white lacy tights that leave
their impression
on her Michelin Man legs.
Shuttled between Tehran and London
and Hamburg and Sunderland
the toddler is said to have
stopped crying
engrossed when placed in
front of the telly
with Tom Jones
singing and gyrating
his hips.
First momentous memory: possessed
jumping on a spare bed in the cool storage room
chanting, I have a peepee, I have a peepee.
The child’s make-believe world
in her blue bedroom
is a cozy bed encased
in a glossy, kelly green frame
an arcade of dreams
a pilgrim’s boat
its perimeter the frontier
separating shelter
and the vast ocean
of sharks and bogeymen beyond.
The all-night game: all limbs must stay strictly within the frame, or else
the beyond, the savage beyond.
Next door a little brother sleeps, his toy soldiers poised on battlefields.
Mommy dressed me at her closet of wonders and scents in a green polyester costume with flouncy sleeves she had sewn for my role as “leaf” in a kindergarten show. Or so I remembered for decades. Recently, a woman writes me saying she was my elementary school classmate. I try to find her name familiar, convincing myself that I do, as we do with so many fellow countrymen’s names that may or may not belong in our pasts. She mentions our “flower” play in elementary school.
Clank clank clank in Mommy’s heels down the hall when I am home alone…
Breathless from bliss on a tricycle.
Twirling my short pleated skirts
in front of the gramophone,
dancing with wrists bent, hands blooming magnolias.
Mommy makes snacks of steamed fava beans and red beets and turnips on dark winter afternoons.
A groovy, young father’s navy blue BMW 2002 with its bunny wabbit grill.
Velvet and wool blankets heaped over a low table we sat around, a heating unit housed under it, our legs jutting into the heated cubby, a toasty korsi on winter nights of soups and stews and writing between the lines.
Every school textbook opened with full-page headshots of the Shah and Empress Farah.
Sleeping in a girls dormitory for a summer where my bed is once covered end to end in sand, maybe from the beaches of the English Channel nearby, and my dolls are dismembered, and we hear rumors of a savage murder in the woods surrounding the international boarding school, but no one tells my parents back in Tehran and neither do I because I am somehow mute.
Barbie and Sindy dolls and their seasonal wardrobes and tiny plastic high-heeled shoes. Sindy’s lavender royal cape, purchased in Bath, United Kingdom. My love for shades of purple unmistakable even early on.
Riding a glittery gold bicycle on the grounds of the apartment complex around a large swimming pool downstairs from my blue bedroom.
An older, sensible father’s blue Peugeot 504 and its backseat booster seat. A turquoise and elongated ceramic figure, a mysterious seated feline, nestled on the shelves of my father’s office, a sprawling city where I run laps and get eye exams.
Dolphin diving in the pool in my red one-piece suit either holding my nose or wearing a pinkish, flesh-colored nose clip. Marco. Polo. Always with the fear of Jaws. Until dusk when we rush home shuddering, wrapped in our towels, lips blue and teeth chattering.
Too early, it was too early to cry each night into the pillow, too early to have begun fearing my parents’ abandonment of me. The death-fear that enters us at birth and propels us into our actions. Every church thrashing, every sports-arena roar, every holler of joy is to defy, delay the inescapable.
Reciting memorized poetry before the entire class as early as the first grade.
Multi-family trips to orchards in remote villages where one family or another owns land, zameen, in Karaj and other villages around Tehran. I begin to see the ruthless pecking order among children. Four, even two years apart was an unbridgeable valley then.
My generous surgeon father’s patients from near and far bear gifts of gratitude. Live turkeys we kept in our winter-emptied pool in the white house from the peasant patients, and Beluga caviar by the tin cans from the affluent.
A train ride to vacation at the Caspian Sea in the northern, subtropical region of Iran with the same families, physician colleagues of my father. It seemed as if we had taken over all the cars, a feast of parents standing, holding on to poles and children underfoot, weaving between pants and skirts, the anticipation of sun, sand, and beach in every cell of our bodies. Pickled garlic, mooseer, served with fresh fish only makes sense in that climate.
Lying on my stomach on the car’s backseat from a first-degree sunburn during the drive home through windy, mountainous roads connecting the Caspian Sea to Tehran.
Back home after the walks in the moist woods of the north, an itch at the base of my neck just inside my hairline. A tick fattens there—not of the Lyme variety. A doctor at my father’s clinic pops it off with pincers.
Hiking the mountains surrounding Tehran. My father so comfortable on those slopes. Stopping to breakfast on wooden structures built atop brawling streams flowing down the slopes. We sit at the wooden banquettes to have fried eggs, nimroo, tea, fresh-baked bread and farmer’s or feta cheese, and little bags of cheese puffs for the kids, inhaling that early morning mountain air. The breakfast everyone still tastes. There’s a feeling of freedom, endless possibility. We are in a film of entirely different people captured in silent and scratchy black-and-white celluloid. I was born with my father’s long legs. We are mountain goats, he and I, hiking the steep foothills of the Alborz mountain range north of Tehran, capped by the mighty Damavand peak.
Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution was declared “victorious,” and one year of chaos had ensued as the Ayatollah Khomeini was digging his claws into government, schools had been gender-segregated, and hejab, women covering their heads and bodies, made mandatory. It was easy to hide one’s mouth discreetly holding the tail end of a scarf over it. I had just returned from the United States, where my father had sent my mother, brother, and me to take refuge while the bloody uprising was taking its course. I re-enrolled in the same school where I had spent my beloved elementary years, Ettefagh, the Jewish school across the street from Tehran University.
There, while in junior high, when a teacher was absent, as class monitor I corralled a classroom of sixty girls sitting by the threes in rows and columns of wooden benches like lines in an I Ching hexagram. We carved so many names into them. I took my stage at the blackboard and entertained with ad hoc performances of making faces, putting on voices, and any other shenanigan or skit that came to body. I could keep the class in stitches for the hour-long period. Which vice principal could object? No unruliness, no strays running down the hall.
Later, at another school, from my back-row bench I orchestrated a class of fifty high school girls. Their periodic mooing out of unmoving mouths drove the teacher to tears. Incapable of taking control of her classroom, she pulled me out of class, being that I was the straight-A