You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  Sometimes I would try to communicate recognition to the bridesmaid, burning a deep stare into her eyes whenever she’d offer to light my cigarette. I wanted her to know, but never for anyone else to suspect.

  Stereotypes exist for the inhabitants of different Arab cities. People from the Syrian town of Homs are reputed to be dim. Tulkarem in the West Bank is made up of hillbillies—fellayin, the Arabic word for peasants. Folks from the village of Isdud—now the city of Ashdod—are cheap. “They heat up their leftover salad and serve it for dinner,” the expression goes. In Gaza, the girls are all lesbians. Maybe the stereotype stems from their geographical isolation from the rest of the country; women turn to each other for lack of more options. Regardless, it is implied that as a Palestinian, to be gay is unacceptable. “I’m homophobic,” a cousin once proudly asserted before telling a story about visiting Mykonos. “I just feel sick when I see two guys together,” he clarified, as though informing us that he was lactose intolerant.

  To be a woman who desired other women seemed even worse, especially shameful and shocking in its lack of reverence for the male-centric culture. Why would you want to exclude men, the stronger, better gender, from the equation?

  In high school, it didn’t take long to realize that I coveted Eman, whose body was like a temple. It was a place where I wanted to worship. When my thespian boyfriend cheated on me with the prettiest madrigal, I was jealous of him, not her. Then there was Julia, captain of the soccer team, with puffy lips and cheeks red with rosacea. Adrienne, lead cheerleader, with massive green eyes and crescent-shaped lashes. And of course the Air France stewardesses on my transatlantic flights from the States to Amman, with their tinted nylons and hair pinned back in little buns. When I saw a cute girl, the feeling in my stomach, the wave that seemed to take shape there, excited and inspired me. But mostly, it terrified me.

  In the days leading up to Eman’s wedding, I would accompany my mother to the Vendôme hotel along the corniche in Raouché, where most of the out-of-town guests were staying. The two of us were staying with a friend of hers from Washington who summered in Lebanon, and who was also invited to the wedding. Each day we would meet up with everyone in the hotel’s lounge area for tea. I would wander to the veranda and smoke. I’d often find Eman’s bridesmaid at an outdoor table, in a T-shirt and black jeans, her foot resting on the opposite knee as she peered down at her BlackBerry. She was twenty-eight, ten years older than me, and already had her own startup—a successful one, I’d heard. She would look up and see me, then smile in a way that suggested I should come over. She’d light us each a cigarette, having just arrived at the end of the last one, its butt still smoldering in the glass ashtray. I’d ask her questions about life in Dubai. “It has the feel of an Arab country, the food and the language,” she’d respond, “without the conservative mind-set.”

  “Are you seeing anyone there?” I once asked. I was careful not to specify a gender, simultaneously avoiding an assumption of queerness and implying it.

  “I’m seeing people everywhere.” She exhaled a billowing cloud and then smiled again, a bravado ruffling up in her demeanor. “I’ve got someone in almost every major city.”

  The wedding was a display of straightness. Everyone I encountered told me my turn was next, essentially instructing me to meet someone. I felt surface-level excitement at the fantasy of being with a man and feeling emotionally fulfilled by one, rather than just sexually satisfied, along with underlying despair, knowing it was precisely that: a fantasy.

  The night of the wedding I sang on stage. I chose a Frank Sinatra song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” which was exactly my range. I knew I had performed well, and I stepped off the stage to rounds of applause and a feeling of empowerment. Eman immediately ran to hug me, kissing both my cheeks. Emboldened by her kisses and tipsy, I sauntered over to the bridesmaid and said that I had something to tell her. I felt giddy at the prospect of my confession as I stepped toward her, only to then trip on my dress and fall to the floor. She helped me up, but I ran back to my table feeling mortified.

  I sat there for a while sipping a glass of wine before noticing that the best man was staring at me. He was cute, m’rateb, and single—the married people had already notified all the single girls of his relationship status. When we caught eyes he waved, then came over and asked if I wanted to dance. He seemed like someone my mother and the community would be impressed by, a good candidate for marriage. As we danced he draped his tie around my neck, and tugged the end to pull me in closer. After a few songs he asked if I wanted to go smoke a cigarette. We took the elevator to the rooftop terrace, where we made out haphazardly, the wind blowing my hair into our faces. “Shall we go down to my room?” he suggested.

  Back in the elevator, he pressed the button for his floor and continued to kiss me. When the doors opened, I spotted the bridesmaid down the hallway, typing into her BlackBerry. My stomach flipped. I watched her put her phone in her pocket and walk into her room. The tie guy put his arm around my shoulder, and I walked with him down the opposite side of the corridor. We stopped in front of a door and he fumbled for his room key.

  He slid the key into the reader above the knob. A green light blinked. “Actually,” I said, “maybe it’s better if we don’t.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “You know how quickly gossip spreads here.” I kissed him and tried to give back his tie.

  “Keep it,” he said. “It looks better on you.”

  We said good night. I walked toward the elevators and then continued past them. Nervous, I summoned the requisite apocalyptic imagery: Scrap metal. Barren tree branches. Tumbleweed. I knocked gently on her door.

  “Hey there,” she said when she opened it. “Nice cravat.”

  I looked down at the tie, its knot wide and loose, then looked back up at her. “Can I come in?”

  She stepped aside and left a pathway for me to enter. She then walked to the wet bar and poured me a glass of water, though I hadn’t asked for one. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I was wishing I hadn’t come here, hadn’t knocked. I felt myself shiver—was something actually going to happen? “Are you cold?” she asked.

  I shook my head, taking off the tie and tossing it on the bed. I stood up. She was standing directly in front of me, inches away. I could feel heat emanating in the space between us. “I’m not.”

  She cupped my waist with her hands and I shivered again. My teeth chattered. She pressed her mouth against my neck, and I crumbled into her. We lay down on the bed and moved up toward the pillows. She slid her hand under my dress and pressed the base of her palm against me. I let out a slight, pained moan. She smiled before continuing and said, “You liked that.”

  The next morning, I thought I could sneak out of the hotel and back to my mother’s friend’s apartment without running into anyone I knew. I had messaged my mother the night before to tell her that I wouldn’t be back until morning, and when she asked where I planned to stay, I responded that my phone was dying. When I stepped off the elevator and into the lobby, I saw that everyone was congregated by the front desk to say goodbye to Eman before she left for her honeymoon. As I attempted to slink away unnoticed, they called out to me.

  “Shit,” I mumbled, then shuffled over to where they were standing. “How was your first time?” I heard someone ask Eman as I approached.

  “First time,” she said, “yeah, right,” and everyone laughed. When the concierge came over to us and announced that the car to the airport had arrived, I found myself taking Eman aside. “I have confirmation.” My heart thumped so hard I could practically hear it. “That bridesmaid is definitely gay.”

  “No way,” Eman said. “How do you know?”

  “She came on to me last night,” I said, keeping my eyes pinned to the floor. “She invited me to her room.” The words practically burned as they left my mouth.

  “That’s disgusting,” Eman said. “What did you say?”

  “I told her she must’ve gotten the wrong id
ea.” I felt the heat spread across my face. “And that I like men.”

  For a moment I worried that Eman would ask why I was still at the hotel and not with my mother, and where I’d slept the night before. Instead she said, “Well, you’d better be careful. I don’t want to come back to a wedding announcement!”

  •

  I looked down and traced the stripes of my sneaker with my index finger. “My secret is that I slept with someone, then outed her while keeping myself in the closet.”

  The silence felt epic, and I wondered if mine was worse than everyone else’s.

  “Why did you do that?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Because I’m terrible? And a coward? “I guess I wanted to see what the reaction would be overseas to that sort of thing.” I raised my shoulders. “I’m not really sure why I did it.”

  “Maybe you were scared,” Richard suggested.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  In New York several years after the wedding, I stood in the main quad of Columbia University’s campus and watched a live feed from inside the auditorium, where President Ahmadinejad of Iran spouted incendiary statements about his country’s superiority. When asked about Iran’s horrific treatment of its gay citizens—half a dozen men had been publicly executed over the previous two years—Ahmadinejad proudly announced that there were no homosexuals in the entire country. His negation of their existence, uttered through a crazed smile, seemed simultaneously ridiculous and threatening.

  I looked at Richard and continued, “But I know being scared doesn’t excuse it.”

  “Do you want to ask your group members if they think you’re a bad person?”

  I looked up at my roommate just as she looked down and shook her head. “Molly,” I said, my voice practically a whisper, “do you think I’m a bad person?”

  Molly kept staring at the floor, refusing to look at me. She sighed. “I knew you were going to ask me,” she said. “I just think you should’ve told me that you’re a homosexual.”

  “Bisexual,” I corrected, cringing at her use of that word and hearing the echoes of Ahmadinejad’s voice. “The occasion didn’t really present itself.”

  “I get it, but it seems like a pretty big thing not to mention.”

  I stared at the ceiling, my heart thumping. I wanted to point out that I hadn’t actually lied, though she was right to imply that I hadn’t been entirely honest, either. I’d deliberately sidestepped pronouns and specifics in our brief conversations about Anna. But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.

  “I would like to at least have had the option of switching roommates, not that I necessarily would’ve,” Molly continued. “I just feel like I’ve been betrayed.”

  “Now, wait,” Greg interjected. Later, he would tell me that in Molly’s words he could hear his wife: You could’ve at least told me you were a junkie before I married you. She’d shriveled him down to a raisin of a man, so much that he couldn’t look his own daughters in the eye when they told him they loved him. And for that he would always seek to hurt her back, cheating on her incessantly and injecting himself into oblivion.

  “No one’s under any obligation to announce their sexuality,” he continued. “What do you want her to do, get a tattoo, wear a sign?”

  He looked at me tentatively. I could tell he was scared of how I’d react, that I was going to be mad for some reason. But I just felt ashamed that he could still muster sympathy for me in spite of how cruel I’d been. He cleared his throat. “Richard, man, what’s your secret?”

  “Well,” Richard said, “I can tell you how I landed here as a patient, fifteen years ago.” I took a deep breath, slowly looking up as he continued. “I asked my son to rake the leaves one morning before I left for work. When I came home and saw that he hadn’t done it, I went inside and unleashed hell on him. It was the last straw for me, the one that made me seek help.”

  When I realized I’d been right about him, I didn’t feel vindicated, or smug, or pleased. I felt frightened, and disturbed by the familiarity. Worse than receiving rage was the ability to detect its remnants.

  7

  “YOU BITCH,” SAID MY MOTHER WHEN I ANSWERED MY office phone one afternoon. I was twenty-three years old and had just started working at a magazine in New York after spending the past six months in Italy.

  Fear took over. And confusion.

  “Because of you, you bitch,” she said, spitting out the last word, “I’m running around like an idiot in the fucking rain, looking for stamps.”

  It took me a moment to understand what she was talking about. That past Friday I had been visiting home and she’d asked if I could pick up a sheet of stamps. “Sure,” I’d said. “Can I get them before I leave?”

  “Okay, mama,” she said. “No problem.” By the time I left on Sunday evening I’d forgotten about the stamps, but she didn’t seem to notice. Not until just then.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, cupping my hand over the receiver, “but I can’t talk about this right now. I’ll call you when I leave the office.” The phone rang seconds after I hung up.

  “Don’t you ever hang up on me,” she rasped.

  “Mom, please. Please stop.” Again I hung up. The magazine’s main line started ringing, her name flashing across the caller ID. I took the phone and placed it beside the cradle. She called my cell and left voice mails until the inbox was full. As the screen of my phone continued to light up, my boss poked her head out of her office. “Hey, can you send those honorarium checks? They need to go out ASAP.”

  “Sure!” I nodded so fast the room blurred.

  “Why’s the phone off the hook?”

  “Oh. I don’t know,” I said, and I placed it back on the receiver. “Sorry.”

  At the Al-Anon meeting about a week into treatment, Bonnie had compared living with her husband to walking on eggshells. “I guess that’s why I’m always so afraid,” she said. Later, I found out that was the title of the seminal book on borderline personality disorder. It was a fitting analogy: the slightest misstep could unleash a force capable of shattering its recipient. Erratic, unpredictable cruelty usually coincides with the most vulnerable and tender moments. One must proceed cautiously and always be on the lookout, always withhold information and never reveal something that can later be used as ammunition. Never get too close because that’s when she’ll shoot. And if she does, always have an escape plan. It is essential to remember these rules. Yet this is the realm, the realm of my mother, in which I consistently forget how to survive.

  “The thing is,” I said to the group the day after that meeting, “she can’t help it.” I had just described my last encounter with her, at the restaurant in SoHo.

  “Well, maybe she can’t in fact help it,” said Richard, “and she probably doesn’t mean to be vicious—”

  “She doesn’t,” I said.

  “Right. But it still has an impact.”

  One morning during my second week at the Ledge, we did something called a H.I.T. list: Healing Internal Trauma. We were working with Richard and one of the other counselors, Charlotte, a Bowling Green native who also led our yoga sessions. A tattoo decorated each of her forearms as well as her ankles, all of them Sanskrit characters. Her hair was deep brown, almost black, her nose slightly upturned, and whenever she smiled, she pushed the tip of her tongue into the sliver between her two front teeth. She dressed somewhere in between sparkling femininity and early nineties grunge, dressed in capris and a loose-fitting T-shirt.

  Charlotte suggested that I do a H.I.T. list on my mother. The activity seemed silly to me, but I decided I might as well try it. I looked straight ahead and attempted to visualize my mother as instructed. All I saw was an empty chair. “I can’t picture her,” I said to Charlotte, who was sitting beside me.

&
nbsp; “That’s okay,” she said. “Just go ahead and start.”

  I looked down at the first statement on my list and felt myself blush. “When you tell me I don’t deserve to be loved,” I winced in embarrassment, “I feel sad?” I looked to Charlotte, worried I was doing it wrong.

  “Good,” she said. “Now can you try doing this without a smile?”

  Getting me to stop smiling was a goal for all the counselors. According to them it was part of my armor. “We wear masks to protect ourselves, but they also keep us from being vulnerable,” Richard announced the first week. “They keep us from achieving intimacy.” During the Wednesday night Big Book meeting, a recovering alcoholic defined intimacy as “into-me-you-see.” I’d written it down on the back page of my journal.

  “Okay.” I shook my head as if to shake off the smile and looked back down at my list. “When you told me you were from a better family than me, I felt bad.”

  “You’re my mother,” Charlotte said. “Tell her, ‘you’re my mother.’”

  “You’re my mother,” I echoed.

  “Tell her, ‘I’m your blood. I’m your family.’”

  “I’m your blood,” I said to the chair. I realized that I was shivering. I looked at the list and couldn’t distinguish the words. I looked at Charlotte. “Do I have to keep going?”

  She nodded.

  “When you told me you were beautiful, and I was average,” I said, and then stopped. I couldn’t speak through my chattering teeth.

  Overseas, her looks, elegance, and status as an Abu Sa’ab all work together to ensure that she is loved. By the time I was in high school, our trips to Jordan had changed shape, contoured by summer jobs. One year, I got to Amman a few weeks before my mother. For days leading up to her visit I was questioned about when she’d be arriving. “I don’t know exactly,” I answered. Like a celebrity, my mother never told. When we found out she was on a connecting British Airways flight set to land at nine thirty, I watched as her friends and family changed out of their pajamas to meet her at the Four Seasons lounge once she arrived. I sat there with a glass of wine, exhausted by the anticipation of seeing her, hoping everyone would finish their drinks quickly so we could go home. I was fully aware that no one had forced me to join.