Bride of the Sea

by Eman Quotah

  The whole tape shop feels familiar, with its smell of plastic, though the tapes are not the same as the ones in the United States; they are cheap and black-marketed, in thick, soft, unfamiliar packaging with typos on the song lists. The shop is darker and smaller than the Sam Goody in Ohio, too. Instead of carpet, her footsteps land on black and white tiles, mottled like birds’ eggs. But the place is full of music she recognizes. FYC and the Smiths and Kate Bush.

  To take that familiarity out of the shop with her, she is absconding with a buck or two worth of merchandise. So what?

  She feels her femaleness constantly here in Jidda, in a way she occasionally does in America. For example, though she isn’t the only woman in the shop, she’s the one woman alone. The one person alone. Two teenage girls with fuchsia lipstick and teased, frosted bangs poking out from under their black headscarves brush past her and giggle. Two young men in jeans and knockoff-looking Levi’s T-shirts hold hands in the M section. She’s curious: Are they Arab or Indian? Are they gay? Up at the cash register, a group of American soldiers in desert camouflage and brown combat boots negotiates with the shopkeeper.

  One soldier has mirrored sunglasses, a crooked smile, and a black crew cut. Later, at an underground party up the coast, Erasure in the background, she’ll learn his name is Zee. Surrounded by drunk and flirty European and Arab expat high schoolers, and a few Saudis thrown in—pretending, like her, not to be Saudi—she’ll tell him, “I had a feeling I’d see you again. I had a feeling we would meet one day soon.”

  He will tell her she’s making it up, and she’ll try to convince him. “No really, it was like a waking dream. I saw you in my mind without those glasses. I knew it was you. I knew I would see you again.”

  She can’t see his eyes the night she steals the tape, but she can tell he’s watching her. What’s with the sunglasses? she thinks. Don’t you know it’s nighttime, buddy? As though he has heard her, he gives her a little salute. Is that kosher? Kosher isn’t the word. Is that regulation? She salutes back and regrets it. She shoves her hands beneath her abayah to keep them from stealing or saluting anymore.

  The female soldier next to Zee elbows him hard, and it occurs to Hannah that they don’t know she’s American, like them. Hannah’s stomach twists. She thinks they noticed her stealing. Will they report her to the shopkeeper?

  She considers returning the tape to its shelf—the right thing, the honest thing. She thinks about saying something to the soldiers in English. “Thanks for your service” or “How long you guys been here?” or “Whaddaya think of this place?”

  Her father appears at the door. Three years since their reunion and he is almost as much a stranger to her as the soldiers are. She came here to get to know him better. It seemed like the fastest way.

  “Lamees is in the car,” he says. “Yalla.” Probably the word slips past his lips involuntarily, without him thinking about whether she’ll understand. Yalla is one of a few words Hannah has picked up so far. Yalla: hurry up. Ahlan: welcome. Akhuya: my brother. Abuya: my father. Ummi: my mother.

  She’s learned the words’ meanings, but she hasn’t spoken them.

  As they walk to the car, the humid night air warms her face. Her headscarf presses against her hair and summons her sweat. She hates wearing the scarf, but she doesn’t want to break the rules. The parking lot and streets are crowded with honking cars. Why do men drive angrily here, as though cutting someone else off is the only outlet for frustration?

  Hannah’s father keeps his eyes on the Americans, who have finished their negotiating and are piling into a Jeep. He seems especially to be watching Zee, who among the tall Americans is the tallest.

  Or maybe it is Hannah who is especially watching Zee. She touches the stolen tape again.

  “The king asked them to come, but they walk around like they own the place.”

  “They’re my age,” Hannah says. She doesn’t know enough about the politics to understand any of it, or enough about her father to guess the true sentiment behind his words. Does he oppose the Americans coming here, or is he wary?

  Her own reasons for being here seem trivial compared to young soldiers “fighting for freedom”—if that’s how they see themselves. If she were being honest, the reasons she has come to Jidda are, in order: to piss off her mother, to meet her siblings, to avoid a semester of art school and her job at the art supply store, to see her father.

  “You don’t have to work, Hanadi,” her father said as they sat in a car outside her Cleveland Heights apartment a little over a month ago, an international airline ticket on the armrest between them. If she were a better person she would have argued with him. But she’s been low on money, and her mother found her number over the summer and started calling her several times a week to tell her to come home.

  She is twenty. She can live wherever she wants. Go wherever she wants. She doesn’t have to go “home” to her mother’s lies.

  Her father picked up the ticket with his index and middle fingers and held it in the space between them.

  “Your brothers can’t wait to see you.”

  The idea of brothers never occurred to her.

  She always wanted a sister, someone to share in-jokes with, to repeat lines from movies with, to be the other person in the world who knows what it was like to be her mother’s daughter.

  She ran away. She looked up W’s name in the Toledo phone book, which they had at the Cleveland library, and called four people with the same last name until she heard the familiar Polish accent.

  “Of course I remember you,” W said.

  So Hannah bought a Greyhound ticket to Toledo with her paycheck from the convenience store where she worked at the time. She finished high school in Toledo, living with W and W’s boyfriend, Tod.

  When Hannah got into art school in Cleveland, but not in New York, Rhode Island, LA, or DC, W told her not to go back.

  “Your mom will find you.”

  Hannah didn’t listen. She moved back to Cleveland, into her own apartment. She gave Muneer and W her new address. But she didn’t tell her mom.

  Being here, she has a weird, admittedly vindictive urge to tell her mother where she is. “Here I am, in the place you kept me from, with the father you said was dead.”

  Hannah slides into the crimson-vinyl back seat of her father’s white Chevrolet sedan. It smells like some sort of woody incense. Sitting in the front, Lamees turns her veiled face toward Hannah. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Lamees and Hannah’s father are the first people Hannah has ever met who sound like her mother. That thin membrane of accent that makes her mother a mystery is normal here, is how English comes out their mouths. This place—this bride of the Red Sea, as her father calls the city—is the origin of her mother’s phonemes. The blue sky like a vat of dye, the air like steam in a bathroom, the promise of sea to the west and carpets of sand to the east, somewhere over there past the city limits. These things gave birth to her mother’s p’s that are not quite p’s, her v’s that bear passing resemblance to f’s, her insistence on opening lights rather than turning them on.

  And so there is a strange familiarity she feels with these two, while at the same time she finds it disconcerting to speak to Lamees in public, to speak to someone whose eyes and mouth she can’t see. Disconcerting to speak with her father, who was dead, who claims one day Hannah disappeared with her mother in a poof. Like I was some sort of five-year-old genie, she wrote to Malik in the letter she’s been working on since she boarded the plane in Cleveland. She’s already written five pages, front and back. Is that what happened? Whatever the truth, she blames her mother for lying about her father’s death, which suggests she lied about so much more. Sometimes Hannah blames both her parents, but mostly her mother.

  “They didn’t have what I wanted,” she tells Lamees. It’s a white lie. Hannah is not an incurable liar like her mother.

  The neon ads of the city are reflected in miniature in her car window: tires, soda, furni
ture, fresh juice. Her father stops at a shawarma shop, the spit directly outside manned by a guy with a carving knife and a chef’s hat and patches of sweat on his back and under his arms.

  Alone with Lamees, Hannah starts to hum. She’s ruined things for herself; she can’t listen to the tape because she’s lied. Why did she lie?

  “I stopped listening to music,” Lamees says. “I used to love it, but the Prophet told his followers only the human voice and drums are halal.”

  What kind of person doesn’t like music? About her stepmother, Hannah wrote: It would be weirder if my father and I had any history together. As it is, she’s some stranger. She can’t figure out what to make of me. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe that’s my problem. I want to get to know her. Really.

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  Since she arrived, Hannah’s days have gone by one like the other, identical pencils in a case. There’s not much to do while her father works. She’d like to explore the city, but they don’t have a driver, and women are not allowed to drive, so they can’t go to the mall or the grocery store till he’s done with work. It’s frustrating and not what she expected, as someone used to coming and going as she pleases.

  So Hannah spends long stretches of time drawing. The day after the shoplifting incident, she sits on the low cushions of the family room and props the hard, flat pillow from her bed on her lap to make a desk. The air conditioner hums, a constant sound. It’s October and balmy outside. Lamees and Mary—the young Filipina woman who cooks, cleans, and helps take care of the boys—are making lunch. Hannah would like to click the FYC tape into her father’s Sony stereo system, but there is the thing Lamees said about music.

  The pillow is from the two older boys’ bed, a full that they usually share. These days, her three brothers—six, five, and three—sleep with their parents. And Mary doesn’t have her own room. Her contract is with Lamees’s sister, but she came to help take care of the boys after the littlest, Hatim, was born. She sleeps on a mattress in the formal living room, with the folding doors closed. There are too many people in this apartment, and Hannah wishes she’d known that before she agreed to fly thousands of miles to a country gearing up for war. The other day Muneer showed Hannah the blueprints for a villa he’s having built in a newer part of town. Everyone, he said, will have their own room.

  “How soon?” Hannah asked.

  “Next year, I promise.”

  Does he think she’ll be here next year?

  In the margins of her journal, Hannah sketches her toes, a minaret, a bowl of black olives. She finds a dull charcoal pencil at the bottom of her backpack, twists it in her knuckle-size sharpener, and sketches a pair of mirrored sunglasses with her own face reflected in them.

  Five-year-old Fadi, the middle of her father’s boys, doesn’t think too much of her drawings. He climbs onto her lap, grabs her pencil, and scrawls on the page, embellishing her careful cross-hatching with swooping loops. He’s autistic and only speaks a few words of Arabic, her father told her, fewer than Hatim.

  Fadi adds a layer to my sketches, she wrote on page seven of the letter to Malik, a few days ago. It’s a collaborative process.

  Hatim is not interested in Hannah; he loves Mary best. But she is trying to win him over by folding things for him: notepaper fortune tellers, gum-wrapper swans, a hat made out of their dad’s newspaper.

  The oldest brother, Fouad, drags her outside to make her watch him ride his bike around and around the courtyard. He knows “On your mark, go!” in English. They go down in the evening, when it’s not too hot, and the air smells like flowers she can’t name.

  Hannah didn’t think too much about Kuwait or Iraq or Operation Desert Shield the day Malik drove her to JFK in New York because her father had neglected to buy her a connecting ticket and she couldn’t afford it. Malik waited until they parked in the garage to start freaking out about the war, telling her she was crazy to board the plane. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t wait until next summer, when the war might be over.

  “If you go, I’ll lose you,” he said as he pulled her luggage out of the trunk. “Why can’t your dad visit you here?”

  “I’m going to Jidda, not Kuwait City.”

  “Maybe you’ll stay there. Maybe your dad won’t let you leave.”

  “I’m an adult. I can do what I want. I’m an American citizen. Although my mom would kill me if she knew what I was doing.” Hannah stood on tiptoe, put her arms around Malik’s shoulders, and kissed him. “Come with me.”

  Of course she didn’t mean it, standing there with the ticket her father had bought her. Except, she did mean it. She wanted to fold Malik up like a letter and carry him in her back pocket.

  “Your relatives will love that. A boyfriend. A black, American, Christian boyfriend.”

  “You don’t know they’d say that.”

  They had walked to the Saudia Airlines counter. Women in black robes and scarves sat near the windows. At their feet were suitcases several small children could fit into, and in their arms they held expertly swaddled babies with thick, Muppet-y black hair. Their older children climbed on the luggage.

  Hannah decided not to kiss Malik again, not in front of these conservative, likely disapproving-of-public-affection-and-dating women. She felt as though she were already in another country. Malik’s last words to her were, “Write me, OK?”

  On the airplane, with stale air hissing down at her, she started the letter. It has grown over the days into a fat stack of pages. She doesn’t know how to transport herself to a post office, and she doesn’t want to hand her father an envelope with a man’s name on it. So she keeps the letter in her purse, next to the FYC tape.

  The first place Hannah’s father took her after she arrived at King Abdulaziz International Airport was her grandmother’s flat. Almost the first place. They stopped for hot pita bread on the way, Hannah waiting in the car while her father hopped into a hole-in-the-wall bakery and emerged with a steamy blue plastic bag. As they drove down a quiet residential street toward her grandmother’s house, the two of them, the bread smell made her giddy and intensified her feeling of displacement: Was she in a car, or a bakery? How had she come to be in this city and country she’d barely known until her father showed up three years ago?

  She’d tried to find out about where she was going before she left Ohio. But the books about Saudi Arabia in the library were about oil and history. She’d had no way to start to comprehend what life would be like here.

  Muneer had not brought Lamees or the boys to the airport. He wanted Hannah to meet her grandmother before anyone else, he said.

  “I’m so happy you came.” He tapped his horn as he steered the car through an intersection with no stop signs.

  Hannah wasn’t sure yet if she felt the same. She always reserved judgment on new situations: a new job, art school, a new boyfriend. Why should visiting her homeland be different? In any circumstance, things could go to crap, or be OK. Best to go in with low expectations. She gripped the handle on her door and pressed her foot to the floor, as though she were braking the car. She closed her eyes and imagined a bumper sticker: “I brake for stop signs.” She opened her eyes and sand-colored apartment buildings marched past.

  She could tell, being here for less than half an hour, that she was a different person than she might have been if she’d grown up here, with her family intact. There was no changing that. Her father had a black abayah thingy and scarf sewn for her and sent to Ohio so she would have them to wear when she arrived. One of the stewardesses—none of them were Saudis—had shown her how to put the abayah and scarf on.

  Her grandmother’s building faced a block of empty sandlots, as though the builders of the neighborhood had suddenly run out of steam and given up on trying to populate the desert. In front of the building, a leggy bougainvillea bush grew in a square of dry soil surrounded by sidewalk. The bright pink blossoms burned Hannah’s eyes.

  “Hellfire flowers,” Hannah’s father said.

  T
wo men sat on the curb, their white robes tented over their knees. She had never seen anything like them, and at the same time, they were as familiar as her own hands. What other lost elements of herself would she find here?

  A grandmother. A family. The thoughts took her breath away.

  Outside the car, the air was greenhouse hot, the sun brighter than anything she’d seen.

  Her father had a key to the front door of the building. The hallway leading upstairs smelled of cumin and onions and ground beef. Hannah’s grandmother waited at the door—she must have been peering out the window for the car’s arrival. She was a small woman with thinning black hair streaked with white, plaited and fastened to her head with U-shaped pins. Her cheeks, probably full and round when she was young, were wrinkled and flabby like deflated balloons.

  She kissed Hannah enthusiastically on both cheeks. Her skin was soft and familiar against Hannah’s. Her scent was sautéed onions and what Hannah would later learn was mastic gum.

  “Hanadi!” she said, and other things Hannah wanted to understand but couldn’t. It was strange to be called by that name, like she was being pulled into the alternate reality in which she’d lived here since her father returned from his studies in America.

  “She’s happy to see you,” Hannah’s father said. “She says she wants to eat up your sweetness.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too.” Tears blurred her vision.

  Hannah’s grandmother nodded, as though she understood. But she didn’t, of course. She went on in Arabic. Her voice sounded like gum cracking in her cheek.

  “She says, ‘God bless you.’ She says, ‘God has blessed us by bringing you back to us, like the Prophet Yusuf returned to his father.’”

  “Yusuf?”

  “Joseph. His brothers threw him down a well and pretended he’d been eaten by wolves. His father went blind with grief.”