The Stationery Shop(55)
But the lump in her throat wouldn’t go away.
We are done with that boy for good.
She’d take Walter’s lobster-roll life. A hundred times over.
We are done with that boy for good.
Roya held on to Mrs. Kishpaugh’s armchair with her oniony hands and waited for the lump in her throat to disappear and allow her to swallow. With time. With time, it would go away.
Cream-colored roses covered banisters and tables in the hotel on Cape Cod. It was midsummer, and the sky in New England was gloriously blue. Roya walked down the aisle almost faint. Zari had helped her find the dress at a shop in San Francisco. It was long with a big poufy skirt that made her feel like a doll. The bodice was made of lace, the skirt of creamy satin. Maman and Baba had flown to America. In their embrace she had taken a quiet refuge, dissolving into their arms at the airport. All this time she had missed them—more than she could admit. Their letters from Iran on airmail paper, their shouting on the phone long-distance, their making her promise that she and Zari would look after each other, could not take the place of holding her parents in her arms and smelling Maman’s lemony scent. Baba had lost almost all his hair and was much smaller now, hunched. Maman still stood straight, but her hair was much more gray than Roya remembered. Inside the large American hotel, her parents were tiny, inconsequential: nodding and smiling at Walter’s mother, shaking hands with tall, gargantuan, blond relatives of Walter’s, looking a bit lost and needing constant translation and explanation.
“Smile, Sister, smile!” Zari flounced around the ballroom in a pale-pink organdy dress that cinched in the middle and showed off her figure. She tightened sashes and straightened tablecloths. She waltzed through and inspected each dish. Throughout the night, she pulled Roya to the dance floor and made sure that Walter’s tie never got crooked.
“You look beautiful, dear,” Walter’s mother, Alice, said. “My, you are beautiful. Oh, Walter. How I wish your father were still alive.”
Roya kissed Walter during the ceremony as was expected and waved at the clapping audience on cue. When they asked her if she was the happiest she’d ever been, Roya nodded and posed for photographs, keeping very still.
After Roya and Walter graduated from university, she from Mills College, he from UC Berkeley, Roya was supposed to go back to Iran. Years earlier, over breakfasts of barbari bread with feta cheese and sour cherry jam, Baba had said she would be the next Madame Curie or Helen Keller. But maybe now she could be a “lady scientist”—one who held beakers up to the light and solved problems and made steady discoveries that shifted the plates of the earth’s knowledge—in New England.
In a suburb outside Boston, she and Walter purchased a small white colonial house with dark-green shutters. He was still in law school, but his mother helped with the down payment for the house in a very matter-of-fact way. Walter commuted to Boston University, and on weekends he showed Roya around her new town. Their home was a mile from the green where the American Revolution had begun, where minutemen fell to their deaths on the morning of April 19, 1775, where British redcoats antagonized the brave colonials and forced them to revolt. Walter relayed all of this with great pride. He took her to the spot of the shot heard around the world and pointed to stone monuments memorializing the dead. Roya stood on that pristine green grass wondering if one day, ever, there would be a memorial for those shot in the square in Tehran on that hot August day in 1953. Probably not. On the very green where her new country had started, Roya spread a picnic blanket and ate lobster rolls and drank ginger beer with her new husband. The spice of the ginger beer burned the back of her throat. She would have preferred water, but Walter told her that his swell girl would learn to love the taste. She nodded yes, she would.
Of course, her parents had gone back to Iran after the wedding. Roya could not talk to Maman and ask her how much tomato she should add to the loobia polo she was making—she could not dash over and pick up her mother for a quick run to the market. She could not read for her father the newspaper headlines or sit with him and laugh at the antics of this silly Lucille Ball who stuffed her face with chocolates. She wanted her parents to see the television set that Walter had bought. She wanted to be able to walk down the street to Maman’s house and touch Maman’s cheek and say, “Put on your shoes, let’s go for a walk.”
When Zari and Jack got married, Maman and Baba didn’t even come to the wedding. Zari planned it in such a very quick three weeks and did not give guests enough notice. Besides, the trip for Roya’s wedding had been expensive for Maman and Baba; they couldn’t afford to come again so soon. Under the redwood trees of the Berkeley campus, Jack insisted that they exchange poems he had written while high. Roya flew out and watched the spectacle and hugged her sister and hoped that she and Jack didn’t starve.
“Is he really going to be just a poet? That’s not a reliable position.”
“How harsh you sound!” Zari said. Then she whisper-shouted, “Don’t worry, Sister! I’ve decided to introduce Jack to advertising. I think he would like it very much. He is so creative. Those poems? They can be advertising-product poems.”
“If you say so.” Roya was still worried.
The sisters started their married lives on opposite coasts and wrote letters and occasionally made phone calls to keep in touch. Roya settled deep into her Northeast life. Zari floated through California with Jack, at first camping out with his friends here and there. And then news came in a letter: Jack has agreed to cut his hair. He’s agreed to apply for a job in an advertising firm. He has to start from the bottom. But a creative genius like him won’t stay at the bottom long, will he?