!”

Her black eyes sparkle, delighted. “Everyone is beautiful in America,
Tami Joon.
”

It is all I can do not to gape at her. Maryam has always had appealing features, but she has a beauty I have not seen before. She has lost her baby fat and toned her muscles and grown her hair long. It falls halfway down her back in perfect, shiny waves. She wears gold, gold, and more gold—earrings, a necklace, two bracelets. In Iran, gold jewelry is how women show off, revealed at parties after coming inside and shedding the headscarf—
hejab
—and manteau we must wear when outdoors to keep the low-class
bassidji
goons from harassing us.

Here, Maryam openly wears her gold. Her face has laugh lines where before was only smoothness. She wears bright pink lipstick, gold eye shadow. Copied from a magazine model, most likely. That’s how she practiced back home. Most different is her chest—this is not the same chest she had when she left Iran.

“Oy, Maryam! What is this? Did you take some special vitamins to make yourself grow in all the right places?” She is my sister; I can ask her.

She laughs, delighted by my naïveté. “They’re not
real,
Tami. I enhanced them last year. They call it a boob job.” She giggles at the words. A
boob job,
this is unheard of where I am from. It would serve no purpose. Nose jobs, sure. They are all the rage, for noses are the one operable, changeable,
fixable
feature of ours that men actually see. The rest of us remains cloaked anytime we are in public.

I question whether Ardishir approved of Maryam’s boob job.

“Approved?” She laughs harder. “Who do you think paid for it?”

I realize now, while looking at her new boobs, that while I may have come halfway around the world, what I have truly done is enter a whole new universe.

“Did it hurt?”

“Not so much.” She shrugs. “It’s what women do here, especially if their husbands have some money. If they are married to doctors or rich men who own businesses, for instance.”

She puts her arm around my shoulder and turns me away from the gate. Toward the exit, toward my future. “Don’t worry, if we have a hard time finding you a husband, we’ll get you one, too. I’m sure Ardishir will pay for it.”

This idea horrifies me.

“I do not want Ardishir buying me new boobs!” This is not something my parents told me about, the need for new boobs.

“You’ll do whatever it takes, Tami,” she laughs. But when she sees that I am near tears, Maryam pulls me toward her and reassures me with a hug. Then she stands back and strokes my cheek. She adds, quietly, “I don’t ever want my sister to be so far away again. So we’ll do what it takes, right?”

I swallow and nod. “Right. You’re right, of course.”

Maryam holds up a bag from Macy’s. She is a manager there; my father tells this to everyone he knows. “I brought you some things to change into. There’s about thirty people waiting for us back at the house.”

“
Here?
You want me to change my clothes
here,
in a public toilet?” I think back to all the times I was forbidden from using the filthy ones back home.

She nods. “Just try not to touch anything.”

I have been traveling for one whole day and two whole nights, and I haven’t slept for more than three hours in a row. I do not want to enter a public toilet, on this, my first night in America. And I do not want a party. “Ay, Maryam,” I groan. “I am so tired. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep my eyes open at this party.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But we expected you much earlier. I couldn’t call everyone and cancel. It would have been rude. Besides, there’s a dentist who will be there whose family we know. He lives in California and has to go back tomorrow. His mother says he is ready to be married.”

A pushy Persian, that’s my sister. She has always been this way, and I do not have the energy on this night to argue. She promised to my parents that she would find me a good Iranian husband with American citizenship, and she will keep this promise. Starting this very night.

I remind myself to be grateful. She is my sister, and her intentions are good. So I let her slip a form-fitting red dress with a deep V-neck over me. I let her put so much makeup on me that I barely recognize myself in the mirror. I let her spray something in my hair that she says will make it curlier and bouncier. I let her put my feet into open-toed sandals with three-inch heels. I let her polish my toenails. This alone makes me smile, to see my toes so colorful and happy. Everything else terrifies me. Excites me? Yes, I admit that. After a lifetime of living under a cloak, I am ready to dress up all fancy. Just on my own terms, not those of my sister.

And after a lifetime spent trying not to be noticed in the streets, it feels very dangerous to have strangers stare at me. And yet stare they do.