FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us. I had never met her before. She had been dead for at least fifty years or more. Even my father could not remember what she looked like, because he was only three when she got the dysentery.

 

We only had one photograph of her. I had stolen it out of a family album when I visited my father’s childhood home in Iran. In this black and white picture, she was posed in front of a tropical backdrop, wearing a dress, clutching a cloth purse, holding it in front of her stomach, maybe just thirty years old—my age. Her hair was bobbed, crow-colored. She stared, unsmiling, at the photographer. Her own grandmother was the one that burned all the other pictures and her belongings when she died. “In Iran, if the family of someone who died was grieving to the point of being unhealthy,” explained my mother in English, “sometimes they burned a dead person’s belongings and images so nobody would be reminded. Her mother went blind crying for her death.”

 

I first saw her in the hallway, in my parents’ apartment on E. 70^th Street in New York. I was visiting for Thanksgiving, a short day trip from D.C. where I worked. She wore platform shoes from the 1950’s and her dress ended right below her knees. But otherwise the skin of her legs, her exposed arms, her face: None of it seemed ghostly, but like real human flesh.

 

I told my father about the sighting at breakfast. My mother toasted the pita in the oven, setting the table with feta cheese, turnips and sabzi greens like cilantro and parsley. “Did she say anything?” my mother asked, bringing the basket of bread to the table, sitting down with us. “No,” I answered, sipping my tea. “She just stood there, holding her purse just like in the photograph, saying nothing.”

 

My father did not respond. He never did in regard to his mother. Now that his father was dead also, I already knew that extracting anymore knowledge about his family and culture was an impossibility. With my grandfather’s death, I lost all of Northern Iran where my father came from—what was once an entire country, some mountains too.

 

Then my grandmother began getting comfortable in this new home. My mother saw her too. We saw her in the kitchen, examining the modern oven. We saw her in the living-room, watching Oprah on the television, the remote in her hand, back straight as a board like a proper lady. We saw her in the hallway often, pacing from one end to the other. She never wore a veil. She had died before that law was put in place. My father ignored her. He claimed not to see her, but if she was in the room, he would leave. She never spoke. But sometimes she broke dishes or slammed doors.

 

It wasn’t about food—since she never ate any—or cost (she never required a bedroom, fresh towels or doctor visits). She did not need a wheelchair or extra care; we never worried for her safety since she was already dead. And we didn’t want to seem callous to throw an old woman out (even if she appeared as a young woman, my age). It’s just that guests who stay longer than three weeks and fail to entertain can begin to be psychologically burdensome, even if the guest is a family member, but especially if the family member is deceased. To this day, I feel guilty saying that. In Iran, extended family are expected to live with each other forever, sometimes building houses around a common courtyard if children became married. They had big, sprawling families. Perhaps we had become too American. I’m not sure except that she had overstayed her welcome and broken my mother’s favorite vase. My grandmother could have chosen other homes to live in—my father had siblings, after all. I knew my father was indifferent, but to my mother and I: We’d had enough of this somber woman. It was unnerving, especially while brushing your teeth or taking a shower. The lady was everywhere. It was as if the more we ignored her and hoped she’d move, the more she made herself at home. 

 

I began to avoid my parents’ place because seeing my grandmother was depressing. I felt like a bad daughter, pawning the old woman off to my mother, so I tried to visit at least once a month. I was in the kitchen early one morning making coffee when she appeared, sitting at the kitchen table. “Grandmother,” I said in Farsi, speaking to her for the first time. “You don’t scare us, but we’re just curious: Why are you here and how long do you plan on staying?” It took a lot to get the words out. I knew it was rude. I focused on the coffee-maker, trying not to look at her because of my shame. She did not speak, but when I turned around, she was no longer at the table. She had left a note. I walked over to read it, but it was in Farsi. I knew how to speak, but I did not know how to write or read, so I had to take the note to my mother to translate. “It says,” began my mother, scrutinizing the ancient spelling, “’Father of a dog. You wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for me.’” 

 

That’s when we heard the sounds from upstairs. Up till now, grandmother had only broken cheap dishes and the occasional vase, but this time she crashed a television set out the sixth floor window, sent it flying down onto E. 70^th Street where it made a huge clatter that even our neighbors heard. Luckily, nobody was hurt because it was still early morning, but someone could have been, and that’s what turned my shame into anger. There was no reason to be polite anymore. My mother said a few prayers and made some excuses to tell the doorman who cleaned up the mess, but I was now determined since I knew how grandmother felt. “Grandmother!” I yelled upstairs. “If you think I was being rude, what would you call what you just did?”

 

Iranians are obsessed with superstitions and fears of being visited upon by a ghost. I thought that being born and raised in America would rid me of it, but mother had instilled the same compulsiveness on me: Silly rules like “only clip your fingernails in daylight, in a garden, on Mondays or Fridays, or a ghost will visit you.” Even my logical, scientifically-inclined father clipped his nails only on Mondays and Fridays. But a ghost was visiting us anyway. Why did grandmother come to live with us because grandfather died?

 

My mother was certain it was because grandmother had become homeless since grandfather’s house in Iran had been sold. Grandfather had always said his wife haunted him, but we never knew he meant it literally. I had only met him twice and my father never visited him at all. But it all made sense now. “So why didn’t she go live with one of father’s other siblings then?” I asked. My mother did not know the answers, but she did have the addresses of each of father’s siblings—people my father never spoke of, that I’d never met. They all lived in Tehran in a row of houses on one street at the edge of the city. When I flew there to ask them questions, my mother and I kept the secret from my father, lest he get angry that we went behind his back. Mother said grandmother mostly watched television while I was gone, mainly cooking shoes, even the ones involving pork.

 

I hadn’t visited Iran since I was seven years old. It felt odd on the airplane, being asked to wear a veil before departing. I took out the one my mother had packed for me in my carry-on bag and tied it around, under my chin. I spent just a week there, alternating nights with different siblings of my father. Each of their houses were identical since the row was made by the same builder. They all had grudges against each other. One wife told me that if she accidentally got mail meant for the other brother, she would throw it over the fence to their next-door house, rather than walk to the door and have to see them. A dry dust lot lay across the street. I asked each of my father’s siblings the same questions, trying to figure out what they knew. Was grandmother unhappy before she died? What did she want? Had they ever noticed anything strange in my late grandfather’s house?

 

Each of my father’s three brothers answered differently. They said they did not remember their mother much. The skinny, quiet one who rode a bicycle to his work said his mother had died of childbirth. “That’s not what I heard,” I said. “How could she have died of childbirth when her last child was born three years before she died?” The simple man shrugged his shoulders, indifferent. The brother that my father sometimes called once a year to wish a Happy New Year smiled and told me it was regrettable that my grandmother—his mother—had fallen to dysentery the way she had. “I can still remember the funeral, the way they buried her,” he told me. But I knew there had been no funeral, because there had been no grave. My father’s third brother claimed that there was no grave because the family was too poor. Then he leaned in as if conspiring and said, “I will show you Northern Iran one day when you come visit for real.” It was my father’s big sister, a spinster living by herself, who clucked her tongue and let it slide: “They strangled my mother,” she said. “None of them will admit it.” A bottle of black-market vodka later, my estranged aunt told me her own uncle had done the strangling. “It was for honor,” she laughed, before crawling to bed to pass out.

 

I returned to my parents’ apartment in New York with newfound empathy for the old woman. It was hard for me to imagine how she could have attracted ire in the conservative dress she always appeared in. I could see how maybe the platform shoes may have caused her to stand out, but for the most part, I thought she looked decent—not someone you’d murder to keep your name clean. I was aware that she had a temper, as evidenced by the broken television, and I also knew she had a foul mouth when she wanted to use it. Since I had returned, grandmother was making special pains to be in my way as much as possible. She was annoying on purpose—running in the hallway when we were all trying to go to sleep, hiding our keys and sometimes even our bills, flushing the toilet when someone was in the shower.

 

When I told my mother the theory about my grandmother’s murder by her own brother’s hands, she said, “This confirms it.” She told me her own mother had suspected that my father’s mother had been murdered as well. “She always insisted on it and I told her she was crazy,” my mother said. “Maybe she had an affair. Maybe she was pregnant.” I looked at my grandmother’s photograph that night and I studied the way she clutched her purse against her stomach, like a shield. Was she pregnant? Had she met someone else while my grandfather was fighting Russia?

 

I stopped grandmother on my way out one day. She was sitting at the dining-room table, studying my father’s leftover New York Times—the science section. I was not sure she even knew how to read English. “Grandmother,” I announced. “I know you’re grieved because your own brother killed you. I know.” She did not look up or respond. “If that’s why you’re haunting us, let me know what I can do to help you be at peace.”

 

She spoke to me directly, in Farsi, so softly that I had to come closer to hear. “You’re just trying to get rid of me,” she said.

 

She was right. But I had to stick to my agenda. “How can I help you?” I repeated firmly.

 

“I always wanted to live in America,” she said. Then she got up, turned around and left the room.

 

I approached my father in his home office and told him I couldn’t keep avoiding the subject anymore, that I knew he saw his mother too, that we had to figure out a way to get rid of her. “I always heard she was a harlot when she was alive,” he said, not looking away from the computer screen. “Now that I actually see her, I’m even more ashamed.” I told my father I didn’t understand what he was talking about, that his mother looked dressed perfectly proper to me. “She was a whore,” he replied. “My father was an idiot to grieve her death for so long.”

 

That night, I flipped through my mother’s family albums, trying to figure out what a whore might look like in Iran’s 1950’s. I had a hard time finding comparisons because it seemed that nobody revealed their dresses. Then it hit me: None of the women in my mother’s album wore dresses, not even modest ones that hit below the knee like my grandmother’s: They all wore veils, even if it wasn’t the law yet. “Your grandmother wanted to live in America,” my mother said, her own opinion. “Everyone could tell by how she dressed. They burned the most improper pictures of her. She may have had an affair, but it was a symptom of something else, her restlessness. They say an American visited her town and she became friends with him. He showed her pictures.”

 

I had an idea. On a weekend when my father was gone for business, my mother and I devised an experimental plan. We hired movers and had all of our Western furniture taken to storage. “Leave only the Persian carpets,” I told the burly men. In a traditional Iranian house, the only furniture consisted of wool cushions lined against the wall to lean against. My mother had cushions like this that she had brought from Iran when she and my father had first moved to America; now she took them out of the closet and filled them, fluffed them and set them against the walls. We cleared the apartment of every bed, every chair, anything that smacked of the West. By the time we were finished, our house looked more Iranian than the houses of my cousins who lived in Iran. Persian carpets lay wall to wall. We sat down, exhausted, and drank our tea.

 

Grandmother must have regretted throwing our television out of the window, because now she fondled the remote control for days after we re-decorated the apartment. She stood at the window and looked longingly at the cars outside, the stylish women walking on the sidewalks. She broke nothing. She seemed paler than usual. She would not speak to me anymore, often left the room whenever I entered. She looked more resigned than at peace.

 

Then, one day, I noticed I didn’t see her at all. My mother said she had not seen the old woman either. We searched the apartment together. She was nowhere to be found. “I think she’s gone,” I whispered, feeling somewhat guilty. “It worked.” My mother nodded her head solemnly, not looking particularly enthused. The trouble had finally ended. We were rid of her; she had no more interest in us. We had succeeded, or so I thought.

 

When my father returned from his trip, his eyes grew big when he saw what we’d done with the apartment. What had happened to the life he had built, all the adjustments they had made over the decades? He was furious. “Do you honestly expect me to sleep on a lambskin?” he screamed. “Where’s my bed? Are you going to tell me you had the toilet replaced with a hole too? That you switched out the toilet paper for a bucket of water?”

 

We never saw grandmother again. And that is when the trouble truly began. 

back to Contest #2