Fiction

Fereshteh Molavi

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A nurse with a white form in her hand comes to the waiting area and calls a name in her sharp voice. Hastily throwing the tabloid on the side table, the little girl’s mom stands up to follow the nurse. The girl runs after her, but her mom orders her to stop by nodding and flapping her hands. I don’t see her expression, for her back is toward me. Her arms extend in the air in vain, and come back to her sides slowly, like frail wings of a baby bird. I close my eyes and lean the back of my head against the wall. I try to see my mom in my mind. I don’t. I remember, though, that I stopped at the threshold of the ward, perplexedly gazing at her pale face with a shiny smile. Half lying, half sitting, she nodded at me to come to her. I was transfixed. Dad, stood behind me, put his warm hand on my shoulder and pushed me a bit forward. I stepped in clumsily. My arms extended towards mom. In the middle of the room, while I spotted a big doll, beet-faced, in a cradle next to Mom, I stopped again. My arms fell down feebly.

I open my eyes to seek the girl. Standing in the space between room and corridor, she watches the casual going and coming of orderlies pushing patients on stretchers. I can see only her profile and one of her two black braids. I take my eyes off her and watch the signs here and there, on the wall, all in Spanish. I try to decode words. I did the same, baby, when Mom said those words. It was a while after the big red-faced doll had been taken out by a nurse with a huge bouncing bust. My head was in Mom’s lap and she was caressing my hair gently and quietly. “Honey, you’re wearing your sweater the wrong way out again.” She said. I just shrugged. She mumbled something and moved my head up. While Mom was trying to help me right my sweater, I heard Dad, in the midst of Mom’s rebuke saying, “after all, she was born in the wrong time …”Mom’s muttering response interrupted him. I was struggling to bring my head out of the tight turtle-necked sweater; I couldn’t see his face. His words made no sense to me, but I recognized a trace of sad sarcasm in his tone.

 The very pregnant blonde, leaning her head against the very young freckled guy’s drooped shoulder, has, now, a sweet pale smile on her face that makes her look like the perpetually smiling woman next to her. I wonder if the charm of her smile comes from a family inheritance, or the serene flow of the guy’s murmur, or the pleasure of touching her belly. Her long narrow white fingers are rotating softly and constantly, as if performing a religious ritual.  I can’t help putting my sweaty palm on my belly. I hope you don’t think that I’m doing something wrong, baby. But if you do, I’ll remind you of my dad’s attempt to take away the blame. Not that I expect you to understand it, but that I understood it eventually. That day, in the hospital, while striving to get rid of the suffocating sweater and digesting the presence of the beet-faced doll, his words didn’t evoke curiosity in me. They were carved in my mind, though. Dad never repeated them, at least not in front of me. But he replaced them with a clearly expressive nodding gesture, whenever I did something wrong in my exclusively odd way. He also avoided talking, in public or private, about the traumatic turning point in his world. Any mention of the coup d’etat or anything else refreshing the anguish of the time when Mossadeq was removed from power, and its aftermath, was as if taboo. Nonetheless, gradually I learned about it, either by hearing, on and off, his mournful words, loaded with a long-held grudge when he got drunk with his friends at home, or by asking anybody else about that time. That I was born on the night of the coup d’etat, immediately after Dad was arrested as a supporter of Mossadeq, cracked the code of his words in the hospital where my sister was born, in the right time. However, it was some years later, in the office of the gynecologist who took the risk of performing abortion, that I felt the deep bitterness of my dad’s words. Staring at the gaudy fluorescent ceiling light, I sipped this poisonous bitterness, feeling it creep noxiously along my veins. Deep inside, something else was also happening. In contrast with the sort of painful relief I’d experienced through being conscious of removing the embryo from my body, I felt, more than ever, a burning desire to hold a baby, not in my womb, but in my bosom.

The mother goddess, shiny brown in turquoise sari, is now observing her creatures with compassion and satisfaction. Fascinated by this simple scene, I reluctantly note the vibration of my cell phone. It’s Shalini, ensuring me they will be here as soon as they can. I want to tell her about the mesmeric tableau that is in front of me. I bet she would be enchanted even more than me if she were here now. After all, it’s she who calls me to join her watching through the window the parade of the mother duck and her little baby ducklings. Yes, I’m talking about our right neighbour and her kids, baby, when they march toward the park near our house. She is a plump woman blessed with health, beauty, and the privileges of an American upper-middle-class family. Contrary to her, Shalini is from a low-middle-class family in South India, which rightfully boasts of sending their brainy eldest girl to a top US university such as Yale. Shalini has brought her asthma and nostalgia along with her to the land of opportunity. Graduated in Economics, she’s got a humble job at a small company in Hartford in the hope of saving some money for her dowry, by following a strict budget. She eats almost nothing other than homemade veggie foods, and drinks a lot of free tap water, often flavoured with herbal teas mailed to her from back home, in small boxes full of inexpensive local stuff. Such a diet makes Shalini so twiggy that sometimes I worry about her. Her body is nothing other than bones and dark skin. But she puts her slimness down to her genes. When asthma hits her, she looks more than ever like a twig, bending and falling under the pressure of a nasty wind scattering her smelly breath. I pray that she won’t have an attack while we stand at the window to watch the parade. It’s not fair of you to think that I do this just to avoid the smell. True, Shalini always smells of garlic, for she sucks on fresh cloves that she has put into her mouth. But, believe it or not, I pray because I wish for that devil disease not to ruin her pleasure at watching the happy parade toward the playground. At such times she dreams about going back home, marrying with a decent guy, and raising a prosperous family. How do I know? Well, there is no doubt that Shalini is shy and taciturn. Nevertheless, one late afternoon, when we were watching her favourite scene, she told me that her golden dream is having a big family with healthy babies. Now, if she’d been here she could have envied how graciously the Indian mother goddess, trailed by her kids, is leaving the room, following the nurse with a blue form in her hand. That late afternoon, I had laughed loudly, and when I noticed her awkward look, I said to her that my dream was having only one baby, rather than many.

While Shalini didn’t like the idea of having an only child, Franca and I couldn’t imagine having more than one child. It made no difference whether that baby would be a boy or a girl — yet Shalini and I liked to play the guessing game when Franca, out of the blue, became pregnant. We had no way to quench our curiosity. She’d refused to have an ultrasound, for she believes it’s against the natural way. Only Shalini and I knew a secret that was at odds with this belief. We never mentioned it, though. It was a long ago, before her trip to Havana. Our landlady was away, and the three of us had dinner at the kitchen table. Franca and I were drinking Brazilian Chardonnay and Shalini accompanied us with her glass of tap water. Sounds weird, baby, but Franca, coming from a village in south Italy, is even more taciturn than Shalini. Not that she’s shy. No way! Just looks like she enjoys her silence, much as a devoted monk or guru who has taken a vow does. Yet that night, her face all flushed, she said that she was so dying to have a baby that she’d done a bit of research on sperm donation. Shalini, with her big brown eyes wide open, looked so shocked that Franca stopped talking. It was too late, though, for her odd words had already triggered an asthma attack. The next day, Shalini tried to convince us that it was the intense aroma of wine that had done it. Franca and I didn’t believe her, but we stopped drinking our favourite Chardonnay while Shalini was with us. A year later, when Franca was spending her summer vacation with her mother in her home village, we received a letter from her that shocked me as well as Shalini. It was a short letter to say that she would be back to her work at Yale soon. Well, no wonder, if she wanted to keep her sessional teaching job! What stunned us was her other news: that she was knocked up by a Cuban guy who she’d met on her recent visit to Havana. Avoiding Shalini’s wide eyes, I folded the letter and involuntarily muttered, “I bet the guy’s dream is to leave the Island.” Before having her inevitable asthma attack, Shalini could only respond to my pessimistic comment so: “No problem, if he’s the right guy…”

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4 Comments

Susan N. August 16, 2016 at 1:54 pm

The story, “You got confused, baby”, could be explored from different aspects. For instance, from the narrative point of view or from the aspect of the labyrinth technique in storytelling or even examining the title of the story, because it is a rich story.
However, the intertextuality has played an important role in giving a philosophical view to the story. In the story there are couple of times that the author states “… there is nothing bizarre under the sun”, and at the end she finishes her story with “After all, you are all my labour and toil here under the sun”.
These statements led me to check in the book of Ecclesiastes, verse 2:26, titled “The futility of all endeavour” from the Oxford Study of the Bible which discusses the idea that it is impossible to understand and interpret God and divine ways, as humans we can only aspire to reach a higher station in life yet life offers no distinctions we are all prisoners of our fate, and there is no distinction rich or poor , fool or wise, wrong or right at death, no matter what we have achieved under the sun (on earth).
However the narrator (protagonist) of the story tries to understand, interpret life under the sun, and explain the mystery of life to her baby. Feeling peace and confidence, she begins her story by saying “you’re still within me, baby, a comfort like you’ve always been…”. She doesn’t care what the wrong or right time, place, guy, creature is, who human or animal is, what the fool or wise means; she has lived her life and earned all her labour and toil on earth, although her foetus is not even a completed baby. She has created her own life. She has “no idea about the eternity” but as a “humble creature” she interprets life and its morals through the story.
P.S. I loved the word play that was made by “wrong” and “right”!

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Fereshteh Molavi May 24, 2017 at 2:57 pm

Thanks a lot for your comment.

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Taghi Abdolhosseini April 11, 2017 at 10:38 am

I came across this accidentally. As I started, I couldn’t stop till I finished it! Very interesting. However, I have to read it again!

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Fereshteh Molavi May 24, 2017 at 2:57 pm

Thanks for reading it.

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