Dreaming in English (24 page)

“He should know, don’t you think?”

I sit back, startled, unsure how to reply. I think that if he knew, Ike might never forgive his mother. And despite everything, I don’t want that to happen. He is as wonderful as he is partly because of her love. To lose the certainty of that love . . . well, it would change Ike. Harden him, somehow, and I love his soft-yet-also-strong heart just the way it is. And yet how am I to fight Mrs. Hanson on my own? If she really won’t stop—and doing something as horrible as this tells me she won’t—what can I possibly do to protect myself from her?

“I suppose maybe he should know.” For my sake, he should. But for his own sake? I just don’t think so.

“Well, I should go.” Jenna slaps her pretty, manicured hands on her pretty, muscular thighs, readying to stand. And all of a sudden, her selfishness strikes me full-force.

“Are you going to say good-bye to Ike? You will, right?” It’s not that I want them seeing each other, but it’s the decent thing for Jenna to do, and Ike will be hurt if she doesn’t.

She stands and shakes out her long blond hair. “Walking away from him takes every ounce of strength I have. Seeing him again, saying good-bye . . . it’s too much. It would just be . . . too much.” She smiles a brave, sad, dramatic smile that makes me want to roll my eyes. “Tell him I’ll drop him a postcard sometime, would you?”

You show up with selfish intentions, stir up all sorts of emotions in my husband, make him an offer he can hardly refuse, get his hopes up for his coffee shop—and now you want
me
to tell him you’ll send him a postcard sometime?

She’s like Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby
, a character I’ve been unable to admire—a dazzling, careless woman who walks away from the messes she makes without so much as a backward glance, leaving others to clean them up.

“Ike deserves better than that,” I say as firmly as I can.
Daisy.

“Ike’s getting better,” Jenna says. “He’s getting you.”

A
fter Jenna leaves, I sink back into my patio chair and let the late-May sun melt into my skin. I’m so exhausted, emotionally and physically, that I actually fall asleep for a little while, until Old Sport barks and wakes me up. Rose is home, and the sound of her car in the driveway is what’s gotten him so excited. I’m excited, too—Rose is busy for an older, unmarried woman, with all her clubs and volunteer work and lunches with “the ladies,” as she calls them. I’m so fortunate I even met her all those months ago when I hid my shoes in her yard, for she’s home far less than I expected when I moved into the guesthouse.

I dash to the pink gate that separates the car part of the driveway from the entrance-to-the-backyard part of the driveway. She gives me a friendly wave.

“Tea, Rose?”

“I’d love that, Tami. Meet you in five?”

“Meet you in five.” I smile from happiness at the familiarity of our relationship. That’s our most-often-used expression:
Meet you in five.
We squeeze in time for tea as often as possible with our respective coming and going, usually daily and sometimes even twice a day. If we’re both home and one of us wants to have tea with the other, we’ll sit at the table on Rose’s back patio, letting the other know we’re available without being intrusive. This is nothing we ever talked about; it’s just the pattern we fell into. But if one finds the other already outside, or just arriving home like Rose is now, we do our
Meet you in five.
Whoever initiates is the one who makes the tea. While I like preparing tea and always use the very nice tea set Maryam gave to me, I prefer it when Rose prepares it because then we use her mother’s china, which Rose inherited. She more often shares stories about her mother when she drinks from these teacups, and I love to hear stories about her mother. About anyone’s mother, actually!

When, over our tea, I tell Rose about my fight with Ike, and about everything that has happened since, she listens—as always—in exactly the way I need: closely, sometimes with sympathetic nods. She listens with love, Rose does. Love, and acceptance, too. I don’t leave anything out—what I said to Ike and how angry he was with me, about Jenna’s coming to see me and telling me how Mrs. Hanson won’t stop until she ruins my marriage to Ike.

I end by asking, “Should I tell him what Jenna told me, Rose?”

“I’m sure that must be a difficult decision,” she says, keeping with her policy of withholding her opinion for as long as possible. I like this about her—she forces me to talk through my problems, and frequently I talk myself into a decision, which she then always says sounds like a good one. Without even knowing she does this, Rose is teaching me to trust myself, that I have within myself the answers I need.

“Ike would want me to tell him.”

“Probably,” she says.

“But he’s very—how do you say?—black and white about things.” I’m incorporating last week’s lesson on slang. “Very cut-and-dry. This way or that way. No gray areas.”

“You’re concerned that he’ll sever ties with his mother.”

“He might, yes. But he loves his family very much, and I know he
really
wants to have good relations with them, and this will only hurt in that regard.”

“It might be easier for you if he did sever ties with her,” Rose says.

I pour Rose more tea and let my mind fantasize how nice it would be if I never had to deal with Mrs. Hanson again. But . . . “Ike wouldn’t be happy that way.”

“Well, maybe this is the last of it.” Rose shakes her head. “If she only
knew
you. If she could only see you with Ike, how good you two are together. How
right.
She really couldn’t find a better daughter-in-law than you.”

“I wish you were my mother-in-law, Rose.”
Or even my mother—I could have learned so much, growing up with you. How to be independent, for one thing.
“She doesn’t even know me, and she hates me, but you were nice from the first moment we met. You invited me for tea that very first day, remember? After I acted so stupidly!”

Rose’s eyes gleam. “It was fun to watch you out my window as you hunted around for your walking shoes! When I found them, I couldn’t imagine who’d left them, or why. I didn’t know what to think—they were brand-new! Hidden in my tall native grass!”

I smile and blush thinking back to that day. Ike had given me the shoes after seeing how I limped from walking to and from English class in boots that hadn’t yet adjusted to my feet. I was afraid if Maryam saw them—a gift from a man—she would insist on chaperoning me on my way to and from English class, and my walks were my favorite times, the times I felt most free. And so I hid the shoes he’d given me in Rose’s front yard, and when I went back the next day, they were gone. I was on my hands and knees searching for them in the long grass when she approached. Holding them up, she asked,
Looking for these?
Then, once she learned why I was hiding them, she put a basket on her front porch and invited me to leave them there from then on. And she invited me for tea, and we’ve been friends ever since.

“You’ve always been so kind,” I say. “Thank you, Rose, for everything you’ve done.”

“You’re welcome.” She pats my hand. “I’ve always found you to be irresistibly charming, and that’s what confuses me so much about Ike’s mother. I have to believe that if she got to know you even the tiniest bit, she’d come to think so, too.”

“She can barely stand to be in the same room as me.”

“Maybe when she sees how you’re providing Ike with the money he needs to get his shop open, she’ll have a change of heart,” Rose says. “It shows your long-term commitment. After all, if your intention were to leave him once you got your residency, you wouldn’t invest your money in the business.”

“She’ll think I’m trying to buy him,” I say. “Or bribe him.”

“If she were your mother-in-law in Iran, what might you do differently?”

I feel my face redden. If she were my mother-in-law in Iran, I’d cater to her every whim. And here, I haven’t even officially invited Mr. and Mrs. Hanson over for dinner yet. No wonder she hates me! “I haven’t made enough of an effort, have I?”

“You’ve done just fine,” Rose says. “But I’m thinking of this phrase,
kill ’em with kindness
, which more or less means if you keep on being nice to her and issuing invitations and making an effort with her, at some point she’ll feel compelled to be nice back. I can’t imagine that her family will let her get away with being mean for too long. Plus, maybe she really
will
come to like you, or at the very least, tolerate you.”

I sigh, for I don’t have much hope that Mrs. Hanson will change her mind about me, but Rose is right: What’s important is that I try. I’ll continue to smile through her meanness. I’ve certainly had enough practice; you do it all too often as a woman in Iran.

Back to my immediate problem: making things right with Ike. After tea with Rose, I put on a gorgeous new skirt I got while shopping with Maryam, one that Ike hasn’t yet seen. It’s calf length and flouncy, colored a swirling mix of gold, red, and purple. I pair it with a purple camisole, marveling as always at how nice it is to bare my skin to the world after being denied the ability for so long—
and look, the world keeps turning
—and I choose makeup that’s especially glittery, and then, in my high-heeled sandals and Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, I bike to Starbucks.

When I enter the coffee shop, Ike has thirty minutes left on his shift. I see him before he sees me, and I feel immediately bad for him because he looks so very tired, and also world-weary, not at all like he’s excited about the conversation we’ll soon have. But that’s okay. I’m enthusiastic enough for us both. I’ll make things right with him, and then I’ll begin to kill his mother with my kindness. I love the idea that kindness can be a form of aggression.

Ike is working the machines, making the drinks and serving as backup for the counter person, so I approach and wait.

“Tall latte,” he calls out, placing the drink on the high counter and noticing me, finally. “Hey, you!” I seem to be a pleasant surprise, thankfully. “You look gorgeous. What are you doing here—no class today?”

“I’m waiting for my husband.” When I give him my best smile, he can’t resist smiling back. I’ll kill him with kindness, too. “I have good news to share with you, Ike. News so good it can’t wait even one minute from when you get off work, so I’m skipping English class.”

“Tell me now,” he says. “I could use some good news.”

I shake my head. “I’ll wait for you over there.” I point over my shoulder at the armchair near the window. “I love you, you know.”

“I do know.” His eyes both soften and sadden. “I love you, too, for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth everything, Ike.”

He nods like maybe he’s too emotional to respond verbally and focuses back on his work. As I watch him for the remainder of his shift, I fall further in love with him by the minute as I imagine him as a child—so earnest, so loving. I love him for what he lost, his baby brother, Charlie Bongo, and for what he saved, his mother’s happiness. I wonder what he did that I was unable to do with my own mother. I wonder if there’s anything I could still do for her, or if it’s really too late, as Maryam believes.

After Ike’s shift ends, we leave my bike locked in the rack and walk, holding hands, to Friendship Chapel, a little nondenominational chapel on campus that I sometimes slip into on my way to and from English class. It’s getting so hot out lately, and the chapel has become my refuge, cool and nearly always empty. When I go there, all the English that’s been crowding my brain, fighting to overtake my Farsi, moves to the back of my mind, and it’s just me again, thinking in the language I know best. Visiting the chapel has become my time to remember home. I think of my mother, my father, my old room. I’m so different from who I was back then. I’m so much happier now that I’m almost ashamed sometimes that I should be so happy when others are still so sad there. That I actually get to live the sort of life people in Iran can only imagine, one where we’re just
left alone.
Where we’re
celebrated.
Where we’re thought of as good and valuable. At the chapel, I close my eyes and see the Alborz Mountains, the Caspian Sea. I see the street signs in Farsi. The highlighted bangs and dark headscarves. I see the good, good people I miss so much. All of what’s good about home, and some of what’s bad, I remember in this chapel. Today’s the first time Ike has joined me here. Until today, it’s been my secret hideaway.

We slip into a pew halfway from the front and face each other. I expect him to ask me what my news is, but instead, he says nothing for a long time. He simply looks into my eyes as if he’s studying a beloved painting hanging in a museum, something he can look at but never touch. But he can, and he should, and why isn’t he?