AIAW Featured Writer: Dena Afrasiabi

Dena Afrasiabi - Iranian American author and writer

July, 2002
Dad and I move for the third time in five years. Our new town in the Sierras has a population of 8,000. They hanged criminals here during the Gold Rush, the town's claim to fame. We arrive a week after I turn fifteen. Dad says we'll have a new adventure in Gold Country. No more Los Angeles smog. No red-faced drivers yelling through rolled-up windows. No emaciated drug addicts passed out in alleys behind our building in East Hollywood. No gunshots waking us in the night.

"No memories of Mom," I add. "No ghosts."

Afterlife
We're not Catholic, but Mom and Dad enrolled me in a Catholic school for fifth grade, a brick building with low-ceilinged classrooms that smelled like chalk and rotting fruit. The nuns talked about God and the afterlife, the rocky path to Heaven, the smooth paved path to Hell. In biology, we watched amoeba swim beneath our microscopes. The nun's voice droned in the background, punctuated by wet coughs. All I saw at first was a thick murky blackness specked with white, but then a pattern emerged: swirls and dots that moved slowly inside the black like a slide show of the afterlife, a place so jumbled that no one can tell where one shape ends and another begins.

Gold Country
Our house sits nestled at the bottom of the hill with five acres of woods behind, a creek running across the bottom. Dad tells me I'm not allowed to go down there on my own. A camellia grows next to the wrap-around porch; the single white blossom opens. Wild turkeys crowd the front lawn, their scarlet necks jiggling as they walk, and I run after them, yelling "gobble gobble gobble," just to watch them scatter, to see the fear in the movements of their feet. A small lone rose bush grows in the backyard, all the blossoms nibbled away. We hear the deer as they descend the hill behind our house, but we don't see them.

If Mom were here, the yard would teem with roses, calla lilies, mums, dahlias, and sunflowers. She would plant orange trees and tomato vines, a vegetable patch with Japanese eggplants and butternut squash. She would hang bird feeders on the porch with sugar water for the hummingbirds, and seeds for the finches. She'd point out different species and I would repeat their names, but forget what they looked like by the next time I saw them. She would interrupt me in the middle of telling her a story, and ask me to listen to a birdsong I didn't recognize. She would tie bars of soap to the stems with yellow rope to keep the deer away. She'd scold me for walking on the new white carpet in muddy sneakers, and tell me not to jump onto a window ledge. I pretend to slow dance with the snow-capped mountains, arms sprawled across the window like a starfish.

Dad unpacks boxes silently in the kitchen, filling cupboards with ceramic plates and cups purchased from different yard sales. He slides medical textbooks and worn volumes of Persian poetry onto built-in shelves. I stand inside each high-ceilinged room and shout hello, just to hear my own voice echo across the empty space: hello, hello, hello.

Magic
Our new neighbor comes over when Dad's at the hardware store. He hands me a basket of chocolate chip cookies and asks me what my dad does for a living.

"He's a physician," I say.

"A magician?"

I don't correct him, mostly because I want his mistake to be the truth. I can tell from the amusement in his eyes that he doesn't believe me.

He smiles. "You must know a lot of tricks."

"Not really," I say, "Real magic can't be pre-meditated. It only occurs unprompted."

"You have strange ideas for a kid. How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?"

"Fifteen." Dad says I should take growth hormones; I'm too small for my age. And too skinny, with breasts the size of crab apples and hip bones that jut out like a boy's.

"My daughter Ariadne's fifteen. The two of you should meet."

I smile and tell him thank you. I tell him I would like to meet her. I don't tell him the last thing I want is another friend to lose.

Ariadne
Her white cowboy hat slides down over her eyes and she's constantly pushing the brim back up, even though she knows it will slide down again. She wears gold earrings the shape of horseshoes, a silver belt buckle. Her plaid shirts have gold threads woven into the fabric, and pearl snaps that look like bits of abalone shell in the light.

She's never lived anywhere but California, but she talks with a slight drawl and looks like she should be holding a lasso, leading a herd of cattle. But instead of cowboy boots, she wears tan moccasins with blue and yellow plastic beads strung on dirty suede tassels. Her blonde hair hangs in two long braids beneath the hat. The braids come undone because she doesn't know the right way to braid them; no one's ever shown her how.

The Garden
Dad changes his name to Cyrus, after Cyrus the Great. He lets his dark beard grow thick and long, with a few red strands that glint in the sunlight. He says the new name and the new beard will inspire him to create his Persian garden, a tribute to my mom.

"But Mom was American," I say.

"Plants don't have ethnicities, Forugh." He hammers nails into the wall above his office desk, hangs a framed photo of the Alborz mountains.

"What does a Persian garden look like?"

He takes down a heavy book from a shelf and shows me a picture of Bagh-e-Eram, a garden in Shiraz, Dad's hometown. Cypress trees and palms surround a long, blue-tiled walkway; pink roses line a narrow strip of dirt on either side. Everything Dad brought from Iran he keeps in his office: books with spines peeling, old photo albums of friends he hasn't seen in decades.

"Does this mean we're going to stay here for a while?"

"Maybe."




Dena Afrasiabi

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