Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “But Pop, be cool, man,” Kier said. “They, like, took our clothes!”

  “Oh, God! Oh, my God!” Fouad shouted at the ceiling. “Can these be the real sons? Give them back, I say, I want the real sons back, not these blobs!”

  Fatima prowled through the living room, peeking through the curtains at every window. She was certain that at any moment one of the Ladies’ Pontificial Committee would take it into her head to drive the twenty miles out to Euclid, sneak into the Ramouds’ bushes, and press her ear against the wall. Fatima went around whispering in a high, strained voice, “I dying! The humiliation! I dying of this!”

  The more distressed Fatima became, the higher Fouad’s voice climbed. He beat his chest and called upon God several times, mingling Arabic and English. Then he switched to Matussem. “Matussem, forgive, please, I beg! I beg!” Fouad shouted at his brother-in-law who was trying to disappear into a corner of the couch, wishing they would all leave so he could watch the TV. “I throw myself under you,” Fouad cried, getting down on his knees. “That I has such infidels as this boobies in your house!”

  Fatima ran over and began plucking at Fouad’s sleeve. “Don’t do this to me. They’ll see! They’ll all see!” she whisper-screamed. “I’m going mad. I’m going for certain to the crazy house.”

  “Hey, Pop, we’re not infidels, man,” Kier said. “You’re blocking the TV.”

  “How would you like if I knocks your heads together?” Fouad said to his sons, trying to stand up. “Maybe that would put you some brains.”

  “Oh, yuh, I really think so,” Saiid said.

  WHEN JEM AND Melvina drove home that day, Fatima was standing at the door, wringing her hands. Her eyes looked shriveled, as if she’d spent the day staring down Morgan Road—all the way through the dwindling reaches of Euclid into the village of Liverpool and on into Syracuse. Fatima’s black hair was piled up in an obelisk over her head, and she had on the red embroidered caftan that she never wore unless she thought it would impress some American. It furled around her in a red plume.

  “My babies!” she cried in a tiny grandmother’s voice. “My babies are getting married!”

  “Dream on,” Melvina snapped, trying to push past her, but Fatima stood her ground, glaring at her niece. Melvie sighed. “All right. What’s your problem, Aunt Fatima?”

  Fatima took one of Jem’s hands and one of Melvina’s—which Melvina snatched back—and gazed at them. Her olive face flickered like a pale flame and those long-suffering eyes were ghostly. “My babies, I’m here to tell you the happy day has arrived! Your husbands, they have come for you early. They were so full with all these love and yearnings they could not wait until next week!”

  Jem pulled her hand out of Fatima’s. “Oh no,” she said. “Big news.”

  Melvina put her knuckles on her hips and stood with her feet braced apart. “What husbands? What? What is this? I’m busy, Aunt Fatima; some of us live in the real world.”

  Fatima stamped her foot and a sound went up behind her. For a moment the sky behind the house darkened with birds, their wings knocking against the quiet, their calls scrambling as they rose. Fatima was startled, and Melvina took advantage of the distraction, rushing the door like a halfback, Jem close behind her.

  “No!” Fatima cried, clutching at them. “They’re not ready. Not before your wedding!”

  Saiid and Kier had been spying on them from the front hall and Melvie nearly ran into them.

  “Whoa-ho!” Saiid said. “I must be in heaven, man. You are our cousins, man? This is completely, like, my mind is psyching out. I take this one, dude.” He pointed at Jem.

  “Kowabunga!” Kier started dancing around, hopping on one then the other foot in a kind of victory dance. Then he came eye to eye with Melvina and stopped. “Wait a sec, man,” Kier said.

  Fouad and Fatima converged on them, each closing in from different angles, and Jem saw that she was trapped. She tried to back up and looked at her sister. Fatima was crying at them, “Not yet! Not yet!” Fouad was saying, “So what do you think of the miserable, suffering sons of bitches?”

  Saiid, the one who’d claimed Jem, was eyeing her up and down. She took in nervous glimpses of him: torn pajama bottoms, a stomach that drooped sideways over the waistband, hair that stood out from his head like black plaster of Paris—there seemed to be leaves, feathers, even small twigs stuck in it.

  “I’d say,” Melvie said, “that we got rooked. Shamelessly! Your own nieces, Uncle Fouad! This was supposed to be a date, not Robinson Crusoe night.”

  “Robin what, man? What’s that?” Kier asked anxiously.

  Jem saw Fouad drop his eyes, and suddenly she realized that the bribe amount was ringing higher. Melvie was bargaining like Monty Hall.

  “Ah, Melvina, you little heartpicker, you bamboozler, you should be the prime minister of England,” Fouad said, meditatively sliding hands over stomach. He looked at Jem. “So Melvie says to me over my oatmeals that you can be the savior of this crying-out-loud family? You want go to these graduate school?”

  “Now you’re talking. Let’s do business,” Melvina said.

  Chapter 24

  THAT MID-JUNE NIGHT the house was quiet. Gilbert and Uncle Fouad were at the horse races. Cousins Saiid and Kier had been banished by their father to the High Chaparral Motel, ten miles outside of Euclid. Matussem was playing drums at the Key West Bar. Melvina was at work. Solitude softened the air around Jem, the warm night moved, and she felt something in her chest opening. Jem went across the yard and cut through the field where the trees had Posted No Trespassing signs, toward the light of Lil’ Lulu’s Garage.

  She recognized his legs, stretched out in jeans and old sneakers under a car. And she felt her pulse slow as she approached and put her fingers on the cool skin of his ankle.

  Ricky sledded out from under the engine. He sat up, turning metallic-blue eyes on her, and reached up with one hand.

  She moved back. “Why’d you lie to me?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I met someone—” She stopped, her spine turning sharp as a fishbone, fingers curling. She said, “Someone, right! Your father is who it was. Why’d you let me believe he was dead, like the kids said, that he got blown up? He’s lying over there in Johnson-Crowes Hospital, right in plain sight. Jupiter Ellis!”

  Ricky stood and moved into the rings of light around the pumps. He looked emptied, eyes and lips stone yellow. “I thought maybe he’d done it by now,” he murmured, then stamped on the bell so it squawked. “He had to have! After all this time. I thought—well, I don’t know what I thought. I haven’t seen him for years. I certainly didn’t want you to know about it.”

  Jem stared at Ricky’s face and remembered the man at the Bumble Bee, bagging groceries, carrying them to the car, skin like parchment, gray, sodden, the smell of old clothes and something like rotting fruit. She remembered him sliding the groceries into her car, twisting a smile at her, mouth collapsed like wet tissue, a pair of dentures peeking out of his shirt pocket, a blurry, green tattoo on his bicep.

  “And Hilma Otts has been looking for him for all this time,” Jem said. “I used to see him working right over at the Bumble Bee.”

  Ricky nodded as she leaned against the pump next to his, regular leaded. “Yeah, she’s seen him all right,” he said. “She just doesn’t recognize him. Or she don’t want to. The explosion didn’t kill him, only burned off his shirt and hair, some big burns on his face and neck. They healed. None of that stuff, whatever Peachy and the rest of those kids said, was true. They just wanted to believe it, and I just wanted him to die. He used to drink till he stank and his body shook like he was crazy. He’d try whatever he could get his hands on after his money was gone. That day he’d been drinking Lysol and rubbing alcohol. Sometimes he tried to beat me to death, smash the face off my head. He used to hit me with a broken pipe wrench, see here?” Ricky pulled his shirt down and showed her a fat, white scar that snaked over his shoulder and around the base of
his neck. “Damn near smashed my whole head off for me one time.”

  Jem’s fingers uncurled inside her pocket as she stared at that white seam. “God, I was wrong,” she said. “I’m stupid. I’m so stupid.”

  “Nah, nah, you weren’t. No more than I am about things. I mean, what do you know about this stuff? I mean—well, I guess that’s how I love you, not knowing, just the way you were up there riding that school bus, looking at this stuff but never falling into it like the rest of us. I mean, you were the first person who saw me. I mean…I mean when you looked at me, I could feel it.” He moved close to her and put his fingers on the nape of her neck under her hair, and she shivered. They shut their eyes together. “Tell me you still see me,” he said, his voice descending to a whisper.

  He was slick with grease, his hands black; he held them out and gathered Jem into himself, her chin going over his shoulder, his arms pulling tight. “Okay,” she heard him saying under his breath, “okay, okay, okay.” His knotted body cut into her arms and ribs, and his voice, his single word was like a war cry and a sob.

  “Okay, okay, okay.”

  Jem opened her mouth, not wanting to say or see anything, nothing in their future, in the unanswerable questions, nothing in their past. Then there was only the pressure of his mouth against hers, starting her on a short, dark journey of forgetting.

  She went with him to the bushy grass behind the garage where it was dark and hidden. She was dizzy, wanting Ricky, want flooding her. They took off their clothes and the grass cut them. Everything was sharp, Ricky’s tongue and fingers, their kisses piercing, fine as powdered glass. Jem sagged under the weight of a kiss, falling with him, then pulling back.

  “Wait, wait,” she said. “We have to use something.”

  He reached into one of his jeans pockets on the ground and pulled out a small wallet. The money compartment was empty except for some crumpled petals and a single condom. He tore it open with one corner between his teeth and rolled it on himself clumsily, hands shaking. He lifted her and she pushed down onto him. He turned his eyes to her so she saw the way the blue fled inward, into the black woods of himself. Behind the garage, she heard a faint backdrop of ding ding, ding ding, the roll of car tires, coming and going.

  The movement of their bodies together was a chant, a sacrifice of the distance between them. The feeling was honed and Jem pressed against him, to feel it all the more. “More,” she said.

  JEM SAT UP and felt the night cooling, the moon on her back. She stood and helped Ricky up. They dressed, Jem feeling the wet heat through her clothes, their bodies speckled with dirt and leaves. A breeze came, riffling grass and pushing Jem’s hair into her eyes. Ricky stood beside her and, holding her, put his face into her neck.

  They walked the fields, now amber with moonlight. The ground seemed to shift under their feet. Jem was quiet, her body finely charged. She also felt a stab of conscience. Melvina would not approve of Ricky, his mechanic’s hands, the beer on his breath. Jem saw just ahead a flash of wing, blue-gray against the dark, ascending. “It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud, then laughed and sang, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.”

  They marched through the sparse woods; above the treetops Jem could see a raft of clouds blown back, a crescent of clear night and moon. Ricky seemed to Jem to blend with the trees at times, his eyes dark as fireflies. They both saw the movement at the same time, something rustling up the hill and across the Ramouds’ lawn. Both Jem and Ricky stopped and stood looking through the trees; Jem felt her breath diminishing as she stood hand in hand with this silent man, staring into her own front yard.

  There was the same movement again, swifter and broader than at first, a spot of white and then a voice singing. The singing emboldened them, and Jem and Ricky walked closer. From the edge of the trees, Jem could see across the yard; it looked blank and velvety, mysteriously empty. Then suddenly she realized Melvina was in the center, moving, floating, her toes grazing the ground, and pinned to her back were two hands, white and pointed as starfish. Then Melvie turned, and Jem saw Larry Fasco was twirling her and singing, somewhat off-key, “Waltzing, Melvina, waltzing, Melvina, will you come a-waltzing, Melvina, with me?”

  Melvina’s white dress flashed and floated over the lawn, and when the clouds hid the moon, the dress turned dark as fir trees, their blue-green shadows eaves of pinecones.

  Melvie was laughing and saying, “Stop! Stop, Lawrence, or I’ll call the police!”

  “Call them, call them all if you like!” Larry shouted. “I won’t dance with any but you!”

  Melvina sank her head upon her partner’s shoulder, and Jem sensed the evening being shored up and moved back by degrees.

  Chapter 25

  LARRY FASCO WAS entertaining Peachy Otts in the Ramouds’ rec room the next morning.

  “It was at this bar in Havana, see,” he said. “Me and a few sidekicks and ol’ Ernie Hemingway. You know ol’ Ernie?”

  “He bags groceries down at the Bumble Bee.”

  “Pathetic! What do they teach in reform school these days?” he said. “Anyway, I says to him, I says, ‘Ernie, how can I become a great writer like yourself?’ I ask him this after I buy him a few beers. He liked Genny Cream.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “From the mouth of God, I’m telling you, every word is true,” Larry said, pointing at the ceiling. “So I lube him up with a few Gennies, ask my question, and you know what he does? Do you?”

  “Hunh-uh.”

  “He says, ‘Get lost, you lowly vermin.’”

  “No way!” Peachy chuckled.

  “He says, ‘Take a long walk off a short cliff, you lowly vermin, scum of the sea, armpit of the earth.’ That’s how he talked. That’s what he thought of me. That’s how writers show they like you.”

  “Cool. Even if I don’t believe you.”

  “Then me and my bud Jupe Ellis, we decided to go visit my ol’ bud Willy Shakespeare who was writing stuff and hanging around, trying to get my opinion. You know Willy the Spear-man?”

  “Hunh-uh.”

  “Lawrence Fasco, what are you doing in my basement?” Melvina said. She was standing in the doorway.

  “Aha, here’s my buttercup,” Larry said. Peachy stared at him and said, “Melvina?”

  “That’s right.” Larry stood and did a little shimmy in Melvie’s direction. “She’s the devil-woman and I’m a devil-worshiper, yee haw!”

  “You better not say that,” Peachy said, chuckling. “She’ll get you, man. She does that—I’ve seen her in action.”

  Melvina stood her ground before Larry’s shimmy and crossed her arms over her chest. She eyed Peachy then turned back to Larry. “And where, pray tell, is Mr. Ramoud, the supposed owner of this house?” she said.

  Larry dropped his outspread arms and walked back to the card table where he’d been sitting. “Well, hell, he’s in the bathroom, as usual.”

  Melvina snapped her fingers at Peachy, and Peachy jumped up and followed her out.

  Jem was upstairs in the living room, the school application form fanned out before her. It depressed her, having to look at the layers of such applications again: test scores, essays, grade reports. They covered the table. Melvie had Peachy sit between herself and Jem. Melvie folded her hands and said, “Now, Peachy Otts. How would you like to go to college?”

  “No way,” she said.

  “Oh,” Jem said. “I don’t know about this.”

  “Why should I?” Peachy said. “College is where the brains go, like Jem. That’s where all the suburbs kids go.”

  “Right,” Melvie said. “That could be you, too.”

  Peachy was shaking her head again. “No way, you guys. What? Look, I’m stupid and teachers hate me. Dolores is the brain, send her. Ma always said me and Glady had can openers for brains. All I ever learned in school was stuff like how to make fart noises on my arm. Perry Hardcaster showed me when I was flunking out of fifth.” She started to lift the crook of her arm halfway
to her mouth, but Melvie lowered it with the tip of her finger. “I never made it out of high school, and I never want to!” Peachy said.

  “Peachy, look,” Jem said, and picked up a page of the application. She pointed to a question that asked about Peachy’s educational objectives. “Just hypothetically. Could you think up something to say for a question like this?”

  Peachy stared at a point somewhere between the page and Jem’s finger. Her eyes were motionless, and her face tightened. Finally she looked up at the two women and chanted, “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow—”

  “Peachy…” Melvina sighed.

  Peachy grabbed the page, crumpled it up, and threw it down on the table. It bounced off onto the floor.

  “Young lady!” Melvina went after the paper, but Jem was looking at Peachy. She turned to the first page of the application and pointed to the blank that read: Name, last, first, middle initial. “Can you read this?” she asked.

  This time Peachy didn’t look at the page at all, but stared Jem in the face. She didn’t blink. Jem looked away. She thought about middle school, Peachy in sixth and Jem in eighth, on the bus where Peachy would stare off while she pricked herself with safety pins and let little points of blood come to the tops of her thighs. Staring and humming. She had a smell, at times almost unbearably sour, like dill pickles. Once Peachy told Jem she was pricking the letters of a girl’s name at school into her leg, so the blood would spell out Janet. Only when she was done she hadn’t spelled out the girl’s name at all. Instead, little x’s and o’s and snaking lines of blood twisted over the surface of the leg, a collection of hieroglyphics.

  Jem heard Melvina murmuring: “That says name. Peachy, can you write your name?”

  With great deliberation, Peachy put her fingers to the page and drew a line of crosses and spirals across the application.

  “Peachy Otts,” she said, then grinned and stood, moving toward the back door. “You’re lucky,” she said. “I don’t write that for just anybody.” Then she ran out the door.