by Gayle Forman
“That’s dumb,” my sister Sabrina declared. “Babies aren’t born doing anything, let alone singing.” But she just said that because she was jealous. Our father hadn’t been in the delivery room when she was born four years before me. He was out playing a gig, and by the time he got word Mom was in labor, Sabrina had already arrived, and though nobody reported it, I would guess she was born not singing but scowling.
Maybe because he was in the delivery room, maybe because I was born singing, or maybe because we looked alike, I belonged to my father, and Sabrina to my mother. It was almost like they decided on a split-custody arrangement before they even got divorced. Sabrina would spend her evenings with Mom, doing crossword puzzles or rearranging the kitchen cabinets. I would spend my afternoons with my father, huddled in the tiny closet he used as a studio. There, amid boxes of old LPs and cassettes, he would play me recordings of his favorite artists: American singers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and Josephine Baker, and Ethiopian singers like Aster Aweke and Gigi. “Hear how they sing their sorrows? How they sing what they can’t say?” He’d show me pictures of these women, who had beautiful voices and beautiful faces. “Blessed twice like the jacaranda tree,” he’d say. “Like you.”
There were no jacaranda trees in White Plains, where we lived at the time, but my father had already told me about how in spring in Addis Ababa, they bloomed with magnificent blossoms, purple and fragrant, blessed twice. He told me about how in winters, which were cold but nothing like here, the air filled with the smell of eucalyptus smoke. He told me of his mother’s cooking, which he missed so much. The tibs she would make for him, the shiro, the goat they would roast before the fasting holidays, the fermented injera bread. He took me into the city to restaurants that served his favorite foods, which became my favorite foods. He let me sip the bitter coffee and the sweet honey wine. He showed me how to eat with my fingers, not dropping any bits. “Konjo, konjo,” the waitresses who looked like me would say to him. “Beautiful.”
He promised one day he would take me to Ethiopia with him. He promised one day he would take me to the clubs in New York City where once upon a time Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane had played. He promised one day he’d take me to hear his hero, the Ethiopian jazz musician Mulatu Astatke, whose career he had moved to America to emulate. “People thought it was not possible to combine the Ethiopian and the American, but listen to the proof,” he would say, playing me recordings of Astatke. “And look at the proof,” he would say, smiling at me.
“Sing with me, Freaulai,” he would say, and I would sing. And whenever I did, he closed his eyes and smiled. “Born singing.”
“Be quiet!” my sister would call from the other room. Like my mother, she had no interest in Astatke or tibs or ever going to Ethiopia. “We live here,” they would tell my father when he mused about moving us home, nearer to his family. “We are your family,” they would tell him.
“Stop singing!” Sabrina would yell if I didn’t shut up.
“Promise me you’ll never stop singing,” my father would whisper to me.
I promised. Unlike him, I kept my promises.
* * *
— — —
Sabrina claimed that once upon a time, our parents laughed together and danced in the living room. That Mom used to go to our father’s gigs, googly-eyed, convinced that love could overcome the wide gap between a Jewish girl from Westchester and a jazz musician from Addis.
Sabrina said that all changed when I came along. Was this true? Or was this Sabrina being Sabrina? Sabrina, who would squeeze my wrist until she left red marks. “Love twists,” she called them, to remind me who loved me. Sabrina, who would whisper in my ear: “Your breath stinks. Your hair is nappy,” and who grew angry if I cried. “If people who love you can’t tell you the truth, who can?” she’d say.
As for my parents once loving each other, I couldn’t say. The staccato beat and locked horns of their fights were nearly as constant a soundtrack to my childhood as the music my father played me. Though like so many things, I didn’t really realize this until the sound stopped and silence engulfed us.
* * *
— — —
When I was ten years old, I came home from school one day to find my father awake, which was unusual enough. He was a driver for a car service at night in the city, getting off late and trying to get a minute or two on stage somewhere at the dwindling number of clubs in the Village. He often came home as Sabrina and I were getting up for school and slept until it was time to work again that evening. But that day, he was up. The table was set with the round platters of Ethiopian food.
I was so excited by the meal and my father being home that I failed to notice his packed bag and trumpet case in the hall. But I wouldn’t have thought much of it. It was not unusual for my father to go on short tours, though it hadn’t happened for a few years.
“Where are you going?” asked Sabrina, who had noticed.
“My mother is sick,” he replied, serving us big portions of food. “I am going home to visit her.”
“Will she be okay?” I asked. I had never met Ayate. She was too frail to travel, and my mother said we didn’t have enough money to afford the tickets to Ethiopia.
“She will be fine,” my father said.
“When are you coming back?” Sabrina asked.
“Soon, Sipara.”
Sabrina frowned. She did not like it when he used her Ethiopian name. “How soon?” she asked.
“Soon,” he repeated. “Is there anything you want me to bring back?”
“Will you bring us one of those white dresses?” I asked. I’d seen them on the women at the restaurant and in the pictures of my cousins. They were beautiful, gauzy and white, with delicate embroidery. I desperately wanted one.
“A habesha kemis?” He smiled. “I promise.” He looked at Sabrina. “Do you want me to bring you one?”
“No, thank you.”
We finished eating and he stood to leave. He had tears in his eyes as he held me close and sang to me, not the Billie Holiday or Nina Simone songs we sang together but “Tschay Hailu,” the rhythmic lullaby he used to sing to me every night. Eshururururu, eshururururu, ye binyea enate tolo neyelete dabowen baheya wetetune beguya yezeshelet neye yezeshelet neye.
“Sing with me, Freaulai,” he said, and I did.
When the song was over, he pushed me away to arm’s length, tears streaming down his face. “Promise me you will never stop singing.”
I said what I always said—that I promised.
He wiped his face, picked up his suitcase and trumpet, and left. I chased him to the hallway. “Don’t forget the white dress,” I called.
But he was already gone.
* * *
— — —
My grandmother died five weeks later. I cried, not because I was sad but because my father would be staying for the funeral and to settle her affairs. And the weeks without him had already been enough. With him absent, my family was like a three-legged chair.
“How much longer?” I asked over the crackling phone line when he’d been gone two months.
“Not much longer,” he said.
“And you won’t forget the white dress?”
“I won’t forget.”
I hung up the phone. Sabrina was standing there. She had spoken to him for only a few moments, monosyllabic yes/no answers. It was like she didn’t miss him at all. But why should she? She belonged to our mother, and our mother was still here.
She had her arms crossed in front of her chest and was looking at me with the same mean expression she wore when she pointed out some flaw of mine. “You know he’s not coming back, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s home now,” she said. “He doesn’t want to come back.”
“But we’re here.”
“Mom was
going to kick him out anyway,” Sabrina said. “You think he’d come back just for you?”
“You’re just being mean.”
She looked at me. She was fourteen years old, but she already had a stare that could make a grown-up flinch. “He took his trumpet, Freya. Why would he take his trumpet if he was coming back?”
“Maybe he wanted to play music for Ayate,” I said.
“He’s not coming back,” Sabrina said.
“Yes he is!” I screamed at her. “You’re just jealous because he loves me more. Because I can sing. He’s coming back!”
She didn’t even seem mad. She looked at me almost pityingly. Because she knew. Sabrina always knew.
“No, he’s not.”
* * *
— — —
A few months after that I received a package in the mail. The stamps bore the squiggly, indecipherable writing of Amharic and showed that the package had been mailed weeks before.
Inside was a white dress. It was beautiful. Gauzy, embroidered with purple and gold thread. It fit me perfectly. There was a note from my father. I promised, it said.
And that was when I knew Sabrina was right.
I threw the dress into the trash. Then I went to my room and climbed into bed and began to cry.
“What’s gotten into you?” Mom asked when she found me there that night. It was still several weeks before she would sit me and Sabrina down in a booth at the Star Diner and solemnly announce what we already knew: that she and our father were getting divorced; that he was staying in Addis for the foreseeable future, but they’d work something out so we could go visit. Another promise unkept.
I didn’t answer. I just kept crying into my pillow.
“I don’t know what’s with her,” I heard my mother tell Sabrina. “Or how to snap her out of it.”
That was my father’s job. He was the one who sat with me when I was sick or scared. He was the one who didn’t ask for explanations when sometimes I was just so overcome with emotions I didn’t know what to do. “Sing what you can’t say, Freaulai,” he would say.
I was still crying when I heard the door creak open. It was not my mother, who had come in several times and admonished me to cut it out. It was Sabrina.
Silently, she climbed into the bed, and then my sister, who did not like to be hugged or kissed or even touched, wrapped her body around mine. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “I’ll take care of you now.”
But I didn’t believe her. Sabrina, who delivered love pinches and scathing critiques. Who hated shiro and tibs and told me to be quiet when I sang. How would she take care of me?
As if she heard my doubts, my sister began to sing to me. Eshururururu, eshururururu, ye binyea enate tolo. I had never heard my sister sing, not even on holidays. I didn’t know she could sing. And yet she sang the lullaby in a clear, pure voice. She sang it as if she too had been born singing.
“Sing with me,” she said.
And I did. Eshururururu, eshururururu, sefecheme azeyea segagere azeyea seserame azeyea sehedeme azeyea yenima biniyea werede ke jerbayea. We lay together, singing, harmonizing without even trying. Our voices blended perfectly, easily, in a way that in real life we never did.
We sang and I stopped crying. I believed that as long as we sang together, I would be okay.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART II
HARUN
When I was nine, Ammi announced that her sister’s family from Pakistan was coming to visit. I was very excited. I’d never met Khala and Khalu or my three cousins. Usna was nineteen, too old to be of interest, but the twins, Amir and Ayisha, were my age. Ayisha was loud and rebellious and made fast friends with my younger sister, Halima, sneaking off to the 7-Eleven, buying Little Debbie snack cakes and Doritos.
That left me with Amir, who was small, quiet, and circumspect, the opposite of his sister. He did not want to go to the movies or play miniature golf or even venture into Manhattan to see the sights. So we stayed around the house, playing board games or lying on our backs in the yard, watching the planes take off from Newark Airport. “That’s Continental Airlines flight seventeen, bound for Los Angeles,” I told Amir. When he asked how I knew, I showed him the notebook I kept with all the flight departures and arrivals. I’d kept it hidden since Saif had warned me that if anyone saw it, they’d get the wrong idea. But Amir didn’t think the notebook was weird, and when I confessed my dream of one day being a pilot, he didn’t think that was crazy either. “You can fly to Pakistan and visit me,” Amir told me.
Amir went to prayer with his father every day, and that week I joined them even though I normally only went with Abu on Fridays and holidays.
“Your cousin is making you devout,” Abu said.
“Your cousin is turning you into a kiss-ass,” Saif said.
One day, I came back from mosque to find Ammi and Khala sitting at the dining room table, where Ammi often worked. Her ledgers were spread out, her cup of tea steaming. Khala was complaining about Ayisha, who had been sneaking junk food and hiding the evidence in the trash, where Ammi discovered it because Ammi discovered everything, be it missing receipts or misbehaving children.
“She’s already so fat,” Khala said, shaking her head.
“She should not lie,” Ammi said, inputting a receipt and transferring it from one pile to the other.
“I’m less worried about the lying than her getting fat,” Khala replied. “More fat.”
Ammi clucked her tongue.
“She’s already at a disadvantage,” Khala continued. “Amir must have sucked all the beauty away from her when they were in the womb. It would be easier to find Amir a husband than Ayisha.”
I didn’t totally understand what they were talking about, but the idea of Amir finding a husband gave me a strange tickling in my tummy.
After that, I could not stop sneaking looks at Amir. He was pretty. He had long eyelashes that were apparently enviable and hair that made a little exclamation point in the middle of his forehead, and his lips were red and shiny, the way Halima’s were when she sneaked on the berry lip gloss she kept hidden in her backpack. I watched how his lips formed a bow when he drank soda through a straw, and I imagined what it might be like to be that straw between Amir’s lips.
“What?” Amir asked, catching me staring at him drinking a Sprite.
And there it was, that tickling feeling.
During ’Asr the next day, I found myself drifting, murmuring the prayers while staring at my cousin’s ear. How had I never noticed ears before? The intricacies, the folds, the delicate pearl of the lobes, which on some people, like Abu, stuck to the neck, while on others, like Amir, were unattached. I touched my own ear as if for the first time, and the tickling feeling returned.
That night, we all watched a movie. We chose Aladdin, because the cousins had never seen it. Khalu disapproved of the way Islam was depicted. “Also,” Amir added, “with how immodestly Jasmine is dressed.”
We all huddled around the television in the basement and turned on the TV. The older kids seemed bored by it. Saif kept trying to do all the Robin Williams parts, but it had been a long time since he’d last seen the movie and he kept messing up.
“Shh!” I said, on behalf of the cousins.
“This movie sucks,” my brother Abdullah said.
“It’s giving me flashbacks,” Saif said. “I used to have such fantasies about Jasmine.”
“This is not appropriate talk for the children,” Usna said primly.
“They don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Saif said.
I do, I wanted to say. Only I didn’t. Not entirely, though I felt certain it was tied up with Ammi and Khala’s conversation about Amir, and with the strange tickling in my stomach.
I knew Jasmine was meant to be pretty and her manner of dress sexy, and I knew she was an object of desire by the way
my brother was talking. But I didn’t care about Jasmine. It was Aladdin I couldn’t take my eyes off of. His face was pretty, delicate, kind of like Amir’s. And the scenes with Aladdin bare-chested made that tickling in my belly stronger than ever.
We finished Aladdin and started watching The Little Mermaid, but the DVD was scratched, and halfway through we gave up and went to bed.
We had shuffled around to accommodate everyone’s sleeping arrangements. Amir and I had been relegated to a leaking blow-up mattress in the living room. We’d been sleeping there all week and nothing had happened, save for a crick or two in my neck.
That night, I dreamed of Aladdin. We were on a carpet, only not the one from the movie but one from the mosque. I could smell the musky scent of it in the dream.
Aladdin was bare-chested, and I was running my hand over his smooth skin. And he was not a cartoon; he was real. In the dream, Aladdin became Amir. And we were flying. And I was holding on to Amir as Jasmine had done to Aladdin.
The mattress shifted. I opened my eyes slightly, and the tickling sensation blossomed into something stronger, a tingling over my entire body, a throbbing between my legs.
A cool breeze rustled through a gap in the window, and I opened my eyes all the way and saw that in sleep, I had wrapped myself around Amir. My hand was on his chest, warm and sticky. My heart felt full. I understood in that moment that this was who I was.
The mattress moved again, and Amir opened his eyes. “What—?” he began to ask, in that same guilty way he’d asked earlier when he thought he was about to be chastised for drinking too much soda. He looked at my hand. “What are you doing?”
I snatched my hand away. “Mosquito,” I lied.
He rolled over and went back to sleep, but I lay in bed rigid, afraid that if I got too close, he would know, as I suddenly knew, that there was something very wrong with me. The next night, I moved to the couch, claiming Amir kicked, and after that I rebuffed his requests to do more plane-spotting. He seemed hurt, but hurt was better than disgusted.