Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  So her and Matussem’s conversations were amiably conducted across wide spaces, usually across the street or over the aisles of Bumble Bee Groceries. Matussem considered this distancing another of the myriad American eccentricities he’d discovered since he arrived. He liked to tell his relatives, “I don’t care how many Bonanza you watch, nothing get your brain ready for real America!”

  Hilma Otts was not the sort he wished to get too close to anyway. Her fingers unnerved him. He’d seen the way they dug into a head of cabbage or throttled her daughter Peachy’s nape when she was up to no good—Hilma had the kind of fingers that made surgeons, pianists, even jazz drummers cringe. He hadn’t been with a woman since his wife’s death, and Hilma convinced him he would never try again.

  In the hundred years since Morgan Road bisected Route 31, the Otts family had grown like a dynasty, spreading and mingling with Brooms, Ellises, and many sundry others, all immigrants from more ancient upstate hamlets, like Cicero and Phoenix along the old highways.

  Without the mall, Euclid remained an amoeba of a town, thirty miles straight out Route 31 north of Syracuse. It took in dirt farmers, onion farmers, and junk dealers and produced poorly clothed and poorly fed children, who’d wait for driver’s licenses then leave in rotting-out Chevies, going as far as a case of Black Label would take them. Usually just far enough for them to come back for good.

  “No one ever escapes this place,” Peachy Otts told Jem when they were children. “You want to think twice about moving here. It’s like that show—The Twilight Zone?”

  Peachy turned up, barefoot and hair sticking out like a bushy doormat, on the Ramouds’ front lawn the day they moved in. She immediately took Jem aside and began telling her stories.

  “I hope you won’t cut the grass in the fields, ’cause it’ll piss Dolores off.” Dolores was one of her older sisters. “I used to sneak up here and watch Dolores and Darren Brummett doing sex in the weeds.”

  At nine, Peachy had buttery skin and rolling blue eyes. “We’re white trash,” Peachy told Jem, leaning against the post that marked off the Ramouds’ lawn from the open fields. “You’re moving into a white-trash town. Crazy nuts, goof-heads. Like once when Glady wouldn’t make sex with Darren Brummett, he went to the fruit stand and stole their ax and chased Glady right around that house you’re moving into.”

  “Geez.” Jem looked back around the house, as if she might have seen them running through the fields. All she saw, though, was three-year-old Melvina in the kitchen window, watching her sternly. Peachy flipped back her knotted hair, and in that moment, Jem thought she looked like a mermaid, with her pale skin and sea-broken eyes. Mermaids were supposed to become sea spume when they died, Jem remembered, unless they found a mortal to love them, to give them a soul.

  HER FIRST YEAR riding the school bus, Jem saw how the countryside could brim with pain. At the Wisters’ she saw the oldest man in the world, a face like a white raisin, leashed to a post in the front yard. He moved around on his elbows and stomach and moaned at the school bus. His hands moved constantly, scratching out dirt patches. This was the first stop after Jem and Peachy’s. Hanky Wister would always get on, force down the window and shout, “Shut up, Granddad!”

  The first time they picked up the Brooms, Jem thought there was a mistake, that the driver was lost. He drove off the road, across a field, and stopped next to an old city bus propped on blocks in the middle of a lot, about a mile out from the main gravel road. A band of seven children, ranging from around ten to eighteen, emerged from the defunct bus, crossed the lot, and climbed onto the school bus. Jem noticed a clothesline loaded down with diapers. The Broom kids looked savage. Their faces were sharp and blank, branded with grime. Jem felt heat rising from their hands, their mouths, the way they ran, banging down to sit in the last rows in the bus.

  If Peachy wasn’t sitting with Jem, she was swaggering up and down the aisle, sizing up the others. She liked to jump into a seat then turn and leer into the faces of the children behind her. Her hair was matted and there was something dreadful in her eyes; often the children would flinch. When this happened, Peachy leaned forward and spit in their faces. Her body was compact, dense with fire. She was alive with limbs, loose energy, somehow stunted, a permanent child-god of destruction. She smelled; she hummed; she stuck herself in the leg with safety pins and watched the points of red appear under her skirt. Other days, though, Peachy was subdued; she’d tell Jem about how her older brother pushed her down in the bedroom, stopped her mouth with a hand that smelled like axle grease, and sweated and groaned his face into the pit of her neck.

  Peachy was Jem’s only friend on the bus. The other children taunted Jem because of her strange name, her darker skin. They were relentless, running wild, children of the worst poverty, the school bus the only place they had an inkling of power. She remembered the sensation of their hands on her body as they teased her, a rippling hatred running over her arms, legs, through her hair. They asked her obscene questions, searched for her weakness, the chink that would let them into her strangeness. She never let them. She learned how to close her mind, how to disappear in her seat, how to blur the sound of searing voices chanting her name. One day someone tore out a handful of her hair; on another someone pushed her down as she stood to leave; on another someone raked scratches across her face and neck as she stood, her eyes full, the sound of her name ringing in rounds of incantation. Waiting to leave, she could see her name on the mailbox from a half mile away, four inches high in bright red against the black box: RAMOUD. Matussem had been so eager to proclaim their arrival. There was no hiding or disguising it. She would run off the bus, straight to her room, but the voices would follow and circle her bed at night.

  None of the other children had ever helped her, not even Peachy Otts, who would watch blandly, without surprise. By the time Melvie started school, the bus route had changed to accommodate new subdivisions, the tentacles of suburbia reaching from Syracuse toward Euclid. New children rode the bus, mild middle-class children with combed hair, cookies and raisins in their lunch. “Faceless,” Melvie complained in seventh grade. The bus no longer took the long, gravel road south to the shacks and trailers, as if the school had forgotten those children were even there.

  As Jem moved toward graduation and college, her tormentors scattered. The kids on the bus dropped out or got pregnant, went to juvenile homes, foster homes, penitentiaries, turned up poverty-stricken, welfare-broken, sick, crazy, or drunk. After a while, no one was left to remember the bus. A kind of relief and loss: no one to bear witness, and Jem did not let herself remember. There was no room left in her to think about any of it; she knew those children had been right. She didn’t fit in even with them, those children that nobody wanted.

  THE LAST TIME Jem had talked to Peachy or seen most of those tough kids together was twelve years ago, when Jem was a high-school senior and Peachy a repeating ninth-grader. They were riding home from school when a police car came up behind them. The red light fluttered behind the bus; they pulled over and the kids started shouting, swallowing stashes of drugs, even cigarettes, jamming knives and pipes between the bus cushions and under the seats. Someone hurled a tiny pistol from the window and Jem watched it wing past the railroad tracks into the ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace.

  Two police officers boarded, and the bus fell into silence. The officers went directly to Jem and Peachy’s seat, and Peachy—who’d been eerily quiet in the moments before—began protesting in a high, altered voice, “I didn’t do it! You got the wrong kid, I swear! You got the wrong kid!”

  As soon as they laid hands on Peachy, that thin voice turned into a terrible wail. She fought with her hands and feet, the way Jem had seen cats scrabble on their backs, claws flying, teeth bared in her dirty face. The police wrestled with a fury of thrashing limbs; Peachy’s face was squeezed past recognition in rage and fear as they carried her out.

  Jem never did find out why they’d taken Peachy. After that, Jem rarely saw her. She never
returned to school. Sometimes Jem saw her working at Onondaga Orchards, the big produce stand up the road. There, Peachy seemed serene, even at home among the vegetables, though in many ways she never seemed to Jem to have grown up; her skin remained milky beneath the dirt, too clear, her eyes nearly vacant, sweet and dull as molasses. Though only in their late twenties, Glady and Dolores, Peachy’s older sisters, looked haggard as old warriors, harrowed by poverty and pregnancy. Jem had once heard Peachy’s mother, Hilma, say of her youngest, “This one could go either way, could almost grow up to be pretty. More likely though, she’ll stay what she is, a goofy devil-child, too slow to get ugly much or tired. She’d need some more smarts or to have a kid like herself to get older.”

  Chapter 10

  THEIR FATHER USED to tell them, “Za’enti da’ar the beauty of the house. She sit upstair in her bedroom window and look down on everyone. ‘I so gaddamn beautiful!’ she think. ‘They all look like ants from here!’ she think. Well, one day the house of Za’enti da’ar gets on fire. I know what you thinking, like maybe the folks gets tired of her saying they are like ants and there a reason for fire. But no. That is just how these old-time stories are: there no reason. It just all of a sudden on fire, okay? So anyway, here come her father, carrying out furniture, running and holler and who know what, he crazy, right? It is bad news. Next come Mama with the clothes and pots and pans. Next the sisters and brothers and babies and all that, crawling and crying and punching everybody. Oh no. Next come grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, the whole gaddamn tribe come out and stand in the street and they look up and there Za’enti da’ar, still in the window, her hair just right above the fires. All they yell to her, they yell, ‘Za’enti da’ar! Za’enti da’ar! Come down here, you crazy ass.’ And stuff like that. Only she don’t listen. No way, unhun. And you know why—”

  “Because she was Za’enti da’ar,” Melvie and Jem would say.

  “That right. She is Beauty-of-the-House. And she says to them, ‘No way, you must be crazy. I am beauty of these house. I don’t care if it is on fire, you don’t get me out in the street.’ And so, because she Za’enti da’ar, she burned up completely. They could hear her screaming out in the streets, aieeehhhaaa!” The girls would already have their hands over their ears. “There nothing left of her after that but a gaddamn golden doorknob.”

  Melvie hated that story, even back when she was eight and Jem was fifteen. Even though she’d sit patiently through it and provide the requisite answer at the proper time, Jem suspected she was waiting for the ending to change.

  “But that’s so stupid!” Melvie would burst out when the story was done. “She must have been emotionally disturbed! What does being in the house have to do with anything? And why didn’t they just drag her out? And how in the WORLD could anyone turn into a golden doorknob? She’d just be bones and ashes, that’s—that’s so—incredible!”

  Their father had hundreds of instructional stories, many of them paranoid, vaguely morbid, a rogue’s gallery of characters. Matussem was on a first-name basis with all his characters and was forever running across them in the world at large. The unsuspecting butcher at the Bumble Bee he called “Raof el-Ghazis,” who was the-man-who-tried-to-train-his-camel-to-eat-air because Matussem suspected him of resting a finger on the meat scales. Whenever one of the girls was too slow or reluctant about joining him on one of his outings—usually to drive out to hardware stores to look at lawn ornaments—he would clap his hands and say, “Come, Za’enti da’ar! Don’t take so long!”

  He populated America with figures from his childhood’s stories; Jem thought it sharpened his focus on the world. Motives and actions would fall into place if he called a woman “Yasmine Al-Hassan” (the-woman-who-screamed-a-lot) or a boy “Semia Abouq” (the-boy-who-ate-hot-mensif-and-then-didn’t-warn-his-father: Father: why are you crying, my son? Boy who has just burned himself on mensif: because I’m thinking of my dead brother in heaven. Father who proceeds to burn himself on mensif: I wish you were up there in heaven with your brother!). These were childhood friends; if Matussem recognized them everywhere, this country couldn’t be such a foreign place after all.

  Jem wondered what language he thought in; his displacement was a feature of his personality. He wouldn’t have been the same father, she knew, if he had stayed in Jordan and raised them there. His removal was part of that soft grieving light behind his eyes and part of the recklessness in his laugh. His eyes were so steady at times Jem thought they were taking in the whole of the world and all its expanse of loneliness. The few times Jem had asked Matussem about her mother and he had tried to tell her, the words swelled in his throat. He would stop and smile as if in pain and trace a pattern on the kitchen table with his finger.

  Who was her father, Jem wondered, in this country without shadows? Matussem flickered thin in the family mind, every step always the first, poised over his drums, raveling beats through the air, telling story after story through them, like Shahrazad, giving life. When he wasn’t telling fables, the girls heard their father’s stories about his childhood, about the way the enchantment of America had eventually drawn him across an ocean. “Every week the same movie! Flash Groodan! Flash Groodan! American spaces ship!” he said. “All the kids wanted to hear about. America.”

  His bosses at work, Mr. Magal, Mr. Boink, and Mr. Gastowe, all told Matussem that he had to shape up, quit wasting so much time on music, or he’d never be promoted out of the basement. Melvie once overheard Mr. Boink refer to their father as “the dirty sand nigger.”

  Their aunts and uncles, who were forever calling from overseas, liked to remind Jem and Melvie that they were Arabs, brushing out their mother’s Irish-American ancestry in lectures and bedtime stories. Aunt Nejla would say, “Never mind about silly Fatima living over there; she’s married. America is no place for young girls like you.” Every summer one or more relatives arrived from the Old Country to tell the girls that America was a flight of fancy, their lives there a whim of their father’s overactive imagination. The mirage would someday melt and they would be back in the family home where they belonged. On the other hand, male relatives like Uncle Fouad and his sons were expected to be footloose and even, as Fatima said, “crazy in the head.” A man was different; he could let himself fly into the world like an arrow and, the aunts told them, no matter where he flew, he would still be an arrow.

  Chapter 11

  BY DAY, THE windows of the Ramoud house reflected the open spaces of upstate New York: Euclid, Boonville, Canton, Minetto, Utica, Fulton (“City with a Future”), Hannibal; lost tribes of toys on front lawns; children on bikes pedaling down the streets; chickens in the road, always getting hit by cars or captured and thrown out attic windows by little boys. The silence was an afterglow of abandonment, a cry through the port towns: places left with just the skin on their bones, their eyes black windows, their hearts doused lamps.

  The Ramouds wouldn’t have said that their neighbors—what neighbors there were—were particularly cordial; most of them were better described as invisible, tucked away in ancient farmhouses with backyards awash in toys, tools, auto parts, and cars on blocks.

  About half a mile up the road from the Ramouds’ house, a small girl stood in the weeds, face smeared with crumbs and dirt, and bottle leaking gray soda pop. Next to her, a boy and girl were slapping each other.

  “Shut up, you!” their mother screamed through the window. “Shut up, shut up!”

  Dolores Otts fell back on the bed and stared at the TV screen, its faint image lost in Friday’s mid-afternoon glare. She was thinking, and she knew she just had to quit doing that. Whenever she started thinking she seemed to get closer to things than she really needed to be, the kind of things that made her crazy.

  She remembered a lot: this was her great misfortune in life. Her ma said Dolores had a flypaper brain, sticky all over. She would read something or hear it on TV and get every word in her head; she never knew when some of it would fly right out of her mouth. She knew from some TV s
how that baby turds held polio. And whenever she happened to think about it, she saw how the field around their place was piled up with diapers, plastic disposables, each with a nest of baby shit. It was, of course, the same place where those babies liked to play.

  She was thinking: “When does life start?” It wasn’t her question originally—she’d heard it on one of the talk shows. It was, she knew, a crazy question; the kind that could get her in trouble.

  At what point—

  Because she knew that she’d been born nearly thirty years ago, but she wanted to know when her life would begin: she hadn’t seen any signs of it yet.

  Maybe, she thought, that was why she’d turned herself over so many times to that damn man, that damn man being many men, forty, maybe fifty, or even a hundred. Who was counting? It didn’t matter, they were all the same, parading around with their dicks like trophies, and nearly every one put a baby in her. She’d thought there’d be at least one infertile Joe in all Clay County, but if there was it didn’t look like she’d ever be introduced.

  It seemed it was like Reverend Murabito said: things didn’t get better until you died. But Dolores had seen corpses—grandparents; her aunt Joe; Patrick and Brian, her fourth and fifth kids—and none of them looked like they were having a party.

  She took a hanger out of the closet and started to unbend it. Just a week before she had noticed a bumper sticker with a picture of a hanger with a red slash through it and the words Never Again underneath. This was in the parking lot of Bumble Bee Groceries. She’d pointed the sticker out to her mother, and the two of them had stood there trying to unpuzzle it until the car’s owner walked up with her groceries.