Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Melvina skipped another stone hard, six hops, and Jem knew she’d heard right. “I’m amazed…I mean…you…not to mention we’d never get away with it,” Jem said. “Melvie? What is it?”

  “It’s just—I don’t know how to do this, and if I don’t do this, I think she’s going to die. It’s going to happen again.” She skipped another stone, turned her face into the wind.

  “Who? Peachy’s going to die?”

  “Dolores Otts.”

  Jem thought a moment, trying to remember. She recalled a pale blonde girl, swollen with pregnancy, standing at the windows of the Otts’s house, waving to the bus she should have been riding. “I didn’t know she was one of your patients.”

  Melvina sat opposite Jem and pressed her knees against her sister’s. “She just can’t die. She’s got her whole life ahead of her yet. I won’t let her, not this one.”

  Chapter 22

  THE CALL CAME to Jem’s phone. “Hello, this is the Atlantic City Police calling for Ma-TOO-sim Ramoud.”

  She rerouted it and minutes later, Matussem was in her office. He saluted Portia, whose back was turned, then hurried to Jem’s corner. “Fifty thousand maintenance men all working on change one light bulb. So okay, I try to get half to work on another bulb. That my job. ‘Manage,’ they tells me, I’m suppose to manage. iAy caramba!” Matussem ran his fingers through his hair till it was ragged. “Your family,” he said, “let me tell you—first they warm them up in hell, then they come here on vacation. How you like that?”

  Jem was separating all inpatient bills into piles according to insurance carrier, a job she’d once heard her supervisor describe as digging a big hole and then filling it up again. Tomorrow, when she’d finished with stapling, they’d ask her to divide the patients according to type of coverage. The next day they’d ask for it to be changed back to carrier. And so on. No one would ever look at the filing. She put down the two piles she was holding and said, “Well. Do you want to tell me more?”

  Matussem checked for Portia, then sat on a typing table “Saiid and Kier—do these name mean anythings to you?”

  “Besides that we’re supposed to go out with them next Saturday? Oh no, what? Say it quick, please.”

  Matussem nodded. “Okay, no pussy-footy, in a few little words: your cousins are in the slammer up the creek.”

  “Use a few more words.”

  “Like this. Okay, your cousins are wild men, what can they say? They want to come to America to get a little bananas. Your Uncle Fouad, as you figured out, gets a little fruitcakes, too, sometimes and he mails them money to come. Only he mails enough so they go buy a Lincoln Continental, too. Your Uncle Fouad thinks because dollars don’t look like dinars they’re not as serious. Okay, here they are already last week, in America, in a black Lincoln Continental, and in Atlantic City—”

  “Wait—” Jem started to say, then changed her mind. “Keep going.”

  “Right. So they are, you can say, living in their Lincoln Continental.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yes. They’re eating and sleeping there. And doing a lot of hanging around. Also, they have a pet—”

  “A pet?”

  “A baby dog who lives in back and messes, but they’re a little crazy so they don’t notice.”

  “Ugh.”

  “So what happen is they bet everything in casinos; they lose everything without question. They bets the money; boom, boom, boom, they lose the money; they bets the car; boom, boom, boom, they lose the car. Who know what happens to poor dog. Next thing Saiid and Kier are half-naked on the boardwalk, talking crazy, drugs, who knows what, and the police goes get them, then goes looking in the phone books, saying, let’s see, who the biggest horse’s ass in world, oh yes, it must be Matussem Ramoud. Now because Fouad is God-know-where what place, I have to go get them and bring them back alive, dead, whatever. How you likes that?”

  “Aw, Dad, don’t do it.”

  “It’s family troubles, no choice. Fifty thousand nephews in the world and I have to got Heckle and Jeckle. What for? I’m ask you.” Matussem eyed Portia as she slowly began to turn, her face like a prow. “I got to go. Don’t tell Melvina.”

  ROUTE 81 WAS dark as a coal chute cutting through the upstate river valleys. The landscape reminded Matussem of a picture he’d seen in a magazine: mountains at the tip of the horizon, dyed blue with distance. Before them, foothills, desert brown, matted like buffalo hide with scrub and thick sage; rose-and-purple banded hills; wheat, gold and ragged—America.

  Matussem was wondering if Fouad was right, if it really was just stubbornness, remaining in Euclid. Was he turning away from his origins, away from knowing? He had once overheard his eldest sister, Rima, say that their mother had borne fourteen children. Why, then, did he know only eight? If he looked too closely at it, fear would stretch open inside him like a black hole, a space where all the unaccounted-for children went. He was afraid of being swallowed up too, like his relatives, back into that history. Everything depended upon the new country, on looking ahead at every moment. Going forward meant that he was still alive; he pushed against jazz; drumming was living.

  Still, Fouad’s voice would slip through his mind: Was it right? Was it natural for his daughters to go on living with him, unmarried? When both his parents and in-laws had died over a decade ago, it had been a release, he thought. But their ghosts returned to accuse him, bedeviling him with fears for the girls and their happiness. He would never throw them away into unwanted marriage. But what was right for them? How could he ever know?

  As a boy growing up in a house full of sisters and their friends, aunts, and female cousins, Matussem had never known there were any other sorts of women in the world. He knew, watching and overhearing his sisters at night, that it was a bitter thing to be a woman. His mother had cradled his head between her breasts, even when he became gangly, arms and legs spilling from her lap. She had stroked his head, called him my eyes, even as she had lifted her voice, a shard of anger at his sisters, saying, “Move faster! Awkward, donkey, beanstalk! Lower your face, rude girl!”

  When Matussem looked into his mother’s eyes, he felt that he was tumbling down a well. He saw murky waters turning and clouding, and he did not understand. He didn’t think then that he would be able to bear looking into a woman’s eyes again.

  Then he met Nora. She taught him how to speak a new language, how to handle his new country. His American lover. Through the year of their courtship she took his hands and fed him words like bread from her lips. Together, they sleepwalked into the region of love. Testing language in their bed, they roamed a new earth, black as pitch. She drew him away like Eurydice, into the world inside herself, into the world under the old one. She took him into a new creation, the corners of the map, her fingers on his skin.

  AS MATUSSEM DROVE, he thought about the first time he had met his wife. He had been only twenty at the time, at his first job in America, pushing a straw broom in a place called The Moral Pharmacy—Where Drugs Are Not for Fun! was painted on the sign out front. He knew how to say “homburger,” “coke cola,” and “not now, Moorvain” (his boss’s name was Marvin). Thirty years later, Matussem wondered if Marvin had engineered the meeting. His mother and sisters had been the only females he’d ever spoken to directly, and he was so timid around women that if they asked him for the time he would flee the room. Luckily, his wife-to-be had entered the store in one of what Matussem called her “disguises.” These were moods or gestures that might, briefly, shadow her loveliness. To him, she was a lightning rod to beauty, attracting it so the sun shone more brightly on her face, the wind filled her hair more deeply. She could lower her face, douse her expression, and the beauty would dim—like that! Two fingers pinched to a flame. Disguise, Matussem thought.

  He saw her seated by the door, alone in a booth, and after her order was taken he asked the waiter, a Greek friend, if he would let Matussem bring the meal to her table.

  Matussem brought her a tray with hambur
ger, milkshake, and fries, and when she saw him—or so he said—she lifted her face and it was there, like striking a match, the flaring of beauty. “Thank you,” she said.

  Matussem, in true Ramoud fashion, fell to his knees on the checkered drugstore floor and asked through his tears, “You me marry?”

  THERE WAS A gray clearing in Matussem’s thoughts where the memory of his wife’s death suddenly changed colors, moving from accident to suicide. There were times when he saw her fleeing his family and friends at their parties; she would serve them without speaking, vanishing into the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom, curling into herself like a jinni disappears into air, telling him when he came for her, it was too much, the food and the music and the language rushing into the walls of her head. She would unroll from the bed into his arms, her face in tears. Or, lithe and dancing when they were alone, Nora laughed like a bell; she would pull the hair back from her face with a single finger, like a child.

  After her death, the mornings opened in Matussem’s bed like gray blossoms, like sharp-winged birds slicing dawn in two. Something always reminded him of his loss: seeing the back of his wife’s head in a crowd, the flicker of her pale eyes in Jem’s dark ones, or Melvina catching her finger to the nape of her neck like her mother.

  MELVIE TURNED TO Jem and Jem sat back. Melvie had come straight from work, wanting a drink. Jem could still smell the floor on her—patients’ rooms, disinfectant, and Betadine; there was also the air of exertion, a kind of sadness and fatigue that Jem rarely saw in her sister. She hadn’t said much all evening; she seemed angry, stabbing at her drink. Jem saw something starting in the top of her sister’s eyes and felt a twist of premonition. Zombies made Melvie dangerous, and this was her second. Melvie leaned across the table. “I just want to know one thing, Jemorah,” she said. “I just want to know if she did it deliberately like Fatima says. I need to know if she wanted to die.”

  Jem knew the question well; it had moved, in various guises, between the two sisters for most of their lives; anything at all could set it off. There was no answer, only a way of pushing it back into the current between them to submerge and surface among the years. But this time Melvina’s eyes were fixed on her.

  “I don’t even have to know why, okay? One step at a time. I just want to know if she did. On purpose.”

  “Melvie—” Jem stopped. She was walking into the current; there was nowhere to stand. The Won Ton à Go-Go had gone still. “I…can’t. I just don’t know the answer to that. I wish I did, but I can’t—”

  “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t!” Melvina shouted at her. Harriet said, “Uh oh,” and Merv was smiling and nodding from across the room. “I’d like you to tell me what you can! You never tell me about her, you never talk about her. It’s as if you’re trying to punish me for something—”

  “God, no, Melvina—”

  “Don’t you think I feel responsible, when I was right there in the room, watching?”

  “For heaven’s sakes. You were two!”

  “It’s as if she were your personal secret. Like you want to keep her all to yourself. Well, what about me, Jemorah, I’d like to know what about me!” Melvie banged both fists down hard.

  JEM TRIED TO think of a way to begin. She turned the tall glass in her hand then looked up at the bar, glimpses of eyes, hands, colored liquids, flecks of light moving with the randomness of memory. Melvie wanted reasons, a mending of this open question of the past; Jem had only fragments. She had never meant to withhold their mother, but she knew that she had lacked some courage.

  “I remember a time,” she began, “when there used to be a lot of pictures of starving children on TV.”

  “Date, please,” Melvie said. “Location.”

  “I just don’t—Biafra maybe? They had big, swollen bellies. I remember flies crawling over them, in their mouths and eyes.”

  “Bilharzia, cholera, yellow fever,” Melvie commented.

  “I asked Mom why the children looked so sad. Since they used to say in Catholic school that when you died you went to heaven. And these children were going to heaven soon.”

  “So what did you say?”

  Jem shook her head. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. Melvie was not yet born. It was a memory of a memory. She couldn’t have known, as a child, how rare and essential those memories would become. Jem could scarcely recall anything of her mother’s reaction, the pinprick of the story: her mother looking at her with a clear, gray-eyed gaze, as if the question was too hard to answer. Nothing more.

  Jem shrugged, staring at her glass. “If she answered me, I honestly don’t remember it. I don’t want to make anything up about it—I don’t want to do that,” Jem said. “She just looked at me that way.” What is a look? Jem thought. Didn’t a mother look at her child thousands, millions of times during their life together? Could the looks be separated? Or was it one single gaze, one that suffered interruptions, but which stayed more or less the same, from the child’s birth on into memory?

  THEY WENT BACK to Melvie’s office where, propped between Medical Surgical Nursing and The Drug, the Nurse, the Patient, she kept a family photo album. It was one she’d claimed for herself years ago, the one that dated from before their trip to Jordan. It was heavy, bound by a red, tasseled string, and the white-bordered photos were held by black glued-in corners. Now the glue was drying out and the corners were coming loose. To Jem, it was a collection of half-thoughts, gestures, and messages from her mother’s life. Her mother was smiling in every shot. There were wedding and baby pictures, school pictures, and shot after shot of festivals—their mother’s favorite pastime—Moyers Corners Fourth of July, Erie Canal Days, New York State Fair, Hill Cumorah.

  Jem didn’t turn to the beginning—which contained mostly unnamed, ghostly babies, she and Melvina floating among them—but put her thumbs together and split the album open at its center.

  At the top of the page there was a photograph of Matussem, Jem, and her mother, grandly pregnant, visiting the Onondaga Reservation Spring Festival.

  “How young she is!” Melvie murmured. “A child. Now she reminds me of someone there. Who does she look like?”

  “She looks like us,” Jem said.

  The images were amorphous, eerily indistinct. There was the small, dark round of Jem’s face, wearing a toy headband with a feather; their mother lighter skinned, her precise features caught on the brink of a laugh; the high wall of her stomach vying for attention, assertive enough for Jem to know that only Melvie could be in there. Matussem’s hair was plastered down with something like shoe wax, and he stood with one arm slung around the neck of a man who looked like a chief, his headdress full as sumac trees, their noses bent alike and skin matching.

  “It’s odd. People are always saying how much we look like our father,” Melvie said. “Not like our mother.”

  “People see color first,” Jem said.

  Under the photograph were the words: Onondaga Indian Reservation, 4/68.

  Jem remembered the Spring Festival: clay beads, ceremonial feathers, drums, dances, and tourists. Dancing men, women, and children, circling, stamping, arms and hair flying level; drums; chants; high sustained vowels; and the belly-deep summons to spring. The movement was the coil upon which the seasons and orbits rested. The dance brought back summering birds and the gentling of the northern winter. The dance offered hope to the frostbitten, soaked, and gloomy of upstate. Jem was drawn to the spiraling Iroquois dances and knew they were turning the earth around each year. The dried land where the Indians danced was an oasis, and the junked cars, the beer bottles, the pieces of trash moved out to the periphery of things; there was nothing but the plain, bare ground where they danced.

  Jem could remember Matussem, with his arm around the man’s shoulders, saying “This dude read me like a book.” She also had some recollection that the man’s name was Chief Dean Martin. But after several Spring Festivals, Autumn Harvests, and the sharing of Matussem’s jazz tapes, Dean
Martin changed his name to Chief Stormy Weather.

  Melvina was staring at the handwriting in the album, so like her own—clean, broad strokes, open-mouthed vowels. There were dates, names, and places. Until the trip overseas. Then she shut the album. “Enough. I can’t do any more right now.”

  “But what about—”

  “I can’t!” Melvina’s voice rose. “The pictures are too solid, they get in the way, they crowd out…what I have left of her. It’s all I have left, all that’s just mine. These tell me nothing about her or any of us.”

  AFTER THEY LEFT Melvie’s office, Jem continued to think about the last photograph in the album: nearly all white, just the bare, gray outlines of a smiling bundled-up child in a pretty woman’s arms. Snowflakes drift around them thick as maple leaves, flocking on the child’s arms, veiling the woman’s hair, both faces turned, inexplicably, up to the brilliant sky.

  Chapter 23

  I SAY! IT’S BEEN a long time since I’ve met two such complete and utter bullshit booby-heads!” Uncle Fouad shouted at his sons. Saiid and Kier sat propped against each other, looking too sick or miserable to sit up on their own. Saiid had no shirt and wore what looked like a pair of mutilated pajama bottoms; Kier was wearing only boxer shorts that said Sunny Buns across the back. The television was on and they stared at MTV. Fouad snorted at them, tossing his head and popping a designer shirt button. Then he tore the shirt off completely so all three Mawadi men were in various states of undress. Matussem, watching the spectacle with a mixture of repulsion and appreciation, backed into the couch across the room from them.