Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Melvina lifted her eyebrows at Jem. “Well.”

  “It’s a start,” Jem said.

  THAT EVENING, WHEN Jem and Melvina went outside, the trees were yellow in the lowering sun; the tall grass, bright splinters; the woods, deep and fragrant. The fields were littered with white and purple clover.

  “Jemorah, I’ll explain the world to you someday,” Melvie said, opening the car door. “It’s all starting to come to me. The trick is you can’t rush it.”

  Jem leaned against the house, inhaling deeply, seeing the spans of telephone wire threading pole to pole, past wildflowers and hills, moving back past half-burned silos and the wreckage of barns, the sky awash in evening colors.

  “And you’re not getting away that easily, Ms. P. Otts,” Melvina said to the highway.

  Chapter 26

  AT 4:45, JULY fourth, Saturday morning, the phone beside Jem’s bed rang and she caught it in trembling fingers, startled awake. A woman was screaming something on the other end, as if Jem had picked up the extension on someone’s fight. It was Arabic screaming, and Jem recognized the hydraulic hiss of the overseas cable.

  “What have they done with my husband?” the woman screamed. “Where is he? Why won’t he come home? He’s dead, he’s dead, oh, God, I know he’s dead!”

  There was a squeak, and another voice, internationally cool, modulated as a flight attendant’s, came on speaking in English, “Hello darlings. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Uh, Jemorah Ramoud,” Jem said.

  “Jemmy! How sweet! This is your Auntie Salandria.” Jem had a flash of recognition. She hadn’t seen this aunt since she was nine years old. “Remember Auntie Sally?”

  Fatima had recounted Sally’s story—one of her favorite fairy tales—over and over to Jem and Melvina when they were younger. Born in Howkville, New York, Sally met Jem’s cousin Raife forty years ago at a roadside stand where she hosed dirt off pumpkins and turned them bruised-side down. Raife had picked his way through the mud and fertilizer in Italian loafers just to talk to lemon-haired Sally. He lifted one of the squashes from the stand and found it gritty and satisfying. She showed him how children would carve faces into it, and there, holding a pumpkin that looked to Raife like a setting sun, he asked her to marry him.

  It was this way with the Ramoud men—proposing quickly, repenting at leisure. It didn’t matter to Sally that she was the fourteenth girl Raife had proposed to during his two-week vacation in America. She agreed to fly away with him, on a magic carpet if he liked. Then she called her mother on the county phone, ten feet up the telephone pole, and gave her the happy news, as well as the information that sister Em was allowed to wear Sally’s clothes until further notice. Sally’s mother had what the family referred to as a “heart-attack scare,” while Raife and her daughter drove to Bill Hole, the closest town with a justice of the peace.

  In forty years Sally had returned to America only twice, both times for fashion shows. Sally of Howkville dwindled and faded, while Salandria of Amman emerged, painted in Mediterranean Technicolor, eyes ringed with makeup, limbs heavy with jewelry, voice heavy with hauteur, a cosmopolitan twinge, although she hadn’t quite finished tenth grade that fateful year of flight. She re-created herself in a place where she had no high-school history, where Howkville was a mystery, a place in New York. She went on to self-publish a book of her own poetry, dipping into Raife’s big pile of money to produce Woman Entire, Moi.

  “Jemorah, habeebi,” she said, lilting. “How old are you now, darling? Why, you must practically be in junior high. Are you going out for junior varsity cheerleaders?”

  “Well—actually, I graduated from college seven years ago.”

  In the background the other woman was still screaming in Arabic, “What have they done to him? Fouad! Name of God the merciful! Fouad! I know it’s another woman, they’ve got him with some prostitute!”

  “Really. Out of college? But that’s silly, no, no, that’s impossible, dear,” cooed Aunt Sally. “Don’t be giddy, darling. I’m barely out of college myself. Perhaps you are older than I thought, I’m becoming so—oh, how do they say? Oh yes, absent, yes, that’s it, absentminded. Dear me, I’m even losing my Engleesee. I’m afraid I’ve turned quite Arabee, you know.”

  Sally’s voice broke off and there was a sound like a wrestling match and for a second the other woman’s voice screaming “Murderers!”

  Then Sally was back, voice still modulated. “Jemorah, darling, not to trouble, but does your dear uncle Fouad happen to be any place convenient?”

  “Uh—Uncle Fouad—uh…”

  Fouad had been going out with Gilbert Sesame later and later every night. During the past week or so he hadn’t reappeared till dawn, sometimes not even till lunchtime. Jem was about to offer to go check on Fouad or to make some other meaningless suggestion when Melvie walked in. Even though she had weekends off, Melvie liked to go in to the hospital every day for at least an hour or two, just to check up on things. She had been in the midst of putting on her uniform, a ritual she performed in early darkness with the ceremony of a nun. On rare night-mornings when Jem was awake, she would watch Melvina fitting her cap, her hands and clothing bluish in the lamplight, her face intent. Melvina did not like to be interrupted. She entered Jem’s room clutching her cap in one hand, the uniform half-zipped up her back.

  “What is this ruckus?” she said. “This mumbling is quite distracting.”

  Jem shrugged and handed the receiver over, then laid back among her blankets and listened.

  “Yes. Yes. No. No. Uncle Fouad, I’m sorry to say, is undoubtedly out at this moment, engaging in who-knows-what sorts of immoral, unsavory, and unclean practices. He has taken to consorting with local criminals and shady characters, and there’s really no telling what he’ll do from one moment to the next. It’s my professional opinion as an R.N. and head nurse—what? No—I’m twenty-two. No, I’m younger than Jem. No, by seven years, two and one-third months. What is that noise? That’s a dishwasher? To continue, it’s my professional opinion that Uncle Fouad may be suffering from a form of mild schizophrenia and possibly one or more forms of venereal disease. I’d recommend immediate professional attention—in the more beneficent air of his own country.”

  Somewhere between “shady characters” and “professional attention” Jem slid into sleep, into dreams colored by medical terms that grew round and bright as balloons and carried her away.

  Chapter 27

  FATIMA CAME OVER that morning at nine with a towering bag of used dresses in her car. Going to her bedroom window, Jem watched Fatima hurrying toward the front door. Then Jem saw Melvie run out from the other side of the house and try to stuff Fatima and the dresses all back into the car. Fatima began wailing, “Jemorah! Jemorah! Oh, God, help! Help me, help me!” Uncle Fouad staggered to the top of the basement steps, covering himself with a single facecloth like a pot-bellied goblin. He said, “Ya’’Allah, what the fuck is that?”

  Jem walked outside where Melvie and Fatima were wrestling over the bag of dresses. When Fatima spotted Jem, she began screaming, “Jem! Come, hurry! She make you dress like her. You be going on your date like a white nun and they won’t talk to you and you’ll miss your last chances to get a man, forever—ever!” The last word of this speech broke into a loud, sustained wail, and the bag tore, dumping its dresses, a gauzy pile of spangles and satins, red as lipstick.

  Melvina bent down and lifted a dress between two fingers as if it were a specimen. The dress quivered, covered in sequins, almost alive. “We are going on a date, Aunt Fatima,” she said. “Not trying out for a Vegas chorus line.”

  “You see? You see?” Fatima whirled upon Jem bitterly. “This her plan. To keeps you old-maid-nun-nurse like herself. All white, fat ankles, fat shoes—”

  “Leave them alone, ya Fatima.” All three women turned to see Fouad standing on the patio, genitals cupped in a facecloth.

  “Clothes, Fouad, clothes!” Fatima cried.

  “Clothes? Yes, clothe
s I have, O sister of wife”—Fouad indicated the facecloth—“I hold in front when coming, in back when going.” He demonstrated, achieving a modicum of coverage for the retreating halfmoons. He turned back. “But you, why you are always buzzing and buzzing, Fatima? You put me thinking of mosquito up my arse. You bug me with this problems of yours.”

  “Oh, God the merciful, God to me on earth!” Fatima moaned, rolling her eyes. “What are the neighbors saying? They saying, ‘The Ramoud speak with naked mens in street!’”

  “Ya’an deeneck, you drives me to drinks, Fatima,” Fouad said. He walked over to them, picked up a red cocktail dress from the broken bag and draped it across his loins and backside, knotting it at the hip. “There. Nice, fine. I have, truthfully, back home, twenty, thirty nice as these.”

  “Aie!” Fatima clutched at her chest. “The party dress is wreck!” She dashed back into her car.

  “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” Fouad waved at the car as the girls turned back to the house. “That woman,” he said. “She an attack of runs.”

  THE PLAN WAS that while the girls and their cousins went out, Uncle Fouad would take Matussem to Moyers Corners Fourth of July Firemen’s Field Days.

  “Your dad, he is too much of a party-poop. All the time with his drums. Always creeping like mole. I fix him up, just wait. We’re going to get crazy-insane, him and me,” Fouad promised.

  Melvina looked at her uncle narrowly as she plucked hot curlers from Jem’s head. “Ow, ow!” Jem said. Melvina was oblivious. “Uncle Fouad, I will not tolerate any violence or mayhem,” she said. “Frankly, I think you and my father might have a more constructive evening if you were to stay home and have an encounter session or a game of chess.”

  “Melvina, you gas, trust me! Or, wait a sec—why don’t you forgets my miserable sons and marry your wonderful Uncle Fouad?”

  “I have no time for levity, Uncle Fouad,” Melvie said, combing and yanking on a lock of Jem’s hair as her older sister writhed. “My sister is a complete ruin and a bundle of nerves. Look at her! Not to mention—and I hope this doesn’t bear repeating—our contract stipulates four years of graduate school for Jem in exchange for a date with Saiid and Kier. Certainly not marriage to you, otherwise known as polygamy.”

  Fouad raised one finger and said, “Ah, but in the Law of Mohammed—”

  Melvie tore at a snarl in Jem’s hair so Jem squeaked. “Too bad,” Melvie said. “This is the Law of Melvina.”

  Just how terrible, Jem thought, grabbing her hair, would this marriage business get?

  THE LAW OF Melvina also stated: Be dressed, ready, and waiting outside the front door on the lawn at least fifteen minutes before the date. Even better, arrange to meet at the restaurant, so that you can take separate cars. Which is what happened when Saiid and Kier phoned a half hour late from the High Chaparral Motel to say they were having trouble picking out what to wear.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Melvie said. She walked out of the house, jingling the car keys, over to where Jem unhappily sat on the lawn in sausage curls and Melvie’s white pinafore. “Jemorah! Grass stains!”

  Sulking, Jem got into the car on the passenger’s side and Melvie said, “Can’t you pretend to be more animated than that? You’re semicomatose.”

  As they were pulling out, there was a slight movement in one of the bushes. “Now what?” Melvie said. “I don’t believe it, there’s a Peeping Tom in the hedge.” She stopped and jumped out of the car. Jem felt some presentiment and hurried after her sister, her heart quickening. “Melvie! Melvie, wait!”

  Melvie was marching toward the bushes like Patton. She’d handled people who were crazed with drugs, had even managed to disarm people who came bearing knives and guns into the Emergency Room. Her shoulders were squared; she was afraid of nothing. “You there!” she shouted. “Drop your weapons and come out with your hands up!”

  The bushes moved again, then parted. The intruder stood as the wind lifted the long ends of his hair up and off his face, and Jem said, “Oh, Ricky.”

  Melvie dropped her shoulders, hands on her hips. “Ricky?” she said. “Ricky Ellis?”

  He stepped out of the bushes, brushing dirt from his jeans. “I was coming to visit,” he told Jem, apologetic. “I saw you out on the lawn, but then when I saw your sister walking out of the house—I don’t know—something came over me. My first thought was to hide.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” Jem said smiling, making a near-curtsy in the white dress. “Lots of people feel that way.”

  “I take it you two know each other,” Melvie said, narrowing her eyes and looking back and forth from Jem to Ricky. “That is, if you really are who you seem to be.”

  “Melvie, don’t you remember?” Jem said. “Ricky went to our school. He lives down the street. He works at Lil’ Lulu’s.”

  “It’s possible,” Melvie said, focusing on him, her stare like a scalpel; he shifted. “Of course, anything’s possible around here—no one tells me anything. As a matter of fact, I thought I heard you were in jail, Mr. So-called-Ellis,” she said.

  “Oh no, that’s my cousin Rusty. Or maybe my big brothers Teeny and Scott? Although Teeny’s only my half-brother.” He looked past her at Jem. “Hey, you look nice,” he said. “Your hair”—he raised one hand toward his own hair.

  “Oh.” She touched one starched curl, laughed and blushed. “It’s terrible.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Oh,” she said and looked at Melvie.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, if it’s any of your business, yes,” Melvie said and started marching back to the car. “In theory, yes. If we can ever get this show on the road. Since it’s ostensibly not necessary to call the police, then I suppose I’ll just go wait in the car by myself.”

  Jem was watching him, trying to read the way his hands slid into his pockets, the way his eyes turned away from her, along the ground. What do I mean to you, she wondered. What if he answered her? What if, like Uncle Raife, he were to take her hand and say: Marry me now, once and for all. Who was he to her? Bad teeth, dirty hair, penniless. Still, somehow, as he stared at her hands she knew she wanted him.

  “I’m going on, um, a kind of—date,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “It’s not real. The date. I mean, well. See, we’re doing it for money.”

  “Oh,” he said, his expression flattening.

  “No, wait!” she said. “I’m not getting this right. I mean this doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s just dinner, me and Melvie, with our cousins. They’re new in this country—it’s like a favor to my uncle.”

  “Right,” he said.

  AS SOON AS they left the driveway, Melvina heaved a heartrending sigh.

  Jem turned to her. “What?”

  Melvina shook her head. She said, “Going from Saiid Mawadi to Ricky Ellis—I’d say that was jumping from frying pan to fire, all right.”

  Jem thought about that for a moment. “Well, I’d rather burn than fry, I guess,” she said, then laughed.

  Melvie cocked an eyebrow at Jem. “Ah, liberal arts talk. I believe that’s a metaphor. You’re talking about death, or maybe sex; standard human functions decorated with words. I have nothing against sex. Even if it is a waste of valuable time and energy. I’m not quite so unsophisticated as you think, Ms. Bachelor’s Degree.” Melvie called Jem Ms. Bachelor’s Degree whenever she was piqued. To Melvie, it was one of the most withering things a holder of an R.N. could say to an N.N. (“non-nurse”).

  “As a matter of fact,” Melvie went on, “I am well aware of the excellent secondary and tertiary by-products of sexuality. But the act itself is problematic, to say the least, rationalized by all sorts of nonsense and neurotic behavior. Well, I’ve tried out sex in its purely recreational format and I find I don’t have much use for it. Perhaps I’ll try it again someday, preferably not for at least another ten years or so. I’ve got too many other concerns to attend to right now.”

  Jem slid a glance at Melvina—
she wasn’t sure if she was more surprised by Melvie’s swearing off sex or by her having had any at all. Then the thought of her own secret lover pulsed once through her. After years of her cool, flat childhood bed, she felt entangled in the memory of gravel and weeds in a single warm twilight, the musk of gasoline, the lip of a kiss as he pushed into her, after so many years of not having a lover, like a bite, bright almost-pain. Jem tried to think of Melvie letting go, reduced to taste and touch. Perhaps it had been with a patient, a semiprivate room, a blue seam of light under the door, after visiting hours, Melvina climbing into the already warmed sheets.

  JEM AND MELVIE took a table up front when they got to the restaurant. Jem ordered a coral okoboji and Melvie ordered club soda. “I have to be on the alert,” she said.

  The two sisters passed about half an hour twirling the straws in their drinks, discussing work, avoiding any suggestion of marriage or boyfriends. After about twenty minutes had passed, Melvie said, “You see? Now this isn’t so bad, is it? And you were so worried.”

  For a moment Jem thought, she’s right, then she remembered that Kier and Saiid hadn’t actually arrived yet.

  Melvie decided they might as well go ahead and order. Fouad had given them three hundred dollars “spending money,” in case Saiid and Kier forgot to bring—or had somehow whittled down—the money he’d also given them for the date. They were feeling expansive and ordered lobster thermidor. Some friends from the hospital stopped by and chatted for a while. They had baked Alaska for dessert. Then after-dinner liqueurs with more friends.

  Melvie clinked her glass with Jem’s and said, “Here’s to blind dates.”

  “I guess so, huh?” Jem said enthusiastically.

  Then Kier and Saiid appeared, each of them escorting a young woman. “Hey, cousin-babes, we made it! Did you think we dried up and blew away, man?” Saiid asked.