THE PINCH

1 2 6 Y T H E P I N C H D I N A N A Y E R I Parvin and Suraya rented a small but comfortable Niagara Falls cottage kissing the American border, just as their older sister Goli had instructed. Their father, Baba Ardeshir, had managed only a Canadian visa, so he wouldn’t be able to cross over to see their homes in Pompano Beach and rural Georgia. Instead, he would stay in Toronto with Goli, self-appointed matriarch since that 1972 day when their mother vanished into Holland or Germany, leaving Baba Ardeshir alone with four teenagers in Tehran – this was years before the Revolution, so Maman’s departure was no spectacle : no midnight Jeep ride into Turkey, no crossing borders under utility blankets. This was curled hair, the good suitcases, in-flight meal. (Just run-of-the-mill, ordinary abandonment, Suri said. Be kind, Pari begged her sister.) ‘‘Maybe we can get a photo of all of us,’’ Babak suggested. The last time all four had appeared in a photo with Baba Ardeshir had been as young children. In black and white, their parents looked hardly out of their twenties. Every detail was professionally arranged , all six smiling obediently, except one: in the left side of the photo, Goli’s fingers on Suri’s forearm, her fingers closing together in a secret pinch. Over the years, the photo had become Amirza- 1 2 7 R deh family legend. They had all seen it once or twice, but despite attic searches and calls to Iran, no one could find a copy. Now their plan was this: Baba Ardeshir would spend a week in Canada with Goli, then he would relocate to the rented cottage for two days to visit with his son and other daughters, then return to Goli’s house for his second week. Likely that’s what their father wanted all along, to sit at his favorite daughter’s table, to be a guest in her comfortable Iranian home. Who wants to trudge among lettuce leaves on Pari’s organic farm or putter around in flip-flops with Suri’s geriatric patients when you can drink cardamom tea all day in a respectable house that might as well be in Tehran or Karaj? Goli had kept every item in her home pretty much like the day she married. (Even the floor plan is the same, isn’t it? Pari marveled. You’d think she’d airlifted it from Tehran and wedged it on whatever faculty street she thought was fanciest, Suri sniped. And whitest, she added, because Pari had begun to cringe.) Goli worked at the University of Toronto, where she was, according to RateMyProfessor, the least-liked faculty member in the engineering department. Shortly after arriving in the West in 1987, Goli started calling herself Flora. It meant ‘‘flower’’ and therefore, she informed her sisters in a tone that stamped out all argument, was an honest translation of her name and everyone must respect it. Nowadays she encouraged her students to use the name too, though she sco√ed at the suggestion that maybe she had been looking at RateMyProfessor. ‘‘We had no time for this silliness when I was a post-doc.’’ But the day her profile was anonymously updated to include a parenthetical (aka Prof. Flora), she spoke in curt monosyllables , then telephoned her brother Babak in New Jersey, who took her calls without fail, for his weekly berating on his future, their father’s mayoral legacy, and the dignity of the Amirzadeh name, which (until now) had signified nothing less than quality and excellence. Knowing that Goli called Babak on Monday afternoons , Suri and Pari took turns keeping his phone line busy, to spare their guileless brother the weekly humiliation. But they had lives too, and Goli sometimes got through. Once, almost twenty years ago, Suri, the more outspoken one and a doctor, had tried to explain to her sister about Babak’s place on a spectrum of emotional understanding, a way of looking at the 1 2 8 N A Y E R I Y world that no one had bothered to consider when...