The Stationery Shop(51)

“No.” Zari shook her head. “We shouldn’t cook there.”

“We cook for you,” Roya repeated, with a glare at Zari.

“Well, isn’t that swell? Why, I would enjoy that very much!” Walter beamed.

“Sure you would, chump.” Jack slung his arm around Zari’s shoulders. “But I’ll skip the cooking demonstration, if that’s all right with you. I got my fragrant Persian cuisine right here.” He tightened his hold on Zari.

Zari’s cheeks reddened and for a minute she stiffened. Then she melted into his embrace.

Walter concentrated on his plate and cleared his throat.

“You come then, Walter. I cook for you,” Roya said.



Their first lesson was on a Saturday evening. Mrs. Kishpaugh made meals for boarders on weeknights and Sundays, but on Saturdays everyone was on their own. Most of the girls were taken out on dates then anyway. And Mrs. Kishpaugh enjoyed visiting her daughter on Saturdays, coming back with long and detailed anecdotes about the antics of her grandchildren. Roya had asked for permission to use the kitchen, and Mrs. Kishpaugh had said fine as long as you clean everything, not a spot, make it as though it didn’t happen.

Zari’s date with Jack that evening was to go see James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Roya snorted when Zari told her the movie title and said it was fitting for the both of them. She had prepared for this night carefully. Earlier in the week, she’d made a pilgrimage to a Turkish/Armenian food shop in San Francisco. Since arriving in California, Roya’s link to Iranian spices was tenuous. At the beginning of the semester, in chemistry lab, she’d met a girl named Seda Kebabjian. (The fact that Seda had the word kebab in her last name made Roya immediately warm to her.) They became friends. One day as they stood at the lab sink washing beakers, Seda had told Roya that her uncle had opened a delicatessen in the Richmond District of San Francisco where he sold spices and teas and jams from the old country. Roya’s beaker overflowed as she stood in a trance, listening.

“Take me there,” she whispered.

When she and Seda arrived at the small delicatessen in the city, Roya stepped inside, closed her eyes, and inhaled the familiar combination of scents. Then she opened her eyes. All at once, she wanted to devour the entire store. She wanted to sweep everything on the shelves into her skirt and run off, carrying jars of every single spice that she had missed so much. A piece of her had come home.

She bought yellow split peas. Cardamom. Cumin. Cinnamon (the one here was far closer to what cinnamon should smell like than anything she’d found so far in America). Crushed rose petals. Rosewater. Orange blossom water. And (was she dreaming?) the shop had actual dried Persian limes and saffron threads! Roya greedily grabbed all the ingredients. Baba had been dutifully sending money to America whenever he could. Now she would eat up his well-earned tomans on her one excursion.



Walter smelled of aftershave and soap when he arrived for the cooking demonstration on Saturday night. He wore his wool trousers, his blue blazer, and a porkpie hat. When he took off the hat, it was clear his hair had been washed and carefully combed for the occasion.

Roya led him into the kitchen and didn’t say a word about him not taking off his shoes. It was pointless in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s boardinghouse anyway. No one took off shoes indoors in this country, which was baffling and slightly disgusting, but she’d adjusted.

She offered Walter a seat and asked him what he’d like to drink.

“Oh, I’ll have a Coca-Cola if it’s not too much trouble, thanks.”

If he’d been Iranian, he would have said, Oh, no thank you, I couldn’t trouble you, I’m fine. She would have asked again, and he would have refused and said he was just fine, thanks, no need for anything. She would have served the tea that she had already brewed first thing. She would have prepared a big bowl of nuts and seeds, a platter of fruit, a tray filled with small chickpea cookies and other sweets. If he had been Iranian, she would have heaped fruit on a plate and peeled a cucumber for him and poured his tea into an estekan and offered him sugar cubes to put between his teeth as he sipped the hot tea. In the beginning she had wanted to do all these things for anyone who visited her in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s house, for classmates who came over to study, for Zari’s Jack even. But she was limited by what she could do in a house that wasn’t her own, in a kitchen where there was no samovar, in a place where people did not consider cucumbers to be fruit and did not think that fruit should be eaten in heaps before dinner. When Seda Kebabjian had come over to review their chem lab notes and Roya had apologized for not offering her more, Seda had held up her hand and said, “Stop! It’s not like that here Roya, it’s not like it is back in both our homes. You do not have to constantly offer and cajole, the guests will say yes when you ask them, and you do not have to worry so much about being the perfect hostess.”

So Walter’s “Oh, I’ll have a Coca-Cola if it’s not too much trouble, thanks,” did not come as a shock. She had already lived here for more than a year. She knew these American ways well enough now. She knew it was not rude that he didn’t politely refuse her offerings at first. She knew that Persian tarof—that ritual of constant back-and-forth offering and refusal, often buttressed with flowery language and exaggerated flattery—was not the custom here.

She came back with the Coca-Cola. The other boarders and Mrs. Kishpaugh were all out. She and Walter had the kitchen and the house to themselves. It was strange to be with him, alone in a large house. In Iran, such a thing would never be allowed. But this was Walter. He was so well behaved; he would never force himself on her. She told herself not to think silly thoughts. “Come, it’s time to cook, no?”