Amreekiya Page 10

  Just as I opened the closet to find something decent to wear and start packing, I heard Yusef’s key in the door. It would be better this way: I could tell him all those things to his face. He called my name as soon as he locked the door again. I met him in the hall, my hands on my hips. “Where have you been?”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “Look, I’m tired, and I’m not in the mood to fight.”

  I stabbed his shoulder with my forefinger. “I didn’t ask that. I asked where you were.”

  He gaped and raised his eyebrows, outraged, folding his arms. “I drove around for an hour or something and then stopped by my parents’ house. What do you think I was doing?”

  “Don’t act like I’m crazy. You’ve been gone for like four hours, and it’s almost eleven.”

  He took both of my hands in his. “I needed to blow off some steam. I don’t want another fight.”

  I pulled away and smelled the cigarette smoke on him. “You could have called, and you didn’t have to stay so late!” I continued to berate him, telling him if I had done the same, he’d be a thousand times more enraged than me. I stomped my foot down hard.

  He threw his hands in the air. “Maybe I should have called. I wasn’t thinking.”

  I went out into the living room and saw one of those grocery bags with red “Thank You” labels that his parents carried in their store. “That’s some more maramiya that Mama gave me. She put some dessert and food on the plate.” I sat down on the couch and opened the bag, which provided enough evidence to prove he had been at his parents’ house. I wasn’t sure if that was better than him being with another woman.

  “What did you tell them? Did you tell them we were fighting?” I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands.

  “I said you were sick, and we were having some … issues.” He wanted to know what was wrong with talking to his parents about the problems we were having. After all, they had been married for over forty years; we could stand to learn something from them. We had been arguing and snapping at each other for days, and he was confused about what to do. He didn’t realize marriage was this hard. He only wanted us to be happy.

  “What did she say?”

  He shrugged. “Mama didn’t say anything bad about you. I don’t see why you’re worried.”

  “Because she judges me. Her, your sisters, all of them.”

  “They mean well.”

  “They mean well for you, and I’m just the whore who lured you away from their bosoms.”

  Yusef sighed. “That’s not true, Isra. They all wanted me to get married.” He sat down beside me on the couch. “And they definitely don’t think you’re a whore.”

  He wanted to know how I felt, and when I told him he didn’t listen. “I am pregnant. You were right about that.”

  He took me in his arms and nuzzled against my neck. “I’ve always wanted to be a father. I love babies.”

  Because he hadn’t taken care of any.

  We cuddled on the bed and talked about children. He wanted to make love at first, but I still felt all the kunafa in my stomach and wasn’t in any mood to do anything that physical. It might make me puke all over him. “I guess I’ll have to get used to this when we have the baby,” he said, and laughed. Then he pulled me to him and asked me if I wanted a boy or girl.

  “I want it to be healthy and good.” I had a feeling that a boy would probably satisfy his mother and give me more of an upper hand in our relations with one another, but the thought of being one of those women who preferred a boy for the advantages it provides made my stomach turn again.

  “Me too. I want it to look like you.” He wrapped his fingers around one of my curls and smiled.

  I looked at his face, the light brown skin that felt so smooth under my fingertips until I reached his stubble. “Your skin, though.”

  He shrugged. “Hmm. Definitely your nose.” He ran his finger down the smooth edge. His had a small bump at the bridge, and it hooked a little at the bottom. He moved his finger down to trace my lips and kissed them softly.

  “I don’t think this is about the baby.”

  I turned over so he couldn’t reach my lips.

  He grabbed a hold of me and kissed the back of my neck and licked behind my ear, tickling me. “You can’t blame me for trying.” He continued with the soft, light kisses on my neck that felt more like a brushstroke, but he couldn’t put me in the mood, couldn’t take me all the way there, because I didn’t want another thing inside me that night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After I put the stuffed chicken in the oven, I cleaned up the mess I had made on the counters and the dishes I used to prepare the meal. By the time I was eleven, I had been cooking all the meals for over a year and a half, and I knew that since Arab food took forever to finish, I might as well get some cleaning done while I waited. The whole time I cleaned, Hanan would show off the new skills she had been learning in kindergarten: the alphabet, how to add and subtract. “I’m going to read soon, ’Sra!” At that age she still couldn’t say Isra correctly.

  She sprinted to the living room and came back with a pencil and paper and wrote out her name for me: Hanan Shadi. After I dumped the crumbs into the trash, I looked at the paper. “Oh, wow, that’s really good,” I said. Once I gave Hanan enough praise, she’d usually get out of my hair, so I pretended the littlest things were great.

  “You know that’s not how we say it, though?” I added, following her into the living room, where she now started coloring little hearts around her name on the coffee table while Rasheed watched TV. “It’s al-Shadi. That’s how you say it in Arabic.”

  Baba and Amu pronounced it “ash-Shadi.” I wondered why both Baba and Amu had decided to leave the “al” off our last name for English-language documents. Until I was seven, I thought my last name actually was Shadi. Then Baba told me that it wasn’t, talking to me like I was stupid. “Don’t you know anything about where you came from?” he asked me. “Sometimes I cannot believe you are my child.”

  But I looked almost exactly like him.

  “Why didn’t you just put the ‘al’ in there anyway?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask dumb questions” was his best explanation.

  Probably it made the name sound whiter. And Amu was a hypocrite for looking down on my whiteness when it always seemed like he was trying to be whiter himself. At least I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t.

  “Isra, when will the food be ready? Wallah I can’t wait any longer. You should have got off your teez and started dinner earlier!” Amtu was yelling from upstairs, her congested voice breaking at the end.

  “It’s going to be a while,” I answered. “I can make you a snack.” I cringed at the offer I made, but it was better than having to hear her complain about me for hours and then pass those complaints on to Amu, who would get mad at me and criticize me some more. If I did something really bad, I knew he would hit me.

  I couldn’t hear Amtu’s response clearly, so I had to walk to the stairs while Hanan followed me with questions about why we did not put the “al” in our name when we spelled it in English. I saw Amtu at the top, looking exhausted and huge and disheveled. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy, with another boy.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth to repeat herself, but nothing came out. At first it looked like she was rolling her eyes at me because she was so irritated by how deaf I was, but her eyes blinked over and over, and she held up both her arms, her hands balled into fists, her whole body shaking. Then she fell down the stairs. I reacted as fast as I could, but I only made it to the second stair before I caught her and stopped her from falling farther. There was blood dripping from the side of her mouth; she had bit her tongue. Hanan was screaming, and Rasheed got up from the couch and yelled “Mama! Mama!” He helped me move his mother to the flat carpet. Hanan was still screaming and crying. I was trembling, but I made feeble attempts at telling Hanan everything would be all right. I needed
her to be quiet.

  “I’ll call Amu Nasser,” I said to Rasheed. “Stay with your mom!”

  I went to the kitchen to use the phone and saw Hanan with tears dripping from the bottom of her face. Her screechy little voice called out her for her mother just like Rasheed had been doing.

  “Shut up, Hanan! I need to call your dad.”

  I had to call twice, and when he answered he called me a stupid himara for not calling 911. “She’s pregnant, ya Allah, and she needs medical attention right now. I will be on my way.” He muttered more things in Arabic, probably insulting me, but I hung up on him in the middle of it and called 911.

  Amu got to the house a few minutes before the paramedics, but he didn’t want to take the chance of hurting Amtu or the boy in her belly any more than they already had been, so he tried to comfort her on the floor while she and Hanan simultaneously cried out for their mothers. I led Hanan away and told her she had to leave her mother alone for now.

  The paramedics were careful when they loaded her on the stretcher. The two of them asked for Amu’s assistance so they could be extra careful with her. Once he saw she was safely loaded into the ambulance, he whirled around and yelled at me for not watching her close enough. “She is pregnant, ya hiwana! I cannot trust you to do anything.” He made the spitting sound and motion, but nothing came out.

  I knew it was my job to always babysit Hanan. I didn’t know it was my job to watch his wife as well.

  He took Hanan because he couldn’t trust me to watch over his daughter, and Rasheed wanted to go to the hospital to see his mother.

  I was all alone.

  Amtu Samia stayed in the hospital for a couple of days. Her baby died, but since it had gotten so big already, they had to cut it out in a C-section, and the doctors told her that her seizures worsened during her pregnancy, so she couldn’t get pregnant anymore. She had to go to the hospital a little later for another procedure. I knew that she came out sterile, so she must have had her tubes tied, though no one ever said that was what she was doing. If anyone asked, I would say it was a hysterectomy, because people would just assume she got cancer and had to take it out for that reason.

  To me, Amu and Amtu were never in love, never seemed to like each other much, but they tolerated each other and must have slept together enough for her to get pregnant once in a while. Now they barely spoke to each other. Amu Nasser worked even more, spending twelve hours at his office on the weekdays, going in most Saturdays for several hours, even Sundays a couple times a month. Amtu Samia didn’t get up until noon most days and rarely ever got dressed unless she went to visit her new best friend, Imm Samir, or Imm Samir came to visit us. Since a visit to them was spending the entire day and evening together, either Amtu was gone when I got home from school and took Hanan with her, or Imm Samir and Amtu would be at the house together, gossiping and laughing their girlish, high-pitched laughs in a futile attempt to appear young. I knew most of the time they were talking about me: what a bad girl I was and my sharmoota for a mother, while I watched Hanan in the living room. They usually stayed in the dining room, basking in their superiority.

  That’s when I began to wish I’d pushed her off those stairs. Because she deserved the worst she could get, and I wanted to be the one to give it to her.

  But it wasn’t all bad for me. Even though Amtu Samia picked on me more, Amu Nasser wasn’t as mean to me and rarely believed her accusations against me now. Amtu Samia would punish her own children on occasion, but not often, because Rasheed was a godsend and she was rarely alone with Hanan now that Hanan was in school almost as long as me. She would give me much worse than she gave them: slaps instead of ear tugs, punches instead of spankings. Besides that, she always wanted me to get more of the abuse from Amu Nasser; she only told Amu about her own children’s bad behavior when it was terrible.

  Amu Nasser grew impatient with having to do what he considered her job. “You sit at home all day, and you cannot control three children? I work my ass off to support this family and to make a good life for you in this country, and you want me to come home to tell Isra she should talk to you in a nicer tone? You’re a sad excuse for a woman. My mother raised five children better than you can raise three.”

  Amtu claimed that she knew how to raise her children, good Palestinian kids, but she had never signed up to raise some bint min haraam, a bastard, with an Amreekiya mother, who didn’t know manners, modesty, or respect. She’d like to see how his mother would deal with that.

  “Ya Samia, she is not that bad. Her father is Falasteeni, she is Falasteeniya. My mother took in her dead sister’s two children, and she never once complained.”

  I liked that she got a taste of her own medicine, got to feel what it was like to be treated like a good-for-nothing.

  One evening Amu Nasser got home before five, which he never did on weekdays even before Amtu Samia fell down the stairs. Hanan was coloring at the dinner table while I was chopping meat and parsley at the counter, Rasheed was at a friend’s house, and Amtu and Imm Samir were out somewhere. He looked surprised to see Hanan and me in the kitchen and asked me where his wife was.

  “She’s at Imm Samir’s, I think.” Not that she ever told me where she was going or even when she would be back.

  He frowned and went to his office to put his things away, trailed by Hanan, who was trying to show him a picture she just finished coloring. “Yes, nice, habibti. Very nice. Baba needs to finish some work. Go show your cousin, okay?”

  I could tell he was angry. Amu Nasser knew I did chores around the house and that I helped Amtu with the big weekend breakfasts we ate, but for some reason, him finding out I cooked dinner every day would set him off, and he and his wife would have a huge fight. I thought she deserved to be punished for the way she treated me, but I hated having to hear them fight all the time. With Mom, our home was so peaceful and serene unless Baba was around, but at Amu Nasser’s it was fight after fight after fight, even though he was only around in the late evenings and nights. Sometimes I wondered why they didn’t divorce, and why Amtu Samia would fear Amu Nasser divorcing her (something I picked up from her conversations in Arabic with Imm Samir). I knew if you were married to a man, you could get half of what he had; Baba didn’t have anything, but Amtu Samia could have made a killing off divorcing Amu Nasser. He was a lawyer, though, so he would probably have everything tied up in court. They’d battle each other for years, destroying each other. The thought made me smile, though I’d be out of a place to live.

  I was sitting on the couch when Amtu Samia and Imm Samir walked through the door, and they were laughing about something. Amu Nasser came out of his office right away, and Amtu Samia’s smile dropped instantly. He greeted them and asked Imm Samir how she was holding up after her husband’s recent death, and if she was lonely not living with any family. Amu Nasser made his questions much shorter than they would have normally been, and Imm Samir’s responses were the same. She knew she had to get out; she could sense Amu’s barely-concealed anger.

  They went into his office to yell at each other, but it was pointless since we could still hear them. Rasheed came home in the middle of it and asked me what was going on, and I shrugged. “I guess they’re mad at each other again,” I said. Hanan was upset and cried at first. I would have taken her somewhere else in the house, but there wasn’t anywhere where you couldn’t hear them. All three of us waited in the living room, silent, stomachs empty. Dinner was ready and got cold. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and made myself and Hanan two plates of food. Rasheed came in a few minutes later and got out a plate and ate at the dinner table with us.

  “Do you think they’ll be mad we ate without them?” Rasheed asked.

  “When aren’t they mad?” I didn’t know why he was so concerned. If they were going to blame someone for being rude, it was going to be me. Not Rasheed. Not their golden boy.

  “True,” he said, and went to get seconds.

  Amu Nasser’s voice boomed. “I did not marry an el
even-year-old girl! She is the only one who cooks and does anything around the house. You run your mouth about her. You should thank me for getting her. I got you a maid and a babysitter all in one child!”

  “No, you bring your cousin’s bint min haraam for me to raise, and all I try to do is teach her how to be good woman!”

  “You are a liar, Imm Rasheed.” He called her “Imm Rasheed” when he was super pissed to remind her she wasn’t living up to that name, the mother of his son, named after Amu’s father. “How can you make her a good woman when you tell all around town that she is a bint min haraam? How will she ever find a good husband if everyone knows this? You want to keep her here forever, that is what you want! Lazy, lazy, lazy!” He kept on shouting that over and over; he didn’t want to let her get in a word edgewise to defend herself. He reminded me of one of those kids that covered their ears and said “La, la, la” because they didn’t want to hear what the other person had to say. I laughed.

  “What’s funny?” Hanan asked, her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

  “Your mama and baba are stupid. They’re like babies.”

  That made her laugh. “Babies?”

  “It’s just like how they fuss and cry when they have nothing to do. It means nothing. It’s just noise.”

  But nothing changed. Amu Nasser threw his weight around, yelled, and criticized when he made an appearance, but that hardly mattered because he was never there, so less than a week after that argument I went back to making dinner every weeknight and cleaning the house and watching Hanan all the time.