First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  Back at my parents’ house, I changed out of my dress and noticed something in my reflection in my mirrored closet doors. A tiny purplish spot above my collarbone. I leaned in closer and found a similarly colored spot on my earlobe, and then a tiny purple burst at the tip of the arch of one lip.

  I didn't feel unwell. Was it some kind of rash? No, it seemed more like a darkening of vessels, a bruise.

  Oh my God. Was this a hickey?

  No. It couldn't be. These marks were no bigger than the imprint of an infant's teeth, and hickeys were bigger, more welt-like. Or was that bruise-like?

  I couldn't bear the possibility. Hickeys were the stuff of juvenile romances, of the back seat of cars, and of television sitcoms. It was Samantha in Who's the Boss?, hiding her love bite from Tony. Such an adolescent mark was unbefitting a woman involved in a mature and sophisticated relationship with her future husband. And the word itself was so disgusting. Pleasant words that described beautiful things never rhymed with icky.

  I leaned in closer and ran my finger over the mark on my neck, relieved it was too small to show up in the pictures, pressing down to see if it hurt like a bruise. No pain, but I took no comfort in this. Too many terms to describe intimacy were coming together with their meanings today, each one an unwelcome revelation. It was one thing to have shared a series of individual kisses, but quite another to have made out, to be marked by hickeys. The words made everything we'd done feel more sinful.

  When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to our guest room was closed with Hadi still asleep inside. The door to my parents’ room was open, and there I found Mama in front of her desk, stuffing unwanted papers into the recycling bag she'd propped up on her chair.

  She turned around as soon as I'd entered. “Good. You're up.”

  I stretched and plopped down on her unmade bed.

  “You never told me how your day went yesterday,” she said, without looking up from the stack of medical journals in her hand.

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “What did you do?”

  I shrugged. “He came, and I took him to class with me. Then we walked around campus, and I introduced him to my friends, and then it was time to go to the mall.”

  Mama raised her eyebrows mischievously and asked, “Did he kiss you?”

  “No,” I said with as much offense as I could muster, and then I searched her face to see if she knew I was lying. Maybe she'd seen the hickey. Maybe I had a kissed look.

  If Mama didn't believe me, she didn't say so. She stuffed a nursing journal in with the recycling and sat down on the bed next to me. Her expression practical and sober, Mama said, “At some point he's going to get tired of looking at you.”

  “Mom,” I said sharply, as if I'd never been more exasperated.

  Mama's face now seemed to say, “Grow up.” “Hudie, if he hasn't kissed you yet, he's going to. And you kids are so good I'd hate to see you building up sins for no good reason.”

  I hated it too, but there was nothing I could do about it now. The sin had been committed. I just wished I knew how bad of a sin this was. Was this one of the rules everybody broke, like listening to music and dancing, or was this a serious, day-of-judgment offense—the kind of thing where my hands and lips would awaken to confess against me?

  “I don't want that either,” I said.

  “I know we haven't decided when to do your aqid, but I talked to Jidu, and if you want, he can do a little ceremony between the two of you, so you know, if the boy did decide to kiss you, at least, it wouldn't be a sin.”

  I didn't know exactly what Mama meant by “a little ceremony.” In the Shia tradition, there is the permanent marriage established with the aqid contract, and then there is the more controversial mutah, a temporary marriage to render various kinds of liaisons between men and women halal or permissible. Engaged couples will sometimes undertake a mutah so that they can be alone together without a chaperone. Sometimes this comes with a caveat that the marriage will not be consummated until the permanent marriage ceremony is performed; sometimes it doesn't.

  I didn't know what Jidu intended to read for us, nor did I care to know. Mutah was on the fringe of acceptable religious practice. Not only was it an issue Sunnis often criticized us for, but there were also many Shias, Mrs. Ridha among them, who found the institution distasteful. They argued that it was an outdated custom that had outlived its historic purpose. During times of war and extended travel, when men were forced to spend long periods away from their wives, mutah protected women from love-'em-and-leave-'em type affairs. It entitled a woman to a dowry and guaranteed that all children born from said relationships would be legitimate, the financial responsibility of their fathers. But contemporary mutah was often seen as a misappropriation, a way for men to get away with fooling around before marriage, guilt-free.

  Mama knew this, probably even agreed with it, but in her mind, the religious necessity of sanctioning the time Hadi and I spent together trumped those concerns. When it came to sin, Mama believed it was better to be safe than sorry, and at the time, so did I. I could've clapped with relief. This was an out. A rescue from damnation.

  “O-kay,” I said with feigned reluctance. I couldn't have Mama thinking I was eager to kiss my fiancé sin-free.

  Mama nodded as if she understood exactly the game I was playing. She stood up and placed a hand on her hip. “So you talk to Hadi first and see what he thinks because you didn't hear this from me. This is between you, Hadi, and your grandfather. I never suggested anything to you.”

  Although Mama believed she had a moral responsibility to make me aware of my options, she didn't want to be involved in whatever we chose past that point. Advising me was one thing, but going against Mrs. Ridha's wishes was another.

  I nodded, and Mama placed her hands on my shoulders. “Now this doesn't mean you can have sex and come home pregnant.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That's gross, Mom.”

  “You say that now—”

  “All right. All right,” I interrupted. “Let's not go there.”

  As soon as Hadi woke up, I told him what was on my mind, as if the thought had come to me overnight, born of the events of the previous day. And then for good measure, I added, “I don't think either one of us got engaged so that we could sin.”

  Hadi agreed to a ceremony immediately. The choice to simply not kiss again until we were married never occurred to either one of us. We'd been offered a morsel of divine permission, and we were taking it.

  Later that afternoon, without my having said anything to him, Jidu came downstairs, the Quran in his hands held open to a particular page with his index finger. We stood as was our custom when Jidu entered a room. He kissed us both on the cheek and inquired as to whether we were done eating our lunch. We said we were, and he gestured for us to follow him with his free hand. He led us into the downstairs guest room and closed the door behind him.

  We all knew exactly why we had gathered, but we did not acknowledge it directly. Jidu merely looked us both in the eye and asked, “You want this?”

  We nodded, and Jidu sat down on the edge of the bed. He opened the Quran to the marked page and read verses I didn't understand or recognize. I felt a flash of disappointment. I was supposed to teach myself to understand the Quran's classical Arabic before my wedding so that I wouldn't feel as I did now—like a child who needed her mother to translate her own marriage ceremony to her.

  Jidu asked Hadi to present me with something to symbolize my maher or dowry. Hadi dug into his wallet and unearthed a collector's coin he'd picked up as a souvenir somewhere. Jidu looked at it curiously and then asked if I accepted this token. I did. I accepted both the token and, a moment later, the boy.

  My consent now given, Jidu motioned for us to bend down. He kissed us both on the forehead and said, “May Allah fulfill all your desires in this life and the next. May Allah keep you for each other and for your children.”

  I bent down again and kissed Jidu's hand, grateful t
o be marrying someone my grandfather approved of, someone who spoke the same language, who shared the same religion and understood exactly why he had to marry me before he married me. But still I walked out of the room feeling no more married to Hadi than when I'd entered it. Hadi and I had merely filed spiritual paperwork with our Lord. It may have exempted us from the sin of the lustful glance or the occasional touch, but it did little to ease the shame of having already kissed, the sense that we had betrayed Baba and Hadi's parents.

  At the end of spring quarter, one of my history professors scrawled at the bottom of my paper, underneath a big red A, “You should be considering a career in academics.”

  It was as if he'd illuminated the obvious path for my future. Ibrahim was already in graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. He'd done the hard work of convincing my parents that there were legitimate careers outside of science and medicine, and after a childhood of sharing so little, I liked discussing my courses with Ibrahim over the phone, exchanging book titles and research topics. I could see myself following in my brother's footsteps.

  I enjoyed spending my days in the library, annotating assigned readings, researching term papers, and perusing the book stacks when I needed a break. The scholarly perspective on history had cast a spell on me. Historians handpicked the events we remembered; they penned the stories that lived on in our memories. As a Shia, I felt this pulling me right back to Ashura, to the lamentation rituals I performed with my mother. I wondered if I could bring a breath of that empathic spirit to other atrocities the world had forgotten. The only thing that struck me as more tragic than all the suffering humanity had endured was that people rarely remembered it, rarely talked about it, and rarely had any reservations about repeating it.

  The more direction I had in school, the more I wanted to talk to Hadi about his coursework. He planned on taking an extra year to complete a double major in psychology, and this concerned me. Taking more time in college spoke to a privileged, find-yourself view of education that the children of immigrants were not supposed to abide. Hadi's lost year was something to be lamented and mourned, but it frustrated me how little he seemed bothered by it.

  I wanted to know exactly when we were going to get married and what was going to happen to my undergraduate degree, if I would transfer to somewhere closer to his medical school or if I would finish here. I wanted to know where to research graduate schools, where to make connections with professors. That summer, every time we talked on the phone, I worked in questions about where he planned to apply, where he thought he was going to get in, if he had professors to write letters of recommendation, if he had started his essay. Hadi's answers were vague and indirect, and this too infuriated me. He had done well on his Medical College Admission Tests that spring. I couldn't understand why he wanted to delay graduating.

  And then one July afternoon, while staying at my parents’ house for the summer, I pushed and Hadi relented. He confessed that his GPA was somewhere in the high 2.0s, and I responded with a shocked, “God no.” I brought a hand up to my heart and held it there as if steadying myself. Tears spilled onto my face, and I was grateful for this proof of my hurt. I wanted Hadi to hear every choke, sob, and sniffle. I wanted him to crumble with regret for putting our academic futures in jeopardy.

  “See, that's why I didn't tell you. And that's why I have to do the double major. So I can bring up my GPA.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  “No. That's why I need some time to fix this.”

  I said nothing and reached for a tissue. Then I blew my nose into the phone and added, “But with those MCAT scores, I never imagined you were dealing with those kinds of grades.”

  “It's all the bio classes. They're designed to weed people out.”

  “But you're supposed to study so hard that you don't become one of those people.”

  “I study.”

  “No. I study. You go to class and poke around in your textbooks for what interests you, but that's not enough. You have to hustle to get good grades.”

  This engagement was supposed to be about me marrying the right guy by our culture's standards, about him wooing me, and about me falling in love. Now I doubted our basic compatibility. I was a list-maker and a goal-setter, but Hadi was approaching his future with a passivity that repelled me. If Hadi were my friend, I would've been able to hear him out. I might've encouraged him to share what was holding him back, but I didn't have the luxury of emotional distance. His ship was sinking, and I was on it.

  After we hung up, I ran downstairs in search of Mama who I found cleaning her bathroom. As soon as I saw her, another round of tears choked me, and I fanned my face, trying to get enough air to talk.

  “Oh my God,” she said, abandoning the toilet brush to the bowl. “What happened?”

  I took a deep breath but could not manage any words.

  “There's been a car accident. Is it Hadi? Is he okay?”

  “No. No car accident. It's just…It's just…” I covered my mouth and tried to suck back the tears. I knew in the grand scheme of life Hadi's GPA was a gnat-sized concern, but in the scheme of our relationship it changed everything.

  “It's his grades,” I said. “He gets Cs.”

  Mama uttered a pitying tsk. “Hababa, I thought somebody died the way you're crying. Cs aren't the best, but they aren't the worst.”

  She put an arm around me, pulled my head down to her shoulder, and said, “It will be okay. Remember all the istikharas we made. Every one of them came out good.”

  I let Mama's words comfort me. Who I married was the single most important decision of my life; there had to be a reason why God had guided me to this match.

  Now that Mama had seen me so upset, we had an official situation. Relatives at home and abroad were consulted. Aunty Najma told Mama not to worry. “Are you marrying the boy or his degree? His marks don't change the fact that he's a good boy.” Mama then called Mrs. Ridha and told her about my concerns. Mrs. Ridha then talked to Dr. Ridha who spoke to Hadi, and then the cycle repeated in reverse, ending with Mama's report on Mrs. Ridha's latest phone call, her hope that her son's grades would improve by next year.

  I had no better alternative than to share this hope. Although religiously there was nothing preventing me from breaking off my engagement, the social consequences terrified me—the gossip, the tarnished reputation, the fact that we'd kissed. I turned to romantic comedies for comfort. They proved obstacles were a given in any relationship. We had merely arrived at the juncture in our relationship where the man takes drastic measures to prove he has become worthy of the woman's love.

  When Hadi called a few days later, I expected him to announce his strategy to win me back, but he said, “I'm sorry I hurt you,” like a man who'd lost a fight. “You deserve better.”

  Now Hadi told me his parents had taken away his car, his prized T-Top Nissan Z with the custom license plate frame that said, “All I want in life is my car and Huda.”

  There was no going back from this. I was the one who'd ratted out my fiancé. Now Hadi's parents had to prove to my family that efforts were being made to bring everything back up to code.

  One part of me wanted to apologize. Another part of me was so mystified I couldn't resist saying, “You're kidding, right? What's taking away your car supposed to achieve?”

  “Yeah, well,” Hadi said in a voice so flat I could almost see him throwing up his hands in the air.

  This problem was suddenly more disconcerting than grades. Dr. and Mrs. Ridha were punishing and rewarding Hadi as if he were a small child—get bad grades and lose your car. And Hadi took it, as if this was a state of affairs he was powerless to fight. This surprised me. I thought all children of immigrants reversed the parent-child relationship to some degree. In our household, my siblings and I navigated our educational careers entirely on our own. Ibrahim, Lina, and I got through homework and term papers, college and financial aid applications all by filling in our parents of our progress on
a need-to-know basis. And because of this, our parents may have had every aspect of cultural and religious control over us but nothing disciplinary. The handful of times Mama or Baba declared us grounded, it sounded so foreign, so imitative of American television parents, we'd laughed until our sides ached and Mama stormed out of the room saying, “Go fly,” or Baba gave up with a frustrated, “Okay, all right. Never mind.”

  In all these years of friendship with the Ridhas, I never realized that Hadi did not have the same kind of relationship with his parents. I wondered if it was because Dr. Ridha had none of the helplessness that drove us to protect Baba. Nor was he a cutesy immigrant dad with a heavy accent. Dr. Ridha spoke American English like an actor performing a voice; he knew exactly which sounds to manipulate to erase all traces of an accent. Nobody looked to Hadi to explain what his father was saying, but it happened to me, Lina, and Ibrahim all the time.

  After a month of tense phone calls between Hadi and me, a community event brought my immediate family (including Ibrahim, home for summer break) to the Ridhas’ house for a weekend. The day after we arrived, Dr. Ridha called Mrs. Ridha, my parents, Hadi, and me into the dining room. Closing the French doors behind him, he told us to take a seat at the table. My stomach lurched. I would never be able to speak honestly in front of Dr. and Mrs. Ridha; I didn't want to risk jeopardizing their opinions of me.

  Hadi sat next to me on one side of the table without once looking in my direction. Mama, Baba, and Mrs. Ridha sat opposite us without uttering a word. At the head of the table, Dr. Ridha cleared his throat and invoked the name of God: “Bismillah ar-rahman ar-raheem.” He took a preparatory breath and said, “We are very happy and proud our son is engaged to such a good girl from such a good family. But I also understand that Huda has some concerns, and I think she should share those with us now so we can discuss them.”

  Everyone in the room turned toward me. From across the table, Mrs. Ridha's lips stiffened with nervous anticipation. Mama gave me the go-ahead with a single, encouraging nod. Baba looked bewildered. He had no idea why we had gathered. Neither Mama nor I had told him. Not only because Baba would've gladly called off my engagement but also because he was the kind to hold a grudge, especially on behalf of his children. Baba still had not forgiven one of my cousins for pushing me and pulling my hair when we were both toddlers.