Digging to America Read Free Page B

sights to point out.
    Lunch was strained baby foods for Susan and a salad for Maryam. Then Susan had a little playpen time in the family room extending from the kitchen while Maryam did the dishes, and after that a bottle and another nap this one long enough that Maryam was free to fix something for Sami and Ziba's supper. Not that they expected it, but she had always enjoyed cooking and Ziba, it turned out, did not. Left to their own devices, they tended to eat Lean Cuisines.
    While the rice was boiling, she straightened the house. She put Susan's toys in the toy chest and carried a bagful of wet diapers out to the garbage can. She stacked and aligned various reading materials but did not throw away so much as a scrap of paper, not a subscription card or a pizza flyer, for fear of overstepping.
    Again she had an image of her mother, this time stooping painfully to retrieve a chewing-gum wrapper and placing it silently, almost reverently, in an ashtray on the coffee table.
    This house was as big as the neighboring houses, with a room for every purpose. It had not only a family room but an exercise room and a computer room, each one carpeted wall to wall in solid off-white. There wasn't a Persian rug anywhere, although you might guess that the occupants were Iranian from the wedding gifts in the dining-room cabinet the Isfahani coffee sets and the tea glasses caged in silver. The playroom had been fully stocked with toys as soon as the agency sent Susan's photograph. And the nursery was ready long before that, the crib and bureau and changing table purchased back when Ziba was first trying to get pregnant. (Maryam's mother would have said that preparing so far ahead was what had doomed them. Didn't I warn you? she would have asked, each month when Ziba once again reported failure.)
    Maryam had told Ziba to trust in the power of time. You'll have your baby! You'll have a houseful of babies, she'd said. And she had confided her own long wait. Five years we tried, before Sami was born. I was in despair. This was a great concession on her part. To speak openly of trying was so indiscreet. (She had been stunned when Ziba first spoke of it. Not a comfortable thought at all, one's son having a sex life, even though of course Maryam assumed that he did.) Besides which, she had always told her relatives that that five-year wait was deliberate. Visiting back home three years after her wedding, she had parried their sly questions with boasts about her independence, her relief that she was not burdened yet with children. I take courses at the university; I'm active in the wives' group at the hospital . . . While in fact, she had wanted a baby right away something to anchor her, she had envisioned, to her new country.
    She saw herself now on that first visit home: her clothes chose n carefully for their Westernness, stylish sheaths in electric prints of hot pink and lime green and purple; her hair lacquered into a towering beehive; her feet encased in needle-toed, stiletto-heeled pumps. She winced.
    She winced too at recalling her automatic assumption that Ziba's failure to get pregnant was exactly that Ziba's failure. When they discovered that it was, instead, Sami's failure, Maryam had been shocked. Mumps, perhaps, the doctors said. Mumps? Sami had never had mumps! Or had he? Wouldn't she have known? Did he have them while he was away in college, and he had felt too embarrassed to mention such things to a woman?
    He'd been fourteen years old when his father diedjust beginning to turn adolescent, with a fuzzy dark upper lip and a grainy voice. She had wondered how she could possibly see him through this stage on her own. She knew so little about the opposite sex; she'd lost her father when she was a child and had never been close to her brothers, who were nearly grown before she was born. If only Kiyan could have stayed alive just a little while longer, just four or five years longer, till Sami had become a man!
    Although now she wasn't so