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| Behnaz Sarafpour, Iranian designer |
Her story begins when she is arrested in Tehran for
leafleting against the repression of the Shah of Iran. She is a student, just
19. Her family gets her out of prison within the hour, but they are afraid her
activities will endanger the family. They find a young Iranian man to marry
her, a doctor in Baltimore. Maryam and Kiyan get to know each other in Tehran and by the
time he returns to America, Kiyan “fills every inch of Maryam’s head.” Within
days of a proxy marriage, she follows him.
In America Maryam, to stave off homesickness, “used to set a
tumbler of club soda on her nightstand. She used to go to sleep listening to
the bubbles bounce against the glass with a faint, steady, peaceful whispering
sound that had reminded her of the fountains in her family’s courtyard back
home.” She becomes an American citizen and has a son, Sami, who refuses to
speak Farsi from the time he is five. When Sami is 14, Kiyan dies and Maryam
raises Sami by herself, working as an administrator at a pre-school.
We meet Maryam in present day in an airport where she and
her son and his wife Ziba are waiting for the arrival of their adopted Korean
baby. An American family, the Donaldsons, is also waiting, with balloons,
signs, lots of fanfare. Bitsy, the American mother, in her expansive way, invites
Maryam’s family to celebrate this occasion every year, hoping the two little
girls will grow up together and become friends.
Maryam falls in love with the perfect little baby, Susan,
whom she takes care of two days a week while Ziba goes to work. Maryam dresses
with the utmost care, even to babysit. In America, she felt like a guest.
“Still and forever a guest, on her very best behavior.” Sami and Ziba
increasingly fall under the spell of the American Donaldsons, however, even
buying a house a few doors down from them. Bitsy Donaldson has all kinds of
ideas about child-raising, about which she is very vocal.
As Anne Tyler tells it, the story afford all kinds of
opportunities to contrast the American and Iranian households. Maryam does not
get along with Ziba’s family, particularly, because they left Iran when the
Shah was deposed, having been in favor of him. She does not talk politics with
them, but they share favorite foods and new year’s customs. The Americans have
their preferred ways of doing things, all of which becomes complicated for
Maryam when Bitsy’s mother dies of cancer and, over time, her widowed father
becomes fascinated by Maryam.
Maryam does not return Dave’s interest. He is rumpled and
shambling, though fascinated by Iranian culture. To Dave, however, “other women
seemed lackluster when he compared them with Maryam. They didn’t have her calm
dark gaze or her elegant, expressive hands. They didn’t convey her sense of
stillness and self-containment, standing alone in a crowd.” Maryam and Dave
begin spending time together, and both the Iranian and the American families
begin wondering what this means.
Maryam tells Dave it isn’t easy being foreign. “You can
start to believe that your life is defined by your foreignness. You
think everything would be different if only you belonged.” But Dave tells her,
“You belong. You belong just as much as I do, or, who, or Bitsy or … It’s just
like Christmas. [The little girls had complained they wanted a ‘real
Christmas.’] We all think the others belong more.”
When Dave asks Maryam to marry him at a big family party,
Maryam is embarrassed into saying “yes.” But the next morning she tells
everyone it was a mistake. She cannot marry Dave. “He is so American,” she
tells her son. “He takes up so much space. He seems to be unable to let a room
stay as it is; always he has to alter it, to turn on the fan or raise the
thermostat or play a record or open the curtains. He has cluttered my life with
cell phones and answering machines and a fancy-shmancy teapot that makes my tea
taste like metal.” She goes back to her simple, orderly life with her cat and
doesn’t see Dave any more. She does notice how small her life has become,
however.
In the end, Maryam runs into Dave, they talk. Maryam is
again invited to a Donaldson party. She plans to attend, she gets dressed, but
it gets late, she isn’t sure. Then, she looks out of her house and all of the
Donaldsons are on her doorstep! When she doesn’t answer they start to walk
away. Maryam calls to them, “Wait!”
Anne Tyler was herself married to an Iranian immigrant, the
child psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi. The character Maryam must surely be drawn
from life. Tyler was also raised a Quaker in isolated circumstances and
subsequently had a strong sense of being an outsider. William Faulkner once
said, “No wonder people in the rest of the world don’t like us, since we seem
to have neither taste nor courtesy, and know and believe in nothing but money.”
The figure of the lovely, self-possessed Maryam is a fine portrayal of a woman
for whom taste is a way of living.
