by Laila Lalami
“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” Jeremy asked, touching my arm.
I was tempted to unburden myself right then and there, tell him everything I’d just found out, and my frustrations with what I still didn’t know. Behind the glass window, the receptionist was looking at her forms, but listening carefully. The elevator doors opened and a man with a police badge clipped to his belt came out, glancing at us as he walked past. “Thanks,” I said, steadying myself. “But I really should go.”
“Take care,” he called as I went down the steps to the glass doors.
Outside, the wind had grown even more violent. It rattled the windows of my car and swept sand and palm fronds across the highway, but even so it took me only a few minutes to get back to the cabin. The big bed was the first thing I saw when I came inside. How long had my father been carrying on his affair? How could he have done this to my mother, after thirty-seven years? For the first time, I began to think of him not as the father who had walked me to my piano class every Thursday, but as the man who sneaked out to the cabin every chance he got. I couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping on the mattress where that woman had slept or touching the bedding she’d used. I turned around and walked out.
This time, I drove to the furniture store, where I bought a new mattress, paying the extra fee to have it delivered the same day. Then I stopped by Walmart for new pillows, sheets, and towels. I was in the throes of a manic energy, as though by purging a few artifacts from the cabin, I could disguise the ruins I’d excavated. Yet afterward, when all the remains of his affair had been cleared, I sat alone in the cabin, and I still couldn’t forget what I’d learned about him.
I pulled out my laptop and did something it had never once occurred to me to do: I Googled him. His name appeared in a business listing for the restaurant, dating back to when he bought it. Briefly he was quoted in a Hi-Desert Star article from 2010, after a winter storm had uprooted a palm tree and left debris on the highway near his business. And he had an account with an ancestry website; it seemed he had been researching his family’s history for some time, tracing it from Casablanca to a tribe in the Chaouia. That’s what I’d been doing, too, digging through his past.
But it wasn’t just my father’s life that I was seeing under a new light, it was mine as well. In my first year at Stanford, I’d joined a jazz ensemble that met in the basement of a church half a mile from campus. One day, walking out of rehearsal with the trumpet player, we ran into a friend of his, a tall, lanky junior with brown hair and an easy smile. His name was Beckett Burke. He’d graduated from Harvard-Westlake, regularly spent winter vacation in Switzerland and spring break in Costa Rica, and was planning to work for an organization that offered contraceptive services and infant immunization in Uganda. The mere mention of these countries, which Beckett did offhandedly as he ordered from the à la carte menu of the Peruvian restaurant he led me to on our first date, nearly took my breath away. When, a couple of weeks later, he took me to his apartment and relieved me of my virginity, I did not mind, or yet know I should mind, that the sex was rushed and unenjoyable. I was flattered that he was interested in me and proud to stand beside him at parties, absorbing his effortless cool as if by osmosis. With his hand on my back, he introduced me as “the lovely Nora Guerraoui” and the sound of my name on his lips, even with his exaggeratedly rolled r’s, thrilled me. What did a sophisticated boy like him, a boy who already knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—aid management in developing countries—ever want with me?
I could not think of a satisfying answer to that question, which was why I started to arrange my life around his. Beckett didn’t like poetry, so I stopped going to the spoken-word performances that had become the highlight of my week and instead followed him to the indie theater where hip new movies played. On Sunday mornings, he liked to drink coffee and read the New York Times, so I bought my own subscription. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons and after much cajoling, he would agree to go on a hike with me, but it was usually brief because he complained incessantly about the weather; it was always too hot or too cold or too rainy or too buggy. When Beckett started to cancel dates or set them up at the last minute, I blamed his busy schedule. When he forgot to call me, I blamed myself for being dull. Only when I saw him walking down Arboretum Avenue with Margarita Semprevivo, his arm around her tiny waist, did I finally understand that he had moved on to “the lovely Rita.”
Of course, there was nothing unusual about what happened. People break up all the time, for all sorts of reasons. But the cheating had so damaged my ability to trust that it took me fifteen months to start dating again. Sameer Hanim was about as different from Beckett as it was possible to be in a place like Stanford. He had grown up in a small town in Ohio, attended a science magnet school, had perfect SAT scores, but couldn’t tell you what Puligny-Montrachet was or where Eton was located or why sports socks didn’t go with dress shoes. Like me, he had been pressured into his field of study—software engineering, in his case—by a mother whose own ambitions had been deferred and denied. What he really wanted to do was make animation. The sketches that hung in the apartment he shared with two other engineering students would not have been out of place in an art exhibit, or at least it seemed so to my untrained eye. He was a shy, quiet boy who loved spending Saturday afternoons watching old television series or browsing comic-book stores.
And yet when we were out at dinner and a pretty girl walked by, his eyes would always follow after her. What was it about me that failed to hold his attention? The question consumed me and I became obsessed with finding the correct answer. I got a new haircut, bought trendy clothes, spent hours reading Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Jim Starlin so I could keep up with conversations about comics. With each new change, Sameer’s attention would settle for a few days, and then we’d be at a party, and I’d notice him staring at someone else. In the end, he cheated on me, too, with a white girl from his algorithms class. Later, they started a software company together.
Even Max, my current mistake, was the same. The only difference was that instead of cheating on me, he had cheated with me. Either way, I had never been enough. I had always been found wanting. For years, I’d told myself that all this was just bad luck or that I had terrible taste in men. But now I wondered if it was something deeper: my father cheated, and I loved men who cheated.
Maryam
Time passed, yet I still found myself reaching for two glasses when I made mint tea in the morning, or looking for my husband’s socks when I folded the laundry, or wanting him to hand me a fresh towel when I stepped out of the shower. These little moments were painful, they reminded me that I was no longer his wife, that I was his widow now, a state of being I was still trying to accept. But life has to be faced, even when it can’t be accepted, and after I received a second phone call from the restaurant manager, asking me when we planned to reopen, by which he meant something else, of course—he meant that the staff had bills to pay and families to support—I realized I could no longer delay the inevitable. I had to go to work.
At five thirty the next morning, when I pulled into the parking lot of the Pantry, I found the cook already waiting for me, smoking a cigarette by the dumpsters. My husband had warned him not to do that, because Mr. Baker, the owner of the bowling alley next door, often complained about the risk of fire, so I told José to put the cigarette out, and he stubbed it under his shoe and followed me inside, not speaking to me until after the first customers came in. An old man took a seat at the counter, reading his Bible as he waited for coffee; a family of four settled into one of the booths by the window, their children arguing over packs of crayons; and a couple in matching Kings caps huddled in the corner, staring at their phones, but then I looked at the table in the back of the diner, and instead of Driss doing his crosswords or reading the newspaper, there was only an empty chair.
“Coffee, Mrs. Guerraoui?” Marty asked me. Despite what people think,
my name isn’t Maryam Guerraoui, it’s Maryam Bouziane, but so many women in this country take on their husbands’ names that I had long ago given up explaining that we were different. Marty was the first employee my husband had hired at the donut shop, a young man barely out of high school back then, and now he had bifocals dangling from a retainer around his neck, yet even he didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t remember, my true name.
“Thank you,” I said, and took the cup of coffee from him. After he walked away, I remained at the counter for a while, trying to will my body to carry out the duties that lay ahead. I had to clear the box of old lightbulbs Driss had left in the hallway, order napkins and toilet paper, decide whether we were going to put up Memorial Day decorations this year, and then try to find them. But in the end, I couldn’t face any of this, and I carried my coffee to the cash register and slumped in the chair behind it. I could do this much at least, I could make change for customers, hand out mints, or give packs of crayons to the children.
Outside, a young couple in hiking jackets and boots got out of a dusty car and stood in the parking lot, checking their tires as if for a leak, then came into the diner, barely glancing at me as they walked past, and found a table for themselves. In a few weeks, the spring season would be over, the tourists would be gone, and the town would return to its empty self. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be needed at the diner.
But had I ever been truly needed? My husband had bought this restaurant in spite of my objections and, perhaps because of our arguments about it, he rarely called on me to help. I came here only if he was short-staffed, when one of the workers was sick, or if it was a busy weekend. Maybe if I had been more involved, I might have been with him the night of the accident, I might have seen the car, or heard it coming, and maybe even warned him to get out of the way.
Footsteps made me look up. It was a young man in blue hospital scrubs, his beard neatly trimmed and his hair pulled into a ponytail, he was probably from the medical office two blocks from the restaurant. “I saw the notice in the newspaper,” he said as he handed me the bill and his money. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” I said. My voice sounded like a stranger’s. I couldn’t bring myself to say more, talk to this man the way my husband would have, ask him how everything tasted, or how work was these days, or was he enjoying the nice weather. From the framed article on the wall, Driss looked on with a smile, a stack of blueberry pancakes and a cup of coffee before him on the counter. DINING IN THE DESERT, the headline said. My husband was proud of that article; it helped ease some of his frustrations, the humiliations he had to suffer through sometimes, working in a restaurant and waiting on people.
“Did they catch the guy who did it?” the customer asked me.
“No,” I said as I handed him his change.
“Well, I hope they do. People drive way too fast on the highway, it’s really dangerous. We need some kind of light or a signal at that intersection. Maybe you could raise this at the next city council meeting?”
He waited for me to say something more, turn my husband’s death into a public cause, rally others around it, but pain is a private business, it would be too difficult for me to talk about it in front of others, let alone strangers at the city council meeting. I had noticed this before about Americans—they always want to take action, they have a hard time staying still, or allowing themselves to feel uncomfortable emotions—so when I shook my head no, the man seemed disappointed in me, and after a moment he left, the door jingling as it closed behind him.
Jeremy
Fierro was waiting for me outside his apartment building, in jeans and a T-shirt, his USMC baseball cap pulled so low I couldn’t see his eyes. In the car, he turned up the volume on the radio when Metallica came on, but I didn’t complain, even though all that crying and hollering about being a rebel gave me a headache, and later when he went on a rant about the Dodgers’ losing streak, I just nodded along. Whatever it took to get the guy the support he needed. I’d sent an email to Hec, an old buddy of ours from Charlie company, because I’d remembered he was in a group like this, up in Oregon, and he’d said it had helped him some. I was hoping it would help Fierro, too.
A folding sign outside the community center told us that the anger-management support group met inside the gym. Flyers advertising summer swim classes for kids, ballroom dancing for seniors, and a family-movie night hung on the wall next to the double doors. Most of the chairs were already taken by the time Fierro and I walked in and joined the circle around the facilitator. His name was Rossi. He wore a bright yellow shirt that stretched tightly over his pectorals, and he spoke with a thunderous voice that I had not expected from a member of the therapeutic professions. “Who would like to share tonight?” he asked.
Immediately a hand shot in the air. It belonged to a middle-aged man whose knee bounced up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. “Hi, I’m Doug. I had a really bad week. My daughter invited a bunch of her friends over for a board game and they were loud. I came downstairs to get a drink. I wanted to tell them to be quiet, but I didn’t want to interfere because my wife had warned me to stay out of their way. Plus, she was already mad at me because she says I never help around the house. Which isn’t true. I mean, I run the vacuum and I empty the dishwasher sometimes. Anyway, I couldn’t say anything to my daughter and her friends, but it’s like, I couldn’t take the noise, either. So I just stood there, in the kitchen, feeling like I might explode.”
A woman in a nurse’s uniform who was slouching in her chair, arms crossed, sat up suddenly. “It happens to me, too. I’m Adriana, by the way. Sometimes I just want to scream when my kids ask me to take them to the park or the movies. I can’t go out looking like this.” She uncrossed her arms then, and I saw that her left hand was missing its ring and pinky fingers. “But I know I can’t say anything, because it’ll only make them think that my ex-boyfriend was right about me. About my temper, I mean. I’m in so much pain all the time. That’s what they don’t understand.”
I could practically feel the heat of Fierro’s disdain radiating from him. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, I thought. Maybe I should’ve insisted that he go through the VA, even though they wouldn’t offer him the private counseling he wanted and would just send him home with another prescription for Paxil or Zoloft or Wellbutrin. But then Fierro did something I didn’t expect: he raised his hand.
“Ah,” Rossi said. “We have a new member tonight. Please, introduce yourself.”
“My name is Bryan Fierro. It’s hard to find someone to talk to sometimes, so I ’preciate you all having me here. My problem is, I can’t sleep. I don’t mean, like, occasional insomnia, everyone gets that sometimes. What I mean is, I never get more than three or four hours of sleep, ever, no matter what I do. Been going on for years. I’ve tried everything. You name it, I’ve tried it. Even chamomile tea. You know how fucked up a guy is when he starts drinking a tea he can’t even spell. Nothing works. I stay up all night and think. Like, I think myself into circles.”
I looked at Fierro only once—when the word insomnia came out of his mouth—then stared at my shoes until it was over.
“Anger can cause all kinds of problems,” Rossi said. “And insomnia is certainly one of them. Lack of sleep can lead to exhaustion, which can lead to poor decision-making, which in turn leads to even more anger. It’s an ugly chain reaction. You may want to talk to your doctor about getting a sleeping aid. Without proper rest, it’s harder to make good choices, explore the source of your anger, and try to control it.”
“Right,” Fierro said, nodding. “Right.”
An older man with tattooed arms raised his hand to speak. He worked for Home Depot, he said, and had been put on probation at work because he’d had an outburst with a customer over an order of window shades. Another guy, a long-haul truck driver, said he missed his wife while he was gone, but as soon as he came back home they’d fight unt
il it was time for him to leave again.
Finally, the wall clock chimed nine o’clock and the session was over. I waited until Fierro and I had left the community center and were alone in my car before I turned to him. “You think that stunt you pulled in there was funny?”
He thumped me lightly on the arm. “Kind of. Admit it, it was funny.”
“You can be such an asshole sometimes.”
“I told you it’d be a bunch of pussies talking about their feelings.”
“Try calling them that to their faces, see what happens.”
“Dude. Relax, it’s not a big deal.”
“Everything’s always a joke to you.”
Fierro leaned in. “What’s that?”
“You heard me. So don’t act like you didn’t.”
“Come on, don’t make such a big deal out of it. I won’t do it next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” I said, starting the car and backing out of my parking spot. I was getting tired of his antics. If he didn’t want to get help, I wasn’t going to make him. Let him do whatever the hell he wanted. I turned the dial on the radio, changing stations. I was looking for the news, but the folk and country station came first and I settled on that instead. My father had been in a folk band before he met my mother, and I’d grown up listening to that music at home—that was how I’d become interested in playing guitar.
Fierro took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “I liked those people. Seriously.”