The Mexican Year

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 UT-Austin and Arizona State were offering me. Then add posh departmental offices, palm trees and 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 cute. Oozing sexual availability. Smiling at me.

Two mochas later I was cramming myself into the passenger seat of her gunmetal blue Miata. Whiplash tour for the Iowa farmboy. She laid rubber through the 90210 zip code, O.J.’s old killing grounds, 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 lightbulb.”

“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 peek 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. Adjacent 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 relaxing superficial place where nothing really matters. Even politics can’t rile us. I toss out names to get her reaction. President Bush is worth a nose-wrinkle. Governor Schwarzenegger only merits a dismissive wave of her wineglass. “I’d pay to see him drop trou, just to know if his dick is all shriveled up from the steroids.”

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 the day.” I push kimchi around my plate with chopsticks. Go for a day, plan for a year.

Phoebe is staring at me intently, as if trying to remember something. “We had a good run, didn’t we?”

I almost blow wine through my nose. “God, 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 her 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’re gone for a year, and I can’t wait for you.” Freckles hover in the emulsion of her pale skin. “I’m 36, Nick. Did you even know that?”

More nodding. But I don’t admit that I found out by riffling through her purse after our first hookup.

“I’ve been thinking it’s time to make some changes. Maybe quit this job. Settle down and get some friends, a couple 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. 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 longer than it looks on a map.

“People in America don’t know anything,” my grandfather used 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. My sister and I were recent immigrants, girls bewildered by a strange new world, so we clung to his every word.

Nasrin 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 bigger and faster than the dhows I remembered from Iran.

“Now let me tell you about the wind and storms.” He 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 Mom and Dad 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 tomboy 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. 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.

After cramming nights and weekends to ace my Graduate Record Exam, after navigating a minefield of identity politics as a gringo in Latin American Studies, after death-marching through four years of doctoral coursework and a 200-book reading list, after learning some French to go with my Spanish, after writing innumerable grant proposals to beg for funding, after leaving a trail of diarrhea and epithets across the map of Mexico, after slaving over a dissertation prospectus until I memorized it word-for-word…

…after jumping through all these hoops of flaming bullshit, I’m still not done with my Ph.D. I’m just getting closer.

This is my oral qualifying examination, when three professors give you the Spanish Inquisition Lite treatment. Their goal? Trip you up. Force you to utter “I don’t know.” Make you look like an undergrad with pretensions. This is their last opportunity to hold you back — or wash you out of the program, even — before you begin your dissertation research. And like the Inquisition, there is no appeal. If your exam committee decides you need to read another 50 monographs about Mexican women’s history, then you do it. And I don’t want to read another goddamn book in my life.

That’s why I scrutinize their expressions and body language as they settle across the conference table from me. So far, so good. Nobody is giving off another-50-monographs vibe. They just look like they’d rather be someplace else.

In the middle, my dissertation advisor and a living legend in the field of Latin American Studies — Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez. Squint at him and you can still see the Brown Panther with a face of dynamited wood, snarling into a megaphone with fist raised, an icon of chicano militancy. But that was the front page of The Los Angeles Times in 1968. Now he’s on the downside of a career in academia, the only place you can trade on left-wing notoriety and frothing Marxist regurgitation. His curriculum vitae reads like an application for political asylum in Cuba. He also feuds incessantly with colleagues, UCLA administrators, even the UC Regents. Most graduate students are terrified of his badass motherfucker act. I think he’s alright if you know how to play him. After four years I’ve become a virtuoso.

To the left, the slouching form of Professor Francisco “Frankie” Chavez. He’s a thirtysomething rico suave with a wardrobe to match. Today he’s wearing a glossy shirt untucked over jeans and ankle boots. His popularity on campus is only skin-deep. The white students wonder if Frankie or affirmative action is responsible for that Ph.D. from Stanford. The Hispanic students call him a “coconut” — brown on the outside, white on the inside — because he dates gringas and his golf game doesn’t suck. Lucky for him he’s the so-called rockstar in the department, teaching and lecturing and publishing like a 60-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket.

To the right, Professor Geena Rausch. She’s my outside field advisor, a “pop culture economist” who made her reputation with an econometric study of female bisexuality. Whether it’s enough to get her tenure, nobody knows. I chose her for my committee because she’s the next best thing to an empty chair. Geena is a junior professor with a crushing workload. She only has time to assign minimal reading, usually articles instead of monographs. And UCLA doesn’t pay her enough to care if I learn anything or not. She colored her dreadlocks orange since I last saw her. It looks like she’s wearing a bag of Cheetos on her head.

“Mr. Roberts, let’s get underway,” Hercules begins in a stentorian voice. He’s always formal, if you couldn’t tell from the suit and tie. Makes me self-conscious that I’m wearing chinos and a PIMPIN’ AIN’T EASY t-shirt.

Minutes drag off my watch as Hercules preambles about the mission of doctoral education. The “Ph.D.’s burden” speech, as I’ve learned to call it. Fight the oppressive structures of capitalism that thrive on social ignorance. Be a change agent for those proletarian dumbasses who lack the political consciousness to be a change agent for themselves. Blah blah fucking blah. Beside him, Frankie and Geena are glazed with boredom.

Eventually Hercules folds his hands into a knobby ball and stares at me. “Mr. Roberts, your graduate coursework doesn’t fit neatly into Latin American Studies. Much of your reading list is drawn from East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. So let me open with a fundamental question about your academic orientation — do you consider yourself a comparative generalist who is currently focusing on Latin America, or a Latin Americanist operating within a comparative framework?”

Jesus wept.

Hercules keeps sidetracking the exam with his “refried beans” — dependency theory this, pedagogy of the oppressed that. He hasn’t triangulated beyond Che Guevara, Emmanuel Wallerstein and Paolo Freire in forty years. That makes it easy to answer his questions, but the cadaverous leftism is upsetting Frankie. Soon he and Hercules are fighting mano-a-mano in the pedantic language of academic discourse. 1960s radical vs. 2000s neocon in a cage match to the death. Between two professors who have brown skin, lifelong tenure, BMW keyfobs, and homes near the ocean.

The irony would be delicious — if I didn’t have white skin, a teaching assistant gig that pays in misery, a Ford Explorer with 150,000 miles on it, and a studio apartment in the Rodney King riot zone of Koreatown.

Meanwhile Geena is doodling on her notepad and struggling to stay awake. I’m beginning to wonder if she pulled an all-nighter to grade papers or catch up on her academic reading. My suspicions deepen when she finally gets a chance to interrogate me. She lets her mouth hang open for an extra beat before launching into a rambling monologue about Hispanic market segmentation. The clock runs out before Geena can ask me a single question. Hercules and Frankie glare at her as if she just abused the institution of the oral exam so profoundly they can’t put it into words.

No whispered consultation about my performance is necessary. Hercules simply announces that I’ve passed my orals, and Frankie and Geena nod like bobblehead dolls. I gust a sigh of relief. I’ve ducked the another-50-monographs bullet. Mission accomplished.

Afterward I endure the usual theater of obsequiousness — handshakes and thank-yous and bullshit honorifics. Their deigned collegiality is the next breadcrumb on the trail to…well, them. Good work, Nick. Keep it up and you’ll be one of us someday.

Only Frankie lingers. We ride down the elevator together and pause in the beveled sunlight so he can fire up a Marlboro. “You made that look easy, chief.” One of the nicknames Frankie uses with me and everybody else. Easier than remembering individual names, he once told me.

“It was nothing,” I shrug. “Just another hoop of flaming bullshit to jump through.”

“That’s the spirit.” His laugh turns into a cough.

Several cute undergrads stroll past. This is southern California, so they’re melanoma-tan and advertising it. Frankie and I ogle them warily. It’s strictly verboten to fuck an undergrad, but career suicide never looked so good.

I shift my gaze to him. “So how’s my funding look?”

“Your funding, hmmm…” Frankie puffs thoughtfully, doing psychological math behind downcast eyes. Trying to find the least bruising words.

“Don’t tell me — Hercules is giving me the grant.” There are only two dissertation research awards in the Latin American Studies department. The grant is $12,000. The fellowship is $24,000. Guess which one I want.

Frankie shields his face with a palm, inspecting my reaction. “$12,000 buys a lot of burritos in Mexico. You’re still planning to live down there, right? Tijuana?”

I’m trying to stay on slow burn, but it’s hard. “Hercules. That goddamn bastard. He’s saving the fellowship for Maria, isn’t he?” Her name is a synonym for female and Hispanic, two competitive advantages I’ll never have.

“Hercules isn’t playing favorites, champ. You’ll be in Mexico. Maria is doing her research in Dallas. It’s a cost-of-living decision, that’s all.”

“You and Hercules need to get off your asses and visit Mexico once in a while. It’s not $12,000 a year cheaper than the United States. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Take it easy, would you? I’m on your side.” Frankie leans in close, giving me a dose of secondhand smoke. “Maybe I can get you the rest of Javier’s funding, since he dropped out of the program. That’s another $9,000. Maybe.”

“I can’t put maybe in the bank, dude.”

“Maybe is all I’ve got right now.” He drops the cigarette and stomps it with a boot, signaling the end of our shoptalk. “So you passed your orals. What are you doing to celebrate? Got anything planned with, uh…what’s-her-face? Your girlfriend?”

“Phoebe,” I sigh.

“That’s the name. Well, you kids have fun. And don’t let this place get to you, alright? Another couple years and you’ll have your Ph.D.” Frankie claps me on the shoulder, all buddy-like, and hoofs toward the faculty parking lot and that gleaming BMW.

Heatwaves boil off the sidewalk around me as I picture my post-exam celebration with Phoebe. Two disinterested participants using sex to fill up the spaces where conversation should be. Trapped in LA, since she isn’t the getting-away kind of girl. Enduring the hipster replicant nightlife until the hour is sufficiently late to play my-place-or-her-place, which has the trump of being 90210 zip code nice. We’ll drink too much before, during and after. But it beats more time in the library, so I fumble out my cellphone and dial her number, half-hoping she’s back from her latest business trip to Hong Kong, half-hoping she isn’t.

There is no sensation of velocity in the airplane’s drowsy cabin, no motion to attract a bored eye. Empty seatbacks reach to the first class curtain and the aisle is deserted. Next to me the window is an oval cutout of starry sky. I press my forehead against the cool plexiglass and stare down from my perch in the night. Lost in the cloudy murk below is Kansas City, receding. Somewhere ahead of me is San Diego. I don’t know where I am right now. Over the Rocky Mountains, maybe.A photo album of faces and places is splayed across my lap. I turn the glossy pages with an unpainted fingernail, reliving the moments that were worth capturing. It doesn’t take long to flip to the end. The brief transit across my adult life makes me a little sad. I’m 23 now, almost 24. I wish it took more pages to hold the experiences I haven’t had, all my sights unseen.

Saman is the star of the album. I look like an afterthought even when I’m the only one in the picture. Across the pages he seems to thicken and settle, becoming a fixture in ever-changing condos. His bulk shows off a trendy wardrobe, rings multiply on his fingers. Sometimes he’s nut-brown in the wake of a business trip that was more play than work. He smiles brightest when surrounded by his relatives, and more dimly when it’s just the two of us.

Of all the pictures in the album, the last one is the most symbolic. We’re captured in brief proximity at Norouz, the Persian New Year that’s springtime back in Iran but still winter in most of America. His arm encircles me possessively, but draped over my shoulder like I’m just another cousin, not cinching my waist as if I’m his wife. He glances sideways in my direction, a mistrustful — even deceitful — angle. He half-smiles for the camera, half-smirks at me and my needs. Behind him is a glimpse of the household where he rules as king, and the front door to his other life.

I stare at the picture with a thumb over my two-dimensional face, just contemplating him. I already know what I look like. A wife with doubts seeping into her heartbeats. A daughter-in-law trying too hard. A girl afraid of whatever happens next.

I married Saman knowing — knowing — that I was choosing this life. A traditional Persian man has certain expectations. So does his family. So does mine, for that matter. But I never expected it would be this hard. Inhabiting a world where I’m always second-best — to my husband, to his parents, to every relative-in-law. Depending on him for money, since it would be shameful if I had my own income. Moving from one lookalike condo and unwelcoming city to the next. Hosting near-strangers from Iran for months on end. Resisting all the pressure to quit school and give him children.

Sometimes I wish I’d waited to marry. No, be honest with yourself, Nooshin — I wish that all the time. If I could meet the bride in the black-and-white portraits inside the album’s front cover, I’d tell her to wait. Scream it at her, even. Finish your education first! Date boys, maybe even non-Persians! Make sure he loves you!

But I already know it would be useless. I remember what it was like to be that bride. She was 18 years naive, and scared of life on her own, and worried that she couldn’t do any better.

Let’s face it, I’m not a catch in any culture. My body is shaped like a kebab, not an hourglass — tall, flat-chested, with narrow boy hips and not much butt. Worse, I have a lazy eye. My right one. I received treatment for it after we emigrated to America, so I’m not a total freakshow, but still. People like it when you look at them, not at them and everything off to their left simultaneously.

That’s why my family began shopping me around like spoiling fruit during my senior year of high school. It was up to them to find me a husband, after all. Dating is forbidden in Islam. My aunts were characteristically blunt about their matchmaking. A girl like me had to be realistic. I was no princess, and I couldn’t expect to find a prince. Take the first man who comes my way, because there might not be another.

My hopes were pinned to the few Persian boys in the neighborhood, a future generation of waiters and taxi drivers from humble families like mine. But their names never came up. In fact no names came up. My aunts pretended everything was okay, but Mom couldn’t. I knew why empty wine bottles and kleenex boxes kept appearing in the garbage. No one wanted to marry me. It wasn’t just a rejection of her daughter, it was a rejection of our family.

A couple months before graduation I was introduced to Mrs. Fazel, a professional matchmaker who specialized in marriages to Iranians. It was time to face the facts. I only had one thing going for me — my citizenship. She showed me a picture of Saman. He wanted to come to America. His family was honorable and starting businesses in this country, mostly in the Midwest. Did I want to marry him? I studied his face carefully. My husband, I thought.

Five years ago I said yes. Now I don’t know the answer.

Compulsions lurk in the depths of our marriage, brushing against my legs when we argue, sometimes dying and washing up on the beach. My domestic loyalty, enforced by a lack of beauty and options. All the insecurity I offset because of this diamond ring on my finger. My family’s pride — or maybe just relief — in marrying me off. A college degree I don’t have and maybe never will. The stupid way I surrender to everything.

Every morning I linger half-awake, hoping this is just a bad dream. I’ll open my eyes and a different man will be snoring beside me, a different girl in the mirror will be rubbing the sleepdust out of her eyes. Or maybe I’ll be back in my high school bedroom with the chance to do it all over again. But today never turns out to be a bad dream. Just more of the same.

I struggle to envision the rest of my life with Saman, and struggle even more to envision it without him. I hide behind a silent calm and pretend I feel no pain. I go through the motions — in the kitchen, with his family, whenever he wants sex. I watch another year bleed off the calendar.

No bad marriage should last forever. I keep telling myself that, and even the Qu’ran agrees. But my shame is thick, and I feel so despondent, and the truth is written in every face I see — I’m no princess, and I can’t expect to find a prince. Maybe this is as good as it gets for a girl like me. Welcome to your future, Nooshin. Year after year after year, until the morning my eyes finally don’t open.