First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  “I wanna thank God for helping me and Ricky get back together.”

  Listening to my peers work through boyfriends and breakups, I was convinced of another upside to being a Muslim woman. I'd never waste valuable getting-into-a-good-college time on a pointless relationship. I'd never worry about finding a date to the Winter Ball or fret over wearing a bathing suit in public. Why a woman would want to go anywhere in what was nothing more than a made-for-water bra and underpants baffled me. I didn't want to introduce the world to the stretch marks that my first and only growth spurt had autographed on my thigh.

  At school I defended these ideas to my friends. Every year I gave talks to the world religions classes about Islam with the only other Muslim girl in school, Nadia Khan. Nadia had Pakistani parents, and she looked—and I say this while cursing Disney studios for getting the stereotype right—just like Princess Jasmine. When our classmates brought up the resemblance, we feigned great offense, but Nadia did, indeed, have thick black hair that hung down her petite, twig-thin body; full lips plumped up with Revlon's Toast of New York; and kohl-lined cat eyes.

  In those world religions classes, we repeated the same lines about the five pillars of Islam; the hijab and how even if Nadia and I didn't wear it, we still tried to be modest in our dress; and the differences between Sunnis and Shias. I'd start by saying, “So there are the two sects in Islam. The Shias believed that Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, should have taken over after the Prophet died, and the Sunnis believed it should have been Abu Bakr. But the split didn't even happen until years after, when Imam Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, was killed. It was then that a group broke off and decided to follow the descendants of the Prophet's line.”

  Nadia was my first Sunni Muslim friend. She folded her hands around her waist during certain parts of the five daily prayers while I kept my arms straight at my sides. She also recited her afternoon prayers separately instead of one after the other like I did. I used to feel as if those minor differences threatened our unity, the small island we inhabited in our sea of Catholic education. But whenever something came up about our dissimilarities, Nadia would say, “Oh, Hudie, like I care.” It was enough for Nadia that we were both Muslims, and she was always quick to add this particular message to our classroom explanations.

  “That's the only difference,” she'd say, brandishing a polished fingernail, her sentences coming fast and without a full breath between them. “It's purely historical. It's the same religion, the same beliefs. We all pray, we all fast, and we all go on our Haj pilgrimage together. No one even really cares about it. See. Look at me and Huda. We're both from different sects, but it doesn't matter. We're still the best of friends.”

  Nadia was brilliant, but for some reason this made her less coherent rather than more. It was as if a genius creature lived inside her brain and made her speak as fast as it thought. But Nadia's genius had a big heart, and every time she made this last point, she put her arm around me for emphasis.

  It was my favorite part of our talk because it filled me with such hope. Nadia and I belonged to a new generation of Muslims in America, and we were painting a picture of Islam on what was essentially a blank canvas. Those two smoking towers of black wouldn't appear until almost seven years later, in 2001. The Gulf War was newly behind us, and we had the luxury of thinking our biggest problem was the movie Not without My Daughter—which, judging by the number of girls in my school who had seen it, was the most important film of the entire decade.

  During every talk we gave, someone would raise her hand and ask how we could want to marry Muslim men when they were like the antagonist Moody, so overbearing and abusive. “Don't Muslim men beat their wives?” Rachel Lazar, the most outspoken girl in the class, once asked.

  “No,” Nadia said, “I have a whole family full of Muslim men, and my dad and all my uncles have never hit their wives.”

  Rachel was not satisfied with this answer, and her next question carried the tone of a challenge. “But what would you do if you fell in love with a guy who wasn't Muslim?”

  “That's easy,” I said, striding toward the middle of the classroom. “I wouldn't fall in love with a guy who wasn't Muslim. How could I fall in love with someone who doesn't share the things that are most important to me?”

  My faith was the only security I had in what I'd already discovered to be a frightening and unpredictable world. Baba, a long-time sufferer from bronchiectasis, was often hospitalized for simple colds that turned into more stubborn infections or prolonged episodes of pneumonia. And then there was the arteriovenous malformation (AVM) found in Lina's mandible when she was eight years old and I was thirteen. For a year, my parents shuttled her back and forth to Stanford University and UCSF until her doctors settled on a treatment for the tangle of blood vessels lodged in her jaw, the location of her AVM so rare that her case was written up in medical journals. And through all that bone-rattling childhood fear, I carried prayer beads in my pocket and prayed until those prayers were answered. I wanted a future spouse who would help me hold up my world with his devotion—not draw punishment into my life for marrying someone outside of my religion.

  “I don't see how you can say that,” Rachel argued. “You can't control who you're going to fall in love with.”

  Here it was in real life—not spoken by some character in a book or in a film—that notion that you couldn't control who you love, that it was something that happened to you as accidentally as tripping. I wished Rachel could step into my world for just one moment and see the glaring contradiction in her reasoning. American culture extolled autonomy and personal power, but it accepted and even embraced complete helplessness when it came to love.

  I replied, “Yes, you can, if you don't let yourself consider people outside your religion, and that makes sense because you're going to have kids and raise a family with this person.”

  In spite of the complete confidence I felt in my explanation, something in Rachel's face shook me. She looked over at her friends and rolled her eyes with such disdain that I almost heard her announcing that I was nothing to her, asexual and therefore unimportant.

  My mind flashed to Hadi. I was tempted to offer up my list of moments as proof that a boy liked me and maybe I liked him, too. But I would never discuss this unnamed thing that Hadi and I shared so casually in front of my class. Mama talked to me about Hadi, in private, behind closed doors, but we never discussed this topic in front of my siblings or father. Mama had warned me time and again to admit to no crush, no interest in any boy in front of anyone ever—not my closest girlfriends and certainly never the boy. “You may change your mind,” she warned, “but you cannot control what people will think. In their mind, they will always remember you tied to that one boy's name.”

  The snotty girl inside me wished I could walk over to Rachel and her friends, with my hands on my hips, and say, “You think you're so hot because you've been to every Winter Ball and prom with a different guy on your arm. Just watch. I'll be married before you've even had a steady boyfriend.”

  I sincerely believed getting married beat having a boyfriend. I repeatedly told myself that the girls around me could have all their temporary boyfriends because one day soon a boy would want to be with me forever. We'd host dinner parties with delicate china and gleaming flatware, and my life would soon be far more mature and sophisticated than Rachel and her friends and their petty concerns about boys and dates.

  But every Friday, when my classmate Diana Marquez slept over, this built-up confidence got a thorough shaking. Diana and I would wrestle over our futures, this puzzle that did not have a single piece locked into place, and wonder how we were going to put together everything we wanted from life. We were the girls who had been plotting and planning our path to college since freshman year—running for student-body offices, joining clubs, studying for tests right through lunch, eyeing the valedictory crown, and grabbing every last possible point for our greedy above 4.0 GPAs. How were our degrees and careers going to
fit with a boy loving us and marrying us and later with soft, chubby babies who chewed on our fingers with their smooth, toothless gums?

  We made lists of careers that made you look smart, so even if we stopped working to take care of our families, people would know that we'd been bright enough to become something else first. Medicine was too long a career path not to use, but maybe law or physical therapy. “But isn't it a waste to go through that much schooling if we aren't going to use it?” Diana would ask.

  “But we have to,” I'd respond. “We can't have worked this hard to get all these As to be just moms.”

  Diana and I had no evidence to complicate this image of motherhood. We'd grown up in the age of the supermom, Murphy Brown, and “We girls can do anything. Right, Barbie?” We merely accepted that being a stay-at-home mom came with the word just firmly affixed to the front of it, and we moved on to creating scenarios for the perfect marriage proposal. I still remember one such daydream where Diana suggested, “Wouldn't it be great if your friends are like, ‘Hey, can you drive us to the movies?’ because they are in on it, too, and you go to open your car door and all these balloons fly out?”

  “Yes,” I added, “but there is this one balloon that doesn't come out, so you go and pull on it, and attached is this little box with a really big ring in it—”

  “And then a limo pulls up,” Diana said, “and you see him get out, wearing a tuxedo and holding flowers, and you say, ‘Yes,’ and you hug and cry—”

  “And that's when you get into the limo,” I said, “and there's a dress waiting for you because you are going to change and go out to dinner at a place with an amazing ocean view, and then when you get there, your favorite song is playing and you dance.”

  As Diana and I spun our fantasies, I admitted to no conflict. I rationalized that a surprise proposal just like this could indeed happen to me in spite of all my familial and cultural restrictions. Maybe a boy could ask my family for my hand without me knowing, and then he could arrange a proposal, if not as elaborate as this one then at least something similar. And after we were engaged, we could catch up on all the moments a Western couple may have had while they were dating. During the year that we were planning our wedding, my fiancé could whisk me away for a romantic birthday, Valentine's Day, and anniversary celebration of when we first became a couple.

  Diana and I had an entire soundtrack for every romantic event we imagined, but no song captivated our imagination like Chris de Burgh's rendering of “The Lady in Red.” Every time we got together, we belted out its lyrics and danced in rehearsal for the night when we would be the Lady in Red in our own lives. When the song ended, we'd take turns dipping each other with dramatic flourish. One night, while mid-dip, we caught sight of ourselves in my mirrored closet door. Diana was in my arms, with one leg kicked up high into the air, her head back, hair fanning out of a messy bun, wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants and white socks, the latter stuffed into high heels. I wore the exact same ensemble.

  “We look so beautiful, right now,” I said in the deepest, most dramatic voice I could muster.

  “It's the socks and the heels, isn't it?” Diana said in a flirty tone.

  And that was all I needed to drop her on the floor where we both crumbled into a fit of giggles.

  “Oh my God, I totally have to pee now,” Diana said.

  I laughed even harder, tears streaming down my face.

  “If you don't stop laughing, I'm gonna pee on your head,” Diana threatened while running out the door to the bathroom.

  I stayed stretched out on the floor, catching my breath. The laughter that had coursed through me moments ago gave way to a melancholic stillness. Diana may have been Mexican American, but we always joked that we were essentially the same person. At some point, we had both lived in tiny three-bedroom ranch homes, overcrowded with immigrating relatives. Our parents had been making us sign the permission slips that came home from school for as long as we could read (“You know my signature,” Mama would say). They allowed us to watch inordinate amounts of television—Three's Company, Silver Spoons, and The Facts of Life—and do our homework right in front of it. We'd eaten obscene amounts of candy and had the fillings to prove it. And we both understood that even though we talked to each other about marriage with age-inappropriate frequency, this was not a side of ourselves we wanted the outside world to see. Diana and I were far too driven; we were both the daughters of immigrants, and we had something to prove.

  But dancing to “The Lady in Red” undid some of the commonality that bound us together. No matter how much our worries and desires matched, only Diana would be allowed to dance with a boy before she was married.

  “Ready for another dance?” Diana asked as soon as she came back from the bathroom.

  “Always,” I said and extended my hands toward Diana, toward the bittersweet joy of wanting what you could not have.

  In my junior year, I enrolled in Marriage and Parenting, a course required by our school's Religion Department. The first quarter was basically sexual education, complete with diagrams of genitals and a list of words we had to learn for a matching test. The words were familiar. Mama was the designated sex-talk giver in the family, and I'd already sat through at least three sex talks where I made a point of only half-listening (I believed in preserving the virginity of my mind). I'd gathered the basics: There were the penis and the testes and some business about hardening and shrinking and ejaculating sperm, but I thought it best to remain fuzzy on the specifics. If I had to guess, I would've said that the belbool (Iraqi slang for “penis” because God knows I would've never been able to use the appropriate term) got really, really small and then slipped in the woman.

  I was equally befuddled by all the words for female parts. I'd heard about the vagina and clitoris, but I didn't know what word corresponded to what. Becoming-a-woman books always suggested studying yourself down there with a hand mirror, but that seemed a completely irrelevant exercise for a girl who grew up being warned that being too friendly with boys (i.e., casual chatting and laughing or, God forbid, flirtatious touching) was enough to ruin her reputation.

  Not knowing anything about sex seemed the best way to prove this thing that was so important to the people in my community. It said, “Look at me. I am so naïve and innocent, I must be a virgin.”

  It wasn't a viewpoint Mama supported. Whenever I cried out, “Gross,” or “Do we have to talk about this again?” she scolded, “It's not gross. It's beautiful, and it's science. This is one of Allah's great miracles. Now pay attention.”

  But as much as my mother tried to teach me that sex was important in Islam, that it was the foundation of a marriage, I believed the risks of knowing too much too soon outweighed the benefits. Islam's healthy and positive attitudes toward sex didn't matter when the people in our community were the ones gossiping, either choosing you or casting you aside, and the consistent message I got was that it was ayb or shameful for an unmarried girl to like a boy or to be excited about anything related to boys.

  In the fifth grade, I had a sleepover for my birthday (my parents’ rule was that I could have friends over, but I couldn't spend the night at anyone's house). When the conversation turned to my friends’ on-screen crushes, I wanted to shush them. In my household, there was nothing cute or innocent about girls discussing boys. It wasn't long before Mama picked up on the topic and called me out of the living room and into the kitchen to ask, “Are your friends talking about boys?”

  I nodded, mortified and ashamed, and then added, “But they're not real boys. Just actors.”

  She didn't meet my gaze. “Already?” she said as if she was addressing herself. “These are eleven-year-old girls. What's the matter with this country?”

  That I could feel so much shame just being in the company of girls talking about boys made it clear—this was a taboo unlike any others.

  A hababa, a good girl, was defined almost exclusively by what she didn't do. She didn't talk to boys. She didn't da
nce at parties. She didn't wear sleeveless dresses or wear short skirts. Show up at one party in the wrong dress, dance a little too long at a wedding, and that descriptor would be plucked from your name.

  However, these strict guidelines oddly comforted me. “Huda hababa,” I'd hear one of the aunties in our community say, and it was as if she had patted me on the back and said, “Don't worry. You have been such a good girl. You will be picked by the best guy.” It was that implied guarantee that made all the self-denial, all the careful guarding of my reputation, worth it. The best guy would pick me—maybe it would be Hadi, or maybe it would be someone else—and in that small space between getting engaged and married, my love story would begin.

  Since my family lived a six-hour driving distance away from the greater Los Angeles area's Iraqi community, our appearances at social gatherings and at the masjid were infrequent but regular. Every year, without fail, on the anniversary of Imam Husayn's martyrdom, a day known as Ashura, my extended family of eight would don black mourning clothes and squeeze into our seven-seater minivan to make the journey to a run-down 1960s South Central Los Angeles church that had been converted to a masjid. On our way there, Mama, Jidu, and my uncle would listen to tape recordings of religious services that made them weep, their shoulders bobbing up and down with each sob.

  My siblings and I did not cry. Not only was our Arabic vocabulary limited to the domestic, but also our family's tapes were garbled from use and full of words to which we'd had no exposure. Baba did not cry either. I'd only seen him cry once, when he found out one of his sisters had died, and that had been only a short, angry burst of tears. Bibi pulled her face behind her long, cloak-like abaya because sometimes she cried, but sometimes she didn't, and holding back tears at a time like this was not a sign of strength. Shia Muslims believe the tears they shed in the name of their ill-fated Imams, those spiritual leaders they regard as the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad, are blessed and rewarded. My family traveled to this mosque precisely because the speaker, referred to as the Seyyid, was a prominent religious scholar known for his ability to evoke the soul-cleansing cry my elders craved.