by Eman Quotah
“That sucks.”
“Later the father regains his sight. It’s a happy ending.”
“Tell her this is a happy ending. Meeting my grandmother.”
In the small living room, plastic had been laid out on the floor and covered with plates of meat pie and white cheese and sliced peppers and the hot pita bread her father had brought. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Is it dinnertime?”
“No, but she’s been waiting to feed you. Fifteen years. Aren’t you hungry?”
When they left, Hannah’s grandmother hugged her tight. If she’d wanted to, Hannah could have rested her chin on her grandmother’s head. She kept her chin up, though, afraid her grandmother’s skull might have a soft spot, like a baby’s. The hug went on for a long time, till Hannah sought her father’s eyes, asking for help.
“Ummi,” he said.
Hannah’s grandmother stepped back and touched Hannah’s hair, petted it like she might pet the small round head of a parakeet.
“We’ll come back. Tell her that.” What Hannah almost said: “Tell her that, Dad.” But the word stayed inside her, between her ribs and beneath her heart.
TAIF
Two days after the tape incident, Hannah’s Aunt Randah shows up uninvited and presses the buzzer outside.
“What the heck is she doing here?” Hannah’s father says when Randah’s upturned face appears on the closed-circuit screen by the apartment door. “I didn’t tell her you were here. Who told her?”
The question is not for Hannah. The tension in the air pulls through the middle of her stomach, though she doesn’t know who she’s looking at until her father tells her. She could have guessed. On the tiny black-and-white screen, her aunt’s expectant face looks so much like Hannah’s mother’s or her own.
Hannah’s father buzzes Randah in. As they wait for her at the open door of the apartment, her footsteps echo in the stairwell. She comes round the bend and floats up the last half flight like a black ghost, kicks her shoes off at the threshold without waiting to be invited inside, and sets down a large pink shopping bag with gold lettering. She hugs Hannah and kisses her cheeks, as though they’ve been parted for a week, rather than years.
“Your mother’s sister,” Lamees says in English.
“Ya shaykhah, she knows who I am,” Randah says.
Hannah has no memory of her. Here is a person who knows who her mother was in the beginning, someone who might give a clue why she would hide Hannah from the family and the family from Hannah.
Randah keeps her headscarf on and gives her abayah to Lamees. She looks Little-House-on-the-Prairie-ish in her pink long-sleeved blouse and a plain brown skirt that grazes the tops of her bare feet.
Lamees ushers them into the sitting room and instructs Mary to bring refreshments: a tray of Pepsi and orange soda in bloodred goblets. Randah, Hannah’s father, and Lamees exchange what seem to be pleasantries in Arabic. They sit on floor cushions placed around the perimeter of the room. The television is on, tuned to news on the English-language channel. Fouad and Fadi lounge on their stomachs on the floor. Hatim naps in another room.
“How are your children, Randah?” Hannah’s father says in English.
“Your father is worried I’ll take you,” Randah says. “Like your mother did. But I’m not my sister. He has nothing to worry about.”
Hannah can hardly believe how quickly the hostility between Randah and her father has come to the surface. She wishes to be anywhere else but here. And yet. It is the first time anyone has confirmed her father’s version of things.
That ubiquitous air-conditioner noise fills the room, like ice water in a glass. Hannah’s father sits straighter. Hannah sits straighter, too.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” he says. He is taking care to speak in English, Hannah thinks. He wants her to hear his disapproval.
Randah takes a stack of wrinkled blue aerograms out of her bag. “The letters my father sent your mother,” she says to Hannah. “Returned by the postal service.” She places the letters in Hannah’s hand.
Hannah holds the stack between her palms. The addresses are in English, but of course the letters themselves are in Arabic. She won’t be able to read them without someone to translate, and that means she will never be able to decipher for herself her mother’s relationship with her grandfather. She tucks the letters under her thigh, as though they are bookmarks and her legs pages, as though she can flag this time in her life.
“Come visit me this weekend,” Randah tells Hannah. “Come meet your grandmother and grandfather.”
Bubbles pop on the surface of Hannah’s soda. She sips. The carbonation tickles the top of her mouth. It never occurred to her to want to meet her mother’s parents, or that her mother had parents. She can’t recall them ever being spoken of when she and her mother were alone together in various American towns and suburbs, the kinds of places where people mistook them for Mexicans or Dominicans and Hannah’s mother didn’t try to convince them otherwise.
Hannah’s father says something in Arabic, and Randah tilts her head toward Hannah.
“We’re going to Taif this weekend,” Hannah’s father says.
The conversation teeters on the edge of argument. “Ah, Taif is very nice,” Randah says. “But you can go later.”
Hannah doesn’t know where Taif is or why they are going there, but she wants a say in this matter. So she says the word she hasn’t spoken yet. It tastes metallic and hard in her mouth: “Dad. I want to meet my grandparents.”
Her father’s eyes cloud. “Weekend after next,” he says.
“Wonderful, I will send the driver.”
Before Randah leaves, she hands Hannah the shopping bag, which contains a red velvet jewelry case, a floral skirt, a yellow blazer, and white flats. So many gifts! Hannah lays the clothes on the seat cushion beside her and opens the case. Inside is a small turquoise amulet with gold calligraphy. She rubs the smooth surface with her thumb.
“It’s beautiful. What does it say?”
“‘Oh, Protector,’” Randah says. “Put it on!”
“She can wear it later,” Hannah’s father says. Hannah freezes. Should she put it away? Should she put it on?
Randah decides for her by grabbing her hand, gently lifting her fingers, and filching the chain and pendant from her.
“Very simple to put it on,” Randah says, looping the chain around Hannah’s neck. She’s wearing a V-neck tee, and the pendant adheres to her chest.
Hannah loses her abayah in Taif. On Thursday, the first day of the Saudi weekend, her father drives the family out of the city, up a mountain, past a rock perched over the road, into a park of low, bushy evergreens. As they ascend, Hannah’s stomach somersaults and her mouth fills with saliva. Her father pulls over against the side of the mountain so she can spit into the dirt.
The park revives her. It smells like pine, like an Ohio hike, and oddly, that makes her happy to be here, in Saudi. The picnic area smells like a summer barbecue. Families have spread cloths along the sparsely grassy edges of the path that winds through the park. Though the late-October air is mild and breezy, people are dressed in layers, as though for a chilly fall day in Ohio. The fathers, wearing blazers or cardigan sweaters over their white thawbs, grill pungent lamb, and the mothers, draped in black, pour tea out of thermoses and set out trays of dates. Little girls of eight or ten, wearing black headscarves and colorful dresses under cardigans, cradle babies and run after toddlers. Older boys kick soccer balls on patches of dirt.
After lunch, Hannah, her father, and Lamees go for a walk, leaving the boys on a picnic blanket with Mary.
“I’ll stay with them,” Hannah says. The three boys might be a handful for Mary, she tells herself.
Muneer insists Hannah come along.
“It’s fine, Miss,” Mary says. “Go with your parents, please.” Mary has a small daughter at home in the Philippines, she told Hannah a few days ago, though she doesn’t seem much older than Hann
ah is. It’s not till now that Hannah wonders how hard it is for Mary to be separated from her own child.
Lamees wears white sneakers under her abayah, and Hannah’s father wears a blue polyester track suit he changed into when they arrived at the park. Once they pass the picnickers and there’s no one around, Lamees lifts her veil from her face and drapes it over the top of her head. One side of her mouth dimples when she smiles, and her front teeth jut toward her bottom lip. They walk up a rocky path that slopes gently. Beneath them, patchy terraced farmland is scrunched into a narrow valley.
Hannah keeps tripping over her abayah. It never wants to stay closed, and her scarf never stays put. She feels foreign to herself wearing them.
Underneath is the real her: jeans and a gray Gap T-shirt.
She wraps the one side of the abayah around the other side of her body and tucks the fabric tightly under her arm.
“You see.” Hannah’s father coughs. He knocks his fist against his chest as though it were the door to a place he wants to go. He sweeps his arms open. In his track suit, he is a blue silhouette against a blue sky. “Our country is not only deserts and camels and oil sheikhs and Mercedes-Benzes. We have mountains and family picnics and trees and goats.”
Two young men with the hems of their thawbs tied round their waists, revealing white cotton pants and leather sandals, saunter down the path toward them. Lamees flips her scarf back over her face and walks a few paces behind her husband.
The men stop to talk to Hannah’s father. The three kiss on the cheeks and bring their hands to their hearts.
“How does he know them?” Hannah asks Lamees.
“He talks to everyone, know them, not know them.” Lamees keeps her voice low. “Don’t talk too loud, and cover your hair.”
Hannah tightens her scarf under her sweaty chin.
“I think I’ll go sit with Mary and the kids,” she says.
Walking back, she breathes the scent of pine needles and thinks of forests and Malik.
Branching from the main trail, a little goat path leads down to a cliff that overlooks the valley. Weeds that smell like basil grow along the path. Hannah removes the abayah, folds it, and stuffs it under her armpit. She slides sideways down the incline. Rocks tinkle under her feet. On a small overhang, she lands on her knees in the dust, stands up, and brushes herself off awkwardly with the abayah. She doesn’t need it. She places it against the trunk of a tree.
Beneath her, down a steep incline, is a field of low green plants. She can’t go any farther.
She picks her way back up the rocks. When she reaches the top, she lies on her back, out of breath. A hawk flies through the cloudless sky. Malik flits through her mind. She wants to find a way to call him when they return to Jidda.
A man comes up to her talking frantically.
“English?” she says.
He keeps talking.
“My father’s over there.”
She wishes she had the abayah. Her arms are bare. After the man leaves her, she tugs off her scarf, drapes it over her shoulders and arms, and walks bareheaded to the picnic blanket, where Hatim sleeps with his head in Mary’s lap and Fouad is showing Fadi how to kick a soccer ball. Mary’s scarf is loosely draped over her hair—can she do that because she’s Christian? Foreign?
Hannah kicks the ball a little with the boys, but Fadi would rather pick it up and throw it, which makes Fouad mad. He scolds his brother in Arabic, and Hannah tries to calm him, but he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. When Hannah’s father and Lamees arrive a few minutes later, Lamees is practically jogging, her face covered.
“Where is your abayah?” Lamees says. Though out of breath, she has the fire of anger in her voice.
“It slipped off.”
“Time to go,” Hannah’s father says.
“I should find it.”
“We’ll buy you another.”
SOCIAL LIFE
After Taif, Hannah tells her father, “I need to meet someone my age.” It’s not that she wants friends so she can stay here forever, more that she can’t learn about this place completely through her father’s male eyes or in the living rooms of her relatives.
He arranges for her to go shopping that week with Summer, his best friend’s daughter, whose mother, he tells her—as though it were a formula for friendship—is American. The younger girl shows up with an extra abayah and scarf draped over her arm. “My mom told me to lend these to you,” she says.
Summer wears a striped Benetton sweater and faded jeans under her abayah. She slides into the back seat of her father’s Nissan SUV and Hannah follows. Summer sits toward the middle, leaning between the front seats to give her driver, Nasser, directions. She adjusts her headscarf, pulling the ends wide and exposing her short Winona Ryder haircut before wrapping the scarf tightly over her hair.
“What music do you like?” she says.
Hannah brings the Fine Young Cannibals tape out of her purse, where she stashed it and forgot about it.
“I stole it.”
“Ha!” Summer takes the tape and shifts forward so she can reach the dashboard and put it into the tape deck. Nasser doesn’t seem to notice as he zips in and out of lanes like a race car driver. Hannah wishes she could lay her hands on the steering wheel, but she’s not sure she could drive crazy enough to not get run over.
Over the music, Summer tells Hannah she spent her last two years of high school in Ohio and a year at a small college in the States. She decided to come home when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
“Why’d you come back with a war going on?”
“Pot, kettle, or whatever.” Summer grabs the front seats as Nasser speeds through a red light. “Hang on to your headscarves! We’re going to a party! Don’t worry. Nasser won’t tell your dad.”
The party is in a walled beach villa forty-five minutes up the coast. The pink marble entryway is littered with shoes. Abayahs and scarves fill two coatracks. Loud disco-like music beckons from the second floor. Derobed, they climb the spiral stairs to a sitting room with no furniture. Big windows face the sea, a dark gleaming in the distance. A kidney-shaped pool, empty of swimmers, fills most of the courtyard beneath them. After she has taken in the landscape outside, Hannah looks around the room. Summer deciphers the crowd, pointing out factions. There are a few young Saudis, gel-haired boys in baggy jeans and Guess T-shirts who smell like cologne and cigarettes. A couple Kuwaitis whose families fled the invasion—“You can tell by their accents,” Summer says. Some girls from the international school, a few of them wearing cat-ear headbands.
Hannah had forgotten it was Halloween.
And there is the guy from the tape shop, leaning against a wall sipping nonalcoholic beer. At first she doesn’t recognize him without his sunglasses and fatigues. He salutes her.
“I’ve seen you before. Remember me?”
“Who?”
“It’s Zee. How’s that Fine Young Cannibals album?”
“Where are your friends?”
“Water pipes.” He points toward the yard and the pool. “They’re out there smoking bananas.”
“It’s apple tobacco,” Summer says.
“I thought Saudi girls weren’t allowed to socialize with men.”
“I’m not a Saudi girl,” Hannah says. “I’m visiting my dad.”
Summer points to red punch in a big crystal bowl. “That’s the booze.”
“Isn’t that against the rules?” Zee says.
“Ever gotten a speeding ticket?” Summer ladles punch into three plastic cups.
“Nah, I’m a total rule follower.” Zee pulls out his sunglasses and puts them on the back of his head.
Hannah gulps too much punch; it’s like drinking a cherry lollipop. “This is terrible.”
“Nice red mustache.” Zee winks. She wipes her mouth with her arm, and he winks again and says, “Still there.”
“He’s joshing,” Summer says.
What a dumb joke, Hannah thinks. Doesn’t matter. She wants to stay close to
him. She tells him she’s dying to see the beach, and they retrieve their shoes from the entryway and stroll down through the night, leaving Summer with the shisha-smoking Americans. They remove their shoes again to walk on the sand. They’re holding the shoes in their opposite hands, as though they’d planned it this way, to let the backs of their hands brush. Ahead of them, the water is darker than the sky. They sit at the border between wet and dry sand, at the edge of the foamy waves. Zee rests his chin on Hannah’s shoulder. She smells the punch on his breath.
“I’m buzzed,” he says.
She touches his fingers, not quite holding hands. A shock of heat zips up her arms and through her ribs.
He’s from Kansas City, his parents from San Juan. She’s never been to either place. He doesn’t ask how long she’s been in Jidda.
“Girlfriend?” she asks.
“Never.”
He has a habit of winking when he says something jokey or sarcastic. He holds this wink for a few long seconds. She almost reaches to his forehead to stroke his crooked eyebrows.
“How does she feel about you being here? The war.” The word war feels as strange as father in her mouth.
“It’s not a war yet. Not too happy, I guess.”
The kiss that comes next tastes as surprising and unsurprising as spiked punch. A little too boozy. A little too sweet. She likes it the way she likes spiked punch: with a nagging sense she may later regret the sips she’s taken. She pushes the thought of Malik to the borders of her mind. This is an innocent kiss, and Malik is so far away, and Zee isn’t looking for anything serious, and he is another solid thing to grab onto. Otherwise, she could imagine herself floating out to sea.
The rest of the week, Hannah reads and writes and sketches. Watches bootleg videos of movies with the sex scenes and the kisses excised by government censors. Sometimes the picture freezes but the audio continues. Smooching noises, sighs. She thinks about Zee when that happens and also whenever an air-raid test siren blares. She writes Malik about the test sirens, the beach house, her aunt, the feeling that everyone is on edge waiting for the war to start but also that life is incredibly normal, where normal means boring.
