by Helen Thorpe
“He said, ‘I got these for you,’ ” she recounted. “He said, ‘They will look really nice on you.’ ”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I told him, ‘Oh, they are beautiful!’ ”
“Jakleen, I think he likes you,” I said, stating the obvious.
She fell over sideways, laughing. “Yes!” she admitted.
“Do you like him, too?” I asked.
“No, I’m not thinking about anything like that,” she insisted.
I asked how Haifa and Noor were faring. Jakleen and Mariam reported that the other two girls had arrived safely in Germany. They were being housed in an encampment, where their major complaint was that they were not permitted to light fires to cook their own food, but instead had to eat whatever their German hosts prepared. Haifa and Noor had also been struggling with learning German. Then Mariam and Jakleen confessed that they and their friends had had a falling-out. The problem was that one of the girls living in Germany had spread gossip about one of the girls living in America, and now both sisters in America were mad at both sisters in Germany. As a result, there had been a temporary interruption in their discourse.
Before the sisters had broken off contact, Haifa had sent Mariam a picture of the baby she had just delivered. Mariam showed us the photograph: I saw a thin little boy, reddish yellow in color, a little waxy-looking. He had been born prematurely, right after the girls had arrived in Germany. Then he had died, Mariam added. It was shocking to behold the photograph of the baby and then to be told he was not alive. Stories of pilgrimage are supposed to end with people finding sanctuary; I could barely accept that Haifa had made the long, wintry trek from the Middle East to Europe, only to reach such an unhappy outcome.
We lapsed into silence, all thinking about Haifa’s grief. I saw that there was a small pile of books on the floor, in between the two beds.
“Oh, do you like to read?” I asked, mustering some enthusiasm for their tiny library.
“Not really,” said Jakleen, eyeing the books with distaste.
I picked up a few of the books and discovered they were tedious-looking religious texts.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to read these books, either,” I conceded.
“Sara just gave us those books,” said Mariam, obviously taken aback.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean what I said!” I backpedaled. “They look like wonderful books!”
The girls burst out laughing. They laughed so hard that Nabiha and I joined in, too. Then the fact that we were laughing so loudly while Sara was in the next room became comical, and we laughed even more while trying unsuccessfully to curb the hilarity. Nabiha broke Jakleen’s bed further, when she shifted her weight and the frame suddenly lurched down at an even steeper angle, and that set us off again. We shushed each other and tried to laugh more quietly, which only made us laugh harder instead. All four of us might as well have been teenagers, hiding from the grown-up in the living room.
I told the two sisters that I was planning to drive to South High School. Culture Fest, a riotous celebration of ethnic dance, song, and music, showcasing the seventy different countries represented in the building, was taking place that afternoon. Jakleen wanted to go with me, though Mariam wanted to stay at home and clean the kitchen. The exterminator had failed to get rid of the bugs in their cabinets, and Mariam thought if she cleaned the kitchen very thoroughly, the insects might go away. It was what was within her control, I supposed—Mariam seemed to find domestic tasks soothing. Before I left, I asked if I could use the bathroom. Earlier that morning, someone must have done laundry, for in the bathroom I stumbled across many pairs of brightly colored cotton underpants draped all over the fixtures and towel rods, drying. Also, one pair of athletic socks. Mariam again, I suspected. I could see why the girls skipped school a lot; they liked to hunker down inside this snug nest, which they had created out of cast-off donations and a lot of domesticity. Whether or not there was an actual storm raging outside, as there was today, it was the bigger storm from which they sought shelter. The storm of war—the storm of life. I wished the girls would go to school more regularly, but I found their nest comforting, too. Here they could seclude themselves away from anything that felt threatening, dire, or just plain cold.
* * *
At Culture Fest, Jakleen and I watched West African girls dance in ways I had not previously envisioned possible. Then a Mexican girl belted out a Serena-style ballad. (“Un-be-lie-va-ble, right? Just boom, knock-down amazing,” Steve Bonansinga, the math teacher who organized the event, said afterward.) Karen-speaking students including Hsar Htoo crooned a traditional song that sounded vaguely Hawaiian. When it came time for the parade of flags, Shani carried the flag of Tajikistan. And I recognized Uyen in a floor-length gown, in the center of a row of Vietnamese girls, performing a traditional dance that involved a lot of gracious swaying. Later Uyen would tell me that the other Vietnamese girls had sought her out when they were looking for additional performers, and after she began attending practices with them, the other Vietnamese girls had become her primary social circle.
Then Jakleen wanted to go to the gym to look for Lisbeth. We found Shani, but she told us that the El Salvadoran girl had left school, distraught, because she had gotten into some sort of dispute with the boy she liked so much. Supposedly they had kissed, a deed accomplished one afternoon in the nearby park, but then Lisbeth had learned that the boy actually liked somebody else. “I think he no a good boy for Lisbeth,” Jakleen pronounced.
In the gym, hordes of students were milling around and visiting booths where they could learn more about the various cultures represented at South. Groups of students from all over had made posters and prepared ethnic food and dressed up in traditional clothing. At a booth about Mexico, we got free candy, but when we popped the hard sweets in our mouths, we were perturbed to discover they tasted of red chili pepper, when we had anticipated only sugar. Shani and Jakleen ran around clutching their mouths and looking for a trash can. That was when we crossed paths with Ms. Aldrich.
“Jakleen! Where were you today?” she demanded. “You weren’t in science class!”
Jakleen shrugged and smiled at the science teacher, eyes laughing.
Ms. Aldrich looked over at me and made an exasperated face. “These girls are worried about their grades, but . . . their attendance!”
* * *
Coincidentally, I had just spent an afternoon visiting the science class for ELA students taught by Rachel Aldrich. Jakleen and Mariam had told me that Ms. Aldrich was one of their favorite teachers, even though they found it hard to sit through her class, because it fell at the very end of their (too) long (in their minds) school day. When I had visited, Ms. Aldrich had been going over a lesson on extreme weather. Solomon and Methusella were huddled next to her, seeking advice. She had asked students to create a weather map of the United States, showing the various conditions typical of different regions. Jakleen stood nearby, waiting her turn for a consultation. Mariam sat at the back of the room next to Shani. Abigail sat nearby.
“You: very, very beautiful,” Mariam told Abigail, looking appraisingly at the girl from Mexico.
“Me?” Abi said in surprise.
“Yes,” Mariam declared emphatically.
Abigail was indeed “very, very beautiful,” but she did not seem at all aware of her own appeal, perhaps because of her extreme shyness.
Ms. Aldrich taught science to the newcomers using visual cues to make the subject more comprehensible. She also had a paraprofessional in the room named Miss Ali, who spoke Amharic, Tigrinya, and Arabic. After a while, Mariam started chatting with Miss Ali, who was wearing a hijab that consisted of a black scarf with a tie-dyed white pattern, as well as a black cardigan and a floor-length black skirt. She also had a set of jangling keys on a purple corkscrew spring bracelet pushed up to her elbow. Miss Ali explained key vocabulary words in Arabic to Mariam:
thunderstorm
tornado
updraft
wall cloud
water vapor
funnel cloud
downdraft
waterspout
flood
hurricane
lightning
Meanwhile, Shani began coloring Mariam’s fingernails with the colored pencils that she was supposed to be using on her weather map. Then Shani and Mariam held hands, as Mariam colored her map with her free hand, and Shani burrowed her face in Mariam’s neck and ceased working altogether.
“I hate school,” Mariam observed happily, with Shani snuggled against her. “No like science. Miss Aldrich and Miss Ali, both like, work, work, work!”
Mariam appeared quite content as she said this—the complaining seemed to be more of a joke or a longtime habit.
“Oh, my phone!” said Shani, suddenly sitting upright. “Mr. Williams!”
Mr. Williams had seized her phone while they had been downstairs, and she had forgotten to retrieve it when she left Room 142.
“Go get it,” Mariam ordered her.
“Tomorrow,” said Shani.
“No, now, please,” replied Mariam. “Emergency!”
Shani asked Ms. Aldrich if she could leave the room and was told no. She needed to work on her weather map. I liked hearing the patter between the girls and noticed how far they had come—they were conversing almost entirely in English. They still mixed in occasional Arabic or Farsi words, and sometimes resorted to body language, but they were using English much more readily. Jakleen came over and asked where Shani wanted to go, and Shani pantomimed sliding a phone into her pocket and said, “Mr. Williams!” While she did this, I saw that Shani was now wearing a gold beaded bracelet I had seen earlier on Mariam’s wrist. It had migrated from one girl to the other.
With encouragement from Miss Ali, the girls made steady progress on the assigned task. As they did, the sisters from Iraq and their new friend from Tajikistan began chatting about something called a buhayra. I asked what a buhayra was. Jakleen said “spark.” I repeated what I had heard, and they laughed uproariously. Mariam took out her phone and showed me a picture of a lake. Buhayra was the Arabic word for “lake”; they were discussing whether to spend some time in the park across the street, walking around the lake, before they boarded the buses that would take them home.
“Tomorrow,” Jakleen said authoritatively.
“No, today!” pleaded Shani.
Methusella finished the science assignment before anybody else and went to show his work to Ms. Aldrich. She nodded in approval.
“Don’t forget your percent sign,” she told him. “You know how to make a percent sign?”
“Yes,” Methusella said assuredly.
Shani turned to me. “Okay, Mariam is crazy. Write, your book.”
“You want me to write in my book that Mariam is crazy?”
“Yes! And very, very small!”
“You want me to write that Mariam is short?”
“Yes! And very, very, play the phone—no working! And very, very sleepy—no go the school!”
Mariam was almost finished coloring her map. She did not even look up as she gave a lazy rejoinder: “Miss! Shani very, very crazy.”
The bell was due to ring in one minute. Mr. Williams appeared at the door of the science classroom, held a cell phone in the air, and waggled the device. Shani ran happily in his direction, and then the bell rang, releasing them for the day. Later, when I spoke to Mr. Williams, he said it was in these informal conversations, as much as in the formal work he gave them, that the kids found a true comfort with spoken English. “I probably help them gain about one-quarter of the English they learn in their first year,” he said. “The rest they get from being immersed in this environment.”
* * *
Later that month, I accompanied Jakleen, Mariam, and Shani out of South, after science class ended. We walked across the big parking lot filled with haphazardly arranged students’ cars and drifted over to the bus stop on the far side of the lot. We all boarded the number 73 bus, which filled up with other kids from the high school. The atmosphere on the bus was clamorous and cheerful, and virtually everybody on the vehicle was a teenager. I sat down next to Jakleen, while Mariam and Shani sat in front of us. Rahim sat down behind me and Jakleen. For a while, Shani and Rahim spoke over our heads in Farsi, while Jakleen and Mariam chattered in Arabic, a clutch of girls standing in the aisle spoke in Nepali, and two boys farther away spoke in Tigrinya. Then Rahim put in earbuds and pulled his hoodie over his head to muffle the noise of the bus, while Shani lapsed into silence as she studied the city views out the smudged window. Mariam began texting with friends in Iraq, and Jakleen started texting with boys from South.
The bus stopped near Shani’s apartment complex, and she waved goodbye. Soon after, Jakleen and Mariam disembarked abruptly, and I scrambled to jump off after them. We walked to another bus stop and waited for a number 3 bus. We handed the driver our transfer slips and strolled to the back of that vehicle. To my surprise, I spotted Ebtisam there, wearing dark sunglasses, a black tracksuit jacket, black leggings, and bright pink sneakers. “Hey, your mother is on this bus!” I exclaimed. Jakleen and Mariam cast me amused glances, like, of course she is. The girls sat down near Ebtisam. Her shift at the factory went from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., and I gathered that most days she managed to be on the same bus the girls caught on their way home. Apparently the family regularly intersected like this on public transit. I had not known that was possible—that a person could manage the bus schedule well enough to find another family member midcommute.
“How is your new job?” I asked Ebtisam.
“Good,” she said.
“What kind of work are you doing?”
We were without an interpreter, but Ebtisam was inventive. She tapped her gums, put her fingers in her mouth, and pretended to take something out. Then she tapped one of her teeth, and pretended to put that into the object. She was making dental implants.
“My pay, one hour, $9.25,” she added. “In three months, $10.25.”
We watched the city scenery slide by as we rocked with the movement of the vehicle. The second bus had a more subdued atmosphere; most of its passengers were adults, and many looked tired. We got off right beside Pine Creek Apartments, and Ebtisam insisted I come inside for coffee. As we entered the apartment, I smelled stale cigarette smoke; on the coffee table, I saw a pack of Marlboro Lights. I had never seen evidence of smoking before and assumed this signaled an escalation in Ebtisam’s stress. It must not have been easy, the transition from staying at home with her daughters to doing factory work.
Ebtisam bustled around in the kitchen and returned with a dish of flaky pastries filled with figs, as well as Turkish coffee in the same small red cups. Ebtisam, Jakleen, and I drank coffee, while Mariam went into her bedroom and got under the covers and called Abdullah on the phone even though it was after midnight in Iraq.
Ebtisam picked up a piece of paper that was sitting on the coffee table and handed it to me. It was her first paycheck. I saw that she was earning about $75 per day. She still had the temporary housing voucher, which meant that she was okay for the time being, but when it expired that December, she would be spending more than half her salary on housing. She would still qualify for food stamps, but it would be hard to cover the other bills with what she was earning. She was hoping to get a second job, Ebtisam said gamely.
“Go to work, come home,” she said. “Make dinner. Go to work somewhere else.”
Her mood shifted, and she said in a worried tone of voice, “America difficult, very expensive. My girls, no shoes, no clothes. Rent very high.”
* * *
After coffee, I explained that I had to get home to see my own son. Jakleen checked the bus schedule and announced I could catch a bus on Mississippi Avenue in five minutes. The next bus would be forty-five minutes later. I decided to go for the bus that left in five minutes, and there was a furious scramble to get me out the door. Ebtisam insisted on driving me to the b
us stop. We jumped into the old clunker she had bought recently for a couple hundred dollars. One week earlier, Nabiha had called to say that Ebtisam had reached out for advice; the car did not run reliably and she kept getting stranded in various parts of town. The problematic car turned out to be an ancient green Plymouth wagon with patches of exposed metal on the hood.
“I hate this car,” announced Jakleen as she slid into the backseat.
Ebtisam sat down in the driver’s seat on a plump brown cushion. She said a brief prayer to Jesus in Arabic (I heard her murmur “Christos”) and then tried the ignition. No sound. She tried again. Nothing. Then she pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key and at last the engine turned over.
“Did you drive in Turkey?” I asked, as she eased incrementally out of her spot.
“No,” said Ebtisam.
“Did you drive in Syria?”
“No.”
“Did you drive in Iraq?”
“No.” Ebtisam smiled at me abashedly. “No driving!”
She had never driven a car before, apparently. Ebtisam was still figuring out basic moves, and she drove out of the lot at what felt like two miles per hour. We hovered at the side of the busy main road in front of their apartment building for many minutes, as she tried to gauge when to proceed. I asked how she had learned to drive. Ebtisam smiled broadly. She said, “Mariam, YouTube!”
After many false starts and hesitations, Ebtisam inched out onto the road during a pronounced gap in traffic.
“Good job, Mom!” cried Jakleen in English.
I thought that Ebtisam wanted to drive partly because she wished to regain the kind of middle-class standing she had once enjoyed in Iraq. A car was a marker of status in the United States. And Middle Eastern refugees often felt they had lost a lot of status. Refugee families from rural parts of Africa or from Southeast Asia generally felt that their living conditions had improved when they resettled in a country like the United States, even if they wound up in a low-rent neighborhood, whereas for Ebtisam the opposite was true—here her situation was much worse than the life she had enjoyed in prewar Iraq. She had formerly lived in a nicer home, and owned more material things. At one point, she would describe the home that she and her siblings had built for their parents in Karbala, and she would hold up three fingers, as she announced “three bathrooms.” Ever since the Iraq War, however, she had been on a downward economic slide.
