by Eman Quotah
“We should have asked if Lamees wants anything,” Diane says.
“I think it’s time for me to go home,” Muneer says.
The doorbell rings, and Diane worries that it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, out to save souls despite the pouring rain.
“I’ll scare them off,” Jameel says. “There’s got to be a Qur’an somewhere in the house.”
Diane puts a hand on his chest. “Leave them be. I’ll tell them we’ve already found the Lord.” She touches the cross at her neck and goes to the door.
Watching Jameel put items back into shopping bags, Muneer considers what he could possibly say about Summer’s schooling. He doesn’t think it’s his business, but what’s worse—a family choosing to be apart for a year, or a wife and daughter who resent their husband and father for a lifetime?
“Muneer!” Diane calls.
He trades places with her at the front door. Standing under a black umbrella is Hannah’s friend from the convenience store. She’s wearing her uniform and her eyeliner is smudged into angry storm clouds around her eyes.
“Hannah’s in Toledo,” she says. “She didn’t want to tell you, but I told her she should. So she said OK, I could tell you even though she didn’t want to.”
“How’d you find the house?”
She shivers from the shoulders up. “Can I come in?”
They sit at the kitchen table and Diane makes individual mugs of Lemon Zinger, sets a saucer in the middle of the table for their tea bags. Jameel puts baklava on a plate; the girl has no idea what it is.
“What did you say your name is?” Diane asks, though the girl hasn’t said.
“Joanie. I’m so sorry for bothering you. Hannah gave me your guys’ number and I got the address from 411. I thought it was better to come in person. She ran away. She says she’s never going back to Miss Sadie.”
“Miss Sadie,” Diane says. “Her mom?”
“Uh huh.” Joanie pulls apart a diamond of baklava and picks at the nuts inside.
Diane fishes the tea bags out of their mugs. “Hannah’s confused. Can you blame her? Her mom was her world, and she has to confront the lies.”
“I should go to Toledo,” Muneer says. He would walk there, if he had to.
“Let her figure it out,” Jameel says. “In a year she’s eighteen. She’ll be free to live wherever she wants.”
Muneer wants to keep chasing Hannah, but he’s also tired, and he knows where she is. He asks God to keep her safe. There’s the five hundred dollars and the ticket in the Chrysler’s glove box. Tomorrow, he’ll have Jameel take him to the Saudia Airlines office and have the ticket transferred to “Hannah.”
“Will you tell me where she is?” he says to Joanie. “So I can stay in touch with her until she’s ready to see me again?”
She writes an address on a notepad Diane ferrets out of a drawer.
“Thank you,” he says. “Could you write her name at the top?” He doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know what last name his daughter’s mother has given her. The girl writes it out in cursive. It’s not his name, but it belongs to his daughter and therefore is beautiful.
“MY NAME ISN’T SALLY”
1975
We had new hair and new names, but we didn’t go to the movies. I didn’t go to school. As the weather got less cold, sometimes you let W leave the upstairs windows open, the blinds up. From W’s bedroom, I glimpsed green buds growing wart-like on the tree in front of the house. Spring was starting without me.
On a warmish day when the leaves on the tree had poked out, waxy and curled at the edges, you got sick and slept for hours. I watched cartoons and crawled around the basement meowing like a cat while Poppy eyed me with concern. I wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich. The jar of peanut butter was way up high in the cupboard. I dragged a chair across the vinyl floor and climbed onto the counter to reach the jar. I got the jar open and a scoop of peanut butter into my mouth, but as I sucked on the spoon, the jar slipped out of my hands and crashed to the floor. I cleaned up some of the peanut butter with a dish towel, but left the glass shards. My brain felt thick and slow, like my tongue did when it was coated with peanut butter. I cut the crusts off slices of white bread I’d already laid on a napkin, and rolled the bread into doughy balls before eating it.
I let myself out the side door and wandered into W’s backyard, where I stepped on the cracks in the fractured pavement. I knew the rhyme “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” I pulled my fingers along the chain-link fence, stopped and pushed my sneakered toes into the holes, climbed halfway up and back down. The neighbors’ rosebush, budless this early in the season, had trespassed through the fence. When I pressed the thorns against my thumbs, they budded with blood.
Being outside felt strange after being inside for two months. Like eating peanut butter after not having eaten it for months and forgetting how sticky it was, and at the same time how much I liked it.
I ran inside for a bandage and back out again to sit on the cold stone of the front stoop. A woman passed by pushing a red carriage, her two babies sitting face-to-face inside it. She waved and smiled, and it scared me. Maybe this lady was a spy, a monster in disguise.
The babies stared at me. One of them giggled. The other drooled, its expression serious, unreadable. I liked babies, always wanted to touch their soft faces and fuzzy hair, but maybe these were baby spies.
I stood up, brushed the dust from my butt, faced the door, and scurried inside. The basement light was off, and I felt my way down the dark stairs. You lay on the couch. When I straddled your bony legs, your eyes fluttered open.
“What is it, Sammy?”
“Hanadi,” I said, sensing you didn’t have the strength to argue. In the space of time it took me to say my real name, you fell back asleep. I watched you for a few minutes. Your hair was matted in places and tousled in others. Your breath whistled in your nose.
“Mama,” I said. I got off you, and the outdoors drew me like a magnet for a third time. I walked down the driveway and turned right. The street was lined with aluminum-sided houses. I’d forgotten my jacket. The sun warmed me at first, and then it skittered behind a cloud and the air chilled. At the end of the block, I turned around and looked up the street to W’s house. It seemed very far. I wasn’t ready to go back.
“I’m running away,” I said out loud.
W’s street dead-ended at an elementary school. I looked both ways and crossed the street. The kids were out for recess, and I heard their shouts and squeals, like bird calls. I walked across a field to the edge of the blacktop. Two little girls with pageboys and bell-bottom jeans were peering at me sidewise, as though we were on either side of a fence, or a cage.
“How old are you?” one of them said. She wore big glasses that swallowed her cheeks. When she smiled, I saw her tongue through the gap her front teeth had left behind when they fell out.
“What’s your name?” the other girl asked. Her baseball-sleeve T-shirt had a name on it in glittery rainbow colors: Katie.
“Sally,” I said, after the Peanuts character. I didn’t want to get in trouble for saying my name to someone other than my mother or W, but I hated Sam.
My eyes were drawn to the other kids—swinging, hopscotching, sliding, roughhousing. The sound of their voices made me want to whoop and call. A scene as mundane as kids playing on a playground—dozens of kids—frightened and thrilled me.
Katie watched me watching a gaggle of boys kneeling around an object I couldn’t see. “We don’t play with those boys.”
“My name isn’t Sally.”
Katie sneered. “But you said.”
“Jessica!” said the girl with the glasses. “Is your name Jessica?”
“How come you won’t say your real name?” Katie said.
The boys had started tossing stones onto a metal slide. I wanted to throw things, too.
“My name is Sam.”
“Are you a boy?
I rotated my arms like a windm
ill. “No.”
“We don’t play with boys.”
“Me neither.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
A teacher noticed our conversation and came over. She was small, not much taller than the girls, a dwarf. I had never seen a grown-up that small before.
“Sweetie, where do you live?”
I pointed up the street.
“Do you know your phone number? We’ll call your mom.”
She took me to the office. The hallway leading there was quiet, no sounds but our footsteps and the squeaky wheels of a janitor’s cart. The cinder block walls were lined with bulletin boards decorated with construction paper flowers, art projects, and drawings of famous grown-ups.
I sat in a padded chair with metal arms that chilled my forearms.
“Who’s this?” the secretary said.
The teacher squeezed my fingers. “You’re in good hands with Mrs. James.”
“Does she speak English?” Mrs. James said.
“Of course she does.”
After the teacher left, I sat for a long time. Mrs. James brought me a crayon and scrap paper and a magazine to lay the paper on so I could draw. She opened her purse and fished around with her arm immersed up to the elbow, till she found me a rustling, half-crushed packet of saltines.
“What’s your name, young lady?”
“I’m not supposed to tell strangers.”
“Well, that’s a good rule. Where do you live?”
“I don’t know.”
“OK. Don’t go anywhere while I speak with the principal.”
Mrs. James disappeared. The clock on the wall ticked hollowly. Mrs. James returned to her desk and made some phone calls. I tuned them out, because she was talking about me and I was tired of people talking about me—you and W, these ladies at the school. After I’d drawn a purple VW bug and trees and a sun, and started drawing a house and crossed it out, and licked the cracker crumbs off the plastic wrapper, and peeled the paper off the crayons, and sucked on the neckline of my T-shirt, and kicked the metal legs of the chair for a while, I lolled in the seat and sighed loudly.
“When can I go?”
“Do you need the bathroom, sweetie?” Mrs. James said.
She must have asked me other questions, because somehow they got word to W, who showed up as Mrs. James was jingling her keys and trying to argue herself out of taking me home for dinner. W had her down jacket on over her uniform, and she’d changed her shoes to fur-lined, olive-green rain boots. She was carrying an adult-size hooded sweatshirt.
“This is your daughter?” Mrs. James put her keys in her purse and sat down, like maybe she thought she would have to stay there with me longer, since this blond Polish woman couldn’t possibly be my mother.
“They live with me. Her mother’s sick.” She held the sweatshirt upside down for me. “Here, Sammy.”
I slipped my arms in and flipped the sweatshirt over my head. Our shared familiarity with the ritual (which we had never done before—we were good improvisers, I guess) convinced Mrs. James to let me go with W, though the sweatshirt hung to my knees and its arms dragged on the ground.
I liked wearing the sweatshirt. It made me feel like a big girl.
Outside, raindrops the size of silver pebbles were falling. W picked me up and bent her head over mine and ran with me to her burgundy Buick.
“God, you’re heavy.” She set me on the back seat and got behind the wheel. The car smelled like W’s house. We sat idling for a little while until the rain died down.
“Busy day, huh, Sammy girl? I nearly lost my mind with worry.”
“Is Mama mad?”
“Your Mama’s dead to the world.”
The word dead made my stomach curl into a fist and punch me from the inside. W must have seen panic on my face.
“Sleeping, Sammy, she’s sleeping.”
I growled. “I don’t want you to call me that.”
She adjusted the mirror so she could see me in the back seat. I covered my face with my arm—I wanted to disappear, to not be somewhere I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be nameless so no one could call me the wrong thing.
“Time is the answer, Sammy.” W rocketed out of the parking lot and up the street, the windshield wipers going crazy and the rain a sheet. In less than half a minute, we’d pulled into her driveway.
“We’ll be soaked on the way in. Let’s wait.” W left the ignition on and watched the windshield wipers go back and forth, and it was like sitting in the Cedar Point parking lot with you. I didn’t want to be where I was, but I didn’t know where else to be.
“I want to go home.”
“I know. This can be your home. Like I told your mother: You guys’ll be safe here.”
When the rain tapered off, W lifted me out of the car. I squirmed in her arms.
“I want to walk.”
She put me down. “Sorry, honey. You’re like my own little girl.” She paused on the stoop, fumbling with her keys. “I won’t tell her. I won’t tell your Mama that you ran away.”
Inside, you were sitting in the middle of the living room floor, wrapped in an afghan that was usually draped over the basement couch.
“It’s cold,” you said. “Where were you guys? Where did you take her?”
“You need broth.” W tossed her coat on the floor and went straight to the kitchen. “Ah fuck—who made this mess?”
“What mess?” you said.
“Nothing,” said W. “Talking to myself.”
The phone rang. I’d never heard it ring before. No one ever called W.
“Someone’s been calling,” you said. “Don’t answer the phone. Where were you?”
“At the movies,” W said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Call if you need something.”
I stayed with you and listened to W as she cleaned up the mess I’d made. She was singing a song I’d heard on the radio, something about Sailor Sam.
“A song for you, Sammy,” she said.
You sipped the Lipton’s cup of soup she made you. W and I spread jam on toast—there was no more peanut butter—and chewed it slowly. When you trudged downstairs with the afghan draped over your head, I followed you. I put my giraffe pajamas on, and once you’d nodded off, I crept upstairs to sleep among the plants. Poppy was already nestled between a fern and the ficus. I pushed pots aside and lay my head on Poppy’s ginger-colored side. She lifted her head, bit my cheek, decided she didn’t care, and curled her head into her paws.
When I think about home, I think about that spot, Poppy and the pots, the low leafy canopy of houseplants that made me feel like I was not stuck between four walls. And W taking care of us, though I hated the fact that she cut my hair. I was learning to forget my father. I was learning to sleep wherever I needed to.
In the dark night, I heard you calling me, and W whisper-shouting, “She’s up here. Let her sleep.”
When I woke the next morning, I was staring at the burgundy ceiling of W’s car. Classical music played on the radio. Potted ferns crowded the seat next to me and the foot wells, and W’s afghan was wrapped around me several times. I wriggled out of it to sit up.
You clutched the steering wheel like a life preserver. The bench seat beside you held our suitcase and vanity and more plants. We were on the freeway, semis passing us on either side, and as they passed, their absence revealed an overcast morning, clouds so low they seemed to erase the sky.
“Where’s our car, Mama? Where’s W?”
“Let me drive. I’ll tell you later.”
“We took her blanket. And her plants. The police will catch us for stealing.”
“You like the plants. I brought them for you.”
My sobs burst out of me.
“W gave the blanket to us, Sammy. And the plants. She wanted us to have them.”
“You’re lying. You stole them.”
“We can’t take them back. We have to go.”
“I don’t want this stinky blanket. It smells like cough drops.”
I opened the window to the cool, early morning air and stuffed the afghan through it. The blanket plopped onto the cracked, potholed asphalt and lay there.
I felt strong, as though purposefully leaving something behind was like Popeye’s spinach, pumping my muscles up. I punched the back of the passenger seat a few times, until my muscles deflated, and I was back to being regular me.
The sky was pale; the day was going to become sunny and warm. We would see fiery rhododendrons at a rest stop on the interstate, dogs on leashes yipping crazily at the joy of being let out of the car. For now, you kept your eyes straight ahead on the drab gray road.
“Close the window,” you said.
I tried to tell you to stop the car and go back—back to the blanket, back to W’s house, back to where we’d started—but the words flew out the window and disappeared on the relentless wind as we hurtled forward to a place neither of us knew.
DESERT SHIELD
1990–1991
YOU DRIVE ME CRAZY
Hannah pulls the Fine Young Cannibals cassette from the shelf and remembers she has nothing but dollars in her purse. She should go ask Muneer for riyals. Put the tape back and walk from the music shop to the Safeway, where he and Lamees are buying groceries. Or better yet, come back another day with her own money, converted into the correct currency. Either option should be easy, as sending a letter to Malik or calling her mother should be easy.
Ever since she arrived in Jidda less than a week ago, leaving Cleveland a month and a half into the fall semester at the art institute, she’s felt restless, listless, rudderless. She’s questioned whether it was a good idea. She needs to grab onto something.
It’s not that she expected to feel instantly at home. She’s moved too much with her mother to think she’d settle into a new place, like putting on a spiffy new outfit and loving how she looked in the mirror, how the clothes made her feel. No, she’d known she would need time to acclimate to this place her parents “came from.”
The cassette tape is solid in Hannah’s hand. She slips it under her abayah and into her jeans pocket. Keeping her hands hidden under the black robe—which she can’t get used to wearing, but is useful for shoplifting—she pats the little rectangle. It feels like a piece of home.
