The Mexican Year

Tucked into the thicket of oaks is a floodlit sign announcing REINA DE ESPANA. “Rain of Spain?” Nasrin asks, turning the wheel so the minivan’s headlights leave the road and light up the ghostly tree trunks, then the cars scattered across the parking lot, and finally the textured stucco walls of the restaurant. “Like that one saying? The rain in Spain falls mostly on the plain?”

“Reina means queen in Spanish,” I explain, surprised I know that, not sure how. I haven’t been exposed to Spanish since we lived in East Los Angeles, two immigrant girls baffled by a strange new world. “Queen of Spain. A Spanish restaurant fit for the queen.”

In October the night air is crisp, even in San Diego. I was forced to borrow a pullover sweater from Nasrin since I forgot to pack anything warm. The same sweater that complements her hourglass figure looks comical on me, too short in the sleeves, too baggy in the chest. But I don’t mind very much. I’m used to looking comical, ungainly, even repugnant.

We follow a tracklit path through a rock garden to the recessed entryway. Inside is a dim foyer with a low ceiling pressing down. Faux wrought-iron torches hang from the walls and all the woodwork is stained almost black. The hostess is a Hispanic teen in a peasant blouse and wrap skirt. Her smile slips a notch when she looks up at me. It’s an opportunity to practice my hairflip technique — a quick snap of my neck counterclockwise, then a gentle downward tilt of my head tipped slightly to the right, letting my bangs settle in a veil across my crooked wandering eye.

The hostess leads us into the depths of the restaurant. Her boots and Nasrin’s heels clack-clack-clack on the red tile floor, echoing the flamenco music in the background. Behind them I’m whisper-quiet in my Nikes. Morose drunks line a shelf of mahogany, turning creakily on their leather stools, following our progress through the bar. Finally we arrive at a dining room of high-backed booths. The crushed velvet interiors look cozy, but they can’t fool my butt. Way uncomfortable.

“Can we sit out on the patio instead?” I ask, pointing at a swath of glass windows filled with murk.

“I guess so,” Nasrin says reluctantly. She has more padding in her jeans than I do.

In a few minutes we’re the only diners seated outside. The patio is a crescent of brick decorated with planters and plastic patio furniture. A waiter pours tea as the table gutters with crooked orange candles for Halloween. Above us tall propane heaters are hissing quietly, casting a warm glow. A steep gully leads down to a one-way street filled with taillights blurring together. The roofs below seem jumbled, almost random, but they fade into a gridwork of lights.

My sister loosens the hijab she always wears in public and sips her tea. “I wish you’d come visit more often. I haven’t been out since the last time you were here.” She has animal eyes in the candlelight.

“You and Farid should get a babysitter every weekend. Go out on dates.”

She laughs, a sad fading sound. “Did you get that from your Dr. Phil book?”

“What Dr. Phil book?” I slowly twirl my teacup on its saucer, playing dumb. Not looking at her.

“That Relationship Rescue book you’re reading.” Nasrin kicks her feet up on a chair, waiting for me to say something.

Silence builds. My voice has gone wherever it goes when I’m ashamed. There’s only the faint roar of traffic, the occasional woofing of a dog. High overhead the oaks rustle in a breeze we can’t feel.

Eventually the waiter returns to take our order, the eggplant bisque for Nasrin, gazpacho for me. Hunger seeps into every thought in my head. Somehow I forgot to eat lunch when I was passing the day in Hillcrest, wandering the streets lined with rainbow-flag shops and funky little restaurants, staring at the men holding hands with each other, the women embracing.

After the door clicks shut behind him, she sighs in annoyance and turns to confront me. Uses her fed-up big sister voice. “Nooshin. Just tell me. How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad,” I finally admit.

Nasrin ponders that revelation for a while. “Do you need to stay with us for a while? That kind of bad?”

“Well…” I start to say. Indecisive. Guilt-stricken. I told them I was visiting for a couple weeks, but I haven’t borrowed money for a return ticket yet. Maybe because I’m not going back.

She covers her mouth with a hand. Her left one. The diamond glinting on her simple gold band is nothing compared to my ostentatious rock. She mutters something in Farsi that I don’t catch. A prayer, maybe. Or a curse.

“What did you say?”

Nasrin is leaning toward me now, breathing fast. Her thick eyebrows gather in anger. “Is he cheating on you? If he’s cheating on you, then you must go to his mother. There’s no other way. Trust me.”

“It’s got nothing to do with that! Saman isn’t cheating on me.” Just saying it I feel my certainty waver. “It’s everything but that. It’s everything else.”

She considers my answer for a while. “No marriage is perfect, you know. I’m telling you that from personal experience. Farid and I, we have our rough patches. All married couples do. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.” She tries for a reassuring smile and misses. “You’ve got the right idea with that Dr. Phil book, but lean on your faith. Read the Qu’ran every day and lift up your marriage to God in prayer. Does your mosque in Kansas City offer marriage counseling?”

All my bones start to melt, slowly and then quickly, until my hair is a curtain shrouding my lap and I’m staring into blackness, my breath hot and ragged. I want to cry. I don’t want to cry. I –

Nasrin’s palm glides across my shoulder, back and forth and back and forth, like polishing brass. “Every wife goes through this. Our men, they can be so neglectful of us. Believe me, I know. But things get better. They always do. Just pray to God for patience and give it time. Nooshin, are you listening to me?” After a while her voice sounds like a distant transmission, then it doesn’t sound like anything at all.

Calling myself a Latin Americanist is a spin job. UCLA is funding me to study Latin America, but I’ve taken more classes outside my discipline than within it, as Hercules never fails to remind me. My transcript looks like a departmental train wreck — World Studies, Ethnomusicology, East Asian History, African Literature, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Social Thought, International Relations, Art History. Everything but Basket Weaving, basically.

Truth is, I’m interdisciplinary by nature. I bore easily. I pick wide over narrow, shallow over deep. I believe wherever you aren’t is probably more interesting than wherever you are. That’s why I oscillate between Latin Americanist and something else. Right now I’m in a something else phase. Studying how the Old World compares to the New World. Daydreaming about the French Revolution and Weimar Germany. Wishing I was a Europeanist with a fieldwork year in France or England or Italy, instead of Mexico. But the closest I can get is teaching assistant for “Introduction to European History”.

Tuesday-Thursday lectures for the class are held in Smith Hall, an aircraft hangar disguised as a lyceum. The 500 students barely make a dent in the empty orange seats. I’ve seen U2 play in smaller venues. Professor Grantberg’s shiny pate is barely visible above the lectern as he blathers into the microphone. His disembodied voice resonates overhead like a nasally god preoccupied with the Hapsburgs. Every now and then he pauses to flip from one yellowing slide to the next, the canned lectures passed down from visiting instructor to visiting instructor like sacred talismans that might lead to a tenure-track position someday, but never do.

Once Grantberg stops droning, the cavern erupts into the usual mania associated with deadlines. Students swamp their teaching assistants in a tide of product marketing — Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy, Nike. Most are turning in their research papers and racing into the afternoon sunshine. The rest are pleading for extensions. Their excuses are rarely legit, but UCLA encourages disciplinary forbearance. Here “the dog ate my homework” isn’t an excuse, it’s a way of life.

Afterward Grantberg leads us through the gauntlet of student groups that line Bruin Walk. Fliers are thrust into our path, petitions to sign, fundraising crap. The solicitations are wasted on us. Together we’re a poor, cynical, and hurrying crowd. Our destination is Jimmy’s, a coffee shop built around the ultimate southern California conceit — a fireplace. Time for our weekly meeting.

“Did I reach them today?” Grantberg asks, hunching over a quad venti mocha. “I feel like I didn’t reach them today.”

Condemnatory silence from the European History grad students, who comprise the entire body of teaching assistants for this class — except for me, the lone Latin Americanist.

“You’re doing a great job, Professor,” I finally lie, since nobody else will. “The syllabus was just against you today. The Hapsburgs on a sunny afternoon?”

That seems to mollify Grantberg, whose beady eyes roam the table behind tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “How do the research papers look?”

“Judge for yourself.” Erik, a former pro wakeboarder, tosses some stapled pages at him. “That’s my best student right there.”

“Typo in the title,” the professor notes, biting off the words in his clipped Harvard accent.

“Yep,” says Erik.

Grantberg drops the paper like its spelling is contagious and slides it back across the table. “What about you, Patrice?”

The ever-disorganized Belgian woman looks up from her mess of papers like a shined deer.

“Never mind,” he sighs. Then he reaches over and grabs a bunch of papers off the top of my pile. “Hey. This one is in Spanish.” His bony fingers riffle through the rest. “This one too. And this one.”

Kelli carefully presses a coffee cup against her multiply-pierced bottom lip. “We send all the students who want to write in Spanish to Nick.”

Grantberg cocks an eyebrow at me. “Is that true?” When I shrug noncommittally, he wags his Van Dyke in disapproving surprise. “Don’t you realize that’s against policy?”

A reference to the University of California’s monolingual policy. Unless you’re taking a foreign language, all instruction and coursework must be in English. I could get called on the dean’s carpet for letting students write exams and papers in Spanish. Not like that’ll ever happen. UCLA’s Hispanic enrollment is embarrassingly low, the dropout rate embarrassingly high. The dean would probably thank me.

I reach over and reclaim my papers. “Next time I’ll tell those Hispanic students this is America and they should write in American.”

Grantberg sets his glasses on the table and massages the brow of his nose. “This isn’t a decision in our power to revisit, Nick. As professional educators, we have to uphold university policy. Right, people?”

Only Patrice bothers to nod. Erik and Kelli keep flipping through their papers, comparing funny manglings of European history. “Astro-Hungry Empire!” Erik blurts, and they dissolve into giggles.

Fuck you the professor mouths in my general direction, remounting his glasses. That’s it for pushback. Grantberg is a lot of adjectives, but quixotic isn’t one of them. He knows the score. UCLA didn’t hire him, it hired his Harvard doctorate — and only for the academic year. Those contracts are never renewed. Next year he’ll be lecturing at a different institution. Someplace urban with gay bathhouses, if he’s lucky. In homophobic flyover country, if he’s not. He’s on the visiting instructor merry-go-round until he falls off.

Someday we’ll be in his tasseled loafers and elbow patches and pasty skin. Assuming we even get a contract. UCLA isn’t much of an academic brand compared to Harvard. Get your Ph.D. from UCLA and all you’ve proven is that you couldn’t get your Ph.D. from someplace like Harvard.

Afterward we file out in a discontented line, Grantberg because he’s unemployed at the conclusion of this academic year, my colleagues because they’ve got papers to grade, me because the weekend awaits. Another one. Usually it’s places to go, people to see — even if it’s just the library and Phoebe again. Except I don’t have Phoebe anymore. She’s doing her ex-girlfriend impression, which means I’m on intimate terms with her voicemail instead of her anatomy. This weekend will be a lot of library and a little wanking, as if I’m an undergrad at Iowa State again.

Balmy sunlight is filtering through the eucalyptus leaves overhead, dappling onto the crushed rock and milky strips of fallen bark. I stick out a skinny leg and it dapples too, warm in sunny spots and cool in shady ones. My other foot is tucked beneath me, my usual sitting position. This is the best bench on campus, and I should know. I feel like I’ve visited them all today, exploring the buildings and winding trails and little forgotten corners of the University of California San Diego. 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 swath of arid hills carpeted in sagebrush and manzanita and yucca, receding across I-5 into the red tile roofs of University City and the stunning fairy-tale spires of the Mormon Temple, and finally the craggy mountains hemming in the eastern horizon.

But I’m not enjoying the view right now. I’m watching a maroon Saturn shudder up the curving hillside road 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. My private taxi service to places where I can pass the entire day. 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 lo-cal 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?” he 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 undergrad with a crooked eye and wedding ring.

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.”

“Where am I taking you tomorrow?” he asks breezily, 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 — ”

At first Farid is slack-jawed with dismay. Then his mouth starts working again, startling me. “Tijuana? There’s no way I’m letting you go down to Tijuana. Not even if I escorted you!”

“I’m not asking you to escort me to Tijuana. I couldn’t. That would be such a hassle for you.” I already feel guilty for inconveniencing him like this. I wanted to rent a car when I got here, but I used up my cash card on the airplane ticket.

He waves off my protestations. He’s a good Persian brother-in-law. Overprotective only when he thinks he needs to be. “There’s plenty of things for you to see in San Diego. Like SeaWorld, right over there. We could make a day of it, maybe on Sunday. You, me, Nasrin, the kids. What do you think? SeaWorld?”

Farid is pointing out the windshield at Mission Bay, a cobalt lagoon dotted with the white triangles of sailboats. Here and there a jetski 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 by myself,” I say stubbornly.

“Don’t you get lonely? Spending all day by yourself like this?” He glances at my purse with the cellphone 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 stalking the apartment, a scowl parked on his haughty face, 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 groundfloor 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 somnambulant behind the wheel. Then a geezer is pulled into the street behind a yappy little dog on a straining leash. I startle 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 facade of Larry Flynt’s Supper Cabaret is so demure I almost cruise right past it, just a textured stucco archway decorated with floodlight splashes and flirtatious signage. I squeeze in between expensive foreign-made bumpers, parallel parking in disappointment. Where Larry Flynt is concerned, I think it’s only fair to expect in-your-face tastelessness on a megalomaniac scale. My brother Brian would be heartbroken to see his Hustler subscription dollars wasted like this.

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 Hustler stylings of the lounge — mirrors everywhere, leopard-print couches, velvet chairs and iron tables sculpted in the form of writhing female bodies. Eyeballing the beautiful people moving like sex on the dancefloor, I’m struck by the thought that Larry Flynt doesn’t know jack about real pornography.

“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 program longer than anybody except Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez himself. He 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.

I break away. “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 come here 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.”

“You finish in less than an hour?”

“With this physique? Not fucking likely.” 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 dancefloor. 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 program,” 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 I taught you.”

“Remember what?”

“It’s not the funding that matters. It’s what you do with the funding.” He rescues a mint leaf floating in his drink. “I got all the funding UCLA could offer and I’ll probably never finish my dissertation.”

“You’ve got a real life, though. A wife and kids.”

“So will you someday. And probably sooner than you think. That’s the shitty thing about life — it always happens faster than you want it to.”

For a while time drags 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 girl-shaped chair at our girl-shaped table. We let them take the chair and go back to watching our colleagues on the dancefloor.

“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 kinda 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. I tend to forget, given my fluent Spanish and ease with latinos.

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

I follow his gaze to a minky Ecuadorian in an Adidas track suit, moving with hips like oiled ellipses. “Adriana? No way, dude. Josefina is the one I want.”

Together we turn toward the Chilean, a vision of desire in her little black dress and platform mules. She’s willowy and sun-streaked and mobbed by men. She’s also whiter than I am, the progeny of an aristocratic European family. The haughty tilt of her jaw implies breeding in the non-husbandry sense of the word.

“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 Ortiz, a name that just 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 her, 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.

The 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 and niece locked in sibling rivalry at full volume, my brother-in-law watching TV with the sound cranked. But tonight they went to the Iranian School for a musical 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 black-and-white pictures. Family get-togethers with relatives crowding into the frame, all the men mustachioed, all the women in headscarves. The bland architecture and even blander furnishings of homes. Our grandfather’s wheat farm, 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 down 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 crooked-eye 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 patio. 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 tap water. “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 crooked-eye 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 that popped 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 even 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. Mom and Dad 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. Just easier that way.

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 commencement picture, Nasrin flanked by our parents. Her mortarboard hat 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 highlighted and coiffed — just what you’d expect from a professional hair stylist — but shapeless beneath her clothes, 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.

She 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 Qu’ran obsessively. She stopped cooking and started microwaving, which meant no more stinky leftover lunches that reek the way only 3-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 wouldn’t be a latchkey kid — 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 craves her own paycheck 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.