“That’s nice?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. I’m not perfect like the harni . I have little breasts and my belly is flabby, a little. My thighs are thick and my shins are thin. He is looking at me and I know he must be thinking of the harni . “I love you more than anyone else,” I say.
“I love you, too,” he says. “We’re together here.”
I slide off my underwear, awkward, scooting up my butt. Finally he eases on top of me and, holding it in his hand, he searches where to enter me. There’s not enough space for him to go in.
“Just relax,” he says.
“It’s okay,” I say. It isn’t, but I tell myself, Women have babies.
He pushes in. Who could imagine it would feel the way it does, all hard. It does hurt. All the good feeling is gone. He is in me for a moment, not moving.
I will make him happy. “Go on,” I whisper. This will be over soon. He is in me and he moves, and it doesn’t hurt so much, and then he groans and pulls away.
“Hariba, sweet,” he says, “are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say. “Was it good?”
“You are the loveliest,” he says.
I don’t feel different. Actually, I do. I feel as if I have done something wrong. But it’s done.
My mother would be ashamed.
I’m ashamed. He puts his arm around me and I lie there, trying to go to sleep. After a while, I get up and put on my underwear.
On the sheets there’s a spot of blood, like menstrual blood. I’m a little sore.
Akhmim raises up on his elbow. “Hariba?”
“I just want to clean up,” I say. I go and take a shower. I can cry in the shower.
He’s waiting in the now-dark room when I come back in. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Just tired. I have to go to school tomorrow.”
I get back into bed. He’s changed the sheets. I lay on my side, a little away from him. I’m so lonely. Nothing has changed.
Well, something has changed. I’m not fit to marry now.
* * *
The next morning I go to school and everything is different and nothing is different. Except that Akhmim is more far away from me and I’m different inside and no one can see.
Monday night I wait for him to get home from work. “I’ve been thinking,” I say without even saying hello. “I think you should go visit the harni during the day when I’m at work and at school.”
He stands there, looking at me in his calm way.
“But I need you for a while yet,” I say. “I’m all alone here.”
“All right,” he says. “You know I love you.”
“I know,” I say. “But it’s not enough, is it?”
For once he doesn’t answer.
In two weeks we arrange it so that he’s only home on weekends-since we rarely see each other during the week anyway. I tell my counselor, Dr. Esteban, and he asks me how I feel.
“Lonely,” I say.
“How do you feel when Akhmim is there?” he asks.
“Still lonely,” I say.
After two months, Akhmim stops coming home. I talk to him a couple of times by slate, and after that he calls me almost every day and we talk. It’s good to hear Moroccan.
He loves me. It’s good to be loved. But it isn’t enough.
* * *
About six months after Akhmim leaves, I decide that I’m going to learn accounting, because I like the numbers and the software, and one of my teachers recommends a book on business presentation. It talks a lot about professional appearance.
“Long hair,” it says, “looks naive and immature.”
For a week, I brush my heavy hair before braiding it and look at myself in the mirror, trying to imagine. I look at the other women on the street.
So finally I go to a place to get it cut, and Gabriel, the man who is going to cut it, puts my optical image on his slate and shows me different ways I can look. For the first time, the face staring back at me looks different.
“A haircut is a new beginning,” Gabriel says.
My Spanish is getting a lot better.
I choose a haircut that makes my hair slide in waves and rounds my face, a shining helmet of hair.
Gabriel gathers my hair in his hands. When it isn’t braided, it is long enough that I can sit on the ends. “You need to cut off the old hair,” he says. “Either that, or you need to make it healthy. But all this hair, it makes your face so tiny, and you will be pretty, I promise.” He cuts a long length of it off, and then he coils it and puts it in a box. “For you to have.”
He cuts and looks in the mirror and cuts and my head feels oddly light. I watch the new girl in the mirror. She looks like a Spanish girl who has Arab parents. She looks modern.
When he is finished, he shows me the hair all around, and I look so different. I shake my head and the hair falls back into place.
“So pretty,” he says.
Not pretty, I’m not pretty. I wish I were pretty. But maybe I look as if I am part of this place, even if I am not.
He puts the box of my old hair on my lap. It is coiled in the box like a wreath. I touch and I try to think of what to do with it. I could send it to Akhmim, but I don’t know what it would mean to him. It probably wouldn’t be a reproach. It probably wouldn’t even be a message.
I could send it to my mother, but it would break her heart. I could send it to Ayesha, but if I were Ayesha, I’d just burn it.
I think it belongs to no one at all, this smooth coil of black hair, and I run my fingers over it. My tears are so hot, they’re as hot as blood.
About the Author
Hugo Award winner Maureen F. McHugh has written both a provocative, powerfully dazzling novel of repression and reawakening and a uniquely moving love story that stands alongside the acclaimed works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.
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