“Go help your Gramma in the garden,” Ma scolded.
I ran out to tell Gramma, who was hosing down the rhododendrons in her muumuu and boots. “We’re going to see Babi in Doha!” I yelled across the yard at her.
“You kids might as well be flying to the moon for all I know,” she grumbled, and kinked the hose off.
We set out for Qatar a month later. The problematic nature of our situation in the Gulf was not made clear to Ma until the London-to-Dhahran leg of our trip, where she made easy transit-friends with Aramco oil wives in the smoking section at the rear of the plane. Ma stuck out among all the white linen, tan faces, and bleach-blond hair, her hijab and morning-glory dress making her look severe and unfriendly to the other American ladies. “I guess you don’t drink anymore then, huh?” one asked, directing a dismissive gesture at the hijab on Ma’s head. Ma took it in stride and shared her pack of Marlboros around. The most boisterous among them was a woman named Mary Lou. She was from Kansas, and one thing was certain—she didn’t want to go back to Saudi, because “there really is no place like home.”
It was on that flight that Ma learned being an expat American woman and being married to an Arab meant that although she and these women came from the same backgrounds, they were bound into two very different worlds. The gap between Ma and Mary Lou could not have been wider. Ma was the wife of a Bedouin man, the kind Mary Lou’s husband thought of as a coolie. Mary Lou was wife to the kind of man who had the power to drill any of Al-Dafira’s land and yet thought twice about hiring Bedouin. Mary Lou explained all of this and more to Ma while drinking her gin and tonics somewhere over Jordan.
“I tell ya, Gale, it’s a different planet over there. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” Before Ma could get a word in edgewise, Mary Lou grabbed her by the knee and leaned forward in a conspiratorial (drunk) whisper: “My husband works with a guy who makes his wives sleep three to a bed!”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to judge,” Ma said, hoping it would be the last word. Mary Lou raised a penciled eyebrow. “Don’t kid yourself, sweetie.” And swilling the ice in her cup, she knocked it all back. “They’re all the same. Ayrabs.”
Ma watched Mary Lou stagger back to her seat. A steward came over and crouched down to speak with Ma. “I just want you to know, we see this all the time on this flight,” he assured her. “I hope she didn’t offend you. They usually have to get drunk to go willingly.”
When the plane stopped in Dhahran, an officer came aboard to check the passports of everyone going to Doha. He looked through Ma’s passport, bored, and then opened mine and Dima’s. He did a double take at the last name Al-Dafira before calling for another officer to come and gawk at the white woman with the Bedouin children. The plane filled up around us with Indian men transiting through Doha to Mumbai or Kerala.
It was the middle of the night by the time we landed on the tarmac in Doha. Ma stood out like an alien at the top of the steps. Two men stood at the foot of the stairs, long hair protruding from under their checkered gutras. There was something familiar about their manner. “They were like your father,” she’d tell me years later when I asked about our first passage to the Gulf. “I don’t know how, but they let me know.” One of them gently relieved Ma of Dima while the other took me by the hand, leaving Ma to carry her bag. For a moment she panicked; these were strangers. But as if he had read her thoughts, the man holding my hand traded me for her bag.
They whisked us through a special line at passport control, and on the other side Baba stood at the baggage carousel. The two men each kissed him on the nose (a practice Ma complained about as being “kind of fruity”), and we waited our turn in the pecking order of “hello.” Baba knelt down to kiss Dima and me, and then rose to tell Ma hello, but she intercepted him with a long, bold kiss, shocking the few stragglers in the terminal. Baba tried to hide his grin as he reprimanded Ma for the benefit of his cousins and led us out to his car, which was not, to my dismay, the DeLorean. It took a long time to get from the airport to our new home. Dima and I watched from the backseat as we passed through the pockmarked moonscape of construction pits and cranes that was our new home.
“Close your eyes!” Baba flung the door open on Apartment 1303. We closed our eyes in the hallway and waited for him to give us the cue. “Come here. No, here. Okay. Open!” We stood in a wide marble hallway with five closed doors.
“Which one is ours?” Ma asked, scanning the doorframes for numbers.
“Ha!” Baba was pleased with her country-mouse mistake. He opened each of the heavy doors and proclaimed, “All of them!” The rooms were dark and empty, and cold air gusted out of them like a chill wafting up from some subterranean river.
“Do all the A/Cs have to be on at once?” Ma stomped into the darkness and turned off the rumbling air conditioner. Her astonishment at the size of the flat turned to suspicion as she saw that the room was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. “Matar. How can we afford this? You could fit two families in here.”
It was not the reaction he’d been hoping for. “Bah. Don’t worry. I have it all under control.”
But Ma knew by his sheepish lack of eye contact that he most definitely did not. The cavernous rooms and creepy stillness of un-lived-in living spaces dampened the thrill of being with our father. Ma investigated further, flicking the lights on and off in each room as if to check if something might be lurking. We went into the living room, which was dominated by a huge pane of glass framing a view of the water. Light from the construction cranes dimly frosted the room. Ma and Baba stood together in silhouette beside a large telescope. Ma bent to have a look at where it pointed: a rig out at sea. She lifted me up to see the red flame glimmering in the scope. It was shockingly detailed, the ripples on the water, the jutting trunk of the rig, and the flame itself. It was like looking closely at a perfectly rendered miniature.
“That’s where Baba works,” she said to me.
“I go back tomorrow morning,” Baba announced.
“But it’s Saturday!”
“Yes, the weekend is Thursday and Friday.”
Exhausted from the journey, she didn’t have it in her to mask disappointment.
“Don’t worry. Your new family will be here to visit in a few days.”
Ma slumped into a chair. “We came an awful long way for you to leave us again.”
Baba changed the subject. “I have one more surprise for you!” He coaxed Ma out of her chair and took us back to the elevator, which took us to a mezzanine floor. “This had better be good if you’re going to strand us,” Ma said, following behind us as we came out to an open rooftop lined with plastic sun chairs.
“Pool!” I yelped, and ran for the kidney-shaped hole in the middle of the seventh-story patio.
“For swimming lessons,” he said, and Ma softened a little as he hugged her to him.
We spent the following week settling in. Ma locked the extra rooms. The longer they remained locked, the more dread gathered around them. They were like the forbidden attic of some neo-Gothic romance set in the Gulf, neglected ghosts lurking in the brightly lit wings of our glass castle. She filled the shelves with the books she had brought for us, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and a mini-library of abridged, illustrated English classics: Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, and The Jungle Book among them. On the top shelf she kept a medical dictionary full of explicit photos of rashes and parasites, alongside which she kept her copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune for her own amusement. We spent a lot of time at the pool in the early mornings, where Dima bobbed in water wings and Ma instructed me on how to dive with as little splash as possible into the pool.
“Tuck your head in!” she’d call from her umbrella, where she watched me show off my headstands and push Dima around the little blue hole with her water wings and inner tube.
At night Ma swiveled the telescope on its tripod and squinted out at the horizon. She reminded me of a queen from one of our illustrated c
lassics, trapped in a turret, surveying her new realm. We took turns looking out at the little candle on the sea. The water of the Gulf was often still, like silver jelly. The only spots of ripple were where three-meter concrete jacks were being dumped into the shallows to build new islands shaped like pearls and palm trees. Beyond the gravel barges, past the rot-bottomed dhows and the nets that kept hammerheads away from the beach, was the unfocused quiver of flame where our father worked. But that little flame in the night was tantalizingly close after we’d traveled so far.
Baba’s schedule was such that he would get one week onshore for every three weeks offshore. We would spend those three weeks in a strange limbo watching Grendizer, the translated Japanese space robot, on television and going for walks on the corniche, a waterside promenade studded with fountains and star-shaped gazebos. Efforts to green the city were ambitious but failed to stop the encroaching desert. Grass parched out after a single afternoon without water, trees died still girdled in their shipping mesh, and the army of migrant laborers brought to repot sunburned petunias were as unsustainable as the gardens they were hired to plant. At sunset we sat in the shade of dying trees and watched the Indian gardeners dig a shallow grave for a freshly shipped rosebush. “You know those won’t root that way,” Ma called out.
The men looked up at her, terrified. They’d been gelded by gossip and horror stories of sheikhs’ wives who entrapped workers into speaking with them, only to cry rape to their husbands. Ma got up, strode over to them with her cigarette, and squatted down to give them a hand. “You have to dig a wider hole,” she tried to explain, cigarette still between her teeth. The poor gardeners looked at each other, dropped their tools, and backed away from their plot. They looked about ready to make a run for it. Ma picked the little spade up to show she meant no harm and dug out a hole big enough for the plant. When she’d finished, the two gardeners timidly returned to the job like scavengers who’d been chased off by a lion. The sight of the doomed bushes briefly blooming against the toxic neon of municipal coveralls was sad. “Poor things,” Ma commented, though it’s difficult to know if she was referring to the plants, the men, or us.
The next Friday afternoon, envoys from Al-Dafira arrived. The day of their arrival Ma had buttoned us into matching pinafores and doused us with her Ysatis eau de toilette, so at the very least we’d make a fragrant impression on them. We were watching from our window when several trucks rumbled up to the entrance of the building. The last of the lineup was a 1979 Suburban, the Bedouin equivalent of the kids’ table at a grown-up dinner party. It came bearing a troop of cousins for Dima and me to play with. Ma smoothed our hair and pinched our cheeks to give the illusion of a healthy glow just in time to welcome the women into the house.
When we opened the door, a pack of kids came bursting in and surrounded us. Some of the shy ones hung back near the door, eyes wide and staring at Ma. One of the smaller kids dashed up to her, tagged her leg, and then skittered back off to a safe distance where he could safely observe her. The standoff between Ma and the children broke when she spoke, and although her language was strange, her tone was understood: “I’m not from outer space. I promise.” Then, like Ewoks to Leia, the kids gathered around, taking turns touching the cobalt silk of her dress and her thin white hands.
My uncle Mohamed’s daughter Alia was closest in age to me, and so we identified one another and immediately fell into cahoots. Despite our language barrier, we communicated in a babelogue of rowdiness. As we got to know one another, the playdate with the other cousins escalated into a riot, and I joined in with the rest in razing the flat. We crowded onto the master bed and leaped for the ceiling, each spring bouncing us higher together. The littlest ones got hurt, tangled in the sheets, or trampled. Somewhere in the savaging of the bedroom we tore the curtains down, we soaked the carpet with the shadafa while sword fighting, and I managed to break my own glasses. The liberation of being in a mob didn’t last. In the end, I wasn’t anonymous enough to escape blame, and Ma snared me out of a skirmish by the nape of my neck and in her deepest, most threatening voice scolded, “You know better than that! What is wrong with you!?”
But I was so emancipated by the chaos that I felt no shame. Now that I knew there were two authorities in my life, Ma’s rules and the tribe’s rules, assimilation equaled rebellion. I bolted with the pack to the door, where we all made off on different bearings, using the stairwell like monkey bars, jumping in the elevators, and scratching graffiti in the wooden doors of neighboring flats. We made it down into the lobby, where the entrance of the building had been converted into a temporary majlis by our uncles for the visit. They had rearranged the leather sofas in the waiting area and now sat in a row, tribunal-style, on the black marble floor.
Ma approached the group of men, trailed by the pack of cousins, who emerged from the elevator in a swell and pushed us in close to the men. Dima and I trailed behind her. “Salam alaikum,” she greeted them in her wide-voweled Arabic.
“Wa alaikum salam,” the men murmured back. They seemed as apprehensive and even bashful as she did at this meeting.
The men watched silently as she found a perch on the edge of the white leather couch; Dima and I flanked her like cherubs in our fancy dresses and stared back. “Come on, Sophia. Go say hello.” Ma pushed me off my seat like she was sending a little boat out into a current.
I went as I’d been bidden to the first man, who offered me his beardy cheek for a kiss, and made the rounds of the room this way, pausing at each person and leaning in for an itchy kiss. Stranger after stranger asked me, “Do you know who I am?” Of course I didn’t have a clue and so smiled dimly and nodded “yes,” waiting to be passed on to the next man.
Dima, who was still barely toddling, had been watching the whole scene. Normally she wouldn’t leave the skirt-clinging radius of Ma, but suddenly and completely on her own she waddled several meters across the carpet toward the row of aged Bedu kings and fell into the arms of a particularly gruff-looking one with an orange beard. “Hi!” she said, and stroked his bright facial hair, fluffing it as though it were a Muppet’s fur. Tears welled up in the old man’s eyes. “Don’ cry. Don’ cry,” Dima lisped, and patted him on the shoulder the way she would a big gentle dog.
“Dima, you know who that is?” Ma asked.
“Grampa,” Dima answered, and the lobby fell silent with surprise.
Despite the fact that he had helped to midwife twelve of his own babies into the world, our grandfather Jabir couldn’t seem to figure out how to hold Dima while she carried on chattering to him in English, speaking more to him than she had ever spoken at all.
That night Ma called Puyallup, and we listened in close. “How was company?” Gramma asked.
“It looks like a hurricane hit in here—when they landed I didn’t know what was going on. There’s nothing left in the house. It’s all broken or eaten or just gone.” Gramma laughed on the other end, and Ma continued, “I feel like I’m just this white woman living on the outskirts of the reservation raising a couple of kids that belong to the tribe.” She paused for Gramma’s reply, but if she said anything it was lost in the switchback byways of AT&T’s pinched veins. “I keep thinking this is how it must be for astronauts. All cooped up for months on end, not knowing which way is up.”
Gramma’s voice came through, but it was shredded and unintelligible. Ma rattled the receiver and hit it against her palm like a plugged saltshaker, as though the static could be knocked out. “Mom?” she asked softly. “Are you still there?” When no answer came she kept the phone to her ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone, before she hung up with a sigh.
7
OMICRON2 ERIDANI • THE BROKEN EGGSHELLS •
We remained in a sort of suspended animation while waiting for Baba to come back from the rig. When Baba wasn’t with us it was as though time ceased, we ceased, and every day in the apartment was just a dream in his periphery. Despite visits from the family, calls to Gramma, and the company of the t
elescope, Ma was lonely. She tried making friends with a Pakistani guard and a Filipino seamstress and once even lurched at a blue-eyed woman in a niqab at the fish market in hopes she might speak English. But she soon found that these people were as foreign as she was in this improbable city. Every week there was a new road, more dust cresting off the construction sites, and higher floors added to the grove of young skyscrapers shooting up around us. It made me dizzy to look up at them from our thirteenth-floor window. I began to fear heights and had dreams of falling: first of plummeting to the ground, then of plunging up into the sky.
Other than trips to the vegetable market and our morning swimming lessons in the tower’s pool, we rarely ventured out. Bored senseless like a caged animal, I laid tracks in the carpet by scooting from one end of the window to the other in an office chair. I imagined myself as an astronaut floating along an observation deck. When I wasn’t doing this, I sprawled on the floor basking in front of the TV until the carpet had matted into my shape like a nuclear shadow cast by cathode ray.
Around this time I began to lose my baby teeth, and ripping milk molars out became a hobby of Ma’s. Unlike many other perks of motherhood (the hunting of lice or the popping of zits, for example), the pulling of teeth allowed her to assert herself culturally. “If there’s one thing I’m going to give my girls it’s a mouth full of healthy American teeth!”
She developed an array of baroque extraction techniques: for example, she’d tie an offending tooth to a doorknob, back me up the appropriate distance, calculate the force required, and slam the door, leaving me blubbering in a puddle of drool and tears. When Baba did visit, his method was much more halal. He would set me down in front of a cartoon on TV and vise my neck in his hand so I sat up straight like a doll in a display stand. This gave me a false sense of security. Then he’d wait ten or fifteen minutes until Princess Sapphire had fenced off the bad guys, by which time I’d forget I even had a wiggly tooth. Then, before I could even shout out or struggle, he’d be holding up a bloody molar for me to see. “Throw it at the sky and the next one will be better,” he told me, and pushed open the window just a crack for me to toss the jagged little tooth up into the air and watch it disappear downward into the construction site below.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 5
