Ten Things I Hate About Me

by Randa Abdel-Fattah

  I grab a piece of bread, fold a piece of chicken into it, and dress it with a teaspoon of the garlic dip.

  “Advice taken!” I cry and gulp it down.

  “Did you hear that, Sowsan?” my dad cries. “Jamilah took my advice. God be praised!”

  We all laugh and continue devouring the feast. Not that our efforts have made any impression on the plates. You know that you’re at Aunt Sowsan’s house if everybody has managed to stuff their faces three times over but the plates of food look no different from when you started.

  It is perhaps the one issue on which Shereen and Aunt Sowsan argue. Shereen gets pretty upset about the fact that so much food goes to waste when there are people starving in the world. She’s quite right, but it’s a habit entrenched in Arabic culture and Aunt Sowsan would consider herself to be dishonoring her guests if she didn’t make such an exorbitant amount.

  It always feels odd to be sitting at the same table as Miss Sajda, eating and socializing outside of madrasa hours. But she fits in well and even Amo Ameen, who’s usually so quiet, is inspired to joviality and is cracking jokes and making everybody roar with laughter. I don’t particularly find the Arabic jokes funny, but that’s because I don’t understand the punch-lines or the context. I just pretend to laugh on their cue. That’s purely a protective measure designed to avoid my dad feeling sympathy for me and translating the jokes into English. Hearing him inject Aussie slang into an Arabic joke doesn’t make for very comic material.

  Miss Sajda and my dad are doubled over with laughter as Amo Ameen launches into a new joke. I get up to help Aunt Sowsan and Shereen clear the food away and start on the dishes. Miss Sajda jumps up to help.

  “No, stay,” Aunt Sowsan insists, motioning for Miss Sajda to sit down.

  “No, I’ll help,” Miss Sajda says, starting to pick up plates.

  “I won’t hear of it,” Aunt Sowsan says. “Sit down and enjoy my husband’s good mood while it lasts!”

  Amo Ameen grins and Miss Sajda shrugs and takes her seat again. “If you insist.”

  “I do,” Aunt Sowsan says, much to my disappointment. We need as many hands as we can get. The downside of Aunt Sowsan’s mammoth meals is the amount of washing-up afterward. It takes half an hour to eat and half the day to clean up.

  I’m grumbling about the washing load to Shereen as we walk to the kitchen with a pile of plates in each of our hands.

  “Tell me about it,” she mutters. “Dad and Amo Ameen could get off their butts and at least bring their plates to the sink. God, male sexism kills me.”

  “I know!”

  “What are you two whispering about?” Aunt Sowsan asks, poking her head between our shoulders as we enter the kitchen.

  “The fact that this world is chauvinistic,” Shereen says. “Women cook and clean and men get fat on the food and get a cup of tea after dinner as well. It drives me nuts.”

  “I agree,” I say.

  Shereen looks at me in surprise. “We have a Guinness Book of World Records moment here!”

  I stick my tongue out at her. “Don’t worry, I’m not fully converted. I still think hairspray shouldn’t be banned.”

  “Environmental hazard.”

  “So are my curls.”

  “Well, my generation is generally different,” Aunt Sowsan says. “But men are improving.”

  “Excuse me?” Shereen scoffs. “What about our beloved brother, Bilal?”

  Aunt Sowsan pauses. “Ah, yes. Bilal—a mystery.”

  After an hour in the kitchen, with our hands wrinkly from the warm water and our backs sore from standing over the sink, we’re finally able to sit down again with cups of tea and pieces of cake and Arabic sweets. We scarf down the pastries filled with dates and the cookies coated with chocolate and layered with strawberry jam.

  While Aunt Sowsan and Shereen are inside praying the afternoon prayer, Amo Ameen asks me a question and inadvertently opens a big, fat, juicy can of worms.

  “So you’re in tenth grade now, Jamilah?” he asks. It’s not often that Amo Ameen addresses me, but he’s uncharacteristically chatty today so I go with the flow.

  “That’s right,” I reply.

  “Don’t you have a special function in tenth grade? Like a dance or something? I remember Shereen going when she was your age.”

  I look over at my dad and his face tenses.

  “Yes, we do,” I say. “The formal. But Dad won’t let me go.” I jut my chin out defiantly, waiting for my dad to respond.

  “Why not, Hakim?” Amo Ameen asks innocently.

  My dad puffs on his water pipe and looks at Amo Ameen. “I have my reasons, Ameen.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not valid!” I cry.

  My dad puts down his pipe and sighs. “Do we have to go through this again, Jamilah?”

  “I just don’t get it. What’s the big deal? I’m not going with a guy. I’ll go with my girlfriends.”

  This is rather a difficult prospect, but if I can only get permission, I’ll do whatever it takes to drag one of the girls from my class with me.

  “When will you ever trust me?” I ask.

  Miss Sajda and Amo Ameen squirm uncomfortably in their seats as they watch my father and me do battle.

  “How many times must I explain to you that I do trust you? It’s the people around you that I don’t trust. And then there’s your reputation. What will our friends say if they know you were out late at a party where there is drinking and dancing and God knows what else?”

  “Who cares what people think? I’m so sick and tired of caring what the oldies in our community think. All they do is gossip. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’ll find an excuse to talk.”

  “We don’t need to make it easy for them.”

  “It’s not like you defend us anyway!” I yell. “You let them talk and talk and you don’t ever come to our defense! Uncle Joseph lectures you about us being disgraces and too free and you sit back and take it!”

  My father recoils as though I’ve slapped him in the face. I can’t bear to look at him and I jump out of my chair and rush into the house, locking myself in the bathroom.

  35

  THE POLAROID IS in an old bottle-green album, wedged in between a photograph of my sister and me striking a pose for the camera, and a picture of Bilal giving me a piggyback ride. Next to it, in my mother’s handwriting, is a small note: Baladna algadeed. Our New Country.

  My father stands with his arms looped lazily around my mother’s shoulders. They’re in the international terminal at the Sydney airport. My father’s grin is framed by a thick black mustache. His hair is high and thick, like a ball of steel wool. My mother’s smile manages to convey both fear and excitement. She’s dressed in flared green pants and a puffy white shirt and has gigantic copper sunglasses perched on her head. Her red henna hair is slicked back into a ponytail.

  The photo has always tugged at me. Pulled me to it when I’ve missed her and when I’ve worried that I’ve forgotten the shape of her eyes and the contour of her cheekbones.

  “What are you doing?” my father asks. I can tell that he’s trying to sound indifferent. There’s still a bit of tension between us since our fight the other day.

  “Just looking at photos.”

  He clears his throat. “Of who?”

  “You and Mom.”

  He approaches me slowly, peering over my shoulder at the open page of the album.

  He lets out a chuckle and then abruptly tries to stop it. “I haven’t seen that photo in ages.”

  “Mom was gorgeous. You know, you could have done with some hair gel.”

  He sits next to me on the couch and smiles. “It was our first plane ride. We arrived in Sydney hungry. We thought we had to pay for the airplane meals. So we hardly ate and kept refusing every time they brought a tray around.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Your mother and I were startled at how easily everybody else accepted each meal.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “We had few savi
ngs as it was and weren’t going to spend them all on food.”

  “Why didn’t you ask somebody?”

  He snorts. “Pride. We arrived in Sydney with two suitcases, a Lebanese flag, one photo album, and a prayer mat. I was not going to advertise the fact that we had so little by demanding to know the price of food.”

  “You know something, Dad, you were a major dork.” I smile at him as I touch the photo. “You seriously needed to apply some hair product to that Afro.”

  “It was the fashion then. I’m sure Bilal’s children will tease him about his porcupine spikes and your children will ask you why you dyed your hair yellow.”

  I slowly turn the pages of the album. And then suddenly he stops me. He tenderly touches a photograph of my mother sitting on the hood of a bottle-green Datsun 12Y. She’s grinning wildly at the camera.

  My father slaps his hands down on his thighs and bursts out laughing.

  “Ya Allah! I remember that day! That was the first and last time I took your mother out for a driving lesson. She managed to drive without incident all along Parramatta Road but then reversed into a parked car on our street!” He continues to laugh. “I was furious. You know why?”

  I shrug.

  “She wouldn’t stop laughing. She just wrecked the rear of my brand-new Datsun and she was in hysterics!”

  I can’t help but laugh along with him.

  “I was getting so worked up, losing my temper and pacing up and down the street, and she was doubled over in laughter. Pretty soon she had me laughing too. That’s how she was. She’d kill me if I messed up the linen closet or dropped a pan but she had a way of calming me down. I loved her contradictions.

  “She was a wise and wonderful woman, Jamilah. We always complimented our friends. You’re so wise, so funny, so smart. We always laughed at our friends’ jokes and were cheerful when we saw them. We were always switched on for our friends. We wanted them to go away and tell others: That Hakim, he is a nice man. Always laughing and happy and hospitable. But to those closest to us, we felt we did not have to pretend. We felt we had the right to come home in a bad mood and not talk if we didn’t feel like it, without caring how the other person felt.”

  It’s the first time my dad has ever been so candid with me about his relationship with my mother. I stare up at him, soaking it in.

  “She was the closest person to me on earth and I never told her I admired her strength of conviction and her sharp wit and her kind heart. I wish I had spent every day with her as though it were our last.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “Yes, we were very happy. We could laugh and talk; we could sit comfortably in silence. Our moods matched like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, the pieces didn’t always fit, as with all marriages. Since your mother’s death I’ve fallen in love with her many times over…Khalas. Enough. What is done is done. I am fifty-two years old and I have three children to raise. It is just that sometimes, Jamilah, I wonder how I am to do this alone…”

  His voice fades away as he takes the album from me and fingers the edges of the photographs. “I’ve never asked you this before,” he says, his voice solemn and guarded. “Have you ever thought…I mean, have you ever considered that I might remarry one day?”

  His question takes me by surprise. It’s not that it hasn’t occurred to me before. When I see my dad sitting up late at night, smoking his cigarettes, drinking his coffee and staring at the floor, I think it might be nice for him. To have someone to hold at night. To have someone to watch M*A*S*H reruns and Egyptian sitcoms with over cups of tea and salted mixed nuts.

  “It’s OK,” he says, interpreting my silence. “You don’t have to answer me.”

  I’m glad. Because I don’t want to tell him that the selfish part of me wants him to be alone. Alone with only the memory of my mother to comfort him on those nights he sits and stares.

  36

  TONIGHT I’M ON my break at work when Timothy comes by on his bike. I see him and my insides go all funny, like they do the moment before you’re about to board an upside-down roller coaster.

  “Don’t tell me—undercooked chops again?” I ask.

  “No, this time it was undercooked fish fingers.” He leans his bike against the table and takes a seat across from me. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “They go all soggy and the breading gets moist and the whole thing becomes a disaster?”

  “Precisely. I love my grandma, but since we moved in with her I haven’t had a decent meal. My mom works late nights and doesn’t really have time to cook. I’m one of those toast-burning guys so I’m usually on a diet of fast food.”

  “Do you mind me asking you why your mom chose to move to Guildford?”

  He hesitates for a moment and then shrugs. “When my mom left my dad, she decided to live with my grandmother and look after her more. It was kind of her way of making up for lost time. She neglected my grandma all the years she was with my dad.”

  “Is it as hard as they say?”

  “What?”

  “Divorce. I know what it feels like to be raised by one parent. But I think it’d be so awkward living between two houses, getting stuck in the middle, dividing your loyalties.”

  “I don’t have a problem with that. My loyalty’s firmly with my mom. My dad was cheating on my mom for years. My mom knew that but she stayed for the sake of me and Jessica. That drives me crazy, but let’s not go there.”

  “So what made her finally decide to leave?”

  “It’s funny but it was something very stupid and simple. She found my dad’s girlfriend’s eyebrow tweezer in the car and it set her off. She went ballistic. All this pent-up anger exploded and she packed her bags then and there and left to go stay with my grandmother. I followed her a couple of days later.”

  “It’s funny how small things can set people off. I remember the time my dad—” I quickly cut myself off.

  “You remember the time…?”

  I smile shyly. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  “Do you usually expect people to open up to you in exchange for nothing?”

  “I’m not used to talking about my dad…”

  “So start.”

  I pause and look at him closely. I see trust and honesty and loyalty in his smile. “I was just going to say that after my mother died, my dad kind of fell apart. Have you ever been around silence? The kind of silence that weighs a house down? Like thick, murky, humid air, it sucks the noise and sound out of a place. My dad barely spoke to us. And then one day he was cleaning out our laundry and he found an old hair clip that belonged to my mom. It had fallen behind the washing machine. He just stood there, bawling. I have no idea what went on in his mind but he started looking into our eyes again after that. He reclaimed his voice and he hasn’t stopped talking since.”

  “My mom did the opposite. She was suddenly alone and desperate to convince herself it was fine. She threw herself into a master’s degree, volunteer work, painting classes, yoga. It drove me crazy. It was like she was trying to make sure that she was busy for every last minute of the day. That way she’d never have to deal with anything.”

  “So I take it things are ugly between your parents now?”

  “Whenever I have weekend visits with my dad, he complains about my irresponsible mother hauling me over to the slums of Sydney to live with her senile mother. He has never stepped foot over to this side of the city. I honestly bet he thinks he needs to be immunized or to apply for a visa to get over the bridge.”

  “Do you ever miss him?”

  “The bimbo hanging off his arm makes it hard to feel any sense of loss. I know lots of people in class wonder about me: where I’ve come from, why I’m here and not in some prestigious school on the North Shore. But I couldn’t care less.”

  “Really?” I say, grinning. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “This is weird,” he says after a moment’s thought.

  “What is?”

  He squirms unc
omfortably in his seat. “I don’t usually do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “I don’t do personal. I don’t talk about family stuff. With anybody.”

  I smile. “Me neither.”

  Uncle Joseph somehow sees me talking to Timothy. My dad now thinks I have a boyfriend and that I only wanted a job so that I could organize secret meetings with him.

  “He goes to school with me and no, I didn’t ask him to meet me at work. He happens to live close by and, would you believe it, he felt like a Big Mac!”

  “Do not talk to me in that tone of voice, Jamilah! Uncle Joseph said that you were in a very compromising situation. How many times have I told you to be careful about your reputation?”

  “Dad!” I cry, jumping from my chair in frustration. “Whose word do you trust? Mine or Uncle Joseph’s? There is nothing going on between me and Timothy. It was an innocent conversation.”

  “But people—”

  “How about I lock myself up in my bedroom for the rest of my life? That way we never have to worry about what people will say.”

  My dad raises his voice. “Do not mock me, Jamilah!”

  “I obey your will. I follow your curfew rules. You don’t appreciate me! I might as well go behind your back because you think I do anyway.”

  And so that’s what I decide to do. I’m fed up with the rules and fights. I’m angry with my dad and I want to get back at him. So when Liz invites me to go to the movies after school with her, Sam, and Peter, I don’t fumble for an excuse to get out of the invitation. I say yes.

  I call Bilal. He’s at the gym and unimpressed with my call as I have interrupted his bicep-curl repetition session. I beg him to delay his plans for tonight and pick me up. He reluctantly agrees, warning me that I’ll be pet food if Dad finds out what we’re doing.

  Then I call my dad.

  “I need to go to Amy’s house tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “We have an overnight test. We have to hand it in tomorrow and our teacher has made us work in pairs.”