Amreekiya Page 4

  “But they’re strict?”

  “About some things.”

  “So you live with your aunt and uncle?”

  “They’re relatives. He’s my dad’s cousin.”

  Halfway there, Yusef’s car started to overheat, which must have been a regular occurrence, because he didn’t seem alarmed. We had to drive the rest of the way with the heat blasting, though. We were both sweating profusely. “Man, your house is far away,” he said, wiping his forehead.

  “Sorry.” You didn’t have to offer me a ride. At least the city buses had air conditioning. I leaned my head further out the window in a futile effort to cool down.

  “It’s worth it.”

  About twenty minutes later we got into the neighborhood. “This is a pretty nice area,” he said. “Must be good living here.”

  It wouldn’t be so bad if I had the house to myself and didn’t have to go to school or interact in any way with the spoiled kids around me. “It’s all right.” To avoid the subject and to be polite, I asked him about school, to see if I made a good decision transferring.

  He parked the car a block away from the house and told me it wasn’t too difficult, but it took a while for him to get used to the amount of work he had in his honors classes. Also, it was in the ghetto; there was a shooting in the area at least once a year, so they put the school on lockdown as a precaution. Cops had been on campus a few times. This terrified his mother, and she sometimes tried to talk him into going to the neighborhood school, which was a lot safer, even if it didn’t have such a good academic program. What was the point of them moving across the world if their children were still going to be in danger? He dwelled on the danger of the area, and I knew it was no exaggeration. My father used to have an apartment less than a mile from the school, the last place where Mom and I lived with him. Yusef took the same concerned tone he described his mother taking; he was scared that I’d be too ignorant of the circumstances and end up getting hurt.

  “I don’t think I’ll be in that much danger,” I said. “I can blend into a crowd.” Nobody knew I was alive at my middle school except to sneer when they were forced to talk to me.

  “You haven’t seen the crazy chicks at this school. They always get in fights because their boyfriends were looking at some other girl. ‘Bitch he’s mine!’” He pointed his forefinger accusingly at the windshield.

  We both laughed. He threw his head back and opened his mouth wide when he did.

  “I won’t worry about stupid girls.” I already had to worry about a stupid woman.

  “I would. I think you’ll get a lot of attention.”

  I looked away and stared at the part of his car door that was starting to come off at the top.

  “I don’t want those girls’ boyfriends to look at you either.”

  I snorted and laughed. “Will you get into fights with them, too?”

  “If it comes down to that.”

  I woke up late the first day of school, a regular occurrence for me then. I had time to put a stick of gum in my mouth and tie my hair back without combing it; if I missed the bus, I was screwed. The last thing I wanted to do was ask Amu or Amtu for a ride. If I got one of them to do it, I’d hear a lecture the whole way there about how stupid I was to transfer to a school so far away when the schools in this area were some of the best in the county, at least as good as the program for the gifted students at this low-class school that had gang fights and lockdowns all the time.

  The adrenaline rush and the walk to the bus stop kept me up at first, but after sitting on the bus for ten minutes, the stuffy air and exhaustion got the best of me. I slept until someone nudged me when we stopped in front of the school. I reluctantly opened my eyes and saw loud crowds of teenagers in front of chain-link fences.

  I tried to find Baba’s apartment in the background, but I couldn’t see it past the school’s two-story buildings. By the time Mom and I moved here, she was so sick that we didn’t have any walks together like we did before, so the scenery wasn’t that familiar. Besides, she said, this was no place to take a leisurely stroll; it was too depressing. The only things to see were decaying buildings, scared people keeping alert, and fierce guard dogs in front of the houses or in the backyard, ready to gobble you up if you got too close.

  Disorganization and crowds were the first things I noticed when I got on campus. The line for schedules stretched from the cafeteria to the amphitheater. I unsuccessfully looked for a sign that showed who had to go where, so I assumed the order was alphabetical and took my place in the last line since we only used Shadi instead of al-Shadi on our official documents.

  I stood there impatiently, my legs aching. I scanned the area for possible seats, but if I sat down, I knew someone would take my spot in line. Already a few had tried to edge their way in, so I made sure to keep as little space as possible between me and the guy in front of me, even though he had atrocious body odor.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard my name, “Isra” pronounced perfectly. He had to be an Arab boy, but I didn’t know many and not any that would come up to me at school. Yusef. I thought about him quite often, but in my rush to leave the house this morning, the possibility of seeing him hadn’t entered my mind. He looked handsome and fresh-faced. Seeing him so close, I could tell he already shaved; he had short coarse whiskers in his pores.

  I was embarrassed about my hair and my greasy skin. I managed a “Hi.”

  “How’s your first day?”

  “It hasn’t really begun. I’ve been here since eight.” I eyed the front of the line resentfully.

  He nodded. “That’s how everything is here.” He looked ahead of us. “You know what? They probably didn’t have half the schedules printed until nine, and they’re coming out with more.”

  I sighed. “Why did they have us even come here this early?” The thought of lying in bed was almost too much to resist. If it didn’t take so much energy, I would have started walking home.

  “When you’re a senior, they just mail your schedule to you.” He stepped closer to me, close enough I could feel the heat coming off his body. “This will be here for hours. We can just go and hang out until it clears up.”

  “Okay.” Even I couldn’t believe how readily I accepted this time.

  Once I sat down, my nerves calmed. His car was far from comfortable, but I felt ready to curl up in the passenger seat and fall asleep. Yusef suggested getting something to eat, so we stopped at one of the nearby fast food restaurants and ordered some breakfast. The building looked decayed, and one of the lowercase letters had fallen off the sign, but the food was edible and Yusef paid for it. He talked about his new job as a busboy at what he called a “hick diner.” He felt grateful that he wasn’t a waiter, because he couldn’t understand half of what his clientele were saying. “People say we can’t speak English just ’cause some people have an accent. At least my parents move their lips. But whatever—it’s money.” He laughed at his own statement and took a big bite of his hash browns. “Can you believe they hired me? I said I was Arab, and if there’s something in Spanish, they still ask me to translate it for them.” He shook his head and snickered.

  I tore pieces off my wrapper and smiled for his sake. That struck me about him: how open he was about these things, even to someone he barely knew.

  “What about your … your amu and amtu? How do they speak English?”

  “Amu’s English is better than Amtu’s, but they speak pretty well.” Amu had some schooling in English back in Palestine, and Amtu in Jordan, but it seemed like her English never improved the whole time I lived with them. I chuckled. “They’re horrible at idioms and slang or anything like that.”

  He smiled and looked out the window. “My parents haven’t been here that long, or, you know, they were pretty old by the time they came. Only me and Lubna were born here. Mama always says that American water’s what made her finally get pregnant with a boy.”

  From what I gathered from Amu’s stories, Baba was twenty-one wh
en he came and Amu twenty-four, both with college degrees. They lost touch as Amu assiduously worked at his law career while Baba was unruly. Somehow Baba met Mom—I didn’t know the story about that. Neither of my parents ever talked about it. Amu Nasser went back home to find a wife.

  Yusef looked back at me. “You’re quiet,” he said.

  I shrugged. “That’s the way I am.” If he had a problem with it, I didn’t care. He could find some other girl to hang out with if I wasn’t to his taste.

  He picked up his cup and swirled the straw in there, making the ice cubes clink against each other. He sank back into his seat and looked ahead at me. “You’re beautiful.”

  I looked down at my hands, at the leftover wrappers, at the ads beneath them. I couldn’t have blushed more deeply; I felt it throughout my whole body, and I had no words to say back to him. You are, too. I like you. It was true but so hard to admit. I said it, though, after a long pause, and he took my hand and kissed my fingertips.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Imm Yusef insisted that I have my dress made by one of her old friends, whose family was responsible for introducing Imm Yusef’s family to Abu Yusef’s when they finally found a permanent settlement in a village right outside Nablus. Imm Yusef gave me a more detailed history of her meeting her future husband and of this seamstress, but she kept referring to people and situations I had never heard of, so it didn’t make much sense. I just knew I needed to go to this woman to make the dress.

  I had no problem with the decision before she gave me an extensive history of the dressmaker. As for the dress, I didn’t have my heart set on anything or any ideas about what I might want other than something that made me look slim and attractive.

  But I knew I didn’t want Amtu there, though this was the only aspect of my wedding she seemed to care about.

  On the way there, I could only think about the old days when I used to have to go clothes shopping with Amtu. Once I got a job of my own at the end of high school, I started buying my clothes myself; all she’d ever buy for me were bargain-store clothes, and she always claimed that they never fit right because I was too fat or too tall for women’s clothes, even at ten or eleven years old.

  I braced myself for the experience during the fitting, comforting myself with the fact that this would be the last time I would ever do this. Just as I expected, once the old woman took my waist measurement of thirty-one inches, Amtu suggested in her sweetest tone—one I only ever heard in front of people outside of the family—that I should lose some inches before my wedding.

  Imm Yusef was sitting next to Amtu, saying something to the seamstress in Arabic. She interrupted herself to say, “That is not so very big.” I appreciated her defending me, but I wasn’t sure if it was because Imm Yusef liked me or because she hated Amtu a lot more than me. The seamstress also chimed in, claiming a real man wanted a woman with a bit of meat on her bones so she could handle his “manliness.” Imm Yusef and Amtu stood with their arms crossed, each refusing to look at the other in a sort of reverse staring contest, but the seamstress threw her head back and showed her dentures as she laughed at her own comment.

  On the way out, Imm Yusef invited Amtu and me to Yusef’s apartment to give me a chance to see it before the wedding. “It is so very small, but he will move out soon for when there are children,” she said. “You can invite your husband, yes? Abu Yusef maybe come a little late. He watch the store until after dinnertime.”

  Amtu smiled and agreed to come, but she doubted Amu could be there on a Saturday evening. We gave hugs and kisses as we left, but before Amtu and I got to the car, she leaned in close to my ear, nearly spitting on me. “I will not go there,” she said. “Imagine what such a place looks like.”

  “I’ll go by myself.” I didn’t like the idea of being alone with Yusef and his mother, but it was a lot better that I only had to worry about my behavior instead of mine and Amtu’s.

  Because only Hanan and I were going to Yusef’s apartment, he came to the house to pick us up to make sure we wouldn’t get lost on the way, though it was just a few blocks from the university I had been going to for four years.

  “Why would Mama be mad that I’m going with you?” Hanan asked while I was putting on makeup in the bathroom.

  “You know how your mother is.” I pressed my lips together and looked at the brown-pink on my lips, deciding if it was right, if it made me look put together but still conservative enough for Imm Yusef’s taste. She’d probably prefer some red or even purplish lipstick, from what I saw of her taste in makeup at the engagement ceremony.

  The doorbell rang while I was brushing my hair. Hanan went to get the door, and I closed the one to the bathroom, considered locking it. I didn’t know why I felt the butterflies in my belly all of a sudden, but I continued brushing my hair. I heard his voice, then Hanan’s, though I couldn’t tell what they were saying. I sat down and tied my hair in a messy bun. It’s not like today is the wedding. We’re just going to his apartment for dinner.

  I composed myself and met them both by the door. Hanan said she had to go to the garage to set the security alarm before we left, leaving Yusef and me alone. “So there’s no one else in the house? What about your other cousin?”

  I shook my head. “He’s never here.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a dark velvet jewelry box. With all the money he and his parents were spending on our wedding, I wondered how he could afford to buy jewelry. I smiled and opened the box to find a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket. “Thank you so much.” I hugged him and kissed his cheek.

  He held me close and kissed my hair, let his nose linger for a few seconds, tickling my scalp. He pulled away to put the necklace on. “Mama told me that’d be a good choice. You could put one of our wedding pictures in there.”

  “Your mother picked it out?”

  He rested his hands on my shoulders. “Yeah, I needed a woman’s opinion.” Yusef had three sisters, yet he always went to his mother to get a “woman’s opinion.” I didn’t mean to, but I asked him why he never wanted his sisters’ opinions.

  “I used to, but they’re all so busy now that they’re married—taking care of their kids and all.” His face fell into something that was not quite a frown but not the bright smile he had on before. “You like it?”

  “Yes, I just wondered.”

  He gave me a soft kiss on the lips. “I know Mama’s intense about the wedding and everything, but she’ll calm down. She’s usually not like this.” He parted his lips and leaned in for another kiss.

  I heard Hanan’s footsteps approaching in no time, but I couldn’t pull myself away until she opened the door from the garage to the kitchen, making enough noise for Yusef to hear because the door always stuck. When she came into the living room, I noticed that all my gloss was on his lips with a smear on his two front teeth. I wiped it off with my palm, and Hanan averted her eyes like I was undressing him. “I need to get my purse,” I said.

  He nodded vigorously. “Uh, yeah, that’s fine. Take your time, Isra. Mama’s still cooking.”

  Hanan opened and then closed her mouth without saying anything. She went into the kitchen for no reason.

  I got my things quickly, and we were on our way out. The silence was too much for me to handle, so I thanked Yusef for coming out of his way to pick us up. “No problem. It’s a relief. Mama gets pretty crazy when we’re expecting company. She’s gotta clean every crevice in the house, make sure everything looks new and the food’s perfect.”

  “My mama’s like that, too,” Hanan said. Except Amtu Samia hardly did any of the work herself. She only criticized.

  Yusef opened the backseat door for her. “Yeah, it’s an Arab woman thing.”

  “Of course. Everyone will judge you if it’s not perfect.” I folded my arms and felt my stomach turn.

  “Women are always hard on each other.” He placed a hand on my lower back and opened the car door.

  Yusef’s apartment smelled like meat stew an
d cumin. The apartment’s appearance was no surprise to me: bright white walls, brown carpet, tiny kitchen, and a narrow hallway. Inexpensive one-bedroom apartments had not changed much in the last fifteen years. I had lived in two with Mom that could be mistaken for this one, but ours rarely had such a strong food smell. When Mom was healthy, she worked all day as a clerical assistant, sometimes Saturdays, so she never made anything too complicated. Most of it came out of a box, spaghetti with premade sauce, macaroni and cheese, tuna sandwiches. Yusef’s bedroom reminded me of the rooms I slept in with Mom; we shared a bed until Mom got too sick and we moved into Baba’s apartment with its dingy walls and more cockroaches than I’d ever seen in my life.

  I sat down on Yusef’s lumpy full-size bed and tried to keep the tears from coming to my eyes, knowing that he would interpret them as those of a spoiled rich girl, one who could not stand the thought of the demotion in status by having to live in such a small, plain place. That was how little he knew about me, and our wedding was only a month away. “I’m so tired,” I offered as an explanation, which was not a complete lie. Memories were always draining.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Why?”

  I stared ahead at the wall. Imm Yusef came to the door. “What are you childrens doing in here?” She was already mad that the only chaper-one we had for our car ride over here was a teenage girl; she had expected Amtu to come at least.

  “Nothing. Just looking, Mama.”

  She told us the food was almost done, and Hanan was out there waiting. I wanted to lie down on the bed and sleep, but I got up and left the bedroom under Imm Yusef’s suspicious eyes.

  Abu Yusef arrived for dinner, and Imm Yusef kept on insisting that everyone eat more all the way through dessert. Abu Yusef didn’t have dessert; he couldn’t wait to sit on the couch and smoke. He must have smoked at least four cigarettes while we ate, and Imm Yusef kept on complaining to him in Arabic. She even got up once and put one of his cigarettes out, and their argument intensified for a few minutes. He lit another as soon as she walked away. “Welcome to my childhood,” Yusef whispered to me and put his hand on mine.