Free A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri Page B

I’m finished, they wait eagerly to hear: Up we went and there was . . . which one? Yogurt or yogurt soda? Maast? Doogh? Truth? Lies? Under the korsi blanket draped over a hot stove, where feet are warmed and stories are told, I reign supreme. Though . . . they say that the korsi is the birthplace of all lies.
I was the one who first told Saba about her body, about marriage, because her mother hadn’t. Okay, so I didn’t tell the full story. I gave it the usual flourishes of the storyteller, jinns and diseases, untimely deaths and the smallish possibility of some vague fulfillment. But most of all, I told her this: books kill a woman’s sexual energy, the allure you’re born with. It can be snuffed out, you know. And Saba and Mahtab were doomed from the age of three, far too educated to ever understand how to appeal to any man. Sure, they could get into trouble like anyone else, but could they lure with their eyes like Ponneh can? Girls who can read books cannot read men.
Their mother is the one who gave them this fate, with her notebooks and her ideas and her fears. She used to watch the girls and chew her lips raw because she wanted them to have grand storybook destinies; and when you have a task like that, you can’t sit around bonding over tea, plucking each other’s eyebrows. You have to stamp out the distractions. That was her kind of mother-love. Grand, useless.
She ruined those girls. Deep inside where no one could see, something was stunted. Their father didn’t help the matter either— because, tell me, how can a girl who has been told to dry herself with hundred-dollar bills ever be a good wife to anyone?

Chapter Three
AUTUMN 1988
     
B
    y eighteen, Saba has collected five hundred pages of simple and fancy English words, not only to someday show her mother— though after seven years without a word, hope is waning—but also because the word lists have become a part of her life. Having studied the language since early childhood with an intensity unheard of in Gilan, Saba feels a tingle of pride each time she catches herself thinking in English.
    Vile . Vagrant. Vapid.
Saba glances at a trio of aimless girls in the alley behind a local store—an impossibly small square box that somehow has everything for sale, not just eggs and sugar, but milk in plastic bags with snip-off tops to drop into a jug, a dozen kinds of pickles, saffron, soap, piles of pencil erasers, toy watches, dried fruit, olives, and nuts. Every corner is crammed full—loosely categorized stacks one behind another, stretching deep beyond the inner walls, burlap sacks of rice around the register, garlic cloves hanging over the door. Saba clutches her rush basket, now full of tea and sugar, and turns away from the girls crouching close together in the far corner of the alley. Though they hide it well, Saba is expert enough to know what they are doing. It is an intimate act, a shared risk, smoking together in public. She smiles at the fumes wafting subtly out of the front folds of one girl’s blue chador, an unnecessary extra covering since her colorful, layered Gilaki garb is modest enough. But chadors are ideal for hiding things. The girl has pulled hers up high over a tight scarf and a long skirt of greens and reds not because she is pious. No, this girl is just bored, playing games, as Saba does with her friends in her pantry.
Up above, a crow calls out from its perch on a phone line.
It is autumn again. The ground is covered with trampled wild berries, pieces of orange rinds, and crushed cans. Cool breezes carry plastic bags into treetops. Wet and dry, red and yellow leaves drift over the streets. The air smells like rain, like a fistful of wet morning grass held up to the nose. Saba feels trapped here, with the blissful poor, in a world made up of the scattered parts of many different eras. A group of older women passes by her. Over their long-skirted, brightly mismatched village dresses, they have draped the austere black of city