The Stationery Shop(57)

“I know it’s not a laboratory job. But, Roya, it’s a good position.”

It had proven far more difficult to get hired at a laboratory than even Roya had expected. Positions for women were few. She was willing to start at the bottom, as a technician. But laboratories didn’t want her. One lab offered her the position of bottle washer: beakers and test tubes had to be washed by hand carefully, the interviewer said. Roya showed her transcripts of her near-perfect grades and her bachelor of science degree in chemistry. It was practically 1960, but it seemed that everywhere she went, male applicants got preference. And she was still—forever—the foreigner. She was in the minority of women who even wanted to work. Most of her cohorts in the Boston suburbs were happy to stay home and keep house for their husbands.

“Well, congratulations,” Patricia said when she found out that Roya had gotten the secretarial job at the business school. “Now who will cook for and take care of poor Walter?”

“I will continue to cook for him, as always, Patricia. Don’t you worry.”

She chopped parsley, cilantro, spinach, and mint. She made the thickest aush soup, and she and Walter raised their glasses in celebration.

Despite Patricia’s disapproval and the sad looks from Alice, Walter stood his ground with his sister and mother and respected Roya’s desire to wait before trying for children.

Over the next year, every now and then, Walter gently asked if Roya had changed her mind. Roya didn’t want to tell him that she was scared of creating another life and growing attached to it. She could not remove from her mind the ugly question: What if something happens to the baby?

Mrs. Aslan’s strange refrain from a lifetime ago sometimes came back to her at the oddest moments. Babies die, she had said. What crazy wife thought like Roya? Patricia was right. Poor Walter, indeed!

For years she thought that her biggest loss in life would be her first love. Or the stationer who had died at her feet. Little did she know that her future held a bigger loss: a loss that would make the summer of 1953 look like child’s play.





Part Four





Chapter Twenty-One


1958



* * *



Births

I did not expect a son and a daughter at the same time! It’s a specific kind of joy blended with exhaustion: an attachment that overwhelms. We are consumed by them. We are blessed and in awe. May God protect them.

The other night I came home from work and the cook had made a special egg and garlic dish popular in her village up north and both of the twins started to cry at the same time, and I could tell that had it not been for the servants and the nurse, Shahla would have been at her wits’ end. Mother came to visit and she sat quietly and retreated into her corner.

I don’t for a second forget any one of the number of things she said to you that were cruel. I felt shame at her lack of an emotional filter, at her forceful and cutting words. I remember when you were at my parents’ house and my mother said things to hurt you. Cut you. Scare you. I was so convinced that she was being cruel. And I can understand, on my best days, why that would scare you away.

But here is the history you do not know:

I was not my parents’ first child. I was not their second, nor their third. I was not my mother’s fourth. I was the fifth child my mother had, and the others who preceded me all died. Two were stillborn, one died in my mother’s eighth month of pregnancy, and one died in the first year of life. That my parents kept trying was a testament to their desire and the times. I don’t know if my parents had more children after me. Maybe they did and I was too young to remember another one dying. My mother only told me about these other lost babies in a moment of extreme duress, on a day I’d rather forget. It was the day that changed everything for us. For you and me, you could say.

Of course, my mother wasn’t alone in losing babies in those days, but others seem to have borne it better. Maybe it was that she lost so many in a row.

I attributed her melancholy to the loss of those babies. I attributed her depression and mood swings and instability—all of it—to that.

How was I supposed to know there was a loss that preceded all the others, that hung over everything?

I hope that you are well over there in America. Be good. Be safe. I hope you are healthy, happy. My children keep me going. Do you know of what I speak?





Chapter Twenty-Two


1962–1963



* * *



Marigold

Sister, Jack and I are expecting our first child. Also, I have learned how to make eggplant khoresh without the eggplant!

Roya read Zari’s letter and filed it neatly on her desk in the pile of to-dos. She wrote back in Farsi and added “Congratulations” in English in block letters at the bottom of the page. As she licked the envelope and sealed it shut, Roya reminded herself of her goals. She was working hard as a secretary at the business school. Her typing speed had soared. It was not the kind of job she had expected to be doing, but compromise was the name of the game in her new adult life. She simply had been unable to get a good (or any) job in science, and it was not for lack of trying. This was what it was to be a woman, she knew. She was already pushing boundaries by even insisting on working. And in science there was always the assumption that she would be taking the job from a well-qualified man. And as a foreigner—well, shouldn’t she just be grateful to be in this country? That was the underlying message she often received from well-intentioned friends and neighbors. Roya scaled back her ambition.