The Stationery Shop(59)

The nurse who took Marigold from Roya’s arms had a blond beehive under her white cap. Her breath smelled of cigarettes. Roya didn’t want to give her daughter to this woman, she wanted to keep her close. The doctor who arrived had a pimple above his lip, ready to burst. Years later, as Roya walked the blocks around her house, she’d be furious for remembering the doctor’s pimple and the nurse’s cigarette smell—they had come between her and her baby, they had inserted themselves into the tragedy of her life, and they would forever haunt her memories on a loop.

Marigold was pronounced dead forty-three minutes after their arrival at the hospital.

On the linoleum floor, beneath the fluorescent lights, Roya’s legs went numb. The doctor’s voice was garbled. He was speaking through mud. Just like when she’d first arrived in America, English was incomprehensible. Beside her stood Walter; he hovered next to her, tall and silent, and in her peripheral vision she saw his huge hands shaking. Alice was diagonally across from her; everything about her mother-in-law was motionless except for her tears.

The three of them went home at dawn. There was no avoiding it, though Roya had considered simply staying in the hospital and not leaving and maybe starving to death on its linoleum floor. In that building, with its beeping and noise and a million other emergencies that could never have been as important as Marigold’s life, in that place that smelled of death, they had sat for hours and Walter had signed paperwork and then they were told to leave. During the ride home, the snowbanks loomed. Limbs she did not have, she could not feel her arms or legs or her fingers; Roya knew it was someone other than herself in the car. She missed more than anything else Marigold’s face against hers. Her grief would have no end, of this she was sure.

It was Walter, finally, who made her tea. It was Walter who got out of bed first every morning and made the hard-boiled eggs. He didn’t whistle anymore. Something sour was always in the air now, rotting in the crater left in Marigold’s wake.



“You didn’t need to come,” Roya said a few weeks later when Zari showed up, suitcase in hand, two tiny kids in tow. Roya stood at the doorway of her darkened house, dirty dishes in the sink in the kitchen behind her, laundry piled up, mustiness in the air.

“Oh, but I did, Sister.”

Zari’s son, Darius, was four now. His little sister, Leila, wriggled in Zari’s arms. Leila was two. Twelve months Leila had lived that Marigold would never have. Everything—every detail, every word, every second, every person—reminded Roya of Marigold. Except that reminded wasn’t the right word. Reminded meant that she had to forget to remember again. But she never forgot. Everything was linked to Marigold; nothing, really, could be separated from her ever. Not even words uttered by a crazy woman in Iran a lifetime ago. Babies die.

Here was Leila in Zari’s arms. Here was her niece, chubby, happy, breathing, alive, a knitted pink bonnet on her head. A bonnet that Zari would have wrapped and placed in a package and mailed to Roya with a note saying, Maman Joon knitted it and sent it. Leila’s outgrown it. Marigold should wear it now.

Marigold should.

If.

Darius squealed and ran to the kitchen. Zari took her shoes off and shouted at Darius to not run through the house with wet boots. Roya stared out at the snow as her sister and niece and nephew rushed past her. The world dared go on in cold, spiteful glee.



To reform Jack, Zari had moved mountains. Under Zari’s expert stewardship, Jack the beat poet transformed into a corporate hack. He wrote jingles for ads, first for print and eventually for television, and if the former idealist poet was saddened by this transformation, one could not tell. Whenever Roya had seen him, Jack was beaming, his kids hanging off him like zoo monkeys, his formerly long hair in a buzz cut. In his suits and thin ties, he was the epitome of a 1960s advertising employee. How had Zari managed to mold her man into this, what wonder drug did she give her Jack, what kept that smile on his face? Oh, Sister, we both know in the end it comes down to what happens in bed, don’t we? That’s how you get anything done, let’s face it! I am no fool and I know what to do.

At the thought of beds and sheets and lovemaking, Roya simply felt numb now.

Zari cleaned the house. The kind of thorough cleaning normally reserved for Persian New Year, the first day of spring. But it wasn’t spring, it was still winter, the ice and snow were everywhere. Zari didn’t care; she cleaned. And Roya thought of all the rituals with which they had been raised to celebrate the first day of spring—all useless now. As if she would ever again have the wherewithal to prepare a Haft Seen table for Persian New Year, to set it with items beginning with s that were symbolic of rebirth and renewal. No. To soak lentils in water so they could grow green sprouts, to paint eggs to celebrate fertility—never. Persian New Year, the first day of spring, Nowruz—meaningless now, all of it. Walter and Roya wouldn’t celebrate it, or Christmas or Thanksgiving either. What was the point?

Zari washed her windows (in February! in New England! why bother? they’d be covered by snow and frost anyway). Zari washed all the clothes too. She went to the store and bought fresh ingredients and cooked and sautéed and fried and basted and filled Roya’s freezer with khoreshes and rice dishes and stuffed grape leaf dolmehs and meat patty kotelets and potato quiche kukus. She opened the windows and let in fresh air (freezing air was more like it). Zari even insisted on melting sugar in a saucepan, then adding a few drops of lemon juice and warm water to create a wax with which she wanted to remove the hair on Roya’s legs.