by Eman Quotah
I felt drawn to the window. One day, while W was at work and you watched The Price Is Right, I sat among the plants and carefully snapped their leaves off at the base. I stacked the leaves like blocks, unstacked them, spread them around on the carpet, and set them one next to the other, making a pathway toward the window. I moved plants out of the way, and the path led to the middle where the curtains parted. I poked my fingers between the drapes and stood like a statue, not actually looking. When I heard you coming upstairs to go to the kitchen, I plopped on the floor with my back to the window.
You leaned against the doorway between the living room and kitchen, a glass of water in your hand.
“What are you doing?” you said.
“I don’t know.”
“Come from the window.”
I inched forward. “The curtain’s closed, Mama.”
“I don’t care.” You leaned back into the kitchen to set the glass on the counter, readied yourself to step toward me and force me to move.
“Why?”
I didn’t know why I wasn’t supposed to sit there, not exactly. I imagined someone outside, spying on us, a monster with many eyes and hands and legs. And your voice, stretched almost to anger, brought me to my feet. I took a few steps, halfway toward you.
“Better. Put these plants back, and make sure you stay out of the window.”
You got your glass and disappeared into the basement. I went back to my leaf path and made car noises for a while. When I went downstairs to see what you were doing, I took my time, sitting on the stairs and bumping down them one by one. At the third-to-last step, I stood up, swung my arms, and jumped, landing as loudly as I could so you’d notice my arrival. You didn’t. When I thudded onto the basement floor, you were cradling W’s phone to your ear, your free hand pressed against your forehead, your eyes closed. You sat with your feet flat on the couch cushion, knees up under your chin, fingers twisted in the yellow phone cord. You were the opposite of those old pictures of 1950s American teenagers yakking on the phone, chewing gum, their legs limber and draped over the side of an easy chair, their faces filled with contentment.
“Who’s that, Mama?”
You glanced to the side as though searching for the person I’d referred to, put your hand over the mouthpiece, and set your feet on the floor.
“Come here.”
I crawled into your lap and put my head on your shoulder. When you began to talk on the phone again, your jaw moved against my head. You must have been speaking Arabic, because my grandmother didn’t speak anything else, but I only remember in English.
“I miss you, too, Mama,” you said into the receiver. “Swear to God you won’t tell anyone you talked to me.”
Evenings, W let me dress up in her cardigan and shoes and clomp around pretending to be a nurse. Sometimes we played Boggle with rules I made up—like, shake the letter-dice onto the carpet and see who could find the Z first. At bedtime, I would lie in my twin bed, humming to ward off thoughts of the monster beyond the window. W usually went to bed when I did, but one night before a day off, she stayed up past her bedtime talking to you. Your voices came to me through the vent.
She said my father’s name. She said, “No one’s going to take her from you. He can’t. The rules are different here.”
“He’ll take her,” you said. “He’ll take her back to Jidda. I don’t want to go back there.”
“OK, OK,” W said. “Don’t worry. No one’s going to find you here. You want to go to the middle of nowhere? This is nowhere. Stay here.”
That’s how I knew he was alive, and he might one day come back. I wanted him back. When you came upstairs, I pretended to be asleep, but I was thinking.
At breakfast the next morning, I said, “When will Baba come?”
W was drinking a cup of coffee, tapping it with a fingernail. I looked at her, because she’d talked about him. She’d said his name. She mimicked blowing a raspberry at me, a silent warning that I’d said something wrong.
You held my chin and turned my face to you. Your eyes were cracked like China bowls. “Don’t talk about him.”
I ran upstairs and burrowed under the comforter, where it was dark and muffled and I couldn’t hear anymore. My warm breath settled onto my face, and my tears disappeared into the flannel sheets. I fell asleep. I dreamed I died. I dreamed you died. I dreamed my father lived and didn’t want me. He was happy we were gone.
After my nap, I steered clear of the bay window, sat next to you, followed you into the bathroom, nuzzled your leg whenever you stood still, swung my leg over yours, and snuck myself into your lap whenever you were sitting, as though I were a neglected cat.
We ate lunch with W in the round eating nook in the kitchen, at a metal patio table laid out with olive-green place mats. The nook looked out onto the driveway and the chain-link fence separating W’s yard from the neighbors’. Spindly rosebushes leaned into a peeling white trellis.
“You’ve been here six weeks,” W said. “You must be dying to get out. Let’s go to the movies.” She spooned into her mouth leftover rotisserie chicken and the rice with almonds and raisins you had cooked the day before to supplement it.
“We can’t go,” you said. “You know why.”
W stared you down, unblinking. You told me to put my hands over my ears. Your lips moved.
W turned her head from side to side like an owl. She pushed my hands from my ears.
“Come on, let’s go. You can’t stay inside forever.” She sawed the flesh off a drumstick, speared the meat with a fork, held it up in the air, and waved it around. She liked to be dramatic. I don’t think you liked that side of her. You took her plate of bones to the sink and slid them into it. W got up and with two fingers removed the bones and tossed them into the trash can. After she sat down again, I walked over and stepped on the foot pedal, listening to the lid slap-slapping.
“You should cut your hair.” W shook her cupped hand, and I realized she wanted me to come to her. I shuffled over, sliding along the tile with my socks. She patted the top of my head. “Both of you.”
“I don’t want it.” I’d never had my hair cut before. It came to the middle of my back and you had to spray it with soapy-smelling detangler after baths and tug a comb through it while I squeezed my eyes and complained about how much it hurt.
“A disguise.” W held her hands out, like she was presenting a painting. “She can pass for a boy. You’ll be able to leave this house and not worry. Send her to kindergarten in the fall. No one will recognize her.”
Your cheeks moved side to side, swishing unspoken words around your mouth.
“Why do we have to worry, Mama?”
“You didn’t finish your rice.”
“I don’t want to look like a boy.”
“OK, sweetie,” you said, the endearment three syllables, in that funny way you had of pronouncing it.
You and W must have repeated the conversation, because the next day I followed you obediently into the basement, where W had stacked towels on the bar and spread newspaper on the floor in front of the barber’s chair. The light in the basement was dim, so she carried lamps down from the living room and set them up on the bar. Too much brightness. I held my hands above my eyebrows, like a visor.
“It’s not that bad,” you said, prying my fingers from my face and pressing my hands to my sides.
W cut your hair first. With the flourish and seriousness of a bullfighter, she draped a pink towel over your shoulders and ran her fingers through your hair.
You looked like a queen to me, in the barber’s chair.
“How do you want it?” W eyed your head expertly, like a real hairdresser would.
You straightened yourself in the chair and looked directly ahead. “It doesn’t matter how you do it. Go on.”
The metallic sound of the scissors slicing through your hair made my skin go cold and goose pimply. I covered my eyes.
“Go watch TV, sweetie,” W said. “If it bothers you.”
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nbsp; “No.” I opened my eyes. If I let you out of my sight for too long, you might disappear. It had become a recurrent nightmare: me, alone in the Cedar Point parking lot, walking in circles in the snow.
I split my fingers on my face like I was watching a scary movie as W snipped, at first hesitantly, gaining momentum and confidence, whirring around you, comparing lengths on the sides of your ears, pinching your chin between her thumb and fingers and staring at your bangs. After a while, I focused on the newspaper beneath you, where the hair fell in a pile, transformed into something different—uglier—than it was on your head.
“Done,” W said. “We should dye it, too. Blond. I’ll buy hair dye tomorrow.”
“How does it look?” You touched your shoulder and bare neck, as though missing something. The new haircut made you look like a teenager, and I was a little afraid of you. You seemed like a stranger. You wore a black turtleneck and mustard-colored jeans. You tugged at the shirt’s neck.
“You don’t look like your real self,” I said.
“Good job, yeah?” W reached over her own shoulder and patted herself on the back. She swept the towel off your shoulders. A flurry of your hairs floated to the newspapered floor. “You look completely different.”
You stared at the mirror behind the bar. Did you see what I saw?
“I don’t want to look different,” I said.
“This is what we have to do,” you said. You got down and lifted me onto the barber’s chair. It was my turn. The two of you debated cutting my hair very short—shorter than yours—with an electric razor W said had been her ex-husband’s. She was happy to have a use for it, she said.
When she turned the razor on, it buzzed like a saw.
“Nonononono!” I yelled, as though she were trying to kill me or cut me.
You hushed me. W dug around behind the bar and unearthed a jar of chocolates. The jar had once had a large gold-foil label, but most of that was peeled back, leaving the white paper backing.
“Honey, take one,” W said. “And have as many as you want when we’re done.”
I scratched the foil off a ball of chocolate and put the candy in my mouth, sucking on it. First, W braided my hair, quickly and deftly, her fingernails tapping against my neck. She cut straight across the back and gave you the plait.
“I don’t want this.” You dropped the plait like it was a rat.
“You will one day, or she will.”
You picked up the braid and stuffed it into the pocket of your jeans, where it bulged, like you had too much cash in there.
“You need new names, too.” W pointed at each of us. “How about Amy and Sheila?”
My mouth was clammy with chocolate. I reached toward the jar and grunted. W put a new chocolate in my hand.
“Amy and Sheila?” Mama rubbed the bridge of her nose, like she was trying to erase her features, as well as her name. She didn’t sound convinced.
As W clipped the hair at my neck, I closed my eyes and watched yellow and red blotches dance around. Chocolate slid down my throat. It was peaceful with my eyes shut. For a few seconds I was somewhere else.
You startled me awake. “Don’t do that!” I had wiped my nose with my fingers, which were sticky. I sandwiched them between my legs and stared at them so I wouldn’t have to see your face transformed by the haircut, by your anger.
“Let her be,” W said. “Stop wiggling, little girl.”
When it was done, W lifted me and set me on the bar, facing the mirror. “What do you think?” she said.
She’d given me bangs and cut straight across the top of my ears, trimming it shorter in back.
“Samantha,” you said, touching the ends of my hair gently so that my scalp tickled. Where in your brain did that name come from? You touched yourself at the base of your throat. “And Theresa. Like Mother Theresa.”
“OK.” W hugged me, and I thought she was going to lift me off the bar, but she didn’t. “We’ll call you Sam, for short.”
“I want to go home,” I said.
“This is where we’ve always lived.” You ran your fingers through my hair and grabbed a handful. You smoothed it down and kissed the top of my head, a hard kiss that made me draw my elbows together and push you off me. “Sam,” you said, trying it out.
My anger was a knot at the back of my neck. I wanted to keep my name.
Hair had piled up on the floor. Your black hair, my black hair—who could tell the difference? W folded up the newspaper and swept up the hairs that had escaped its borders. She squatted and held the dustpan between her feet, the long handle of the broom bobbing above her head. Tiny hairs stubbornly stuck to the vinyl floor. I pressed my finger against one. On my skin, it looked like a paper cut. You blew, and the imaginary cut was gone.
“Make a wish,” W said.
ASPIRATION
1980
HACIENDA ROAD
In Aspiration, California, Theresa changes her name to Lara and Sam’s to Emma. She gets a job working the register at the plant nursery on Hacienda Road, and from Jimmy, her boss, she learns to grow succulents and how to break the tip of the aloe and rub its gel onto the sunburned skin at the edges of Emma’s tank tops. She rents a yellow bungalow with green trim and a weedy front yard, and from the hippie couple that lives next door she learns about the other kind of weed, which they grow in a hidden corner of their backyard.
“Shhh,” the husband says. “We call them ‘Mexican tomato plants.’”
The smell of those plants.
The hippies are welcoming. They invite Lara and Emma over for dinner and let ten-year-old Emma hold their baby and carry him around in a Guatemalan striped sash wrapped around her torso, not too different from the muslin wraps Lara’s mother and sisters used years ago to tote infants in Jidda. The hippies’ house is full of sun. The bead curtain between the kitchen and the living room clicks like a misbahah when they pass through to drink sun tea at a table the husband, Toby, made out of the kitchen door. The pots of basil and rosemary on the windowsill above the sink smell better than the marijuana the hippies grow, Lara thinks. Dog hair drifts along the hardwood floors, but the hippies keep their golden retrievers in the bedroom after they see the panic on Lara’s and Emma’s faces at the sight of the animals.
“They’re real gentle,” says Eleanor, the wife, as she leads the dogs away, her fingers hooked into their collars.
Lara doesn’t tell her that she and Emma have never been so close to a dog in their lives.
They ask a lot of questions about where she’s from, and she smiles and pretends sometimes not to understand, sometimes not to hear. They make guesses: Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico.
Emma tugs Lara’s jeans. “Is that where we’re from, Mom?”
Once, Eleanor says how much she admires single mothers, who cares what people say, and asks Lara if she’s divorced. Lara lets Emma answer. “My Daddy’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Eleanor says, and the next day leaves a basket of tomatoes at their door.
After a month, Lara decides the marijuana in the hippie backyard is a bad influence on Emma and the neighbors are too nosy-friendly. She and Emma move over a brown hill to a beige shotgun house with a stone patio in the back and a cherry plum tree in the front. She smells weed. The town is full of hippies, it turns out. On the weekend Lara and Emma run into the original hippies in the tiny downtown. They coo over the baby.
“You’re here,” Eleanor says.
“Right on,” Toby says.
In Aspiration, Lara trims her own hair every six weeks. She takes the heavy scissors from her sewing basket and sits on the toilet with the door closed after Emma is in bed. She doesn’t have to look in the mirror. She cuts a straight line across the back of her own neck with her eyes closed. Having kicked around the West Coast for a couple of years, Lara has learned some things. Don’t get familiar with a hairdresser. Word always gets back to someone about where she and Emma are. In other towns, before Aspiration, it happened time and again: A Buick or Chevy�
��some car that could be her neighbors’ but definitely wasn’t—out on the street several days in a row. Or some Saudi she didn’t know watching her in the grocery store. She always knew they were Saudi before she heard them speak, by the particular blackness of their hair, the way the women wrapped their headscarves or didn’t wear them at all, the smell of the men’s cologne, some specific note in a child’s whine that reminded her of her childhood. When they recognized her or almost recognized her, she and Emma had to move again. One year, they moved four times, and in between she had the mole on her cheek removed in a dermatologist’s office. She has learned to avoid towns with universities or flight centers, the types of places Saudis go to study or train for the national airlines. She watches out for an American man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, reading a newspaper. That’s what a private investigator looks like. When she catches a man like that watching her, she knows how to pick up and leave. She’s not tired of leaving. Behind her eyelids, when she’s snipping her hair, she sees the possibility of weariness edging toward her. The possibility she’ll one day want to find a place she never wants to leave. Will want to chisel her home into a rock face. But the fear of being found stays with her, the wanting to put on her own cap and sunglasses, hide behind the paper’s A section, and spy on Emma at school so no one can snatch her.
Emma has refused to have her hair cut for years. It wraps itself around her as though protecting her, covers her face and her shoulders, her little-girl chest, her back, nearly reaches her butt. Her fingers are long and elegant, her hands nearly the size of Lara’s already, but her little-girl feet haven’t caught up.
Once when Lara was small, when she was Saeedah, her father slipped two gold bangles on her wrists while she slept. The next morning the bracelets surprised her. How tight they were. How she couldn’t slip them off without bending them so that they were lopsided, no longer perfectly round. But they reminded her of Baba, so she kept them in a velvet box and one day brought them to America, where she sold them to pay for the mole removal.
