Amreekiya Read online

  “Wow. Really?” I was groggy, but I humored her anyway. I was about the same age when we first found out Mom was sick, but the doctors said her chances of survival were good because she was so young. Life had a cruel way of misleading you.

  I went out and had a bowl of cereal myself while Hanan talked. “Is Mama okay?”

  “Yeah, that’s what your dad said.”

  “You know, Rasheed gave me a hug today, and his eyes were all red, so I don’t think she’s okay.”

  I didn’t want to have to keep pushing this lie, but how could I explain suicide to a six-year-old, especially her own mother’s? “He was just surprised that it happened. He wasn’t expecting it, and we were both together when we saw her fall.”

  “Oh.” She bunched the bedsheet in her hands. “Did your mama get sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Yeah, I cried a lot.” I still cry. Just last night I did. Tears came to my eyes right then.

  “Mama won’t die, right, like your mama did?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Amu came back early the next morning and made breakfast for us before he woke us all up. I didn’t know he could cook. And instead of blaming me, he thanked me for taking care of Hanan and letting her sleep in my bed for the night. I also didn’t know that he was capable of gratitude.

  Rasheed and I were quiet at the table, only giving concise responses to something Amu said, but Hanan was excited to see her father again and kept talking to him. She was always a daddy’s girl, something I found slightly sickening, but I guess I couldn’t blame her for it. Though Rasheed had been the spoiled favorite since he was a boy, Hanan received most of the affection when Amu was around, which was less and less these days, and that change must have been what made her work harder and harder to keep him home. She was too young to realize how tenuous father-hood—or, for that matter, life—was, but her parents were making their best efforts to show her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The cosmetologist stayed away from heavy eye shadow and dark lips, but she still ironed my hair and put it up in a messy bun (the fashionable kind, not like the ones I did most days). I went back home with Amtu Samia and Hanan to get my dress, and then Rasheed and Amu Nasser joined us on the way to the mosque to have the imam marry us. I had never been to one of these before. Only immediate family were invited, or, in my case, the family I lived with. Basically, all the imam did was ask if Amu would give Yusef, who was standing by his father, my hand in marriage, and he agreed while I watched from the sidelines with Hanan, Amtu, and Imm Yusef. They shook hands, and Amu pulled Yusef in for a hug and kisses. “Mabrook, ya ibnee!” he said to Yusef, so elated that he’d finally found an acceptable way to get rid of me. Ya ibnee—what a crock! He’d never considered me his daughter, so how could Yusef be his son?

  Abu Yusef and Rasheed gave their congratulations to Yusef as well, and Imm Yusef gave me a bone-crushing hug and a thousand kisses on the cheeks. When she was done, I looked over at Hanan, who was tearing up and wiping them away with her fingers. I knew she wasn’t a happy crier, so I put my arm around her and asked what was wrong, though I didn’t expect her to be honest in such a crowd. “Now you’re going to leave,” she said.

  I could feel the tension in the room increase when she said that. “Bass, bass, Hanan,” Amtu Samia told her. “This is what every woman does.”

  “My son is very nice man, habibti. He will be nice to your cousin.”

  “I won’t hog her too much,” Yusef said, laughing while he placed his hand protectively on my back.

  “I’m okay. I know.” She blushed and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  Amu Nasser pulled her close to him and told her that there would be a great party now and that I would be happy with my new husband and new life. Besides, she would still get to see me; I would still be close by.

  It was a lot easier than the engagement ceremony; there was no stage, no ring exchange, only some pictures before the party. Outside it was hot and humid, and my dress felt sticky and heavy by the end of the night. Everyone congratulated me, and most gave me hugs. The older women had advice, stories, and praise. For a couple of hours I was caught up in the festivities, dancing the dabka with the women and children and being lost in the moment. I started to feel tired only after I sat down not long after dark, drinking some ice water and having some food. I hadn’t had an appetite all day long and only ate a small breakfast, but now I could hardly keep myself from inhaling the food.

  “Wow, you’re really hungry,” Sana said when I got up to go to the buffet table for thirds.

  “I’ve had a busy day.” I looked at the crowd to find Hanan, but I couldn’t see her. Last time I saw her, she was meeting up with some of her friends. She seemed better once we got to the reception. Maybe it wasn’t so stupid of Amu to comfort her with the fact that a big party would follow.

  Sana tapped her heel against one of the legs of the table, scanning the crowds in front of us before she leaned in and whispered, “And a long night ahead of you.”

  It was past one in the morning by the time Yusef and I were on the road, heading to my new home. He drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and told me about his experience, smoking the arjila and shooting the shit with the other younger guys—apparently Rasheed wasn’t “that bad”—and listening to the older men tell stories about their weddings. “You know, I can’t believe this day has actually come,” he said. He took his hand off the clutch, put it on mine, and smiled.

  I smiled and nodded. I was relieved that it was over. No more parading, no more lectures, no more sneaking around.

  Sitting down and taking off my heels was a short relief, but once he wrapped his arms around my waist, all the tension descended back on me again. I told him I needed to freshen up, take a shower, because I was so sweaty and caked with makeup. He nodded, pouty and put off. We undressed at the same time, but he was out of his tux in a couple of minutes. He came closer to me when he went to the closet to hang it up and cover it with plastic. I was trying to take my last sleeve off, but my skin was damp and the dress was a little too small in the first place, so that I nearly tripped trying to take it off. He caught me and laughed and asked if I needed any help.

  I rushed to the bathroom and made the water as hot as I could, steaming up the tiny room instantly. I stared ahead at the wall and wiped the black eyeliner from my cheeks and eyes. It was much easier to do this unplanned, spur of the moment, so my body wouldn’t clench like this. I dried myself off and took a long look in the mirror. I covered my body with the towel. I couldn’t look at myself right now. How could I let him see me?

  Thirty to forty minutes must have passed, and I just had to make myself go out there. I put my slip on and brushed my hair back, my stomach still in a knot when I walked out the door. Yusef was lying down on the bed, his eyes closed. I sat in front of him and hesitated before I rubbed his forearm. He opened his eyes and grinned, staring at my loose breasts. “I thought you escaped through the bathroom window,” he said.

  “I can’t be a runaway bride; we’re already married.” If the days of planning with his mother, the engagement party, and the dress fitting hadn’t run me off, Yusef’s penis definitely wouldn’t.

  I leaned in and kissed his lips softly. He sat up and tried to pull the slip over my head. It caught a little on my arms because I didn’t lift them high enough, so I finished the job and slid it off. We both laughed nervously, and he apologized as he kissed my shoulder and cupped one of my breasts. I closed my eyes and pulled him down on top of me. I clenched my teeth as he put himself inside me, and gasped when the pain was too much for me to hold back.

  Yusef went to sleep not long after, clutching his pillow and snoring softly. My thoughts weren’t keeping me up. My legs were. I was so bored I counted how many times Yusef’s snore descended into a breath. When I got to 734, I decided I was too restless to sleep and quietly left the bed. It was so hot. His body spread warmth like a heated blanket.
I needed some air, some space.

  I went to the living room and opened the only window. The cool night air felt so good that my heavy eyelids closed, and I thought I might get some sleep while standing up, but as I leaned back, my head hit the wall and woke me up again.

  I heard voices from the sidewalk, so I looked below. It was a group of three, and though I couldn’t see them well, from the sound of their voices I guessed they were two guys and a girl, all drunk. No surprise. After all, it was a Friday night at an apartment complex right across the street from the university; three or four in the morning wasn’t late. Yusef must have done that, especially when he was sharing an apartment with a college buddy, not even a year ago. Sana’s oldest brother Bassam got his own apartment a few years ago. One time she and her parents stopped by, and they saw three empty bottles of Southern Comfort, a smoked roach, and his laundry scattered around the floor and countertops. Though Sana saw her father’s face tighten, he only said through clenched teeth, “If your grades fall, I will snap you like a twig between my fingers.”

  “You know if it was me, or my sister, Baba would have snapped us like a twig right then and there,” she said. We always did that: commiserate about how easy men had it.

  I noticed a man staring at me from his window across the way, licking his lips. I was only wearing my slip, and my cleavage protruded while I was leaning over. I felt exposed. More exposed than when Yusef saw me naked. Was there any privacy here?

  I slid the window shut, put the lock down, and closed the curtain. Windows scared Mom, too, at least when it came to me. Ever since I could remember, I made a habit of looking out of them, just watching the way cats do, even pulling up a chair when I was too short to see out of them, so Mom always made sure the lock was down. At Baba’s, there was no lock, and Mom asked him several times to buy some because she was afraid that as soon as no one was looking, I might go to the window, reach my head out too far, and fall out. She kept nagging him for a couple of months, but chemo gave her a short temper. She roared at him, her face livid: “Why can’t you just be a man, at least some of the time? That’s all I ask!”

  And he finally bought the locks.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  During our trip to Falasteen ten years ago, Amu was embarrassed by how little we children knew of Arabic and Islam. Whenever relatives would meet us for the first time, they’d start talking to us in Arabic, and we’d have a blank look on our faces. Then they would look to Amu Nasser or Amtu Samia and say, “ʿAyb!”—For shame! (I at least knew that much Arabic)—and then something else, probably criticizing us for being too American. What made it worse was that none of us knew how to pray. It apparently involved a lot of kneeling, opening your hands, and looking to the side while reciting a sura; somehow you had to know when to do which. You couldn’t just open your palms and look up at the sky and ask for things like Christians did, the way people did in movies. Amtu Samia didn’t seem to care that much—she was pretty snooty around my family and Amu Nasser’s and wasn’t going to explain anything to these low-class people—but I saw the rosy tint of shame come to Amu Nasser’s face every time he had to admit that all three of us spoke hardly any Arabic.

  So within a few months Amu enrolled us in a brand-new Sunday school, located in an office complex, to learn about Islam and Arabic—at least Qur’anic Arabic, which would be of no use when speaking to modern-day Arab people but was better than nothing in his eyes, I suppose.

  I wasn’t against the idea of having another day of school like Rasheed and Hanan, but the thought of being around other Arab kids intimidated me. First, I couldn’t speak Arabic, so the ones who did usually looked down on me for that. Second, I had a white mother. One more strike and I wouldn’t be Arab at all.

  It turned out that not many students at the school spoke fluent Arabic, and some weren’t even Arab. Though we were taught that the prophet Muhammad believed an Arab was anyone who could speak Arabic, it was far from true, at least here. The non-Arab kids—mostly Pakistanis, Iranians, and a few black kids—were not berated too badly for their mispronunciation of Arabic words, because they weren’t expected to know the language, but when it came to the Arab kids, color played a huge role in how badly you got nailed for such a mistake. If you were light, especially with a dark teacher, you had to pronounce all the guttural sounds perfectly, reaching deep in your throat to create the sound for the letters haa’ and ‘ayn and ghayn, or you were a miserable excuse for an Arab. But if you were dark enough, you didn’t have to worry about how your vowels sounded and could say your haa’ like an English h, soften your ‘ayn into a, and make your ghayn into g, as long as you memorized the sura verse.

  On our first oral quiz, the Arabic alphabet, I even heard one of the dark girls run all her letters together so that all twenty-eight of them sounded like one really long word. Our teacher said nothing, gave her a passing score without comment.

  I only learned the alphabet and the Qur’an’s opening sura “Al-Fatihah,” which you were supposed to recite when you started a prayer (something I still didn’t know how to do). My pronunciation was usually on the mark, except for a couple of times with my haa’, when I only said it at the top of my throat like an Amreekiya, as my teacher, Brother Radwan, didn’t hesitate to tell me before he snickered and mimicked me. Though they tried to advance us every three months depending on how many of the suras we knew, I didn’t advance once in the six months I was there. But I didn’t bear the brunt of the criticism: I was light-skinned, but I had dark curls and dark eyes to make me look Arab enough. Passable at least. The school had some students with light hair and light skin, some even with blue or green eyes—though most of them had two Arab parents, more Arab than me. Those were the kids who really heard it when they did not pronounce their consonants strongly or emphasize their vowels enough, and they tried harder to pronounce the words correctly. Of course, it wasn’t all bad for them, either. They were always the most attractive unless they had some disfigurement like a harelip, and because most would assume they were white, it was probably easier for them around other people. They didn’t have to explain what they were, because the other people thought they already knew.

  Sunday school was like regular school: everyone broke off into cliques. We were separated by age and, of course, gender (the boys and the girls were supposed to sit at opposite ends of the class). Groups became more particular, though. The ones who spoke Arabic hung out together and felt like they were better than the rest of us, and we non-Arabic-speaking students came up with our own method for sorting people. The dark ones had their own groups and felt superior because they were true Arabs and knew more about their culture than we would ever know; the lighter ones formed a coalition and felt superior because we were more worldly and educated and attractive. I was surprised I made it into the “light” category. We were the darkest people in our neighborhood except for the Indian family that lived two blocks away.

  It seemed like a lot of pointless work to remember all this, too, because once these kids weren’t around a bunch of other Arabs, the lighter ones would pretend they were Greek or Italian or Eastern European, and the dark ones would suddenly become Mexicans. I recognized a few from my middle school, and I would never have known they were Arab, even if I came up to them and asked.

  The only good that came of it was that I met Sana after about a month. During the lunch break they gave us between our grammar and religion lessons, I told everyone how much I hated Brother Radwan, the snickering asshole who had the nerve to say that I wasn’t learning suras because I liked seeing his face every week. I was on guard while I spoke and kept my voice down, because he liked to walk around the small office complex and catch the students doing bad things, like an uppity half-breed girl talking shit on a great educator who donated his time to teaching Muslim youth about their religion. Sana was in the same class as me and responded loudly to my complaints: “I can’t stand looking at that dude’s feet. Seriously, if he’s going to wear sandals, he’s got to shave tho
se feet. I just have a few stray hairs on my toes, and I get rid of them before I wear flip-flops. I thought my dad had some hairy feet, but that guy’s got him beat. Ugh!” She shuddered.

  Two of the other girls chuckled, but it sent me into a long belly laugh. Amani, Sana’s older sister who liked to brag about what a good Muslim she was by not eating pork or anything that may have been made from pork, like gelatin or Hot Cheetos, but wore tight jeans and green contact lenses, was not pleased with the comment. “Sana, that’s so mean,” she said with her hands on her hips.

  “It’s true. Those are pubes on his feet.”

  The other girls were scandalized, but I only laughed harder. From then on, if he passed by or quizzed one of us on the spot, Sana would stare down at his feet, and I’d fight back laughter. The other girls here were so prim and proper and pretended to be deaf to anything remotely lewd. It was the same way at regular school unless you were one of the slutty girls who already had sex or gave blow jobs. Even those girls hardly owned up to knowing those things around other girls. They just let boys use them so they’d be popular.

  We had an amicable split from the rest of the group. We hung out, just the two of us, between two big trees for shade and talked. One day, totally unprovoked, some boy named Motabel came up to Sana and told her she was ugly.

  She looked away. “Get the hell out of here.”

  He folded his arms and raised his chin smugly. “If I leave, it’s not gonna make you any less ugly.”

  His reasoning, or lack of it, was funny to me, but I didn’t laugh because it would seem like I was siding with him. “And you’re the cutest guy in the world, aren’t you, Pizza Face?” Sana responded. He smelled bad, too—a mixture of feet and moldy towels. I’d felt a little sorry for him before because he seemed poor and probably didn’t get to wash his clothes often, but that vanished in a second.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m a man.”