Veil of Roses (24 page)

T
hings go from horrible to unbearable in a matter of minutes. Masoud begins to holler at me and wave his contract in my face, insisting that I have misunderstood his intentions, that I should sign it and it is no big deal. Ardishir rushes out of the house and shoves Masoud back. A good, old-fashioned Persian shouting match ensues. And I hurry inside, now desperate to get away from the man I intended to marry in a few short hours.

There is dead silence from my classmates when I come back to them and their many pairs of pitying eyes, which confirm what I already know: I’ve lost my quest to stay in America. Come Thursday, I must go back to Iran.

Agata stands and rushes to hug me. “Honey, you can marry Josef. Right, Josef? You vill marry Tami so dat she can stay, von’t you?”

Josef stands up straight and thrusts out his chest. “Good girl, Tami,” he declares. “I will marry our good girl.”

My tears burst forth at their kindness. He is more than worthy, but I cannot marry Josef. I crumple into Agata’s fleshy arms and let her guide me to a chair next to Eva. I bury my head in my hands and try to accept what just occurred.

I have to go back to Iran.

I hear the deliberate
clink, clink, clink
of a soup ladle stirring the pot of Persian Wishing Soup. I look up and emit a bitter laugh as I see Maryam standing there by the stove, stirring and stirring, mocking the fact that there is no need. The soup can be poured down the drain. I have no wishes left; none of mine are to come true.

“The bride has gone to pick flowers, Maryam,” I say bitterly.

She looks only at the swirling of the soup, not at her little sister who is so desperately in need of comfort.

“Maryam?”

I see her cheek muscles tighten, but still she does not look my way.

“Don’t you want to say I should have listened to you? That I should have followed your plan and married Haroun?”

Her head shakes involuntarily, like she is thinking something she’d rather not say. Like she is suppressing a great anger.

“Say it, Maryam,” I demand. “You knew best. Like always. And I should have listened to you. And I deserve to go back because of how stupidly I behaved.”

She stops stirring and taps the ladle against the soup pot. She turns to me. “Is that really what you think I want to say to you right now?”

This is such classic Maryam.
“Yes.”

“I would never bring up such things right now.”
Even though they’re true,
her tone implies.

“That’s so good of you,” I spit out at her. “You’re so perfect.”

“What are you mad at me for?” she yells. “What did I do? Tell me, Tami, exactly where I went wrong, because when I look at this, I can’t see what more I could have done to help you out.
You blew it.
You’re as stupid as
Maman Joon.
”

I gasp.

“You never wanted to marry anybody! He knew it! That’s why this happened. He didn’t trust you. You were too busy running around having fun when you should have been demonstrating your sincerity to your future husband that you weren’t going to leave him at the first chance you had for your little coffee-shop boyfriend!”

“I didn’t see Ike even once since I met Masoud!”

“That’s not the point! Your heart was never in it.”

“How would you know?” I scream in Farsi. “You give up the right to think you know me when you leave home and stay away for
fifteen years,
Maryam! What kind of sister does that? Tell me. What kind of sister, what kind of daughter, does that to her family?”

Maryam’s face crumples. She opens her mouth to defend herself but no words come out. Eva grips my arm. I turn to her.
“What?”

“Calm down,” she cautions. “Don’t take your anger out on your sister.”

“Whose side are you on here?”

“Yours, Tami. But what happened has nothing to do with your sister, and you know it. Just be quiet for a little while.”

“Aaaargh!
You’re
the one who always talks too much, Eva.
You’re
the one who needs to be quiet once in a while.”

I look around at them all, ready to take on anyone who dares cross me.

“Should we go?” Danny asks suddenly. “Maybe we should go.”

“Yes,” Edgard quickly agrees. “We should go.”

“Damn right we should,” Eva mutters.

My classmates give their hurried good-byes and are out the door in less than a minute. Eva, the last to leave, slams the door behind her.

I peek out the back window. Masoud is gone. Ardishir sits alone at the table, his head sunk in his hands. Maryam continues to stand there staring at me.

“You better go check on your husband,” I tell her. “It looks like he needs you.”

“You need me more,” she says quietly.

“No,” I tell her plainly. “I don’t need you. There’s nothing you can do for me anymore.”

I
kick my bedroom door closed behind me and look around for something else to kick. I see my suitcase propped against the dresser, so I go over and kick it and then I kick it again. I was already packed for my new life in Chicago.

And now I have to go back to Iran.

I have to go back to Iran.

My
hejab
is buried at the bottom of my suitcase, underneath my beautiful purchases from Victoria’s Secret. I was so sure I would never have to wear it again.

I unzip my suitcase, pull it out, and drape it over my head. I stare at myself in the mirror. There I am again, me with a veil, looking more like
Maman Joon
than I ever have.

This thought nauseates me. I yank the
hejab
off and drop it to the ground and for the next hour I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I do not send mean thoughts Masoud’s way; it seems there is no point. It was not meant to be, that is all. There is some reason I am needed back in Iran. Perhaps my parents will require my assistance in ways they do not yet know. It is good for older people to have at least one child remain with them, to care for them as they age.

You’re lying to yourself, Tami. They don’t need you and you let them down. You failed them.

Maryam was right. I did waste too much time with Ike. Eva and I should have placed ads earlier on Persian singles websites, and I should have spent those hours after class calling each prospect on the telephone. I had three months. I could have met so very many men in this way. I could have even gone to an Internet café in Tehran and placed my ad before leaving. I should have insisted to Haroun that we marry immediately, even without Ardishir’s permission. Failing that, I should have married Masoud the same day I met him. We should have come back to my sister’s house already married, before he had time to decide he needed a contract from me.

I think these thoughts over and over, around and around, for hours, until finally there is a tapping on my door.

“Come in.”

It is Ardishir. He looks devastated. I sit up in bed and he comes to sit next to me. “God, Tami, I am so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’ll be all right back home. I miss my parents.”

He shakes his head. “I called Haroun just now,” he says after a long moment, then purses his lips. “I thought maybe, you know…”

“He said no, right?”

“He said no.”

I nod. “It’s okay,” I whisper.

“It’s not.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. Maybe my father will be able to get another visa for me next year or the following year and I can try again.”

Ardishir gives me a sad smile. “You’re too good for this. You should not have to jump through all these hoops in order to stay here. America would be lucky to have you.”

I let out my breath. I would be lucky to have America. I
was
lucky to have it for the short time I did.

“I have a favor to ask of you, Ardishir.”

“Sure, anything.”

I reach over to my suitcase, pull out the camera he gave me and my photo album, and I hand them to him.

“Will you keep these for me?”

“I, ah…” He purses his lips and I can tell he is trying not to cry.

“Please,” I say. “It’s best I leave them behind. They’ll never make it through the airport. And I can’t stand the thought of their dirty hands on them, pawing through them and…”

I stop. I can so clearly see how it will unfold if I take these pictures. I would pull on my veil as we enter Iranian airspace. I would step off the plane onto Iranian soil—the soil of my homeland—into the chaos of Mehrabad Airport. My parents will wait anxiously for me, but they will have a long wait, for because my passport has an American stamp in it, I will doubtlessly be searched and harassed. I will be pulled aside into a windowless room and forced to defend my photographs. They will call me a whore and a
badjen
and tell me I should be ashamed of myself for having loose morals. I will sit there, veiled and silent and docile and in fear. I will let them say these horrible things in the hopeless hope that they will give me back my pictures. I would rather die than endure watching them tear my pictures into pieces with their hateful, dirty hands.

I hold up a photo of Eva in a miniskirt and thigh-high leather boots. Ardishir smiles. I hold up one of Agata pole dancing. He laughs. “You see why I can’t take these back with me.”

Ardishir reaches out and cups my cheek in his hand. “You’re sure,
Tami Joon
?”

My tears start falling at his touch. I bite my lip and nod.

“Okay.” He drops his hand and slowly goes through my photo album. “You’ve really got talent. I hope you know that.”

I say nothing. Talent means nothing in Iran. Creative expression can kill you.

When Ardishir gets to the last page in the album, he finds the long-ago photo of
Maman Joon
holding me at the ocean that day. He pulls it out from its place and tries to hand it to me. “You need to keep this one at least.”

“I don’t want it,” I choke out. “I don’t think I can stand looking at it anymore.”

He again tries to hand it to me. “You need to keep it. Maryam has told me how much it means to you.”

“Why is she so mad at Maman? I don’t think she has any right to be mad at her.”

Ardishir shrugs. “You can’t help how you feel, can you? If you’re mad, you’re mad.”

“But why?”

Ardishir stares at the photograph for a long moment.

“Please, Ardishir. Tell me.”

His eyes are black when he looks at me. “Your mother is the one who decided the family should return to Iran. It was right after Khomeini arrived back from exile. She thought things would be so much better in Iran. You know, that women would get to keep all the freedoms they’d been granted under the Shah, only there would be none of the Shah’s corruption. And they’d all get to help create this just society.”

“Lots of people thought that,” I counter, stunned though I am. I’d always thought it was my father’s decision. I’d always thought they went back for only a visit, and got stuck. “It’s not fair for Maryam to be mad at her for this.”

“Everyone told your mother not to return. Her parents, her grandmother. Even your father was very wary. But she insisted. And then…well, you know the rest, I’m sure.”

“I don’t think I do.”

Ardishir gets up from the bed and walks to the window. Facing away from me, he says, “You know your mother was arrested, right?”

I gasp. I cover my mouth with my hand and shudder at the thought of my poor mother being hauled off to jail. Tears fill my eyes as I shake my head. “No,” I whisper. “I didn’t know this.”

“They’d only been back two weeks when Khomeini mandated that women had to wear the veil again. She was arrested at a protest. She wasn’t an organizer or anything, she just was in attendance and happened to be one of the ones they hauled off. She spent something like five months in jail. Maryam doesn’t know what happened to your mother in jail. It’s something no one talks about. But all the fight left her. All her confidence. Maryam said she’s never been the same since.”

I reach for the photograph. I stare and stare at
Maman Joon
. At her long free-flowing hair. Her muscled legs. At her certainty that she could comfort me in the way I needed. She lost all that, and so much more, because of one bad decision.

“I remember running around our house in Iran, wearing my mother’s
hejab
. She got so mad at me. She chased me around, yelled at me, grabbed it back. But I thought it was so exotic.” My voice breaks. “Isn’t that all that every little girl wants? To be just like her mother?”

I look into her confident eyes.
What did they do to you? Did they rape you? Humiliate you? Force you to renounce your beliefs? You must have wondered if what had happened was even real or if you were going crazy. So soon back from America, you must have lain on a mattress in a sunless prison cell, with cockroaches crawling through your hair, and you could still smell the salt of the ocean, couldn’t you? You could still remember the breeze in your long black hair. You must still have remembered what it was like to watch your two daughters run open-armed into the waves. Did you remember lifting me up that day, Maman? Did I get knocked down by a wave and become afraid? Did you yank me out of the water and tuck me into you, into the person I knew best, the person with whom I always felt most safe? Did you think of that day at the beach,
Maman Joon,
when you were locked in that prison cell?

Yes, my mother made a choice. And yes, it completely altered the course of her life in a horrible way. Once upon a time, the world
was
hers for the taking; the proof is in this photograph. And she would have wanted that for me and for Maryam. If she had any inkling of what was to come, I know with all my heart that she would not have made the choice she did.

I forgive her. Unlike Maryam, I forgive our mother.

I raise the picture to my lips and I gently kiss the image of my mother. Ardishir is right. I must keep this precious photograph forever. It is uniquely important to me.

But the others—well, I know just the person to give them to.

“Will you do me a favor?” I ask Ardishir.

“Of course. Anything.”

I reach into my suitcase and pull out an envelope that contains all my negatives. I hand them over.

“I have a friend named Ike,” I tell him in a raspy voice. “And after I’m gone, I’d like you to give these to him. Maryam will know where to find him.”

Ardishir nods at me. His eyes are wise and sad. Clearly, he has heard about Ike.

“He’s opening a coffee shop soon, my friend is, and he told me once…that he’d display my work…and I thought maybe…”

I cannot go on. I collapse into Ardishir and sob. “Oh, Ardishir, I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?”