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and whispered with Maman about the new regime and the Shah. The twins used to call her Dr. Zohreh. After the night in the Caspian, she visited Saba in the hospital.
Ponneh and Reza press their heads together to pore over the fragile pages—every shadowy photo, every vibrant illustration, every detail of a mystical American life that is no longer welcome here. Saba feels guilty because dreams of such a life—dreams of betterness, otherness, of American entitlement—feel like a betrayal of her friends—of Reza, who at eleven is already a nationalist and full of Gilaki ideals, and Ponneh, who will have to become the new Mahtab. Saba translates the English words on the cover. “Life,” she says as she fingers the title in red-and-white block letters at the top. “January twenty-second, 1971. Fifty cents.”
“How much is that?” Ponneh asks.
“A lot,” she says, though she isn’t sure.
“Who’s the lady?” Reza asks, daring to touch the yellow hair on the brittle page. “She’s probably old and gray by now.”
“It says her name here,” Saba says, trying hard to pronounce it, before realizing that Ponneh and Reza won’t know any better. “Ta–ree–sha Nik–soon.”
“Strange name,” says Ponneh. “Sounds like shaving a beard . . . reesh-tarash .”
“She’s the daughter of the American Shah,” says Saba, because she has read this magazine a hundred times by now, and she knows.
Reza nods gravely. “Yes, yes, I know this Niksoon. A great man.”
Ponneh rolls her eyes and Saba flips to the center of the magazine, where pictures from this beautiful girl’s life are displayed for millions to see. She is a princess. Shahzadeh Nixon . There she is in her expensive American dress (four different dresses in as many pages!), with her flirtatious American grin and her shiny American suitor—a boy so pale and handsome that he could be in the movies if he wasn’t busy beaming over his shoulder at photographers and staring at the fairy girl’s hands as if he were just a little bored.
“So lucky,” whispers Ponneh. “Read that,” she says, pointing to a headline.
“Ed Cox, a Scion of Old Money with the Instincts of a Liberal.”
“That has some difficult words, but Maman translated it for me once,” says Saba. “It means his money is old and his thoughts are new. Just the opposite of what you want.”
Ponneh is trying not to look confused, so Saba pulls her shoulders back and says, “Old thoughts are the thoughts of philosophers, which are better than those of revolutionaries. And new money is the money you earn—like my baba did.” Saba’s mother never liked to mention that the Hafezi lands were inherited—now dwindled to a fraction of what the family owned under the Shah. It was an inconvenient detail to the lesson, and sad to think that rising by you sweat and wit was an impossible thing in the new Iran. No shalizar owner becomes wealthy on rice sales alone. There are land rentals and bribes and compound interest. Saba knows this, has studied it with her math tutors, but follows her mother’s example of forgetting to mention it.
“What does this say?” Ponneh points to a caption, but Saba is no longer listening.
“This is where Mahtab lives now,” she says, looking at the opulent dining room with its lush curtains, sparkling decorative branches, and tuxedoed men.
The other two grow quiet and Reza mumbles, “In the American Shah’s house?”
“I don’t mean exactly here,” she says. She pulls out two other magazines hidden in the pockets of her backpack. She flips through the pages, every one filled with iconic images of American life— loose hair and color televisions. Roofless cars and apple pastries. Hamburgers, cigarettes, and stacks of music tapes. An expressionless statue carrying a torch. Pancake diners dedicated solely to the breakfasts of the peasant class.
Then Saba takes three handwritten pages from inside the magazine. “What if I told you that Mahtab already wrote to