Anne Tyler - Digging to America

To look at her, encased in satin and glittering with gold, their relatives might have laughed, but Maryam knew what she meant. It was hard, harder than the people back home could possibly imagine, and sometimes she wondered how they both had lasted this long in a country where everything happened so fast and everybody else knew all the rules without asking.

My sister reads off lists of items she wants me to send, Farah said. Athletic shoes and cosmetics and bottles of vitamin pills. There are vitamins in Iran! Perfectly good ones, but she believes that the vitamins in America are more powerful. I sent her a bottle of Vigor-Vytes and the first pill she took, she told me, 'Already I feel so much younger! I have so much more energy!'

Uttering the phrase Vigor-Vytes led Farah to change over to English, probably without meaning to. It was a phenomenon Maryam had often observed among Iranians. They'd be rattling along in Farsi and then some word borrowed from America, generally something technical like television or computer, would flip a switch in their brains and they would continue in English until a Farsi word flipped the switch back again.

I suppose you have less of that because your brothers can ask their children to send things, Farah was saying. Or Parviz can, at least, with his two up there in Vancouver where all the stores are excellent. (This last sentence flipped back and forth lickety-split, triggered first by Parviz and then by Vancouver.) And besides, you're so much stronger. You would just say no. I should be stronger. I am a, how you say, floormat.

Doormat, Maryam said.

Doormat. I am a push-off.

Maryam held her tongue.

They had been traveling through the New England countryside at a speed that was surely illegal, passing small, tidy farms that could have lined the tracks of a toy train set. Now they swerved onto a gravel road, with a clanking of metal from the back seat. A few minutes later they parked in the yard of the Jeffreys' gray clapboard house. Oh, good, Farah said. William's home.

He was sitting on the front porch steps a wiry man in faded jeans. When he saw the car he rose and ambled over, grinning. Salaam aleikum, he said as Maryam stepped forth, and then, in English, It's good to see you.

It's good to see you, she told him, pressing her cheek to his.

William was one of those men who had never quite managed to leave their adolescence behind, in her opinion. His jeans were patched with bits of the American flag, and he wore a wisp of a goatee and a single long braid which, now that he was bald on top, made it seem that his hair had somehow slipped several inches backward on his head. His enthusiasm for all things Iranian struck her as adolescent, too. Guess what! he told her now. I've made fesenjan for dinner tonight in your honor.

Exactly what I'm in the mood for, she said.

William was in full charge of the cooking and the housework. He was also the breadwinner; he taught creative writing at the local college. Maryam couldn't imagine what Farah did with her time. They had no children hadn't wanted them, evidently and she had never held a job. When she led Maryam upstairs to the guest room she said, Now, I think the bed's made up… oh, yes, good. The wildflowers on the bureau, jammed clumsily into a cruet, were probably William's doing as well.

Once Maryam had unpacked they met for cocktails in the parlor, which had the hollow, barnlike feel of a bare-bones New England farmhouse but was decorated with Persian rugs and Isfahani enamelware and jewel-like paisley fabrics. William talked about his newest invention: he was working on an executive toy that he felt sure would make them rich. It's kind of on the order of a lava lamp, he said. You remember those. Only this is much classier-looking. He brought it out to show her: an hourglass shape, in clear plastic, filled with a viscous liquid. See, he said, inverting it, how the liquid sort of squiggles down, spirals clockwise awhile and then changes to counterclockwise, builds up on the surface in a pyramid shape and then all at once decides to flatten… Doesn't it just grab you?

Maryam nodded. She did find it oddly mesmerizing.

What gave me the idea was, we were coming to the end of a bottle of McGleam shampoo and so I turned it upside down over a new bottle; you know how you do. Propped it just so in order to get the last few drops out. And I was watching the drip and suddenly I thought, Man! This could be some, like, Zen-like thing that would center people and focus them. We could market it as a device to lower people's blood pressure! So I worked out this design; figured out the most attractive shape… only I haven't got the liquid quite right. I mean, it has to be the proper consistency. Thick like McGleam but not too thick, of course, and clear like McGleam because I believe clear is more calming Why can't you just use McGleam? Maryam asked.

Oh. Use McGleam.

Wouldn't that be the obvious solution?

But… shampoo? Besides, McGleam's about the most expensive brand in the drugstore. He gazed fondly at Farah. Nothing but the best for Farah — june, he said.

Farah gave him a languid wave and told Maryam, What can I say? I have that tanglesome Karimzadeh hair.

Over dinner that evening (a real Iranian meal from start to finish, everything authentic), Farah reminisced about their shared childhood. She had a sunnier vision of the past than Maryam did. All her memories seemed to involve hilarious parties, or wagon rides at the family's summer place in Meigun, or daylong picnics with every single relative on both sides in attendance. Where were the quarrels and the schisms, the uncle who took opium and the uncle who embezzled, the aunts' endless, bitter competition for their father's grudging notice? Did Farah not remember the cousin who killed herself when they forbade her to go to medical school, or the cousin who was refused permission to marry the boy she loved? Oh, those were happy, happy times, Farah sighed, and William sighed too and shook his head as if he had been there himself. He loved to hear talk about Iran. He would prompt Farah if she skipped a detail. And the coins! he said. Remember them? The brand-new gold coins that they used to give you children every New Year's? Maryam found this presumptuous of him, although she knew she should feel flattered that he was so interested in their culture.

It must have been the dinner conversation that caused her to dream that night about her mother. She saw her mother as she had looked when Maryam was just a child pure black hair and unlined skin, the beauty mark on her upper lip accentuated with an eyebrow pencil. She was telling Maryam the story about the nomad tribe she used to spy on as a girl. They had moved into the compound across the street, arriving mysteriously late one night. The women wore gold up to here (and she gestured toward one elbow). The men rode shining horses. One morning she awoke and all of them had vanished. In the dream, as in real life, she told this story in a slow, caressing voice, with a wistful look on her face, and Maryam herself awoke wondering for the first time if her mother might have longed to vanish also. She had never asked her mother a single personal question, at least as far as she could remember; and now it was too late. The thought stirred up a gentle, almost pleasurable melancholy. She still mourned her mother's death, but she had traveled so far from her, into such a different kind of life. It no longer seemed they were related.

The guest room was beginning to grow light, and the window above her bed showed a square of pale gray sky and a jagged black ridge of fir trees. The scene struck her as no less eerie than a landscape on the moon.

Over the next several days, she fell into the leisurely routine of the women from her childhood. She and Farah sat drinking tea as they leafed through glossy magazines. William was generally tinkering in his workshop or off somewhere cruising hardware stores and junkyards. Then in the afternoon he started cooking, and every evening he served another Iranian dinner. He took great pride in stating the names of the dishes in Farsi. Have some khoresh, he would say, the kh so stressed and labored that it sounded like a cough. As the week wore on, Maryam found this behavior more and more ridiculous. Although really, where was the harm? She knew she was being unreasonable.