Does My Head Look Big in This?

by Randa Abdel-Fattah

“Amal Abdel-Hakim!”

  His pronunciation of my surname is commendable.

  “Er . . . yes, Mr Piper?”

  “Hand me that note at once! I will not tolerate students slacking around in my classroom!”

  As any wise student knows, if a teacher intercepts a note-exchanging exercise, you should scrunch the paper up in the hope of smudging the pen and making the words illegible. I scrunch like mad.

  It doesn’t work. I think the pen is one of those brands that dry upon impact with the paper. Stupid efficient stationery. I hand Mr Piper the note and, in accordance with the first lesson in the Diploma of Education which states that teachers must always revel in humiliating and exposing students, he reads it out loud. Adam is blushing like an overheated solar-power system and gives me a sympathetic look. The rest of the class is sniggering. Simone and Eileen flash me supportive smiles. Mr Piper sighs and rolls his eyes at me.

  “Your perception is riveting, Amal,” he says in a bored and sarcastic tone, dropping the note down on my desk. “It’s comforting to know that there are people in my class who have the maturity and intelligence to make derogatory comments about other people’s external appearances.”

  Now what the hell am I supposed to say to that?

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Bloody mind-reader.

  “I’m really sorry, Mr Piper.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was wrong of me to make fun of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s, er, insensitive and hypocritical of me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wouldn’t want people to make fun of me either.”

  “So your remorse is basically based on the fact that you can identify with me? Mere empathy has prompted you to apologize?”

  This is one of those trick questions. I’m sure it is.

  “Um. . .”

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t let me catch you again or you’ll be slapped with a detention.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tia arrives at school the next morning with a bandage on her arm. Two point five seconds in home room and the whole class is forced to listen to her morbid tale.

  “I was assaulted,” she sniffs, wiping her nose with a tissue for dramatic effect.

  “How?”

  “No way!”

  “You poor thing, what happened?”

  “Well,” she says, sitting on her desk and crossing her legs modestly. Not. She’s wearing black undies.

  “I was at Heat nightclub—”

  “But you’re not eighteen yet!” Kristy pipes up. Maybe there was a cushion on the floor beside the cradle after all.

  “I have my ways,” she explains in a smug, coy tone. “I was with my sister and her uni friends.”

  “Ohh!” Some of the girls and guys are thoroughly impressed.

  “So I’m on the podium, dancing with my friends, when this group of Asians comes along to dance next to us.”

  Eileen starts scribbling furiously in her book, channelling all her anger into her pencil, until the lead snaps.

  “We knew they were trouble as soon as we saw them. They just had that look, you know.”

  “What look?” Rita asks.

  “That look,” Tia snaps. “One of them had the nerve to jump up with us on to the podium and started to try to dance real close and dirty with us. We told him to get lost. It was so gross.”

  “No!” Claire gasps.

  “How dare he!” Rita shrieks.

  “This is while you’re on the podium?” Adam asks sceptically.

  “Yes,” she snaps. “Harassment can occur anywhere.”

  “Hmm.”

  She glares at him and turns to her audience, which has grown from Claire and Rita to some other girls and guys who have a love–hate relationship with her (hate her for her looks and bitchiness but would swoon if she said one nice word to them or gave them the slightest bit of attention).

  “There he was with his filthy hands on me and so I slapped him away and then I fell off the podium and hurt my elbow!”

  “Oh no!”

  “You should sue!”

  “Sure it wasn’t your heels you tripped over?” Josh mutters to Adam. Tia ignores them.

  “Honestly, nightclubs are just infested with trouble-making gangs now. I avoid going out to them any more because of the kinds of people who go. It’s like an invasion of—” She darts a look at Eileen but doesn’t continue, knowing her message has been delivered.

  “My dad’s right, you know,” she continues smugly. “He predicts Anglo-Australians will be extinct in this country, soon!”

  She glances sidelong at us and I demonstrate to the class how quickly the skin can turn from white to volcanic red. I’m about to say something. Eileen is about to say something. Simone and Adam both show signs of saying something. But we don’t have to because Josh speaks up instead.

  “Well with the number of people you sleep with you should be capable of fixing that dilemma and populating an entire town.”

  Totally crude. Totally offensive. Totally vulgar.

  We can’t stop grinning.

  34

  We’re invited to a family friend’s wedding on Friday night. My parents know the bride’s parents from way back when I was still in nappies. We haven’t really kept in contact, but my parents met them at a mutual friend’s house several months ago and got an invitation soon after.

  There are about four hundred and fifty guests, and it’s being held at an enormous reception hall overlooking a lake that looks like a flow of sparkling lemonade. There are four singers performing throughout the night and a ten-piece band. There are ten people in the bridal party.

  Apparently it’s a small wedding. That’s according to some of the guests who love weddings because it gives them a chance to hog all the food while scanning the hall filled with their family and friends in their mission to detect any backstabbing ammunition. We call them the Wedding Gossipers. They’re notorious for going on wedding crawls, attending one wedding after another, sucking up (or creating) fresh rumours, then regurgitating them.

  Tonight’s wedding should make them salivate. The bride is Syrian and the groom is Afghani. Of course, the big mouths are lapping it up, having a field day with their hushed “You didn’t hear it from me, but. . .”

  The bride, Amina, met Hosnu when he was in the last year of his temporary protection visa. She’s a migration agent and they met at the asylum seeker centre she works at. It’s all pretty simple from there. They fell in love and got engaged. So the Scandal Scavengers are dribbling with glee: He’s too handsome for her, proving he only married her for the visa; she’s turning thirty and was well and truly on the descent down the hill; the bride’s family paid for most of the wedding. How shameful, when it’s the man’s responsibility! But I suppose it’s because her parents were just so happy she finally found somebody.

  It all feels a little Bridget Jones, only Amina isn’t the type to sit around in her pyjamas singing songs about loneliness over a bucket of butter popcorn and slab of chocolate.

  Uncle Abdel-Tariq and Aunt Cassandra also know the bride’s family and we’re all seated at the same table. Yasmeen and Omar are here too. After listening to Aunt Cassandra and my mum tell us their wedding-day stories for the billionth time, the MC finally announces that the bride and groom are waiting outside the doors of the reception and asks us all to stand. Then the drums and flute start to go wild and the singer begins in an enthralling, intoxicating voice, which makes my heart bounce around inside me with excitement and anticipation. My mum and Aunt Cassandra are beaming, and my dad and Uncle Abdel-Tariq are sticking tissue into their ears, grinning sheepishly. Tissue plugs are an age-old tradition for them whenever they face over-enthusiastic amplifiers at weddings. My mum and Aunt Ca
ssandra are mortified.

  A group of people, mainly extended family members and close friends, stand around the entrance, clapping in rhythm with the music as they wait for the doors to open. The drums beat passionately and I can feel them – thumping inside my skin. Then suddenly the doors open and we all gasp as the bride and groom enter, their faces glowing like two lighthouses.

  They move slowly down the red carpet as the band plays around them and the singer performs. People start to dance a Syrian form of the dabke, where you hold hands and move in a circle, stepping and kicking and twisting your feet in complicated but graceful ways. Every time I go to a non-Palestinian wedding and my mum pushes me on to the dance floor and tells me to stop being so shy, I end up looking like the daggy, confused girl. At Palestinian weddings I’m a pro. It’s just that everybody has their own adaptation. The Lebanese have a version, the Syrians, the Turkish. Even within each nationality there are versions of each version so I always perform a standard one step, one kick, which usually gives me a bare minimum pass (it also works at Greek and Jewish weddings).

  I’m clapping to the music and my hands are red and sore but I’m having too much fun to care. I catch Amina’s eyes and smile widely at her, mouthing out “Mabruk”, congratulations. Hosnu is grinning like a man who has been given a new chance at life. My mum and Aunt Cassandra go all teary, even though they’ve probably spoken five words to Amina in their entire lives and have never met Hosnu. My dad sees my mum’s eyes and playfully offers her the tissue in his ear.

  When the bride and groom finally make it through the crowd and take their seats on the stage, the music continues for another forty minutes. Mum’s going all aggro on Yasmeen and me, wanting us to get up and dance. We stand up and rush to the middle of the dance floor, wedged in among the crowd of bodies so nobody sees us. It’s too embarrassing with all the parents watching.

  I love Arabic music and as soon as I’m on the dance floor a wave of energy takes over my body. Yasmeen and I start belly dancing, laughing and singing aloud to the familiar pop Arabic song as we shake our hips and torso in different patterns. After half an hour of belly dancing we link hands in the dabke line. On my right is an old man who is surprisingly more energetic than me and whose hand is seriously grossing me out with its sweatiness. He grins at me and I wonder where his dentures are. His eyes are aqua-blue and he keeps leaning over to me and shouting out “Mashallah” – God be praised – in an admiring voice, confirming to me that he is senile. He praises me on my green eyes, as though they are a product of my handiwork, and shouts over the music to ask me if I’m single. I pretend that I can’t hear him. Except, for someone so old, he doesn’t look fooled for a second and yells out whether I know his grandson, Ramy Salah, who is “well known” and “very popular” because he owns a mobile phone shop on Bourke Street and drives a Lexus. I squeeze Yasmeen’s hand tighter. But she is too busy being interrogated by a tall, broad woman with cherry-red hair, gold bracelets on both arms up to her elbows, and a massive gold cross plunging down her cleavage. Mr Energizer on my right is now asking whether I have a mobile telephone and I tug Yasmeen out of the line. We rush off to the bathroom and explode into a fit of laughter. We gloss our lips, curl our eyelashes, style Yasmeen’s hair, fix my hijab and make sure there’s no toilet paper stuck to our heels.

  “So that old man doing the dabke,” Yasmeen says when we’re back at our table and digging into our entrée. “First set-up attempt?”

  “One down,” I groan.

  “This is my second. The first was in the foyer, when we first arrived. She wanted to know if I was a Muslim, what my TER score was, and did I attend university or technical college. This one now asked me if I was Christian and knew how to cook and speak Arabic. I told her I was a Muslim who could use a microwave and speak a little Urdu, and would that do?”

  “No way!”

  “She totally freaked out. Luckily you dragged me away in time. She looked like she was getting ready to slam her heels into my toes!”

  We spend the rest of the evening perched on a back table, away from the crowd, checking out the selection of guys. We end the night convinced that our short-listed selection are all probably either attached or mummy’s boys. Anybody with white socks and black shoes is immediately disqualified.

  Nobody is free from prejudice I guess.

  35

  The story to my parents is this: Leila’s mum is OK with Chapel Street but her dad is having a hernia, so under no circumstances should they answer the phone in case he rings for an interrogation seminar. If he needs Leila, there’s always the mobile. My dad considers this equivalent to an “accomplice after the fact” (he watched Law and Order last night), as he would be betraying the trust of Leila’s father. I argue that it is Leila’s mum’s business what she hides and doesn’t hide from her husband, and who are we to interfere in their marital relationship?

  Yasmeen and I are pulling a shifty very badly but we’ve got no choice. It’s either that or Turkish matchmaking chat room.

  I’ve been in front of the mirror for three hours. No kidding. My entire wardrobe is on my bed and floor. I’ve decided that I hate all my clothes. Everything. I am a girl with nothing to wear. To make matters worse, I put on liquid eyeliner and it smudges. That’s when I go berserk. I mean, I’m wearing a hijab, so if my face doesn’t look good, what hope have I got? A good manicure? I attack my eyelids with cotton buds but that only makes it worse. My eyes are black and puffy now. Great. I feel well and truly hideous and all I want is to sit on the couch with a packet of Tim Tams and watch back-to-back episodes of Survivor.

  I feel a teeny weeny bit better after I throw my clothes at the wall, have a bit of a cry and scream at my mum to leave me alone and not to dare enter my room. I eventually scrub my face and start all over again.

  It takes me ages to finally look semi-decent. I’ve highlighted my eyes with eyeliner and mascara, applying some lipgloss and a touch of blush. Yasmeen will be proud. I decide on a baby-pink chiffon hijab with a white cotton headband underneath. I’ve draped the hijab loosely around my head so that the headband shows, flicking the tail ends over my shoulders and clasping them together with a brooch I bought from a funky jewellery shop on Bridge Road. I go for a long, straight black skirt, a soft-pink fitted cashmere top and pink heels. It’s clearly all very centrefold. I still feel ugh, but if “I feel like a supermodel” is ten and “Even my mum would think I’m ugly” is one, then I’m hovering on five. There is no way I’d enter Chapel Street on a Saturday night on a score of one to four.

  My mum takes photos of me before the girls arrive. She’s gushing that I look like a Barbie doll, with obvious reference to Toy World in Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

  Leila’s brother, “Sam”, drops her off at our house and my mum answers the door. Thank God he’s got the manners of a goat because he doesn’t bother to say hello, just speeds off in his red 180SX. From the front door I can see the dice hanging down from the rear-view mirror and the “No Fear” sticker covering his back window. His arm is dangling out of the car window, his techno music doof doof doofing, on the assumption that the next few streets are dying to share in his bad taste.

  Leila looks stunning. She has massive, doe-shaped brown eyes with a jungle of thick brown eyelashes. She’s outlined her eyes with eyeliner and they’re so bright and dazzling we should be able to use them as headlights. She’s wearing a black silk veil, with a red headband underneath. She’s got on a wrap-around red dress, which she’s put on over black fitted trousers and red heels. My mum takes one look at her and finishes half a roll of film.

  When Yasmeen arrives she starts yelping and squealing, hugging and kissing us, overjoyed that we’ve opened our make-up bags. Her hair is straightened and kicked out at the back and she’s wearing a three-quarter-length black dress.

  “You two look gorgeous!” She puts her night bag in the hallway. She’s staying over tonight but her bag could
probably supply her for a week.

  My mum drives us to Chapel Street. We want her to drop us off at a side street because we don’t want to look like utter morons – but she goes all “you’re ashamed of your own mum” on me and so I let her take six solid minutes to parallel-park in front of a packed-out fruit juice shop directly outside the Jam Factory complex.

  We make quite an entrance in the restaurant. It is beyond embarrassing.

  We sit down at a booth and it’s one of the best nights the three of us have spent together. Leila is relaxed and uninhibited, cracking jokes and talking about anything and everything but never once mentioning her family. They are irrelevant tonight. As we’re eating our chicken and mushroom pastas Yasmeen announces that it’s present time and Leila starts to blush.

  “You guys didn’t have to—”

  “Leila!” Yasmeen moans. “Don’t go all shy and modest and I don’t need presents on us. It’s your birthday! Use and abuse!”

  Leila grins. “OK, fine. What did you get me?” she asks.

  When Leila has opened the wrapped jewellery box, her eyeballs start to pop in and out like a reversible slinky.

  “It’s stunning,” she whispers, holding up a white-gold chain and oval locket.

  “Read the inscription,” I tell her. “Sorry about the font size, we had to fit it in.”

  Leila opens the locket up and reads it aloud: For your strength & faith, you inspire. Y & A.

  We have a bit of a Kodak moment and hug each other. After an hour the cheesecake arrives and while we’re stuffing our mouths, arguing about how many minutes you need on the treadmill for every bite, Leila lets out a startled cry and drops her spoon on the table.

  Hakan is standing at the front door, next to a girl wearing a mini denim skirt, black knee-high boots and a top as thin as tissue. It’s funny how your brain thinks of the dumbest things at the wrong time. My first reaction isn’t where they’ll be burying Leila. Instead, I’m actually wondering whether that girl realizes she makes Jessica Simpson look like a brain surgeon, walking around like that when it’s fourteen degrees outside. Then the reality of the situation hits me so hard I have to spit my mouthful of cake into a napkin.