He can't, Maryam said, spooning out rice. You'll have to answer for him.

Oh. Susan turned back to Dave and said, Mari -june found him under her porch.

Lucky Moosh! he said.

Guess what, Susan told him. I get to sleep in my new room tonight.

So I heard. You have a whole new house.

The moving truck's moving my bed today.

Is it a normal house, or is it a magic house? Dave asked. What?

Well, for instance, some mornings when I go for my run I see this house two streets over that I really like to look at. It's got a porch swing, and a hammock, and a cupola on the roof. But then other mornings, I don't see it.

Susan sat back on her heels and studied him in silence. I mean, he told her, it's not there.

Where'd it go?

Well, I don't know, he said. Sometimes it's there and some - times it's not. A lot of things do that more than we're aware of. They do? She looked at Maryam. They do? she asked Maryam.

'There was one, and there wasn't one,' Maryam quoted, surprising even herself. 'Except for G.o.d, there was no one. '

Dave said, What's that?

That's how people at home used to begin old stories. It's like 'Once upon a time,' I guess.

Really! Dave said. He set down his coffee cup. That's fascinating! How does it go, again? 'There was one ...'

Oh, well. It's just a loose translation, she said.

No, really. How does it go?

She couldn't say why she felt so weary, all at once. She dropped the scoop back into the rice bin. At her feet, Susan was asking, What's a cupola, Mari -june? Does my new house have a cupola?

Instead of answering, Maryam told Dave, You know, it's ridiculous that you should have to stay around here all afternoon just twiddling your thumbs. Why not let me bring Jin-Ho back when I take Susan home?

Oh, he said.

She felt a twinge of remorse. Not that you aren't welcome, she said. But there's no reason you should tie up your day.

I don't have a day, Maryam.

She pretended not to hear this. All you'd have to do is switch Jin-Ho's booster seat to my car, she said, if you don't mind my asking.

So that he was forced to say, Well, of course, I don't mind at all. Then he stood up, with his hands hanging loose at his sides in an empty, disconsolate way. But still she didn't relent.

Susan and Jin-Ho spent the afternoon building Moosh a house out of a cardboard carton. They begged a bath mat from Maryam to pad the floor, and they scrawled windows on the walls with a felt-tip marker. For a bed they lined a shoe box with one of Maryam's scarves, although she warned them that most likely Moosh would refuse to use it. Cats are too willful to sleep where you tell them to, she said. Jin-Ho said, Okay, the shoe box can be his bureau, then, but Susan who was fairly willful herself said, No! It's his bed! I want it to be his bed!

Well, I guess it won't hurt to try, Maryam told her.

And we're going to have a cupola, too.

Maryam laughed and went back to her cooking.

Around six o'clock, Ziba called to let her know they were more or less moved in. At least the furniture's in place, she said. So Maryam wrapped the rice pot in a towel and rounded up the girls and put them in the car. When she dropped Jin-Ho off at the Donaldsons', Bitsy came out with a Styrofoam cooler of food for Sami and Ziba. This can be for tomorrow, she said, and then I thought the day after tomorrow I'd invite them for supper at our house. Would you like to join us, Maryam? I could ask Dad to come too.

Oh, thank you, but I have plans, Maryam said. She didn't want Sami and Ziba to think she was overly involved in their lives.

On the way to the new house, she tried to orient Susan. See, when you're old enough to walk home from Jin-Ho's on your own you would pa.s.s this big house with the trellis, and then you would cross the street looking both ways first, remember and then at this next street you would turn right, at the yard with the bird feeder in it ...

Susan listened in silence, studying each landmark as if committing it to memory. She had the most beautiful posture. She sat in her seat like a miniature queen, perfectly composed.

Ziba met them at the door in one of Sami's old shirts. Her face was shiny with sweat and there was a smudge on one cheekbone. Come in! she told them. Welcome to your new home, Susiejune! She swooped Susan up in her arms and showed her the living room. See how nice it looks? Do you like it? See where we put your rocking horse? Maryam, holding the rice pot, took a right instead of a left and headed toward the kitchen. She had planned to send Sami out to her car for Bitsy's cooler, but he was nowhere to be seen and Ziba was carrying Susan up the stairs now, chattering in a rather anxious way about how pretty Susan's new bedroom was; so Maryam went back for the cooler herself. She saw when she unpacked it that Bitsy had supplied not just a ca.s.serole of some sort and a container of salad, but also a dessert a homemade pie. She set the pie on the table next to her pot. The pot contained Sami's favorite dish: rice with fish and mixed greens, a meal complete in itself; but now she wished she'd provided something on the side.

Ziba came into the kitchen, holding Susan by the hand, and said, Will you stay and eat with us?

Maryam had a.s.sumed all along that she would stay, but the fact that the question had been asked made her doubtful, suddenly. She said, Oh, well, I know you must have work to do.

You're more than welcome, Ziba said, not denying that she had work.

So Maryam declined again and took her leave.

Slipping back into her car, waving at Ziba and Susan, who stood watching from the porch, she wondered if she had done the wrong thing. Should she have offered to help, to put the meal on the table and share it with them and clean up afterward? Or was Ziba glad to see the last of her? It was so hard to tell. She could understand, sometimes, why Sami lost his patience with these elaborate old-country courtesies that concealed everybody's true feelings.

She cast a final glance at the two on the porch and then pulled away from the curb, feeling unsettled and dissatisfied.

The new house changed their lives, and only for the better. Susan could join in the neighbor children's outdoor games no more complicated playdate arrangements. It was a ten-minute drive to her preschool, and less than that to the grocery store, and just a short walk to the Donaldsons'. When school let out for the summer and Maryam resumed her Tuesday-Thursday babysitting schedule, she sat on Sami and Ziba's front porch contentedly hulling strawberries while Susan rode her tricycle, or she puttered with Susan and Jin-Ho in the tiny backyard garden they had planted. The first slim carrots were ready in late June, and both girls were beside themselves. They ate them raw for lunch with a dill-and-yogurt dip. Even Susan, who usually spurned all vegetables, polished off three.

Maryam worked at Julia Jessup just one day a week in the summer. She paid a few bills, saw to correspondence, made a couple of telephone calls to order supplies or arrange for routine maintenance. Often the only other person in the building was the janitor, pushing his wide broom down halls that were already gleaming. The school's director, Mrs. Barber, spent her summers in Maine, but she would phone from time to time and ask how things were going. Oh, fine, Maryam would tell her. The men are here to resurface that place underneath the jungle gym, remember? And the Windham twins' father has been transferred to Atlanta, so I've written to the next two families on the waiting list. She was aware of sounding busier than she really was, as if trying to demonstrate that she was earning her pay.

Even during the school year this was an undemanding job, carried out at a measured pace among people long familiar to her. She worked in a kind of trance, sitting at an immaculate desk in the center of the so-called goldfish bowl that she shared with Mrs. Barber and Mrs. Simms, the a.s.sistant director. It soothed her, somehow, to perform the most trivial tasks to perfection. At the end of every day she emptied her computer's recycling bin, and she defragmented her hard drive exactly once a month.

In July she went to Vermont to visit her double first cousin, a daughter of an uncle on her father's side and an aunt on her mother's side. Farah was several years younger than Maryam, and different from her in almost every way. Living in an area where everyone else was a native, married to an ex-hippie she had met while she was studying in Paris, she had chosen to become exaggeratedly Iranian. She met Maryam's plane in an outfit so exotic that even in Tehran, people would have gawked: a maroon satin tunic over tight white leggings, curly-toed sequined slippers straight from a Persian miniature, and a bib of golden chains that all but covered her plump bosom.

Maryam jon! Maryam jon! she shrieked, jumping up and down. Everyone else at the gate pale and drab by comparison turned to stare at her. Salaam, Mari june! she cried. For a moment Maryam wanted to pretend she had nothing to do with this woman, but then when they were face-to-face she saw Farah's Karimzadeh eyes, long and narrow with pointed corners, and the Karimzadeh nose as straight as a pin. Unlike Maryam, Farah was letting her hair go gray, and the gray hairs frizzed and corkscrewed up from the black just as their grandmother's used to.

During the drive from the airport (in a dusty beige Chevrolet with a back seat full of machine parts), Farah spoke Farsi in such a rush that it seemed to have been bottled up inside her. She relayed all the news from home, quoting telephone conversations not just word for word but in the appropriate voices their cousin Sholeh's thin whine, their second cousin Kaveh's bullish bellow. Farah kept in much closer touch with the family than Maryam did. Oh, a dozen times a week, she said, one person or another will be wearing me out with complaints, and at my expense, too. Which implied it was she who placed the calls, but why, if she found them so tedious? Some form of survivor guilt, perhaps. They go on and on about the difficulties of current conditions their entertainment so limited, almost no films allowed, almost no music, no liquor except what the smugglers deliver in bleach jugs after dark. They imagine my own life is sheer pleasure. They have no idea how hard it is here!

To look at her, encased in satin and glittering with gold, their relatives might have laughed, but Maryam knew what she meant. It was hard, harder than the people back home could possibly imagine, and sometimes she wondered how they both had lasted this long in a country where everything happened so fast and everybody else knew all the rules without asking.

My sister reads off lists of items she wants me to send, Farah said. Athletic shoes and cosmetics and bottles of vitamin pills. There are vitamins in Iran! Perfectly good ones, but she believes that the vitamins in America are more powerful. I sent her a bottle of Vigor-Vytes and the first pill she took, she told me, 'Already I feel so much younger! I have so much more energy!'

Uttering the phrase Vigor-Vytes led Farah to change over to English, probably without meaning to. It was a phenomenon Maryam had often observed among Iranians. They'd be rattling along in Farsi and then some word borrowed from America, generally something technical like television or computer, would flip a switch in their brains and they would continue in English until a Farsi word flipped the switch back again.

I suppose you have less of that because your brothers can ask their children to send things, Farah was saying. Or Parviz can, at least, with his two up there in Vancouver where all the stores are excellent. (This last sentence flipped back and forth lickety-split, triggered first by Parviz and then by Vancouver.) And besides, you're so much stronger. You would just say no. I should be stronger. I am a, how you say, floormat.

Doormat, Maryam said.

Doormat. I am a push-off.

Maryam held her tongue.

They had been traveling through the New England countryside at a speed that was surely illegal, pa.s.sing small, tidy farms that could have lined the tracks of a toy train set. Now they swerved onto a gravel road, with a clanking of metal from the back seat. A few minutes later they parked in the yard of the Jeffreys' gray clapboard house. Oh, good, Farah said. William's home.

He was sitting on the front porch steps a wiry man in faded jeans. When he saw the car he rose and ambled over, grinning. Salaam aleik.u.m, he said as Maryam stepped forth, and then, in English, It's good to see you.

It's good to see you, she told him, pressing her cheek to his.

William was one of those men who had never quite managed to leave their adolescence behind, in her opinion. His jeans were patched with bits of the American flag, and he wore a wisp of a goatee and a single long braid which, now that he was bald on top, made it seem that his hair had somehow slipped several inches backward on his head. His enthusiasm for all things Iranian struck her as adolescent, too. Guess what! he told her now. I've made fesenjan for dinner tonight in your honor.

Exactly what I'm in the mood for, she said.

William was in full charge of the cooking and the housework. He was also the breadwinner; he taught creative writing at the local college. Maryam couldn't imagine what Farah did with her time. They had no children hadn't wanted them, evidently and she had never held a job. When she led Maryam upstairs to the guest room she said, Now, I think the bed's made up ... oh, yes, good. The wildflowers on the bureau, jammed clumsily into a cruet, were probably William's doing as well.

Once Maryam had unpacked they met for c.o.c.ktails in the parlor, which had the hollow, barnlike feel of a bare-bones New England farmhouse but was decorated with Persian rugs and Isfahani enamelware and jewel-like paisley fabrics. William talked about his newest invention: he was working on an executive toy that he felt sure would make them rich. It's kind of on the order of a lava lamp, he said. You remember those. Only this is much cla.s.sier-looking. He brought it out to show her: an hourgla.s.s shape, in clear plastic, filled with a viscous liquid. See, he said, inverting it, how the liquid sort of squiggles down, spirals clockwise awhile and then changes to counterclockwise, builds up on the surface in a pyramid shape and then all at once decides to flatten ... Doesn't it just grab you?

Maryam nodded. She did find it oddly mesmerizing.

What gave me the idea was, we were coming to the end of a bottle of McGleam shampoo and so I turned it upside down over a new bottle; you know how you do. Propped it just so in order to get the last few drops out. And I was watching the drip and suddenly I thought, Man! This could be some, like, Zen-like thing that would center people and focus them. We could market it as a device to lower people's blood pressure! So I worked out this design; figured out the most attractive shape ... only I haven't got the liquid quite right. I mean, it has to be the proper consistency. Thick like McGleam but not too thick, of course, and clear like McGleam because I believe clear is more calming Why can't you just use McGleam? Maryam asked.

Oh. Use McGleam.

Wouldn't that be the obvious solution?

But ... shampoo? Besides, McGleam's about the most expensive brand in the drugstore. He gazed fondly at Farah. Nothing but the best for Farah -june, he said.

Farah gave him a languid wave and told Maryam, What can I say? I have that tanglesome Karimzadeh hair.

Over dinner that evening (a real Iranian meal from start to finish, everything authentic), Farah reminisced about their shared childhood. She had a sunnier vision of the past than Maryam did. All her memories seemed to involve hilarious parties, or wagon rides at the family's summer place in Meigun, or daylong picnics with every single relative on both sides in attendance. Where were the quarrels and the schisms, the uncle who took opium and the uncle who embezzled, the aunts' endless, bitter compet.i.tion for their father's grudging notice? Did Farah not remember the cousin who killed herself when they forbade her to go to medical school, or the cousin who was refused permission to marry the boy she loved? Oh, those were happy, happy times, Farah sighed, and William sighed too and shook his head as if he had been there himself. He loved to hear talk about Iran. He would prompt Farah if she skipped a detail. And the coins! he said. Remember them? The brand-new gold coins that they used to give you children every New Year's? Maryam found this presumptuous of him, although she knew she should feel flattered that he was so interested in their culture.

It must have been the dinner conversation that caused her to dream that night about her mother. She saw her mother as she had looked when Maryam was just a child pure black hair and unlined skin, the beauty mark on her upper lip accentuated with an eyebrow pencil. She was telling Maryam the story about the nomad tribe she used to spy on as a girl. They had moved into the compound across the street, arriving mysteriously late one night. The women wore gold up to here (and she gestured toward one elbow). The men rode shining horses. One morning she awoke and all of them had vanished. In the dream, as in real life, she told this story in a slow, caressing voice, with a wistful look on her face, and Maryam herself awoke wondering for the first time if her mother might have longed to vanish also. She had never asked her mother a single personal question, at least as far as she could remember; and now it was too late. The thought stirred up a gentle, almost pleasurable melancholy. She still mourned her mother's death, but she had traveled so far from her, into such a different kind of life. It no longer seemed they were related.

The guest room was beginning to grow light, and the window above her bed showed a square of pale gray sky and a jagged black ridge of fir trees. The scene struck her as no less eerie than a landscape on the moon.

Over the next several days, she fell into the leisurely routine of the women from her childhood. She and Farah sat drinking tea as they leafed through glossy magazines. William was generally tinkering in his workshop or off somewhere cruising hardware stores and junkyards. Then in the afternoon he started cooking, and every evening he served another Iranian dinner. He took great pride in stating the names of the dishes in Farsi. Have some kh.o.r.esh, he would say, the kh so stressed and labored that it sounded like a cough. As the week wore on, Maryam found this behavior more and more ridiculous. Although really, where was the harm? She knew she was being unreasonable.

On the last evening of her visit he asked, May I serve you more polo? and she said, Why don't you just call it rice?

He said, Pardon? and Farah looked up from her plate.

I mean, Maryam said, backpedaling, thanks, I'd love more polo.

Am I p.r.o.nouncing it wrong? he asked her.

No, no, I just . . . She disliked herself, suddenly. She seemed to be turning into a cranky old lady. I'm sorry, she said to them both. I guess it's the combination of the different languages. I get confused.

But that wasn't what was bothering her.

Once, a year or two after Kiyan's death, a colleague of his had asked her to a concert. A nice enough man, American, divorced. She hadn't been able to think of a good excuse for declining. In the car she had mentioned that Sami was contemplating tennis camp she had used that exact word, contemplating and the man had said, You have an excellent vocabulary, Maryam. And then a few minutes later he had told her he would love to see her sometime in her native dress. Needless to say, she had not gone out with him again.

And once while she was waiting in her doctor's office a nurse had called, Do we have a Zahedi here? and the receptionist had answered, No, but we have a Yazdan. As if they were interchangeable; as if one foreign patient would do as well as another. And the way she'd p.r.o.nounced it: Yaz-dun. But even if she'd said it properly, Yazdan was an Americanization, shortened from its longer form when Kiyan first came to this country. Besides, in point of fact Maryam was not a Yazdan anyhow. She was a Karimzadeh, and back home she would have stayed Karimzadeh even after marriage. So the person they were referring to didn't even exist. She was an invention of the Americans.

Well. Enough. She straightened in her seat and smiled across the table at William. I believe this is the best ghormeh sabzi I've ever eaten, she said.

He said, Gosh, merci, Maryam.

When she got back to Baltimore, she found that Susan had changed just in that one week. Several freckles as fine as powdered cinnamon were scattered across her nose now, and she had learned how to walk in flip-flops. She strutted through the house with little slapping sounds as the rubber soles. .h.i.t her heels. Also, Ziba said, she had discovered death. It's like it all at once dawned on her. I don't know from where. She wakes every night now two or three times and asks if she's going to die. I tell her not till she's old, old, old. I know I shouldn't promise that. But I tell her, 'Children don't die.'

Exactly right, Maryam said firmly.

Well, but Children do not die.

Bitsy told her not to worry about it anyhow, because she'd get to come back again as somebody else.

Maryam raised her eyebrows.

But Susan said, 'I don't want to be somebody else! I want to be me!'

Yes, of course she does, Maryam said. Tell her Bitsy's crazy. Oh, Mari -june.

People have no business pushing their airy-fairy notions on other people's children.

She meant well, Ziba said.

Maryam allowed herself a derisive hiss, although she knew that Ziba was right. Bitsy had only been trying to offer rea.s.surance. And she'd been a blessing during Maryam's time in Vermont keeping Susan not just that Tuesday and Thursday but all of Sat.u.r.day when Ziba's mother had had to undergo an emergency appendectomy. So on Maryam's first Tuesday back home, she made a point of inviting Jin-Ho over to Susan's for the day. Brad delivered her, along with her bathing suit rolled in a towel, and the girls spent the morning splashing in the inflatable wading pool. After lunch, while they were napping together (really just giggling and whispering upstairs in the guest room), Maryam prepared two separate pots of chicken with eggplant, and when it was time for them to walk Jin-Ho home she carried one of the pots with her to give to the Donaldsons.

Bitsy said, Is that what I think it is? the minute she opened her door. Am I smelling what I think I am? You've made my favorite dish!

A small token of our thanks, Maryam said. You were so kind to take care of Susan.

I was happy to do it. Won't you come in?

We should be getting back, Maryam told her.

I've just finished making a pitcher of iced tea.

Thank you, but Right, I forgot, Bitsy said. When it comes to matters of tea you're such a purist. You must hate when people put ice in it. Maryam said, Not at all, although it was true that she had never understood the practice.

For some reason Bitsy seemed to take this as acceptance of her invitation, because she turned to lead the way into the house. The girls scampered after her and Maryam reluctantly followed, wondering how she had ended up agreeing to this. I didn't leave Ziba a note, she said, placing her pot on the kitchen table. She'll be wondering where we've gone. But even as she spoke she was settling onto a chair.

You know what you should do? Bitsy asked. She opened the fridge and took out a blue pitcher. You should come help us eat your dish tonight when you've finished watching Susan. Oh, I'm sorry; I can't, Maryam told her.

Dad will be here!

I'm having dinner with a friend.

Bitsy went to the cupboard for gla.s.ses. Jin-Ho said, Mama, can me and Susan make popcorn? but all Bitsy said was, What a pity. A man friend, or a woman?