Together Tea Read Free Page A

want a husband now?”
    â€œEverybody in this life needs a partner.”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œYou need someone. What’s going to happen when I die? Who’s going to take care of you? When you’re all alone and old? Your brothers? Who’ll wipe your nose when you’re sick?”
    â€œI’ll wipe my own nose! I’ll call a friend! Hire someone—I’ll put signs on tree trunks for a nose-wiper!”
    â€œYou need someone, Mina. You need to have . . .”
    â€œEverything you didn’t have?” Mina finished the sentence for her.
    â€œNo, Mina,” Darya said quietly. “Not everything I didn’t have. Everything I had . I want you to taste life the way I have. To give you a fraction of what I was given. I want you to have a passion. I want you to fall in love like I fell in love.”
    â€œYour marriage was arranged.”
    â€œIt wasn’t arranged. It was . . . encouraged. I got to know your father. I took the time. I loved my mother. I knew she wouldn’t do me wrong. Because my mother . . .”
    Darya broke off and cried silently into her hands. Her mother had been killed by a bomb during the Iran-Iraq War. She had been buying pomegranates at the greengrocer’s downtown when the bomb blew the grocer’s wooden stalls into shreds. Darya often cried when she talked of Mamani.
    Mina’s body grew slack as she remembered asking Mamani for those pomegranates years ago. But she forced her body up straight. Darya’s tears over Mamani were nothing new.
    â€œBecause . . .” Darya looked up, her face wet but suddenly calm. “Because, Mina, my mother gave me a gift when I was nineteen. Don’t you see? She gave me a gift, and at the time I was young too and foolish and couldn’t appreciate what she’d found for me. I attended my own wedding only because in those days we didn’t refuse our parents’ choices. It took years for me to realize what she had done for me. The happiness that she placed into my hands.”
    Mina thought of the man in the bathroom next door, sitting on his knees and squeezing putty onto pink tiles. She thought of her father’s few wiry hairs, his uneven teeth and self-help tapes, his bulging stomach, and the way he listened to American songs on the radio, hearing the lyrics all wrong. That’s the gift Mamani gave her? That’s the happiness Darya was talking about?
    â€œIt’s ridiculous,” Mina said. “You can’t pick a spouse for someone else. How do you know what’s right for them?”
    â€œIt’s been done for centuries. This, the way they do it here, this is ridiculous. You can’t pick a spouse for yourself. How does one person, one young person know what’s right for them? When you were fifteen, did you think the way you do now? Well, when you’re thirty, you’ll look back on today and laugh at your thoughts. It’s like anything else when you’re young. Vegetables. Cod liver oil. A jacket on a seemingly warm day. Your mother says take it, it’s good for you. You refuse, it seems unnecessary. Then you realize she knew you better than you knew yourself. That’s why she’s your mother.”
    Darya’s red bun bounced as she talked. “Don’t you think I know how you feel? I cried like you cry by yourself at nights now. I didn’t want to get married, didn’t even find Baba attractive. I wanted to get a PhD in mathematics and become a professor. I always thought I would contribute something huge to academia, that I would be remembered for a theorem or proof or something . I never thought I’d be sitting with Kavita and Yung-Ja on Saturdays solving equations no one would ever see. I couldn’t even imagine not being a famous mathematician back then. When my mother introduced your father to me, I hated him. I hated her for pushing him on me. I spent several months,