The Newlyweds
Page 39
“I made up that girl,” he said suddenly. “I was embarrassed—you bringing up my marriage directly like that. That’s because you’ve been abroad so long.”
She stared at him. One of the broken lights above their heads buzzed suddenly and went on.
“Only two hours until the flight,” her father said. “Imagine if we missed it.”
“You never saw Mokta?”
Nasir shook his head as if he were disgusted. “I didn’t even know there was a girl living there.” He was looking at his gift as if he regretted it. “When you were young, you used to wear clips something like that. At least, I believe you did.”
“She did,” her mother confirmed. “Exactly.”
“It was so long ago—but I thought these might remind you of home.”
That was another thing about the kind of proposal she’d dreamed of receiving. It happened unexpectedly, and you didn’t hesitate for a moment in your answer. Nasir was looking down, and his lashes were so long that they touched the darker skin underneath his eyes. He wouldn’t ask; she couldn’t accept. The seconds were grinding down to nothing right in front of them.
“Yes,” she said, too loud. “Yes—I’ll remember every time I look at them.”
“It can take an hour and a half just to get through the line,” her father was saying. “I’ve heard that. And then we have to find the gate.”
“I have something,” Amina said. “Hold on.” It wasn’t in the first suitcase, and so she had to open the second. Down at the other end of the row of chairs she noticed another woman opening another suitcase, unburdening herself to her relatives, as if she’d only now realized the difficulty of future exchanges. The cardboard box was at the top of the suitcase, where her mother had carefully surrounded it with a nest of clothing, and when she opened the lid she found all three of the birds intact. She removed the red cardinal, along with one of the metal fasteners, which you were supposed to use to bind the feet to the branch of an evergreen tree.
“One came to the yard—” she began, and couldn’t continue; instead she held it out to him. Was this brush of the palm when he took it the last time they would touch? Did that occur to him, too? There was no clue in his expression.
Nasir frowned. “Is it really this red?”
“Redder,” Amina managed. “It doesn’t look like something you would find in Rochester. But you do.”
“Your wife will like that someday,” her mother said happily. Now Amina could see that she felt the gift exchange had been equitable. “Be sure to tell her it comes from abroad.”
She and her mother each took the strap of one rolling suitcase. Across the departures hall, the line had begun to move.
“Let me take those,” Nasir said. He had wrapped the cardinal carefully in the same paper he’d used for her mother’s perfume and put it in his bag. It would ride back downtown with him to his office, bumping against his side. In the evening he might rediscover it, unwrapping and setting it on the folding table (would Sakina or Shilpa have taken away the cloth with the red-cheeked Dutchman?). The bird would stay there, observing him each morning and evening as he took his meals, prepared on alternating days by his sisters up and down the stairs. One day soon he would get married, perhaps even to the girl in Comilla. But it wouldn’t be like him to lose or throw away her gift. It would live with him forever in this city, which she was very likely never to see again. At once she felt a yearning for this object so strong that she might have reached into his bag herself to touch it if they hadn’t already been moving toward the security barrier. She hadn’t known it was possible to envy a molded piece of tin.
“We’ll send you an e-mail,” her father said. “Let you know that we’ve arrived.”
“It would still be good to send something more later,” her mother whispered as they joined the line. “If we can find someone who goes back and forth.”
“Which of you is traveling?” demanded a guard in green, and Nasir had to return the suitcases. Her mother offered their documents while her father watched helplessly, looking at this airport functionary as if he expected him to reject them on a whim. Instead the guard grunted and returned them, then blocked Nasir with an outstretched palm.
“Step back, step back,” he said. Nasir glanced at the box she still held in her hand—and then turned away so quickly that it was difficult even to fix a final image of his face. Instead she watched his broad back passing through the tinted glass and into the parking lot, where he was abruptly drained of color, taking on the antique distance of a figure in a black-and-white film.
“Keep moving,” said the guard, and they did.
Reach for the Stars
In my native country, Bangladesh, it is difficult to get an education. When I was thirteen, I had to leave school because my father—a decorated Freedom Fighter in our Liberation War with Pakistan—couldn’t support us. I couldn’t stand the idea of falling behind my schoolmates, and so my mother helped me study on my own for my college entrance exams. We would check out books from the English library and look up all the words we didn’t know. My relatives, who had more money than we did, shook their heads and used a Bengali proverb, saying that my parents and I were “sleeping under a torn quilt and dreaming of gold.” Maybe so, but we didn’t give up. Five years later, I passed my exams on schedule.
I dreamed of going to college abroad, especially in America, but that was too expensive. Instead I became an English tutor for wealthy children, traveling to their houses by rickshaw. Many of those families had their own computers, and it was on one of those computers—practicing my written English in an international online forum—that I met my husband, George, an American.
As a woman in Bangladesh, I was rarely allowed to enter a mosque, but here in America I can worship freely. My husband and I were married at the Islamic Center of Rochester, in a hall with light streaming through the stained-glass windows. I wore a red sari, which is traditional in my country. As I listened to my husband repeat the words of the shahada—the Muslim declaration of faith—I looked at our witnesses from the congregation. There was an Egyptian, a Saudi, and a Pakistani: people who would never have met if they’d stayed in their own countries. At the ICR I have met determined people from all over the world, struggling to make better lives for themselves here in Rochester.
What I love about working at Starbucks is getting to know my customers. They tell me about themselves, and they’re interested in my story as well. I believe that getting to know your customers and anticipating their needs are the essence of good service. It’s what makes Starbucks not only a coffee shop but a center of our community. When I’m not working, I take courses at Monroe Community College. I’m pursuing a degree in education because I’d like to teach English to others like myself one day. I would like to help my students become as comfortable in English as I am when I speak to our customers. I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community.
By: Amina Mazid Stillman
Barista: Starbucks, 1914 Monroe Avenue
Rochester, New York
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wouldn’t have written this book if not for an extraordinary person I met six years ago on an airplane. Farah Deeba Munni opened her life to me, sharing her two homes, her sense of humor, and her memories, while giving me the freedom to make something entirely different from them. A writer couldn’t ask for a more valuable gift, and I’m deeply grateful for her trust and her friendship.
The hospitality of Farah’s parents, her grandmother, and her extended family, both in Dhaka and in Haibatpur, exceeded even extremely high Bangladeshi standards. Farah’s husband, David Butler, was an invaluable resource for all things Rochesterian, and I’m grateful to him for his patience with this project. I owe thanks also to Omar Shareef and Shahriar Kabir and their families for welcoming me into their homes in Dhaka, and to Betsy Hartmann for discussing her experiences in Bangladesh.
At a time of sparse funding for the arts, I’m indebted t
o the Guggenheim Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which provided financial help as well as a genuine community of writers, a rare thing. I’m also thankful to Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker, and to David Bezmozgis, Emma Freudenberger, and Fatema Ahmed for their thoughts and suggestions about early drafts of the manuscript.
Robin Desser is the kind of editor who isn’t supposed to exist anymore, both sympathetic and exacting, and this book is much better for her hand in it. I always feel lucky to have Binky Urban for an agent—this time in particular for convincing me to keep going when I thought I was really stuck. And this book is dedicated to Paul, who supports me in ways I couldn’t have imagined when we were only newly wed.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel The Dissident and the short-story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; both books were New York Times Book Review Notables. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
ALSO BY NELL FREUDENBERGER
The Dissident: A Novel
Lucky Girls: Stories