by Eman Quotah
He looks up from fastening the collar of his thawb with studs. “Old lady, I can hear you. What are you talking about?”
“Not a thing.”
She says goodbye to Aaliyah and puts her scarf on, drapes her abayah over top of her head. She sits on her bed while Muneer drapes his mishlah over his shoulders. He goes to the mirror to carefully lay a clean ghutrah and his iqal on his head. Perfectly adjusting the crease of the starched fabric at the crest of his forehead takes him a few minutes.
“Let me help you,” his mother says. “The girl should have used more starch.”
“Don’t blame it on poor Sara,” he says. “What does she know about ironing ghutrahs?”
The wedding hall is set apart from the hotel, on the other side of the parking lot. Cars have arrived. The white lights strung across the building switch on as they approach, and the place transforms from a plain box into a neck with a woven necklace of pearls.
He leaves her at the door of the hall and kisses her on the cheek before heading back to the hotel, where the men’s gathering is being held.
Later, Mama tells Muneer everything: How the hall was bright white, high ceilinged, full of women she didn’t recognize. How she wished she’d brought Aaliyah or one of her other daughters. Sitting down at a table in the far corner of the room, she tried to smooth the creases in her gray silk dress, but they obstinately stay put.
In her white satin purse were photos of him. She scanned the room for girls of appropriate age and family.
At a Jidda wedding, young women would have cinched scarves around their hips; they would have danced Egyptian-style with one leg poised outward, or flipped their long hair side to side. Here, the girls sat demurely at the round tables, their purses set in front of them, chewing on mints and pieces of allspice they’d plucked out of the bowls on the tables. Mama set herself down at a table where two girls, one in a dress the color of the bougainvillea flowers outside and the other in peach and green, took turns whispering to each other.
“They were too made up,” she says.
As she inspected the guests, Mama took several mints and cupped them in her hand, closing her fingers over them and slipping them into her purse. A woman in green sequins and bright blue pumps grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her cheeks. Lama’s sister Lena.
Mama shows Muneer where Lena’s lipstick rubbed off on her skin.
“God bless you for coming. You are the only one from Jidda who has blessed us,” Lena said.
“Oh, of course my dear, it’s nothing. Where is your sister?”
“At the hotel, getting the bride ready. God bless you for coming.” A little bit of the lipstick had come off on Lena’s front tooth. She kept licking it but her tongue didn’t budge it. She moved on to the next guest, repeating her kissing performance and her lipstick-fixing.
On the stage, women in white were singing songs about the prophet and beating drums. Mama sat for a few minutes, but her legs wanted to move. She floated around the room, among the tables, leaning from time to time on her cane, staring openly at the young women. A few stared back.
“Which family are you?” Mama asked, and if she liked the answer, “Who’s your father?”
She set her sights on two young women holding hands, their hair curled into ringlets and held back with garlands of white flowers, gardenias Mama could smell three tables over. Their fingernails were unpainted, their faces fresh, with a hint of rouge, no lipstick or mascara or eye shadow. Their modest satin dresses fell to their ankles. Was it the bougainvillea outside or the gardenia in the girls’ hair that caused Mama’s nose to itch, her eyes to water? She instantly knew she’d found perfect brides-to-be, the way she knows how much rose water to put in syrup, how much spice lamb soup needs. Mama could see they were pious, modest girls, suitable for Muneer.
Mama does not believe, as some people do, that girls should not wear makeup until their wedding days, or that listening to music will send you to hell, where hot lead will drip into your ears. Her own father, she tells Muneer, was a music lover who kept a horsehair violin in a red velvet–lined case. But Muneer’s divorce was a disaster, a catastrophe, and she blames herself. She isn’t going to let that happen again. He needs a girl who won’t make trouble or gossip too much, will not smoke shisha, will be devoted to her husband and family, covers her face and does not mix with other men—not brothers-in-law, even with her scarf on—and prefers listening to the Qur’an over listening to music.
This is the kind of girl Mama was looking for at the Madinah wedding.
Either of these girls would do.
“Who are those girls?” she asked a woman sipping orange soda at the next table.
The girls were first cousins from a well-known Madinah family, the woman said. The father of one owned a date factory on the outskirts of the holy city.
Midnight had slid by. The drums were dun-dun-ing and women were trilling for the entrance of the bride, who wore a beaded white dress with puffy lace sleeves. Her bangs were curled and teased, her lipstick orange-red. She followed an entourage of women and little girls carrying ribbon-wrapped candles that dripped wax on their delicate hands.
Mama sat. The two suitable girls were two tables over. One tapped her foot in time with the drumbeat. The other sipped coffee. The girls removed pink and white candy-covered almonds from little mesh bags tied with ribbons, popping the candies in their mouths and snapping the clasps of their purses in time with their chewing.
The trilling in the room rose to a crescendo, and Mama’s temples throbbed. The bride arrived at the stage, her closest family members gathered round her as she sat, stiff as a doll in a gold-and-white armchair, for everyone to gaze upon.
Mama spat the clove she had been chewing into an empty coffee cup and moved to the girls’ table. The candied almonds had sweetened the girls’ breath. The young ladies smelled like sugar.
“Is your mother here?” Mama said.
“No, Auntie,” said the foot-tapping girl.
“Over there,” said the other. She pointed her little porcelain cup, embellished with delicate roses and a gold rim, toward a woman in a golden dress at another table.
“You’re like twins,” Mama said. “Neither of you is married?”
The mother of the one girl gamboled over. She had a big gap between her upper front teeth, deep pink lipstick, and silver eye shadow. To Mama’s chagrin, she knew this woman. Karamah was a grade-school friend of Faizah’s who married a man from al-Madinah and moved here years ago. She kissed Mama on the cheeks, back and forth several times.
“Haleemah! How are you? How is your family? God has blessed me with seeing you!”
Mama shows Muneer the second stain on her skin, this one from Karamah.
“Your daughter—how old is she?” Mama asked.
“Seventeen. Graduating from high school this year.”
Mama said her son was thirty-two.
“That’s not how old I am, Mama,” Muneer tells her.
“Oh?” she says. “I confuse you and your brothers sometimes.”
Mama wondered if Karamah had heard about her feud with Faizah, but the woman seemed open, friendly.
“Can we meet your daughter?” Mama said.
“Ah. Yes of course. We can welcome you tomorrow afternoon.”
The girl was whispering something to her friend.
Muneer stops Mama’s story. “She’s too young.”
“That is not the end of it,” Mama says. “Something else happened tonight.”
She goes on: Karamah squealed. Confused, Mama touched the corner of her own lips, rubbed her lips against her teeth. Was something the matter with how she looked? But it was a squeal of delight. For what?
“Your sister! Shall we greet her?”
Faizah. Mama’s heart flattened. Her limbs moved as though stirring thick syrup. Karamah rushed to the far side of the hall and embraced Faizah. Muneer’s aunt wore a sequined peach dress, Bahraini freshwater pearls at her throat, large gold earrings th
at nearly reached her shoulders, high-heeled shoes that matched her dress.
“She looked so tacky! So badawi!” Mama tells Muneer.
Mama, in her plain silk, made her way to Lena. Mama took a deep breath and said a quick prayer before speaking. “I thought my sister was not invited.”
“God protect you. I hope we haven’t offended you.”
Before Mama could say anything further, Lena caught the arm of a woman she apparently hadn’t greeted yet and left Mama behind.
Mama didn’t want to leave until they fed her. But she guessed the food wouldn’t be ready for at least an hour. Her belly tight with hunger, she opened a mesh pouch and chose a smooth silver almond. It tasted like nothing until the sweet coating began to dissolve in her mouth. She bit, and pain shot through her gum. She heard the crack of her tooth and grabbed her jaw. No one noticed her wincing, though her face felt transformed by the pain. Her sister and Karamah sat at a table in the far corner of the hall. What were they talking about?
She found herself caught in her sister’s gaze.
Faizah’s eyes were hard as date pits. Mama looked away, as quickly as she might jerk her hand from the sting of a jellyfish. She brought her eyes to the bride sitting alone on the kosha platform. The pain in her mouth became too much. Clutching her jaw, she left quickly so she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone on her way out. She was barely able to tell the doorman to fetch Muneer. As she waited at the door in her abayah and tarhah, Faizah came toward her carrying her purse.
“So rude of me not to say hello,” Faizah said, moving in to kiss Mama. “You’re leaving already?”
Mama had to kiss back and accept her purse from this sister she hated.
“Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“My tooth.” Mama moved her jaw as minutely as possible as she said the words.
The doorman called Mama’s name, and she slipped outside to where Muneer waited to walk her to the hotel room.
She tells him everything later, after he’s rushed her to the emergency room and they’re back in Jidda, having missed the appointment to meet the young bride-to-be.
She’s angry at how everything has turned out, though she knows it’s God’s will.
“It was rude not to go. I told the mother we would come.”
“Mama, you were in pain. It’s good we came back so Jameel could fix your tooth. That girl was too young for me.”
The words gush out of him like Zamzam water from the spring in Makkah. He wants someone who will understand heartbreak, sorrow. Not a callow adolescent girl. Sadness springs forth with his words, and he feels like Hagar trying to stop the water from coming as she carries her infant son Ishmael between two desert mountains: “Zam! Zam! Stop! Stop!”
The water was a blessing for Hagar, of course, and no one but God can end our sadness.
“We rely on God,” Mama says. “Pray to him.”
“There’s a woman at the newspaper, a female journalist.”
“You chose a bride for love last time,” she says weakly. “Why would you do that again?”
TOLEDO
1975
From Cedar Point, we drove an hour to Toledo, where we stayed in the spare bedroom of Weronika, your friend from English as a Second Language classes. W, she liked to be called. Her thick Eastern European accent made her sound like she was gargling some delicious, thick liquid—chocolate syrup or caramel sauce. Her cluttered house had light blue walls and deep blue shag in most rooms, including the bathrooms. She had bought the house that way, she told us, and she would sit in one of her green-and-peach wing chairs, her feet resting on a stack of magazines on the marble coffee table, and say, “I work hard. I don’t have time to change anything.”
There were two rooms that didn’t make me feel like I was underwater: First, the oak-cabinet kitchen with an antique white stove, checkerboard-tile floor, and a breakfast nook with white café curtains that left the top of the windows bare and streaming with light. Second, the wood-paneled basement with a wet bar, a red vinyl barber’s chair inherited from the previous owners, a lumpy sofa whose arms and back had been shredded by W’s cat, and rows of paperback sci-fi novels in a built-in bookshelf along the far end. The whole house smelled of cough lozenges, raisins, and cigarette smoke. W, who in my child’s mind was ancient but was thirty-five years old, always seemed to be hacking up a lung, leaving wadded-up tissues and full ashtrays around the house.
When W was at work the first day of our stay, you put on a pair of hot-pink dish gloves you found under the sink and traversed the apartment with a wastebasket tucked into the curve of your arm, plucking trash from the carpet and coffee table with two gloved fingers. I followed you around, bumping into you whenever you paused to stoop and reach for something. You put your pink-gloved fingers around my waist and set me on the arm of the living room sofa.
I slid off and leaned against the arm. “Why do we have to stay here, Mama?”
“Few weeks,” you told me. You went into the kitchen, removed the gloves, and pulled things out of the refrigerator: a tomato, half an onion wrapped in cellophane, three eggs.
“Can we go home after the weeks, Mama?”
“Maybe,” you said. “Sure.”
I flopped on the floor crying, and you tripped over me on your way to the counter, landing on your knees, the food clutched to your chest, the eggs miraculously intact between your fingers.
“No crying. I didn’t say no.” You lifted yourself without using your hands, your eyes closed, like you couldn’t look at me. When I didn’t stop, your voice rose. “Stop crying, OK? You want lunch or no?”
I nodded, cowed, my heart in my knees, and climbed onto a chair to watch while you chopped an onion. You spread the onion along the bottom of a cast-iron pan coated with hot, shiny, smoking olive oil. While the onion sizzled and its fumes burned my eyes, you peeled a tomato with the point of a paring knife and squeezed the seeds out between your fingers, like you were squeezing a washcloth. You chopped the tomato with quick flicks of your wrist and tossed it into the pan. The phone rang and you ignored it. Steam rose. You reached your hand into it to break three eggs into the pan and stir them with a fork. We ate the eggs in folded English muffins, like tacos.
I liked watching you cook and eating with you. In the heat of the kitchen, tendrils of black hair curled off your face. You seemed certain when you were making a meal for me, no matter how simple—and the meals were always simple: open-faced cream cheese sandwiches softened under the broiler, long strips of hamburger fried in a pan and served with mint and yogurt, rice tossed with chickpeas.
When we weren’t tossing out snotty tissues and cigarette ash or making a meal or a snack or afternoon tea, we watched the ten-inch black-and-white TV in the basement, where the reception was terrible. We never left the house. No preschool, no walks, no trips to the grocery store. If I wanted to pretend I was playing outside, I’d skip around the coffee table in the living room, humming that jump-rope song: “My mama and your mama were out hanging clothes/My mama punched your mama …” Except I thought it was “hugging clothes” and “jumped your mama,” and there was no one to correct me.
The living room had a bay window filled with plants, a little jungle. There were ferns and creeping things with heart-shaped leaves, a ficus pruned like a huge green lollipop, orchids with petals like candy hearts, velvet-leafed African violets, a shock of gangly mint. The plants were in fake terra-cotta pots that were cracked on the sides and crammed close together, some of them half stacked on each other. Renegade clovers grew along the edges of the pots. W’s marmalade cat, Poppy, slept in the one narrow space left on the floor.
You fought with W about the blue damask drapes that hung ceiling to floor. You wanted them closed. She wanted them open. She left for the hospital intensive-care unit before we woke up, and when we went upstairs for breakfast, we would find the curtains open. You made me sit at the kitchen table, out of sight, while you swiftly drew the drapes closed and flicked on the lamps. The yellow lig
ht turned the carpet greenish.
In the afternoon, I would sit in the swivel chair closest to the front door, waiting for W to arrive in her white cardigan and slacks and white leather shoes with piping around the edges. She would clink the metal mail slot cover on the front door, and I’d run over to see her face through the slot. I’d run back to the chair before you could drag me from the door. W would tramp inside, stomp the snow off her boots and tug them off, lay her cardigan in my lap, walk straight to the window, and tug the pulley.
W told me to turn the lamps off while she bent down and caressed the leaves of her plants as though they were kitten ears. “Look,” she said. “They’re reaching for the sunlight your mother deprived them of.”
I sidled past the plants and displaced Poppy, who hopped up, licked a paw, and slinked off. I scooted as close to the glass as I could, catching a glimpse of a twist of coral-colored light illuminating the rain-beaded branches of a maple tree like a giant candelabra.
“Come from there, Hanadi.”
I crawled to the swivel chair and rested my elbows on the seat. You picked up the white cardigan from the floor where it had fallen, folded it, and laid it on the chair back.
After several days of this, W put her hand on my shoulder. Like she was claiming me for her kickball team. “Who’s gonna be outside to see?” She started to cough.
“You know,” you said.
You were everything to me. I wanted to be on your team. But I also wanted to go outside, and I sided with W.
“Who’s gonna see?” I said.
Behind your back, W smiled and clapped her fingers together, like she’d won a prize. I felt like I’d won one, too.
You won the battle, though. You sidled along the wall to the edge of the window, like a spy staying out of view, and pulled the drapes closed, arm over arm. W winked and shook her head to the shoulder on either side. I understood her message: arguing wasn’t worth it.
On W’s days off, she tried to convince you that we should go to the mall with her, or the grocery store, or the movies. You said no, so she went by herself and I yearned to be with her.
