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ABSTRACT A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER by: Christopher Joseph Maggio Marjane Nafisi is a thirty-four-year-old Iranian-American. During her last year of graduate school, she leaves campus to help her mother care for her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. As she cares for her family, she is distracted by her unfinished dissertation and her relationship with Joseph Battaglia, a man nine years her junior. Over the next several months, she must decide where to put her energies: on that relationship, on forgiving her father, on finishing her dissertation, or somehow on some combination in between. A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Christopher Joseph Maggio Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2016 Advisor: Brian Roley Reader: Joseph Bates Reader: Timothy Lockridge ©2016 Christopher Joseph Maggio This thesis titled A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER by Christopher Joseph Maggio has been approved for publication by The College of Arts & Science and Department of English ____________________________________________________ Brian Roley ______________________________________________________ Joseph Bates _______________________________________________________ Timothy Lockridge Table of Contents 1. An Historic Phone Call 1 2. “Is it my birthday?” 10 3. Date Night 15 4. Baggage 19 5. Trivia on Tap 27 6. Hurt 31 7. A Very Nafisi Christmas 39 8. Ameliorations 41 9. A Doctor 50 iii Dedication To Christine Purtell and Barbara Euskavech iv Acknowledgements Thank you to my family, especially Mom, Dad, and Gina; my friends, especially Brad Powell; my peers at Miami—there’s too many of you to name; my teachers, especially Brian Roley, Joseph Bates, Timothy Lockridge, TaraShea Nesbit, and Kevin Griffith; the Miami University English Department, especially Monica Baxter; the staff at Circle Bar, O Pub, and Oxford Coffee Company; and the authors and musicians who inspired this novella. v 1 An Historic Phone Call Marjane is reminded of the scars, small faded tallies on the pale chalkboard of his upper back, while bathing the father who never once bathed her. A pink soap bubble slides down one of the scars, past his waistline, over his left buttock, and onto his shower seat. She asks him what happened. He trembles partly from nakedness, partly from neurons, and says his name. She’s been crouched beside him but sidesteps to her right, dodging a spasm from his right arm as she moves toward the toilet. Once seated on the lid, she looks him in the eye and asks, “Papa joon, what are those scars on your back?” He repeats his name. She tries one more time, but that’s all she gets—“Hussain Hussain Hussain.” While Marjane is toweling him off, she hears the garage door open. Mama is returning from a meeting with the realtor. Six months ago, Marjane’s parents “downsized” to a McMansion in Sewickley, a suburb north of Pittsburgh. But a sluggish housing market has kept the old home, the Persian Palace, with its window grillework of steel peacocks, from selling. Still, the Nafisis couldn’t wait until it sold to move. Papa needed a first-floor bedroom with adjacent bathroom. What they don’t need, Marjane thinks as she wrings out the towel, are the three other bathrooms, nor the four chimneys that lead to a surprising dearth of fireplaces. She dresses him into his pajamas, and they walk, arm in arm, to his bed. How tremulous he is for the few minutes he’s on his feet, how much he needs to lean into her. “Steady steady steady,” she says. In a few weeks, she might not be able to support him alone. How did her mother, short like Marjane but frail with age, manage all these months? After Marjane tucks in her father, another ritual he never performed for her, she raises the bed rails into their vertical position, kisses his forehead, dims the lights, and tiptoes to the laundry room, which is also connected to the bedroom but is toward the front of the house. While removing her clothes from the dryer, she smells sautéed garlic. She drops her hamper and follows the aroma into the foyer. From the foyer, a runner leads down the hallway. On the left wall hangs a framed black- and-white photograph from Shiraz or, rather, the Shiraz her parents used to know. The photograph is of a large garden clock, set horizontally into a grassy road median, mopeds and buses streaming by the three and nine. In the kitchen, Mama stands at her butcher-block island, her back to Marjane, chopping onions. Unlike the old home, with its three wings and multiple quarters, the new house lacks partitions. Beyond the island is a white dining room table and then, without any sort of divider, save the edge of another rug, is the living area. Marjane notices the time—9:37—blinking in green on the microwave. Āsh takes three hours to cook. Arms folded, Marjane leans in the doorframe. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Making āsh to welcome you home,” Mama says. “Ri-i-ight.” “What?” Mama continues to chop but cranes her head to Marjane. Mama’s caviar- colored hair lacks the strands of gray that skipped a generation and landed on Marjane’s head. 1 However, crow’s feet and puppet’s mouth chisel Mama’s face, the result of years spent worrying after patients and now her husband. “You don’t want āsh? I’ll give it to Broca then.” From across the first floor, in the living area, comes the jingle of dog tags. Despite her mother, Marjane smiles. She can’t help but smile at anything involving Broca, her black lab/chow mix. “How did the meeting go?” Marjane asks. “Ok.” Mama continues chopping. “He suggested I hire someone to cut some trees, so the property seems more manageable.” Marjane’s smile fades. As a child, she spent many hours in the backyard playing in those trees. It’s not her house to sell, though. “What are those scars on Papa?” she asks, sidestepping right to the stainless steel refrigerator and leaning against it. Mama stops chopping onions. “What scars?” “On his shoulders and back. I asked him about it, but he just kept saying his name.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s in the past,” Mama says, waving the last word away as she pivots right and shuffles to the stove, cutting board in hand. So goes her patented response to any question pertaining to her biography: “You used to vacation to Spain when you were a child?” “It’s in the past.” “You were the first woman to graduate from Pahlavi University’s medical school. What was that like?” “It’s in the past.” “Um, why did you throw away those pictures of your parents?” “It’s in the past.” “Mama, no,” Marjane says, pushing herself off of the refrigerator. “You never saw those scars before?” Mama asks. “I have, but it’s important to know for sure if ‘it’s in the past’ or if he hurt himself recently. You have to tell me these things.” “I told you to focus on your studies, but you argued and argued.” “Yeah. Well. I’m here. Get over it.” Mama takes the lid off a boiling pot and adds the onions. Marjane flinches as her mother sips from the stirring spoon. “You know your father’s family was very poor?” Marjane says yes, she knows and thinks if she hadn’t, she might have been content watching her father’s decline from her West Coast vantage point. But over the years, she pieced together not only her father’s upbringing but also the shame this later caused him: shame from his med school colleagues, shame from his father-in-law. Through his shame, she understood partly why her father logged so many hours in the OR as a surgeon and not at home. He wanted to provide the perfect life for his family, but of course their displacement made “the perfect life” impossible. It’s been Mama’s turn to speak, but instead Mama drains half a bottle of olive oil into the boiling pot. “Mama!” 2 “What?” Mama’s face is innocently inquisitive, like a child caught next to a broken window, the baseball bat peeking from behind her back. “Never mind,” Marjane says. “I’m going to bed.” Mama shrugs and continues stirring the soup. “Ok. Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow.” Marjane storms upstairs, Broca following her. Marjane won’t eat āsh if it’s saturated in oil, and her mother knows this. She slams her bedroom door. Not that it is really for her, anyway. She suspects the real reason for her mother’s nocturnal cooking is to lighten a tomorrow already ladled with an alphabet soup of appointments and procedures: CT, MRI, PCP, each one sure to spill into the next what with waiting times and the many minutes it takes to move Papa in and out of his wheelchair. They also plan to tour Kane Gardens, a nursing home about twenty minutes north on I-79. She flops on her bed, her dog joining her. Aside from the bed, her room is bare, save a dresser and a dozen moving boxes, most unpacked. Never mind she and her family will be passing multiple restaurant chains tomorrow. Or that Papa can no longer differentiate between āsh and chicken noodle soup. Mama, despite a long meeting with her realtor, would rather cook through the night on her bad hip. The next day, Mama will drag Tupperware from waiting room to waiting room, bugging the medical assistants to use their microwave, rather than allowing her husband to deign to anything less than her home cooking.

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