Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He would make himself return, to please his daughters, his relatives, but most of all to get to that pinpoint of anxiety and longing inside his brain, the skip in his dreams, the whisper that it was all a mistake, that he was in the wrong place, that he never would be at home here.

  He would leave his green-sided hills and dairy valleys, his country of surprise and transformations. He’d seen a picture of the South Dakota badlands once, a place where the earth crumpled around snaking depressions, peaks and ridges flash-tipped white, clawed-out scoops. Everywhere was veined white, the mountains shining. This was hidden treasure to him, a place that he had wanted to see. Yet now he would leave it and who knew if he would ever return?

  AMERICA WAS THE place where his world began, away from the webs of family. In the new, wild western country, family flew into particles, relatives moved, changed courses, sifted around each other like the snow, the amazing interwoven flakes sweeping off the belly of Ontario that meteorologists called “lake-effect.” It was the lake-effect family that swept together and meshed in the icy blasts. It was all they could do to lock hands against the whirling air. It shocked him awake; it was so dangerous to create a new kind of family, to be so vulnerable to the elements. This was the kind of living he had come to want for himself, the choice to live together, to love.

  THAT AFTERNOON, THEY drove to the airport. Matussem appeared to be wearing every piece of clothing he owned—a three-piece suit, an ascot, an overcoat, a scarf, overshoes, gloves, and a gray felt fedora he’d bought on his honeymoon in Atlantic City in 1960. Melvie kept shooting angry glances at him in the rearview mirror she’d pointed directly at him. Matussem positioned himself at the center of the backseat, hands on his knees, chin pointed up. “Are you trying to convince all the relatives that you’re in the Mafia?” Melvie asked, halfway there. Jem resisted turning around to look at him.

  Matussem cleared his throat and adjusted his hat.

  “It’s August first!” Melvie said. “It’s eighty-four degrees out. You’re going to the desert. So now you’ve decided to give yourself heat stroke, just to provoke me.”

  Matussem coughed a dry little noise and pulled the edges of his coat lapels more closely together. “These my threads, can’t go no places without threads.”

  Melvie was having second thoughts about the whole trip. The day before she’d given her father diet cards with long lists of foods he was not, under any circumstances, to touch. She’d also given him a paramedic’s first-aid kit, full of things like surgical thread and booster shots for malaria, hepatitis, and typhus—especially typhus. Earlier today Jem had found the kit stashed beneath her own bed.

  When Jem had asked Matussem about taking his drums he’d said, “It’s okay, they are wait for me. I have try to go these ones alone.”

  Later, when they were leaving, the creamy surfaces of the drums, like lotuses floating on the water, were the last things she saw when she turned out the basement light.

  AT THE GATE, Melvina went over a specially prepared list of flying essentials prepared by the Flight Attendant Guild of America: mystery novel, flashy magazine, gum and candy to clear the Eustachian tubes, a toothbrush for after gum and candy, celery sticks, decongestants in case of increased cabin pressure, motion sickness pills, a pillow, extra blankets, Melvina’s phone number at work and at the Won Ton à Go-Go, camera, film…

  They all took pictures of each other waving at the door to the ramp, and Melvie said, “See, Dad? It isn’t hard at all. You just walk down that little hallway and get in the plane and look for the seat number on your ticket and get in it and go to sleep. Your feet don’t have to touch the pavement.”

  Matussem gazed at Melvie as she spoke, but he didn’t appear to be taking it in. He walked stiffly to a waiting area seat. Jem thought, with alarm, that he didn’t look quite real—as if he had mentally slipped out another door. His eyes moved, but they were an odd bluish gray, not black; his hair stood up in sweaty spikes.

  “Dad?” Jem said. She looked at Melvie. “I don’t think the flight part is the problem here. He’s nervous about going back there. I certainly would be. All that pressure.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Melvie said. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “Mmm?” Matussem made a buzzing sound, turning his eyes mechanically. One leg was crossed over the other and his suspended foot was tapping out a vivid tattoo against the air. There was a whooshing electric sound and a voice announced boarding. Jem watched the blood in her father’s face fading. His fingers curled, white-marbled around the armrests of his chair, and he whispered, “Girls, girls, I can’t move, something happening here, I am…par-zalyzed….”

  Melvina looked at the door then at her father; she folded her arms. “You’re not going to do this to me right this very second, Mr. Ramoud, because they’re beginning boarding now.”

  Matussem continued staring ahead through the window. Off in the gray wash of the Syracuse morning the planes wheeled, some about to rise, others descending, heavy and cloud-bound in the distance. “Par-za-lyzed,” he whispered. “Can’t hardly move my lips. Can’t go to Jordan, neither.” Both his feet were planted on the floor, hands locked to the armrests.

  The attendant counted off the first set of rows to board.

  “You’re not paralyzed, Mr. Ramoud,” Melvina said. “I work with paralyzed people all the time. You work in an administrative office where you don’t have anything to do with paralyzed people. Frankly, you’re just afraid to stick your head outside your little office tower to learn anything about the world. Believe me, you don’t have the first idea what paralysis is!”

  Matussem kept vigil on the window; he wasn’t taking the bait. “Par-za-lyzed,” he said. “Legs are crumble.”

  They called off the next set of rows to board.

  Melvie smiled and said, “You know, this amuses me. Really. It does. You forget I’m a nurse. I’ve lifted three hundred pounds and more of paralyzed patients. That’s three hundred pounds of dead weight. You want to play games with me, Mr. Ramoud? Think your answer over very carefully. Because if you do, you see, I am prepared to carry you on my back and strap you into your seat. And everybody on the plane, including the pilot and the attendants, will laugh at you.”

  Matussem’s eyes moved just an inch or two in Jem’s direction. “She could does that?”

  Jem thought that might violate some federal aviation regulation, but then she looked at her sister’s face and said, “You better keep in mind who we’re dealing with here. Hey, maybe you’ll have a really great time.”

  Melvie was down on her knees, prying Matussem’s right hand off the armrest. “That’s it!” she said. “I’ve had it.”

  “No, no!” Matussem’s left hand flew over to the right side, and he clutched the same armrest with two hands. He was now half sitting, half crouching. “I won’t do it, I won’t go!”

  “Oh no? Oh no? What won’t you do?” She’d already pried two fingers free. “What won’t you do? Huh?” Her hands were indomitable. Jem grabbed Melvie’s arm. “Don’t break his fingers!” She looked around for airport security, but no one was paying attention, as if this sort of thing happened there all the time.

  They announced final boarding.

  Melvie squeezed her fingers under Matussem’s remaining grip and grabbed his hands before he had the chance to reattach himself. “Ha! Child’s play!” Melvie announced. “Try again? Double or nothing!”

  For a moment the two of them wrestled together, eyeball to eyeball. “So what’s it gonna be, Mr. Ramoud?” Melvie’s hands were locked onto his, her eyes wild, her skin gleaming with the intensity of sheer pleasure; she was smiling, her teeth brilliant. “What’s your game?”

  Matussem’s shoulders fell and Melvie let him straighten as she felt the fight go out of him. He shook his fingers then picked up the fedora that had fallen free during their altercation and put it back on his head. “What you mean?” he said with his eyes wide. “Melvina, you little heartpicker, I was just pulling on your leg
s. Little joke. I going, sure, I going all along. Can’t wait to see family.”

  When he kissed Jem good-bye he whispered in her ear, “Don’t let her kill you. Such crazy fingers.”

  Chapter 30

  IT WAS DOLORES’S time, the hour of death. Illness had invaded her, creeping into her lungs and coloring the air, closing her mouth like a mask; she was a mummy. She was Lazarus, brought back to life just to prove someone else’s point, just long enough to see her death coming.

  They were releasing her from the hospital before the sun was even up. There was no sign of Melvina. The nurses had trundled Dolores into the wheelchair; they said she was well enough to eat, sleep, and move, all on her own. Behind her, back in the room, Lana was saying, “Hey, where you going with her? Hey, she’s sick,” and trying to flash some kind of SOS on the venetian blinds by her bed. Dolores heard the television playing early morning music in the background.

  She knew she would be leaving her sister Peachy behind, the only one of them all she could spare a thought for. Dolores saw herself climbing to the top of their windblown field; it came to her through the walls and mirrors of the hospital as they wheeled her along. She could see it in the eyes of the nurses and orderlies: the broken trailer, the strewn bottles, her muddy feet. She would climb to the top of that field, no matter how they cried and clung to her skirts. She would stand where she could look at the trailer and at Euclid and lay it all down. So she could step out of that body of hers at last, the heavy flesh, the teeth, the hair, lay it aside and go free.

  Chapter 31

  HE RAN HALF bent, hands before him, eyes half lidded, through the brush, the tall shrub, the belly-high fields of tall grass and weeds, cattails and pussy willows. He moved along the back fields, around marshy areas where the land folded into water. He didn’t know why he ran, only that his hands lifted of their own accord, that he sank toward the wind, that the wind pulled on long seams inside him, from his neck to his feet, and he seemed to fly, as he did in his wonderful dreams, night after night, waking with his arms full of air.

  He came to the edge of the field, to a guardrail where the highway started, and walked through the gravel cinders and bristling plants. He crossed at the flashing red light, trying to avoid his boss at the gas station across the street. He was supposed to be at work.

  Ricky Ellis, the homeless boy, the orphan boy. He smiled because he’d made it all up. His father had survived, ridiculously, several bouts of drinking toxic chemicals. His natural mother was long gone. She’d been a fifteen-year-old runaway off the Onondagan reservation in Nedrow when she met his father. Ricky would check himself from time to time for signs of her, the edge of bronze his skin took on in the light, the way his clear eyes would seem to change suddenly and blacken, and something else—there was always something else—shifting inside him, the slant of the bones and muscles in his face, the river-quickness of his limbs, his body running with the currents that forked through upstate.

  He remembered when she had cooked for them, Ricky and however many children were there at the time, his brothers and sisters, his father’s kids from past marriages, overlapping marriages, future marriages. They sat in a crowd around the table, some against the wall, eating canned beans, macaroni and cheese from the box, while their father ate meat loaf—there was only enough for him. There was also the old woman who lived with them. His mother’s mother? She never left the living-room couch. He remembered his father saying the old lady would be a bum if they didn’t keep her off the streets. She saved apple cores, crusts of bread, kept them under her pillow. Sometimes, while the old lady slept, one of the dogs would sneak away from her couch with a steak bone in its mouth.

  He didn’t have a clear memory of that time; he didn’t think it had lasted long. He didn’t know what happened to the old lady. She used to lie flat on her back, turning beads in her hand and saying words that sounded like prayers. They weren’t English words; his father called them crazy-ass words. She never did speak any English, but Ricky liked the sound of her talk. He’d fade to sleep sometimes on the floor by the couch, letting the syllables lull him, as if the words were part of him and his body understood what his mind couldn’t.

  Ricky’s mother was like him, fleet, with a runner’s spirit, yet capable of sitting and playing endless games of solitaire in the kitchen, the bulb over the table rattling with flies. She taught him how to play a game called Napoleon’s Tomb. She kept track of her score on a scrap of paper, and every now and then she would slap her forehead and say, “Oh, ding it, Mary Lu!” That was her name. Mary Lu. The other name, like a whisper, Hínuga. He remembered. She had never talked much.

  He remembered that she used to watch him while they all ate. She herself never seemed to eat; she was tall, thin, and leathery as a piece of beef jerky. She’d hold that black-bottomed frying pan to her chest like a shield and it matched her eyes exactly, black as something burned. He wondered why she stared like that, like she was plotting to swipe him one night, like the old-time Indians used to do, and steal him back to the reservation with her. He thought he might have liked that better than where he did live. Even though the words Indian reservation called to mind a big, fenced-in place, like a fair-grounds, with campfires, tipis, and guards at the entrance. He didn’t care; he wished for a place just for himself and his mother and the old woman.

  In the end, she did run, but without him, and the old lady on the couch was gone soon after. There was no note for him, no souvenir of any kind. No one cooked for them anymore; dishes spilled out of the sink and grew crusts. Their father would cash his workman’s comp checks the moment they came and there’d be a day of good eating—hot dogs and beer and canned sauerkraut and Twinkies—then, nothing but whatever scraps the neighbors could spare. Their father would disappear again.

  After his mother left, the kids ran wild. Nothing could hold them, not foster homes, not detention centers. Some of his half sisters were grown-up by that time, and they took the younger ones in. Ricky lived for a while with his stepmother, Hilma Otts, and her kids. He used to sit on the edge of the back doorstep and look at the garbage that had seemed magically to rise up out of the fields. He was only a kid, maybe eight or nine, but he noticed that some kinds of garbage would break apart and disappear, and some kinds, like beer cans, would roll around and around like tumbleweeds, set adrift across the fields. Years later, when his half sister Dolores Otts set fire to her trailer, he was not surprised. He remembered her eyes when he kicked in the door, craning toward the sky, as if she were drowning, her stacks of magazines, beauty hints, marital advice, and recipe cards, those collected towers of garbage, dried and bound, going up like matchsticks. Those piles had gone to the ceiling. If Ricky hadn’t found the garden hose in time she might have killed herself and all her kids.

  When Ricky was nine his father blew up a car in their backyard with a blast that rocked Euclid, knocking glass out of the windows of Lil’ Lulu’s Garage. Ricky had come running out and saw that the whole rear wall of the house was scorched, bits of ashes and sparks rising from it. The car, a Camaro, which had been up on blocks, was blasted into great shards as if by a giant’s burning hand, pieces rocking and smoking, strewn up and down the street and over the hill. His father was across the yard, sitting, his legs straight out, his eyes white holes in a blanket of soot. The volunteer fire department came and took him away. The next day, kids on the bus said that Jupiter Ellis had been blown to smithereens.

  Ricky didn’t say anything to discourage the story. In fact, he started crying because the idea was so sad and appealing all at once. His father should have died, Ricky thought. He certainly deserved to die, and, once dead, Ricky could relax and begin to like him a little, even to miss him. He had sniffed and wept and worked his way up to a full-scale, fevered wail, which made all the other kids shut up and stare at him in pity. The bus driver, Mrs. Lagarty, with her heavy red arms, had pulled the bus over and yelled, “All right, what the hell’s going on back there now?”

  Ricky ye
lled back, “Nothing, I’m having a heart attack!” And he was so surprised by the way one of his father’s very own expressions had popped from his mouth, in what seemed like such a clever way, that his father stayed dead from then on. Ricky dropped out of school a couple of months later.

  THE OTHER THINGS weren’t true. The things they said about Ricky. He wasn’t bad. Hilma Otts said he was like a kid raised by a pack of wolves. So what was wrong with that? he thought. None of the human beings he knew did such a great job.

  He cut across another lot, this one thick with trees, and into a spray of weeds that he drew back like a curtain with one arm. Through the dried, late-August stalks and pods, he could see her house, the redwood that Max Blemer had built, charging everything to the limit and beyond on his twenty-five new credit cards. Somehow Max had gotten his name on a kind of pre-approved list, even though he had only been the town garbageman and unofficial dogcatcher. He had filled out every single application form he got and received the cards every day in the mail over the course of three glorious months of spending. No one was too surprised afterward when one day the Blemers suddenly weren’t living there anymore, leaving behind the big newly built house, wide-hipped and resplendent in its woods.

  Jemorah and her family lived there now. The day they moved in, Ricky pedaled his half sister Kathy Broom’s bicycle up and down the wide country road that bordered the house, fascinated with the new girl who was nine or ten at the time. Her hair was darker than any he’d seen, except perhaps for the crown of black he remembered edging his mother’s part, beneath a wash of red dye. He circled the house slowly, taking care not to touch the lawn, hiding among the trees, deep in the places where the men came and stuck them for their sap. His mother used to say they were bleeding the trees.