She was on my passenger side, so I unbuckled my seat belt, leaned across the seat, and groped for the handle to open the window. I rotated the crank, slowly and painfully, counterclockwise. The window jerked down in spurts, as stubborn and recalcitrant as my three-year-old in the backseat. When I had worked my window into its slot, I sat up, brushing away the hair that had fallen in my face. The other mother cocked her head slightly and said, with a hint of awe, “Wow! I didn’t even know they made cars like that anymore!” If only I’d had power windows at that moment, I could have coolly drawn a barrier between us with a touch of my fingertip.
Later, at the bank drive-through, I admired how the other cars’ windows slid gracefully open, like curtains before a performance. At night, I dreamed of windows that closed effortlessly, saving me at the last moment from attackers. I became convinced that my manual windows were giving me carpal tunnel syndrome. If only I had a car with power windows, life would be good.
But how would I convince my husband that a new car was an urgent necessity? We had discussed purchasing one when Aliya was born. In the first raw weeks after her birth, when I was too scared even to carry my infant downstairs for fear of falling, I’d insisted we needed a safer vehicle. But Ismail—the same man who went to our daughter’s crib throughout the night to check on her breathing and murmur a prayer over her sleeping body—balked at the suggestion that buying an expensive car was part of being a responsible parent.
In the mud hut on the coast of Libya where he had been raised, families collected water from a common well and filtered the larvae from it through empty flour sacks before giving it to their children to drink. By the time he was a teenager, the sound of his mother wailing in labor was as familiar to him as her haunting moans of grief; she had buried five children. Three faint gray lines were visible at the center of Ismail’s chest—the last traces of a tattoo his mother had given him when he was a child, slicing his skin and filling the wounds with ash, to protect him from evil spirits. That was his health insurance.
In the suburban tract housing development where I had lived in Southern California, we displayed NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH stickers in our windows and children didn’t talk to strangers. Though the names of all the developments rapidly colonizing the inland hills were Spanish, the only Mexicans we children knew of were the ones who migrated north through the canyons, moving in quiet packs in the dark. We knew these Mexicans were real because when we ventured into the ravines, farther than our parents permitted us to go, we sometimes found their tattered blankets and the charred remains of their campfires. We feared these dark, dusty apparitions and made the same mistake as many of our parents did: we confused poverty with evil.
During my pregnancy, Ismail and I had traded tales of our childhoods, captivating each other with descriptions of our “exotic” backgrounds. I described earning my pancake-flipping badge at summer camp; he recalled reciting the Qur’an to a blind imam at the local tribal mosque after school. We reminisced about our first jobs: mine, at Baskin-Robbins at age sixteen, to earn money to satisfy a voracious clothing appetite; his, at age five (for no money at all), stocking the shelves of his father’s tiny shop in the village market. We imagined that we had escaped unscathed from the hazards of our respective childhoods and would now build a bright new life together, one that combined the best of American freedom and Middle Eastern tradition. But Aliya upended all those idealistic thoughts.
Some aspects of American parenting thrilled Ismail—such as the first-class university hospital, five minutes from our house, to which our health insurance gave us easy access. But most middle-class parenting rituals mystified him. He could not understand why I spent hours on the Internet, looking up recalls on baby cribs and car seats. He questioned my using hypoallergenic detergent on every cloth item that came in contact with our daughter. He refused to plug in the baby monitor I’d purchased for our small home. When I came back from the store with the entire series of Baby Einstein videos, he seemed skeptical of claims about the beneficial effects of classical music on developing minds. He was deeply suspicious of the idea that being a good parent meant making the right purchases; that with enough money, we could protect our children from the pain and ugliness of the world.
When it came to cars, Ismail felt the best way to reduce risk was to drive less, that a good car was one that was paid for and reliable. Both of our vehicles met these criteria. Besides, my husband loved his car. He shook his head scornfully at other drivers, wondering aloud why more people didn’t own a vehicle like his. When he was feeling exceptionally magnanimous toward Aliya, he would tell her that maybe, just maybe, he would give it to her one day.
His pride and joy was a 1986 Toyota Tercel. Its paint was chipped, its cracked vinyl upholstery was held together by duct tape, and remnants of bumper stickers from the eighties still clung pitifully to its rear end. I should have taken comfort in his display of loyalty. Instead it annoyed me. When I parked this car amid a sea of Volvo wagons and SUVs at my daughter’s preschool, I felt a burning shame.
According to the commercials, a new car came with an overhaul to the buyer’s self-esteem—but not for my husband. Looking at his reflection in the gleaming paint job, he saw only a materialistic sucker mired in unnecessary debt. In his mind, to value something that was old and flawed was a sign of integrity. In our consumer-driven culture, which promised to erase all signs of age and decay for a price, it was also an act of defiance. His car had more than two hundred thousand miles on it. Its market value was irrelevant, because he had no intention of selling it. He was committed till the bitter end. When it could no longer exceed fifty miles an hour, he adjusted his driving route accordingly. When the air-conditioning died, he drove stoically through a steaming North Carolina summer. Not even the August heat wave that melted a videotape to his dashboard would make him consider a replacement.
When Ismail talked about his car, his voice softened, as if he were talking about an old friend, one who came into his life long before I did. It made me uncomfortable; Ismail and this car shared a bond I could not completely understand. And I knew that I could never ask my husband to choose between the two of us—if I did, I would be a sorry, lonely woman. But I was not asking him to give up his car. I wanted to replace mine. He listened carefully to my argument. He looked skeptical as I described my parking-lot shame, my power-window dreams, and the repetitive-stress injuries to my wrists. But he could feel the force of my desire. So instead of trying to talk me out of it, he agreed to begin shopping for a new car.
We found ourselves in a vast used-car lot, scrutinizing a midsized sedan as if it were a work of art.
“Do you love it?” Ismail asked me. “Because if you do, let’s get it.”
I walked around the car one more time, trying to determine whether this was the one that would banish my shame and quell my desire. I looked under the hood. I sat inside and examined the interior. It met all my criteria. But nothing about it—not even the power windows—made me feel anything close to love. All I felt was a growing awareness that I was going to get what I’d asked for—and that it would cost me more money than I’d ever spent on a single purchase in my life.
“You decide,” Ismail said. “It honestly makes no difference to me.” He made a sweeping gesture across the row of cars before us. “All these cars look the same.”
My eyes landed on a late-model foreign sports car with sleek lines and a gleaming hood. Next to it, a rusty American car with a crumpled fender bulged out of its parking space. The first auto brought to mind a drive down a winding Tuscan road at sunset, en route to a mountaintop wine tasting. The second screamed claustrophobic American poverty: sitting in a traffic jam on the way to Wal-Mart, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. To Ismail, though, they were both just metal boxes on wheels. In that instant, I glimpsed the lifelong challenge of our marriage: I assumed we saw the same thing when we observed the world, but our interpretation of what we were looking at would never be the same.
We bought the car. Thousands of dollars, representing years of savings, flew from our hands in an instant, and in exchange I got a used car that seemed safer and smelled faintly of a family I didn’t know. On the way home I tested the power windows, watching them glide up and down. In my new car I no longer felt as if I was in exile from the American middle class. I was able to slip unnoticed through the gates of affluence and back into that neighborhood where most of what glittered was borrowed: our houses, our cars, even the clothes we wore. In my rearview mirror I could see Aliya strapped into her car seat, her round face turned to the window, contemplating those speeding metal boxes, the sea of asphalt and steel, the endless storefronts of strip malls. “There are two slaves in a consumer society,” writes priest and activist Ivan Illich: “the prisoners of envy, and the prisoners of addiction.” In my spacious new car, with traffic pressing in on me from all sides, I felt trapped.
9 Gifts
Early one morning in September, when our house was pitch dark, Ismail sat upright at the first sound of his alarm, dressed quickly, and left our bedroom. After I made my way downstairs for a cup of coffee, I found him standing at the counter, stuffing the last of his breakfast into his mouth, his eye on the clock as if he were competing in a pie-eating contest at the fair. The minute hand clicked forward, and on cue, Ismail dropped the food he held.
For the next month, nothing would touch Ismail’s mouth between sunup and sundown. Not food. Not water. Not my lips. A chart posted on our refrigerator told him the precise minute when his fast had to begin and end each day.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the lunar calendar, the month during which the Qur’an was revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Each year, more than one billion Muslims observe Ramadan by fasting from dawn to dusk. In addition to avoiding food and drink during daylight hours, Muslims are expected to refrain from all other indulgences: sexual relations, gossip, evil thoughts—even looking at “corrupt” images on television, in magazines, or on the Internet. Ramadan is a month of purification, during which Muslims are called on to make peace with enemies, strengthen ties with family and friends, cleanse themselves of impurities, and refocus their lives on God. It’s like a monthlong spiritual tune-up.
Fasting was easier for Ismail when he lived in Libya, surrounded by fellow Muslims. Everyone’s life changed there during the fast: people worked less (at least those who worked outside the home), took long naps during the day, and feasted with family and friends late into the night. Now, with a corporate job and an American wife who worked full-time, he experienced Ramadan in a totally different way. He spent most of his waking hours at work, just as he did every other month of the year. He still picked up our daughter from day care and shared cooking and cleaning responsibilities at home. Having no Muslim friends in our southern college town, he broke his fast alone, standing at our kitchen counter. Here in the United States, Ramadan felt more like an extreme sport than a spiritual practice. Secretly I had come to think of it as “Ramathon.”
I tried to be supportive of Ismail’s fast, but it was hard. The rules seemed unnecessarily harsh to me, an American raised in the seventies by parents who challenged the status quo. The humility required to submit to such a grueling, seemingly illogical exercise was not in my blood. In my family, we don’t submit. We question the rules. We debate. And we do things our own way. I resented the fact that Ismail’s life was being micromanaged by the chart in the kitchen. Would Allah really hold it against him if he finished his last bite of toast, even if the clock said it was a minute past sunrise? The no-water rule seemed especially cruel to me, and I found the prohibition against kissing a little melodramatic. I was tempted to argue with Ismail that the rules were outdated, but he had a billion Muslims in his corner, whereas I had yet to find another disgruntled American wife who felt qualified to rewrite one of the five pillars of Islam.
When Ismail told me stories about his childhood, it was as if he were reading from an ancient, hardbound storybook about an exotic land where the wailing of women was as constant as the howling wind, where children died like stray kittens from diseases I had never heard of, where the thirsty sucked water through cheesecloth to avoid parasites that could colonize the human body and emerge later as worms as long and thick as a pencil. When they were struck with illness, families journeyed for days to Sufi shrines in the desert, where they pleaded with long-dead saints for a cure.
My childhood memories were equally strange and unsettling to him. Like this one: one evening when I was a child, a few days before Christmas, my family sat at the dinner table. I was five, my sister seven. Just as we were finishing our meal, the conversation turned to Santa Claus. What was he doing right now? my father wondered. Maybe putting in a late night at his workshop—and what time was it at the North Pole, anyway? He shook his arm; his watch slid down his wrist. As he was calculating the time difference between San Diego and the North Pole, a booming knock on our front door made us all jump. No one ever stopped by our house during dinnertime.
My dad’s eyes grew wide. “I wonder who that could be?” he asked, locking eyes with my mother. When he swung the door open, my sister and I gasped: there on our stoop, wiping his shiny black boots on our frayed welcome mat, stood Santa Claus himself, in a red suit so rumpled and worn it must have been around the world and back.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he bellowed, his voice ricocheting off our living room walls.
It was an awkward introduction, but my mother, who is a master at making other people comfortable, took it in stride. She smiled pleasantly as she stood up from the table. “Hello, Santa, would you like to come in?” As if Santa were our neighbor stopping by to borrow an onion instead of a global celebrity who held the desires of children everywhere in the chubby palm of his hand.
Santa waddled across the room and heaved himself into my dad’s favorite chair. Patting his thigh, he gestured for me and my sister to come to him. I looked down at the half-eaten meal on my plate and then back at him. Before he arrived I would have given anything for a one-on-one consultation, but now I wasn’t so sure. He had massive, candy-apple red felt arms, bloodshot eyes, and a wiry beard that was yellow at the edges and slid up and down his face when he spoke.
Hovering close together just beyond reach of his broad, hairy hands, my sister and I nervously recited the list of everything we wanted for Christmas. Then I turned to the window, scanning our front yard for that reindeer with the glow-in-the-dark nose and all the rest of them. All I saw were our own toys scattered across our overgrown front lawn. My neighbor’s car rolled slowly into his driveway, tires crunching over gravel, the engine shuddering and sighing to a halt in the garage. There was no sign of a sleigh anywhere. Santa explained that he’d left his reindeer at the gas station around the corner. “For a fill-up,” he added, with a chuckle and a wink. He did smell faintly of gasoline. He wagged his finger at us and told us to be good, and after my mother had taken a few pictures, he disappeared as abruptly as he had arrived.
After I told Ismail this story, he was disturbed and full of questions. Who was that man in your living room? What was it like to place your faith in an obese man in a furry red suit? The whole idea of Christmas as a day of reckoning for children, and salvation as a pile of presents beneath the tree, made him anxious. He knew Christmas was important to me, but he had no idea why. He could sense that the stakes between us grew high during the holiday season, so he decided to proceed very cautiously.
“I’m happy to celebrate Christmas with you—please just explain to me what it means to you and how to honor the occasion.”
He spoke reverently, as if Christmas were a sacred holiday—and it was, but not in the way he imagined. The high stakes of the season had nothing to do with the afterlife and everything to do with the real and immediate possibility of our home turning into a living hell if he failed to embody the so-called Christmas spirit. Everything depended on his ability to access that elusive state. So he tackled the problem like a sci
entist, believing that once he could identify its elements and composition, he could reproduce it at will. But the Christmas spirit could not be reduced to a laboratory experiment or a mathematical formula; nor did it lend itself easily to a clear definition.
It had to do with a cut tree in the center of our living room, its branches bent under the weight of ornaments and blinking lights, its trunk girdled with brightly wrapped presents; velvety, oversized socks hanging from the mantel and weighed down with chocolate or mints or bars of soap. It had to do with a particularly flattering family photo, signed and mailed to friends and family; a reindeer with an electrified red nose and a lawn covered in colorful lights. But these elements, however essential, were not enough to make the holiday successful. A twinkle in the eye, a generous impulse, a burst of good cheer were required. If it was difficult to remain in good spirits while fasting during Ramadan, it was exponentially more so to remain cheerful during the Christmas season, in the mad rush of shopping and wrapping and baking and decorating and recovering from a hangover and mailing and receiving and thanking and returning for store credit.
Having always been surrounded by people who celebrated them the same way I did, I had never thought too much about holidays. I had never imagined I would have to explain the significance of chocolate bunnies that laid caramel eggs in nests of shredded green plastic each Easter, or the blazing smile of the jack-o’-lantern on Halloween, or the tree that rained dry green needles onto the living room carpet each December. Each time he posed a question, I felt a sharp loneliness. Explaining these rituals was not easy—especially to such a serious student as Ismail, so eager for symbolism and meaning, so quick to assume that holidays had something important to do with God or history or nature. It was difficult for him to understand holidays untethered from meaning and drifting in an ocean of desire and delight.
My Accidental Jihad Page 6
