Sugar by Annabelle Taghinia

I loved my mother. She bought me an alarm clock for my twelfth birthday because I was always late to school, slow to wake under her gentle hands. She smelled of powdery makeup and sweet perfume. Her steps made no sound on carpeted floors. She was a wonderful woman. 

She wasn’t a perfect woman. My mother and her friends often sat on our kitchen floor, hair spilling forward from poorly pinned headscarves, snorting laughter and spilling tea. She was young and beautiful. Her life seemed to shine, bright and clean and fresh like her skin in the morning. A sink full of plates looked charming. An unwashed counter was endearing. A living room littered with abandoned dishware became glamorous. She drank home-brewed Turkish coffee from dark pungent beans all morning. She ate baklava and soft cookies all afternoon and left sugary fingerprints on the counters. It seemed to me that all she did all day long was stretch her long limbs out and tear thick envelopes open with manicured nails. 

The year I was to be married, it became clear that we did not have the means to support the monthly shopping trips and voyages to her friends’ houses to pay 10 rial for them to pluck our brows and trim our hair. It was 1953, and my mother spent every morning by the radio, listening to music or news about the struggling economy and the British oil boycott. My mother claimed exhaustion on eyebrow threading days and pretended to throw up in the bathroom whenever I begged to go shopping. She ran out of coffee beans, and a large jar appeared on our kitchen counter, full to the brim with cheap tea leaves. After another month and a half, my mother was angry and bitter all the time, dark like the liquid in her cups. One night, we were sitting together eating cold bread with butter, and she said, “We have to do something.”

I stood up and looked in the refrigerator. There was nothing but jam, torshi, and a carton of eggs. I opened it. The eggs were rotten. “We have to do the grocery shopping.”

She sighed. I threw the eggs in the trash.

“We’re poor. You need to get married.”

I whirled around. “Oh, can I? I can get married?”

She frowned. “Yes.” The frown softened. “I’ll miss you.”

I was fifteen years old, developing breasts and an interest in boys. I didn’t care. “I can get married!”

My mother found Reza in less than a week, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of a friend, and our life returned to normal. My mother drank sweetened coffee and left honeyed fingerprints on my signed report cards and paid her friends to bring me back expensive scarves and European lipstick whenever they went to Tehran. We plucked our brows and complained about our figures and poked at pus-filled pimples in the mirror and pulled checks out of the envelopes from my father before throwing his letters away. My mother told me that my father sent her depraved, desperate letters, clawing at her feet from afar. She hated to read them, and often yelled and cried if I was caught trying to look at them, which I rarely did. I was blinded by her shine.

Meeting Reza for the first time, I could hardly breathe. My mother sat beside me and talked, and I sat, watching attentively, bowing my head to my chest. From my perspective, Reza was beautiful. He talked quietly, but as his confidence grew, his volume grew with it, until he and my mother were joking and laughing together. His laugh was deep and charming, with little endearing squeaks if he was particularly tickled, which occurred often around my mother. It made me feel bright inside. He reached for a sugar cube for his tea, and I did the same after. Our eyes met, and he smiled. I smiled back, blushing. I knew I could be happy with him and his thick, unplucked eyebrows, with his deep squeaky laugh. He seemed so simple, so light, so alive.

Maman had been planning my wedding since childhood. She would sew me a dress, and I would wear blue diamond earrings, the only remnants of my father in our home. I was to be married in a large open room, and Maman would dab at her shining eyes with a silk handkerchief until a man with thick muscles and hair swooped in and asked her to dance. The night would stretch long and lovely, filled with the delicate summer fragrance of twilight in the country. We would invite women with curled hair and blue-painted eyelids, who laughed loudly with lipstick-stained teeth, who left marks on my cheeks when they kissed me and called me beautiful, lucky, the prettiest bride. We would serve nothing but sweets until everyone’s gums ached. We would be feminine, free.

It was unrealistic, but I was always certain it would happen. It was the way she said things. Off-handedly, flashing her teeth and pursing her lipstick-sticky mouth; certain. When she found Reza for me, the daydreams clarified. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see the yards of silk and loaves of sugar. I could see our marital mirror. In the reflection, I was mature, womanly. We were beautiful. 

I thought about marriage constantly. I craved the feeling of a ring around my finger, a man in my bed, Reza in my life. Our wedding grew closer, and I grew more frantically excited, talking nonstop, spending hours grooming myself in the mirror. One morning, I twirled into the kitchen, grabbed a piece of bread and stuck it into the toaster, brushing an ant off the side, then leaned against the counter, watching the coils glow. “Maman, I’m going to get married. Isn’t it wonderful? Oh, it’s incredible. Marriage is what a woman is made for!” 

The scent of warm bread drifted up. My mother was quiet. I turned around. She took another sip of coffee, then stood and poured it over the unwashed dishes. 

“I’m not much of a woman, then,” she said. She sat back down. The toaster dinged. I flinched. She folded her hands. I turned around and grabbed my bread, burning my fingertips. For the rest of the morning, she sat, empty-eyed. I ate my toast. The radio blared nonsense about the oil industry and Prime Minister Mossadegh. We didn’t speak. 

I was a lazy child. I never cared enough to put in effort. Life was easy for me, and I had no desire to complicate it. Despite Maman’s sloppy job hiding evidence of my father, I learned little about him. The letters came, we kept the checks. That was all. When the letters began arriving more often following my engagement to Reza, I was not suspicious. I barely noticed. After every letter, Maman would have a look on her face, her eyebrows drawn, her nose flared. She looked like she had lost something. I watched her read her novels, and it took her hours to turn the page. I thought she was grieving losing me to marriage. I was oblivious. My head was full of sugar, rotted through years of sloth and self-absorption.

The morning before my wedding, I entered the kitchen through the open door, and my mother wasn’t there. This was strange. I usually entered the kitchen to find her sitting with her legs propped on my cushion – “Saving you a seat!” she’d say – nursing a cup of coffee, and we would chat while I ate. Our days were slow. Maman didn’t work, and I had quit school after my second meeting with Reza. I ate and talked with my mother, and then we retired to the living room to read vapid novels and laze about for hours. We only left the house for shopping or visiting her friends; Maman hated exchanging her slinky pajamas for stiff, modest clothing, hated people seeing us, two women alone. Around noon, we would wander to the kitchen, and I would nibble on vegetables and burnt meat right out of the pan while my mother arranged a platter of baklava, chocolates, and cookies, which she would coat in a layer of powdered sugar and eat from all afternoon. We never cleaned much, because she said she was nobody’s servant, not even mine. So our days were lazy and slow, enjoyed together. 

Something was wrong when I entered the kitchen that day, and it was empty. I stopped, confused. I could hear short bit-off sounds like sobs permeating the quiet.

When I was young, I only went into my mother’s room when I couldn’t sleep. During the day, the room was closed off from the slow drip of life across the rest of the little house. The curtains were always drawn. I was rarely there during the day, but it was always clean, nothing like the elegant disarray of our life. When I entered the room that morning, Maman was sitting on the floor in the middle of a mess of men’s clothing: button-ups, slacks, navy blue and white. On the unmade bed was a shredded pile of paper, neat penmanship mixed with the sterile printed material of a check.

“Maman?”

“Help me,” she said.

We spent the morning sorting out piles on her bedroom floor. We spent the afternoon on my mother’s mattress after the last pile had been formed. She lay still and silent like a corpse. I complained of my hunger, but I stayed. Finally, my mother got up and grabbed the first pile. I followed. We carried pile after pile into the dump outside until my underarms prickled with sweat. My mother dumped the last pile and turned to face me. I had wrapped her in a shawl, and it was falling off her shoulders, exposing her skin to the air. Long tendrils of her hair snaked towards the open air like criminals hungering for freedom. The horizon was streaked with sunset. The lot next to our home stank of waste and faint traces of a strong cologne. She stood tall, a goddess in the golden, surrounded by facts of her failure.

“Farah, a strong woman falls for no man.”

I inhaled, gagging around the stench of rotted celery rising from the trash.

“Farah,” she said, “be strong.”

I woke up the morning of my wedding imagining Reza’s thick eyebrows and nice lips. I left my bed imagining my lovely sugar-stained wedding and the stomachache I’d have when Reza and I consummated our union. I dressed imagining the jewelry I would wear. I left my room imagining walking through the halls of his house. The door to the kitchen was closed. I stopped. The skin of my shoulders prickled. There were voices in the kitchen. My mother’s, the tinny drone of the radio, and another, a deep voice, a male voice. I stepped back and tread on a loose floorboard. The conversation stopped. The kitchen door swung open. My mother was standing in the doorway, hair loose, face streaked with salt. I could see a man standing by the counter, arms squeezed close by his sides. He wore a white shirt and navy pants. He was handsome. A large carpet-bag sat by his side, deflated as if empty. His eyes were round like mine.

Within an hour, he had packed my clothing, toiletries, alarm clock, and books into the bag while attempting to make small talk with me. The radio fizzed and blared. Prime Minister Mossadegh had been overthrown in a military coup. It was August. Sleep sweat stuck my clothing to my skin. My mother sat slumped in a chair, combing her fingers through her limp hair, watching. I wanted her to stand up, yell, hit him, hold me. Anything. But she just watched. After he loaded the bag into the trunk of the taxi, my mother stood up and draped her thin arms around my shoulders. “Be strong, Farah.” She was trembling. “My girl.” I thought of Reza, waking up in his home across the village. I said nothing. I didn’t know that was goodbye.

I pictured my father to be a large, burly man, rough, abusive. The man who sat in the backseat with me during the hours from my mother’s apartment to my new home, who hummed along to the radio, who pointed out and praised the new girls’ schools, who offered me sour pistachios and said he remembered that I preferred savory over sweet, that was not the man my mother had married and divorced. But there he was, telling me he couldn’t bear to see me married so young. There, telling me that I would be going to school again, checking in on me every half hour, staying calm when I yelled, making bad jokes and laughing even when I didn’t, there was my father.

His apartment in Tehran was small, warm, clean. I saw his wife, standing in the kitchen as we passed through, carrying my things to my room. She was petite and pretty. She was young, even younger than my own mother, who was twenty-nine. When she smiled, her face melted, eyes squinting and chin wrinkling. She was the second most beautiful woman I knew. Given my own room, I spent much of the first day lying on the new, strange mattress that hadn’t yet found the shape of my body, tracing the imperfections in the white paint bubbling off the ceiling. The room was small, the bed only big enough to hold me, the floor covered with a small traditional carpet patterned with green flowers and white birds. In the late afternoon of my first day at my father’s house, I stood up from the bed and found myself in the middle of the room, hesitating, twisting around, looking for something. The books on the shelves, old classics interspersed with modern novels, Persian and English, the Shahnameh and copies of Rumi poems thick with bookmarks and writing. The desk, pushed politely against the wall. The full glass of water set on the bedside table, moored amidst the clutter. Around it, a vase of flowers, old paper clips, a stack of notecards. An alarm clock.

My father came into the room because he said he heard my sobs from down the hall. He found me kneeling on the carpet, curling my fingers into the tassels on the edge, clawing and pulling. I yelled at him. I asked him why he had taken me from my home. I told him he was a criminal, a thief, a nobody. I called him bi-sharaf. I told him he was cruel, that he took everything from my mother, that he took her soul. I hit him, and I cried, and I spat at him and clawed at him, which I remembered clearly, despite his denial that I injured him in any way. I told him I would never forgive him. I told him that he had taken my life from me. Afterwards, he left me alone, and then he came back when my temper had died and the tears ebbed, holding a tray of soup and a box of tissues. The ash reshteh was hot when it hit my raw throat, stinging and soothing like the admonishing of a gentle parent. The reshteh were so soft that I didn’t need to chew, instead swallowing the disintegrating wheat noodles whole, nearly choking on the beans.

“Chew, baba,” my father said. He sat at the foot of the bed, careful to not touch me.

“It’s soft,” I murmured, suddenly embarrassed, stirring the soup uselessly in the bowl.

“Ah, I’m sorry. Your stepmother didn’t— It was left on the stove for a while.” He finished his sentence and looked regretful. I felt heat behind my eyes, but I did not cry.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. I finished the soup. He took the tray from me and set it on the desk. I said, “I’m tired.” He tucked the blankets around me. He hesitated above me. He kissed my forehead. He picked up the tray, turned out the lights, and left.

The next morning, I woke up and dressed in a haze, feeling horribly tired and strange. I left my room and walked through the house to the kitchen. My stepmother was sitting at the table, a plate of peeled and sectioned oranges next to her. She was reading. When I entered, she looked up. Something was boiling on the stove; the whole room smelled of strong chaii. When I tried to speak, my voice spilled out rough as stone.

“Where is he?”

She stood up, closing her book and setting it noiselessly on the table. She was a short and chubby woman, but she held herself with a dancer’s grace. “Your father is at work, aziz.”

I looked around. Every tool in the kitchen had a hook on the wall. The dishtowels were clean and matching. She had embroidered them herself. I looked at her, and she looked like she was about to speak, so I opened my mouth before she could.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at him, because he is my father. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it.”

“Don’t you?”

I didn’t know what to say. The smell of tea reminded me of mornings in a different home. I wanted to leave.

She glanced at the fridge and then back at me.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Later, as I nibbled from the plate of buttered bread and sliced cucumber she had prepared, I watched her sip her tea and read, eyes gliding back and forth across the page behind the burgundy frames of her tiny glasses. The embossed cover of her book read, Interpreting Socrates. She looked focused, intent. When my mother read, her eyes were often glassy or unfocused, and she stretched and yawned often.

“What do you do all day?” I blurted. “You just sit around and read and wait for my father to come home?”

She took a long time to respond, seemingly reading to the end of some page or chapter. I studied her face: her thick eyelashes and shaped brows, the solitary blemishes on her forehead and chin. Her lips had the gentle sheen of someone who applies lipstick often, and her hair was plaited neatly down her back. She retrieved her bookmark and marked her place, setting the book down on her lap still open to the page she had just finished reading.

“Yes, my life is slow,” she said. “But I occupy myself. I clean, and I cook every meal. When I don’t have more housework, I read, or meet with friends, or write essays. The mind is a muscle.” She smiled. “But it’s nice to have work to do. I’m glad you’re here.”

I stared at the table, its intricate wood grain, its finish dull with use. “Why did you take me away from my mother if I was going to be such a burden?”

“You’re not a burden. You’re company for a lonely old woman.”

I smiled at that, unintentionally.

“You’re not old, khanom.”

“Ah. Well, you’re right. But I’ll tell you, twenty-five can feel ancient.”

I was tired and felt displaced, out of body. “When did you marry my father?”

She closed her book, placed it on the table, stood up, and offered me a cup of tea. I accepted, to have somewhere to put my hands. She talked as she poured. “Two years ago. We met through my uncle, who works with your father. He was a minute early, soaking wet. The poor man had walked twenty minutes through the November rains with no umbrella. In Tehran! His shoes and ankles were filthy with gutter water. But he was so polite, he refused to come in past the foyer, refused to sit down until my uncle scolded him for leaving me all alone. And then he came in, he spoke to me… He told me about you and your mother.”

“What did he say?”

She paused. When she spoke, she was hesitant. “He told me that he made mistakes. He said that he criticized your mother too much. He said… I don’t know if I should tell you.” She sighed. “He said that he threatened to take a second wife, and your mother reacted poorly. Farah, I know you have had a hard time, and I know it has been so hard for Firouzeh to raise you all alone. She is a remarkable woman, your mother.”

She handed me the cup. I smelled the bitter aromatics of the black tea, the sweet cardamom winding its way through, and felt my eyes burn anew. “I left her all alone,” I whispered. “I was supposed to get married, and I left her, she’s all alone, she put all her money into the wedding, khanom. She’s all alone and poor now. My mother cannot be alone. My mother doesn’t like to be alone, you have to understand!”

I could taste the salt of my tears in my mouth. I wanted her to leave. My stepmother wiped my face with a washcloth, soothing and tutting. Over her shoulder, I could see the dark stain of the tea soaking into her embroidery. I had knocked my cup over in my grief.

“Your mother is smart,” she said. “She has handled it, Farah, I can promise you that. No matter what has happened, I can tell you right now that your mother is safe and supported. She has a way of working things out. You, most of all, know that.”

I nodded. She picked up my discarded teacup and placed it into the sink. I watched her wash it out, dry it, place it in the cupboard. She was dependable, strong enough to open jars yet delicate enough to dry my eyes. She turned back to me. “Would you like to help me make lunch?”

After a week of her careful tutoring, my stepmother allowed me to cook lunch for the three of us. It was a Saturday, a bright sharp day that boasted the dewy smell of a nighttime rain melted into a clear sunny sky. I spent the morning making fesenjoon with rice and tah deeg. My walnuts were not chopped fine enough and I poured far too much pomegranate paste in; the stew burned in the oven, the chicken was overcooked and rubbery, the rice mushy and the tah deeg bland and flaccid, the kitchen a disaster. Still, it was mine, mine alone. My father and stepmother gasped and applauded when I brought out the large yellow plateau of failed tah deeg, and cheered loudly when I pulled the top off of the pot of singed stew. We all ate far too much of my chunky, tasteless food. My father said, “Afarin, afarin!” and my stepmother said, “I taught you well, azizam.” I couldn’t stop smiling. I had done something for myself.

After lunch, my father went outside to fetch the mail, and my stepmother gave me an appreciative kiss on the temple as we cleared dishes. “Your mother would be so proud,” she said.

I had just finished loading the cookware into the sink to soak off the burnt bits when my father re-entered, one letter held lightly between the index and middle fingers of his left hand, the rest of the mail clamped under his right arm. He held out the letter to me.

“Farah, it’s from your mother.”

I looked between my stepmother and father. 

“Go on, read it!” she said. I dried my hands against the cotton and embroidery thread. I left the room with the letter. It was the first contact I had had with my mother since the week prior. I situated myself on my bed, holding the thick envelope material delicately. I brought it to my nose, staring out at the room as I did: the colorful carpet, the muted books, the glint of the alarm clock. The paper smelled like sugar and coffee. I opened it clumsily, nails tearing and adhesive sticking. I pulled the thin sheaf of paper out of the envelope and began to read.

Some time later, my stepmother sent my father to check on me, concerned that the letter had upset me or reawakened my anger. When my father knocked at my door, he was met with silence. Concerned, he tried again, louder, calling my name and saying, “Are you okay, baba? Are you okay?” After his fifth or sixth time calling my name, he paused, then said, “I’m coming in.”

He found me sitting upright on the bed, alert and oddly still. The letter, a single sheet of paper mangled with my mother’s imprecise handwriting, sat in front of me on the comforter. At the sight of him, I began to cry.

“You did this,” I told him. “You hurt her.” After I said that, I became so unintelligible that my father had to wait until I could compose myself.

“You are a lonely, horrible man. You are old and going bald, and I hate you. I hate your wife, and your house, so small and cheap. I want to be with my mother! But you made her do this. She was going to be okay, with me.”

Once I stopped crying, I was eerily calm. I didn’t want to be violent. I wanted to lie back and close my eyes for an eternity.

“What did the letter say? Is your mother okay?”

“No,” I gasped. The tears came back again. “You hurt her. She was going to die.”

“What?” he said. “Who hurt her? I didn’t touch her! Is she okay?”

“She said she spent her last rial on that wedding, she was going to starve, ahmagh. You divorced her. She couldn’t find a job that would take her, we were surviving on your checks for me. She was going to be on the streets, she was going to— I don’t know. You almost killed her.”

He looked confused, standing in the doorway. “She was going to be on the streets?”

“Yes, stupid! You took away all her money. What did you think she was going to do?”

“What did she do?”

I grabbed my face in both my hands and squeezed, staring down at the letter. The pressure on my cheeks felt grounding, punishing. “She had to do something,” I mumbled.

He was closer to me now, marooned in the middle of the carpet, looking like he was searching for something solid to hold onto. “Farah. What did your mother do?”

“She had to do something. She was going to starve, you divorced her, you took me away, you made her do this! She loves me, she was going to let me go through with it, she didn’t even want it, she just had nowhere else to go, grandfather won’t give her anything else. It makes sense. We made a promise. They give us money, and we give them a wife.”

“What did she do, Farah?”

I was touching my own tears on my cheeks but I wasn’t crying anymore. I felt sensitive and raw and my eyes were hot and delicate. “She had to marry him. I was supposed to be there and everything was supposed to be okay, and then you took me away, so she had to marry him.” I looked up at him and began to cry. “Right?”

It took a year before my father could convince me to go visit my mother. I visited her during Norooz. The village air was ripe with the warmth of a new year and my mother didn’t live in the same house anymore. She met me at the door and looked at me with wide, cautious eyes, as if she were a child caught stealing. I stood in that moment, just for a second, just watching her watch me. Finally, I said, “Salaam, Maman.” She hugged me so hard I could feel her bony shoulders digging into mine. 

Over dinner, a measly array of food both burnt and undercooked, my mother apologized for the quality of her cooking, the messy state of their apartment, her own appearance, the disarray of the sofreh they had set up for the holiday (the seeds unsprouted, the apple rotting, the Shahnameh missing entirely). At every turn, Reza quietly comforted her. It’s delicious. I don’t mind the mess. You look wonderful. Norooz isn’t my favorite holiday anyway. During the awkward shuffling transition to tea and cookies, I looked around her new home, so distant and yet so familiar. I could hear the radio: …proposed the vote for women… the Shah’s radical idea… I could see through the open door to their bedroom; on the floor was a pile of masculine clothing, Reza’s. He had settled into his seat again, sipping tea, reaching for a sugar cube. He had just started to grow a small, sparse goatee. He was eighteen. My mother was thirty and developing age lines that no cream could ward off. Reza deposited a little white cube into his own cup, and then offered me the bowl. I smiled, thanked him, shook my head. I took a sip of my tea: strong, dark, full-bodied. There was no trace of sugar.

Annabelle Taghinia is a high school senior from New England who spends her free time writing fiction, including a collection of stories about women in Iran. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Lost Balloon, and others.

15 May 2026