Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  “Oh. Well … it’s okay. I just wanted to know that you’re, you know, that everything’s fine.” There was a brief silence. “So … is it?”

  “Yeah,” Ibrahim said. “Everything’s cool. Just tired. I’ve been putting in some extra hours, that’s all. Taking a few day-shifts on top of the evenings for extra cash. Didn’t leave too much time for sleep.”

  Or to make phone calls to clingy girls who think he belongs to them just because he kissed them a few times, Jada thought, closing her eyes tightly and feeling a resurgence of her previous humiliation.

  “But I was planning on calling you tonight for sure,” Ibrahim continued.

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ …” he said.

  He was about to dump her.

  “I want to come over, meet your parents. That way they’ll know who I am and feel comfortable about it when I come take you out.”

  “What?” The word came out on a puff of breath.

  “It doesn’t feel right. Me meeting you in the city, taking you all the way to the beach, or … kissing you in library parking lots.” There was laughter in his voice. “So, I think I should meet them.”

  “Okay,” Jada said, rushing before he reconsidered or changed his mind. “When?”

  This time Ibrahim’s laughter was fully audible.

  “Before you answer,” he said slowly. “I want you to think about it. And think about, you know, what that means.”

  “What do you mean ‘what that means’?”

  “Me … meeting your parents,” he said.

  Jada bit into her lower lip and took a deep breath.

  Her heart felt like it was kicking its way out of her chest.

  He was right. It deserved some consideration, because thinking about her father and his high standards, and her mother with her old-fashioned ways, this could go spectacularly wrong.

  Or it could be perfect.

  She had never wanted to hide Ibrahim to begin with, and that day at the library only confirmed it. Just watching him walk across the study lounge, she felt an irresistible urge to claim him. And when he offered her and Lisa a ride home, it didn’t feel right to refuse, because she knew he might interpret it as her not wanting her friend to know much about him, when really, she hadn’t wanted him to know much about her friend.

  Lisa, like just about everyone she knew at Crestlawn, was likely to see him as a curiosity and nothing more. And she might even have asked inappropriate or intrusive questions; the kinds of questions that might have scared him off. As it was, the passage of each day this week made her wonder whether he had been scared off anyway, by Kyle’s judgmental stares or the whispers of all those girls in Crestlawn uniforms, huddled in one corner of the room and staring at him.

  But she should have known better. Ibrahim wasn’t likely to be intimidated by anything as trivial as a gaggle of private school kids. And clearly, he wasn’t fazed at the idea of being scrutinized by her parents.

  “Once you think about it,” he continued, “let me know what you come up with.”

  Resisting the urge to say ‘yes’ right away Jada pursed her lips in case the word escaped anyway, without her consent.

  “But … how will I let you know. Since I never know when you’ll call me. Or if you’ll call me.”

  “That’s kind of what I was planning on calling you about tonight.”

  “What was that?”

  “No biggie. Just that I got a pager. So you can reach me whenever. If you beep me, I’ll call you right back. You got a pen?”

  “Yeah …” Jada looked around frantically, grabbing a stub of a pencil from next to the phone book, and then a piece of mail.

  Ibrahim recited the number for his beeper, and she wrote it down, repeating it back to him.

  “If I don’t call you back right away, it’ll only be because I can’t,” he said. “Or, I’m ‘sleep or something.”

  “Okay.” Jada bit back an ever-widening smile.

  “Cool,” he said.

  The line was quiet for so long, she held the phone away from her ear and looked at it, as though that would tell her he was still there.

  “Ibrahim?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” His voice sounded thick.

  “Are you falling asleep?” she asked.

  “Sorry. Yeah. Little bit.”

  “Right. You’ve been doing all those extra hours. I’ll let you go.”

  “Nah, it’s cool. I can talk for a little while more.”

  But she could tell he was saying so with some effort.

  “It’s fine. You should rest. For work. And I have your pager number now, so …”

  “Yeah. So, call if you need me,” he said over a yawn.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. G’night, Jada.” His voice was warm and deep.

  “G’night.”

  She held the phone for a few moments more after he hung up. She was still smiling when she finally replaced the receiver.

  ~~~

  “I don’t do very well with girls.”

  Raj portioned out a mass of greens into which little white cubes were mixed. Then he slid Ibrahim a small bowl of what looked like a red stew, fragrant with spices he could not identify, and finally, another bowl of white rice, except the grains were slenderer than the rice grains Ibrahim was used to with Mexican or Chinese food, and the aroma vaguely floral. Their meals had become full productions lately, with Raj seeming to want to show off now that someone else was sharing the food he cooked.

  “You should trust me by now,” Raj laughed, seeing the suspicion on Ibrahim’s face as he eyed the meal.

  “I trust you,” Ibrahim said.

  “And you’re sure your co-worker doesn’t want to join us?” Raj asked again. “There’s more than enough.”

  “Nah, she’s good.”

  Ibrahim was working the site with Luisa tonight, one of The Mexican Girls. When Raj had come in and offered them some of his dinner as she and Ibrahim were vacuuming one of the rooms that served as a conference or meeting space, she had quickly refused, and been surprised that Ibrahim did not. All the women, when they arrived onsite for a job tended to be reserved and cautious if people were still around, which Ibrahim supposed made sense since the dangers they faced as women doing near-solitary work at night were not to be underestimated.

  But it had become a routine for him, to take a break to eat with Raj whenever he worked the Redwood City house. Often, Raj was working late when the building had otherwise emptied out. And often, Ibrahim found him there when he came in.

  From their first interaction, and in the ones that followed, Raj spoke to him as though there was no difference between them, a cleaner, and a guy who went to Stanford and worked on computers. And from what Ibrahim could see, it wasn’t self-conscious or a self-congratulatory nod toward equality, but a genuine inability to see that any meaningful difference between them. So, Ibrahim liked the skinny young man with the inquisitive eyes and hint of an accent.

  Tonight, when Ibrahim and Luisa had come in, Raj was not alone, but working with a young woman with blonde flyaway hair, and pale skin. She had a loud, brash demeanor that Ibrahim associated with girls from the East Coast and the nasal, grating voice so many of them seemed to have.

  Her hair was in a messy bun with several loose strands floating about her, and she had shoved her eyeglasses up among her tresses. Underneath her unkempt appearance, she might have been pretty, but she wore a boxy, shapeless t-shirt and jeans that were far too large and held up with a tightly cinched black leather belt. It was as though she was deliberately playing down her good looks with poor grooming choices and ugly clothes.

  She and Raj were working on what seemed to be a thorny problem, because she raised her voice in frustration often, and sounded like she was bossing him around. Or maybe he was the source of her frustration.

  By the time Ibrahim had finished with the bathrooms and come back out into the front, she was gone, and Raj had his head down, concentrating on a sheaf o
f papers in front of him. In the slump of his shoulders, Ibrahim could read mild embarrassment at someone else having been there to witness the browbeating.

  Only once they sat down to eat did Raj say—without any prompting from Ibrahim at all—that the young woman’s name was Molly, and that though they worked together, his interest in her went way beyond the professional.

  “I don’t know how to ask her out,” Raj said. “And it doesn’t help that she’s so …”

  “Aggressive?” Ibrahim supplied.

  Raj gave him a look. “You think she’s aggressive?”

  Ibrahim picked up his fork and dug into the greens. “Let’s just say, I wouldn’t be cool with it if my girl came at me like that. Like she came at you.”

  Raj sighed. “That’s the problem … I think that’s what makes me like her. She’s so … self-assured, so confident. She doesn’t seem to have the tiniest impulse to … defer.”

  It was things like this that made him like Raj. There was no one else he could think of, except maybe Jada who would speak a sentence like that to him and believe he would understand it, not just in its literal meaning, but in the meaning beneath the meaning: she doesn’t have the tiniest impulse to defer.

  Ibrahim laughed. “I don’t think the opposite of deferring is cussing you out though.”

  At that, Raj nodded. “I know. But in my culture, women are sometimes taught to behave submissively and it makes it difficult to get to know them. To really know them.”

  “So you think if she pops off at the mouth and puts you down, you’ll know her better?”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds stupid, I admit.”

  “Because it is, man. You need to have a woman who respects you.”

  “Well, maybe if you had to deal with girls who smile and nod, and hold themselves back, you’d be as frustrated as I am.”

  “So, you sayin’ all Indian girls nod and smile?”

  “No, of course not. But the ones my mother chooses for me, yes. So, I guess I find a girl like Molly intriguing.”

  “Having your mother pick your girl might be the real problem.”

  “No doubt about that.” Raj laughed.

  Ibrahim shook his head. “You can find someone better than Molly. Like check this out. I have a girl, right?”

  Ibrahim stopped, realizing that he had been about to describe Jada. Describe her as his girl.

  Raj looked at him expectantly. “You have a girl …” he prompted.

  “I mean … she’s not my girl yet … But she’s a girl I’m talkin’ to. And she’s stubborn and knows what she wants and says it. Boy, does she ever say it. But there’s this other thing about her, like she’s … not only willing, but waiting for me to take the lead. Know what I mean?”

  “Maybe she wants to submit,” Raj said matter-of-factly.

  He shrugged, digging into his meal and taking a mouthful of rice.

  “Submit,” Ibrahim repeated. “What you mean? Like, be like you said, submissive?”

  Grimacing, Raj squinted. “Not quite. Women can learn to behave submissively, but it isn’t who they really are. That’s what I mean about some women in my culture. Some of them are only playing a role. They aren’t given a choice. It’s demanded of them by our cultural norms. But to truly submit is to give, of your own volition, genuine trust to someone who you believe is deserving of it. And who won’t abuse it. It remains in her power, to give that submission, and to take it away.”

  Ibrahim took a bite of his food, almost forgetting to notice and assess the taste. He thought of Jada, how she pushed a little, but only as much as necessary to let him know how far she was willing to go. And then she waited for him to take them the rest of the way.

  “Girls like that, who want to submit?” Raj continued. “They’re rare. They likely have a strong father-figure, someone who has taken care of them, and has never let them down. A man they could safely trust, implicitly. They look for that in a partner. They expect it. They’re not afraid of it.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Ibrahim said.

  He thought of Jada’s nice neighborhood, her nice home and the smooth easiness of her diction. He thought about the way she moved with confidence and comfort, with no expectation that something terrible might be around the corner that might hurt her. Only a protective and loving home cultivated those things.

  And then he thought of Bree and her watchful, cautious manner; the anticipation of a slap, a shove or some other unknown calamity always visible in her eyes.

  Ibrahim shoveled more food in, eating quickly.

  He liked the greens. They had a grassy taste to be sure, but also a little spicy kick as well. And the little white cubes were cheese though he didn’t know what kind.

  He would have liked to sit here and savor and dissect every flavor, but he needed to get back to work shortly. Luisa would resent it if he sat around having a hot meal and philosophical conversations while she emptied trash cans and cleaned toilets.

  “It’s reasonable,” Raj said. “But it’s also something to be careful of. Because with a girl like that, before you accept her gift of submission, the only right thing to do is make sure you are a man who has earned and is worthy of it.”

  21

  Then

  “They’re excited to meet you,” Jada said.

  She was breathing fast, her chest almost visibly rising and falling.

  Sitting in the front room, pretending to read a book, she had been looking out the front bay window, waiting for the familiar car to pull up. When it had, she stood so suddenly her book had spilled onto the floor and she skipped over it, practically running out the front door to greet Ibrahim, stepping outside and holding it ajar so they had a moment of privacy before going in.

  She looked him over now, handsome in his khakis and Tommy Hilfiger button-down, smelling amazing.

  “Excited to meet me?” Ibrahim grinned down at her as she looped her arm through his. “I doubt that.”

  “Well, my mother is. My father is … reserving judgment. But I’m excited. I’m definitely excited.”

  “I can see,” Ibrahim said.

  They paused at the front door, facing each other and while she could feel her heartbeat skittering and skipping in her chest, Ibrahim seemed almost preternaturally calm.

  “Ready?” he prompted, as though she were the one going in to meet perfect strangers and not him.

  Jada nodded and with her hand on the doorknob poised to turn it, remembered something. Getting up on her toes, she pressed her lips briefly to his. Ibrahim returned that pressure with his own, and when she pulled away, he was smiling.

  Just last night she had decided that she would greet him this way from now on and say goodbye this way. To be coy was childish and a waste of time. She would be unashamed of how much she wanted him, and of how important this was to her.

  “Here goes.” She took a breath and opened the door.

  The front room was empty and neat because Jada had herself straightened up this morning, putting away the stray pieces of mail. She moved the newspapers and tennis shoes, and the umbrellas that littered the entryway. She took her sweatshirt, her raincoat, her stray socks back into her bedroom and out of view.

  Her mother watched her do it, a small bemused smile on her lips. She exchanged looks with Jada’s father, but they both said nothing. She knew that they knew then how weighty this meeting was.

  The only thing out of place was the book she had been reading, now lying on its face on the rug.

  Jada hastened to pick it up and when she did, and set it aside, she saw that Ibrahim was giving her a smile not dissimilar to the one her mother had given her that morning.

  “Relax,” he mouthed. “It’s fine.”

  Jada nodded, and took another deep breath.

  “Let me go get them,” she said.

  ~~~

  Timothy Green, Jada’s father, reminded Ibrahim of a school principal. He had the probing eyes of someone who knew you were lying to them but hadn’
t quite figured out about what. When he entered the room and was introduced, Ibrahim saw him size everything up; not only Ibrahim himself, but the way he stood next to Jada, how close he was, how her body seemed to orient ever-so-slightly in his direction.

  Ibrahim would later swear that in those first few moments, Timothy Green had seen some version of his daughter’s future that included the young man in his front room; and he hadn’t much liked it. But he was polite, if a little reserved, and gripped Ibrahim’s hand firmly when they shook, eyes never leaving his face.

  He looked back at the older man just as attentively, seeing the slight wave in his hair, the hook of his nose with the flared nostrils, and the red undertone of his skin. Indian, or part Indian, Ibrahim guessed. It might have accounted for the jet-blackness of Jada’s hair, the hint of burnt sienna in her skin.

  Her mother, whose name was Dinah, had the placid face and serene demeanor of a woman well-loved and taken care of. Her hair, like Jada’s was long and thick and dark. She restrained it at the nape of her neck in a bun that seemed comprised of several braids, wrapped and intertwined with each other. Her blouse and skirt ensemble were plain and topped with a light cardigan. She not only looked like Claire Huxtable, she gave Ibrahim the same benevolent smile that Claire Huxtable always bestowed on the friends of the Cosby kids. He liked her right away, and felt right away that she was leaning in the direction of liking him.

  “What movie are you planning to see?” she asked, when the introductions were done.

  “Sea of Love,” Jada supplied. “Al Pacino.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Green said, nodding. “He’s very good. Everything he’s in is pretty good.”

  “What time does it start?” Mr. Green asked.

  Even that innocuous question sounded like a test.

  “Four-thirty, sir,” Ibrahim said.

  “So you should be back when? About eight?”

  Jada laughed. “Daddy, no. We might hang out after that. I’ll be home by curfew.”

  Mr. Green said nothing.

  “I’ll have her back probably even before that, sir,” Ibrahim said.