Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  Rebecca watched Zubaida’s rapid progress with growing excitement. She decided Zubaida was doing so well at adapting to American life that Rebecca would take her on a “girl’s trip” to Texas to visit Rebecca’s mother and a couple of childhood friends. Zubaida’s school had a week of spring break coming up. It gave them the perfect chance to spend time alone together in a variety of situations that would be unique to the two of them, and, she hoped, leave Zubaida with a set of memories that would continue to reinforce the message that Rebecca was truly on her side and committed to her well being.

  While she saw to it that Zubaida’s experiences in California were stimulating and varied, she was still aware of how far those experiences differed from the more ordinary sort of middle-American life that Rebecca knew as a child. She had tried to impress upon Zubaida how much diversity there was among the population in Los Angeles, but the reality of Zubaida’s time was that she seldom had any chance to mix with anyone outside the kids she met at her school.

  With so little time left before Zubaida was to go back home, perhaps never to return, Rebecca felt obligated to give her the broadest experience of American life that she could. Perhaps Zubaida could continue to learn from it whenever she played it back in her memory during the years to come.

  They arrived in Dallas on April 19th to visit with one of Rebecca’s old girlfriends. Rebecca was interested to see how Zubaida would do with the company of children she met in Texas. They surely had nothing like the preparation Zubaida’s classmates got, in terms of knowing how to handle themselves with her. If Zubaida could hold her own among them, it could mean that she might be closer to being able to hold her own back inside of her culture.

  Rebecca got a case of butterflies in her stomach at the thought of how uncomfortable it could possibly become, but she was determined to stop any antagonistic situation before it became too difficult for Zubaida, anyway. After all, they would be leaving Texas after a few days. There wouldn’t be time for any conflicts to get out of hand. It seemed like a perfect way to let Zubaida sample some variations on ordinary American life.

  April 19th was a Saturday, so Rebecca’s friend threw them a little pot luck party at her house. It was a good excuse for her daughter to invite a bunch of her friends over and introduce Zubaida to test her social skills with them. Before long the girls were laughing and playing together as if Zubaida were a long time neighbor. Rebecca had to marvel at this girl’s ability to relate to strangers. When Zubaida was in one of her stable moods, she seemed to be able to ease her way into any new or novel situation and quickly find some way to meet it straight on. Even when she was quiet and non-confrontational, Zubaida’s matter-of-fact sense of herself as some kind of alpha personality gave her an innate authority around other children, sometimes even around other adults. Most of the time, she didn’t seem to consciously realize she had it. She simply radiated it and then reacted to its effect on others. Throughout the afternoon, she displayed so much playful charm that by the time evening rolled around, she and a group of girls had decided to stay late and hang around together.

  Zubaida’s English was good enough for her to muddle through conversations without any help now, and it was such a thrill for Rebecca to watch this child, who ten months earlier had no idea of what America or its people were like. Once dusk settled in and obscured Zubaida’s scars, it became impossible to tell her from the other girls running and jumping around the yard.

  It seemed like a miracle, all on its own, separate and aside from the magical restorations that Peter had been performing over the months, that a child so monstrously injured and lost to the world should now be playing tag at a spring evening picnic in a backyard in Texas with a bunch of American girls.

  Two nights later, they stopped in East Texas to spend the night with an old friend. Zubaida romped around during their visit to a wildlife preserve, marveling at the unfamiliar animals and abandoning herself to the day. She had a good time posing in front of a fenced camel while repeatedly insisting to Rebecca that as far as she was concerned, when you are hungry nothing hits the spot like a good camel sandwich. Rebecca couldn’t tell if she was making that up or not. Photographs of the afternoon show Zubaida mugging and posing for the camera without any shyness or inhibition. The wounded puppy aura that she projected a few months earlier was nowhere to be seen.

  The final two nights of the trip were spent in Austin, the capital since Texas became a state in 1846. It put Zubaida smack in the middle of the American Old West. People explained to her that this was considered the distant past for the United States, but she knew it had happened long after the ramparts of Zubaida’s home village were already melted by age.

  Before she met Rebecca’s mother, Zubaida tried to listen to Rebecca’s explanation of her family history, but the details were overwhelming. Nothing in her background knowledge of what it meant to be part of a family prepared her for stories like the ones Rebecca told her, or the stories so many of her classmates at school told about their own situations at home. She understood the words, but the pictures they formed were from an alien world. Rebecca told her all about how she and her brother grew up without a father, and with a mother who went out into the world to work everyday and who was able to carry the little family on her shoulders alone, without being reduced to begging or forced into marriage. During Zubaida’s lifetime, nothing like that had ever been possible for the women who must serve.

  She could only listen and then shrug off such stories. People might as well have been talking to her about the secret lives of cats and dogs, cute little tales that had nothing to do with her beyond presenting some future topic of idle conversation about the way people do things in America.

  But when she listened to Rebecca describe her own way of creating a secondary family around herself with her teachers and her fellow students by being actively involved in all sorts of social activities, Zubaida felt the zing of familiarity. She had already experienced enough of what daily schooling was like to be able to picture how she would approach her life if she could stay in school, year after year. She knew that if she could, she would also replace some of the attention that her overtaxed parents often couldn’t give her with the comfort and support of a circle of friends and a full time school environment. Rebecca told her how she was even allowed to work while she was still in school, to earn extra money. She used to run off and do extra sports and social activities in her spare time.

  Zubaida tried to imagine what it could be like for a girl still in high school to have so much freedom—to walk the streets alone without being called a whore and to earn her own money, which she could spend as she wanted. That was a form of wealth which a personality like hers could understand. Day to day freedom received as an embarrassment of riches. She had to wonder—how does a girl handle the constant barrage of choices all day long? And how does a woman raise children alone and still have a good job with dignity and never have to beg on the streets? How much does a woman have to know, in order to succeed at that?

  Once Rebecca’s mother arrived and Zubaida had the chance to be around her for awhile, she began to get a sense of where some of Rebecca’s strength came from. This woman who had worked all of her life and raised her children alone spoke with quiet assurance and a gentle southern manner. She kept her posture straight despite her delicate frame.

  To Zubaida, she was otherwise like most of the other American adults she had met so far; her conversation was the same sort of pleasant adult stuff that Zubaida was learning to handle by rote. But it was confusing; Rebecca’s mother appeared poised and healthy and was obviously an active person. How could that be? Had she not spent her life as a sole provider? And she certainly looked far younger than any of the woman from Zubaida’s village who were mothers of grown women. How could any woman appear so strong and healthy after a life alone?

  And Peter’s mother, Sandy—she looked young enough to be his older sister, even though her family was broken, too. So were broken families the
reason so many of the women in America looked young and healthy? Was this why Peter and Rebecca’s parents look as if their legs were still strong and their backs were not hurting? Most of all, did all of this mean that if Zubaida stayed in school after she went back home, so that she got a usable education to carry with her into adult life, she was going to have to break her family into little pieces in order to be happy and healthy and strong?

  Was that some kind of hidden secret behind American success?

  She hated the way it made her feel, to even think about watching her family break up into little groups and move away to different parts of the country while everybody goes on with life practically alone. It filled her with dread to consider, even for a moment, what it would mean to live as a single entity in this world. It was the same kind of dread that used to hit her in the stomach back at home, when she bent over to peer down into a deep desert well.

  Toward the end of the trip, Rebecca noticed that Zubaida was becoming withdrawn and moody. She tried to get her to talk about it, but Zubaida wasn’t in enough pain to make it worth risking exposing her vulnerabilities.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The uncertainty about how to react to overall daily life in America followed Zubaida home. At least it no longer wound up her emotions into overdrive the way such things used to do. Now with her appearance nearly restored and with the effects of the medication and the therapy sessions bringing her a sense of relief, many of her inner torments no longer had claws. She let the conflicts run through her thoughts and sorted through them before deciding whether to react or ignore them. The process took up a lot of her energy and didn’t leave her feeling sociable, but she was able to keep it to herself, most of the time, and to handle the worst of it when she was alone.

  Life in America was easiest when she took it all as an elaborate form of play and adapted to the dominant rules of the play as quickly as possible. If she didn’t focus on Peter’s overall goals for her surgeries, and if she ignored the big picture questions and simply concentrated on playing out each moment of this American pageant as well as she could, then she could feel the relaxation that came with moving in harmony to the social expectations of those around her. The game did nothing to make her larger fears and anxieties go away, but it distracted her attention well enough that she could ignore those feelings and keep them packed away, out of sight and out of mind, while she tried her best to imitate behavior that met with expectations of the Others.

  But did that word feel right, anymore? The “Others,” as she had been taught about them, were corrupt people. They might not be corrupt like the Taliban, but they were just as dangerous. The Taliban were corrupt because they were so sure of their ideas of truth and decency that they didn’t care if they abandoned both and used violence to enforce their rule. But the Others were corrupt because they are so sure that truth and decency didn’t matter that they seldom bothered to use violence to make people cooperate. Instead, lacking respect for life, they loved to destroy with temptation.

  America was supposed to be full of the Others, if not the very Land of the Others itself. But Zubaida hadn’t met any of the Others, yet. She recognized that therefore, there had to be least one other group besides her people and the Others. Whoever they were, she still didn’t know what to call them. She had no way to even describe or define them.

  The trip to Texas sharpened Zubaida’s dilemma; there were so many kind and friendly people. How was that possible? And with her English developing enough that she could participate in conversations and understand most of what was said, the people she met now seemed even less foreign to her. Although their lives were greatly different from hers in terms of the available physical comforts, her lifetime of living as a part of an extended family made it easy and natural for her to recognize warmth and hospitality and to react well to it. The very core values of her own culture, far older than any form of religious control, had survived long enough to be handed down over the centuries, for no other reason than that they fit human survival so well: hospitality to a stranger, generosity to a friend, fidelity to one’s promises. No one who showed her such clear demonstrations of those very qualities could be dismissed as an Other.

  Now things were growing increasingly complex because she kept running into more of them, the not-Others, whatever they ought to be called.

  When Rebecca took her to Texas, she had painted Zubaida into a tiny little corner by showing her so many who were not the Others—which proved there wasn’t something special about Los Angeles. There were too many not-Others to ignore any longer. She had to somehow learn to recognize them, perhaps through some trait that they all shared.

  Zubaida recognized the feeling of being pushed into a corner, for different reasons. She had watched her entire village’s female population struggle to exist in the tiny corners of their own. All of them were either women who must serve, or, like Zubaida, girls who were expected to grow up to that existence.

  The images of these women and girls had made such an impact on Zubaida that even here in America, so many thousands of miles away and in such a different world, she could still sense them inside of herself. That old cornered feeling throbbed inside of her. Meanwhile, contradictions clashed between the world of the Others as it had been described to her, and the simple world that Peter and Rebecca were showing her each day. Each point of view battled to become the truth in her eyes.

  She was doing her best to follow her father’s directive and learn everything that she could while she was in America, but he had not told her what she was supposed to do with all of that information other than share it with the others in the family, once she returned.

  But what happened the day after Zubaida finished telling them everything she knew about life in America and everything she knew about reading and writing? What was she supposed to do, then—go find a corner to occupy and watch it slowly grow smaller and smaller with each passing year?

  Her loyalty to her family and to the familiarity of her old life was solid inside of her. Homesickness was a constant nagging feeling in the back of her mind and the pit of her stomach. But as the time to return back home began to close in on her, the question of what she was returning to was becoming difficult to ignore. Just because she was a master of maintaining a nonchalant attitude even when confronted with amazing things, she was only human, an eleven year-old girl. The opportunity to go shopping with a bunch of girlfriends in a mall conveyed messages far more potent than simple challenges about greed and the worship of material things. These messages were far more ominous in terms of their capacity to affect her.

  This kind of personal experience taught her how to exercise personal choice, how to consider her own individual style of dress, and how to devise her own way of presenting her personality to the world instead of hiding it under veils. Were these the corrupting forces that the Taliban clerics railed against? Because they didn’t make Zubaida feel corrupted; they made her feel stronger.

  Where was she supposed to put that strength, once she brought it back home with her? What would her family think about that? What could they possibly expect from her?

  She certainly couldn’t see any way to leave it here, and since everybody kept assuring her that she was going to be allowed to go home, where could she hide her education back in her homeland? Where could she hide her cultural awakening and her sharpened personality and her personal strength?

  Was there any veil thick enough to keep all of that hidden from disapproving eyes whenever she was out in public? At home, were there walls thick enough to restrain her curiosity?

  Her father had asked her to become someone that her own world didn’t know how to understand and accept. On the other hand, Peter and Rebecca were showing her a life that she wasn’t going to be allowed to live with them in America. It was as if she had become some kind of a ball, and now everyone was taking turns at batting her this way and that, without anybody saying a word to her about where she was supposed to eventu
ally land.

  * * *

  Kerrie Benson spent the first two weeks of May watching Zubaida slowly withdraw into long silences. Benson’s unique student still participated in classroom work but she was beginning to have daily spats with classmates. They were always minor issues, things that were quickly resolved, things that any other girl might suddenly find to be of concern. The difference with Zubaida was that she was having more of those moments and they were getting in her way at school.

  When she and her best friend Emily got into a spat, Benson finally took Zubaida aside and quietly told her that she had been noticing some changes in her behavior. This argument with Emily was causing Benson to wonder—was something going on that she should know about?

  At first Zubaida gave her the standard look-away-and-clam-up routine, but when Benson asked when her next surgery was taking place, Zubaida suddenly looked as if she were about to burst into tears. Then all her concerns burst out of her like a flash desert sandstorm. Yes, her final operation was coming up in a couple of days, on Friday, May 16th.

  Even though it was the last one, she dreaded the hospital and the anesthesia. Most of all she dreaded another recovery. And this time, she knew that after the recovery period, she would be returning back home to Afghanistan. She missed her family and wanted to be back with them, but she also couldn’t imagine what sort of a life awaited her at home.