STORY

And then some days we would go to the movies. They were not common, those days when all of us went - my mother and my father and my sister and me - but when we did, there was something funny that happened. Suddenly we discovered how difficult it was for four people to be happy. We saw what a monumental thing to ask for it was. It was a place where everybody was supposed to be happy, and it was theoretically a place where all of us had the same destination, the enjoyment of the movie. Everywhere else we could say, well, our minds are elsewhere. At home we could all be going in a million directions - school and work and the day's newspaper and Iran and America and what are we doing here anyway - even when we were all sitting at the same table. But at the movies we had to face the truth that we were all doing the same thing and still it was difficult to be happy.

It was comical. It turned very serious movies into very funny ones, only we didn't know it. Look at them, we thought. Look at them acting like the business of the movie is so serious when a family that loves each other doesn't even know how to sit and watch them on a screen and be nice and happy for an evening. How were we supposed to take them seriously? As soon as a single person came on the screen and started wanting something, we just started thinking about how much we wanted from the world and then the whole thing started up again. And I thought that maybe what we needed was a blank screen. At least then we would all take a breath and then we would look at each other and see that we all needed a breath to take. As it was, the movie would just get us going.

Look at the man in the movie, my father would think.

Look at the woman, my mother would think.

Look at the girl, my sister would think.

Look at the boy, I would think.

That is me, we would think. That is me up there on the screen. That's my heart up there, and if I can't tell that to my own family who can I tell? Why do we have to come all this way and pay money and smell this popcorn smell just to be something we already know, just to say something we already are? We weren't any of us trying to dream of any place that didn't include everybody else, so what was the point of coming all this way when there was a man and a woman and a boy and a girl right where we were? To dream some separate dream as though we could cut off two hours from our lives and then slide right back into it as though nothing had ever happened? Who did we think we were?

When we went to the movies, it seemed like we thought we were Americans, like we could sit and watch a movie together easy as pie, and if that meant dreaming a separate dream and then sliding right back into our lives as though nothing had ever happened, then we could do it, only we couldn't. We had too many questions and nowhere to ask them when the movie ended, because there was a moment during the movie when we had been sure we were watching ourselves on the screen, but if the movie was just going to end and we were just going to walk out with everybody else and everything was going to be the same as it was before, then what was the point of all that? A movie made the most sense when it was the last movie we were ever going to see, when we could say, okay, I got it, life is the biggest thing there is, and we are in it, we are in it as much as anybody, and we are also in it as a family, which is a crazy thing, but which might just have a destination at the end of it that will make sense for everybody. Every movie was wonderful if it was the last movie we were ever going to see, and we knew that nobody was supposed to suggest that when they walked out of the movie theater, they were supposed to say wasn't that good or wasn't that lousy, they weren't supposed to say, wasn't that us? They weren't supposed to say, excuse me, I may be mistaken about this, but wasn't that us back there? And we wouldn't say it either, but I liked the way we wouldn't know what to say coming out of the movie theater, I liked the way it wasn't some easy transition for any of us, because one of them was the truth, either the life on the screen or the life of the people walking out of the movie theater, and everything seemed to indicate that it was the latter, but if it was so, then why did we need the former? Why did we need this place with its popcorn smell and its Americans transitioning back and forth so much more easily than us when all it did was tell us that we possessed the significant measure of truth ourselves?

Maybe it had to do with the way we remembered coming to America, which was already the dreamed-about place and which was still the dreamed-about place for so many people in our family in Iran, and it felt strange to go to the place where people went to dream even after we were here. Maybe it felt like we ought to be the ones who were living since we were here. What was the living that you did in America? We didn't know. We tried all kinds of things and usually just came back to each other and our house. And then one of us would suggest we take in a movie, and after a while, we got to where we could say, okay, let's go, and it would still be a movie and we would still see ourselves on the screen, but we wouldn't think that the problem lay in each other's inability to see that. We got to where we knew that something just as big was happening inside each other as we watched the movie, and we didn't have to know what it was, just that it was there.

But it took some time to get there. It took a long time of going to movies together and watching Americans walk out of the theater looking calm and peaceful and wondering why we felt more lost and more found and more sorrowful about life and more glad about it too. It took a long time of not knowing how to bring all of ourselves to the movie theater, because if we really did that, why would we need the movie, and if we didn't do that, why would we want to go somewhere where we would have to turn a part of ourselves off for a couple of hours? And we had to learn, each on our own, that the part of ourselves that we could keep on was the part that was in this place with everybody. We were in America with everybody, and it was a place where movie theaters were a place that people went, and we were in an Iranian family in America with everybody too. We were the only ones, in our family at least, but we were in it with everybody too. If we were going to dream with them, then we ought to really dream with them, and all we could do was to know what was the dream and what wasn't. And it helped to not be in our own country to do that, because we had already seen once that there was no place to go to dream and stay dreaming, so we could say, okay, we know what this is - it is not supposed to take the place of the dream we have ourselves, it is not supposed to introduce us to that dream for the first time, it is just supposed to be a little thing to help us along to the dream we already know, and it might seem like we are losing the heights of that dream when we do that, but the important thing about a dream is not its heights, it is its continuity, it is what stays alive as we are walking out the theater with everybody, and that depends on what was alive walking in. A movie is just what goes in between. It is the thing that helps to carry us between two crowds, and when we were young as a family we both loved to be carried and resented it, until we saw that between love and resentment was acceptance, which said that nobody was a hero for being carried and nobody was a villain either, and once we put heroes and villains aside like that, we knew we really were the movie we most wanted to see.