by Laila Lalami
“No.”
“How come?”
Salma shrugged.
“Well, I’m looking forward to it anyway,” I said. “I’ve never seen them in a school performance.” From behind the curtain came the shrill sound of a microphone being hooked up to a power source. The air-conditioning unit stopped and, a moment later, started again. Back when I went to school here, there was no AC, just an oversized fan that whirred painfully from above. I had to sit backstage in whatever costume Mrs. Fleming had sewn for the play, sweating under its weight, scratching my skin in places where it met the cheap fabric, waiting for my cue. Even though I ended up with the same parts every year, I liked performing in plays because it was the closest thing I’d found to reading a book. Books were better, of course. In books, I could be more than the mute sidekick; I could be the hero. “It’s already ten past six,” I said, looking at my watch.
“Do you have somewhere else you need to be?” my sister asked sharply.
The testiness in her voice had been there since my father’s will had been delivered to the house by a courier from the lawyer’s office. The will had been drawn up many years ago and we all knew what it said: legalese about splitting my father’s assets between his spouse and children. What none of us had expected was a life insurance policy worth $250,000. Its sole beneficiary was me.
The din in the cafeteria rose. A cell phone rang, then another. In the back, chairs scraped against the floor. “I don’t understand,” Salma said. “I just don’t understand. What did I ever do to him?”
“Nothing,” my mother replied. “This is not your fault.”
“Nor is it mine,” I said, looking at my mother, but she didn’t acknowledge me; her eyes were fixed on my sister.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” Salma asked me.
“About what?”
“What do you think? About all that money he left you.”
“Since when do you care so much about money? Or is this Tareq talking?”
“This isn’t about money.”
“What is it about, then?”
The houselights dimmed, and the audience grew quiet. Salma turned to face me. “I’m the one who stayed here. I’m the one who stuck with dental school. I’m the one who took care of him when he had cataract surgery. I did everything he wanted me to do while you were”—she waved her hands in the air—“gallivanting at music festivals. And then he leaves it all to you. You can’t even hold down a real job!”
The insult was still ringing in my ears when an old woman in the row behind us cleared her throat pointedly. I lowered my voice to ask, “Do you really want to talk about this here?”
“What does it matter where we talk about it?”
“He didn’t leave everything to me. You and Mom still have the business.”
“Yes, it was quite thoughtful of him not to take that away.”
I glanced at my mother, hoping for some kind of support, or at least some sympathy. Instead, she put her hand on Salma’s knee, as if to beg for her forgiveness. “Your father never told me he changed his will. I wouldn’t have let him if I knew.”
“Well, he did it anyway,” Salma said. “Nora was always his favorite.”
So much anger in her voice. So much resentment. But how had our father disfavored her? Had he not read to her from the same books, taken her to the same parks, played the same board games with her? Had he not driven thirty miles to Palm Springs every Sunday morning and waited two hours to drive her back when she took that SAT prep course in high school? Had he not paid for dentistry school? For that wedding in Orange County? Had he not watched her twins whenever she needed to be away on a conference? Had he loved her any less? “Listen,” I said, “I didn’t ask for any of this.” My voice was muffled by the sound of the piano overture.
The woman in the row behind us leaned closer. “Sshhh,” she hissed.
“So what if you didn’t ask for it?” Salma said. “You expect me to feel sorry for you? And why do you always have to bring Tareq into everything?”
“How many times do I have to say it? I didn’t know about the insurance. I just don’t understand why you’re so mad at me when I had nothing to do with it. And yes, Tareq is always putting—”
A cold hand landed on my shoulder, startling me. “Either be quiet or take it outside,” the woman said. With her side braid and dark eyes, she looked like an older version of Mrs. Nielsen, my kindergarten teacher. “Get your hand off me,” I said.
The curtains parted. A king and queen stood on the stage, admiring their infant princess in her cradle. I was so unsettled by the blame in my sister’s voice that I found it difficult to pay much attention to the play. It didn’t help that the costumes were poorly made and that the children wore too much makeup. While bestowing her gifts on Aurora, one of the three fairies sneezed, sending green glitter flying everywhere but on the cradle. At least the action was moving quickly. In forty-five minutes, the princess had been cursed, pricked by a spindle, enchanted, and put in chambers. Aida and Zaid finally appeared as night watchmen, who dozed as the prince made his way past them to the princess’s room. A kiss, a broken curse, and the audience erupted in applause.
As soon as the curtains closed, I turned to my sister again, but Salma ignored me and began to make her way out to the blacktop. I could see that she wanted me to correct what had happened, but even if I could, it would not undo the choice our father had made, nor what it said about us: that he thought she could manage without his help, and that I couldn’t. But she believed it meant something else altogether: that he cared less about her than about me. Outside, the sky was a hazy orange and the air felt heavy with heat. Salma stood by the swings, her eyes filled with an envy that silenced me.
Envy was not something I expected from someone as accomplished as my sister, and yet it was there. It had been there, really, since the day I found out I’d been accepted at Stanford. Salma had gone to the state school in San Bernardino and, after receiving poor scores on her MCAT, went to Loma Linda School of Dentistry, which had seemed like a fine place to her, until my admissions letter arrived. She was quiet for days. My mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop talking about it. She told her brother and his family, her new friends from mosque, the neighbors from up and down the street. Everything I said or did she suddenly deemed brilliant. Having her approval was an entirely new feeling for me, and it was perhaps because of it that I decided to study pre-med in college. But three years later, when I called home to say that I had changed my mind about medical school and that I would be applying to the graduate program in music at Mills College instead, the news was greeted with horror by my mother, and ridicule by my sister. My mother couldn’t believe that all those years of calculus and biology and chemistry had led to chamber quartets and jazz ensembles. “Don’t do this,” she warned me. “You’re going to ruin your life.”
“Mom, calm down. You’re acting like I got pregnant or something.”
“Pregnant! Why do you say this? What have you been doing at school?”
“Nothing. I’m just saying it’s a graduate degree, not a life sentence.”
“You have your head in the clouds!”
Meanwhile, Salma had just become engaged to Tareq Darwish, a fellow dentistry student whose parents had emigrated from Syria in the 1970s. She and Tareq were planning to open a joint dental practice, a fact that my mother held up that day, and every day thereafter, as the kind of behavior to be expected of a child for whom parents had given up everything. I called my sister and asked her to talk some sense into our mother, but she only laughed. “Wait,” she said. “Music? Seriously? Oh, Nora.”
My father alone offered something besides derision. He listened to my music, and over my mother’s objections, sent me small checks from time to time. Now he had set aside some money for me, and that had caused my sister’s envy to flare up
like a bad rash. She could barely look at me as we stood in the middle of the chattering crowd. I should go back to Oakland, I thought, I’ve been here long enough. I have a composition to finish, friends to see, my own life waiting for me in the Bay Area. Then the twins came running across the schoolyard toward us. “Did you like it, Aunt Nora?” Aida asked me.
“It was great,” I said. “I’ve never seen a better royal guard. High five.”
“What about me?” Zaid asked.
“No one can fake sleep as well as you. High five again.”
The children stood between their mother and grandmother, their faces lit with a joy I hadn’t seen since I’d returned home. I offered to take pictures. Through the viewfinder, I noticed that Aida’s hair had darkened, its shade now closer to mine. I was about to remark on this when Salma took the children’s hands and told them it was time to go. “Good night,” she said stiffly, and led them away to her car.
In the Prius on the way back, I listened to my mother say, for what seemed like the tenth time that day, that she hadn’t known about the life insurance. “I don’t know when he bought it,” she said. “He must have paid for it from the business account.”
“Do you blame me for this, too, Mom?”
“I don’t blame you. I worry about you. About your future.”
My mother said this with resignation, as though it were her charge in life to be saddled with me. This happened every time I returned home. We’d spend a few peaceful hours in each other’s company and then the détente would end and the comments would start, all of them variations on the theme of her disappointment in me. Why don’t you find a better job? Why don’t you apply to law school? Why don’t you move back here if you’re not going to law school and you can’t find a better job? Did I tell you that Mrs. Hammadi’s daughter is getting married? Are you wearing that to dinner? White isn’t a good color for you, you know, it makes you look darker. Did you watch the video that Tareq put up on YouTube? His keynote address to the American Periodontal Association was watched by 313 people. Can you believe it? And the big one, the one that came up with increasing frequency as the years passed: When are you getting married?
Nothing but unconditional surrender would have satisfied my mother. Because of this, I had learned to deploy my own set of loaded questions. Why did you quit college after you got married? Why did you move us to the middle of the desert? Why, oh why, did you vote for George W. Bush? Why do you call a three-week-old embryo a baby? Surely you know the difference—you wanted to be a doctor. Yes, you told me about Mrs. Hammadi’s daughter three times. Did she get married three times? Did you watch my piano performance at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens? It’s also on YouTube. And how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to get married.
These battles never ended in a clear victory. The best I could hope for was a return to the status quo, which usually happened right before I had to leave again. Now my father’s will had opened a new front in the conflict with my mother, and this time Salma was involved in the hostilities as well. But I felt too weak to fight. I couldn’t bear to spend another day in the house. Before going to bed that night, I filled up my car with gas, packed my bag, and zipped my laptop into its case. I would leave for Oakland first thing in the morning, I decided.
And yet when it was time to go, I couldn’t face the thought of returning to my apartment, either. Going back to that life meant I had put my father’s death behind me, that I had moved past it somehow, and I hadn’t. So I asked my mother for the key to the cabin in Joshua Tree. Maybe “cabin” was too fancy a term for it. Though it sat on an acre of land, it was a simple one-room shack, with large windows and a slanted roof, built by a homesteader in the 1940s. One day, driving back from the national park, my father had seen a FOR SALE sign on the side of the road and called to make an offer—without consulting my mother. He said it was a steal at $25,000 and a fantastic investment; she called it a dump and a waste of money. He said he’d renovate it and rent it out; she retorted that no tourists would ever want to stay there. Every time the two of them talked they quarreled, and the cabin gave them a fresh subject of contention. My mother handed me the key reluctantly, all the while trying to talk me out of it. The cabin was too small. The swamp cooler didn’t work well. It might be too hot there during the day. And it could get cold at night. Sometimes there were coyotes.
I didn’t care. It was just for a few days, I told her. All the way to the cabin, I thought about my father. He had driven on this stretch of the 62 every day. Here was the gas station where he stopped for refills, the used books store where he picked out his paperbacks, the liquor store where he bought his beer. Already, life went on without him.
When I got to the cabin, I found that the front door wouldn’t open. The key got stuck. With some effort, I pulled it out and went back to the car. Remembering a trick my father had taught me, I rummaged through the glove compartment for a pencil, with which I colored the teeth of the key until they were dark with graphite. Then I tried the lock again. This time, the door creaked open. The smell of dust and musk immediately made me sneeze.
The place was barely furnished. Under the window sat a gray sofa, its cushions stained and pilling. There was a small kitchen, with two stools at the counter, and a Formica-topped table with an unsteady leg. A stone fireplace separated the living area from the queen-size bed. The bathroom was the only private space. I opened the kitchen door and stepped into the backyard. There were several yuccas, a Joshua tree, and two garden chairs, caked with dust and weighted with stones to prevent their tumbling over in the desert wind. Here and there were tools my father had bought with the intent of landscaping, but by the looks of the yard he had never used.
I walked back through the house to the front porch, where the swamp cooler hung. A turtledove had built its nest on top of it and now the bird turned its head toward me, as if daring me to disturb its peace. We stared at each other for a moment. “All right, little mama,” I told her, palms raised in defense. “We can share.” Slowly, I slid my hand behind the metal box and turned on the water valve. All the while the turtledove kept watching me. I stepped back, drenched in sweat, and went inside.
I wanted to call Detective Coleman to ask for news, but it was early yet, and so I kept myself busy cleaning house. I scrubbed the sinks, wiped the windowpanes, swept the floors. The bookcase took a while to dust, as I sat on the floor leafing through the paperbacks that lined it. Spy novels. Mysteries. Thrillers. Was that what my father came here to do all those weekends when he said he was renovating? Or were these books meant for the tourists?
By the time I was done cleaning, it was the middle of the day and I felt suddenly exhausted. I went to sleep in my clothes. Again, I dreamed about him. We were in a train station, filled with travelers rushing about, dragging their roller suitcases behind. The creaking of the wheels came from every direction, making it difficult to hear him, though he was standing right beside me. Hurry, Nor-eini. Hurry. We’re going to be late. When we went downstairs to our platform, I saw that we were not in a train station at all, but at a port. The ocean was cobalt blue and stretched before us endlessly. We managed to fit into a small boat with our bags. My father began to paddle, working his oar expertly, but I had trouble with mine. This way, Nora, he said. Look. Hold it this way. But the wooden handle kept slipping out of my hands.
I woke up in a sweat, my clothes sticking to me and the smell of household cleaner in my nostrils. After taking a shower, I glanced at the clock. It was finally time to call Detective Coleman. “We’re still investigating,” she said when I reached her. There were 251 silver Fords in town, she told me, and it would take some time to figure out which one was involved in the accident—and that was assuming that the car belonged to a local, not a tourist.
“Has anyone come forward? A witness?”
“No, no one yet.”
I tried to steel myself against more disap
pointment, but it came anyway. I would call Coleman again tomorrow, I thought. Perhaps tomorrow there would be some news.
Maryam
For a long time after my husband died, I felt as if I were caught in a heavy fog, unable to see my way forward, or even to perceive much of what was going on around me, the arrangements that my daughters were making, often without consulting me I should say, so that when I did speak, it was only to agree with a decision that had already been made. And yet that Thursday night, I forced myself to come out of the haze, put on some fresh clothes, and go see Sleeping Beauty at the elementary school. I did it for the sake of my grandchildren, who were only eight years old at the time; they didn’t know much about life, and therefore nothing at all about death. I walked into the school cafeteria thinking we would have a normal evening as a family, but my son-in-law wasn’t there, he had an emergency at the office, and my daughters started arguing about my husband’s will. They couldn’t even wait to get home to do it, they were yelling at each other in front of everyone, deaf to my pleas to lower their voices, and after a while I gave up, folded my hands in my lap, closed my eyes, and recited the Surat al-Nas, over and over again. I was so relieved to see the curtains part, and the king and queen appear onstage, that I started applauding like a madwoman.
When I was young, I was easily enchanted by new friends, new places, new ideas, but later the magic would wear off and I would see things for what they were. Other people were different, like my friend Karima Ait-Yaacoub, who was the voice of the student movement at the university in Casablanca, and I would say its face as well, because they put her on all the posters, after she went to prison. She was arrested early on, I think it was in 1979, they put her in Derb Moulay Cherif, which you may have heard of, perhaps, it was such a famous prison, if one can say that prisons are famous, maybe there is a better word for that kind of fame. Afterward, her husband was left to plead her case in and out of court, until he got himself arrested, too, distributing flyers for another protest, so that their children had to be taken out of school and sent to live with their grandmother in Midelt. I didn’t want that life for Driss and me.