IF THE COLOR of lust, as Adad imagined, was in the final accounting red, then the color of love was black. At least for Alicia, who found herself writhing in darkness. The net of love was depression; its dividend, despair. She had received only a brief note from Mustafa, left in the mailbox here at the house, explaining his hasty departure:
Dear Alicia,
My mother is very sick and she need me. I must to go to her today. I do not know when I will return. I hope you think about me. I hope you do not find another man when I am away. No one have more hungry for you than Mustafa. Do not feed no other man. But if you do, do not like it like you like to feed me. I sin for you. You sin for me. This is love.
Skinny Israel
The letter didn’t seem real to her when she had sat in bed reading last night. It was as if she were standing over a stranger’s shoulder eavesdropping on some other girl’s devastation. From the vantage point of a movie director’s well-placed, downwardly angled camera, the actress’s trembling shoulder blocking the letter’s lower right edge, the part that read This is love. But then you’d hear that anyway, read in a voice-over by some actor with a Mustafa-sounding accent, right before the camera, like Alicia’s vision, zoomed in on the last thing the lover wrote, the most private thing they would ever share, the soul of their rapport: Skinny Israel. And that’s when the screen, in deference to the girl’s numbness, would go black.
Until now, she hadn’t really understood how emotionally attached she was to Mustafa. His absence was as tangible as his presence—she could feel it, like cold or heat, or like the sensation he had referenced in his note, their sensation, hunger. Feeling love, it turned out, was nothing compared to feeling the loss of love. Love was child’s play. Loss was for women. Not sex, not love, not impregnation, even, had made her feel like this. Like a woman. Holding hands and kissing, doing naughty things with boys while your mama was at work—all that was sugar and spice. This—heartache—was a blade that sliced away your emotional baby fat. (The way she’d once seen Mama Joon trim the lardy excess from the bottom of a brisket.) Here she was, left with the meaty core of herself. A finer cut, perhaps. Or a more muscular one maybe. Who knew? But, an incipient rigidity of spirit accompanied this loss. Or maybe that was pretense, the illusion of fortitude, as temporary as the instinctual clinching of her fists. The pain of the severing was wrenching and oddly embarrassing, and she had wrapped her arms around her waist to withstand the achy shame of it all, the punch of her pride jabbing affectingly at a sore spot near her ribs. She had squeezed herself tighter, trying to wring out every drop of naïveté. That’s what was forming in the corners of her eyes—the last residue of childishness, of girlish gullibility—pooling there, like sap from a pine. Sap from a pine! Was this why they called anything overly sentimental “sappy”? Why if you ached for someone you were said to be “pining”? She despised her anguish, even as she wallowed in it. What were tears if not acknowledgment of an awful truth you were simply too foolish not to have anticipated? He would leave. Of course he would leave. What was she thinking? Nothing lasted forever. One day, Mustafa had shown her how he stocked items on the shelves in the store, describing a system she had been too trusting to imagine. “Old stuff always up front,” he had told her, stopping her from buying an almost out-of-date can of peaches. “Reach in back for the fresh one.” No, nothing lasted forever. Not life. Not boyfriends. Not canned fruit. Everything had an expiration date. Forever, like the hoax of “nonperishable” goods, was for unvigilant shoppers. Sooner or later, the truth would come out, impose itself. Like Santa Claus and fairy tales, forever was for children. The world could not sustain the lie of eternal anything, especially “happily ever after.” Love was as perishable as peaches. Yes, she was a woman now, fermented into maturity, almost instantly, by the acidity of grief.
That was last night. Last night she had gone to bed a woman—but she woke up this morning feeling like a bitch.
Her entire body, lean from loss, ached with anger. She had dreamed of rushing out of the house and going straight to the Quicky Mart to see Adad. Mustafa had told her his uncle, despite his stiffness, had a soft heart; she also knew that in the Totah family, he was in charge. Mustafa’s father had been stabbed in a fight in Aleppo and died before Mustafa was born. Uncle Adad had always been like a father to him. She would confront him—no, put her bitchiness aside—confide in him, tell him the truth: she was pregnant. She hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Mustafa! (Hadn’t he guessed it? Hadn’t he noticed her bump? No. Boys were so stupid. Even the smart ones. And so blind. Even the ones like Mustafa with 20/20 vision and mystical-looking eyes.) She hadn’t even told Mama Joon. But she would tell Adad, because he and he alone could bring Mustafa back. She would tell him about the child. Tell him how much she and Mustafa were in love. Touch the tender spot in Adad that Mustafa had assured her existed behind his dispassionate façade. Then he would help her. Wouldn’t he? Yes. Love, even in its perishability, was remarkably persuasive. Just look what it had made her and Mustafa do!
She grabbed the black hoodie she’d been wearing ever since she realized she was pregnant and slid into its camouflaging comfort. Only this morning, she didn’t bother to zip it up all the way. This morning she would let the change in her show. If Mama Joon was in the hall or the living room, Alicia would saunter past her, and give her a good look, not flaunting her state, but introducing the news, prepromoting it for later, like they did on the Today show, which she heard blasting from the television in the front of the house when she opened her bedroom door and walked down the hall.
“And when we return,” a woman’s voice was saying, “we’ll have an exclusive interview with the man behind the mystery that everybody’s talking about. Back in a moment . . . this is Today.”
There was, Alicia found, always something on television that mirrored what was happening in your life, if you bothered to notice. Any channel, at any given moment, could startle you with knowing. A football player might score a touchdown just as you finally solved an algebra problem (which had happened for her one Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago when she was struggling to complete some homework), and all of the loud cheering that ensued would blare down the hallway into your bedroom and make you feel like it was for you. “A ninety-nine-yard pass from Pythagoras to Alicia Ramsey!” She had jumped off her bed and, wearing slippery socks, almost fell on the hardwood floor. Or a snippet of a song playing in the background might capture what you were thinking or feeling. That, too, had happened to her not long ago. She had been watching the movie Dead Presidents on cable, last October, around the time she’d found the courage to flirt with Mustafa. It was the scene where Chris Tucker, having come back from the Vietnam War a drug-addicted nut, died from a heroin overdose, with Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone” playing in the background. That’s what had gotten to her. The Al Green and her own loneliness and the idea that, if you weren’t careful, you could end up like that. But that wasn’t even the craziest part. The song wasn’t just playing, like on the soundtrack or even on a radio in the room. When the cops burst into Chris Tucker’s apartment to arrest him for that messed-up robbery he had been a part of and find him with that needle sticking out of his arm and his head tossed back, eyes wide open and blank with death, they also find Al Green in there wearing a big fuzzy hat cocked real cool to the side, coming out of the television, on Soul Train singing “Tired of Being Alone,” like a preacher or like anybody with some good advice, because, in case you didn’t realize it, if you’re not careful, you really can die of loneliness. Or certainly alone. Or both! At least that’s the way Alicia had taken it. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time—within a week, she was flirting with Mustafa. You never knew when something, like that needle coming out of Chris Tucker’s arm, might stick you.
On her way out, she was relieved Mama Joon wasn’t in the living room relaxing in her recliner. But then her mother’s voice emerged above a loud commercial for Tide. “Where you going?”
She stopped without turning to
face the kitchen, where Mama Joon was. The question almost doused her bravery. But she stuck her chin out and yelled back over her shoulder, in the undeniable tone of a woman, sounding more like Clarissa than herself, “To the store. I’ll be right back.”
“Bring me back some eggs,” Mama Joon said. Then, without pause, as if eggs were a medium, as if hens proffered little Rosetta Stones that bridged the linguistic gap between generations, and you could dispatch someone to buy them from the corner store, she added, “We need to talk.”
Alicia slammed the door behind her, wondering what she would say to Adad, whom she really didn’t know. With each step, she gained more and more confidence, along with the sense that from now on, the thing growing in her would inspire her voice. Wasn’t she already in communication with it? She hated biology, but she’d picked up enough to know that cells were rapidly dividing inside her uterus. Cells. A woman with child was her own cellular network. She would do the talking for it, for her or him. And in its strange and powerful way—it had already shut down her period, reason enough to admire its savvy—it would help her figure out what to say to Adad. But how would she figure everything else out? Was there something in the biology classes she had skipped or dozed through that could have explained it all to her? In high school, she had concentrated on the basics, English and math. But rhetoric and grammar weren’t offering up any answers. There was no conjunction that would connect you to where you needed to be now. And? Or? Not helping. No preposition, even: Over, across, beyond. Words that sure made you feel like they should be able to prop you up, carry you through, get you there, but they couldn’t. Not now. Not once you were pregnant with a vanished Syrian’s child, and you were suddenly all alone. Well, almost all alone. (She rubbed up and down the orb of her stomach.) Maybe math could help you calculate where you were, what was left, who you were now. Was there an algebraic formula that could reveal the new you, the X that equaled you minus him, the one you’d lost, divided by you plus the one inside you?
Yes, she saw the problem clearly in her mind, but she could not solve it.
* * *
ALICIA STOOD OUTSIDE the Quicky Mart waiting for Adad to look up. She could tell he knew she was out there, though he hadn’t yet acknowledged her presence. When he finished with a third or fourth customer, he finally raised his head. Their eyes met between the intermittent spaces of the glowing red, white, and blue neon Bud Light logo hanging in the store window, right through the middle of the capital U in BUD. It was as if that letter were shining an accusatory beam onto each of them, reading, as it did, the same in each direction, an electronic palindrome of incrimination. “You!” it said for Adad, who wanted the girl and her polluted, potato chip seduction never to have happened. “You!” it countered for Alicia. Thanks to Adad’s prolonged pretense of her invisibility (he saw everything—anybody who frequented his store knew that), and to the scorn he was transmitting through the “BUD,” she was now certain of his complicity in Mustafa’s departure. Just like that, as the Today host had promised, “the man behind the mystery everybody’s talking about” was revealed.
She watched him motion to someone at the back of the store to come and take his place at the register. He was animated and appeared to be angry, further confirming, for Alicia, his guilt.
“What’s wrong?” Malik asked his father, as he climbed up to the checkout platform, but Adad rushed past him without speaking and headed out the door.
He had operated his store for seven years with a necessary mix of fairness and greed, courage and fear. His judgment about when to be kind and tolerant and when to be firm and confrontational had always been right. The man who said “I don’t want any trouble” was already in trouble, so he never said that, though this instance—a visibly anxious young woman recently impregnated by your kin, with gun-toting relatives only blocks away, showing up at your place of business, not coming in to buy something, just standing outside staring you down, eyeing you with suspicion, calling you out—was surely a moment when it might be prudent to retreat, to assume a defensive posture, find the humility within, deign to be trite and just say it: “I don’t want any trouble.” Which was true. He didn’t. He could maybe even thicken his accent. “I dun’t want no trouble,” he could say, groveling with the imperfections of an immigrant’s tongue, pandering with the obsequiousness of a wretched inferiority he knew he did not possess. He could not stand his ground because, really, it wasn’t his ground anyway, this uneasy but ideal American corner that he rented—he thanked Allah for it every day—roamed by Black men with a territorial swagger Adad quietly respected and admired. Yes, something could be trite and true—“I don’t want any trouble”—but that was not his style. He preferred to be tough and true, and that’s what he’d be right now. Not mean, but firm, immovable. Oh, he would make the girl understand that there was nothing here for her. He would present her with the obstinacy of an ATM given the wrong PIN. Presenting himself as a mechanical man, that’s what had made him successful in a place that barely acknowledged his existence and that he sensed might reject him if it did. In fact, he was like the opposite of an ATM to most of his customers. They walked up to him—to the It, positioned up there behind the cash register, the anti-ATM, the Almighty Taking Man, surely that’s what he was to some of them—and gave him their money. He was invisible to them. The He who had the beautiful wife, Zahirah. The He who had two sons, the very evidence of his humanity, working right here with him, looking just like younger, more attractive versions of his flesh-and-blood self, if anyone cared to notice. The He who had pumping through his heart the sweet memory of a moonlit night in Cairo on the Nile, an affection for rivers (including their own Mississippi), and yes, an occasional ill-advised sympathy for the irrationality of young love. No, most of the people he encountered every day, all day, did not even really see him. Not him. They saw the anti-ATM who smiled on cue and who without fail, indeed with the precision of a machine, though he took and took and took, gave them their change.
Alicia wasn’t the worst of them. At least she knew he was a man, not a machine. Now. Now she knew. Mustafa was a man—Adad was Mustafa’s uncle, so he had to be a man, too. Alicia knew. That’s why she had come to the store this morning and was standing there staring at him, for the first time, at him. You didn’t ask a machine “What happened?” with your eyes. You didn’t come to see a machine about your problems. You came to see a man! His nephew, if he had done nothing else by conquering this woman, had gotten that done. He had made someone here feel the realness of Adad Totah! Of the entire Totah family. Made someone realize they were here. Planted the Totah seed in this fertile, foreign, American soil. Yes! Like a tree. Like a flag. Like their Stars and Stripes on the moon!
So then, yes, there was pride in Adad’s toughness. Alicia had gotten herself into trouble, not him. She had tempted Mustafa, and she had tempted fate. One of those seductions had worked out for her just fine, in the short term—she’d had her little affair; the other, in the long run, so the frustration on her face said now, had not. Next time she’d think twice about whose mouth she fouled with food during the fast. And Mustafa? Well, next time Mustafa would think. He would be back at home now, probably just having arrived, beginning to understand that he’d been banished from America because of his irresponsible ways. No, his mother was not sick. “But, Mama, you look fine,” he would say when she and Zahirah, not their neighbor Hasim, showed up at the airport to greet him, as his uncle had said. And Rana would be glaring at him, almost through him—when his sister-in-law was mad her hijab seemed to pulse from the heat of her anger—and Mustafa would know he was in trouble. “What did you do with that girl?” she would ask him. “Give me your passport! Give me your visa!” And she would rip up his papers right in front of him, right there in the airport. That’s what she’d told Adad she would do. And he knew she would. Rana applied her formidable gifts as a seamstress to everything she did in life. If she didn’t like something, the way it was made, she would tear it apart at the seam
s. Then she would put it in her work pile and later, when she found the time, at her leisure, she would sew it back together, better—the way she thought it should be. “I’ll fix him!” she had yelled, when he had called to tell her of Mustafa’s predicament. “I’ll fix him good!”
Channeling Rana’s rage, Adad looked Alicia in the eyes. He allowed his own convenient contempt for her moral failing to tighten his tongue.
“Mustafa is gone!” he said, louder than he’d intended. Alicia flinched, almost as much from his forcefulness as from the truth of his words. Two boys walking on the sidewalk rolling a bicycle between them turned their heads in unison toward Adad’s shout, where they saw nothing unusual, nothing but Alicia and the man who sold them snacks. It was as if they thought they had heard the call of an exotic bird but looked up to see only a couple of pigeons, and they moved along without breaking stride.
“I know!” Alicia had recovered, drawing strength from her misery.
“Then why are you here? Why do you come to my store and look at me through the window? What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know!” She wanted to say she knew he was somehow the reason Mustafa had left, that she knew he had something to do with breaking them up. But what good would that do? Adad’s brow had pressed forward, shading his eyes, dehumanizing him. If she could see his eyes, she might know what to say to make him help her. But he wasn’t giving her anything to work with. He was only a stiff, yelling, masculine figure that could walk and flap its hands, pause to pull up its khakis by the belt (exposing faded, grayish white socks, melting from their fraying elasticity, puddling at the ankles of pale, hairy legs), and shout a few things if you pulled his strings: “Mustafa is gone!” “Why are you here?” “What do you want from me?” He reminded her of a life-size doll, only one that, in its middle-aged duress, had lost all of its cuddle appeal.
Ramadan Ramsey Page 5
