I haven’t thought about her for so long that I have forgotten everything. I don’t remember her last words. She and her husband Ali came to see us for good-bye. They told us that they were moving and that no one would know their address. They were going in hiding. I never saw them again after that. Ali was the first to die. I cried so much for him; I was going insane.
Do you remember her face Maman?
Sometimes I see women who look like her and I picture her in my head. She had beautiful, thin brows. And her hair; it was smooth, black and silky.
Do you remember her last words?
No. I don’t remember. I never thought of her again. For years I worked hard to forget what happened. I erased memories and thoughts and events until there were only pieces left. And now that I try to put them back together, the pieces don’t quit fit anymore. It’s like dropping a jar full of pebbles into the sand, then watching them disperse either underneath the sand or into the ocean. It’s like losing a part of you, a part of your heart, a part of your soul. She was a part of me. We were always together ever since we were little girls. She was the trouble-maker, the rebel, not wearing her scarf properly, her bangs always showing, never wearing dresses or skirts. She and Ali could have had a normal life, with a big house and children. But they had different motives. They had another purpose in life. She didn’t want to be a mother or a housewife. She was Mina and I loved her a lot. And now I don’t remember anymore. I just remember knowing that she was gone. Yes, she was gone.

Their war was pathetic. Their battles never solved their problems, their disagreements or differences. Monica Sadler and Dave Keith were the unhappiest couple on Magnolia Boulevard. They slept on the same bed but they hardly ever kissed or held each in their arms before falling asleep or made love. They fought, not speaking to each other for days and then made up, reuniting again, apologizing to each other. It was a routine for them. Dave would come home, his shirt wrinkled after a long day at the construction site, his glasses skewed with dirt all over them, his breath stinking from cigarettes. He would drop his briefcase on the living room floor, not really caring where it would land, his designs and maps falling out, and then he would lie still on the couch, tired and bored. His wife Monica would appear from her office, wearing nothing but a silky, black bra and grey shorts, holding a violin bow in one hand, with a I’m-sick-and-tired-of-you-coming-home-looking-like-crap look and then she would disappear into her office again to write notes.
Dave Keith was an architect. Monica Sadler taught violin lessons at home and sometimes at Jefferson Middle School. They were married for two years and had nothing in common. They met at Monica’s friend’s wedding and claimed to their families and friends that they had fallen in love or that it was love at first sight. But the truth was that they were two desperate, lonely people in their mid-30s who needed a secure, official, permanent love, and not one of those flings or on-and-off kind of relationships. They dated for about two months and then one summer night, when Monica turned 36, Dave asked her to marry him because he was tired of unsteady relationships and failed romances. He wanted a wife. Not a trophy wife, but one who would love him in sickness and in health, who would be there when he came home late at night, weary and worn-out, the kind of wife who would never leave him. Except Monica wasn’t the typical wife. She was the type that partied with her girl friends every Friday and Saturday night, the kind that was too lazy to work everyday, the kind that hated cooking and cleaning and seldom ever said the words “I love you”.
They fought with each other over small things, like why Dave hated scrambled eggs and cranberry juice, or why Monica refused to learn cooking and didn’t have a proper job. They fought over the fact that they were never really in love with each other and should have never married. They fought over why they didn’t have kids or why their house was too big. Then they made up and Dave told her he loved her but neither one of them knew for sure.
Their war was pathetic, so was their marriage and relationship. Two years passed and then one evening Monica packed her stuff into a big, black suitcase and left. She never told Dave that she was two-months pregnant with his baby or that she was moving to London to play for a professional orchestra. She never told him that deep down she knew he had grown to love her, that she knew he wanted to hold her and touch her and watch her play because it was erotic and she played so beautifully. She knew from the way he kissed her neck as she played the violin in her silky, black bra, from the way he touched her and smelled her hair. She knew but never told him that she didn’t grow to love him, that she could never return his love.

Doing the laundry is therapeutic; it’s like taking a tranquilizer that calms you and erases all the bad thoughts. As the clothes turn upside down inside the washing machines, your thoughts do the same. Some get recycled and others are deleted. Doing the laundry is a process of recycling, cleansing, erasing and saving. When everything is done and the machines stop turning, and you take out the whites and colors, the process is completed. And you feel satisfied.
I like doing the laundry. I like putting clothes inside the machines and taking them out, filling them with bleach and softeners, and then watching as they turn upside down, inside and out. As I walk inside the Laundromat, I smell freshness; it’s like spring air. And I breathe in and out. Inhale. Exhale. And my thoughts are cleansed, so is my soul. Everything is clean and purified and fresh.
Today was the first day of a new year and Maman asked me to do the laundry. So I did.

Calling them great is an understatement. No, they were far beyond great. They were extraordinary children. They were anything but ordinary. Grandma’s children were too pure, too good, too great, too ambitious, too important to die. On the surface they seemed like ordinary kids who loved to play, who walked on the sandy beach, made faces for the camera, and secretly ate their mother’s hidden pot of blackberry jam. But beneath their sparkling, killer eyes, they were fighters of freedom. They wanted independence and justice. They were too young to die under the hands of the unjust, the unworthy. They were too young to suffer what they suffered. They were too young, too beautiful to die.
I have looked at their black and white photographs. Aunt Mina’s keeps coming back to me, her angelic face, her simple, sincere half-smile in every photo, her short, silky, black hair. A tomboy. Maman says Mina wore slacks at a time when women were expected to wear skirts. At Maman’s wedding Mina had her hair done at the salon and hated it so much that she’d combed it back straight. She was different from other girls. All you have to do is look at her eyes and then you’d know. There is something about those eyes of hers. They sparkle, they talk. Mina’s eyes talk. They tell you that this girl is not ordinary, that she will do great things, that her heart is a pot of gold, big, full of love. That she is a rebel, stubborn, ready for anything.
I am trying to picture that snowy night when the Shah’s secret police-The SAVAK-shot her in the back. I am trying to see Aunt Mina running into the night, struggling to pick up her feet in the snowy field. She runs 100 meters, Grandma says, and then she falls, just 26 years old. Grandma tells me she didn’t cry because Grandpa had prepared her. She says that when they got the news, Grandpa held up his hands in prayer and thanked God that his Mina was killed for a cause, that she hadn’t died in a car accident or from something ordinary. He was proud that his daughter had died a fighter, a martyr.
I ask Grandma how she accepted the death of her children. She says God. I left it all to God and accepted his doings, she says matter-of-factly. I don’t ask her anymore because I start crying, for them, for the pain that Maman and Grandma went and still go through. And I know that I have to tell their story. Somehow, in some way, I have to tell why they were so extraordinary, why they were so invaluable, why they are so missed. I have to tell their story because they deserve to be remembered and known for what they did, for who they were, for what they could have been. Calling them extraordinary is not an overstatement, it’s not just a mother’s love, it’s not her exaggeration and pride, it’s a fact.

So I sit behind the glass window to watch the rain, to sip my hot coffee, to face an empty street on Christmas Day. And I like this setting, the rain even, the by passers who look for an open coffee shop. I am glad that I am not in New York yet, that I’m here with mom and dad and my sister and grandma. I like that it is raining and I’m drinking coffee and it’s not bitter anymore. I love the steam that rises from my cup, the foggy windows, and the cheery faces that smile. I love it Mom and you were so right to tell me that America is heaven. You were so right that it couldn’t get any better than this for us. I hated this place so much at first and I thought that you betrayed me by taking me away from a land I was just getting to know. I thought that I wouldn’t get anywhere here and I was wrong mom. I was wrong.
So I sit now, with her, and we enjoy the warmness of our cups and we watch the rain. And we both love it. I don’t have to say anything. I can just sit still and indulge the air, the aroma of Christmas, and be the happiest girl in the world. Mom, dad, thanks for bringing me here. I will write for you always, and I know that you will read and I hope that you see that it’s all because of you.

He woke up the next day in his hotel room with a hangover. He pushed his blanket aside, sat up, reached for a bottle of aspirin, then dropped his head back down on the pillow. Damn, he said out loud. He had class today and he wouldn’t make it. The sun was bothering him; the blinds were slightly open. New York was killing him; the city stank, the cab drivers were crazy, honking aggressively, and everything was too damn expensive. He couldn’t make his body move. He was tired, exhausted, and felt paralyzed. An hour passed and he finally got out of bed, took a shower, got dressed as hurriedly as he could, and walked out of the hotel with his one suitcase. As he got into a cab, he remembered the terrible funeral and felt a knot in his stomach. He asked the driver to get him to the airport as fast as he could because he couldn’t stand the sight of Manhattan anymore. Because he couldn’t breathe and everything made him sick and he wanted to throw up. The driver, a friendly, middle-aged man with a heavy Indian accent, told him not to worry; they would get there in no time.
Inside the airport, he got himself a cup of coffee and sat himself down on a chair. He had never forgotten her and had hated himself for not having that last coffee. He had thought about her a lot during those four years that she was gone, and he had read her emails over and over again. He had realized that she had given him more than he had given her, that she had cared for him too much, that she had always been there as a friend. He had denied his feelings, his growing attraction towards her. He had convinced himself that she was a student and he a professor and that nothing should happen. He had convinced himself because he had feared that those feelings could turn into a fatal attraction.
And now that he sat inside a grim airport, drinking a cold, bitter coffee, he could no longer deny those feelings, feelings that could have grown into a deeper love had they not been dismantled. He threw his empty cup away and headed for his gate. He would go back home, eat a nice meal, and he would let her go like he did four years ago.
The end

We have gathered in the living room, drinking tea again, eating Maman’s chocolate cake. And Grandma is telling us about her house in Mashad where she used to rent rooms to young college girls. Tomorrow is Christmas day and we are telling Grandma about the things people will be doing. It’s like our own new year, my sister tells her. Families gather and spend the whole day together. Somehow the conversation moves to our apartment in Tehran, the basement and the big walnut tree that grew in the garden. I suddenly miss those days. The days when I belonged to Tehran, when I was little, living in a house with a walnut tree, with a red bicycle that Daddy bought when I was seven. The days when I stood, watching the tree in awe, feeling small.
The night’s conversation ends a little after 12 and everyone goes to bed. And I stay awake to write about Tehran. Again.

I enjoyed my coffee finally; it was perfect. Not too bitter, not too sweet, but a perfect balance between the two. It was two days before Christmas. She was looking for ice-cream in the frozen aisle and I was sipping my drink, waiting. The shoppers were buying their Christmas foods and goodies, chocolates and sweets, Christmas cards and Santa hats, Champaign bottles and expensive wines. There was no line for caffeine addicts like myself; the little Starbucks inside the grocery store was practically empty. Just as I was savoring my last sip, she showed up, holding a bucket of ice-cream, and told me to get up. Outside, a woman in a Santa hat was asking for donations. I didn’t have a dollar bill.

We have talked about colors before, haven’t we? We have talked about the colors of autumn, colors that make life lovable, livable, colors that give us hope and faith. We have talked about orange and auburn and red and why they are your favorite colors, why they light up your day and make you glow. We have talked about the colors of day and night, the baby blue of the morning sky and the pitch black of the night sky. And we never forgot your mesmerizing green eyes, did we? Or your sister’s sparkling, dark brown eyes?
Tomorrow we should talk about the colors of winter. We should talk about the red sky right before a snowy day and the white snow that disguises everything. We should always talk because we always listen to each other, as good friends, as good sisters. And then you can tell me how to be a better person, a better friend, a better writer. You can tell me and I promise to take it all down, memorize every word.
A cheer to the colors of our flags, the colors of our homes, the colors of life.

She had her coffee in a red mug by the fireplace, her notebook and novel sitting next to her, the sun beaming inside through the blinds. The house needed cleaning; the tables needed dusting, so did the window sills and the kitchen cabinets. She was hosting a party that night for her girlfriends. None of the girls celebrated Christmas, and yet they had all agreed to throw a party anyway, get in the holiday spirit and enjoy each other’s company. They always had fun when they got together on Saturday nights, dancing, drinking, gossiping, discussing their future plans, their marriages and break-ups. She finished her last sip of coffee and put the mug aside. It was the first day of winter and everything seemed perfect. She was relaxed and decided to take a walk. She would do the cleaning later.