Free A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

English and moves on. Now Khanom Basir, the Evil One , takes Saba’s hand. Saba tries to pull away, but raising two sons has given the awful woman a strong grip—and an expression like a snake preparing to strike, all beady eyes, sunken cheeks, and crafty, lipless smirk.
“Enough now,” Khanom Basir snaps at the other women, snickering behind their hands. “Laughing at a girl in her first messy state, it’s like poking at a sleeping camel.”
Saba and Khanom Basir spend the next half hour alone in the dim toilet past the living room. “You are not dying,” she tells Saba in her no-nonsense tone. Then she explains it all—almost as scientifically as Saba’s mother would have. “It’s not the worst as far as curses go. We bleed once a month and in return men have to toil and suffer until they die. They smell. They grow hair everywhere. Their bodies are shameful to look at—everything splayed out on the outside like that. . . . I’ll tell you, Saba jan, I love my sons, God knows they’re perfect, but . . . On your wedding night, when you see it, you’ll know what I mean and you’ll thank God for what he gave you.”
Afterward Saba thinks that none of the other women could have done a better job of revealing the mysteries of womanhood without fuss or embarrassment. Of course, had Reza’s mother realized that Saba was imagining all these wedding-night discoveries with one of her own precious sons, the cunning woman would have been much more careful with her words. Still, Saba wants to please her. She relishes Khanom Basir’s rare kindness, her attempt to make her comfortable with her body. Maybe her mother would have done the same. Only it would have been just the two of them, and Mahtab.
“Should I call my mother?” Saba asks. “I want to call her.”
Khanom Basir’s body seems to tense. “She can’t get calls where she is.”
“Why not?” Saba asks—maybe now that she is a woman, she is entitled to some truth. “I know she’s in America. I want to call her. Why can’t I call her?”
“Oh, God help us. . . . She’s not in America,” Khanom Basir says coldly. “And it’s your father’s decision when to tell you everything. So don’t use this as an excuse to create yet another Saba drama. Okay? Part of being a woman is accepting things that happen and not making your pain the center of everything. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she mutters. If her mother was here, Saba would tell her that her back hurts. She would tell her the definition of all the words she has looked up in the dictionary. She would show her the lists she has made since the separation—lists of her favorite songs, of English words she knows, of movies she has watched, and of books she has read. On the day they meet again, her mother will want to know these things.
Back in the living room, Ponneh jumps up and cheers. Apparently, she too has had an explanation. “Good job, Saba! You’re a woman now.”
“Hush, child,” says Khanom Omidi, tossing some dried jasmine from her chador in the air around Saba. “Do you want the whole world to know her dirty, dirty business?”
But Ponneh ignores them. She steps aside and waves at a tea tray on the floor with so much flourish that one would expect a Norooz feast instead of the tea, kouluche pastries, and chickpea cookies that Ponneh seems to have found in the back of Saba’s pantry. “I made you a becominga-woman snack. So you don’t faint or freeze from blood loss.”
She gives Khanom Mansoori an eager look, and the ancient woman nods her hennaed head slowly, her heavy eyelids half closed with sleep and erudition, as if to say, Yes, Ponneh jan, you have learned the science of it.
A few minutes later, Reza shows up at the door with his muddy football and a stack of blank tapes he hopes to fill with Saba’s music and is shooed away by the women making the most embarrassing fuss. “Go away, go away. None of your business!”
Saba wonders if Mahtab too experienced this