by Laila Lalami
Now, sitting at my dining table and holding the acceptance letter from Silverwood Music Festival in my hand, I was grateful to be back in Oakland. At least, I would always have my music. It was my consolation, my only hope, the answer to what I didn’t understand and what I couldn’t change.
I helped Margo pack up and move to Fremont and, because I couldn’t face the prospect of more change, stayed in the apartment alone. I woke up in a devastatingly empty place every morning, and every morning I tried to convince myself that I had been right to return to the city. Often I caught myself thinking about the tenderness with which Jeremy held me, how he had made me feel less alone, but each time I forced myself to push these memories aside. It was better to make a clean cut now, try to put my life back together the way it had been before.
My piano piece came as a relief in those early days. Something about those twelve acrobats in Marrakesh had so moved me that I was still thinking about them years later and a continent away. They each performed a solitary act, and yet the effect would only be achieved when viewed in unison. I had never belonged to any tribe, and perhaps I would never be able to, but I could try to put that feeling in my music. I worked for hours on end, sometimes coming out into the dining room to find that night had fallen, and the breakfast dishes were still on the table. I’d reheat a frozen pizza, eat it standing at the sink, and return to the piano.
* * *
—
One morning in August, just before I had to leave for Silverwood, I went to the post office to fill out a hold-mail form. The walk was less than a mile, but along the way I noticed that the little store that sold Ethiopian coffee was expanding into a café, the Korean restaurant my friend Anissa and I had gone to for her birthday had been turned into a sushi bar, and the yoga studio had moved. As I waited for the light at the intersection, I thought about what else had changed over the summer: I didn’t have to fill in applications for teaching jobs in the fall, I was featured in a major music festival, I lived by myself.
Then the light turned red, but instead of crossing, I continued another three blocks toward La Coccinelle. I’m just going to walk past it, I told myself. Nothing more. It would be good to take a longer morning stroll, get a little exercise before the next day’s flight to Boston. But as I got closer to the coffee shop, the terms and conditions of that promise began to shift. If Max Bloemhof is there, I said as silently as I might a prayer, I will go in and talk to him.
When I arrived at the café, I spotted my neighbor Andrew sitting with his laptop by the window. He was working on a dissertation about the upper-class Victorian gentleman’s attempt at constructing masculinity through fashion—a topic that had sounded legitimate, even interesting, when he’d told me about it, but that would seem completely preposterous to anyone back home in the Mojave. In the cozy armchair was Lena, working on her food blog while her blueberry scone sat untouched. And next to her was a kid whose name I had never learned because he always wore headphones and never looked up from his drafting notebook. I stood behind the window, my eyes traveling from table to table, looking for Max. Finally, I spotted his jacket at an empty table under the gilded wall clock. He always liked that spot, because it was farthest from the bustle of the ordering line. In a few quick steps, I went through the front door and was standing at his table. The clinking of a cup behind me made me turn, but instead of Max coming to the table, along came his wife, Evelyn.
They had been married seventeen years. Their oldest son’s age, plus eight months. The marriage had been a mistake, Max had often told me, something he’d been forced into when he realized Evelyn was pregnant. They were both Dutch, both visiting professors in a small college in Texas, both unhappy that they had ended up in one of the most conservative states in the country. But less than a year later, his book Before Night Comes was published. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a bestseller. Evelyn landed a tenure-track job at the San Francisco Art Institute. They bought a house. Their daughter was born. Whenever Max told me this story, he made it sound as though one event had led to the next, without his having played much of a role in what happened.
Evelyn’s hair was longer now, and she was wearing a chunky turquoise necklace that verged on gaudy, but otherwise she had the same professorial look she had about her the only other time we had met, at a reading in San Francisco nearly a year before. The bookstore was crowded that night, so I hadn’t seen her until after I’d put my hand on Max’s arm and leaned in to say hello. She’d fixed her hazel eyes on me and I immediately withdrew my hand. Max did the introductions and made some small talk, but very quickly he maneuvered her through the crowd to the front row, leaving me behind. Now Evelyn was at his table, carrying his cup of Earl Grey tea and a plate of pastries. “You,” she said.
“I—”
Words failed me. I had wanted to see Max to find out if he still stirred feelings in me, but instead Evelyn had appeared. She set the tea on the table and considered me for a moment, a half smile on her face, before she reached back and slapped me, hitting me so hard that my ears rang. Everyone turned to look.
“Stay away from us,” she said.
Without a word, I turned around and left. All the way back to my apartment, my hands inside the pockets of my hoodie were balled into fists. At home, I went straight to the storage closet in the hallway and pulled out my suitcase. With an efficiency that came from years of practice, I started packing, carefully avoiding my reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Never before had I felt more alone.
Maryam
Ramadan was difficult that year—not because of its many deprivations or because it fell in the middle of the summer, when the days were long, but because I missed my husband so much. Yet the fast had a healing effect on me, too, each sunrise and sunset restoring a little more of my peace, so that, by the time Eid arrived, I finally gathered up the courage to take care of something I had been dreading. I started in the garage, thinking it would be easy to discard the transistor radio missing its knobs or the boxes overflowing with old magazines, but these immediately brought back memories of the donut shop, with the two of us listening to music, flipping through Newsweek and Time, looking for news of home.
From the garage, I moved to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet revealed eye drops my husband had been prescribed after his cataract surgery, tubes of heating cream he used to rub on his knees when they bothered him, a container of Calcibronat, which he said was the only thing that worked on his headaches. In the bottom drawer, I found an empty jar of Vicks VapoRub, its label translucent with grease, and the hot-water bottle he slipped under his blanket whenever the temperature dropped below fifty. There were so many pills and cures and ointments, useless protections against the inevitable—the Surat Al-Imran teaches us that every soul shall have a taste of death, and the life of this world is only the comfort of deception.
In the hallway closet, I found my husband’s work shoes, the soles still caked with dirt, the gray slippers he wore around the house, and his hiking boots with the frayed laces. In the bedroom, I pushed open the accordion doors of the closet, ran my hand along the row of clothes hanging from the rod, and examined each jacket, each shirt and pair of pants, as if it could imprint itself in my memory under an intense enough gaze.
I set aside any items that might interest my daughters, put the clothes and shoes that could be donated to charity in Hefty bags, and then sat on the sofa with my hands in my lap, watching the cat groom itself in a patch of sunlight. The house was quieter than I had ever known it. Memories of long-gone years kept visiting me, bringing with them joy and pain all at once, and several moments passed before I got up to wash myself and unroll my prayer mat. I don’t know how I managed that difficult day, but I did, which made having to do it all over again, a few weeks later, and in a place I despised, almost unendurable.
I had tried talking Nora out of living in the cabin in Joshua Tree where Driss brought the
other woman, but my daughter was deaf to all the hints I dropped. My poor, gullible daughter. What would she have said if I had told her that her father had betrayed the trust I had placed in him? Maybe she wouldn’t have believed me. To her, he could only be a hero, he could never be a man of flesh and blood, full of the same weaknesses and capable of the same mistakes as other men.
The sound of my tires as I pulled up to the cabin chased a family of desert quail from the front yard, and they ran to hide under the creosote bush. I dragged the trash bins that had been left near the mailbox to the kitchen door before I went inside. It surprised me to find that everything looked as if my daughter had just stepped out and might return at any moment, because she had left a half-empty glass of water on the counter, a pair of socks under the coffee table, sheet music on the piano. The piano! I had forgotten it was here, and now I realized I would have to call the movers from Riverside to have it returned to the house. What about the wooden chandelier? And this new rug? I called her on her cell phone to ask her, but she brushed me off. “Do whatever you like,” she said. She was in Boston, she was too busy to talk to me.
I pulled a trash bag from the kitchen drawer and furiously emptied the fridge of milk, expired eggs, bread that had turned green. I found myself imagining the two of them at the kitchen table, or sitting on the sofa, or listening to the record player. When I asked Nora about the young man she’d brought here, to this place I wanted so desperately to forget, she didn’t even try to deny it. But why him? I asked. Look at Salma, I told her, she’s married, has two children, and lives a respectable life. But my younger daughter had lost her way. As I cleared out the rest of her things from the cabin, I murmured a prayer for her, as I had so many times in the past, only this time I prayed for more than her health, more than her safety, more than her happiness. I prayed for her greedily, for the thing I had given up years ago and never found again.
Home.
Nora
The pleasure of my company was requested, the invitation in my welcome packet said, at a cocktail reception held in honor of the featured composers. The party was funded by wealthy donors, and from all available evidence it was mostly donors who were milling about the ballroom that night, in designer tuxedos and satin gowns. My plane had arrived two hours late and I hadn’t had anything to eat, but by the time I made it to the buffet the only offerings left were a few shrimp swimming in an unidentifiable sauce and asparagus drying under the bright lights of the chandeliers. Disappointed, I picked up a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and stepped outside. The terrace was less crowded, it turned out, and I found myself standing next to an elderly couple. “It’s much cooler out here, isn’t it?” the wife said.
“Mercifully,” I said. It was also more humid than I expected, the air threatening a thunderstorm, and I wished I had remembered to pack an umbrella. I would have to see if any of the stores near my hotel carried any. Again, I searched the crowd, looking for one of the other five composers, or at least someone from the festival staff, but I saw only unfamiliar faces.
“First time at Silverwood?” the wife asked.
“Yes,” I said, relieved to have some company. “How about you?”
“Oh, we’re old-timers.” She smiled warmly at me. Pinned to the neckline of her evening dress was a white ribbon, presumably a charitable cause she supported. “My husband and I have been coming here since 1989. It’s one of our favorite things to do; we look forward to it all year long. We’ve made a lot of friends here.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“And who are you with?” her husband asked.
“Sorry?”
“You must be one of the composers’ guests?”
“I am one of the composers.”
“Oh.” He glanced at his wife as if he needed help in coping with this odd situation, then pulled out a folded program from his pocket and looked through it. “You must be, uh, how do you say your name?”
“Guerraoui.”
“And what does the N. stand for?”
“Nora.”
“I’m David Ford,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. “This is my wife, Liz.”
The Fords made small talk for a few minutes before moving away, but my experience with them left a bad taste in my mouth. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that, the following morning, I met with Geri Turner and Roy Gilmore, the bass player and drummer who would be performing with me at the end of the week. Each of us worked in different styles, but Geri and Roy were so easy to work with that by the end of our first rehearsal I felt as though I had played with them many times before. I remember looking up from the piano and catching Geri’s eye as she was about to start her solo, or the little nod that Roy gave as I started mine.
Still, the pleasure I derived from playing with these musicians was too often overshadowed by my experiences outside of rehearsal. A security guard stopped me as I tried to go into the venue on my first morning, asking me to show my ID and tell him what business I had in the building. Standing in the middle of the café one day, trying to decide on lunch, I was handed a tray of dirty dishes by an attendee who assumed I was part of the help staff. Another time, a music critic talked to me for a good fifteen minutes before I realized that he thought I was Tahira Khan, one of the publicists at the festival, a woman with whom the only thing I had in common was the color of my skin. Everything else about us was different: she was taller, heavier, prettier, and she even spoke with a British accent. For years, I had wanted to be included in one of these prestigious venues, and now that I had finally been admitted into one, I felt out of place.
I was caught between the contradictory urges of running away from Silverwood and proving myself to all the David Fords in attendance. My rehearsal week brought about an anxiety the like of which I had never known before, and by the time the day of my performance arrived I was seriously contemplating calling in sick. I had been out and about every day, so I knew I couldn’t claim to have the flu, but I could easily have complained of food poisoning. Maybe from shellfish. Or deviled eggs. I was in my hotel room, frantically searching for the festival director’s phone number, when my mother called. She wanted to tell me that she was clearing out the cabin and locking it up until probate closed in October, at which time it would be sold along with the restaurant. She would take care of moving my old piano back, she said, but did I want to keep the antique chandelier I’d bought? Or could she just leave it there for whoever bought the place?
“I can’t really talk right now, Mom. I’m in Boston.”
“What are you doing in Boston?”
“I’m featured at Silverwood.”
“Silver-what?”
“Silverwood. It’s a very big deal.”
“So you want to leave the chandelier here?”
“Whatever you like.”
She gave a sigh of exasperation.
“What is it now?” I asked. Standing at the window, I saw that clouds were gathering for an afternoon thunderstorm, and the sunlight had dimmed. In the street below, a car raced to make it before the red light and another one honked as it waited to turn. It struck me how much I disliked the noise of big cities, how unsuited I was to them. At heart, I was a desert creature.
“You left everything,” she said accusingly.
“I don’t understand. Isn’t that what you wanted? You wanted to sell the restaurant, and I said it was fine. Now you want to clear out the cabin, and I’m telling you that’s fine, too. I’m agreeing with you.”
“I never said I wanted you to leave.”
Even after I’d declared defeat and walked away from my mother’s fights, she wanted to drag me into a new one. I was speechless, my mind reeling for a retort that would put an end to the conflict between us, but coming up with nothing. And she must have sensed an opening, because she pressed on. “You always run away, Nora. When it gets difficult, you run away. I did thi
s, too, when I was your age.”
When she was my age, she had moved to a new home, a new country, a new continent. She had meant to change the course of her life, but she’d changed my sister’s and mine, too. How different would things have been for us if she had stayed? Maybe I would’ve had the ordinary life I had always wanted. I would’ve felt that I belonged somewhere. I wouldn’t have been taught, by textbooks, the newspapers, and the movies, to see myself once through my own eyes and another time through the eyes of others. I wouldn’t have wanted so badly to fit in and, paradoxically, to stand out.
I could go on like this forever, imagining the other world that might have been. Then it occurred to me that my mother, too, had been imagining a world that might have been: a nice house on the western side of Casablanca, a husband who taught philosophy at the university, one daughter a dentist and the other a doctor, both married to men who were comme il faut, neither greasy account books nor dog-eared music sheets in sight. She’d spent years trying to mold me into someone she could be proud of, but I had been so busy breaking out of that mold that I hadn’t noticed all the ways in which I was already like her. My blindness to cheating. My running away when things got tough.
It was there, standing at the hotel-room window talking to my mother, that I made up my mind to go onstage that night. I can’t say that I wasn’t intimidated. The venue, the audience, the acoustics—all these were on a grander scale than I had been accustomed to in California. Walking across the stage to the piano, I had to resort to the technique I’d been taught in middle school: pretend you’re playing for only one person.