Mariam Sharma Hits the Road

by Sheba Karim

“It’s a free country,” Ghaz said, because of course even in the Deep South she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  “Yes, it is,” the waitress replied evenly.

  I squeezed Ghaz’s arm under the table, trying to signal it wasn’t worth it.

  “Your kind?” she said after the waitress left.

  “I think she was trying to be helpful,” I said.

  Ghaz snorted, and said we should leave no tip, but Umar insisted on leaving twenty-five percent, and even bought a bottle of the Hawaiian barbecue sauce.

  “What the hell, Umar?” Ghaz cried as we got into the car. “I thought you silenced that app!”

  “I thought I did, too!” he replied.

  “God,” I said. “If this stuff is happening to us, what’s happening to women who wear hijab?”

  “They get knifed in the street,” he replied.

  “Oh, relax. The number of Muslims being killed has to be way less than the number of black people killed by cops,” Ghaz said.

  “Some of those black people might be Muslim,” Umar reminded her.

  “I used to think the world would end with nuclear war,” I said, “but now I’m leaning toward slow, painful, ugly decline.”

  “Not a bang, but a motherfucking whimper,” Ghaz grumbled.

  “I can’t win,” Umar said. “Some people don’t like me because I’m gay, some people don’t like me because I’m Muslim, and some Muslims don’t like me because I’m gay.”

  “And I bet some gay people won’t like you because you’re Muslim,” I stated. “Just because you’re queer doesn’t mean you aren’t prejudiced.”

  “It could be worse,” Ghaz reminded him.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You could be gay and Muslim and a refugee living in a garbage-strewn, makeshift camp, no country willing to take you, haunted by the memory of your entire family killed before your eyes.”

  “Damn, woman,” Ghaz said.

  “That is true,” he conceded.

  “You could be that,” Ghaz continued, “but instead you’re a rich kid on the road trip of a lifetime. Look on the bright side, right?”

  As if on cue, a giant pickup truck with monster wheels merged in front of us, the large Confederate flag attached to the back fluttering in the wind. Hanging below the rear bumper were two giant metal balls.

  “Wow,” Ghaz said. “Look at those truck nuts.”

  “Is that really what they call them?” I said.

  “Yeah. They’re testicles for your truck.”

  I was speechless.

  Umar groaned. “You guys, I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to turn around and head home.”

  “No way!” Ghaz said. “NOLA or bust, remember? If we turn around, truck nuts wins! What we need to do now is take a deep breath, relax, put on the Boss, and crank up the volume.”

  Bruce Springsteen took us all the way through western Alabama, down a bucolic highway that had no billboards and hardly any vehicles, only woods and open road leading us toward a beautifully layered sunset, teal-gray expanse of sky, a narrow band of wispy pink clouds, a horizon edged in deep gold. It was nice to be in nature, sans people, because people could be pretty awful.

  By the time we entered Mississippi, it was dark. We filled our tank, stopped at a Taco Bell, eating it so quickly we all felt sick, and when we returned to the car Ghaz announced we were going to play a game of post–Taco Bell Truth or Dare.

  “How is post–Taco Bell Truth or Dare different from regular?” I asked.

  “More farts,” Umar said. “My question is, how many dares can you do inside a moving car?”

  “I guess that means you want truth,” she responded. “Umar, please tell us about the first time you came. Not, like, in a dream, but purposefully.”

  “Ummm . . . I honestly don’t remember much about the first time. Well, I do remember that I was scared to masturbate because a teacher at Sunday school had told us masturbation was haram and would make your eyesight weak, so when I first did it I turned the light back on to make sure I hadn’t gone blind. But other than that, I don’t really remember.”

  “Fine, then tell us about an interesting time when you came,” Ghaz said.

  “Interesting . . .” Umar clucked his tongue as he thought. “I mean, it’s silly.”

  “Even better,” I said.

  “Okay. So, there was this guy in the community, Wasim. He was, like, five or six years older than me. His mother was Kashmiri and he had light skin and hazel eyes and black, black hair, even thicker than mine. Terrible dresser, but beautiful face. His family’s house was super modern, boxy with lots of glass, and once in a while they’d have a party, which everyone would be excited for because they’d have yummy Kashmiri food, and I’d be excited for because Wasim would be there. I mean, all the girls had crushes on him, too, he was like Imran Khan with greener eyes.”

  “Who’s Imran Khan?” I asked.

  “Famous Pakistani cricketer heartthrob of his time,” Ghaz explained.

  “Anyway, we go to a party at his house—I must have been eleven or twelve—and the boys are in Wasim’s room playing video games. Wasim is playing this assassin in medieval Rome, and I’m cheering him on like the other boys as if I care about the video game, but all I really care about is that I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed and he’s on the floor right in front of me, and sometimes as he plays he kind of jerks back, and whenever he does, his hair brushes against my bare toes. I had to work so hard to play it cool, because every time it happened I’d get a shiver up and down my spine.”

  I noticed Umar’s shoulders do a little shimmy, as if reliving the physical memory of his experience.

  “And then?” Ghaz said. “Please tell me it ends with you two on a Ping-Pong table.”

  “What? No! Wasim’s mother came to tell us to come down for dinner, but I stayed after everyone left. I’d noticed a laundry bin in the corner, so I opened it and stole a pair of Wasim’s dirty boxers. I stuffed them inside my shalwar, and when I went home that night I held them to my nose and, you know, jacked off. Because I had them stuffed in my own crotch, they smelled like a combination of him and me. It was the closest we ever got.”

  “See,” Ghaz said, “if you did that with the stolen underwear of a girl, I’d be grossed out, but since it’s a guy, it’s kind of sweet.”

  “What happened to Wasim?” I asked.

  Umar shrugged. “Graduated from college, became a biologist, got married young, moved to the West Coast. Last time I stalked him online he had a receding hairline.” He ran his hand through his own locks, reassuring himself of their longevity.

  “Mars, do you remember when we first met Umar?” Ghaz said. “He wouldn’t have been able to say the words ‘jack off’ without his cheeks turning that sweet shade of pink. We really brought out the potty mouth in him.”

  “It was always there,” Umar said. “It was waiting for the right audience. All right, Ghaz, your turn to spill your tea. We know you have something good.”

  “Same question? Well, I think the first time I came is pretty interesting,” she revealed. “I was ten, and you know what made me horny? The Quran. We used to learn the stories of the Prophets in Sunday school, and one day we learned the story of Yusuf.”

  “Ah.” Umar nodded.

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  “Yusuf is the same as Joseph; you know, his treacherous brothers throw him down the well, yadda yadda. So, he ends up in Egypt, and the minister buys him and brings him home, and he’s so smoking hot that Zulaikha, the minister’s wife, is totally beside herself with desire. She wants him so bad that one day she can’t take it anymore, and she locks the door of the room and is like ‘Come over here, hot stuff,’ and he wants her, too, but of course he remembers Allah and says ‘I can’t, it’s a sin,’ and runs away. She chases after him and grabs his shirt and the shirt tears in her hand, and Yusuf makes a break for the door and when he opens it, who’s standing there but the minister.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

>   “So the minister is standing there wondering what the hell is going on, and Zulaikha freaks out and says, ‘Yusuf tried to seduce me!’ And Yusuf says, ‘No way, she was jumping me.’ But when the minister sees that Yusuf’s shirt is torn in the back, he knows his wife is lying, and he asks for Yusuf’s forgiveness.”

  “The lustful woman trying to corrupt the virtuous man,” I said. “Classic.”

  “Oh, but that’s not even the best part,” Ghaz went on. “So after this happens, word gets out in the ’hood and all the ladies start talking smack about Zulaikha. That she’s so full of lust and ishq for her slave she can’t see straight anymore, yadda yadda. And when Zulaikha hears the goss, she’s like, screw you bitches, and invites them all over for a banquet. She gives them knives and veggies to chop, and then she asks Yusuf to come into the room. When he comes in and the ladies see how insanely hot he is, their knives slip and they all cut their hands and stand there bleeding, staring at him lustfully. And Zulaikha’s like, ‘Now you b’s see why I’m crazy for him!’ and Yusuf’s like, ‘I’m outta here,’ and after that he goes to prison, you know, where he interprets the dreams.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “For the pharaoh, right?”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I listened to Sister Fatima tell us this story from the Quran, and that night in bed I kept thinking about it. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word lust, and it was the first time I learned that sexual desire can be so powerful that you can tear someone’s shirt and cut your own damn hand, and I kept wishing I could see Yusuf because I wanted to feel it, too. Only for a sec, though, because I didn’t want to get into too much trouble like Zulaikha did. So, I started imagining him in front of me, and I got this tingling feeling between my legs, and I put a pillow underneath my torso and started rubbing my crotch against it, faster and faster, and while I’m coming, who walks in but my mother. And she yells, ‘What are you doing?’ and I say, ‘I was thinking about Prophet Yusuf,’ and she slaps me and tells me I’m dirty and makes me do wudu and pray and ask forgiveness from Allah for having impure thoughts and she took my pillow away.”

  “Oh, Ghaz,” I said. To me, the idea of your own mother hitting you was so foreign and incomprehensible and sad, but Ghaz spoke of it like it was simply a fact of childhood. “How many times has she hit you?”

  “Not a lot,” Ghaz said. “Not a little, either.”

  “My mother could never hit me,” Umar said. His mother doted on him, still babied him even though he was almost eighteen. “And my father doesn’t need to hit, he employs a different kind of intimidation.” His phone began to vibrate. “My sister,” he said.

  Umar pulled over so he could talk. I looked at Ghaz in the rearview mirror. She was humming along to “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, not seeming at all disturbed by the story she’d relayed. Outside, Umar was making funny faces at his phone, probably FaceTiming with his niece and nephew.

  “Ghaz, have you ever thought about seeing a therapist?” I asked gently. “The stuff that’s happened with your mother . . . it has to be rough on you.”

  “I guess. But I’ve never known it any other way.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it made you feel good.”

  “But it’s made me resilient. I’m cool. Besides, you know what my ultimate rebellion is going to be? To be happy.”

  I didn’t doubt Ghaz’s determination to be happy, but she couldn’t keep running from her past, or pretending everything was cool. But what else could I do except keep bringing it up and hoping she’d one day let us in?

  Thirty

  AFTER A LONG DAY in the car and confessional conversations, by the time we arrived in the infamous party capital of New Orleans even Ghaz declared herself too beat to hit the street. It had already been such an emotionally intense trip I wasn’t sure I had the energy to party much longer. I wasn’t a huge partier anyway. Plus, I needed time and space and solitude to process what had happened with my dad, and the fact that my mother had known my father was back in America but didn’t tell me, and the Sylvia incident and all else that followed, but this was impossible because we kept moving, and with each day came some new incident or revelation.

  I needed to withdraw for a bit, decompress.

  But first, New Orleans.

  Umar had spent hours Googling in the car and found us a cool hotel for seventy-nine dollars a night in downtown, “normally one forty-nine,” he informed us proudly. It was a historic building, with a lovely stone courtyard and tall, beautiful windows. Umar had booked the room with one king bed because it was cheaper, but since we didn’t want to be charged for an extra person, I volunteered to wait across the street as they checked in.

  I stood in a shadowy part of the sidewalk where I could observe Ghaz and Umar enter the small, ornate lobby, walking up to a stern, bald man sitting at the fancy antique writing table that stood in for a reception desk.

  They were holding hands, a handsome, fashionable couple, Umar with his cropped hipster pants and wavy, rock star hair, Ghaz in a black skirt embroidered with black flowers and a white button-down vest-shirt and a string of pearls and cheetah-print Converse. As I watched them, my heart ached a little. I wanted them to be happy. I wanted us all to be happy. So much uncertainty lay ahead. At least I had the comfort of knowing that no matter what, my mother, and even my supremely annoying brother, would be there for me.

  Umar and Ghaz checked in and disappeared through the hotel’s inner courtyard. When Umar texted me the room number, I decided to stay out for a while longer. It was nice to be alone, on a quiet street lit by a beam of pale moonlight.

  The bright side of all this road trip distraction was that I’d obsessed less about Doug. If we were still dating, I’d be calling him each night, recapping the day’s highs and lows. He was such a good listener. It was what had first attracted me to him. A lot of guys cut women off, or listen only so they can respond, but Doug listened like he cared about what I had to say, because he did. It might sound like a silly thing to fall for someone over, but it was a special quality. My high school boyfriend had loved to hear himself talk, and preferred me to remain quiet and nod. Doug was always asking me what I thought, how I felt.

  My mother would have liked him.

  My phone buzzed. Earth to Mars! R U in a vampire trance in the middle of the street??

  When I got to the room, Ghaz was in downward dog, Umar sprawled on the bed, watching The Big Bang Theory and eating potato chips. The bed was the room’s crowning centerpiece: an enormous, intricately carved wooden four-poster with a damask canopy.

  We played rock, paper, scissors to see who’d sleep bitch, and I lost. I lay awake, listening to Umar’s intermittent but heavy mouth-breathing, and at two a.m., I texted Shoaib.

  Everything cool?

  Yeah why?

  No reason. I miss home.

  Well, I had to hire another feminazi to lecture me

  haha

  They don’t come cheap

  Ur an idiot. Hows ur girlfriend

  We broke up

  Why

  Too clingy, and kinda dumb. Whats the point of a girlfriend if she can’t do ur math homework

  Plz tell me u didn’t ghost

  Nah, had a talk with her

  I never thought Shoaib would have the moral high ground on me.

  Good. Mom ok?

  She’s always ok. Ghaz ok?

  Not really.

  Ghaz moaned and turned over, flinging her arm across my chest, sleeping beauty in distress. A tendril of hair lay across her cheek, the strands splaying with each breath. Her face was clenched, her lips moving, forming words I couldn’t make out.

  I should go, I told Shoaib.

  later

  I rested my hand on Ghaz’s forehead. “Ssshhh,” I said, over and over, until her jaw relaxed. At some point, I fell asleep, because I woke up to sun streaming through the curtains and Ghaz tickling my feet.

  “Wake up!” she cried. “Brand-new day! Don’t you love this room?

  �
��The water pressure sucks, though,” she added, before jumping on top of Umar and pummeling his side. “Umaaaar utho! Partying is better than sleep!”

  “What time is it?” Umar asked.

  “Almost noon.”

  “Are you serious? I have to head to the IANA convention,” he said. “I have to show my face.”

  “We can all go,” Ghaz offered.

  “What?” I said.

  “Come on, Mars, have an open mind,” she told me.

  “I do have an open mind, but religious conferences are not my thing.”

  “Did you guys even register?” Umar said.

  She shrugged. “What, is some burly bouncer going to kick us out?”

  “But you can’t be seen with me,” he said. “Like, three of my cousins are supposed to be there. Plus, what if Ghaz runs into someone she knows? Her parents will freak if they find out she’s at the biggest gathering of Muslims in the United States.”

  “Biggest gathering of Sunni Muslims,” she reminded him.

  “He’s right,” I agreed. “It’s a bad idea.”

  “I’ll wear a disguise,” Ghaz said.

  “Oh, really? What are you going to go as?” I said. “Santa Claus?”

  “The Burqa Avenger,” Umar suggested.

  “The Easter Bunny,” I said.

  “Oh, I know—you could walk around as Zulaikha, with a torn piece of shirt in your hand, all hot and sweaty, like, ‘Yuuuuuuusuf? Anyone seen Yusuf?’” Umar said. “Oh, and Mars could dress as the minister, and walk behind you all pissed off, going, ‘Has anyone seen Zulaikha?’”

  “Lemme guess,” Ghaz said. “Our darling Umar will play Yusuf?”

  “I can’t help the effect I have on women.”

  Ghaz leapt forward and pinched his burgeoning love handle. “Not if you keep this up. Come on. You’re too hot to get fat.”

  “Shut up. It’s the Southern five; I’ll lose it when I cross back over the Mason-Dixon,” he said. “But seriously, what are you thinking when you say you’ll wear a disguise?”

  “You really don’t know?” she cried.

  “What?” I said. “Drag again?”

  Ghaz laughed. “Yes, I’ll attend the IANA convention dressed like a drag queen. No one will notice.”