The Stationery Shop(58)
At the back of her mind, a question nagged. Patricia was right: she should be starting a family. What was she so afraid of, for goodness’ sake, why did she think something bad would happen? Roya walked to the post office and mailed the letter to Zari. She would call her later in the week, send a present, of course. Of course. She walked home quickly, remembering all she had to do. She was happy for Zari and Jack. She really was.
She was busy though, boy, wasn’t she! So busy.
Sometimes in her dreams, Bahman would appear. His smile, the musky scent, the eyes filled with hope, his touch, how he leaned into her against the books at the Stationery Shop, the taste of that first espresso, the sweet pastry, the slope of his back next to hers . . . She willed herself to forget it all when she was awake. She could not allow it to interfere with the present script of her life. In the dreams he was always young, sometimes happy.
On the phone at Persian New Year, Jahangir told her that Bahman and Shahla were busy with their children now. Twins. Twins! The once-a-year phone call with Jahangir was the only way Roya ever heard news about Bahman. Maman and Baba certainly never talked of him. During her first two years in the US, she had exchanged letters with a few of the girls she’d gone to school with in Iran and with two of her cousins. But as months wore on, they stopped writing each other. Too much distance. Too much time. The only people she exchanged letters with anymore were her parents in Iran and Zari in California. But the annual phone call with Jahangir kept her connected to a past she couldn’t bring herself to abandon, no matter how painful.
Walter studied hard, and Roya was happy—well, content—well, settled at her job at Harvard Business School. HBS, they called it. Everyone loved acronyms in America. Her coworkers were efficient and sometimes kind. It was satisfying to insert the paper in the typewriter every morning, to type letters to the dean and other professors, to take notes, file papers, put things in absolute order. She liked being on top of things. Everything was in its place: the files, the letters, sharpened pencils, manila folders. She controlled her world with precise care.
“So!” Patricia said when over for another dinner. “How is everything with you two? Anything exciting on the horizon?”
“May I get you a drink, Patricia?” Walter asked through gritted teeth.
“I’m holding one, but thanks.” Patricia smiled. “Walter, remember Richard from the Cape cottage when we were growing up? His family and ours were very close.” Patricia said the last bit to Roya in an explanatory tone as if bringing her up to date, even though Roya knew Richard. She and Walter had dinner with him and his wife regularly. “Well,” Patricia went on, “he and his lovely wife—oh, I love Susan! she is so elegant!—are expecting their third child! Third!” Patricia sipped her drink.
Roya went to the kitchen and fried some onions for no reason at all. She sprinkled mint on them and ate them out of the pan as her body shook. She and Walter were in their midtwenties now. Most of their friends and acquaintances had at least one child. But it was not too late for them. Patricia was rude. Direct and interfering. It was none of her business. They had managed to wait, and wait they would.
She came on her own schedule. She was born in Mount Auburn Hospital on January 11, 1962, and when Roya held her, when she looked into eyes that were strangely alert, held the tiny milky, cheesy body pressed against her own, she was terrified. But Roya was also, in a strange way, real again. She was not an actress in an American movie. She was delirious and dizzy—yes—but amazingly grounded at the same time. For the first time in a long time, Roya was fully herself again.
When they came home from the hospital, Alice took care of the three of them. Alice, who smelled of potato salad and lotion, who was matter-of-fact with Roya and enchanted with her granddaughter. Roya missed Maman sorely but was grateful for Alice’s presence, boiling everything in sight as a hedge against infection, providing good cheer, and making endless quantities of baked potatoes with sour cream.
Alice’s face crumpled a year later when their baby stopped breathing. Alice cried in the car as they drove to the hospital in an icy panic.
The baby gasped for air. Marigold. Her name was Marigold. She’d landed in their lives, and for almost twelve months, Roya had lost layers of her reserve. She had never given Walter complete access to herself; she had a part of herself always locked away. He’d accepted it (he was Walter!), grateful just to have her there, to see her every morning. But Marigold—with her light brown hair, her gray eyes, her soft mewls as she breastfed, grabbing onto Roya with startling strength—Marigold broke through every single glacial wall Roya had built up and melted it with her toothless smile. For twelve months, Roya, exhausted and exhilarated, was purely herself. Even the romance of her youth fizzled in comparison; nothing had ever meant everything to her the way this baby did.
On the drive to the hospital, Walter clutched the steering wheel, silent. Snow steadily fell; snowbanks hardened and grayed. The sound of Alice’s prayers filled the car: verses from the Bible and entreaties to God. Alice had driven from the Cape to visit them; they had been having Sunday dinner when Marigold’s bad cough wouldn’t stop, when the fever she’d had for days flared higher, when she wheezed and gasped for air. As Roya sat so still in the backseat with her burning baby in her arms, she felt like she might crack and splinter into pieces. Just let my child be all right, please let the doctors bring down her fever, she will be better, of course, she has to be. Marigold wheezed, and then out of desperation Roya sang her an old Persian folk song. Alice stopped praying and listened, and Walter just drove as fast as was possible on the ice.