Baba tensed, and Ma pulled herself up gingerly into a sitting position. “Oh, kitten. I’m so sorry.” I didn’t understand the commiseration as she pulled me to her, planting a long kiss on the part of my matted braids. “I need to tell you something. There’s not going to be any little brother.”
“Why? Where’s he gone?”
“Just gone.”
I didn’t protest, comforted by being back in Ma’s arms. But as she rocked Dima and me back and forth in the cradle of her IV tubes, I saw a shadow darken Baba’s face, a tiny hint at the shattering disaster about to make deep impact on our little world.
8
DELTA ARIETIS • THE LITTLE BELLY •
Ma’s pale skin showed the blotchy red rash of the infestation first. The burrowing mites weren’t as evident on our darker skin until the pruritus left us squirming, rubbing our backs against the spiny Astroturf alongside the building’s swimming pool. The pregnant females had burrowed under our skin and let loose with trails of their microscopic eggs.
“This looks like scabies,” Ma said, holding a magnifying glass up to her skin and then back down into her circa-1950 reference book of children’s maladies. “Either you girls got them in the desert or I picked them up in the hospital,” she concluded.
The doctor gave us a prescription salve and we underwent a routine quarantine in our little flat in the big city like astronauts returning to earth. He instructed Ma to boil all fabrics, stuffed animals in particular. So Dima and I sat by in the kitchen letting the hot vapors scald our cheeks while we whimpered in protest as our stuffed animals were plopped into the boiling cauldron like plush lobsters.
The scabies rash was still visible the week Baba was due for his land leave from the rig. We hadn’t seen him since Ma had come home from the hospital, and she did her best to make us presentable, wrestling us into our best dresses and ruffled socks. She seemed nervy that morning as she trammeled me by my ponytail and dragged the brush down through the tangled mess.
“You’re killing me!” I howled, certain I was actually dying from the pain.
“It hurts to be beautiful.” She punctuated the truism with a pitiless yank.
“Cut it off!” I shrilled.
Unsympathetic, Ma finished ruthlessly plowing my hair into rows.
“Don’t talk like that, most girls would die to have nice thick hair like yours. Besides, your Baba wants his girls to have long hair.”
She finished banding me into the braid and I stationed myself as far away from her brush as possible at the window to sulk. That afternoon the sun seemed to hover at half-mast forever as I pressed my tear-stained cheeks against the glass. Construction had just begun on the office tower across from us when we arrived in Doha, and we had watched its rebar and cement hatch from the ground like crocuses in the spring. Now it had almost matched the height of our own building. I looked across at it, my lips suctioned against the glass of the window, watching dimly, like a goldfish.
The first thing I noticed was the shade cast over the sun by a sudden plume of dust. Then our whole building wavered like a stack of books, and Ma dragged us under the dining room table in case we went down too. After the quake had settled, Ma crawled to the window and looked out. “Oh, no,” she started repeating to herself. “Oh, no!” and held Dima and me back from looking. The entire tower that had been under construction kitty-corner to us had collapsed on itself. Later we learned that the workers had accidentally walled a bulldozer into the building and tried to drive it through the unreinforced lobby doors to get it out. I morbidly craned the telescope down from its usual coordinates and scanned the mess, looking for blood or guts or any color at all in the mealy gray rubble. But all I spied from my perch before Ma pulled me away from the telescope were the remnants of a red-checkered gutra.
By the time Baba finally arrived that afternoon, the ambulances had come and gone. The construction accident had shaken Ma. It seemed like a bad omen of things to come. As Baba entered, she held back in the living room like a dog straining at its leash. He was uncharacteristically somber. He kissed me without a word and didn’t seem to notice the scabies rash or the fishbone braids I’d suffered for. Ma lifted Dima from the floor and put her to bed, then she led me into the bedroom and bundled me in. I pouted and threw the covers off.
“Stay down,” she warned, and went back out to the living room.
But the twang of the TV turning on drew me out from the covers. I snuck to the open bedroom door and peered out to where my parents sat. Baba slouched on the floor cushions, flicking through the channels on the TV. All I could see of Ma was the ripple of gold hair draped down her back. I went back to bed and fell asleep to the comforting sound of television fuzz. Then at some point in the night Ma came back into our room, silhouetted in the darkened hall. I knew something was different but couldn’t recognize what. Shock seeps through in the strangest ways. A tight staccato of realizations hit me, and I saw her holding fistfuls of her own long, blond hair, like she’d scalped Rapunzel. She crawled into the bed with us and lay still.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, frightened. Her silence seemed dangerous, a volatile kind of hush.
But she was silent, just staring in the darkness. Then Baba came into the doorway; Ma hurled the fistful of hair at him. He caught it out of the air and curled it around his hand like a bandage. “What you want me to do?”
He seemed to shrink in the doorway, but he was really just walking away. The apartment door slammed behind him and Ma lay down in a fetal position between Dima and me. “Your baba has another wife,” she sobbed. I remembered the breastfeeding woman in the desert. We really did have a little brother after all.
Most people who hear the following part of the story think our father was being cruel. But in reality, he was just clueless. He brought his other wife, Flu, with him the next day. She was indeed the woman I’d met in the desert, and she carried our little brother, Badr, with her. Baba announced that Flu would be staying with us and moved her suitcase into one of the bedrooms. He said he was worried about Ma being here all alone, that Flu could help her around the house and take care of us. “She’ll teach the girls Arabic,” he offered. But Ma was too shocked at his utopian delusions to answer.
“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to live like some fucking hippie on a commune!” she shouted and corralled Baba into the kitchen, where she slammed the door. Meanwhile, Dima and I watched Flu. Baba’s big secret sat in one of the unused bedrooms, a specter in black berga, nursing Badr silently on the bare mattress. Down the hall we could hear Ma crying through the walls of the kitchen. Baba went through a long explanation detailing his story: Flu was his cousin from Saudi, and his brother Mohamed had convinced him to marry her because she needed help. She lived on the outskirts of a little town in a shack with her sisters and widowed mother. All of them had ended up becoming second wives because they were so poor. She and Badr lived there still in her mother’s un-air-conditioned, running water–less hut while he was on the rig.
“You said yourself the flat was big enough for two families!”
“I can’t believe you twist my words in my mouth!” Ma blew the door open and stomped to where we waited near Flu. Ma grabbed Badr from Flu and lifted him like she was weighing a piece of meat. “How old? Six months?” she barked at Flu. She calculated the approximate time of our castaway night in the desert with the tribesman, and then put two and two together. She pointed at Flu and the baby without looking at them. “So that is why you left us in the desert that night? Don’t lie.”
Baba went into the bathroom and locked himself in. Ma went to sit in the living room. Flu followed and sat across from her on the swiveling office chair. Ma ordered us to her. “Come ’ere, girls.” She lit a cigarette (which she never did indoors) and drew us to her, creating a united front against the other female encroaching on her territory. Sweaty metal bangles slid up and down Flu’s hairless arm while she waved away the thick Marlboro smoke Ma was blowing in her direction.
Flu took my hand in hers. I looked at Ma for approval, but she was back to watching the bathroom door and wasn’t listening anymore.
Flu swept me up and forced my locked knees until I was sitting on her lap. I struggled in her grip; the coarse embroidery on her jalabiya made my rash itch even more. Still no sound came from the bathroom. What would be the right etiquette for this situation? An all-out brawl probably would not have been frowned upon. They could have scratched each other’s eyes out, throttled, beat, maimed, or—as Al-Dafira tradition goes for the settlement of such disputes—disemboweled each other. Instead they sat at the table while the tea leaves sank and listened together for the toilet to flush.
What seemed like an hour passed before Baba emerged, sheepish, giving a fearful look to Ma and a pitiful one to Flu. This was my chance to get away. I wriggled off Flu’s lap, relieved of shield-duty protecting her from Ma’s evil eye. Flu showily kissed my forehead before Baba took her back into the bedroom where Badr was asleep. Ma said nothing as the sun set into night. No sound came from the bedroom. She fixed us a dinner of canned tuna and pocket bread, plotting all the while what to do. In the end, the silence coming from the room drove her to germ warfare.
After she’d washed us up for bed, Ma gave me a kiss on my prickly-rashed forehead. “I want you to go sleep in the room with Baba,” she said, and opening the door a crack, she nudged me into the dark room. “I’m sorry, kitten,” she whispered in my ear.
I didn’t know what she was sorry about and felt my way toward the bed, where I could barely make out two dark heaps under the sheet. “Baba?” I asked of the dark figure in the bed. No sound came from the heap. I crawled up, doing Ma’s bidding like a smallpox-infected blanket sent straight to Chief Pontiac. Baba pulled me up and nestled me in between him and Flu. Badr squirmed beside me. I could see his puckered lips suckling at the air, dreaming, as I imagine babies do, of big tits in the sky. Flu was snoring steadily, every third breath ending in a snort. I concentrated on the rhythm until I too fell into sleep, waking only occasionally to scratch.
The next morning Ma dressed in the blue morning-glory outfit she had bought to meet our family. The monochrome was broken only by the dots of pink rouge on her cheeks, efforts at a healthy glow only drawing attention to how weak and tired she actually looked. After the surgical nightmare she had become practically translucent, and I had become obsessed with tracing the topography of her blue veins through her skin. Dima was spacing out in front of the living room window chewing a cocktail sausage. Ma’s recovery meant we’d been living off canned food, triangle cheese, and juice boxes for weeks. Ma had packed the suitcase with our few possessions that had not been gifts from Baba. Depending on his movements this morning she would make an executive decision about our future as a family unit. By the time we left the apartment, the light in the window was tinted with an orange, martian glow. A sandstorm was approaching. Baba stepped into the hall just as we left and watched us get into the elevator. They said nothing to each other and within minutes Ma, Dima, and I were in a cab driving into the darkening storm.
“How will Baba know where we are?” I whined from the backseat.
“He’ll know,” Ma said in her emergency voice, the deep one that warned us not to argue.
Visibility was so low on the roads that the cabdriver had to inch forward as we passed into the eerie billows of the sandstorm and finally came to the corniche where the apex of the Sheraton Hotel rose over the dashboard. The massive ziggurat of the Sheraton was even more impressive to me now than it had been in Baba’s video. It squatted low on its reclaimed pilings like a broken-down spaceship caught in the earth’s enchantment. We passed through a series of automatic doors, each sealing us off further from the storm—closer to sanctuary, hermetically sealed from the confusion of our culture and our family. Entering it was like stepping into a gigantic, glamorous terrarium from the future. The soft hiss of chlorinated spray misted from tiled fountains, teacups clinked on their saucers, the concierge smiled.
As long as we stayed inside this temple to unreality and out of the sandstorm, we could suspend belief and forget the fact that our father had married another woman and that she had been the one to birth a brother. Ma checked us in under a false name and, having no money, gave them our passports as collateral at the desk. Someone would have to bail us out of the hotel if we were ever going to leave. A bellhop led us into the elevators. The doors were brass, the ceiling mirrored with triangles of colored glass. A full view of the patterned fountains sprawled below us as the elevator rose and a double-breast of buttons glowed out of the side panel.
The doors opened, we stepped out to a landing, and he led us to our room. The sandstorm gave a day-for-night quality to our view. All hours seemed the same. There’s no way for me to know the duration of our stay; it was probably only days, but it seemed to me like a long time. Ma didn’t want us to draw attention by playing outside in the halls or lobby, so she tried to amuse us by making floppy origami cranes out of napkins and reading aloud from the hotel pamphlets on the bedside table. “Listen to this, girls!” she’d begin enthusiastically before sharing some unimpressive piece of trivia. “The American astronaut Alan Shepard was the first person to check in here!”
It was in the liminal hours of what might have been early morning when a soft knock came at our door. Ma opened the door to a black specter. It was Flu. Baba had found us and sent her to apologize.
“Ecomme. Dawen,” she said through her berga.
“I’m not gonna calm dawen.” Ma mocked her. She was about to slam the door, but Flu intercepted it, hennaed fingers in the doorjamb.
“Come. Down.” This time she enunciated. “Matar. Down.”
She pointed downward toward the lobby. Ma let go and released Flu’s hand.
“Kittens, I’ll be right back,” Ma said, and left with Flu.
I turned to Dima, who had fashioned a cushion-throne for herself at the head of the bed, remote control in hand. We blinked at each other. Dima turned back to the TV. I quietly opened the door and snuck into the hallway. It was empty, and in the near distance I heard the chime of the elevator: aural catnip.
Shuffling down the hall, I pressed my ear to the wall and listened to the hum of invisible machines running the mother ship of the building. I made it to the elevator, where I was conducted safely down the warren of ranked halls and stairwells, descending into the lobby. The cobalt of my mother’s hijab glinted from under the filigree of a café gazebo. She was smoking and sitting across a table from Baba and Flu.
I ducked low under the window rail so she wouldn’t see me. Ma gesticulated at them with her cigarette, bartering for our status as his first family. Her intensity had faded since our first day in the building, but her anger hadn’t. She gazed over Baba’s shoulder at the player-less piano and dragged long on her cigarette. Just as I landed at l, Ma turned and stared directly at me like an owl spying a mouse. I pressed the highest button I could reach as she stood and mouthed my name. I blanched and then for some reason waved, knowing I was going to get into trouble for leaving the room anyway.
The button I had pressed turned out to lead onto a winding hallway lined with tarnished brassy mirrors. The lights were dimmed, but the same automated rendition of “Bright Eyes” dusted down from the ceiling speakers. Following the hallway to its mouth I came to an empty restaurant, also brass, with a great Fibonacci-sequenced chandelier hanging over the tables. A panoramic floor-to-ceiling view of the sandstorm (now all pink and copper) rimmed the room, something between the grandeur and the emptiness belted together to
mute the space, and I stood stunned and disoriented by the mirrors and windows and the wind.
Somewhere beyond one of the mirror panes I heard the scraping of silver on a plate. One seam in the mirror was darker and wider than the others. I pushed it a little and it slid open. This was the private wing of the restaurant. I peeked in, stepped through, and came up behind a row of potted palm trees lining the entrance of a private elevator flanked by two silver oryx. Kids my age were bickering, and I leaned in between the fronds to see an Indian maid standing at the sideboard near a triangulated bay window; behind him hints of coast were visible every few seconds through the continuing storm. A man with a mustache sat at the head of the table, thobe crisp and white, gutra folded up in the aggressive “cobra” style of the time. To his right sat a fair woman in a silk dress ruched at the neck. To his left sat a distinctly Arab woman with long black hair hanging in a braid over the back of her chair. The adults ate in silence while two sets of children all around the same age tossed saltine crackers like shuriken at one another under the table. The two boys to the right of the table had light brown hair like the woman in the stylish silk dress. The three to the right were heavier-set and wearing thobes. All five were vying for the man’s attention.
Here, in the uppermost cockpit of the Sheraton, was the dream my father imagined for himself: an alternate reality where his wives and children clustered around him on a Friday morning. He wasn’t being cruel when he brought Flu to stay with us; he was trying (unsuccessfully) to assume a lifestyle far beyond his means.
I felt Ma’s presence behind me before she made herself known. I didn’t turn around. I knew she was watching the scene too, making the same assumptions I was about the rich family in the VIP room. Grasping my shoulder, she held tight at first, and then I felt the urgency, the desperation, the anger, and the static all zap out of her in a resigned understanding. When my mother and I finally backed out through the mirrored secret door, my father was waiting for us. Flu stood near the corridor with Dima hitched up in her arms. Ma patted me toward Baba. “It’s okay, kitten. We’re not angry anymore.”
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 7
