You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  12

  “TELL HER.” RICHARD NODDED IN CHARLOTTE’S DIRECTION. He sat with his legs crossed, shoes off, holding a socked foot in his hand. “Tell her, ‘Charlotte, I’m struggling with an attraction to you.’”

  I looked around at the others, at the poster-board signs taped to the walls listing in crayon the different ways a person could feel: Sad, Bad, Mad, Afraid. I looked out the window onto the woods, and then at the sloped ceiling. My ponytail reached farther down my back as I tilted my head. I would need to cut my hair when I got home. I shifted my eyes to the Sanskrit character tattooed on Charlotte’s ankle peeking out from underneath her pant leg. Her dark hair was pulled back that day, making her cheekbones more pronounced, her round hazel eyes even rounder. I fixed my gaze just below them as I spoke. “Charlotte”—my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else—“I’m struggling with an attraction to you.”

  A gong sounded inside my chest and vibrated through my fingertips out into the room. I regretted bringing it up. I continued, “When I told you I was falling for someone, it shouldn’t have been you that I went to for help.” I glared at the floor, unable to look at her anymore. “I’m so sorry if I violated your boundaries.”

  After confessing I felt hollow. Deflated, like someone had popped a balloon that had filled up inside me. I could feel my shame morphing into anger, and suddenly I was furious. It didn’t seem fair that I longed for this woman I hardly knew. It didn’t seem fair that I was there at all.

  AS FIRST RANKED IN HER CLASS, A DISTINCTION THAT still exists at the Quaker Friends School in Ramallah, Alia Abu Sa’ab’s firstborn daughter, Minister of Finance Khaled Abu Sa’ab’s first granddaughter, the owner of two highly pronounced cheekbones and the first girl in 1960s Nablus to wear a London-imported miniskirt, Laila Abu Sa’ab was certain to have a great life. She was born in between two catastrophic Israeli-Palestinian wars: ’48 and ’67. The second one broke out when she was eight years old. In less than a week, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria lost control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Another wave of Palestinian displacement ensued. The possibility of a state called Palestine receded even further into the distance, becoming nearly unattainable.

  The extent to which violence affected her childhood is unclear; she rarely speaks of her youth, and never relates much information when asked. She recalls that on weekends, she and her four siblings would travel through three checkpoints from Nablus to Ramallah, for two scoops each of pistachio ice cream at Rookab. She remembers that her youngest brother went to an Israeli prison eight times when they were teenagers, the stays ranging from nineteen to forty-five days, for throwing rocks at armed soldiers and trying to muster up his own resistance movement. After throwing stones at a Humvee convoy that blocked a mother from taking her seizing child to a hospital in Jerusalem, he was placed in a solitary cell so small that he couldn’t stand upright and had to remain hunched for an entire three weeks.

  After college, Laila turned down a slew of suitors: rich ones, handsome ones, good-familied ones. Though everyone expected her to, she knew she wouldn’t marry for a while. What was the rush? Things were changing. Women no longer had to go straight from their parents’ home to their husband’s anymore. In the late 1970s, the waves made by the sexual revolution in the States were just washing up on Middle Eastern shores. Against the return of the ayatollah in Iran and the rise of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the U.S. seemed like a bastion of freedom and liberalism. In America, she would be able to date whomever she wanted and not worry about her reputation. “Play the field,” her Harvard Med School–educated father told her. “Go places. And never settle.”

  Besides, she’d spent the last twenty-one years watching her parents, her mother constantly screaming at her father, him trying to drown her out with his cardiology work, fellowships, books. He loved his wife, but he certainly couldn’t connect with her, not with a mind like his. Laila wouldn’t let that happen, she would never be like her mother, cleaning and cooking and using her kids as leverage against her husband, forcing them to take her side, a decision they would regret once they were older and able to think for themselves. No, she would never repeat her mother’s mistakes, and she certainly wouldn’t let herself be beholden to a man. She planned to get a master’s degree, and eventually a PhD. “The thing about education,” her father said to her the day of her college graduation, which coincided with a sharp increase in Israeli settlement construction on confiscated land in the West Bank, “is that no one can take it away from you. Everything else can be stolen. Everything else can be lost.”

  When her parents moved to Chicago, where her father had just accepted a position as head cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Laila decided she would stay with them and apply to master’s programs in the States. At her goodbye party before leaving Amman, she met Talal.

  Talal was also from Nablus. He’d grown up poor, one of nine brothers and sisters. At the time that he met Laila, he was also on his way to the States: to California, where he would attend business school. He wasn’t suave or especially handsome, but he was determined, and he pursued her relentlessly. Every week he sent a letter to Chicago from L.A., and he eventually traveled to Illinois to visit her, flying into O’Hare and renting a flashy red Mustang that he hoped would impress her. Laila’s three brothers all made fun of him for it. Her father had been skeptical of the match from the beginning and saw the car as further evidence of how ill-suited the man was for his daughter. “Anyone who rents a red convertible must have an inferiority complex!” he said, and told Laila not to date him because of it.

  Laila and Talal spent most of their time together in the red car, since it was one of the few places where they could be alone. Before he left Chicago, he proposed to her in it, and a few months later they were married in Bridgeview. Grad school applications had been replaced by wedding plans. After a brief honeymoon on Lake Superior, the only destination Talal could afford, she returned with him to California.

  Laila hated Los Angeles. It was too spread out, too detached, and even farther from the West Bank than Illinois. And the anonymity of the place was entirely unfamiliar. She would walk around their neighborhood and not recognize a soul. Back in Nablus, she’d once left her passport at a café, and by the time she got home someone had already dropped it off. Even the telephone operator knew her life story.

  Talal taught her how to drive on the way to the DMV for her Behind the Wheel test, on Interstate 405. After that things felt a little better; she could explore the city and make it feel less foreign. It helped that she was fascinated by all things American. She developed an appetite for In-N-Out cheeseburgers and Neapolitan shakes. She watched The Young and the Restless and The Price Is Right daily. In home videos, she uses the phrase “Come on down!” at least a dozen times—when it’s time to blow out the candles at my birthday party; at the beach, encouraging us to get in the water; on the first day of school as we make our way to the bus stop. Infomercials captivated her as well; she’d sit in front of the TV mesmerized by the promise of cleaning products that could get out any stain imaginable, vitamins that could provide unlimited energy. Usually she’d pick up the phone and place an order, consulting Talal after the fact, though he didn’t mind. He found her enthusiasm charming. She’d hold on to the goods until losing interest and getting rid of them; at their one garage sale she tried to sell a BeDazzler that she’d ordered off the television in 1982. And whenever any mail would arrive from Ed McMahon, she’d call Talal at work, screaming that they’d just won a million dollars.

  Seat belts, speed limits, and fire drills were novelties as well. Once, while she was six months pregnant, Laila was in the middle of a seminar on interior decorating when the building’s fire alarm went off. Everyone else groaned and got up, slowly filing toward the door. Laila jumped out of her seat and ran, pushing people out of her way and screaming, “Let me out, I have a baby inside me! I have a baby inside!”

 
; By then she still knew no one in California, except for Talal, and the baby growing inside her. But he was in class most of the day, business school at USC, forty-five minutes from the apartment, an hour and a half with traffic. When they did have time together they spent it either watching TV or at a local Italian restaurant, then getting ice cream cones and driving to the beach to catch the sunset. Most days she spent sitting by the window looking out onto the ocean, touching her hand to her ever-expanding belly and trying to enjoy the view. But beautiful scenery could never make her feel less lonely. “Who cares about the view?” She would say whenever Talal would remark on it. “I’ve seen it, it’s beautiful, now what?”

  Her water broke one summer night, while they were both asleep. After frantically pulling a robe over his pajamas and grabbing the bag they’d prepared, Talal sped along the freeway to the hospital in downtown L.A. For once there was no traffic.

  It turns out that they didn’t need to speed; it took another day for the baby to arrive. Talal was back in class when it was time to start pushing, her mother on a plane, hoping to make it in time. The day Laila became a mother, and me, a daughter, we were the only ones there to greet each other.

  On the fifteen-year anniversary of the war that had ravaged her hometown, Laila gave birth to me, her first child, a daughter. On that ominous day the doctor who performed the delivery forgot to remove the placenta. It rotted in her womb, causing her to bleed internally, and then externally. She returned to the hospital for a month, leaving me in my grandmother’s care. “There was so much blood,” Teta would say. “She almost died.”

  Three months later, Laila and Talal moved to Washington. Talal bought a used Ford van, which had a built-in bed in the back and a carpet of sunflower seed shells. It looked like it should belong to either plumbers or kidnappers. They drove across the country with me in a basket between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. By the time they bought a house in the D.C. suburbs, Laila was better acquainted with America’s nuances and idiosyncrasies. Her feelings of loneliness and alienation had somewhat subsided. Besides, Washington was more like Palestine: densely populated, noisy, and filled with more Arabs than Palos Verdes.

  Talal and his brother built a deck in their backyard. Laila planted roses. In a home video from when I was a toddler, I inch my way toward the rose bed. “Don’t touch the flowers!” Laila calls from behind the camera. As I get closer I call out to my father, “Baba, come sit with me! Sit with me—”

  And I topple over, onto the ground and onto my head. He rushes over to where I’m sprawled, my leg bent backward behind my neck. Instead of lifting me up he simply readjusts my leg, then offers me his hand. “Do you know why you fell?” he asks.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were touching the flowers!”

  A non sequitur, but I accept his logic as valid. In the video Laila laughs behind the camera. “Something to remember,” she says.

  •

  When I was eight years old, they sent me to French sleepaway camp in Quebec for a month. My mother flew with me to Montreal and together we took a train to Saint-Alexis-des-Monts. “I don’t need you to come along,” I said as we boarded a pre-dawn train. “I’ll be okay on my own.”

  She would return to Montreal that evening and travel to Amman the following morning for the rest of summer. I spent that first day of French camp reveling in my newfound independence, thrilled to be around teenage counselors and away from my parents. In class that afternoon we were instructed to draw a stick figure and label its body parts in French. Eager to impress the others, I drew a man dancing barefoot in the rain with an upturned umbrella. When the teacher came by to inspect my work he frowned at the sight of my drawing. He then glued the pages of my notebook together, as if to cancel out the incident.

  Soon it was dark. No one in my dorm spoke English. I lay in bed listening to the unfamiliar French around me, trying unsuccessfully to stifle tears. The older girls in the room attempted to comfort me—one even offered her teddy bear—but I wouldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t them that I wanted. I felt abandoned—a whole month without my mother. In the morning, I begged the camp’s dean to let me call her before she left for Jordan. They finally gave in, and when she answered I cried, “Mama! Don’t leave me! I need you!”

  And so my mother stayed in Canada. I spent the weekdays in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, and on the weekends I took a bus to Montreal. I’d sob when I had to leave her on Sunday afternoons. The routine persisted for the entire month of July, until finally, we went home.

  •

  A few years after their house was built, when I was two and Karim a newborn, Laila got a license in real estate. She became a top agent almost instantly, taking on Arab families that relocated to D.C. as her primary clients. She worked practically nonstop for fifteen years, our basement filling up with little plaques and paperweights that said things like “Super Agents’ Club” and “Number One in Sales,” until she and my father separated. After that she’d take on the occasional client, but the economy was in recession, and fewer properties were being sold at the time. The constraints of financial necessity rendered her obsolete.

  When my father moved out, my mother decided to downsize, renting out the house and moving to an apartment in D.C. proper. It wasn’t long before she discovered Cafe Milano, a place where politicians, lobbyists, and the occasional Hollywood actor schmoozed. George Clooney once offered her a seat at his table. “Where are you going?” I would ask as headlights seared through my bedroom window, her friend honking from the driveway.

  “Yalla, bye,” she would say, spraying a spritz of perfume and rushing out to the car. I would watch her open the passenger door and climb in, kissing the friend hello as they backed away. She would stay out late, so late that I often thought there’d been an accident, that she’d died, she was dead, my mother was dead. I’d pace the hallway upstairs crying, until I’d finally break down and call the restaurant. The hostess would wander off to find Laila at her table and moments later she was on the line. “Habibti, everything’s fine,” she said soothingly, the hum of chatter and music in the background. “We’re just ordering dessert now. Go to sleep.”

  One night, when I called Café Milano, the hostess told me that my mother refused to come to the phone. When I heard the rumble of the garage a few hours later, I came running down the stairs to embrace her, and she immediately smacked me across the face.

  I never called the restaurant again, or worried about accidents.

  •

  One afternoon, just before I moved away from D.C. to New York, I came home and found her sitting at the kitchen counter, a full tray of cookies on the table beside her, the prepared kind from the grocery store. I pointed to the cookies. “What are those for?”

  “They’re from an open house for new clients I held this morning.” The tray was full, not one cookie missing. “No one came,” she said, looking up at me then quickly looking away, as though she was ashamed. “Have one, if you like.”

  I imagined her sitting at an empty table in a model home kitchen, her business cards beside her in an untouched stack, waiting for someone to show up. I thought about the other real estate agents at the firm with perfect English, who continued to secure clients despite the recession. I thought of the bills that arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, now solely her responsibility. She wasn’t supposed to be paying bills alone. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way for Laila Abu Sa’ab, but she had chosen the wrong marriage and the wrong life. And though she resented me because of it—I was, by default, the wrong daughter—I also understood. I had come from my mother, I had lived inside her, but I was not of her. I was not an Abu Sa’ab, a wedge driven even deeper after she divorced my father and dropped her married name entirely. After that I was a foreigner, an unfamiliar thing, other. I would never belong to her again, though I desperately wanted to. No matter how hard I tried I would never attain the status of being hers. It would always remain just beyond my reach.

  �
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  My words hung in the air like laundry on a clothesline. Charlotte, I’m struggling with an attraction to you. They repeated themselves over and over again in my head. “Can I respond?” Charlotte asked. “Or would you rather I didn’t?”

  “No,” I said. “I want you to.”

  Charlotte took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t feel violated,” she said. “I think it makes sense that you feel the way you do. I’m unattainable to you. I exist only in possibility. And that’s intoxicating.”

  She looked nonplussed, unfazed by my confession. I suppose I wasn’t the first. “Plus, I’m giving you all this positive attention, all this acknowledgment and approval.” She said what didn’t need to be said, because by then everyone in that room already knew it, everyone but me. Her response seemed somehow reductive, as if she’d taken everything and plugged it into a simple formula: Acknowledgment + Approval – Mother’s Unconditional Love = Attraction. Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.

  Finally, I was able to lift my head and look at Charlotte. My eyes pooled as I smiled stupidly and hoped no drops would escape.