Americanized Page 7

  “If you think you’re going to have a bad trip, you’re going to have a bad trip,” Evan warned me, and that was enough to prevent me from trying anything stronger than weed.

  I loved Evan so much that when I visited Samira for a weekend in college and she took me to a hemp festival, I stocked up on hemp necklaces and hemp lip balm purely for his benefit. I knew the items would be the perfect conversation starter, and I wanted him to know I did cool things like hang out in college towns and go to hemp festivals.

  My affection for him reached the point where he became my drug of choice. My highs and lows depended solely on how much attention he paid to me. And so when Evan asked me if I’d ever be interested in smoking out with him after school, I said: “Affirmative, love of my young life.” Actually, I said: “Yeah, totally.” I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t crazy about the way pot made me feel. As far as social lubricants went, I much preferred wine coolers and down-home punch. But mostly my vices included chocolate and pints of Ben & Jerry’s.

  A few days went by as I waited for Evan to make good on his invitation. When he did, I called my parents and told them I was staying late to help with the school play. I didn’t feel an iota of guilt for lying. My heart nearly burst out of my chest as I spotted Evan waiting for me by the bus circle. He gave me a small wave as I made my approach, but my dreams were just as quickly dashed when he told me we were going to his friend Adam’s house to smoke. I didn’t want to hang out with Adam. I’d suspected in the past that Adam had a crush on me, and I was now left to wonder whether Evan’s whole invitation was just a setup for me and Adam to hang out together. I was also hoping I would finally get to see the inside of Evan’s house (especially since I’d covertly driven by it with friends multiple times, thanks to the stalking skills passed on to me by my sister). I wanted to know what his bedroom looked like. I wanted to know if he was messy or clean, and if he was nice to his mom when she was around, and if he arranged his CDs by any particular order. I wanted to know everything about him.

  I didn’t want to know anything about Adam. He was nice, but I wasn’t attracted to him and found him far too clingy. I tried to be careful that anything I said to him didn’t seem flirtatious, so that Evan wouldn’t mistakenly think I was interested in his friend. So I barely spoke as we gathered in Adam’s backyard and passed around a glass pipe. It was nothing short of a miracle that I managed to take several hits without coughing. But the romantic notions I had of the afternoon never materialized. After we finished smoking, we went inside the house and watched the movie Friday (where the phrase “Bye, Felicia” originated!). Evan sat on a recliner by himself, while Adam sat on the couch next to me. Even with my thoughts hazy, I could feel my heart sink as I stole glances at Evan. He was falling asleep. If he had any interest in me, he would have made more of an effort to make conversation. Or maybe he would have sat a little closer to me. When the time came and I had to leave, Evan was barely alert enough to say good-bye to me. I liked him much better when he was sober, I decided. I walked back to school alone and convinced myself I needed to do everything in my power to get over Evan Parker. A guy like him would never love me the way I deserved to be loved.

  I was so consumed by my feelings for Evan that it never crossed my mind that smoking pot was a privilege afforded to American teenagers and not us undocumented kids. If Evan got caught getting high, he could go to juvie. If I got caught, I’d have a criminal record that could be grounds for deportation. Maybe that was why my dad was so desperate to keep us from doing drugs with our friends. If my sister or I got arrested, it could cost all of us the ability to stay in the United States.

  In spite of all this, my feelings for Evan only multiplied. I woke up one morning determined to spill my guts to him. If he knew how I felt, then maybe he would admit that he reciprocated my affections. I put on my cutest denim halter dress, straightened out my bob haircut, and wore a little more makeup than usual. When I got to school, I told Izzy that today was the day. I was going to confess my love to Evan Parker. And so, when I saw him in the distance, walking toward me during our twenty-minute brunch break, I stood up a little straighter and smiled a little wider. He smiled back.

  This is it, I told myself. The timing is perfect. Tell him how you feel.

  I’d practiced what I was going to say in my head a million times. I was going to tell him that I couldn’t be his friend anymore, because I was in love with him. Evan walked over to me and gave me his usual bashful grin. He opened his mouth to speak, and these were the words that came out: “Can I have five dollars?”

  I was speechless. In that moment, I realized that I’d been too generous with Evan and that he probably considered me the most likely sucker to give him a loan, because he already knew how I felt about him. I only got paid $5.65 an hour at my new job at Gap Kids. I wasn’t about to give him an hour’s worth of hard-earned money from folding pocket tees.

  “No, sorry,” I said at last. “I don’t have any money.”

  The saga with Evan continued for a couple more years. There are two endings to our story, one where he irreversibly broke my heart, and one where he didn’t. For now, I’ll tell you the latter. It was a few weeks after graduation when we ran into each other at a party. I had a boyfriend at the time, but he would usually become an afterthought anytime Evan was in proximity. After some polite small talk, Evan told me that he was quitting pot and needed to find someone to bequeath his beloved pipe to. Of course, I offered to take it off his hands. He drove my car to his house, and I finally got to step inside the place where he spent most of his days. His bedroom was meticulously tidy. His shelves were filled with books on various religions. He talked to me about spirituality, and I pretended to be interested. And then he pulled a tiny canvas bag out of a drawer and handed it to me. Inside was his beautiful glass pipe.

  July 21, 1998

  Evan said he quit smoking pot, and I asked him what he was going to do with his pipe. He said he had to find someone to give it to. And I told him I wanted it…I let Evan drive my car to his house. I got to be in his house, in his room, sitting on his bed. And now I have his pipe. It was a dream. I could hardly sleep that night. I just felt guilty. My feelings for him are real, and they’ve always been.

  I don’t have the pipe anymore. My parents confiscated it after little Kia found it in my bedroom and asked them why it smelled like cigarettes. Surprisingly, I did not get grounded. It’s entirely possible my dad wasn’t as offended that I was smoking pot as he was that I wasn’t smoking it with him.

  * * *

  *1 Farsi for “finger food” or a small sandwich.

  *2 Played by Jared Leto in a seminal role, Jordan Catalano was the object of Claire Danes’s character’s affection in the cult-classic TV series My So-Called Life.

  Mamani is here and she’s driving all of us mad. I can’t stand her. She’s so selfish and awful. I’ll be so happy when she leaves.

  —Diary entry: August 27, 1999

  “Go back to your country” is one of my least favorite phrases in the English language. It’s vile and racist and only uttered by xenophobes and bigots. And yet the words did run through my mind during the months or years that my dad’s mom, Margaret Farideh Kanani-Ghasr, would come from Iran to live with us in America. Maman Farideh*1 (or Mamani, as we called her) regularly drove me nuts. I was mortified in movie theaters when my mom had to quietly translate every line of dialogue to her; I had no patience for her incessant nagging, or the fact that she couldn’t seem to speak without spitting. The culture and generation gap that separated us was too immense to navigate. I was certain we were destined to never understand each other. Whenever I reached peak frustration levels, my parents liked to remind me that my grandmother had had a difficult life and that I needed to practice compassion. But that didn’t make up for the fact that she was currently ruining my precious teen years. It never quite sank in that my life at fifteen was sunshine
and roses compared to what she’d gone through as a teenager. Her existence was marked by a series of unthinkable losses. Mine was marked by aloof boys, prepping for the SATs, and a looming fear of deportation.

  Mamani was born in France to an Iranian father and a Lebanese mother. She was the younger of two girls and adored her older sister. The two of them were completely inseparable until they were forced apart. They attended boarding school in France together (her whole life, she would remain fluent in French), but when Mamani was twelve, their mom passed away and their dad lost his job and decided to move the family to Tehran. He told his daughters they were merely going to Iran to visit family, so both girls mistakenly thought they’d be returning to their lives at school. But en route to Iran, their dad married off my grandmother’s fourteen-year-old sister against her will. She didn’t speak a word of Farsi and ended up married to an Iranian man who was in his early twenties. The sisters didn’t know it at the time, but it would be ten years before they’d be reunited. My grandmother wrote her sister letters over the years, but as in every good tragic story, her sister never received them.

  Three years later, my grandmother had her own arranged marriage, to a neighbor (my grandfather Mohammad Saedi) who was five years her senior. Everyone in my family called him Pedar Joon, which translates to “Father Dear.”

  My paternal grandparents.

  My grandmother moved in with him and his family, and at sixteen (when I was still yearning for my first kiss) she gave birth to my amoo*2 Abdullah (more commonly known as Abdol). My dad was born four years later, followed by my two aunts. My grandmother not only raised four children but also had a full-time job making clothing for Tehran’s elite class. While her employers were extravagantly wealthy, the Saedi family was considered lower middle class at best. But despite their lack of money, Farideh and Mohammad had a solid marriage. My grandfather was a kind and gentle man who made a very modest living working at a printing press. He wanted to protect his wife from his family’s violent tendencies, but he couldn’t exactly disown his parents. As a young boy, my dad regularly witnessed his mom getting beaten, and the image of her being abused remains burned into his memory. After one particularly violent incident, my seven-year-old dad took the bus to fetch his father at work so that he could hurry home and tend to my grandmother’s bloody wounds. A year later, my grandmother would be so depressed by the harsh treatment she received from her in-laws that she tried to commit suicide by overdosing on opium. Luckily, she survived the suicide attempt, and by the time the kids were older, the in-laws were kicked out of the house and removed from their lives completely.

  The Mamani I knew was incredibly independent and stubborn to a fault. She was also a strict Muslim. Whenever she lived with us in America, she would scramble to put on her head scarf if a male relative entered the house. She didn’t drink alcohol or eat pork, and she always fasted during Ramadan. She made thirteen pilgrimages to Mecca, and faithfully prayed five times a day. I used to love peeking through doorways to her bedroom and watching her kneel on the floor and whisper “Allah Akbar.” She seemed so focused and at peace during these moments of prayer and contemplation. But when my dad was growing up, she preferred bright red lipstick to a chador.*3 He was often embarrassed to bring his friends around the house, because he didn’t have a “typical” mom. Islam became a part of her life after the unexpected death of her oldest son, and religion became the only way she coped with the debilitating grief.

  My amoo Abdol at Amjadiyeh Stadium (currently known as Shahid Shiroudi Stadium).

  My amoo Abdol was handsome and charismatic, and taken from the world far too soon. At eighteen, he became one of the youngest soccer (or football, as it’s more commonly known in Iran) players to join Team Melli, Iran’s national team, and became a star in the country. His fame and income helped turn his family members’ lives around. Thanks to Abdol’s connections, my dad was able to attend one of the best private schools in Tehran, free of charge. During and after his soccer career, Abdol was also a lieutenant in the air force. When he was thirty-one, he piloted a flight to northern Iran to pick up a high-ranking official. The plane crashed on the way, killing my uncle and seven passengers. He left behind his wife and young daughter (my wonderful cousin Gita). My dad was in college in Baton Rouge when the crash occurred, and for two months, no one in his family told him that his brother, the person he loved most in the world, had perished. They were too afraid to break the news over the phone, and so they waited for his closest childhood friend to be able to tell him in person.

  My grandmother was only forty-seven when her son passed away. Islam saved her life during this incredibly difficult period. Finding religion gave her a tiny bit of solace, and she remained a devout Muslim till the day she died. Six years after my uncle’s death, my grandfather died of cancer. Mamani had gotten married at fifteen, became a widow at fifty-three, and spent the rest of her life on her own in an apartment in Mashhad, a city on the far eastern side of Iran. She came to America often and would live with us for long stretches of time. When I was a child, she drove me so crazy that I decided the only solution was to run away from home. I hopped on my bike barefoot and pedaled down the streets, determined never to return. I lasted about thirty minutes before returning home, kicking myself that I didn’t take her advice to put on a sweater.

  But there was one event in my life that connected Mamani and me forever: the time I broke my vagina. It was before puberty had fully arrived, so I didn’t have much experience with blood and my private parts. My parents were away for the weekend, and my grandmother was in charge of watching us. I was making myself a snack in the kitchen, but due to the fact that I was vertically challenged, I couldn’t reach a dish in one of our cabinets. I climbed up on the counter, as I often did to grab the dish, but when I hopped off, I didn’t realize the door to the lower cabinet was ajar. I landed on it, with my legs wide open. I think it’s safe to say if I were a boy, I would have died instantly from the pain. I thought for sure I would never bear children and that I’d need an emergency vaginoplasty. My grandmother found me screaming in agony, still straddling the cabinet door with my feet not reaching the ground. I was frozen. I was in so much pain, I couldn’t move. I was crying, and she burst into tears when she saw me.

  “Saaara! Saaara!” she screamed.

  She slowly helped me off the cabinet door and proceeded to have a panic attack. She didn’t speak any English and didn’t have a driver’s license, so she couldn’t take me to the hospital. (In retrospect, she probably wasn’t the best person to be taking care of us.) What if I bled to death from my vagina? How would she explain that to my parents? My own mental state became more fragile when I went to the bathroom and saw blood on my underpants. I was 99 percent certain I’d just lost my virginity to a cabinet door.

  My grandmother immediately got on the phone with my khaleh*4 Shahrzad and explained the situation. My aunt rushed over and called my khaleh Mandana, who lived in Los Angeles and worked as a nurse, for professional medical advice. My already humiliating day got worse when my khaleh Shahrzad announced that she’d been told to examine my vagina. I was horrified. I lay on my bed, completely mortified, as my aunt checked between my legs for any visible signs of trauma and permanent damage. Despite her lack of medical expertise, she said I looked fine. I wasn’t totally convinced, but I was willing to agree, since the pain was starting to subside and there was no way in hell I was going to allow anyone else to look at my vagina ever again.

  Despite the throbbing pain and humiliation, I’m grateful for my lady-parts injury. Though my grandmother and I didn’t ever speak about it again, it was a terrible experience that bonded us. And for a woman who kept her emotions buried, seeing her in tears made me realize that she loved me. During her last visit to the States, we decided to take a walk together to a nearby Persian market. Long strolls were her favorite pastime, and that particular afternoon, the temperature was breezy enough
to prevent her from getting too hot in her coat and head scarf. The streets in San Jose smelled like Maryam flowers, and as we walked the mile to the market, she pointed out other plants and foliage that she thought were beautiful. Even in her eighties, she would walk several miles each day at a brisk pace. In Mashhad, she walked everywhere. What I remember most about that afternoon was when she mentioned that in all her daily prayers, she always asked God to keep her two legs intact. She didn’t see much reason for living if she couldn’t be self-sufficient, and she couldn’t be self-sufficient without her legs.

  Mamani in Santa Cruz, on her last visit to the States, in 2010.

  In 2011, she was hit by a car on one of her strolls in Iran. She was eighty-five years old, and while she survived the initial accident, she died from her injuries a few months later. The doctors said it was a miracle she survived at all, given her age, but that she was in incredible health for a person in her mid-eighties. I couldn’t help thinking if she’d still been staying with us in California, the accident would have been avoided. I know she could have easily lived to be a hundred. I wish I had spent my adolescence less annoyed by and resentful of her presence. I wish I had made more of an effort to get to know her better. When a certain leader of the free world tried to impose a ban on Muslims entering the country, I thought of my own family immigrating here, but I also thought a lot about Mamani. I know my parents had their reasons to raise us without religion, but it still upsets me to hear my grandmother’s peaceful beliefs denigrated. She had a difficult life, but she didn’t blame anyone. She was tough and knew how to take care of herself. But most of all, she was curious about the world and open to other people’s belief systems. During that last stay in San Jose, she went on a walk, stumbled across a church service, and slipped inside. She couldn’t understand what anyone was saying or doing, but she still wanted to observe and even dropped five dollars in the donation basket. I can imagine that some churchgoers may have been unsettled by this little old lady in a head scarf hanging out among a bunch of Christians. But I’d like to think they kept an open mind, like she always did, and that no one let the words “Go back to your country” enter their thoughts.