My sister’s townhome is an echo chamber of noises that drift in the quiet air.  A clock’s tick-tock.  Wind on the roof tiles.  The toilet gurgling endlessly.  Mundane domestic sounds that seem new again, as if I’m hearing them for the first time.  Sounds usually lost in the noise of family, my nephew Ali and niece Sopha locked in sibling rivalry at full volume, my brother-in-law Farid watching TV with the sound cranked.  But tonight they went to San Diego’s Iranian School for a religious program and took their cacophony with them.

Nasrin and I are on the couch with the fireplace burning a steady propane blue.  We sit hip-to-hip, reviewing the photo albums she inherited as the older sibling.  Two little girls smile for the camera in a series of overexposed pictures from the 1980s.  Family get-togethers with relatives crowding into the frame, a diminishing number of mustachioed men, an increasing number of women in black head-to-toe chadors.  Homes of bland architecture and even blander furnishings, some damaged by Saddam’s bombers.  Our grandfather’s wheat farm far away from the war, where I once caught a frog and brought it inside to show everyone – only to have the frog leap out of my cupped hands and onto the dinner table.

She sags against me, giggling.  “I can’t believe you don’t remember that!”

“I was too young to remember,” I sigh.

My memories of Iran aren’t my own.  They’re hand-me-downs from Nasrin, who was 10 when our family left.  Old enough to remember for both of us.  That’s how I know I was her little mop-headed partner in mischief, following her around everywhere, all lazy-eyed and spindly.  At dinnertime our house was alive with delicious cooking smells and we’d try to sneak into the kitchen and snatch halva – our favorite dessert – when Mom and our aunts weren’t looking.  We loved to play hide-and-seek in the jungle of potted plants that decorated our apartment building’s courtyard.  From our bedroom window we could see the spectacular peaks of the Alborz Mountains that ring Tehran, and lying in bed we’d point our toes at the peaks and give them made-up names.

“I didn’t want to leave.”  Suddenly Nasrin’s voice is cracking like ice cubes in water.  “I know there was a war going on, but I never wanted to leave.”

All I can do is put my arms around her.  I don’t have the experiences that came with living her memories, the emotions they left behind, the sense of loss.  I try so hard to remember Iran, to reconnect with that little lazy-eyed girl and everything surrounding her in the photos, but I can’t.  I just can’t.  That’s me, but a me I never knew.

After a while Nasrin sets aside the photo album labeled IRAN and progresses to AMERICA.  I perk up beside her.  The first backgrounds are full of Long Beach, where one of Dad’s relatives lived.  Dozens of us were crammed into the smallish house until we got an apartment of our own.

I tap my fingernail against a rusty chainlink fence that keeps showing up in pictures.  “Remember the scary dog that lived next door?  That mastiff or whatever?  We were always afraid it would jump over the fence and get us.”

“Don’t remind me,” Nasrin shivers, leaning into my shoulder.

My memories begin with America and the way she clung to me – the familiar – in this strange new world.  We walked to elementary school together, wondering if it was a sin in Christianity to cut through the graveyard of the Catholic church.  We spent lunch in disgusted fascination, marveling at the American kids eating things that couldn’t possibly be food – bright orange Doritos, cheese that came in sticks, candy like fireworks in your mouth.  During recess we played Iranian games together or watched the American kids play four square, a cryptic exercise with rules we couldn’t begin to discern.  We were always talking or whispering or giggling in Farsi, our secret language.

“You never seemed like a little kid to me until I was in 7th grade,” Nasrin is saying.  “My bus passed the elementary school and I used to stare out the window at the playground and think of you.”

The photo album becomes disjointed, a tale of two sisters separated by age and the school system.  We caught the bus alone, and went through the school day alone, and came home alone.  Nasrin flips through the glossy pages, remembering junior high and high school like they were bad cooking burns.

“…and then there was the whole nightmare with my immunization records, when the high school wouldn’t even let me enroll.  Dad and Mom couldn’t get the paperwork from Iran because diplomatic relations hadn’t been restored…”

The camera captures a girl struggling with expectations, trying to be the perfect Iranian daughter, helping our parents navigate the baffling details of life in a foreign language.  Trying to fit in despite the “nots” – not dating, not playing sports, not losing her accent, not hanging out with American kids after school.  Eventually the pictures stabilize on a small circle of friends, Nasrin and the handful of other Iranian girls.  Persians, they preferred to be called.  It was just easier that way.  Most of them wore the hijab, including Nasrin.

A high school graduation picture is tucked underneath the clear plastic.  A boy’s picture.  “Charlie!” I laugh, elbowing Nasrin playfully.  “Charlie…what was his last name again?”

“Geathers,” she sighs wistfully.  A fond memory, getting asked to prom by the star running back.  But the face beaming confidently at us is black, and Muslim girls like us couldn’t attend prom anyway.  She turns the page.

Tucked into the back cover is a graduation picture, Nasrin flanked by our parents.  Her mortarboard hat is balanced precariously on her hijab.  Its square overhang casts a sharp shadow across her face, as if she’s being paroled into the sunlight.  She smiles almost desperately and tilts forward into impending motion.  Get me out of here, she seems to be saying.  Beside her Mom is equal parts pride and exhaustion.  She’s immaculately made up – just what you’d expect from an Avon rep – but shapeless beneath her ankle-length jilbab, not the hourglass that Nasrin inherited.  Dad is a ghost who materialized from somewhere else, the two jobs he was working.  He looks about a million years old.

My sister closes the photo album and sets it aside.  “It was easier for you.”  There’s still bitterness in her voice.

I never struggled the way Nasrin did.  At first I was too young to know any better, just a little sponge soaking everything up.  By junior high it was my English that was perfect and my Farsi that was suffering, since our family interaction had dwindled away – Nasrin got married, Dad was never home, Mom read her Quran obsessively.  She stopped cooking and started microwaving, which meant no more stinky leftover lunches that reek the way only three-day-old Persian food can reek.  Instead I ate cafeteria lunches and all those weird American foods that weren’t weird anymore.  I began playing sports so I’d have something to do after school – and discovered that volleyball and basketball transformed my awkward height into a measure of acceptance.  I never even faced the pressure of our religious ban on dating.  Boys made fun of me, but they never asked me to prom.

Nasrin once told me that being an American was harder than it seemed, because you couldn’t just become an American.  You had to stop being whatever you were before.  And she couldn’t stop being Persian even if she wanted to.  I want to ask her if she feels the same way now, but I can’t muster the courage before the couch rocks beside me.  “I’m going to check on that toilet,” she says, following the gurgling noise down the hallway.

My experience is the opposite.  It’s my husband and his family who want me to stop being everything I was before, the carefree American girl who speaks crappy Farsi and dreams of a college education and would rather visit Mexico than Iran.  They want me to be a good wife like generations of women before me, stretching back in an unbroken chain to the homeland I can’t even remember.  Contort myself into the shapes of tradition, even if who I am is totally different.  Start having children and complete my destiny.

I tried, Saman.  I tried for five years.  I tried until all my trying is used up.