First my father and then my mother were gone, but I do not remember the leaving. I do remember the absence of them though, the strange calm that settled over me when I believed that my life had irreversibly adapted to new routines, different fingers to sift through the tangles in my hair, different lips to kiss my forehead when the lights were turned off at night. How long would they be gone? I had no way to understand these things. As always, my sister was my rock, and I was calmed by her steadfast confidence, and soon just stopped asking the questions. It had been 8 months since we had arrived in Iran which was a lifetime of days and naps and dinners and breakfasts in the courtyard. The crisis of my grandfather's illness had passed as mysteriously as it had come. Life was constantly redefined.
The phrase “jeesh dahram” earned me a trip out to the toilet room which was across the courtyard outside and not in the house. I never visited that drafty room alone, unable to reach the slender chain that hung from the bare bulb above my head. I had long since adapted to the low crouch over the white porcelain hole in the concrete floor, and the strain to see over my pants wadded at my knees to watch the stream of yellow emerge from my body. I would say “tamom,” when I was through, and then felt warm water being poured over my bare skin from the long arched spout of a plastic water pitcher.
In Iran, just as there were not toilet seats, there were also no bathtubs. I became accustomed to taking showers with my Aunty Mary and baby cousin, clothes shed outside the door and water beginning to fall all around me in a tall tiled room with a drain as big as my hand in the middle of the cool floor. Aunty was thin, and she stood over me, as she held my baby cousin’s slippery body close to her breasts.
“Come on, joonam, you’re not afraid of water are you?” Her voice echoed off the dripping walls of the cavernous water room, and tried to lure me from where I stood. With her arms full of squirming baby skin I knew that, for the moment, I was in charge even though I was fearful of the way that water burned my eyes when it dripped down my face. I did not move my feet as I watched how their silhouette against the high window made their faces dark, and steam swirled around them. I felt the warm water circle around my toes as it moved across the floor. I waited until my turn to be in charge was over, and baby Mariam was handed to the towel and arms that emerged in the doorway. I let myself be picked up and lifted to the soft breasts of this woman, draping my arms over her shoulders and nesting my eyes in to the warm skin of her neck.
“It’s not so bad, is it, my dear,” I knew she was saying to me in her voice that was different from my mother’s, and for the time it took her to wash my back with her scratchy cloth, I was her baby, and I belonged to her. I let her place me back on my feet, and looked past her long dripping lashes into her brown eyes as she picked up each foot, resting it on her crouching thigh, and moved the sudsy cloth between each of my toes.
