I left Burt in good hands, with my suicidal ex-roommate who loved that cat more than she loved herself. Two months into living with her, I learned she was fond of cutting herself as a way of pacifying her psychic pain. She was used to neglect and abuse, and I figured she and Burt made the perfect couple. Before I had my very own nervous breakdown, I kicked her out, with Burt in tow, and promptly left New York.
I miss Burt sometimes though I wasn’t very sad to leave him. I know it sounds cold of me, but I am now ready to engage with an animal that engages back and doesn’t piss on everything.
Finding a rescue dog in Orange County has been like picking out of a garbage can outside the kitchen of a four-star restaurant. I was originally scheduled to adopt a two-year old purebred toy Maltese named Mimi (I called her Me!Me!), based on conversations with an eager animal rescuer at a shelter just north of Laguna. Mimi, he told me, had been used as a Baby Machine well before she was fully grown. Her owners had lost her papers when they abandoned her along with three pups. Without those papers, Mimi and the babies she machined were worthless. The pups were mutts anyway, he said.
When I met Mimi at her foster home, the first thing I noticed were that her once beautiful white locks had become sticky-yellow clumps of goo and hair. She reminded me of those rosy-cheeked, blonde high-school cheerleader who inexplicably become crack addicts and live to share their stories on various talkshows.
Even though I felt a certain kinship with Mimi (no, I’ve never been a blonde cheerleader nor have I ever been a crack addict), looking dirty and raggedy didn’t help her case. Her jitteriness and nervous bark began triggering my own symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I, too, became jumpy.
Sensing something was not quite right with the chemistry between Mimi and me, the foster mom let me know that she’d already lined up a home for the poor thing if I were to change my mind about taking her. Disappointed and annoyed that I’d wasted a half tank of gas, I told her to go ahead with the other applicant.
I was ready to blame fate and leave pet-less but the foster mom lead me away from the front door and into the little puppy den she’d constructed out of newspapers and crates, adjacent to the washer dryer.
“I think you’d be the perfect mom for one of Mimi’s daughters,” she said.
Foster Mom couldn’t release the pups yet, she explained. “They’re too young to be taken away from their mother. But if you come back in a week you can take one. This sweetheart’s name is Daphne,” she said, pointing at the one who’d come to rest her chin at my feet.
I hated Daphne’s name but loved the fact that she looked Maltese but wasn’t all white. She had a black patch over her left eye, both of her ears were black and wavy-haired, and her face was angel-white.
She looked like a high-class bandit. She looked like me!
I looked over at Mimi, who stood jittering and nodding off while on all fours. What it was that Baby required for another week from this poor, wretched creature the foster mom called mom I could not fathom.
“Daphne’s very sweet. And hypoallergenic,” the foster mom said, listing Baby’s selling points. (I’d already re-named Daphne Baby at this point.) It was obvious that Foster Mom had mistaken my silence for reticence.
“Her tail tells me that dad was probably Pekinese but she’ll stay small. You can tell by the paws.” She smiled and nodded lovingly as she lifted up Baby and one of her very tiny paw to show me. “You very well could take her to your yoga classes, if you wanted. And she’d be the perfect lapdog for a writer. She’ll be your best friend.”
•••
The critters I brought home as a child had relatively brief stays but most were banished instantly. I had two birds for a year (this was a record). When one of the cockateel died, my mother set the other free. This all happened while I slept. For years, Maman lied to me and said they’d both flown away so as to avoid any and all existential conversations with a small child. When she told me the truth (I was in college when she decided I’m ready to deal with the concept of death), I tried to imagine it all as a romantic, spirited act on Maman’s part, but I could not overlook the small details that got in the way: the neighborhood spraying of an insecticide designed to kill off all gypsy moths had taken place at the time of death of my bird(s).
I had a cat for a few hours when I was 10. As a delayed rebellion against being forbidden to keep furry creatures that did not require a cage in our house, I amassed a harem of three female cats during my twenties. I hated the spinster stereotype, later gave away two and kept one: Burt, who is now the child of the aforementioned suicidal painter woman I knew for only three months.
In the fifth grade, Baba agreed to buy me a hamster, after I repeatedly volunteered to take the classroom hamster home for the entire weekend. I can still conjure up the weary look I learned to anticipate on my father’s face as I’d wobble towards his car, hugging a cage bigger than myself. But how selfish it seems now to have cried and judged him when my pet hamster contracted Wet Tail (a mysterious and fatal hamster disease) and died while I was on vacation with Maman. My father threw him (No-name; really this was his name) in a small ditch and later begged me over the phone to understand that there was no way to keep a dead hamster in the house for a week so I could give it a proper burial upon my return.
Only a few years had passed since we’d escaped from Iran. It was the time of the Hostage Crisis. For the most part, my ears were shielded about the news of the violent deaths of his friends, family and former colleagues—in Iran, Europe, and the U.S. I had no data then to understand my father’s apathy about bodily remains, hostility towards Iranians and bad politics.
But come to think of it, despite the morbid cloud that hung over him (all of us) after leaving our country, Baba did rather like Zaneekeh (Bitch), our pet bunny, who lasted a good six months.
Bitch was incredible. With her powerful legs she’d honed her hop to somehow jimmy the latch at the top of her crate. When we all woke up one morning to Bitch’s poop-pellets all over the living room, kitchen, and stairs both of my parents insisted we give her away. I insisted we give it to the mentally challenged girl in the special education class that mingled with ours for art and music. To my mother’s chagrin, I then brought home pictures my friend Mary’s Bible-beating mother had given me of Jesus, lined them up against Zaneekeh’s cage, and prayed to keep them both safe.
•••
When I visit my parents with Baby, my father and she stare at each other, without him ever extending a hand. My father’s face is dead-pan while Baby whimpers for attention.
Baba dislikes that I disobeyed him about getting the dog more than he dislikes the dog itself.
“My friend died when I was in my thirties. In the autopsy, they found dog hair in his lungs.”
I’ve heard Baba repeat this story ever since I was old enough to hold a furry creature in my arms. I know he’s not making it up, I just wonder if it’s a fiction that has traveled through the Persian community, the way the story about Richard Gere and the hamster has become a universal folklore. How does one get dog hair in the lungs?
“Baby is hypoallergenic and doesn’t shed. That’s not fur, it’s hair,” I explain, tugging gently on Baby’s still raggedy baby-mop.
Baba just turns up his nose and says nothing while my mother over-compensates by cuddling Baby at her neck. I know Maman is afraid to get close because of her asthma (correction: emphysema from decades of smoking).
“Leave them alone,” she says, before adding solemnly, “She lives alone.”
Of course it makes me feel pathetic, that she assumes I only became a mother to Baby so I wouldn’t be alone. I actually like being alone and so does Baby. We have plenty of alone-time together. I get to practice mauna (silence) while we interact, and that is the main reason I dread marriage. There’s nothing Zen about living with another human; it’s complicated.
We drink our tea, Maman’s dark and unsweetened, mine, a cream-and-honey dessert. I can tell she is disappointed about the failed date I have been keeping silent about. Later, she needles me: “Are you sure you weren’t at all kesheedeh to him? You both studied in England.”
In the other room, I spy my father’s eyebrows turn away from the television and arch with approval.
“What could be so wrong with him?” Maman asks.
“He has a fat ass,” I say, watching the reaction register simultaneously on both Maman and Baba’s faces. “And he doesn’t even like me. He was considering me for a wife but he didn’t even like me!”
•••
Maman sees Baby as progress, as a step towards motherhood. She recently set me up on a blind date with her Persian physical therapist’s friend, right after the failed date I set up on my own. Now that she’s been given a second chance at life, after nearly going off to behesht, she’s quit smoking, taken up exercise (but not yoga). She’s also heard her calling—to find me a Persian husband with a good name.
‘You don’t even know him, Maman.”
“My physical therapist is a very good man. They are distant relatives, and your father knows the family.”
“Everyone here is related if you trace back far enough. You haven’t even seen how ugly he probably is. Does he at least like yoga?”
I appreciate Maman’s assistance with my love-life because I’m having a hard time dating in Orange County. I just wish that meeting an attractive artist who is also Persian and easy-going were as easy as adopting a luxury rescue puppy.
As much as I disliked the pretentiousness of the New Yorkers I’ve dated most of my life, the Persian dating scene is far too extreme a change for me. I also hate music with a throbbing bass, and I need a man’s haircut to be very low maintenance. But there are less superficial reasons I’m having a hard time dating in my own ethnic pool. Take this for example:
“A Persian girl would never do that,” my Blind Date said, seemingly out of nowhere, as I sat on his couch simply sipping my water politely.
I first thought, Maybe this is just another Iranian doubting that I’m really Iranian. I get that a lot: ‘You don’t have a Persian nose.’ ‘You don’t have a Persian body.’ What does all this nonsense mean?
“A Persian girl would never do what?” I asked him.
“Get up and help herself to a drink.”
“What would she do? Die of thirst while waiting for you to offer water?”
“A Persian girl would also never come to a man’s house to meet him for the first time.”
Blind Date had no problem letting me know that he thought I was a social deviant and that he disapproved of my occasional smoking and the fact that I am mother to Baby. But he did say that he found the idea of me helping myself to a glass of water “refreshing.”
Blind Date also had a laundry list of questions in addition to his criticism. I tried to answer politely. All the while I kept thinking that his home was the site of residence #4 of my wanderings thus far through Orange County. My former roommate (not Iranian) and the former apartment had been every ounce as bland and dreary as the man sitting in front of me interviewing me for marriage.
When I excused myself to take leave, he said, “It’s okay,” and waved his hands. He explained that he liked my looks and rooh and preferred that I stay. I silently translated all this to mean that he was secretly devising a way to marry and rearrange me. When I insisted on leaving, explaining that I was tired after teaching two yoga classes in a row, he made me a cozy bed of cushions on the couch and told me to rest while we talk “about the future.” (Would a Persian girl nap on a stranger’s couch?)
I explained to Blind Date that I prefer to avoid all talk of the future, that I live according to the yogic philosophy of living in the present and then left, without feeling any remorse, especially not after he laughed at the concept of staying present.
Blind Date was not present. And he had no idea what yoga is. Had never even seen it!
•••
I am a bitch and I finally have a bitch—a real bitch. And Baby’s just about the most beautiful baby bitch that ever lived to bark. We downdog together and she sits in my lap while I write. Baby is my soulmate, my interim cuddler, until a gorgeous Persian man, who looks like an incarnate visage from a Persian miniature painting, comes along, with wavy black hair down to his shoulders, which he pulls back and away from his chiseled face. There will be a certain haziness to his dark and perfect features, as if there were a heavenly light following him always (and binding him to me), especially when he emerges in a yoga class, barefoot, handsome and ready for the Lady and the Dog.
