Every horizontal surface in my parents’ modest split-level is crowded with picture frames.  Many are fading snapshots taken back in the 1980s.  Dad and Mom were newly married in those photographs, him pinched beneath a majestic combover, her swaddled in a black chador.  You can’t see America coming in their faces.  They never planned to join the diaspora tossed like chaff across the Great Satan.  The Revolution was supposed to make Iran safe for families like ours – poor, conservative, and observantly Shiite.

Soon Nasrin makes three in the pictures.  She was born on an heirloom silk carpet at home, since the hospitals – even the maternity wards – were choked with almost-martyrs.  It was the first year of the Holy Defense, as the Iran-Iraq War was known.  Even women were being armed to resist the Iraqi invaders.  Dad volunteered for a Basij brigade, but he was put to work on the air defense system instead.  One of his cousins and several friends were successful in joining the militia.  They got on a bus to the front and were never heard from again.

I appear halfway through the war.  The silk carpet was gone, donated to the Revolution to raise funds.  Mom gave birth to me on a sheepskin that the midwife provided.  Smiles were nonexistent.  All faces look strained, even mine peering from a crib.  My lazy eye was insignificant in the wartime suffering.  Grandfather’s second wife worked in a factory sewing undersized uniforms for the boy soldiers.  At night Saddam’s bombers rearranged the skyline of Tehran.

I’m never a central figure in the pictures.  Not for my birth, not even for my wedding – the first milestones in a woman’s life.  But it’s everything in between that makes me a little sad.  Dad and Mom don’t have a single portrait of me as an American.  No yearbook  pictures.  No team photos of the girls’ varsity basketball and volleyball squads.  Nothing to remind them that I was happy and carefree and sometimes bareheaded, my English the best in the family, my Farsi the worst.  They only want to see me as the perfect Iranian daughter.  Another Nasrin, unspoiled and unchanged by America.

Dad’s voice is a jolting complaint.  “Are you even listening to me, Nooshin?”

“Yes, Dad.  I’m listening.”  I blow out a breath and sink deeper into the couch.

Dad reclines in the same Laz-E-Boy he’s had since I was a 6th grader.  America has aged him into a ghost.  His eyes have gone dead, his combover has dwindled into sparse frizz, his limbs have become bony in their loose and sallow skin.  He stares at me through thick glasses in cheap plastic frames.  It’s a look of accusation.  I’m not grateful for the sacrifices he made.  18 years of raising me according to the Holy Book – and I run away from my husband like this?

“You need to listen to your father.  He knows what’s best for you.”  Mom pauses behind the couch, her hand lingering on my shoulder.

“I said I was listening, Mom.”

Mom spends so much time in the kitchen that she almost seems like an appliance.  Her hourglass shape is a memory consigned to the picture frames.  Now she fills out a flowered housecoat.  I don’t catch any glimpses of her gracefulness either, just a slippered trudging.  Among family at home there’s no need for a hijab.  Her hair is dyed a glamorous shade of ash blond – but with roots as wide as a boulevard.  She claims she’s too paralyzed by my marital crisis to get a touch-up.  Everything is my fault, as usual.

Her hand pats at my back, feeling the ribs.  “You’ve gotten so thin.  Have some food.  Come on, daughter.  Eat.”

The coffee table is laid with customary food and drinks.  Torshi and shouri, sour and salty vegetables.  Nuts and yogurt and olives.  A dish of candy.  And the usual pot of tea, made strong for the morning hour.

“If she doesn’t want to listen, fine.  She can talk instead.  What did Saman say?” Dad asks stonily.

I haven’t felt like eating in a long time.  Not since Nick cooked for me in Canyon Sin Nombre, actually.  But now I pop some torshi into my mouth to avoid answering.

Nasrin is sitting on the couch next to me.  Her eyes roll in exasperation.  “They argued and she hung up on him.”

I glare at her, mouth still full.  “You listened in on the other extension?”

“Someone had to.”  She turns a pleading face to Dad and Mom.  “We have to do something.  He said Nooshin was spitting on God and both our families!”

Dad waves it off tiredly.  “Your sister already knows that.  Why do you think she doesn’t eat?  It’s the guilt sent by God.”

Mom bends to pour me a cup of tea.  “Guess the brand.  Ahmad’s of London.  You’ve been drinking it since you were a little girl in Iran.”

“Mom…”  I can barely hear myself.

“How many times do we have to say it?” she continues, adding a cube of sugar.  “He’s your husband.  You must go home and work on your marriage with him.  It’s been three weeks now.”

“And four days,” Nasrin piles on.  “Almost a month.”

Mom passes the steaming cup to me.  “Well, divorce won’t solve anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.  Do you remember how hard it was to find a husband when you were 18 and a virgin?  It will be impossible if you’re 23 and divorced.”

The words flatten me.  As if marriage is the only place I belong.  As if I’d remarry immediately to the next stranger they find.  As if my feelings, my small hopes and even smaller dreams, don’t matter at all.  I sip my tea without tasting it.

Dad is a stoic profile fixated on the view outside, where church-going Hispanics pass in bunches on the sidewalk, trying to save on gas.  “Maybe her guilt is for something she’s done to wrong him.  Maybe she feels like she can’t go home.”

“Why would she feel like that?” Mom asks with genuine curiosity.  “A wife can’t wrong her husband so badly.”

“No.  Of course a wife can’t.  Not unless – ” Dad cuts himself off.  Whatever he’s thinking makes his stare terrible when it settles on me.

Nasrin’s voice is rising in alarm.  “Oh god.  You didn’t, Nooshin.  You swore you didn’t!”

I can feel my right eye jerking wildly in its socket.  “Didn’t what?”

“Sleep with Nick!”

Dad and Mom don’t know about Nick.  I made Nasrin promise not to tell.  That makes her accusation even more devastating.  Dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, cursing me under his breath.  Mom’s face is wiped with shock.

“No, Nasrin!  I didn’t sleep with Nick!”  My hands become impotent fists.  Forgotten, my tea cup spills to the floor, splashing the bare foot not tucked beneath me.

I bend down to blot at the carpet with napkins.  When I straighten up again, I’m terrified by their baleful glares.  The mention of Nick has completely estranged my family from me.  I start to cry.

“What is this man to you?” Dad asks like he has broken glass in his mouth.

Nick is a friend.  My only friend.  But I can’t say that.  Islam doesn’t allow friends of the opposite gender, especially not when you’re a wife.  It’s a ban made from the weight of God and centuries.

Nasrin answers when she realizes I won’t.  “His name is Nick Roberts.  He’s a graduate student in the Latin American Studies department at UCLA.  I know because I saw his business card.  He gave her a ride home from Tijuana, when she went there without telling us.”  She hesitates, as if staring into an abyss.  “Saman cancelled her cellphone because of Nick, so they couldn’t talk anymore.”

That’s too much for Mom.  She has to retreat to the kitchen.  Her curses are worse than Dad’s, sometimes veering into English.

Dad spears Nasrin with a look.  “Saman knows of this man how?  Because you told him?”

“I had to!  He kept asking about Nooshin.  Why she wouldn’t talk to him, what she was doing all day and night, why she wasn’t coming home…”  Nasrin glances sideways at me, a flash of anguish.  “I couldn’t lie for her.”

I’m huddled over my lap, watching my jeans speckle with tears.  I didn’t realize the position I put Nasrin in.  All the harm I was doing – to her, and now Dad and Mom.  My lack of appetite worsens into nausea, as if I need to vomit up a sin.

“She isn’t to leave the house.  Not even with you.”  Dad crooks a finger at Nasrin for emphasis.  “She isn’t to use the phone, either.  Not unless it’s to talk with Saman or his family.  We have to make sure she has nothing to do with this man.”

“I understand.”  Nasrin’s face is etched with satisfaction.

“Tell your mother these things.  Take her and go somewhere, so we can have privacy.  Now that I understand what’s going on, I need to talk frankly with your sister.”

Nasrin slides off the couch and retreats from my peripheral vision, hips snapping back and forth.  Hushed but angry conversation drifts from the kitchen, then the front door opens and closes.  A car coughs to life and pulls out of the driveway.  Dad interrupts his terrible stare to rub at his eyes again.  It must pain him to look at me for too long.  I’ve failed – I’ve always failed – to be the perfect Iranian daughter of their photographs, the only Nooshin they want to see.