“It makes you wonder how they are ever able to agree on anything,” Iraj Mansouri said. They were leaving his wife’s aunt and uncle’s house. It was raining and the clouds were blowing all over the sky. The boy, Arash, liked the way they looked.
Iraj’s wife, Soraya, did not say anything. She was thinking about what her aunt and uncle had told them. Actually it was her aunt who had been doing the telling. Her uncle had not wanted to talk about it.
“What is the use of talking about it?” he’d said. And he’d gotten a pained and lost expression on his face.
“Maybe we should invite my niece and her family to our house and we should all sit here quietly with our troubles like you,” her aunt said.
“I am not saying that we should all sit here quietly. I am saying that we should talk about things that get us somewhere. This conversation does not get us anywhere.”
“It gets me somewhere to talk to my niece about it. Besides, she has a right to know about her cousin.”
“What is there to say? We gave him some money for school and he lost it gambling again. Okay. That is our life. Okay. Let’s have dinner.”
“It is the American football,” Soraya’s aunt said to her. “He told me once that he could look into the eyes of men and see victory or defeat. I have seen this game. You cannot even see their eyes because they are all wearing those hats.”
Soraya wished she could talk to her cousin and tell him about a mother and father who loved him so much that they didn’t even know how to talk about it. Over the phone he knew how to sound happy. She would have to get on a plane and go to Houston and talk to him face-to-face and then he would see it in her eyes.
“You will make yourself upset talking about it,” her uncle said. “And then our guests will go home and I will have to walk around this house on tip-toe because you will still be upset.”
Her aunt ignored him. “I’ve always believed that he could do great things. He could be anything he wants to be. He told us that he wanted to study economics.”
Her uncle began setting the table. “I am sure you are hungry,” he said.
“He said that he wanted to work for the World Bank. He said that after he finished studying, he wanted to go to Washington D.C. or New York.”
Maybe that would be the thing to wake him up, Soraya thought. He couldn’t live in those places without being serious about his work. But the way he was going, she didn’t even know if he was going to graduate from college.
The young man in question was Arash’s favorite cousin. He’d told Arash that he didn’t have to call him his Uncle Shahram, that they could be cousins just like him and his mother. When he’d come to visit, he’d taken Arash to the park by their house and let him climb the tree as high as he wanted. It wasn’t because he didn’t care if he fell, it was because he knew that he wouldn’t fall. He knew that a kid only worried about falling when someone else started worrying that they would fall.
He’d told Arash about Iran, about going to school there and how the teachers had been mean but the kids at school had been nice. He’d told him about how he and his friends had had to run away from a policeman once who’d caught them making fun of people going to pray. Arash liked the way he could tell stories about Iran but still knew a lot about America too.
He knew that Shahram was in trouble now, but it was his trouble. He wasn’t worried about him, because it seemed like exactly the kind of trouble a guy like him would be in. It was foolish to bet on football games, but Shahram really did believed he could do anything, and if he thought he could do anything in Iran, he probably thought it was even easier to do anything in America. Arash felt bad for Khaleh Firouzeh and Aghaye Mohandes, but he didn’t know how Shahram was going to get to wherever he was going without some kind of trouble. It was the same thing that let him allow Arash to climb to the top of the tree at the park. He just had to learn the difference between a kid who was good at climbing trees and some football teams that he didn’t even know.
“One of them only wants to talk about it and the other one only wants to not talk about it,” Arash’s father said. “How do you explain that?”
Arash waited to see if his mother was going to say it. It seemed so obvious, but she was only looking out the window, and he felt just then that life was a thing where he was going to have to say some obvious things, not because other people didn’t know, but because they got wrapped up in feelings, and he was probably going to get wrapped up in feelings sometimes too, but driving back home in the rain as the clouds were blowing all over the sky, it seemed like there was only one feeling to have, and for now he was going to say it, and his words felt like the clouds blowing in the sky as they came out.
“Well,” he said. “They’re doing the same thing. It looks different, but they’re doing the same thing.”
And his mother looked at him and realized that along with everything else, something very significant was happening in the backseat of their car as they drove home in the rain.
