Wedding Song Read Online Free Page B

one of the girls home. In Masood’s version of the story, he pointed to a bouncy girl. “That’s a girl for you,” he told my father.
    In my father’s version, they followed the girl home, and when they were sitting in her house having chai and rice cookies, my father spotted a girl playing with the prospective bride. She had fair skin and wild black curls. “That one,” he whispered to Masood. “That girl is the one I want.”
    The day after, they went to this girl’s house with flowers and a box of Gaz, Isfahan’s famous sweet confectionery. My maternal grandmother Touran wouldn’t let them in, fearing they could be thieves, staking the house to steal her belongings. They finally convinced her to take the gifts and to check with a certain person who had given his daughter to a Shirazi and knew my father’s family.
    When they came back the day after, not only had Touran checked their credentials, she had also visited her uncle, Dr. Sayed, asking for his advice.
    “Give her to them,” he had said.
Maman’s Story
    When I was thirteen, the same age as my mother at the time of her marriage, Maman sat down next to me. Her fingers traced circles around the peacocks and pomegranates on the Persian carpet as her eyes watched me. I was stretched out on my stomach, legs crossed and raised behind my back, one arm under my chin, doing my homework, reading the false history of Iranian kings and their conquests. I wished she would go away.
    She picked up a book, turned it around, and leafed noisily through the pages. I wanted to tell her that I had an exam the following day, that I didn’t have time to give her attention, that she needed to leave me alone. Instead, I stabbed the words on the paper in an attempt to lodge them in my brain, already too preoccupied to absorb the information. I reached to grab thebook. “Maman!” I started to tell her to leave, but it was too late. She was reading a poem in a sing-song way. When she finished, she giggled, a child in front of the class expecting applause.
    “I was a good student,” she said.
    “Okay.” I rolled over, sat up, and collected my books to leave.
    “I was good at everything but math.” A muffled laugh escaped her cracked lips; her irises glimmered with green dots I had never noticed before.
    I didn’t respond. I wondered if I should go to a friend’s house to study.
    Then my mother told me her wedding story for the first time. “I’d just come back from school,” she said, “sitting down just like you to do my homework.”
    My mother’s voice was flat. Her eyes lost their green speckles, their light. She took my pen when she explained how her mother had taken hers and told her not to bother; they had to prepare for her wedding, pack her bag to leave for a new city.
    I imagined my maternal grandmother rushing about the house. I remembered her unsmiling face, her rough hands, her hair parted in the middle and severely pulled back. I had seen her two or three times, once during her visit when my brother was born. She and her youngest son, my five-year-old uncle, shared the bedroom with us. My father moved to his mother’s room for a few days. Grandmother Touran avoided the members of our large household and constantly snapped at me and my uncle. She kept away from my paternal grandmother, but when in her presence, called her Khanom-bozorg, great lady. Giving respect and honor to her daughter’s mother-in-law, she hoped to soften her heart toward my mother. The children, even my cousins, adopted the title to address my paternal grandmother.
    During her visit, my mother’s mother used the space heater in the room to cook simple meals because she didn’t want to eat with the rest; she didn’t want to be in the way; she didn’t want to impose. Intensely uncomfortable under somebody else’s roof, she couldn’t wait to get back home. She shunned intimacy; there were no hugs and kisses.
    On the day of her departure, grandmother Touran shook her index