I didn’t get it.
“Park never guessed it was me,” Laleh said. “He never guesses right.”
“It’s because you have such a good poker face,” I said.
“Probably.”
I loved my little sister. Really.
It was impossible not to.
It wasn’t the kind of thing I could ever say to anyone. Not out loud, at least. I mean, guys are not supposed to love their little sisters. We can look out for them. We can intimidate whatever dates they bring home, although I hoped that was still a few years away for Laleh. But we can’t say we love them. We can’t admit to having tea parties or playing dolls with them, because that’s unmanly.
But I did play dolls with Laleh. And I had tea parties with her (though I insisted we serve real tea, not imaginary tea, and certainly not anything from Tea Haven). And I was not ashamed of it.
I just didn’t tell anyone about it.
That’s normal.
Right?
* * *
At last, Laleh’s story ran out of steam, and she began scooping spaghetti into her mouth with her spoon. My sister always cut her spaghetti up instead of twirling it, which I felt defeated the point and purpose of spaghetti.
I used the lull in conversation to reach across the table for more pasta, but Dad pressed the salad bowl into my hands instead.
There was no point arguing with Stephen Kellner about dietary indiscretions.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
Salad was inferior to spaghetti in every possible way.
* * *
After dinner, Dad washed the dishes and I dried them while I waited for my electric kettle to reach 180º Fahrenheit, which is what I liked for steeping my genmaicha.
Genmaicha is a Japanese green tea with toasted rice in it. Sometimes the toasted rice pops like popcorn, leaving little white fluffy clouds in the tea. It’s grassy and nutty and delicious, kind of like pistachios. And it’s the same greenish yellow color as pistachios too.
No one else in my family drank genmaicha. No one ever drank anything besides Persian tea. Mom and Dad would sniff and sip sometimes, if I made a cup of something and begged them to taste it, but that was it.
My parents didn’t know genmaicha had toasted rice in it, mostly because I didn’t want Mom to know. Persians have very strong feelings about the proper applications of rice. No True Persian ever popped theirs.
When the dishes were done, Dad and I settled in for our nightly tradition. We sank into the tan suede couch shoulder to shoulder—the only time we ever sat like this—and Dad cued up our next episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Every night, Dad and I watched exactly one episode of Star Trek. We watched them in broadcast order, starting with The Original Series, though things got complicated after the fifth season of The Next Generation, since its sixth season overlapped Deep Space Nine.
I had long since seen every episode of each series, even The Animated Series. Probably more than once, though watching with Dad stretched back to when I was little, and my memory was a bit hazy. But that didn’t matter.
One episode a night, every night.
That was our thing.
It felt good to have a thing with Dad, when I could have him to myself for forty-seven minutes, and he could act like he enjoyed my company for the span of one episode.
Tonight, it was “Who Watches the Watchers?” which is an episode from the third season where a pre-warp culture starts to worship Captain Picard as a deity called The Picard.
I could understand their impulse.
Captain Picard was, without doubt, the best captain from Star Trek. He was smart; he loved “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”; and he had the best voice ever: deep and resonant and British.
My own voice was far too squeaky to ever captain a starship.
Not only that, but he was bald and still managed to be confident, which was good, because I had seen pictures of the men on my mom’s side of the family, and they all shared the distinguished Picard Crescent.
I didn’t take after Stephen Kellner, Teutonic Übermensch, in many ways, but I hoped I would keep a full head of hair like his, even if mine was black and curly. And needed a haircut, according to Übermensch standards.
Sometimes I thought about getting the sides faded, or maybe growing my hair out and doing a man-bun.
That would drive Stephen Kellner crazy.
* * *
Captain Picard was delivering his first monologue of the episode when the doot-doot klaxon of Mom’s computer rang through the house. She was getting a video call. Dad paused the show for a second and glanced up the stairs.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “We’re being hailed.” Dad smiled at me, and I smiled back. Dad and I never smiled at each other—not really—but we were still in our magic forty-seven-minute window where the normal rules didn’t apply.
Dad preemptively turned up the volume on the TV. Sure enough, after a second, Mom started yelling in Farsi at her computer.
“Jamsheed!” Mom shouted. I could hear her even over the musical swell right before the act break.
For some reason, whenever she was talking over the computer, Mom had to make sure the sound of her voice reached low Earth orbit.
“Chetori toh?” she bellowed. That’s Farsi for “How are you,” but only if you are familiar with the person you are speaking to, or older than them. Farsi has different ways of talking to people, depending on the formality of the situation and your relationship to the person you’re addressing.
The thing about Farsi is, it’s a very deep language: deeply specific, deeply poetic, deeply context-sensitive.
For instance, take my Mom’s oldest brother, Jamsheed.
Dayi is the word for uncle. But not just uncle, a specific uncle: your mother’s brother. And it’s not only the word for uncle—it’s also the relationship between you and your uncle. So I could call Dayi Jamsheed my dayi, but he could call me dayi also, as a term of endearment.
My knowledge of Farsi consisted of four primary vectors: (1) familial relations; (2) food words, because Mom always called the Persian food she cooked by its proper name; (3) tea words, because, well, I’m me; and (4) politeness phrases, the sort you learn in middle school foreign language classes, though no middle school in Portland has ever offered Farsi as an option.
The truth was, my Farsi was abysmal. I never really learned growing up.
“I didn’t think you’d ever use it,” Mom told me when I asked her why, which didn’t make any sense, because Mom had Persian friends here in the States, plus all her family back in Iran.