Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  It was a Sunday evening and the two of them were driving back to Syracuse. Her mother unplugged the lighter and touched the glowing ring to her cigarette. She put the filter to her lips then blew out through her nostrils, sighing. “Because I don’t believe in it. Because I don’t believe in any god. I’m an atheist.”

  Jem kicked her feet up and down; they didn’t reach the floor. The shiny patent leather flashed blue lights. Outside rain foamed in the air and rushed up the hood of the car. The evening was dull, lowering around the road.

  “Mom, look! Lookit what I can do!” Jem had yanked on the car handle and the door swung open, the street rushing under them.

  “Jem!” Her mother reached over and caught the handle. She slammed it shut. “Not while we’re driving, okay?”

  Jem crossed her legs and watched one foot bob next to the other for a while. Then she said, “So then why do we go to church?”

  “To make your grandparents happy.” Jem’s mother held the cigarette in one side of her mouth and puffed out the other while she played with the radio dial. “And because Auntie Fatty doesn’t approve.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Wrong religion, I guess. Not dressy enough.”

  “What’s an atheist?”

  “Someone who thinks what they choose to think.” The smoke from her cigarette rose and turned arabesques through the air.

  Chapter 7

  MORE THAN ONCE Jem had heard Melvie refer to the functions thrown by the Ladies’ Pontifical Committee at St. Yusef in Syracuse as “human sacrifices.”

  “And that’s putting it nicely,” Melvie said. “What they’re doing is feeding their virgins to their raging gods of macho domination and chronic dissipation. And that means us.”

  Matussem referred to them simply as “Arab hoedowns.” “Jordan, Syracuse,” he said, “it all the same wherever.”

  If the Ladies’ Pontifical Committee had heard Melvie, they would have slapped her name on their Suspicious Laity List. This list, which grew longer each year, noted the latest social indiscretions of longtime offenders and the recent blasphemies of new parishioners. Several Pontificals harbored hopes of one day turning the list over to the police to aid in resolving a murder or drug bust. Many local Arabic matrons aspired to belong to the Ladies’ Pontificals—an elite whose members’ reputations were as spotless as their bed sheets. When asked to describe themselves, Pontificals liked to use phrases like: “A Welcome Caravan” and “Stars of Bethlehem.” Among their duties they listed: marriage makers and shakers, preservers of Arabic culture and party throwers, immigrant sponsors, and children-police. With thirty-two members, from ages ninety-two to forty-seven—“the baby”—the Pontificals were the touchstone to a small but irrepressible Syracuse-Arab community. Their criteria for admission were mysterious and implacable, and Fatima had been told repeatedly she might have to wait for someone to die before she could be considered. After all, Mrs. D. Hind Abdulaboud pointed out, they were ambassadors to the United States of America, with personal connections to the Lithuanian League, the Catholic Youth Organization, the Greek Mothers, the Malaysian Socials, the B’nai B’rith, and most important of all: the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  As an aspiring member, it was all Fatima Mawadi could do to try to live down the ongoing faux pas perpetuated by her brother and his two girls—both still, she thought, thank God, virgins—or at least the local grapevine hadn’t turned up anything new on that score. She knew it was a risk to ask her brother to play for the Archbishop, but she also knew this could be the favor with enough pizzazz to entrench her once and for all in the Ladies’ good graces.

  “If only that daughter of that brother of mine would wear a little bit Maybelline,” she scolded her husband, hovering over him in four-inch heels as he sat on a metal chair in the still-deserted auditorium. “It would kill Jemorah? A little foundation? Maybe some eyeliner? Maybe, God forbid, brush her hair? Are you trying to tell me that would kill her?”

  “Fatima,” he said. “Is only just me, Zaeed, your husband. Don’t get exercised. I never said nothing about no makeup.”

  “I know that, you Jordanian moron!” she snapped and walked away, scolding to herself. Spotting her nieces outside, she marched to the front and yanked the glass door open. “Jemorah, Melvina, my babies have arrived at last!” she cried, kissing their faces at right angles, then vigorously pinching each. Melvie swatted her hand away. “Pale, pale, so what’s new?” Fatima said. “You think you live under rocks. A little tanning booth is all it needs, my babies.”

  “Suntanning produces photoaging, sun poisoning, and melanomas,” Melvie said, still in her coat.

  Fatima cocked one eyebrow at her. “Such wise, wise words! By the prophet’s holy name that such a girl exist who is so wise to talk back to auntie!” She turned to Jem. “Show me your fingernails. No, no! This are terrible! This will never do. What man will come near such fingernails? All right, let’s get these over with”—she began shucking the coats off them—“I knew it! I knew it! Still looking like rats! Starving rats. Your father doesn’t feed you a thing. Don’t you eat the meglube and mjeddra I brung?”

  In the twenty years since their mother’s death, Fatima had been coming to their doorstep once a week with pots of food and bags of cast-off clothing that Melvina wouldn’t even let Jem unfold for fear of mold spores. Jem usually spotted sequins or fire-engine red among the piles of clothes before Melvie packed them all off to the Salvation Army. Matussem fed the smoky cauliflower and lentils to Peachy Otts’s tomcat.

  While neither of the two sisters was malnourished, neither of them had the dramatic figure that Fatima arranged herself into with corsets, belts, and plunging necklines.

  “The heartbreak of it is you’re not even trying,” Fatima said. She brandished her cleavage like an opera singer, hoisting her shoulders and holding her hands out, palms up. “Look at that. You don’t think I’d lost these rose-blush of a teenager.”

  “Those are mammary glands,” Melvie said. “Not hood ornaments.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said those are mammaries. They’re glands, sacs that produce hormones and lactate throughout pregnancy.”

  Fatima dropped her hands. “How dare you speak to your flesh and blood auntie like that? Ya’Al-LAH! I, who sacrificed having my own family just to nurse this orphans!” She appealed to the ceiling. “I’m not raising a daughter, I’m raising a snake! Listen to that! Do you hear?” She turned to Jem, asking furiously, “Do you hear that belligerence? You who let your fingers go like a boy’s! Just to spit on me!”

  OTHER FAMILIES BEGAN to arrive. It wasn’t until Zaeed saw Amy air-kissing Fatima at the entrance that he knew he could relax. Now Fatima would stop worrying about ministering to him and would tend to her other obsessions.

  Amy was his mistress in name only. Zaeed found women too exhausting to be involved with more than one at a time, and the one he had was more than enough. He’d let Fatima select Amy for him in the same way she matched up other friends and relatives. Zaeed was sixteen and Fatima was fifteen when they were first married, and she would ask him about other women. “But don’t you ever think about it? Aren’t you even curious about other women?” This he misunderstood as teasing. Gradually she became more insistent until, some years after they’d immigrated, she began speaking only in English and saying things like: “What wrong with you? Are you man or blob? All the husband of Ladies’ Pontifical Committee are having affair. Am I to put up with your big husband demands all by myself? I am a wife or a maid, I want to know!”

  Zaeed allowed Fatima to steer him in Amy’s direction. She was of good Lebanese stock (with a streak of Irish), American-raised, with nice light skin, good teeth, and a secretarial school education. It was a perfect arrangement for Amy: an Arab “involvement” to distract her parents from her Jewish boyfriend. They were ever hopeful that Zaeed would take advantage of the Law of Mohammed and take her on as an additional wife. Every other Wednesday afterno
on Zaeed and Amy met in a downtown parking lot, drove to a Motel 8, drew the shades, and silently played pinochle. Rumors flourished like grapes on the vine; friends were grateful for the gossip.

  Amy was kindly and compliant. When they met at social events such as this, she brought Zaeed scotch and sodas from the bar.

  “Look at this poor Fatima,” Zaeed said to Amy, nodding at his wife who was greeting people in the lobby, moving among them with manic energy, her head at a fixed tilt. “She so discontent. She attach to fancies, then she disappointed because they don’t make her then so happy. Crazy type lady, but cute.”

  Amy handed Zaeed his glass. Her parents were also there that night, watching them with pleasure. She curled up on the chair beside him, and her smile delighted people; they took it for the glow of illicit love.

  SOMEONE HAD TURNED on the church’s PA system and little girls in party dresses were standing on the linoleum tables, play belly dancing to World War II-era Arabic tapes. Matussem was beginning to set up equipment on stage. He was adorned in silver rings, chains, and bronco belt buckle. All that plus his hair, which appeared to have been dipped in car oil, made him look like a cross between Elvis and Dracula. Another man helped Matussem cart out amplifiers and cables. From across the room, Zaeed watched with pleasure as Larry Fasco moved around the stage; he reminded Zaeed of a tropical fish that Fatima had owned for a week or two before it went belly up in the tank. It had an almost completely transparent body; you could see the gem of one eye and the tiniest spiral of innards. You could also see your fingerprint if you scooped it out of the water, as Zaeed had liked to do, to examine it on the tip of an index finger.

  This man floated back and forth with the same bright fish eyes. Zaeed could almost see gills working on the transparent neck. Though, he thought, that might just be his third scotch and soda.

  Matussem couldn’t get the sound check right; nearly every time he touched the mike it sent piercing feedback through the hall. Diners would drop their forks, clutch their ears, and send forth Arabic curses involving drought, blight, and leprosy. “May God strike you with lightning!”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Mat,” Fergyl Otts said. “I mean, Jesus H. Christ.”

  The Ramoudettes were getting nervous, unaccustomed to being surrounded by so many—in Owen’s words—“non-Americans.” What they were accustomed to was the Key West Bar community. Matussem, on drums, was the only musician among them, which left them thin on melody. Owen on bass guitar and Jesse on maracas took their lead from Matussem. Luckily, Fergyl rounded out the band with a Hammond organ complete with electronic saxophone, trumpet, accordion, violins, and harp, which helped fill out the bald spots. What they lacked in finesse they made up for in volume.

  The real reason they played so loud was that the Ramoudettes had half-deafened themselves with rock music inside the echo chamber of Lil’ Lulu’s Garage. After the three of them had been working there for over twenty years, practically everything sounded good to them; all music mellowed through the opaque drums of their ears, rolling in, rich and diffuse, like singing in the shower. The world was musical: cars sluicing down Route 31 through Euclid, dream racers not even seeing the tiny hamlet; voices—any voices—melodious words tripping in random notes: “Fill…er…up…please…high…oc…tane.” It all had internal cadence. As long as it didn’t sound like the ding, ding of the garage’s rubber hose bell. Under the constant onslaught of kids riding bikes over it, of cars backing up in the drive, and people stomping on it, the Ramoudettes were testy and skittish as Pavlov’s dogs. Fergyl had gone so far as to disconnect the chimes button from his organ, lest he inadvertently touch it and traumatize the group.

  On most days, when the highway was empty and the fields were standing still, a passerby would hear the garage’s radio music making its way along the weedy plot, up, faintly, to the Ramouds’ kitchen window. Matussem first noticed this not long after he and his daughters had moved to Euclid. One morning several months ago, Matussem had walked over and presented himself at the gas pumps. He wasn’t certain how to make introductions so he jumped up and down on the chiming hose. A ferocious man with crooked teeth ran out of the office and told Matussem to quit it.

  Matussem took one look at him and thought, okeydokey, Mr. Snagglepuss. This person didn’t have a speck of music in him. Matussem walked home and returned three minutes later, rolling his car over the hose.

  This time, a man in coveralls came out of the garage. The skin laid on his face like a shadow, his lips pulled in, vanishing. Matussem thought of tales he’d heard of men held captive by giants, waiting to be roasted for dinner. Matussem beckoned the little man over and said in a low voice, so as not to be overheard by his boss, the Giant, “Excuse, Sir, I just happen to notice—as your new neighbor—that you are like me, a big lover of music. I want to says, if you don’t mind, that I am thinking that a man of such big feelings as you are being is all wrong in job like these.”

  Fergyl squinted at Matussem. He was trying to read his lips because Matussem’s voice, lowered and foreign, made it impossible for Fergyl to get all of what he was saying. He did catch the words “wrong job.” He said to Matussem, “Hang on. I got some guys I want to hear this.”

  Fergyl reappeared in triplicate. Matussem couldn’t remember to whom he originally had spoken, only that out of one came three, like the Christian trinity. And when he saw them, dressed identically, emerging from their pit of music, he sat up and said, “Hey, we got a band!”

  JEM DRIFTED AWAY from Melvie and Fatima, walking through the reception lobby. She stepped into the chapel and saw the stained-glass panels, triptychs of saints; her face and shoulders shone in the light. The Eastern-styled icons, heavy-lidded and owl-eyed, smiled at her in blessing.

  Back in the reception hall, the long tables were filled to capacity as servers brought out vats of stuffed grape leaves, squash, tabouli, rice, roast lamb, and loaves of Arabic bread. There were bottles of arak, which the men called for over and over. The smell of cooking rose in a wet fog. The church janitors had spontaneously called all their friends and relatives. Now a large group of them were performing tribal dances against the back wall, brandishing long swords.

  The Archbishop sat up front at a private table. He was a tiny man with a giant smile that seemed as permanent as his nose. He also appeared to have few teeth left, and after Fatima met him, she’d crept over to Jem and Melvie’s places where they sat with Uncle Zaeed and hissed, “A country bumpkin! These one’s a throwback to camels and tents, my God. What will the Americans think now?”

  The Archbishop reminded Jem of someone, and on closer inspection she realized that he resembled the chapel’s stained-glass saints with their full lips and dipping eyelids. He raised his finger, using their gesture of benediction. He was seated at the place of honor beside his hundred-year-old mother. From time to time she would blot a piece of food out of the Archbishop’s beard with her spit and napkin, while crooning in Arabic, “My boy, tut tut, my baby boy.”

  The honored guests sat with the High Secretary of the Ladies’ Pontifical Committee, Mrs. D. Hind Abdulaboud, a woman with an iron hairdo and black rhinestone sunglasses on a pearl chain. Mrs. Abdulaboud had acted as their mistress of ceremonies, shuttling the Archbishop and mother from place to place and contriving to let as few people as possible speak to them. She was hunched over her guests at the moment, watching the Archbishop’s mouth as he ate, as if she too would have liked to blot food from his beard.

  “Look at her,” Fatima hissed to her friend Estrelia. “She must be wait for him to cough up the golden chicken bone.”

  Estrelia grunted, gnawing on a shank of lamb that she held between dagger nails like Fatima’s. “She’s a prune’s ass. Have another drink; relax your nerves, honey.”

  “No time for nerves,” Fatima said, surveying the room. She took a long swig on her mai tai. “Time is for arranging. Husband time.”

  Jem and Melvie pretended to be busy eating stuffed grape leaves, trying to ignore Fatima as s
he towed a man to their table. Fatima moved directly over them and plucked the grape leaf from Jem’s hand. “Wake up, girls!” she said. “These here nice Mr. Farah Farah come to meet you. Fifty-eight years of age and no wife ever. Pure and clean like a baby.”

  “Now wait just one second.” Melvie was rising out of her seat, pointing at the man. “Our father already brought this one home ten years ago!”

  Mr. Farah Farah was tremendously fat. He slowly spread his hands, palms up, on either side of his great belly. There were multicolored stains all over the front of his shirt. “Still available,” he said. “All for you.”

  “And wonderful, beautiful job, with pension!” Fatima said, clutching Jem’s shoulder. “Accountant!”

  Mr. Farah Farah drew himself up at the mention of his job and squinted at Jem. “You know how to cook, clean shirts, refinish floors?”

  “You, sir, are morbidly obese,” Melvie said, prodding his belly with her index finger. “I’m appalled that you would even think of presenting yourself as a suitor when you’re already courting heart disease.”

  Mr. Farah Farah spread his hands even wider, as if to touch the poles of his vast desert-belly, and his eyebrows descended, meeting at the top of his nose. “These one!” he said, staring at Melvie. “Ya’Allah, Fatima. You tell me she is change. She is change like eyes of the Sphinx. Not once in a thousand year. These sister-in-law I cannot take!”

  FATIMA RELUCTANTLY SURRENDERED Farah Farah. As the party progressed, she moved through the crowd with predatory concentration, scanning tables, her hands grazing a shoulder here, an arm there. She moved like a sheikh, with the sword of her gaze tearing away veils, appraising family trees, bank accounts, and social standing.

  At one point Fatima hesitated at a group of young men with soft jaws and plummy lips. They slid their eyes like sparks in Jem’s direction as Fatima pointed, but Jem could hear one protesting, “No way, no Arab girls for me! I want an American girl who’ll chew my ears up.” Fatima swatted the top of his head, but they all nodded agreement. She only moved away from the group when she heard they were about to start tenth grade.