A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri Read Free Book Online Page A

Mahtab, “You will be, be cause Saba is rich.”
Maybe Mahtab whispers my name just then. You know, sometimes when she’s bored, she reads my letters and makes up stories of our days together.
“All of life is written in the blood”—Maman leans close and taps Mahtab’s nose, identical to mine down to the last bump—“and you and Saba have the same blood. It doesn’t matter where you live.” This is true. How much control does Mahtab really have? How much control do any of us have? It is all predestined like the old fortune-tellers say. Mahtab should know, because she was in the water that day too. And I’ll tell you, she will be insulted when she hears that you crazies think she is dead!
Maman gets up to stir the no-lamb stew. Look at them: my poor mother, my sister. Look how sad they are without me. It’s hard to know how much food to make for only two, or how to keep a conversation going. You need four for a full table. And look at the future that is now planted in Mahtab’s mind: she will be an American shahzadeh in a magazine, with four dresses in as many photos and a quiet, light-skinned man with old money and new thoughts. She has American ambition now, the kind you see in movies about orphans. Now Mahtab is the sort of girl who worries—about money, about love, about her future. There are so many things that America has taught her to want.
The next day Mahtab goes to the library. She finds out about school courses, and entrance tests, and free money from the government, which is how the girl from Love Story got to go to college. She fills her mind with all sorts of facts and deadlines and admissions rules—all the same things my high school cousins in Texas have been obsessing over since they arrived there. But most important, she stamps her dreams of glamour and riches with a name. She takes her girlhood goals, her love of books, her childish need for comfort, and her twinly self-hate and wraps them up in a neat little package, sealed tight and sizzling with an iron brand. A name that even the greasy, cumin-scented Iranian man at the gas station will recognize: Harvard.
AIJB
    “See?” says Saba, getting up and dusting off the dirt of the alleyway from the back of her pants. “How’s that for a good story? A hundred times better than TV.”
    “That’s it?” Reza asks. “That’s all there is? Does she go to Harvard or what?”
Saba tries to contain her anger. “We’re eleven,” she says. “Obviously her letter doesn’t say whether she got in. What do you think this is, your mother’s story time?”
“I thought—” Reza mumbles. “I’m sorry.”
“Saba just means that a good storyteller doesn’t give everything away at once,” says Ponneh with a seriousness that makes Saba smile. Ponneh is always adding weight to the things Saba says just by agreeing with her.
“Exactly,” says Saba. “It’s like Little House. One problem per episode.”
Ponneh and Saba follow arm in arm as Reza leads the way back to the main road—because he claims to know how to handle policemen with his masterful command of big-city ways. There they will find a phone to call Saba’s house, where all their panicked parents and the Khanom Witches are likely gathered. Reza doesn’t seem very worried. Ponneh picks at some dry skin on her elbow and says, “Too bad we never bought any sweets, since we won’t be allowed any for the next ten years.”
Saba unlinks her arm from Ponneh’s and takes out a wad of bills from her pocket. “We should save the money for something better,” she says, thinking of Khanom Omidi’s hidden coins and the fact that Ponneh will never have her own private wealth, no matter how small. There live too many older sisters with needs greater than Ponneh’s in the Alborz home. “Let’s start a dowry for you, for when you’re older.” When Ponneh’s face darkens and she starts to object, Saba says, “Our secret. We’ll take care of ourselves.”
Khanom Basir says that Ponneh