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me?” She waves the pages in front of their faces, her eyes full of the exhilaration of knowing something they don’t. “It makes sense that Maman doesn’t call me,” she says as her eyes fall on an advertisement for a long-distance telephone company. “She doesn’t want me to hear Mahtab in the background because everyone thinks I’d be hurt that they chose her to go to America.”
“Stop,” says Ponneh, her voice shaking. “I want to go home.”
“Those pages are just your English homework,” says Reza, his gaze never quite meeting Saba’s. “Where’s the envelope? And the stamps?”
She folds the pages one at a time, tucks them together, and places them in the center of the Life magazine over an ad for a color television so that they will be out of Ponneh’s careful sight. “Who keeps an envelope anyway? It didn’t have an American postmark. It went through Turkey.”
The ad reads: You made it number one in America. . . . There’s only one Chromacolor and only Zenith has it. Number one in America must be the best anywhere. Saba tries to imagine the kind of television Mahtab watches these days. Big, hypnotic. Always in color, with ten channels, the latest shows, and no rules. No need for smuggled videotapes marked “Children’s Cartoons.”
“Do you know what’s number one in America?” Saba says. She tries to sound playful, as if she were making up a game, and when Ponneh plays along just like Mahtab would have, Saba loves her almost as much. She realizes more and more now that replacing her sister will require an impossible balance. Ponneh is like Mahtab in all the right ways: brave, willful, in charge. But just as soon as Saba begins to forget that Ponneh is not Mahtab, Ponneh says something unguarded that Mahtab never would, or she makes a seductive face that the twins don’t know how to make, and Saba breathes out, trying to release the guilt of comparing the two, of loving Ponneh too much. No, she hasn’t replaced Mahtab just yet.
“What?” Ponneh reaches for one of the magazines, her too-light almond eyes sparkling with exaggerated curiosity, as if trying to make up for an earlier disloyalty.
“Harvard,” Saba says, turning back to the Life magazine. In this one issue there are three separate mentions of the place. Shahzadeh Nixon’s fairy-tale fiancé went there to study law. And a few pages later, an article about the incoming president starts with the line: The selection of a new Harvard president ranks in gravity with the elevation of Popes and premiers. Clearly an important university—a place magical enough, special enough, to be the setting of Love Story , a film worshipped by Americans and Iranians alike, and discussed in every one of Saba’s magazines.
A place fit for Mahtab. A name most Tehranis and even some Rashtis recognize.
“Okay,” says Ponneh, putting both hands in her lap with all the resignation of a doctor or a school headmistress. “You can tell us about it if it helps. My mother says it’s a good thing to tell stories.”
“I don’t know,” says Reza, shaking his head. “It’s getting late.”
“Go ahead, Saba jan,” says Ponneh, shooting Reza a warning glance. “I’ll listen.”
Saba beams, but doesn’t reach for the handwritten pages. “Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything,” she lectures importantly, so that Ponneh giggles and shifts in place. “America is complicated. It’s better to just imagine it like a TV show.”
Saba is the only one with a television, a VCR, and a whole set of illegally dubbed and undubbed American programs on tape, which her friends secretly watch with her, mesmerized by the cracked, grainy images; the way people’s lips rarely match the words; the twists and turns and perfect timing of American life. Saba imagines Mahtab’s life in episodes, each as vibrant and mysterious as Shahzadeh Nixon’s magazine spread, and every setback resolved as effortlessly as in a thirty-minute television comedy. She