The Mexican Year

Balmy sunlight is filtering through the eucalyptus leaves overhead.  The rays dapple onto the crushed rock and milky strips of fallen bark surrounding me.  I stick out a skinny leg and it dapples too, warm in sunny spots and cool in shady ones.  My other leg is tucked beneath me in my usual sitting position.  This is the best bench on campus, and I should know.  I’ve visited them all today, exploring the buildings and winding trails and little forgotten corners of the University of California San Diego, better known as UCSD.  The view from here is spectacular.  Down this plunging slope is an emerald expanse of sporting fields with athletes moving like colorful regimented dolls.  Beyond is a stretch of arid hills carpeted in sagebrush, manzanita, and yucca.  The hills recede across I-5 into the red tile roofs of University City and the stunning fairytale spires of the Mormon Temple.  Craggy mountains hem in the eastern horizon.

But I’m not enjoying the view right now.  I’m watching a maroon Saturn sedan creep up the curving hillside towards me.  The car is slowing for every cute coed, then speeding up again.  A familiar jowly face appears and disappears and reappears behind the shifting reflections on the windshield.  Farid, Nasrin’s husband.  It takes him a long time to reach the parking lot behind me.

He’s been dropping me off every morning on his way to work, then picking me up in the afternoon on his way home.  Yesterday it was Horton Plaza, the shopping mall that engulfs six city blocks in downtown.  The day before it was the run-down museums and charming kitsch of Balboa Park.

Farid leans his bulk across the interior and opens the door with a meaty arm.  “Salam, Nooshin!”  Before I can reply, he hurriedly tosses an empty McDonald’s bag into the back.  “You didn’t see that.  Got it?”

So much for his 2,000 calories per day diet.  I wonder if he eats the traditional low-calorie lunches Nasrin makes for him – tahdeeg and shirazi and khoresht – or if he just throws them away.  Judging by his waistline, he probably eats both Nasrin’s lunches and Mickey D’s.

“What do you think of campus?  Like it?  Anything interesting happen?” Farid asks, running the questions together into a single interrogatory statement.

“I love it.  It’s so beautiful here!  But nothing really happened.  I just…you know.  Walked around.”  Blending in like any other coed with a wedding ring, lazy eye, and hijab.  “Thanks for picking me up.”

His hand flaps, waving off my gratitude.  Taxi service is a duty expected of Persian men.  They’d drive to the horizon for a female relative.

Campus is filling the windows of the car.  I point out sculptures from the world-famous Stuart Collection as we roll past them – talking and singing trees emplaced in a grove of eucalyptus, the giant red shoe loping through the woods, a Stonehenge-style assemblage of granite blocks.  But Farid is more impressed with the library, which squats in the middle of campus like a gigantic spaceship ready for blastoff.

“She got Botox, you know,” he suddenly says.

“Who?  Nasrin?” I ask in alarm.

“Nasrin?  Who said anything about Nasrin?  I’m talking about Googoosh!”  Farid points at the stereo for emphasis.  Googoosh is crooning in Farsi from the speakers, an old Persian torch song.  “She got Botox for sure.  Her forehead is smoother than a baby’s bottom.  Have you seen her lately?”

I haven’t even heard her lately.  I don’t really listen to anything Middle Eastern anymore.  My musical tastes are thoroughly Americanized – gangster rap, Eurotrash techno, Japanese bubblegum pop, stuff like that.

Farid honks absentmindedly at a girl struggling across the street in balky platform boots.  “My sales call today, you wouldn’t believe it.  Way out in Kearney Mesa.  Almost past the county line.  And this is a big county.  Does that make any sense to you?  Only a single sales rep to cover a county this big?”

“No,” I agree, when he pauses to wait for my response.

“I drove out there and got lost.  Kearney Mesa.  I never go that far.  To me it’s like…I forget what you call it.  That thing on the map where explorers need to go.”

“Terra incognita?”

“Right!  Terra incognita.  So I’m driving around, trying to find this place, and then I see this certain building out in the middle of nowhere, and I thought to myself ‘That must be it!’ and sure enough, it was.  Have you ever had that happen to you?  Where you know something, but you don’t really know how you know it?”

“I guess so.  Why don’t you get a GPS unit?”

“What?”

“A navigation unit.  So you can drive right to your destination.  You just put in the address and the GPS unit does the rest.”

“But that takes the mystery out of it.  No more terra incognita.  I don’t want to drive all over San Diego County just to go from one sales call to the next!”

A new insight into my brother-in-law.  Becoming lost and found again is the only adventure in his life.  I wonder if Saman feels that bored with me.

“Where am I taking you tomorrow?” Farid asks, changing the topic.  “You want to visit La Jolla?  It’s the richest zip code in the United States!  Per capita, or however they figure that out.  It’s like Beverly Hills with a beach.  How does that sound?”

“Well….” I say, dragging out the word.  “I was thinking Tijuana, actually.  I’ve never been to Mexico before.  If you dropped me off downtown I could take the trolley – ”

He interrupts with an impossible laugh.  “Tijuana?  Nobody goes down there anymore.  It’s too dangerous!  Haven’t you been watching the news?  The drug violence, it’s completely out of control.”

“That’s what they said about Terrazas Park when Nasrin and I were growing up there.  The media always makes things sound worse than they really are.”

“In Tijuana they’re shooting into crowds and cutting off heads!  How do you make that sound worse than it really is?  It’s like Iraq down there, like Afghanistan.”

I fold my arms across my flat chest.  A stubborn gesture.  I’m plotting ways to get to Tijuana.  But all the ways seem to involve money, and I used up my cash card on the one-way airplane ticket.

“Nooshin, there’s no way I’m letting you go down to Tijuana.  It’s just not safe.  Okay?”  Farid interprets my silence as assent.  He’s a good Persian brother-in-law.  Overprotective when he thinks he needs to be.  “There are still plenty of things for you to see in San Diego.  Like SeaWorld, right over there.  We could make a day of it, maybe on Saturday.  You, me, Nasrin, the kids.  What do you say?  SeaWorld?”

His arm is pointing at Mission Bay, a cobalt lagoon dotted with the white triangles of sailboats.  Here and there a jet ski carves a frothy wake across the waves.  At the marshy edge I can see leggy white cranes, stepping delicately, occasionally snapping their bills into the water.  Rising on the opposite shoreline is the unmistakable outline of SeaWorld, domed roofs and pedestrian esplanades that fan out from the towering sky needle.

“I’m fine doing things by myself,” I say.

“Don’t you get lonely?  Spending all day by yourself like this?”  Farid glances at my purse with the phone that never rings.  “Don’t you miss Saman?”

I feel my face burst into a smile.  Lonely?  Here I’m languid and bright, not lonely!  I love San Diego in my solitary state.  Not because it’s a sleepy paradise folded between ocean and mountains, not even because my sister lives here.  I could probably fall in love with anywhere right now.  Anywhere with no Saman impatient for his meals and ironed shirts and sparkling clean surfaces.  No Saman pawing me in bed, or snoring in my direction afterward.  No Saman for a thousand miles.

This neighborhood in Beverly Hills could use a triple shot of espresso.  The architecture is understated to the point of blandness, especially at night when the colors darken into monochrome.  My headlights shine on glassy ground-floor stores, restaurants with private office suites on top, boringly posh homes on elevated setbacks behind stucco walls, the occasional palm-draped apartment building with “Oaks” or “Arms” in the name.  I’m almost asleep behind the wheel.  Then a geezer is pulled into the street by a yappy little dog on a straining leash.  I adrenaline-rush wide awake and slalom my Ford Explorer around the jaywalkers.  Last thing I want to do is add vehicular homicide to today’s list of Shit That Went Wrong.

The façade of the Aqua Lounge is so unremarkable that I almost cruise right past it.  I squeeze in between expensive foreign-made bumpers, parallel parking in disappointment.  This basement location on Beverly Drive used to be a sin pit.  When I started at UCLA it was Larry Flynt’s Supper Club, a tits-and-steak burlesque joint.  Before that it was an upscale skin bar called the Beverly Club.  But now it’s just another glitzy club trading on washed-up celebrities and the gawkers they attract.  I’ve seen Erik Estrada here before.  That kind of place.

On the sidewalk I can already hear the salsa thumping.  Once the doors swing open the beat reaches right out, making my heart a metronome.  Inside is a new Sunday ritual known as Mambo Nights, when copious helpings of Latin music collide with the too-cool-for-you stylings of the lounge – beaded bar, aquariums stocked with eels, walls of basswood and textured clay.  I pay my $10 cover and eyeball the beautiful people moving like sex on the dance floor.

“Yo!  Nick!  Over here!”

Above the crowd I spot a pudgy arm waving frantically.  My mood leaps.  It’s a rare Enrique sighting.  He’s a perpetual graduate student who’s been in the Latin American Studies department longer than anybody except Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez himself.  Enrique slides to his unfashionable Rockport-clad feet, a bulbous married 38-year-old who grins in triplicate if you count his double chins.

“How you been, dude?” I ask, embracing him in a bear hug.

“You’re even more fashionably late than us Hispanics,” Enrique jokes, hugging me back.

“What the hell brings you down from Northridge?  Isn’t this scene a little hip for you?”

He acknowledges my putdown with a yeah-yeah-whatever gesture.  “I drove down to congratulate my favorite gringo.  You passed your orals, right?”

“Last week.  Did you really drive down just to congratulate me?”

“Hell no.  I wouldn’t even drive to Van Nuys to see your sorry ass.”  He jerks a thumb in the direction of Malibu.  “Believe it or not, I ran in the Cancer Challenge 5K.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I walked some.  But still, I finished the fucking thing.”  Enrique rubbernecks around.  “You here with Phoebe?”

“Nah.  We broke up.”  The confession hurts more than I expect.

“Always happens before your dissertation research.  They realize you’ll be gone for a year and panic.  I lost a fiancée that way.”

“No shit?”  It’s a story I’ve never heard before.

He picks up his drink – a mojito, in keeping with the salsa theme – and turns toward the dance floor.  No stories for me tonight.

Javier commands the center of the throng, whirling gracefully.  Everybody seems to be mesmerized by him, including us.  He’s a waifish Puerto Rican with an abundance of lips and eyes.  Slicked-back hair reaches halfway down his delicate neck.  Beneath the open V of his shirt is a perfectly smooth chest and flashes of a tattoo, right above his heart.

“Javier dropping out is a big blow to the department,” I say after a while.  “He’s the best of us.  No offense.”

Enrique bristles a little, but only a little.  He knows it’s true.  “Frankie told me you’re angling for the rest of Javier’s funding.”

I shrug.  Best neither to confirm nor deny.

“Just remember what you’re looking at.”

“What do you mean?”

“Me, dumbass.  I got all the funding UCLA could offer and look at me.”  He rescues a mint leaf floating in his drink.  “I’ll probably never finish my dissertation.”

“Stop talking that shit.  You’ve got a real life slowing you down.  A wife and kids, dude.”

“So will you someday.  Probably sooner than you think.  I’ve decided that’s the difference between academia and real life – real life always happens faster than you want it to.”

But right now real life is dragging on a belly of lead.  Enrique finishes his mojito.  The waitress brings two more, one for each of us.  We make smalltalk with a couple lawyers from Santa Monica who want to poach the extra chair at our table.  We let them take the chair and go back to watching our colleagues on the dance floor.

“You’re the only gringo here,” Enrique observes.  “Weren’t the other white students invited?”

“You know Javier.  He’s just more comfortable around you guys.  I’m kind of surprised he invited me at all.”  Enrique’s comment is an ethnic overlay on my perception of the crowd.  I realize I’m one of the few white faces in the entire club.  I tend to forget, given my fluent Spanish and ease with Hispanics.

“So you’re single now, huh?  You should hook up with Sophia,” he’s saying, voice almost lost in a swelling electronic riff.

I follow his gaze to the second-year student in the Ph.D. program.  She’s a minky Ecuadorian in an Adidas track suit, moving with hips like greased ellipses.  “Sophia?  No way, dude.  Josefina is the one I want.”

Together we turn toward the Chilean who recently joined the M.A. program.  I’ve never seen so much sun-streaked hair and curvy limberness crammed into a little black dress before.  Her haughty carriage implies breeding in the non-husbandry sense of the word.  She seems like royalty because she is royalty – the progeny of an aristocratic European family with a “von” in their surname.

“I heard she doesn’t even know how to drive,” Enrique says in awe.

“It’s true.  She’s been chauffeured her whole life.”

Then Maria sashays in front of her, interrupting our fantasies.  Maria fucking Ortiz, a name that cries out for funding.  She’s Hispanic in skin tone only.  Otherwise she’s just a hippy pot-smoking girl from Anaheim.  If you want to understand everything wrong with academia, start with her.

“Did you know Maria’s Spanish is so bad she can barely conjugate?” I say through clenched teeth.

Enrique glances sideways at me.  “She’ll become fluent.  Just give her time.  You’re born with the skin, not the Spanish.”

“I bet she winds up at a private college somewhere, gets tenure without publishing jack shit, and lives happily ever after.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he grins in triplicate, raising his glass.

I clink with him and pour the rest of the mojito down my throat, gagging on a mint leaf.

And I’m still gagging now, remembering how I felt looking at Maria Ortiz, an innocuous victor in this zero-sum game of gender and skin tone and ethnic-sounding surnames.  It takes effort, superhuman effort, to remember I still have the advantage off-campus.  Like a fellow white male counseling me about career prospects once said, “What’s the worst that can happen to you?  You’ll get your Ph.D. and go work in the private sector and rise to the top like scum.”  But that’s just another wrong, and two of them – minority favoritism in academia, white privilege in Corporate America – don’t make a right.

“People in America don’t know anything,” my grandfather liked to say.  He was a kindly old man with gnarled hands and salt-and-pepper stubble.  His stooped body had come to America but his mind was still in Iran, dancing with memories of life as a wheat farmer in Borahvaz.  We liked Grandfather’s stories because they were always about something that was wrong with America and right with Iran.  Nasrin and I were recent immigrants, girls bewildered by a strange new world, so we clung to his every word.

My sister and I knew the rules.  We were supposed to sit politely and listen until he finished with his story.  Then he’d ask us a question so we could show him what we learned.

“Let me tell you about the wind,” he began, bones creaking as he settled into his rocking chair.  “First of all, you must never forget that the wind has eyes.  If you open the door and there’s a wind nearby, you should stand between the doorway and the wind.  Because if the wind sees the opening, it’s going to rush at it.  Wind has very poor eyesight, you know.  That’s why it’s always knocking things over.”

We nodded eagerly, demonstrating that we understood.

“But that doesn’t mean the wind is bad.  Far from it.  The wind is mischievous and playful, just like you little girls.  It likes to chase plastic bags around and blow leaves back and forth.  Have you ever wondered how your kite sails up into the air?  When you fly a kite, you’re giving the wind a plaything.”

Again we nodded, me less briskly this time.  I was too little to fly a kite by myself.

“Persian men build dhows to trick the wind.  They know it’s distracted by anything new and bright, especially on the open flatness of the sea.  The sails are playthings to the wind, carrying the boat along.”  Grandfather raised an eyebrow significantly.  “Have you ever seen an American boat tricking the wind out in the harbor?  No, you haven’t.  They only have motors.  That’s the only way Americans can make a boat go.  In America people don’t know these things.”

I thought of the American boats in Long Beach harbor.  Maybe they didn’t have sails, but they were big and fast and modern.

“Now let me tell you about the wind and storms.”  Grandfather reached into his pocket, dribbling a fine white powder down his trousers and onto the floor.  He showed us a palm dusted with flour.  “When the wind is blowing into a storm, that means it’s hungry.  You should always be prepared for a storm.  Keep a little bit of flour in your pocket.  To stop a storm, all you need to do is throw a handful into the air.  Then the wind can eat and become full and ease again.”  Noticing that he spilled flour on the floor, he kicked it into dust with a slippered foot.  “Americans never feed the wind.  They run and hide from storms, in their cars and homes and shopping malls, and let the wind grow weak from its hunger.”

Nasrin proudly showed Grandfather her pocket of flour.  In my pockets I only had a marble and some bottle caps I collected for their strange words.  A-R-B-O-C-G…oops, I remembered it’s left-to-right in American, not right-to-left like in Persian.  K-I-N-G-C-O-B-R-A. B-U-D-W-E-I-S-E-R. K-E-Y-S-T-O-N-E.

He paused for effect, leaning down conspiratorially until his stubbled chin was almost touching his knees.  “In America people think you can control the wind by giving it a name.  They name every big storm and call its name on the news.  That mastiff next door, the big dog that scares you so, it has a name too.  Can you girls control the dog by calling its name?”

That made us giggle nervously, shaking our heads in unison.

“Okay, time to test what you’ve learned.”  Grandfather crooked a finger at the framed black-and-white photo on the wall.  His old farm back in Iran, a few buildings huddled in a field of wheat.  “Imagine you’re on the farm with me and we’re walking along the fields.  If you want the keep the wind from knocking over the wheat, what should you do?”

“You should plant a line of trees so high the wind can’t see over it,” Nasrin said with jaded 11-year-old sophistication.

“No!” I shouted.

He smiled benevolently at me.  “What would you do, little one?”

“Shoot it with a machine gun!” I said, pantomiming something I’d seen on television.  “Nothing can see if you put out its eyes!”

Grandfather sat back warily in his rocking chair.  Then he tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more like the way he coughed after a Turkish cigarette.  Later I overhead him telling Dad and Mom that America was changing me already.  I couldn’t tell from his tone of voice whether that was good or bad.

America was changing me, turning me into a girl who forgot her memories of Iran and learned new ways.  That’s how I know he was wrong about the wind having eyes, and feeding storms into calm, and lots of other things too.  But when it came time to marry Saman, I forgot how different I’ve become.  I forgot because I never really understood in the first place.

Now the man Nasrin and I called pedar bozorg – Grandfather – stares down from a gilded portrait on her living room wall.  He’s forever kindly, with eyes like warm stones.  Suddenly I miss him with sad longing.  I wonder what story he would tell me if I confessed the shadows in my heart, why I bought a one-way ticket from Kansas City to San Diego, the doubts and uncertainty and hopelessness I carry in my suitcase.

I met Phoebe at a glassed-in Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard, just a few blocks from the WELCOME TO UCLA sign.  I’d flown out to visit the campus, lured by the promise of graduate funding, which was more than the University of Texas-Austin and Arizona State were offering me.  Then add posh departmental offices, palm trees, eye-candy coeds…and like the cherry on top, Phoebe.  A busty redhead with crow’s feet and amazing calves.  She was ordering coffee – just plain coffee, thankyouverymuch – and backlit with squiggly neon letters that spelled out ESPRESSO.  Not a knockout, but close enough.  Oozing sexual availability.  Smiling at me.

Two mochas later I was cramming myself into the passenger seat of her gunmetal blue Audi TT.  Whiplash tour for the Iowa farmboy.  She laid rubber through the 90210 zip code, O.J.’s old killing grounds, the Viper Room where River Phoenix croaked on the sidewalk, I forget what else.  Her hand kept slipping off the stickshift and onto my knee.

I figured her for a fling.  A few dissolute weekends together.  Months even, if the horizontal surfaces stayed fun.  But we kept hooking up, again and again, until the calendar looks all wrong.  It’s four years later?  Neither of us is four-years-later material.  She’s a nightclubbing trade lawyer who spends more time in the Eastern Hemisphere than this one.  I’m a self-centered grad student with no money and half a tank of gas.  Sex introduced us, but inertia gave us a future.

“You want to go out for dinner?”

She asks the question without turning her head from the gigantic wall-mounted TV.  Relaxing on the couch.  Naked.  Most chicks I’ve known are self-conscious about their bodies.  Not Phoebe.  She’s no pornstar, just resigned to herself.  A woman with torpedo tits and a blocky waist.

Now she’s looking at me.  Her brow dents in irritation. “Nick.  I’m talking to you.  You want to go out, or stay in?”

“Go out, probably.”  I’m in the kitchenette contemplating an empty refrigerator.  Traveling as much as she does, Phoebe never bothers to keep food around.  “Yeah, let’s go out.  But not to that new place.”

“Veruca?  Don’t you like their ambiance – ”

“Ambiance isn’t fashionistas,” I interrupt.  “Ambiance isn’t drinks that cost $15.  Ambiance isn’t so much indirect lighting that you can’t lay eyes on a single honest-to-god light bulb.”

“Come on.  We’re supposed to be celebrating.  Veruca’s dessert menu is awesome.  Right?”  Channels flicker and hiss as she thumbs the remote.  “We could get the praline cheesecake.  Or maybe the tiramisu.  I love the way they use blueberries and pistachios in it.”

I’m peeking out the slatted window above the sink.  The view hasn’t changed much in four years.  Across the street is a Ducati dealership that sells car-priced motorcycles.  Further down is a meditation center called Inner Fitness.  Posters in the center’s windows implore me to save biodiversity and fight global warming, neither of which is in my job description.  I let Greenpeace take care of those things.

“Well?” Phoebe sighs.  “What are you thinking?  That sushi place instead?”

I’m thinking, we feel like two people who are almost done passing through each other.  But I don’t say that.  I just grab my clothes off the floor and start dressing.

After a while the TV clicks off and she joins me.  It takes her a few tries to step into her panties.  “Wherever we go, it has to be walking.  I’m too buzzed to drive.”  She tugs a hoodie-dress over her head and wriggles into it.

“How about Damto?”

“Damto?  That Korean restaurant down the block?”  Phoebe wanders into the bathroom and poses in front of the mirror, tits out and hip cocked, inspecting herself.  “Sure, I can do Damto.”

Outside the neighborhood is dimming into night.  Above the designer rooflines I can still see the sunset, squished flat and receding toward the Pacific.  Twilight makes the freshly-watered lawns appear slick with blood, or maybe oil.  Somewhere a car alarm bursts into rhythmic honking.  Next to me Phoebe is doing her BlackBerry trick, simultaneously walking and thumbing through emails from work.

Damto is known for its traditional cuisine, which is Korean food just like your Korean grandmother would make, if you had a Korean grandmother.  All the prices are celebration-sized, so Phoebe rarely takes me here.  Somehow we get the prime table right at the front windows, giving us a view of the army of runners circuiting the block in lycra and spray-on tans.

We order the panchan platter and hundred-flower wine and talk about nothing, same as always.  Our conversations are a superficial place where we go to relax.  It’s just another quid pro quo between us.  I won’t talk about work if she doesn’t talk about work if I don’t talk about work.  Ditto for politics.  That leaves us with sports, celebrity gossip, and our fucked-up families – even though I’ve never met hers and she’s never met mine.

Our heads track a pair of runners as they dash beneath a streetlight.  Phoebe watches the guy’s ass.  I watch the girl’s.

“When are you going down to Tijuana?”  She tries to ask the question casually, but that’s not how it comes out.

“Next week sometime.  Tuesday or Wednesday, probably.  I’ll just go down for a day.”  I push kimchi around my plate with chopsticks.  Go for a day, plan for a year.

Phoebe is staring at me like she’s trying to remember something.  “We had a good run, didn’t we?”

I almost blow wine through my nose.  “Dude.  Don’t say it like that.  Like you’re Greta Garbo without the accent or something.”

“I’m being serious, Nick.  This has been fun.  Right?”

I nod.  And keep nodding, until it feels like my head is going to fall off.  Our communication has been reduced to trite scripts and rote gestures.  Finally I say, “It’s been more than fun.”

That makes Phoebe smile wistfully. “But not more enough.  Or enough of more than fun.  Or whatever I’m trying to say.  We’re still having this conversation.”

“Yeah.  I guess we are.”  I always knew this moment was coming, but the timing could be better.  She’s fast-forwarding to the end credits and skipping over a bunch of sex scenes.  “We could put this off, you know.  I’m not moving to Mexico yet.”

“But then you’ll be gone for a year.  Doing your research.”

“Yeah.  That’s how it works.”

“You could’ve asked me to wait for you.  And for a while, I could’ve said yes.  But we’re past that now.  It’s become too late.”  Freckles hover in the emulsion of her pale skin.  “I’m 36, Nick.  Did you even know that?”

More nodding on my part.  Beats admitting that I found out by snooping in her purse after our first hookup.

“It’s been 10 years since I passed the bar.  I’ll probably look back and think this was the best decade of my life.  Single girl gets paid to travel the world.  And the boys…”

“I’m starting to feel like chopped liver over here.”

My comment only merits a dismissive wave of her wineglass.  “It’s time for me to make some changes.  Quit this job and settle down at a local firm.  Get some cats, a boyfriend.”  Phoebe gives me an apologetic hair-flip.  “You know what I mean.”

I know what she means.  A real boyfriend, not whatever you’d call me.  I’m more like a fuckbuddy with social pretenses.

The waitress arrives to refill our wineglasses.  It looks like she’s cradling a ball of dried bamboo leaves wrapped in twine.  The spout gurgles a liquid that’s fragrant and pinkish and cloudy.  Hundred-flower wine.  Would fifty-flower wine be half the proof?  Is there even such a thing as fifty-flower wine?  The crap you think about during a breakup.

“You know what’s going on with me?” Phoebe murmurs into her wineglass.  “What it really, really is?”

“Tell me.”

“My favorite shopping arcade in Hong Kong got torn down.  This place I used to visit on Kowloon Dock Road.  I think it was just a dead-end alley that the vendors took over.  They were squeezed in on top of each other, selling all this old-fashioned stuff like prayer sticks and chickens tied up by their feet.  The colors and noises and smells, I can’t even describe how intense it all was.”  She makes blotting motions with her napkin, but not at her eyes.  She’s noticing a spill on her dress.  “I always thought I’d bring my husband there, you know?  Share it with him.  Except it’s gone now.  This last trip, the whole arcade was bulldozed.  I waited too long.”

Her unexpected confession is paralyzing.  We don’t do poignancy and emotional connection – or not much, anyway.  I cover my discomfort with a gulp of wine, then another.  Phoebe gazes into the night, playing absentmindedly with her strawberry mane, cleavage stacked on the edge of the table like a jutting continental shelf.  Wondering what she sees, I glance out the window too.  She smiles brightly at our reflections in the glass.  I can’t decide if it’s the same look that beguiled me four years ago, when she was the cherry on top of UCLA, or not the same look.  All I know is that I’m a long ways from Iowa.  Even farther than it looks on a map.

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.