And here we all were, right back where we’d been fifteen years ago. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the sameness of it all.
They cornered me though, the girls. They rolled up to the house, right into the driveway, and pulled me away – just like they’d done countless times before. I sat in the back, forehead against warm glass, while they tossed reprimands into the back seat. I was supposed to lean on them, they said. Why wasn’t I letting them help? Why didn’t I answer texts and phone calls?
‘How are things with Rashid?’
Mona’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, and I didn’t need to see the rest of her face to know she was scowling.
‘Things are fine,’ she answered. Zaina looked at us, mouth open to ask a question, but I kept talking.
‘Yeah? That’s good to hear.’
‘Why wouldn’t things be good?’ Zaina asked.
‘We just had a little fight is all,’ Mona said, and I could practically see the smoke coming out of her ears.
‘About what?’
Mona shook her head, looking to her left before turning onto a main road. ‘I can’t remember. Something stupid.’ I snorted at that, but they both ignored me. Zaina looked out her window while Mona turned the radio up.
I figured out where she was taking us and it softened my mood a bit. Years ago, before there was a fro-yo place on every corner, all we had was Mango World – these little refreshment stops scattered across the country. There was one in particular we used to go to; it was the furthest away from school, so we had to drive all the way up the Gulf Road to get there, thereby maximizing our outing. The place was no bigger than a highway rest-stop, too tiny to move in and with no chairs or tables. You ordered your ice-cream or milkshake or sundae from the car and they brought it out to you. I didn’t think they even had a toilet, but the waiter nodded when Zaina asked him, and she jumped out of the car, calling out her order behind her as she headed for the shop.
‘Have I done something to piss you off?’ Mona asked once the man had left to take someone else’s order.
I sighed, leaning back against the seat. ‘No. I’m sorry about that.’
She was quiet for a moment, fiddling with the radio, keeping one eye on the shop. ‘I ended it.’
‘Good.’
‘I did,’ she repeated, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
‘Good,’ I said again.
She crossed her arms, tilting her head but not turning around to face me. ‘So, no one has to know.’
‘No one has to know,’ I replied, thinking about Rashid and the old CDs and the way he always brought home a dessert whenever Zaina and I came over. He would stay out of the apartment, giving us our girl time, only returning when we were about to leave. And then, he would walk in with a box of cupcakes or slices of carrot cake or some disgusting marzipan thing he’d gotten because he thought the shape of it was interesting. We’d sit around the coffee table, gorging ourselves on the sweet stuff until we were about ready to pop, even though us girls had sworn we were going off sugar.
Could he tell, even then, that night in my yard, that there was something fundamentally wrong, some fracture or stain in me that no one could treat? Maybe there is such a thing as fate, and we were, all of us, destined to play these parts: Zaina, the optimist without doubt; Mona, the siren without fault; me, the coward without hope; and Rashid, the one who deserved better.
‘You never said what happened with you two?’
She shook her head and looked out the window towards the ice-cream shop. ‘You’ll think it’s stupid.’
Maybe, I thought, but all I said was, ‘That’s never stopped you from telling me things before.’
I saw her mouth in profile stretch into a brief smile. ‘He wants kids.’
I twisted a hair tie around my fingers. ‘But you said—’
‘We didn’t want kids. Yes, we did say that,’ she said with a slow nod. ‘It was one of the reasons I fell for him, that he didn’t believe in that whole idea of it being our duty to have children, like how people think it’s one of the goals of marriage. He didn’t believe in that old-world crap. He agreed with me that the world was going to shit and we didn’t need to add more people to it. He agreed that it wasn’t selfish for us to want to focus on our careers and enjoy our lives. He agreed with me!’ She hit her fists against the steering wheel.
‘So, what happened?’
She sighed and leaned back against the headrest. ‘He said he’d changed his mind, that he was young when he said those things and that now he thinks it’s important to have kids. He started pressuring me, saying we could just have one, like that was some kind of compromise.’ She scoffed out a laugh. ‘I panicked, and then he came along.’ Even now she would not name him. ‘And he was so easy, so uncomplicated, and I could pretend I was single again, that I didn’t have responsibilities, that I didn’t have to think of anyone but myself.’ She looked out the window again, and we could see Zaina coming out of the shop. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’
I knew she meant Rashid, and it seemed to me she must have – on some level – meant to hurt him, but I didn’t say anything more about it and neither did she.
Zaina cradled her bowl of ice-cream in both hands while the waiter followed with the rest of our order. In the car she started to tell us how disgusting the bathroom was, but Mona wrinkled her nose and said, ‘Not while we’re eating.’ So we sat in silence, listening to some Frenchwoman gurgle on the stereo. The day was warm, and Mona ended up turning the A/C on; she left the windows down, which probably wasn’t good for the environment, but no one said anything about it. I focused on my ice-cream and fruit parfait, eating around the raspberries and digging out all the bananas to eat first. Zaina was making a mess, vanilla and chocolate leaking over the edges because the bowl was so full of cookies and cake slices. It was basically a bowl of diabetes. She had several napkins laid open like a patchwork blanket across her lap, but I knew that before she was halfway through, there’d be chocolate on her shirt. Mona was slurping at her smoothie. She could have kept driving, unencumbered as she was by a bowl or parfait, but she didn’t. We stayed parked, there by the mosque, while we ate, just like when we were younger.
‘I want to go away,’ I said after a while.
Mona jumped on the idea. ‘Girls’ trip, yes.’
‘I could do a weekend, I guess,’ Zaina added with a tentative nod.
‘I meant, go away permanently.’ The girls turned around with such horrified looks that I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘As in leave the country, move.’
‘Oh,’ Zaina said, turning back around. ‘You mean, go back to school?’
‘Or something,’ I murmured.
‘“Permanently” implies more than school,’ Mona pointed out.
‘Yeah, it does.’ I stirred the neglected raspberries in the soup of melted ice-cream until it turned pink and cream.
‘Why don’t you just go to school?’ Zaina asked, digging at the remnants of her own dessert. ‘If you go to the States, that’s two, maybe three years abroad.’ I made a humming noise of agreement, looking out the window at the cars pulling in to the parking lot and honking for service.
‘Have you spoken to your parents?’ Mona asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’ She tossed her empty cup out the window, managing to get it in the trash bin propped up against a lamp-post a few feet away.
‘They weren’t enthusiastic.’
‘Shocker.’
‘Well,’ Zaina began, ‘like I said, you can try again later.’
‘Or I could just leave.’
The pause that followed stretched easily into a silence that I found uncomfortable yet welcome. Zaina reached into the back and I handed over my almost-empty parfait cup. She took it and her empty bowl and deposited them in the trash while Mona and I watched.
When she was back and the car was in motion again, she said, ‘You’re talking about running away.’
I laughed and shook my head
. ‘I’m too old to be a runaway.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘If you’re asking if I’m thinking of leaving without their … permission …’ I had to bite out that last word. ‘Then the answer is yes, I am.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s insane.’
‘Well, if the shoe fits …’
‘This isn’t funny,’ she retorted, scowling at me.
I gave them the condensed version of the fight with my parents, about my suggestion of going away to school and how it was shot down, about Mama’s insistence that it was a waste, about what a burden I’d become to them. I talked about how I was tired of playing by the rules, how futile it was, how I couldn’t conform any longer and I desperately needed some control over something.
They didn’t interrupt, letting me rant and rave, Mona driving and Zaina nodding along to the parts she’d already heard. I stopped mid-sentence, maybe even mid-word, just ran out of steam. I was so tired of talking.
‘I think you should go,’ Mona said. ‘I think it would be really good for you.’
‘Are you listening to yourself?’ Zaina snapped. ‘She can’t just leave! Her parents would never forgive her for that.’ She turned around to face me. ‘Running away is permanent, Dahlia. You won’t be able to take that back. They’ll see it as a slap in the face.’
‘Maybe they deserve a slap in the face,’ Mona said under her breath, reminding me why I adored her.
‘They don’t deserve this,’ Zaina said, crossing her arms and shaking her head. ‘I know you think they’ve made mistakes, but forcing them to cut you off isn’t the answer. And they will cut her off,’ she insisted when Mona was about to interject. ‘You know what her parents are like. This is a pride thing. If she leaves, they’ll be forced to cut her off. Then what?’ She turned back to me. ‘How are you going to support yourself?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said in a mocking tone, ‘get a job maybe.’
‘Do you know how hard it is to get a job abroad?’ she shot back. ‘Like a good job? Or do you just plan on waiting tables or something?’
‘I’m not completely useless,’ I muttered, looking out the window.
‘I didn’t say you were.’
‘You might as well have.’
‘Come on, guys,’ Mona cut in. She fiddled with the stereo, turning the Frenchwoman up to the point where we couldn’t comfortably talk over her. It was a clichéd song, full of accordions and Left Bank sounds; it made me think of mime artists in stripes, black berets, and ruby-red lips.
An imaginary me, in my head, went there, to Paris. She’s terrified when she lands. Foreign country, unknown language, unfamiliar streets. For days she wanders up and down the rues and across the arrondissements and jardins, acclimating to this puzzling city with its light and people and quirks. Where will she find a home? St Germain and its vie bohème? Could she fit in with the art school students, find work in an English bookshop? Or would she end up in the crooked lanes of Montmartre, maybe in the sweaty kitchen of a kebab shop in the shadow of the basilica? Or perhaps she’d be taken in by the Eastern Europeans of the Marais and find work braiding challah bread?
‘This is what Um Dawood was talking about,’ Zaina said, pulling me from my thoughts.
‘What?’
‘The fenjal reader,’ she replied, turning in her seat. ‘She said you were planning something and that you should rethink it. This is what she meant.’
‘Now, that’s crazy.’
‘It’s just really extreme. You need to think hard about what you’d be doing.’
‘I know.’
‘You have other options,’ she continued. ‘Why do you act like you don’t? Give it some time, maybe they’ll come around to the school thing … or marry someone and move away with them.’
I shook my head then leaned it against the warm window. ‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘It could be,’ she insisted.
‘It really couldn’t,’ I argued.
She sighed. ‘You know, sometimes I think your mother has a point, you do make things more difficult than they need to be.’
The silence in the wake of that comment rolled over us like dust in August. Mona turned the music up even louder, like she could drown out Zaina’s words or chase them from our minds, or maybe shove them back down Zaina’s throat. But what is said cannot be unsaid. It remained, documented in the log of everything we had ever said to one another – the snide remarks, the verbal jabs, and all those unintended words that resurrected old hurts.
The silence between us was unbearably loud and heavy, and it carried us all the way home.
18
When Day Breaks
I am a cloud stitched into the fabric of the sky. Shapeless, globular, and without substance. Poke me and your hand would slice right through.
I occasionally wonder what might have been. I don’t wonder about silly things like whether or not I’d be married by now if it hadn’t happened. I don’t wonder whether Nadia’s kids would have a cousin to play with, or how I’d have been invited when Mona and Zaina double-date (they were kind enough not to make me a fifth wheel). I don’t wonder about those things. Ever.
I wonder about me. About the me that I am and the one that I might have been. When something traumatic happens at a formative age, it stops that development – not even stunting it, but sending it branching off in a whole other direction, making you someone you might never have otherwise been. Some of your traits might survive, some might evolve and adapt to your new circumstances, but some are sure to die away, to wither into indiscernible nothings.
Some (and here’s the scary part) might never even be. Some traits might have been in the wings, waiting for the right time to assert themselves as fully fledged aspects of your personality. Confidence, say; or conviction; or inner strength. The kind of traits that need to flower and blossom in safety, like lion cubs roaring at their father, knowing they can bash him about and boast and get nothing more than a little slap. But put those cubs in front of a rival, let them roar and receive their wounds and scars, and they’ll never roar again. Face the horror, the absolute ugliness of the world too soon, and there are parts of you that will just never be.
I cart these other selves around, these other ‘me’s yoked to the back of my mind. And they’re heavy. They mature as I do, learn as I do, aspire and succumb to disappointments like I do; and we carry each other around, all these histories and possible lives.
If alternate realities exist, might there be a world with a whole Dahlia? One who laughs easily, who trusts, who doesn’t shun attention? Might there be a yathoom-less Dahlia with no aches or hollows in her chest?
Is there a Dahlia who’s happy … the kind of happy that requires no elaboration?
The days blended and the nights buckled, one into the next. I rarely slept and yet I didn’t feel awake. I existed in an in-between state of agitated melancholy – aware of little, but feeling too much. I couldn’t close my eyes without having those days and nights rush back to me. I tried to remember a fixed point, a time and date when the abuse started, but it was too much to ask of my mind. All I had was an endlessly looping slideshow of grins and lingering glances, hands too low on my body and fingers curling around the nape of my neck. I recalled the little escalations with chilling jolts of renewed panic: his hands on mine the first time he’d made me touch him; his rubber lips on my cheek when he tried to kiss my tears away; the blood throbbing in my face when he’d made me sit flush in his lap.
When the funeral I didn’t attend was done and the ritual of mourning was over, I remained in a daze. It occurred to me that I was the only one who had ever suffered lasting effects; his emotions and reactions – if he’d had any – were transient and short-lived. It was always about immediate relief, temporary satisfaction. Even his death had been quick, when he should have gone in some drawn-out manner, covered in sores and boils, or his lungs drowning in some vile fluid. Not this expedient and merciful end that resolved nothi
ng.
Bu Faisal’s secretary was a Lebanese woman with poker-straight copper hair and too much makeup. She said he was busy, and when I asked her to tell him it was me, she gave me a look like I was wasting her time. But minutes later she hung up the phone and told me to go on through.
His office was modern and streamlined, all done in blacks and whites and glass. The desk was heavy and ornate, like an antique, espresso-colored and bare of the myriad items that tended to accumulate on desktops. All I saw was a day planner and a notepad with scribbles and doodles; these were bookended by his silver laptop at one end and a clear vase filled to the brim with white rocks at the other. Out of the wide mouth of the vase sprouted a squat tree or bush of some sort. Baba might know what it was called. It had thin branches, like mint green toothpicks, and white flowers the size of Q-tip heads.
The greeting I got that day was more muted than usual, no purple prose or profuse praise. Just a couple of ‘Welcome’s and an invitation to take one of the black leather chairs opposite the desk. I chose the one nearest to the vase, fingering a few of the delicate flowers.
‘It’s a gypsophila,’ he said, picking up the phone and punching some numbers. When the call was answered, he asked for tea.
‘It would be impossible to draw,’ I said when he hung up.
‘I’m sure you could manage it.’
I shook my head, feeling far too close to tears. ‘Little flowers are impossible. There’s too much detail; it’s overwhelming.’
He hummed in agreement or understanding and tapped at his keyboard until the office boy came in with a tray of tea and sugar, glasses of water, and a plate of little butter cookies. He placed it on one end of Bu Faisal’s desk without a word and left, closing the door behind him.
The Pact We Made Page 17