When my father tells it, he skips all of this guessing, because he’s the greatest storyteller of the family, and he has a nose for when the strange turns of history begin to sound too much like myths.
He only speaks what we know for certain.
He says, “Your great-great-great-grandfather earned all this land. He was a doctor, the best in Isfahan. At that time a pasha in India had a daughter who was sick—probably with a mild schizophreniform disorder, but back then, they had no diagnosis for these things. So he prescribed a sedative. She calmed down and eventually grew out of it.”
That’s it.
To me, this was tightfisted.
What about the court of the pasha?
Was the daughter beautiful?
I will tell you, reader, that I imagine her like Kelly J., who looks nothing like a pasha’s daughter, but very much like a Disney princess.
How long would it take the doctor to caravan to India, and what did he do in the heat of the day, as the camels lay on the ground resting?
I would imagine he walked into the palace and looked up to see the daughter watching from a terrace above him in the grand hall. At that exact moment he fell forever in love with her.
But she was wracked with convulsion and delusion and horrific visions.
In her bedroom, he would submit the full weight of his knowledge to healing her condition, knowing all the while that his success would only separate them forever.
And she too might have loved the Persian doctor. Cursed though she was with illness—she might have come to prefer it for his company.
The tragedy of love would unfold as the doctor could never sit by and watch the princess in such pain. He would heal her and together they would suffer the duller ache of longing. I would imagine him trudging behind a long caravan back to Isfahan, broken.
But my father would make no concessions to mythmaking, when the truth was available.
“The pasha gave him his weight in gold,” my father would say, “and once again in jewels. And your great-great-great-grandfather returned home. He bought all the land around Ardestan.”
That was all we knew. He returned with enough treasure to buy thousands of acres. Enfolded in them were mountains, and a river, and enough villages to make him a local government unto himself.
“If only he had been fat,” joked my father, “we’d be twice rich. But your father’s fathers were all cursed with heroic fitness.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“It’s true,” he says. “You don’t think it’s true?”
When we have this conversation I am in the kitchen in Oklahoma, where they make fun of kids with hairy arms and bubble butts. I imagine my father, a portly bear who I have never seen move faster than a brisk walk.
“Well, it’s true. You descend from kings. Good-looking ones.”
Suddenly, I realize he’s saying that because my mom told him about school. About Brandon Goff pointing at how my shirt doesn’t go straight down my back, and shouting to everyone that I have a bubble butt.
This happened in the halls, and Kelly J. wasn’t around, but still.
I didn’t say anything to my dad because I’m not even sure how he knew. I guess my sister saw me stretching out my shirts on the back of a chair and told my mom, and they figured it out. I didn’t say anything to my dad. It’s not like he could do anything but talk on the phone anyway.
We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t any great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.
Anyway, that’s how come we had all that land.
* * *
IN OKLAHOMA WE ARE the opposite of kings.
Everything we own is inside a hard gray suitcase. It is mostly coats and papers. There is one squished shoebox full of photos that my mom guards, and cries over when she thinks we’re asleep.
We left all the toys, and the books, and my candy bars. It has been years since we left Iran—but I wonder about the candy bars.
One of my last memories of Iran is my dad coming home with a case of Orich candy bars a few weeks before we had to escape. When people here ask me what kind of candy I like, I say, “Orich!”
And we go through the exact same script every time.
They frown. So I explain. “They’re chocolate-covered coconut.”
“Oh, like Mounds bars. We have those here.”
Everyone is always insisting they have things here, but they do not have Orich, or my father. That is two things.
They have everything else here.
The grocery stores scared us at first. They have chips that are all the same shape and stack on top of each other in a tube. But they don’t have Orich bars. I say, “Like a Mounds bar, but they taste different.”
“Oh?” say the grownies, as if they don’t believe me. “How?”
I don’t know how to explain. I barely remember the taste of Orich. I only know I ate a Mounds bar and it wasn’t my favorite most amazing thing in my mouth … so it must be different.
I usually say, “I also like Kit Kat.”
They smile, because I finally answered something normal.
I don’t say that in Iran, Kit Kats aren’t broken into bars; they’re one flat square.
Whenever my dad brought home a case of candy bars, we ran to the door. I was just a five-year-old kid. My sister was eight. Our dad had such a habit of bringing home cases of chocolate that my mom had made me a place to store them. She took a clown doll and sewed giant baggy pants around it that ruffled out with dozens of little pockets. Back then she sewed us all kinds of toys. She even made a step stool the shape of a big red bus—stuffed with cushions so I could reach my bed.
Anyway, we’d run up to my dad. “Baba!”
He was a dentist who worked above a candy shop. They used to joke that it was the perfect arrangement.
We opened our mouths so that Baba could look.
* * *
I remember the taste of his thumb better than Orich.
He would look in my mouth, push on my molars to make them perfectly straight. I used to think my Baba could change the shape of teeth as easily as the great hero Rostam could move mountains.
After he checked our teeth, I would hug his right side, because he kept cigarettes in his left breast pocket.
This is a memory that has no sound, but probably it should have my Baba’s laugh, which was such a rich and resonant chortle that it fills rooms of my memory that he was not even in.
He was still thin at that time, with a bushy red mustache. I only remember him eating kebab and ice cream.
He presented the last case of Orich—probably thirty or forty bars.
* * *
From here, the memory splits into three dessert-oriented stories.
The first is the myth of the Baker and Tamar.
The second is the legend of my sister’s cleverness.
The third is the history of a clown’s underpants.
* * *
YOU SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING.
In school they have dances that other kids go to. There are about six reasons I don’t go. One, they’re at night and you need a ride. Two, I don’t know what they are like. Three, I don’t dance. Four, Brandon Goff goes. Five, his friends still call me bubble butt and it’s become a “thing.” Six, no one ever asked me.