Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “I’m not interested,” Melvina said. “You’re two hours and twenty-eight minutes late.”

  “Well, hey, what are you expecting?” Saiid said. “We look in the closet, none of our clothes is cool tonight for having wild times, and then we went to buy more.”

  The women with Kier and Saiid wore tall, lacquered hairdos, combed out from their heads and painted with gold stripes. Jem noted their matching lipstick and nail polish and spidery coats of mascara: they could have passed as Fatima’s nieces, the ones she was meant to have.

  Kier said, “This guys are Jen and Heather from the mall. They was selling us our new clothes for tonight, man, and we just said, like, hey, why don’t you guys come out with us, too!”

  Melvina was giving Kier a look as clear and pure as ice. “You brought these women on our date? This will cost Fouad extra.”

  “It’s cool, cousin-babies,” Saiid said. “This is even more fun—four babes, two guys, see? Let’s go dancing.”

  JEM WAS THINKING about the women in the other car, with their nails and lips flecked red as blood, their glittering hair. They seemed secure in some animal knowledge of how the world turned, how they were supposed to look and behave. Jem didn’t want any part of this dancing business; she wouldn’t know the steps, or where to put her hands or feet. But Melvie was driving to Cloud Ten anyway, her hands in a death grip on the steering wheel. “It’s part of the deal, it’s a date, we’ve got to have fun on the date.”

  In the parking lot, Jem watched the two salesgirls float from the car, dresses soft around their legs, hair crystalline under the lights. They giggled at everything.

  At the door, Saiid asked Melvina to pay the cover charge. “I pay you on Tuesday,” he said.

  “Credit card companies charge twenty-one percent interest,” Melvie said, cracking her purse open. “I’ll charge you twenty. Compounded daily.”

  Jem watched the salesgirls string their fingers along the boys’ arms, humming their voices in the boys’ ears like steam. As soon as they got inside, Saiid led Jem and Melvina away from the others into a quieter section and took out a checkbook.

  “Okay,” he said, writing. “Here we goes.”

  Melvie put her hand up. “Wait a second,” she said. “That’s not necessary. The agreement is for Tuesday payment.”

  “Hey, hey!” he laughed. “Is not for that, is for fun! On our date!” He tore the check out of the book and handed it to her. It was made out for two thousand dollars.

  Jem and Melvie looked at the check, then at Saiid.

  “It’s good, these check,” he said. “They knows me here, these bartender dude, he cash for you easy. So you go have fun, me and Kier go have fun, is a good, fun-time date, okay? Okay.”

  Jem watched Saiid fade slowly, walking backward, his smiling face receding like an eclipse of the moon, until he was lost in the lighting and crowds. Melvie’s face was set, eyes and mouth drawn into fierce lines. “We’ll see about this.”

  She presented the check to the bartender, who took one look at it and burst out laughing. “This is from the Rubber Chicken Boys,” he said. “Everything they touch bounces! I’ll give you two bucks for it—I’d love to frame this over my cash register as an original piece of art.”

  Melvie reclaimed it, saying she’d need it for evidence. “Passing fraudulent checks,” she said, slipping it into her purse. “The FBI will get my full cooperation.”

  Jem was ready to call it a night, but Melvie stood firm. They had to stay until midnight, she said, so that it would technically be considered a full evening. “We’ve come this far,” she said, pointing to the neon clock above the bar, which read a little after ten. “It would be like walking halfway across the desert then walking back again.”

  “So what’s so big on the other side of the desert?” Jem grumbled, but she let Melvie buy her a drink. The only open table overlooked the dance floor; from there they watched Kier and Saiid drinking and working through an endless variety of women. They started with the salesgirls, went on to two others, then two others, and so on. The dance floor pumped with music, people rising and drifting on tides of it, hair and clothes becoming kaleidoscopic, and Kier and Saiid turning at the center of it all.

  The boys found their cousins again after an hour or so, during a break in the music. “Hey, dudes!” Kier shouted; Saiid appeared to be holding him up. They fell into seats simultaneously. “When did get you here? Where I knows you from?” Kier said.

  Saiid breathed whiskey into Jem’s face. “So is this a fun-o date or what about it?”

  “Well, if it isn’t the Rubber Chicken Boys,” Melvina said, swirling her drink.

  “How is this?” Kier said. “You—you look like someone,” he said to Melvie, leaning back so far in his chair Jem doubted he could see her. “Holy baloney! Just like Mama!”

  Saiid looked at Melvie. “No way. No no no no no way, man.”

  “Will you marry me?” Kier asked Melvie.

  “Hey, I tells you what!” Saiid said. “He’s so true. We needs wives, man, for this side; we already have for the Old Country.”

  “Have what?” Jem said.

  “Wives, man! We got wives, babies, a black Trans Am, everything there is in Jordan!”

  The sisters looked at each other. Melvie’s eyes were sharp. “Does your father know about this?” Melvie asked.

  “Oh, mans!” Saiid shouted and then for some minutes the two boys were laughing and saying “Oh, mans!” over and over again. When he finally regained control, Saiid told them, “He knows more about it than we do. He say, wives, wives, the more wives, the more like normal dudes we gets. We got to get ones for America. The ones in Jordan are all wore out, man. It’s sad, they’re dragging.”

  Melvie hoisted her purse up from the back of her chair and produced pen and paper. “All rightie,” she said and directed herself to Kier whose mouth had gone slack and who seemed to have entered a trance while the music and lights boiled around him.

  “You want to marry me?” she asked. Jem looked at Melvie, a dart of worry.

  Kier nodded, his mouth an open slot, eyes hanging upon her face.

  Melvie pushed the pen and paper at him. “There, write it there!” she said. “And sign it, bub.”

  Kier took up the pen, and Saiid, in slow motion, tried to intercept him. “No, wait, man,” he said. “Wait, it’s a trick—I never see it like this before, on napkins, man—”

  Melvie only shrugged, eyes lowered, and Kier was not to be put off. With drunken single-mindedness, he brought pen to paper.

  “Oh, mans,” Saiid moaned. “Now you do it, now you put us in the bed you made.”

  Chapter 28

  THE BALL WAS suspended in air by two opposing arches of water. The Moyers Corners firemen were playing Baldwinsville, each side trying to maneuver a ball over the opposite side of the wire with their hoses.

  “This, my friend,” Fouad said, indicating the game, “is so sad and boring.”

  Matussem was transfixed, watching the ball upon its ruffle of water, dancing on shafts that turned white in the early evening sun. It was almost magic how the ball seemed animated and free floating, and time and again he wished the ball would float endlessly, that neither arc would prevail. But again the ball faltered, tripped over one side of the wire and plummeted, streaming ribbons of water. Then Matussem turned away to face his brother-in-law and felt, suddenly, very tired. “What is it, Uncle Fouad? In the Old Country you have bigger hoses than these, better balls, what?”

  “Old Country, schmold-country,” Fouad said and clapped his hands together. “What kind feast is these? Where the drinks? Where the dancing girls are?”

  Matussem was annoyed; they were just a few feet from the fairway, from snapping whirl-a-gigs, the dive of the roller coaster, the cascade of the Ferris wheel, all the joints and mechanized parts of delight, and just a few doors down, a booth for the Bearded Lady. “This is the fun, Uncle Fouad, here, can’t you even tell? Ya’Allah, this is Moyers Corners on the Four
th of July. It practically a holy day here, every guru and saint in America is out today!”

  Fouad watched a tremendously fat man in overalls eating french fries walk by. “Okeydokey, which one is Mister Tubby there?” he said. “Saint or Imam?”

  Now Matussem was angry. “Mr. Tubby!” he said. “Mr. Tubby know secrets of universe.”

  Matussem’s vexation didn’t last; it was chased away in the thunder of metal rides, the small children rampaging everywhere, the clicks of the Wheel of Fortune. Even Fouad couldn’t help surrendering to the charms of the mob and the greasy air. For the better part of an hour, Fouad fixated on trying to drop a clothespin into a milk bottle. After about eighty dollars worth of chances he won a small, blue toy poodle. Matussem watched him evaluating the prize, turning it over and over, holding it up to the light and sniffing it.

  “Will you give that to Rima?” Matussem asked.

  “My wife? Good heavens, no. Why I am wanting to do that? This my dog. Let her win her own gaddamn dog.”

  Several containers of steamed clams and innumerable beers later, Fouad said to Matussem, “You know what your problem is, O younger brother of my wife?”

  Matussem watched Fouad douse another clam in hot butter. Matussem had stopped several clams back, but Fouad seemed to have limitless capacity, his designer shirt streaked and printed with thick fingers of butter. Matussem was fooling around with his plastic forks, drumming on the table. He remembered that Melvie always referred to the Moyers Corners Firemen’s Field Days as a “bloodbath and a bacchanalia of germs and acting up.” In the carnival music, grinding calliope and loud rock, he heard the call of jazz again, its banner, over the too-loud, wild-eyed fest.

  “Your problem,” Fouad continued, “is fun, yes, children, no. I am meaning, what is it now, Matussem, why you should be holding on these daughters when they should learning to be good girls back in Jordan? Maybe you think they are too grown-up for learning, but never for girls, especially when not married. These no place for them. I tell you what, I stay here, give one my return ticket and I buy another for other girl. They keep my wife company, give her someone new to scream at. Ha ha! I even tell you what—I give you a ticket to go, too. Time for your sisters to find you new wife. Now Goobert Abdel Sesame is even there to help. I send him last week to watch business and so my wife doesn’t blow a gasket. It’s time for you, Matussem, time to put family back where it belong.” He pointed openly at a woman in a flannel shirt and a headful of pink curlers. “Degenerates! You are wanting your daughters to be around degenerates, I guess? These daughters without the saint-arms of a mother?”

  Matussem scuffed at the gravel beneath his feet; above their heads the tent canvas billowed with wind. He ran one hand back through his hair so it stood up like exclamation points, then looked at Fouad’s shrewd face, unreadable as a pork belly. It was almost impossible for Matussem to think fondly of his old home through the smudge of years, the sense of poverty, so many lonely sisters, the social restrictions that kept them home. The loneliness had welled up in his mother’s stunned eyes. Did Fouad know something Matussem didn’t know? He looked now, full of clams and Budweiser and sun, as if he’d been born at the beginning of time. He looked like a caveman, from his hunch over the salt potatoes to the territorial way his hairy hands curved around the clams, threading them with salt and butter and eating a containerful at a time.

  Fouad was opening his mouth again either to make a big pronouncement or swallow a contingent of clams, the black hole sliding wide, teeth stumped as horse molars, when a woman sidled up to their table and picked up Fouad’s poodle.

  “A stuffed poodle—cute, cute,” she said, turning it over.

  Fouad snatched the poodle and clutched it to his chest, snapping, “Get back!”

  The woman looked immobile as a mountain. Her breasts swelled at the edges of her tube top, gleaming like dolphin flesh. Her jeans were too small, left half-zipped at the fly. A leather jacket was slung over one shoulder, and a studded dog collar glinted at her neck. She ignored Fouad and leaned against the table, facing Matussem. “Ooh, honey-child, you’re like chocolate Cream o’ Wheat, you’re a gleam in my eye, I could suck you right up.”

  Matussem smiled down at his hands, staring at the way his fingers held the plastic fork. His face warmed with pleasure and confusion.

  “I say! I say, Miss Big-Fats!” Fouad cried out behind the crescent of her wide shoulders and rippling waistline. “Go away! We are not a charity organization.”

  The mountain-woman creaked her head a quarter inch in Fouad’s direction. “Shut your hole, you ol’ gas-bag.” She turned back toward Matussem, put her hands on her great hips, and said, “Are you related to Nurse Melvina Ramoud?”

  Matussem sat up in alarm. He looked carefully at the woman before him: she looked strong enough to hoist the picnic table over her head. Her jeans were forced open by muscle and bone as wide as the Brooklyn Bridge; the muscles radiated out, suspended from her sternum. The hair that floated from her head changed colors, burnt and opalescent in the late light, and something resembling a bullwhip snaked through the loops of her jeans.

  “What has she done?” he said in a failing voice.

  “Now wait one bloody second—” Fouad said. He attempted to stand, but she put the flat of her palm on the top of his head and held him, for a moment, in mid-crouch. Then he slowly sank back to the bench.

  “Well, shit, she ain’t done nothing,” she said to Matussem, and cracked a smile with a diamond like Fouad’s embedded in her incisor. “Nothing but save the life of one of my best friends and biggest fans—a half-crazed, no-good, lecher rowdy, but well-meaning overall. Well hey!” She slapped Matussem a blow on his back that resounded through his body. Her smile, in that leathery face, was sweet and light as cream. She jammed herself onto the bench and muttered, “Scooch over, Slugbutt,” to Fouad, who grunted, glaring down at his clams.

  “I searched heaven and earth to find you, big boy,” she said to Matussem. “Or, I should say, your daughter. I was thinking of telling her if she ever got sick of nursing she should come on my rig with me and see the country. I could use a partner like her—they just don’t make ’em like that any more—”

  “Rig? Rig?” Fouad grumbled. “What is rig?”

  “Why, it’s that little beauty right over there.” She sat up and pointed. “Y’see that eighteen-wheeler on the front lawn of the Presbyterian church? That baby’s mine and the First National Bank’s. We see the world together, hauling whatnot from point A to point B. You want to go for a ride?” she asked Matussem.

  “No way, José,” Fouad said. “We busy mens, all the time getting busier. We got things to do like you don’t wanta know about.”

  Matussem was looking at the truck. He liked the way it tucked itself so neatly onto that patch of lawn, half-turned like a creature with a crooked neck. The cab was painted with swirls of red that appeared to flame from the windows, a fiery jungle. The side of the cargo box bore the legend Prime Movers.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Matussem said. He looked at her. “How did you find me?”

  She shrugged and dipped her fingers into Fouad’s container of clams. Fouad was turned away from them completely, drinking a can of beer in a sulk. “Hells bells, all Euclid knows you, all twenty-two of ’em. They says, you go looking for Nurse Melvina Ramoud, you better report to Big Daddy Ramoud first.”

  “No way. Really?” Matussem said. “Probably they mean the other way around.”

  Fouad snorted.

  “Oh no, no,” she said. She held another butter-shiny clam above her lips and tilted back her head as if anointing herself, then caught it in her mouth. “Anyway, everybody says, go to the Field Days. Hell, it’s the only show around. This thing has drained the population off six, seven upstate counties. Shit, the only person left in town is some little greaser-ghoul at the gas station. He sent me here and the guy at the clams booth showed me your table—”

  “You see? This is done because of me,” Fouad
said. “They says, ‘Who eats the most clams? Who has the nicest, cutest belly? That is Uncle Fouad!’”

  Matussem stared at this woman, awed. There was something that he recognized in that feather of a smile.

  MATUSSEM AND FOUAD drove home as the evening lowered. Matussem had forgone the chance to ride in the truck, but the memory of the woman stayed with him, slithering through his thoughts: her feather-smile and tough face. The house was dark as they pulled up the driveway. Then he remembered—his daughters were both out, swept away by their cousins; Matussem imagined the places Saiid and Kier were opening to them, halls of seductive music, glimmering veils floating in the air. Perhaps he would never see them again after such a night. He remembered the way his parents had married several of his sisters to men they had never seen before in their lives. As a child, Fatima used to sneak out and take secret looks at the suitors who came to visit, to describe to her sisters. He remembered his sister Lutfea tearing all her dresses to pieces because from Fatima’s perspective in the bushes outside the suitor’s window one of his eyes appeared to be larger than the other. “The evil eye,” Fatima had pronounced at age nine, pulling back one eyelid with her finger. But Lutfea married, despite the deformity that, to Matussem, was invisible. All his sisters married, even Fatima the Terrible. He had never questioned it before: marriage as regular and perfect as clockwork.

  They went back inside together, Fouad belching and swaying from too many clams. Matussem watched Fouad lumber down into the rec room, stomach preceding him. After Fouad disappeared down the stairs, Matussem stood in the doorway. This was not, he thought, a night to stay home alone. He heard the purr of the VCR through the floorboards. Fouad would be watching Oklahoma! Fiddler on the Roof, or Zorba the Greek, movies he’d brought with him from Jordan and continued to watch on a nightly basis. Soon he’d send his usual cable to his wife in Amman saying, “Can’t leave yet. Still needed desperately. Love, Fouad.” Then, as the last strains of “Oklahoma, O.K.” were fading, he’d be off to the strip club.