Kansas City has become an unfocused loneliness, the streets a slow tired fugue of headlights and taillights, sidewalks emptying like a sliced vein, night falling falling falling and us with it.  The wind is cold and wet enough to sleet.  Saman is a slouching hulk in the winter parka we bought as newlyweds.  He’s talking at me in angry Farsi zigzags.  I lag a half-step behind, separate but tethered.  My warmest tube-style hijab is pulled forward into a cowl so I can’t see him.  Hearing him is bad enough.

“We agreed that it was finally time for you to get pregnant, God willing.  We told my family, and I assume you told yours as well.  It was the right decision.  You’ve gone too long without children.  Like my mother says, an empty womb is an empty life.”  Saman badgers at my silent lagging.  “We agreed, wife!”

“No we didn’t, husband!  You threw away my birth control pills.  How is that agreeing?”

“You didn’t complain at the time.”

“Because I…”

Because I just surrendered.  The same way I did when he pressured me into sex after dinner tonight.  His belly was stuffed with mahi kabob, I couldn’t eat a bite of my own cooking.  He waited until I was done with the dishes before ordering me into the bedroom.  I tried to say no, but he grew beet-faced and berated me in a voice that cut through the thin walls and finally I felt so trapped, so worthless, that I just gave up.  His hairy onslaught was mercifully short.  Afterward he caught me douching with the only thing I could find, a bottle of Diet Coke.  In my panic I’d forgotten to lock the bathroom door.

“You didn’t complain because why?” he demands.  Maybe for the second time.  He lowered his voice when a black woman passed by on the sidewalk.

“What difference does it make?”

“Wife…”  He makes the Farsi word – zan – into a promise.  Into a threat.

“This marriage is about what you want.  What your family wants.  What I want doesn’t matter.  It never has.”

“What you want doesn’t matter?  We are married for five years while you are on birth control.  I wanted to start a family right away!”

“Only for your green card application.”

“Not only for my green card application.  The Prophet said marry and keep a family!  That is the primary purpose of marriage, to bring children into the world.”

“The primary purpose of our marriage is to get you a green card.  And you have that now – ”

“You are becoming impossible!”  Saman breaks ahead in fury.

I remember Grandfather’s warning from long ago – too much honesty can strangle a marriage.  It was advice he gave to Nasrin before her wedding.  My marriage needs that advice more than hers.  Saman and I are a lie told until we come true.  Otherwise he’s a picture incapable of rejecting me, I’m a path to citizenship for him.

Sleet is beginning to pelt the city.  Streetlamps and headlights are streaked with the snowy rain.  The balmy escape of southern California has never seemed farther away, dwindling, almost lost.  My husband is far enough ahead that a jogger can weave between us.

Smokers huddle beneath a canopy overhanging the mosque’s entrance.  I recognize the mullah, a swarthy man of outsized proportions.  His cigarette is a tiny smolder in a huge paw, his nose is an eclipse of the rest of his face.  I trust Dr. Phil’s relationship advice more than his.  He’s listening to someone tell a joke.  “A woman says to her friend, a man can take up to four wives.  We can only take one husband.  How is that fair?  Her friend says, I’m not even sure I want the husband I have.  I sure don’t need three more!”

The laughter doesn’t touch me.  Saman is greeting his mother, who went visiting to give us privacy.  Up a short flight of crumbling stairs are plate glass doors filled with shiny darkness.  In their reflection are the portraits of us.  My mother-in-law is a storm cloud with a stone-faced center.  Saman nurses his resentments, chin tucked into chest.  I’m only half a face behind the bangs veiling my lazy eye.

Inside is the same bright and undecorated blandness you can find in any American mosque.  The shoe rack has overflowed onto the carpet runner in the hall.  I slip off my Nikes and linger outside the worship room, staring at the empty pairs of shoes lined up.  What they remind me of – people who have gone missing from their lives.  The same way I want to go missing from mine.

“Sister, please.  The prayer is about to start,” calls an usher.  His smile is full of pinpricks.

It could be another girl moving into the women’s ablution area, a tile annex connected to the kitchen.  Her knees jut awkwardly when she sits on a tiny pink plastic stool.  The motions – splash face, hands, head, feet – are rote and vacant.  Water goes down a drain shared with the dishwasher.  There’s a pay phone in the mosque, I think.  There are computer terminals with internet access.

A familiar voice corners me.  “Are you retarded?  Hurry up, daughter-in-law!”

“No I’m not retarded!  Don’t call me that anymore!”  I look up at her with tearful resentment.  “God made me this way.  Calling me retarded is like calling God retarded.”

My mother-in-law freezes in surprise.  I’ve never talked back to her before.  “What did you say to me?”

“You heard me.”

“You’ll speak to me with respect, daughter-in-law.”

“Why?  You don’t speak to me with respect.  Why should I speak to you with respect?”

Her face is creasing into wrath.  “I’m the mother of your husband, the grandmother of your future children.  You’ll treat me with the respect I’m due!”

“Omigod.  I can’t believe this is my life.”  I murmur it in English, trying to remember the last time I painted my toenails.  I’m tugging on a pair of black knee highs.  This mosque is so conservative that women aren’t allowed to show bare feet or ankles.

My mother-in-law doesn’t speak English.  She glances over her shoulder anxiously, barking at me to hurry up.  But at least she doesn’t call me retarded again.

Hustling into the worship room, we take up position in back with the rest of the prostrating women.  The patterned wool carpet is mesmerizing up close, with my forehead pressed into its grating texture.  The repeated image of a mosque arch symbolizes the doorway through which a righteous believer enters Paradise.  For me it enlarges into oblivion with every bow.  There is no future in this present, where too much honesty can strangle a marriage, and not enough honesty can strangle a heart.