Anne Tyler - Digging to America

The corners of Kiyan's lips were twitching upward again, she saw.

Also the fountain, the jasmine, the full moon, and the nightingale, she said.

There was no moon, of course, and no nightingale either, but she flung one arm toward where they might have been.

Kiyan said, I'm sorry about this.

She turned to look at him more closely.

It wasn't my idea, he said.

He had the faintest difference in his speech. It was not a real accent, and it was certainly not an affectation. (Unlike the speech of her cousin Amin, who had returned from America pretending such an unfamiliarity with Farsi that he had once referred to a rooster as the husband of the hen.) But you could tell that Kiyan was out of practice with his native tongue. This made him seem less authoritative, and younger than she had first thought. She found herself warming to him. She said, It wasn't my idea either.

Somehow I guessed that, he said, and this time the corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.

They sat down on a stone bench and discussed what had happened to the country since he had been away. I hear there have been demonstrations against our mighty Shah of Shahs, he said. My, what bad, rude people, and the two of them dissolved in silent laughter. They exchanged their views about politics, and human rights, and the status of women. On every issue they agreed. They interrupted each other to spill out their tumbles of thoughts. Then after half an hour or so Kiyan cocked his head toward the house, and she followed his eyes and saw three of her aunts clustered at a window. When the aunts realized they had been noticed, they shrank hastily out of sight. Kiyan grinned at Maryam. We've given them quite a thrill, he said.

Maryam said, Poor old things.

Let's go to a movie tomorrow. They'll be in heaven.

She laughed and said, Why not?

They went to a movie the next evening, and to a kebab house the day after that a university holiday and that evening to a party at the home of one of his friends. This happened to be a period when young women had more freedom than at any other time before or after, in spite of Maryam's complaints, and her family thought nothing of letting her go unchaperoned. Besides, it was understood that Kiyan's intentions were honorable. He and Maryam would almost surely be getting married.

But they had no interest in marrying. They agreed that marriage was limiting and confining, a state that people settled for when they wanted to reproduce.

At night she began to feel his presence in her dreams. He never physically appeared, but she caught a whiff of his nutmeg scent; she felt his looming height beside her as she walked; she was conscious of his particular grave, amused regard.

It was unfortunate that by the time they first met, he had already been in the country for five days of the twenty-one planned. The end of his visit drew closer. The women in Maryam's family became more anxious, their questions more pointed. A hopeful-looking uncle or two began popping into view any time Kiyan paid a call.

Maryam pretended not to notice. She acted breezy and unconcerned.

One day after her English class she was descending a long flight of steps with two friends when she caught sight of Kiyan waiting at the bottom. Spring had backed off somewhat, and he wore a casual brown corduroy jacket with the collar turned up. It made him look very American, all at once; very other. He was gazing away from her toward some people boarding a bus. The sight of his strong, pronounced profile sent a knife of longing straight through her.

He turned then and saw her, and he watched without smiling as she approached. When they were face-to-face, he told her, Maybe we should do what they want.

She said, All right.

You would come with me to America?

She said, I would come.

They set off walking together, Maryam hugging her books to her chest and Kiyan keeping his hands deep in his jacket pockets.

As it happened, there was no way she could go with him when he left, a mere four days later. They had a long-distance ceremony that June Kiyan in Baltimore on the phone, Maryam in Tehran in her Western-style floor-length wedding dress with guests from both families surrounding her. The next evening, she left for America. Her mother held a Koran above Maryam's head as Maryam walked out the front door of the family compound, and all the women were crying. You would never guess that they had been praying for this to happen since the day she was arrested.

She had not been one of those Iranians who viewed America as the Promised Land. To her and her university friends, the U. S. was the great disappointer the democracy that had, to their mystification, worked to shore up the monarchy back when the Shah was in trouble. So she set out for her new country half excited and half resistant. (But underneath, shamefully rejoicing that she would never have to attend another political meeting.) The main thing was, she was joining Kiyan. Not even her closest girlfriends knew how Kiyan had grown to fill every inch of her head. When she stepped into the Baltimore airport and saw him waiting, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that showed his unfamiliar, thin arms, she experienced a moment of shock. Could this be the same person she had daydreamed of all these weeks?

She was nineteen years old and had never cooked a meal, or washed a floor, or driven an automobile. But clearly Kiyan took it for granted that she would somehow manage. Either he lacked the most basic sense of empathy or he had a gratifying respect for her capabilities. Sometimes she thought it was the first and sometimes the second, depending on the day. She had good days and she had bad days more of the bad, to begin with. Twice she packed to go home. Once she called him selfish and dumped a whole crock of yogurt onto his dinner plate. Couldn't he see how alone she felt, a mere woman, undefended?

Telephoning overseas was not so common back then, and so she wrote her mother letters. She wrote, I am adjusting very well and I have made several friends and I am feeling very comfortable here; and in time, that became true. She enrolled in driver's ed and earned her license; she took evening courses at Towson State; she gave her first dinner party. It began to dawn on her that Kiyan was not as acclimated to American life as she had once supposed. He dressed more formally than his colleagues, and he didn't always get their jokes, and his knowledge of colloquial English was surprisingly scanty. Instead of disenchanting her, this realization made him seem dearer. At night they slept curled together like two cashews. She loved to press her nose into the thick damp curls of hair on the back of his neck.

That part, the most powerful aunts on earth could not have arranged.

Sami said he was dubious about roasting a lamb on a spit. He worried it would disturb the neighbors. So Ziba added more dishes to the menu, and her mother came for a week and helped with the cooking. Afternoons, Maryam joined them. They peeled eggplants and mashed chickpeas and chopped onions until the tears were streaming down their cheeks. Susan was given the task of washing and soaking the rice. It touched Maryam's heart to see her standing on a chair at the sink, no bigger than a minute, wearing an apron that fell to her toes and concentrating importantly on stirring the rice about in its bath of cold water. While she worked she practiced the song that Bitsy was teaching the girls. Evidently Bitsy had given up trying to dissuade the welcomers from their eternal darned 'Coming Round the Mountain,' as she put it, and was focusing instead on the arrivers. She had sent away for a CD of Korean children's songs, which to her dismay turned out to have not a single word of English on either the label or the case. For all we know, these are dirges, she had complained to Ziba. But the song she had selected seemed anything but a dirge, with its jaunty, perky melody and its chorus of Oo-la-la-la-la's. Maryam found it charming, although Susan told her that she and Jin-Ho had preferred another one. She sang no more than a line of the other one Po po po, it sounded like before collapsing in a fit of giggles, for some reason. Maryam smiled at her and shook her head. She was struck by the ease with which Susan had picked up this music, as if her Korean roots ran deeper than anyone had guessed. And yet here she stood, tossing her colander of rice with the efficient, forward-swooping motion employed by every Iranian housewife.