You kill the quarter-hours dune-ranging through the blankest Saharas, each kilometer of hard-won track wiped out by the wind as soon as you turn to look back. At huge intervals, oases punctuate the evacuated tracts. You head for whatever infrequent way stations you can scrape together.
Mother's Day, never marked by more than a week of low-level anxiety capped by an emergency call to FTD, swells to an international conference of sacred distraction. All day, the woman's face struggles to take shape. You fight for detail, work to recover the first sight your eyes ever recognized, the most familiar, most assumed, most beatific, nauseating, neglected, adored, abused. Hours pass trying to fix her features, to see past their gross lines, to zoom in beyond your usual myopia down to the local intricacies of cartilage, her smallest fleshy finials.
Her full-tipped nose swims into focus, your nose before its Anglo contamination. The pained laugh lines on the outskirts of her eyes deeping to plow cuts. Her chin's drumlins assume a detail that only enforced isolation could have given you. A haunted face, a hunted one. Framed in that copper coif of composure that it took you until the age of twelve to realize was not her natural color. Pahlevi copper. Before that, in pictures, Pahlevi blond. Westoxification at its finest. Hair color that would be hard to hide, even now, under the required head scarf. A face no longer welcome in the country of her birth, the same country that now bankrolls Sacred Conflict and their army of God's Partisans, the ones who have seized you, her baby, the flesh of her flesh.
All day long her muscles materialize, cling to the noble cheekbones, a grimace of pleasure peeking through the interdicting fear. Every brave smile apprises you of its bewilderment, the wild route of its arrival here. You make out the tuft of peach fur on her upper lip, there already in '51, the year that old Tavakoli and his family migrated to England in the wake of Mussadegh's nationalization of Anglo-Iranian Oil.
Three years later, in the returning Shah's wake, the freshly rechris-tened British Petroleum sought out her faithful father and reinstated him to his middle-management post. But by then your mother Shah-naz's lovely, peach-furred lip had captivated a handsome American serviceman loitering around London prior to his inevitable return to Iowa and a lifetime of agricultural extension lecturing. Veiled in white, in an incoherent Anglican ceremony where her whole displaced family did their best ferangi impersonations, your mother swore through that fleshy mouth to love, honor, and obey this American, to follow him into lifelong exile deep in a land that couldn't tell Iranian from Indonesian.
These features, this face: what could the domesticated prairie have looked like, through eyes so black and baffled? Not a question you've ever entertained, before Mother's Day inflicts you with time enough to entertain all questions. Isfahan, your mother's singsong once sang to you, is half the world. Growing up in Basra, Kuwait, and Doha could not have left too much room in her remaining half a world for a town like Des Moines.
And yet, the laughing, skittish voice tries again to tell you, I never felt at home until I came to the United States. The black eyes whose gaze you could never bear to meet dart away, caught in the compromise of something like truth. People in the Midwest are so friendly. So ready to take you in. By which she must have meant that Iowans, in their bounty, could not imagine how anyone would not want to be like them, given half a chance.
But she did, your hair-dyed mother. Did want to become that local and featureless thing. Did take on a rolling, open, Midwestern look, that history of no history. Did adopt the life that her cosmopolitan father, the emissary of empire, unwittingly trained her for, through her childhood spent shuttling among Oil's tap points. Did learn to sing, We are from l-oway, I-oway! Never at home until here.
The face that solidifies before you at morning grows old by nightfall. All those years, Shahnaz among the alien corn. Her ancient words, ways, and beliefs, hidden under a bushel. Her occasional Franco-Farsi, a mumbled merzi to checkout clerks or an accidental khoda hafez when leaving the rare party where she fully relaxed. Her annual covert Norooz celebrations, the third week of March, the flowers all hothouse imitations and the nougat candies all made with Jewel Tea Company bleached imperial equivalents.
Except for these lapses, she steeped her life in protective coloration, her olive skin aging, growing pale, each year refining its successive approximation of hearty farm stock until, by Mother's Day midnight, you can mistake her for white, the white of your father, your state, your upbringing. The apparition gazes on you, neither scolding nor imploring. With a simple look, she works her daily vigilance. This May exercise recalls you to the basic fact of her existence. Her life needed no further justification, so long as you and your brother still needed her to survive the world in which chance set you down.
Her two boys: all the light those eyes ever needed. Hers was the countenance of love, too circumspect for any photo to have captured. This is the mask of happy sacrifice. The face of the most maternal being that a child could conceive. Your icon for safety, for every comfort and care ever taken for granted. Your weight, your shame, your memory, your mother.
After sunset, her features dim. She disappears into the black of your enclosure. Nothing remains of her dislocated solicitude but that brow's accommodation, her motherly wiliness, the will to improvise. You cannot conjure her back. She morphs into the woman you never witnessed, the one who came into her own after you fled her faultless nest.
Your desertion must have changed those features, for eyes always betray the thing they look for. With you up in Chicago, teaching the global economy's privileged elites how to maximize their verbal throw weight, Kamran off building Peace Corps housing in Mali, and her hapless husband shrinking to nothing with each successive day of retirement, spinning down the tube into prime-time dramas of Texan millionaires, what could the daughter of Anglo-Iranian wandering, the born mother, still find, in the corn-rowed wastes of I-oway, to nurture? For whom could she go on living? What could absorb her surplus care?
She found a replacement, so fast it made you jealous. Force of habit, maternal instinct's inertia left her continuing to cook, cranking out sustenance as if there were still fledglings to eat it. Great, heaped mountain ranges of her family's favorites began to pile up in a home that no longer housed enough mouths to consume it all. At last a woman friend, a fellow volunteer at the 4-H, suggested a joint catering service, Shahnaz on the stove and native Rosemary handling the front office.
For two years, the women's experiment in grassroots capitalism coasted along on word of mouth. They served pork chops and mashed potatoes to confirmation parties and fried chicken and apple dumplings to golden anniversary reunions. All the while, your mother hid in her heart of hearts the conviction that people wouldn't really cat that way except out of ignorance. Once she'd secured a loyal clientele, the woman launched her calculated gamble. She introduced her offerings sparingly, slipping in a little mast o esfinaj or khiar alongside the glazed hams, and no one was any the wiser.
Emboldened, she graduated to saffron-flecked rice with bottom-of-the-pot and zereshk pulow at one party, an eggplant "Mullah-has-fainted" at another. Piecemeal, she deployed the full menu of raptures and revelations: kabab koobideh, fesenjan, qormeh sabzi. To these Persian mainstays she added a panoply of recipes reverse-engineered from a youth spent bouncing around all the capitals of the Middle East.