Amreekiya Read online

  “He smokes right in the house?” That was the only thing that surprised me. I’d been spending hours every week at his parents’ house. I had seen plenty of these disagreements before.

  “He’s old.”

  “Take more dessert, ya Hanan,” Imm Yusef said, already spooning another square of it on her plate. “Abu Yusef has no manners, smoking right in the house with guests! ʿAyb, ʿayb.” She clicked her tongue and went about making more tea.

  I was sleepy by the time we got home, so I changed into my pajamas and took off my makeup, and lying down made every muscle in my body gradually relax itself. These days were so exhausting for me; I had finals and papers coming up, work, visiting Imm Yusef so I could watch her plan the wedding, and family visits with Yusef. On top of that, Yusef asked me as soon as Hanan got out of the car if we could meet alone. “Without my crazy parents,” he said, grinning. And my insane relatives, too, he probably wanted to add. I felt the temptation to say yes, but I only gave him a maybe. At this point, it seemed like another obligation that I had to fulfill.

  And anyway, I had no time to squeeze in meeting him without looking suspicious to Amtu. Normally she didn’t care about what I did as long as I cooked and cleaned, now that Hanan didn’t need to be watched all the time, but ever since my engagement, she kept her eye on me to make sure I didn’t mess anything up. She kept track of my work schedule to make sure I wasn’t staying out later than I should be, and when I went to see Imm Yusef, she always called their house to make sure that was where I was going and that I came back in a reasonable amount of time.

  I had tomorrow to think of these things, though.

  I was just about to doze when Hanan quietly called my name.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you really going to, like, go through with it and everything?”

  “Umm … of course. I mean, it’s only a month away. It seems a little late to break it off.” I sighed. “Why?”

  “Oh, you know, are you really going to live in that apartment? His dad smokes in there, and it’s so small.”

  I turned over on my other side so I could see her. She had her knees to her chest. “Well, it is only a one-bedroom. Those are usually small.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  I turned back over on my other side, keeping my back to Hanan. I suppose I had some time every other morning to see Yusef. Nothing could get Amtu out of bed early unless it had something to do with Amu.

  Yusef had coffee ready for me when I arrived. It was strong instant coffee that needed more sugar or milk, but I thanked him. We sat down on his couch, his hand on my knee. I faintly smelled his father’s cigarettes from a couple of days before.

  “I would have made some food, but I noticed this morning that I didn’t have anything to make.” He laughed and took a drink from his coffee cup.

  I didn’t imagine Imm Yusef’s only son cooking for himself, the prince she considered him to be, but it was something that he knew how to make a decent cup of coffee with the help of a machine. I’d be surprised if Rasheed knew how to operate a coffee maker or fry an egg.

  “What about you? Do you cook a lot?”

  Maybe this was an interview to see how good a wife I would make.

  I stirred the coffee with the spoon and sipped some from that, focusing on a water stain right in front of me. “I cook almost every day. I don’t know if it’s that good.” I did know that Imm Yusef’s food was better. A lot better.

  He put his arm around my shoulders, shaking me up enough to almost spill coffee on the front of my shirt. We laughed and kissed; he tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear and caressed my cheek with his thumb. We ended up talking most of the time, and I rested my head on his lap. Our conversation turned to children. It had to be the first time I ever discussed this with anyone, and I always went back and forth on whether I would want to have some. “Two would be good,” I said.

  “A girl and a boy?”

  “No, two girls. Boys run around the house naked and pee in your face.”

  He chuckled. “Come on, boys aren’t that bad, but I like girls, too. They’re so cute and sweet.” He went on about his three nieces, about how much he loved them, how much they loved their khalu, their maternal uncle. He took me to his bedroom and showed me a box he kept of drawings and other crafts that his younger nieces and nephews made in school or at home. One was him as a stick figure in red crayon with his name misspelled on the top, “Uncle Useef.”

  I held on to his arm and smiled. “How old is she?”

  “Three. She’s my youngest niece.” He raised his eyebrows mischievously when he looked over at me. “Two boys and four girls would be good for us.”

  “Six?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you need a second wife to have the other four.”

  He laughed. “Why’d your aunt and uncle only have two?”

  I hesitated. “Amtu had some trouble with pregnancies. She had a miscarriage when Hanan was four or something, and they found something wrong with her uterus.”

  “Cancer?”

  I kept my eyes down on his niece’s drawing. “I don’t know for sure. I was pretty young, and they didn’t talk about it.”

  “That must be hard.”

  I went to his house every Monday and Friday morning for a couple of hours, and Amtu didn’t seem to take note of this change in my schedule. I left before nine, so I doubted she was even up, but I asked Hanan a few times about anything she heard her mother talking about when I wasn’t there. I also looked in my rearview mirror for almost the whole drive to his apartment, making sure that no car was following me. Hanan said I was paranoid. “You’re acting like Mama’s a secret agent or something,” she told me. “She wouldn’t follow you in a car. She hates driving anyway.”

  At first I thought it was ridiculous that everyone kept such a close eye on us to make sure that we didn’t do anything haraam. I mean, we were going to be married; the wait wasn’t that long. We could resist temptation.

  But lately when I was around him, it seemed like all I could think about was how warm his skin felt against mine, his hands that were just rough enough to be manly, and the way his eyes softened when he looked at me. When I was at work, too, or in class, or finishing up my last assignments as a college student, my mind would wander to Yusef. I wasn’t this bad even as a teenager. Probably because we were better at keeping our hands off each other back then.

  After that first day we rarely had any serious conversations. We kissed and explored each other’s bodies. I could always feel his hard-on pushing against me and the pulsating wetness between my legs, but we both kept our clothes on.

  “Imagine what it’ll be like when we’re married, when we get to see each other every day. None of this sneaking-around bullshit.” He stroked the back of my hair while I snuggled up to his neck, breathing in his musky scent on his bed.

  “What made you ask for me?”

  His eyes met mine, and he grinned. “Because I had to have you.”

  “But why right then? Why not wait until the fall, when you’re graduating?”

  He sighed and ran his fingers through my hair. He gave me a few syrupy and vague answers: he couldn’t stop thinking about me, he lost a piece of his heart every day he was without me, blah, blah, blah. Eventually I coaxed the truth out of him.

  “I was at Khadija’s house for dinner one night, and her husband had this friend over. You know Abu Bilal?” He examined my face for a reaction.

  “Should I?”

  “It’s good you don’t remember him—he’s not much to remember. But he wanted to marry you. He was going on about how you were such a ‘rose,’ and then when it was just us guys, he was talking about what a ‘womanly body’ you had, and a ‘beautiful face.’” His mouth tightened, his tongue moving over his teeth underneath the skin. I had never seen that expression before. He shook his head over and over. “I almost killed that guy. I wasn’t going to let him take my woman just ’cause he’s got a four-bedroom h
ouse and a nice car.”

  “Oh, he’s the one with the white ex-wife and the three kids?” That was what Amu and Amtu kept on repeating: he has big house and nice car, and he was married to an Amreekiya before, so he’ll be okay if you don’t always act like a lady because you know Amreekiyaat don’t know how to act like proper ladies the way Palestinian women do.

  “Yeah, he’s got an American ex-wife. I think he has three, yes … I know he’s got kids at least. He’s forty-five or something.” He kissed my neck and ran his tongue down the middle in a way that made me moan while he cupped my breast. “He can’t do this for you. You don’t want some old guy, popping Viagra pills just so he can enjoy your ‘womanly body.’”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I had been up nearly the whole night, scrubbing the kitchen and the living room walls. We were having company the next day, which we did at least once or twice a month back then, but something about this company coming over was different. I wasn’t sure why, but Amtu Samia was even more insane about having every inch of the house clean. Earlier that night, when we had come back from a family friend’s, she screamed in my face that the house looked like a pigsty. She claimed the walls and kitchen floor were filthy, and she hit me upside the head and told me to get it done.

  “It’s not even that dirty, you crazy bitch!” I yelled in her face.

  That’s when Amu Nasser intervened and twisted my ear so hard I thought it’d fall off. My eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t talk to your amtu this way. What is wrong with you, ya hiwana, you animal?” He ordered me to clean the walls and floors until my hands were so tired they fell off. If I mouthed off again, he would do much worse to me.

  “You came from trash, so you don’t know cleanliness,” Amtu Samia added.

  Hanan’s six-year-old eyes were wide and her lower lip was trembling; even Rasheed looked a little frightened, but he went right up to his room to avoid any trouble. “I’ll help, Baba,” Hanan offered.

  He pointed to the room we shared. “No, you will go to bed. It is a school night.”

  Never mind that I had school the next day.

  I stormed off and changed into my cleaning clothes, banging anything I could the whole time. I did the same when I made the soap mixture, and the real noise started when I was cleaning the walls with the adjustable mop. With every stroke, I made sure to slam the mop against the wall, and not long into my cleaning, Amu came down in his pajamas and yelled at me to keep it down. I was already steaming, and seeing his anger only fueled mine. “I can’t get it clean without touching the wall, you know.”

  He slapped my face and told me to drop the attitude. And then I heard the lecture I knew so well: he saved me from the streets and gave me a good home, and all I did was complain when I had to give anything back. “I am finished,” he said. “I am done with your shit.”

  I wanted to throw the bucket of soap at him, and I was tired enough for my self-control to be at a minimum. He went back up the stairs. I left the mop in the laundry room to dry and stood in the garage, thinking about leaving in my cleaning clothes, saying goodbye to no one, taking nothing with me. It’s not like I had much of value: no money, a few outfits, letters from my family in Ramallah, and a small photo album from Mom. I couldn’t leave without that, and getting that meant I’d have to go back to the room with Hanan and say goodbye.

  And I had nowhere to go, no one to take me in. No friends at all.

  On the way back in, I grabbed the stepladder and a dry squeegee to wash the walls, ignoring the tears running down my face.

  I wasn’t done until three in the morning, and I was too restless to go to bed, so I pulled out some books and the small photo album I hid in the slit in the box spring of my bed. I knew that Amtu often went through my stuff, and I didn’t know what she’d do to it, the spiteful bitch. The only good thing I got out of that night was that Amtu Samia never laid a hand on me again. I suppose I scared her by my sharp retaliation, and I was already as tall as she was and probably twice as strong.

  I made myself comfortable on the couch and looked through the photos. There were only five or six of Mom, but it was what I had left of her. She had some of her family, her parents’ wedding and family vacation photos, two of her and Baba together. I stopped at the wedding photo of her parents, two twenty-somethings smiling into the camera, unaware that their only child would later have a swarthy, curly-haired bastard and that they would leave her to die practically by herself.

  For a short second the thought that they might decide that they were wrong about distancing themselves from Mom and me and might take me in entered my mind, but it was so crazy that I shook my head and snickered at my own thought. I should have found them just to spit in their faces, to tell them that I’d rather jump off a cliff than have them in my life, call them my family. Call anyone my family.

  I was exhausted the next morning and overslept, so I barely made it to school on time. The day dragged on, and all I thought about was sleeping. I didn’t pay attention at all, just doodled on my notebook to keep myself up. The walk home from my middle school was slightly under a mile on flat ground, but it felt like an uphill journey that day.

  When I finally got home, I listened to the message on the machine: Hanan’s teacher saying that no one picked her up, or “Hannah” as she said; the school required her to stay in class until four-thirty, about an hour after school let out, but if there was some family emergency, she could stay longer. She’d like a call back so she and Hannah wouldn’t be worried about what was going on.

  I held myself back from crying out. The last thing I needed was to go pick up Hanan from school before I had to make a big dinner for our company, not giving me a second to take a quick nap. I was so tired that I was about to fall over.

  No, I wouldn’t take it. Amtu couldn’t still be sleeping at this hour, and why the fuck did she need to be? She got to sleep all damn night while I cleaned up for her guests. I stomped up the stairs and went into the bedroom without knocking. I heard Rasheed’s TV in the background. Typical: Hanan’s teacher had probably called after he got home, but he would never be expected to pick up the phone or his little sister. I could have strangled him, too.

  I saw just what I expected, Amtu sleeping in the bed, except her snoring sounded strange and uneven like she was having to catch her breath with each snore.

  “Amtu?” I felt a twinge of embarrassment: that was the first time in a while that I called her Amtu to her face. Usually I didn’t address her and avoided speaking to her at all costs. “Amtu? It’s really late, and Hanan’s still at school.”

  Still the same weird breathing sound.

  My stomach turned in on itself. Amtu Samia had seizures—that’s why she decided to get sterilized. But it had been a few years since her last one, and they were supposed to have been taken care of. I turned on the light and took the blanket off her. Her eyes were bugged out. It seemed like she was choking. “Amtu? What happened?” I saw two empty bottles of medication on her side.

  I should have jumped to the phone and called 911 right away, but I hesitated. This woman had done everything to make me wish that I was dead and had taken out every bad feeling she had all these years on me. She’d live and never thank me and keep me as her slave.

  I made the call anyway. The man on the phone told me an ambulance would be there as soon as possible, and to try and pump her stomach and make her vomit. As soon as I got off the phone, I yelled for Rasheed while I did the pumping, adrenaline the only thing keeping me going.

  Amtu puked all over the bed right when the paramedics got to the door; the smell and the sight of it made me gag. Rasheed was still on the phone with his father, keeping him updated on his mother’s status between sobs. I went down to let the medics in, and they quickly jogged up the stairs. I was only halfway up behind them by the time they had her loaded on the stretcher, Rasheed trailing, wiping his red eyes. When they left with her, he cried, sitting on the stairs, his shoulders sagging. I looked at the small
clock on the living room wall; it was just after four.

  “I’m going to pick up Hanan.” I’d barely make it there in time, but leaving was better than staying there.

  Once I fell asleep, I dreamed about Amtu’s corpse: her severed head in the cleaning supplies beneath the sink, her body lying on a shelf in the pantry, in my bed, on the sofa. She was on the front lawn, splayed like the Vitruvian Man. Her face was pale, her lips bluish-purple, and her eyes open wide. I ran screaming down the street until I was out of breath and collapsed on the pavement. The pain of the fall was enough to startle me awake in my dream. Mom told me that I had been sleeping for years, and Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia and Hanan and Rasheed were all figments of my imagination. Baba had no family here in the United States, especially not in the same town.

  Then I really woke up when Hanan opened the door. I yawned and asked her what time it was. Seven-thirty. I remembered I had already gotten the call about Amtu Samia being all right. They were just keeping her for observation and psychological evaluation. Also, Amu gave me all the names and numbers of the people I had to call to say that our dinner would be canceled. “Tell them that Amtu is in the hospital because—”

  “—she’s having an appendectomy?” I filled in right away, something my teacher had mentioned in my science class that day.

  He paused for a minute. “Yes, yes, say this,” he said absentmindedly. He ended the call with an order to take care of Hanan and cook dinner.

  I made the calls and told Hanan her mom was in the hospital because she had gotten a little sick. Then I went to bed right away. The day had been exhausting, and it wouldn’t kill Hanan and Rasheed to make sandwiches or ramen for themselves. There were things a lot worse than that, and they knew that now.

  “Did you eat yet?” I asked Hanan.

  She nodded. “I had three bowls of cereal. Each time I got a different one.”