Olive

By Azadeh Amirsadri

 

It’s a warm June day in 1976. I am 17 years old and standing with my family and my 30-year-old husband’s family at the airport In Tehran. My mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law have red eyes and red nose tips from crying and trying hard not to cry in public. My mother-in-law is seeing her firstborn leave again to go overseas, but this time with a new wife instead of going alone. My mother is seeing her daughter start a new life far away from her, and years later she told me a part of her was always not sure she had made the right decision to marry me off so young. In the picture we took at the airport, I am standing by my younger sisters, carrying a very cool beige Samsonite makeup case and from the look of my sisters and me, I doubt we could have known that it would be the last time we were in Iran together as a family, ever. My sisters and I are looking at the camera, I am scared, excited, and sad; my sisters are standing there, wondering probably what will happen next. When I say goodbye to my grandmother who had raised me for the first five years of my life, she discreetly puts a folded one-hundred-dollar bill in my hand and closes her fingers on it. She whispers to me that she wants me to buy something for myself when I get to my destination.

The flight that brought me to America had a stop in the UK and my husband, whom I had met three months earlier, bought himself a white wool Irish sweater at the long layover at the airport, as did the young Iranian woman who sat on the aisle seat next to me. She spoke Persian with an American accent even though she was Iranian, and had come to visit her family and was returning to the States. I disliked her right away for no good reason except that she had bought her Irish sweater and I hadn’t bought anything. I also envied the fact that she was traveling on her own. She and my husband were speaking to each other mostly in English, because it was easier for her, and she was telling him about her college in Boston, how far Philadelphia, our final destination was from the airport in New York, and other things that must have not been worth translating for me, as I didn’t speak English. With their new matching sweaters, smoking Dunhill cigarettes, and speaking to each other, I felt a complicity between them that excluded me.

We landed at JFK airport, a place my grandmother had warned us about because according to her, it was the largest airport in the world. She had asked him to hold my hand there and not let go the whole time, worried I might get lost in the size of that place. Quickly after landing, my husband bought a Popular Mechanics magazine at the newsstand and his colleague who was on the same flight, bought a Playboy magazine. As he was looking at the centerfold picture, he said to my husband, “My magazine’s pictures are better than yours,” making both of them laugh and making me extremely uncomfortable, feeling naked and exposed. The Boston girl got picked up by her boyfriend who lifted her in his arms and I disliked her even more because she could have a boyfriend who loved her and whom she loved, something I wasn’t allowed to have.

We arrived in Arlington, VA the next day and stayed at a long-term motel that all Navy officers stayed in until they found housing. During the day, I explored the neighborhood and tried cooking elaborate meals, because one of the nuns at my French Catholic school had told me that the way to a man’s heart is through the stomach, as she was signing my report card when I was leaving school early. How she knew, I had no idea, but we all gossiped about her having been a man or a sex worker before becoming a nun because she was mean and strict, and demonizing her was one passive way to fight back.

My husband, would leave for work in the morning and return in the evening and I was all alone, with no English skills, trying to navigate this new life. Getting a haircut was an elaborate chain of miming the cut and style I wanted at the hair salon, someone there saying her neighbor spoke French, calling the neighbor and having her translate what I wanted. Most of my time was spent reading the few books I had brought with me and eventually discovering a small stash of French books at the public library near the house we moved to that we shared with another Navy family. Le Petit Nicolas, a children’s series, and a thick French cookbook with food drawings were my salvation as I was trying to figure out how to be an adult in this new life of mine without my family and friends. I followed recipes from the library cookbook and made such remarkable bland dishes as cream of celery soup and baked chicken that came out cooked and pale, with no flavor. I felt my worth was in my cooking skills and would hide in my room with a headache excuse instead of joining others for dinner when the chicken looked pale and the soup tasteless.

Back home, being 5’6” tall, I was a tall girl for an Iranian, and right away at JFK airport, I realized I was not that tall after all. I had also a desirable white color in Iran and came to realize a few years later that I was not white in America. One day in Philadelphia, walking to school I stopped at Wanamaker’s department store and used the Clinique make-up slide, something that doesn’t exist anymore, to see what color makeup I should buy. I slid the knob to white skin and brown hair, and as I was about to add my eye color, the sales lady stopped me and said “Put the slide on olive skin, you are not white.” I didn’t understand what she was saying and continued to pick eye colors that matched mine and she said again in a louder voice “You have olive skin” and pointed to my arm. I must have seemed very confused because I looked at her and she pointed to her face and arm and said “Look at me. I am white. You are olive.” She was pink and slightly aggressive in the way she talked to me and I truly did not understand how I wasn’t what I had been all my life. Also, olives in my world were tiny salty condiments, not colors. I didn’t buy any makeup and left the department store, upset and confused. Forty-some years later, I was having dinner with my youngest son during the early days of the lockdown. He explained to me that my politics were white: a progressive identity formed in the late 20th century, which is considered liberal today – “blue no matter who.” He added that even though I don’t see myself as white, in the US – how I am perceived and treated is as a white person. He added, “It is only after you make your differences known that people may place you in a different box. Even still that comes with privilege.” His passionate dialogue took me back to that day at Wanamaker’s, the pink lady and olive me.

(3 Quarks Daily)