The leaving

Oakland, California

1970

Roshan had not been back to Iran for 8 years when my father’s teaching job offered him a sabbatical year, and it was decided we all would go to live with my grandparents in Tadjrish, just outside of Tehran, Iran. My mother would be returning to her family home in Iran a married woman again, married to an American no less. Our big white house on the hill in Montclair, with the addition my father had built for my nursery, it would have to be sold. We would be gone a year, so there was no sense leaving it to stand empty and waiting. We would have to start over when we returned.

Roshan was an alluring symbol of a wider world that none of us had ever known. Even my father, already 47 years old, had never traveled as a tourist before. His only time out of the country had been as a soldier in Iwo Jima during World War II, and he coveted old photos of himself, youthful, and bare-chested with a rifle in his hand, as if he’d been in swim trunks on a beach in Bali. He wanted nothing more than to follow this dark-haired Persian girl around the world, this sad-faced mother and wife that longed to be a daughter and sister again if even for a short time.

My half-sister Lygeia was seven years old that year, a tall child that had weathered too many emotional storms already for one so young. She’d been the motherless small child in my father’s life when he met Roshan, and became a pawn in the emotional powerplay that resulted in their marriage and my birth. By the time I emerged as the fourth member of this new family, Sissy, as I called her, had already become guarded, for the adults in her life had proven to be unpredictable, careless. The world shifted constantly under her feet. The trust and security that I took for granted were not hers to hold. But at three I recognized none of this. I adored her. For me, the sun rose and set on her face, and as long as I could be near her all would be well.

A whirlwind of preparations swept us all up in haste, matching dresses for my sister and I to be sewn, suitcases to fill, gifts to be bought. As a tiny, moon-faced three-year-old, my concept of travel was long, boring bouts in the back seat of my father’s Mustang. Life was simple, predictable: long climbs up the winding stone staircase to our house, trips to the supermarket, and barefoot mornings at nursery school. My world was small and I moved confidently in it. I thought it could never change.

My mother, my sister and I left for Iran first, in the fall of 1970, with the understanding that my father would follow after the house and car were sold and he had completed the fall semester’s classes. That we left behind the only home I had ever known, our metal swingset surrounded by towering pine trees, that we left behind our dog, my sister’s school, my father’s students, none of this mattered – we were all swept up by mother’s sheer enthusiasm: the wild fire in her eyes. But while the leaving seemed to be about her, what we would find once we were in Iran was unique to each of us, and wholly personal. My father and my sister longed for context, the smells and tastes of this culture that set my mother apart from others around us. I was only along for the ride. But it was in Iran that my senses were awakened and my memory was born. I was too young to understand that a chapter of my life was ending and that I would forever categorize events in my life as “before” or “after” our year in Iran.

The Trunk - parts one and two

Oakland, California
Fall 1974

My memories of Iran had already faded by the time I was seven years old so when the trunk arrived one fall day in October I was awestruck. It arrived on our doorstep like a long forgotten relative, encased in metal and lacquered wood, shredded rope wrapped around its belly and our address plastered to its top in my father’s careful script. The heavy iron handles lay flat along its sides like tiny round arms, worn and smooth in my hand. This was the lost trunk that my parents had sent ahead before our return. They had considered it lost, gone forever, and yet here it stood after having had travels of its own.

It must have taken both my parents to lift that trunk. I imagined them holding those heavy handles, surprised by the weight of them, and then a noisy heave as they brought the trunk over the threshold. They would have carried it slowly through the dark hallway and down the carpeted stairs to our rumpus room, calling out to each other when they turned the corners. But I wasn’t there to see any of that. It was already enthroned in the deep shag of our rumpus room floor by the time I got home from school, and it lay in waiting to be opened, mysterious and silent. It’s silence and weight did not whisper, but ached with a tired groan, finally still and finally home.

My father’s massive canvases stood leaning against one wall, their colorful geometric faces hidden and only the blond wood frames and frayed canvas edges exposed. The black upright piano with its bench settled underneath it stood ignored challenging the old zenith TV on its rolling cart as if it stood a chance to claim my attention. Instead, both sat waiting for me to awaken them from sleep. But that trunk, surrounded by our big corduroy pillows, that was new – unexpected, uninvited even.

Iran had become an “other”, foreign, strange, the half of me that was oddly-colored and smelled of celery stew and rose water; the half of me that I tried to ignore. My year there when I was three and four was like a closed chapter of one of my father’s library books – black and white pictures of artifacts and statues, flashes of memory, paper schoolbooks and pots of steaming rice; the bright orange of a glass of fresh carrot juice. Iran was the sound of my mother’s shouts in to our kitchen princess phone on New Years Day; her voice desperately reaching, searching, through the phone, her loud voice, shouting through smiles and tears, in the language that was familiar yet incomprehensible to me now. Iran was the phone inevitably handed to me to hear a tinny distant voice calling my name in answer to my small hello. The awkward silence when I didn’t know what else to say.

And when this trunk was finally opened it brought forth all these things in a flood that made me breathless, even without words. Its heavy rope was cut with our kitchen knife and fell away to expose the heavy padlock that had been hidden underneath. Within minutes my father produced the small key and the top was lifted. Stale air mixed with the smell of sweet moth balls lingered in my nose as I stretched my neck to peer inside. Its dark gut was still and full. My mother, chatty, exuberant, welcomed each item from its depth as she gingerly removed them– small folded rugs with bright patterns, tiny sheep skin hats that I could hardly believe I had ever worn, a tin samovar with small matching tea cups, clothes, wraps, shawls and stiff beaded shoes of gaudy colors. I stood away and poked at these things with outstretched fingers. Everything was scratchy against my skin and the old, weighted smell was so strong it assaulted me and filled the room, seeping around corners and in to the next rooms. I gladly disappeared into the kitchen to make her a cup of strong black tea and leave her with these smelly and unexpected relatives.

When my mother was satisfied that she had unfolded each item, caressed each with nostalgia and longing and then refolded them with the same creases, she began returning them back to their waiting vault. The trunk which witnessed this whole scene was eventually closed with a slam and my mother sprang up from her squat with a light step, chatty– both of my parents seemed to welcome this trunk home. As for me, I was wash with relief when it was all over: the foreigness of these things only served to remind me of my own unexplainable foreigness. The trunk finally took its rightful place amongst the old boxes in our garage and I felt more at ease with its place there, hidden and unseen.