You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  I landed in Amman at ten thirty and went straight from the airport to the Allenby Bridge. Everyone else is already in Palestine, where the last four days of Teta’s week-long funeral will take place. All of Teta’s grandchildren will be there, as well as her children, including, of course, my mother. Anouk wanted to come to the funeral. But the idea of introducing her to my family, especially in that setting, seemed too stressful, so I suggested she come another time. She agreed that it made sense to wait.

  It’s a Thursday, so the border crossing is crowded with commuters trying to return home to the West Bank before Friday, the Muslim holy day. The room is stale with the smell of smoke. Everywhere I look children run around chasing one another, their mothers yelling at them to sit still. I stand in line at the Jordanian-run security counter behind packs of men in wrinkled suits, some carrying briefcases, all of them smoking. When I get to the front, I hand my luggage and passport to the official at the desk. “Wait for the bus out there,” he says, pointing at the door. “It will take you across.”

  Outside, there are at least two dozen people waiting on the tiled platform. I see a bus parked on the other side of the bridge. I drop my bag on the dry earth and sit under a barren fig tree, rolling a fallen branch between my palms as I wait.

  Forty-five minutes later, the driver finally appears and walks onto the bus. The engine rumbles as it chugs over to us. I rush to get on before anyone else and choose a seat near the front. A man walks down the aisle and collects our passports. Even though we’ll get back once we cross, parting with my passport makes me anxious. It’s another thirty minutes before we actually start moving. The moment we do, warm orange liquid pours onto my head and down my back. I look up—an open can of Mirinda that someone left on the luggage rack has toppled over. I breathe deeply and gaze out the window at the Jordan River passing beneath the bridge, which serves as the demarcation line between Jordan, to the east, and Israel and Palestine, to the west. It’s really just an idyllic stream running over stones and between muddy banks. But the word river makes arbitrary borders seem inevitable.

  Less than two minutes later we are on the other side. The driver pulls in front of the Israeli customs office, turns off the ignition, and steps off the bus, shutting its door behind him. We wait. I’m hungry, thirsty, tired, and covered in sticky orange soda. The bus door opens and a new official steps onto the bus. He walks up and down the aisle calling out names and handing back our passports. By the time he’s done we are all standing, eager to exit. When the doors open once again, I push my way past the others and rush inside to customs.

  A large Israeli flag hangs over the officials’ booths, along with Hebrew letters. A line has somehow already formed. I eventually get up to the counter and again hand over my passport. As I’ve come to expect, the official holds on to it, and I am told to return to the waiting area. “For how long?” I ask.

  “Someone will come for you,” he says. “For questioning.”

  I sit in a plastic chair and wait. A box of tissues sits on the table in front of me, a plastic waste bin beside it. I look around at pictures of President Clinton seeming pleased with himself as he presides over Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands on the White House lawn. I glance past the customs desk and out the window at the giant banner that reads, “Welcome to Israel,” knowing I may not make it in. I try to sign on to the complimentary Wi-Fi but can’t connect to the network. I give up trying and take out a book instead.

  Almost two hours later a soldier approaches me, casually slapping against her leg a passport that I assume is mine. She is tall and thick, and the scars around her mouth signal that she once had a cleft palate. I also can’t help but notice that she is beautiful. The sight of an attractive woman in a military uniform and combat boots is somewhat jarring. She stands over me, unsmiling. She offers no greeting. Instead she asks, “You’ve been to Lebanon?”

  “Yes,” I respond.

  “Why were you there?”

  “For a wedding,” I say.

  “Where in Lebanon?”

  “Beirut.” Beirut is the right answer. If I said anywhere south of the city—the south is Hezbollah territory—I likely wouldn’t be allowed in.

  She flips through my passport. “Wait here,” she says, then rushes off. I wait, again, as instructed. I have little choice anyway. I watch groups of soldiers chatting, drinking Cokes, eating Magnum candy bars, and laughing while guns hang lazily from their chests. They all look very young. They’re mostly brunettes, like me, with the occasional blond. One soldier catches me staring and I quickly avert my eyes.

  The day passes by slowly. With little to focus my attention on, I enter the cycle of hope followed by disappointment, thinking that each person I hear coming around the corner is her. It isn’t—not until late afternoon. By that point I am numb, and the excitement that I anticipated feeling at the sight of her doesn’t come. She is carrying a bottle of water and wiping crumbs off her chin. “Follow me.” She leads me to a white table with soldiers seated around it. One of them is shuffling a deck of cards. He deals them two at a time. Behind them are piles of suitcases, some held together with string or duct tape. “Find yours.”

  I frantically search, feeling the pressure of the other soldiers watching me, of the clock ticking. I don’t want to take too long. Finally, I find my suitcase. I bring it to the table, where the soldiers are now all smoking. My soldier looks up at me from her cigarette and the hand she’s been dealt. She puts down the cards and leans her cigarette against the side of a dirty tin ashtray, then gets up and plops my suitcase onto the middle of the table. The other soldiers boo her for interrupting the game, but she ignores them and proceeds to open it.

  First she takes out my camera, a brand-new point-and-shoot Canon that I bought specifically for the trip, knowing my entire family would be together for the first time in years. She points it up toward the unfinished ceiling and snaps a picture, making sure it doesn’t explode when she presses the shutter button, the camera shattering into tiny pieces, along with the rest of us. She snaps another shot, this time of the wall. She then points the camera at herself and takes a picture, a sober expression on her face. I hear the film rewinding as she puts it down.

  Next, she searches through my clothes. She unfolds them, holds them up to the light, shakes them as though something incriminating might fall from the fabric. She crumples them into little balls before tossing them aside. Then she looks through my toiletries bag. She pulls out tampons and toothpaste before shoving them back into the pouch and dropping it next to my suitcase. She gets to my shoes at the bottom. She picks up a boot and examines it. “Why do you carry men’s shoes?” she asks. “You are lesbian?”

  The soldiers all laugh, but she doesn’t laugh along. She keeps her eyes fixed on me.

  “They’re mine,” I say. “They’re not men’s shoes.”

  “You can put your things away,” she says, dropping my boot onto the table. I do as instructed and zip up my suitcase. I look to her for more directions, but she says nothing. Finally I ask her where I should go next.

  “Wait here,” she says. It’s growing darker now, and I am getting anxious. My mind starts to wander. Is she planning to keep me until after the border crossing closes? Until no one else is around? I feel an unexpected wave in my stomach at the thought of being alone with her.

  “I need to leave now,” I say. “I need to get across before it’s too late.”

  “You want to go?” she asks. “You can.”

  What was all this for, then? To make me panic? To make me never attempt to come back?

  The customs official is about to stamp my passport and let me through when I stop him. “Can I ask you to not stamp it, please?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I plan to go back to Lebanon. To Beirut,” I emphasize. Mine is a common request, and depending on the particular official, it is either honored or it isn’t. I hold my breath. The official keeps his eyes on me while he opens the desk drawer. He the
n takes out a square of paper and hurls the stamp down onto it. He tucks the square between the pages of my passport and hands it back to me. I thank him and continue past customs, past the currency exchange, until I am outside.

  The sun is now just barely visible behind the mountains. A few taxis idle in the parking lot. I get into one and head toward Jerusalem, where I’ll catch a bus with specially designated license plates that will take me to the West Bank.

  •

  I see everyone during the four days of Azza. On the final day, we pile into cars and drive from Ramallah to Nablus. As we sit in mourning and receive guests who’ve traveled through numerous checkpoints to pay their respects to my grandmother, laughter fills the air. We tell stories about the time she thought she’d gone blind while driving, only to realize she’d entered a tunnel with her sunglasses on; the time she stayed up all night playing the slots in Atlantic City, then slept on the floor of our shared hotel room to avoid waking us; the time she bought six-inch patent leather heels at age seventy-three. My mother and I grow close again, we fall into old patterns, we choose to momentarily forget the tensions between us. What does any of it matter in the face of nonexistence? Both Karim and I have come from New York to be with her, and it feels good to reestablish intimacy. It feels good to be a family.

  Two months later, I take a bus from New York to Washington to see my mother, who’s just returned from overseas after settling all of Teta’s affairs. Anouk and I plan to move in together soon, and it’s time to tell my mother about her, as much as I’ve resisted doing so.

  I pick up the photos from the trip, and as I look through them later that afternoon, it takes me a moment to remember how shots of ceiling pipes and cinder block have ended up among them. Then I come to her photo. I can only discern a vague figure and the outline of sunglasses resting atop her head. But her face has been obscured by the flash, rendering her indistinguishable from any other.

  MY MOTHER RUNS OUT OF THE LIVING ROOM OF HER apartment and returns with a Qur’an. She sits down beside me on the couch and holds the book close to her face, almost touching her cheekbone. Her mid-calf-length nightgown is bunched up around her thighs, unintentionally tucked into her underwear. She breathes deeply. Sweat drips from her temples.

  “I am a conservative, religious woman,” she says. She has never shown signs of being one.

  I’ve just told her the truth about Anouk. Until now, I’ve called her Adam.

  “How many people know?” My mother’s voice gets increasingly louder and more adamant, her body quivering. “How many people are laughing at me right now?”

  Everyone knows. “Mom, I—”

  “Shut up!” she shouts. “I talk, you don’t. I would feel sorry for you if you were really a gay.” She gets closer to me; I feel heat emanate from her chest. “I’d feel sorry for myself, most of all. But you just want to play games with people. Why did you cry about that guy from Argentina? You were either lying then, or you’re lying now.”

  “I wasn’t playing games,” I say in a matter-of-fact tone, determined to maintain a composed, calm distance. She wants me to react emotionally, like a child, and that’s when I get into trouble. I look at her and try to respond flatly. “I loved him, too.”

  “When you decide to fall in love with someone else, this woman will be just another one of your victims. And I’m sure you’ll come to me for sympathy.”

  We are running late to dinner. I am fumbling through an attempt to tidy up the apartment. It’s the only thing I can think to do in this moment that might please her, though I know it will do nothing at all toward that end. “We should get going,” she says. “Does your cousin know where the restaurant is?”

  My cousin is visiting D.C. for the week, and she’s the reason, the excuse, that I’ve chosen to stay with my mother this time instead of with Renata, or at my dad’s, or anywhere else.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Should we call her?”

  My mother asks me to help with the zipper of her dress, and I do. I rub her neck gently when I get to the top, very gently. I want to soothe her, but I know she’ll push me away if she senses this.

  “How many times my father told me to watch out and be careful of you,” she says as she puts on a string of pearls. Her father passed away when I was twelve. “He warned me that you were manipulative. He told me not to marry your father. Why, God, why didn’t I listen?”

  My chest begins to ache. Again I try to block her voice. It’s increasingly difficult to do, but I keep trying.

  I unplug my phone from its charger, and the screen lights up as I touch it. There’s a text from Anouk: Everything all right? She knows that home is hard.

  When we leave the apartment my mother runs ahead of me in the corridor. I struggle to catch up. In the elevator she asks me again who knows, and I tell her that my aunt does—her younger sister. I told her about Anouk while we were in Nablus for Teta’s funeral.

  “Great,” my mother says. “So everyone knows.”

  At the restaurant, my mother and I sit beside each other, my cousin and her husband across from us. We all share pasta, rosé, and finally, crème brûlée. My mother and I dip our spoons into the bowl at the same time, shattering opposite ends of the crisp burnt surface and arriving at the soft custard underneath. Our silverware clinks. We look at each other, and I smile. She smiles back.

  The next morning I find her asleep on the couch. I slept in her bed, which we normally share when I visit. I wake up disappointed that her side is empty.

  19

  NEAR THE END OF A TOO-LONG WINTER, SNOW GIVING way to sleet and finally to rain, the professor and I arrange to meet for coffee. We’ve kept in touch over the years, at varying degrees of distance. We meet on the Upper West Side. It’s pouring when I arrive. I shake droplets off my umbrella and spot her waving at me from a table inside. She wears jogging clothes, New Balance sneakers, no nail polish. Though she hasn’t visibly aged, she looks different.

  I tell her about Anouk over cappuccinos. I wonder if having a French girlfriend makes her suspect a fetish, before realizing she has no idea how I once felt about her. She talks about her children, now both in school. She asks if I plan to have any. “I’d like to,” I say. “But I’m nervous.”

  “Parenting is like piano lessons,” she tells me. “It’s not always something you know you want, but no one ever regrets it.”

  “Some people regret it,” I say, thinking back to my most traumatic childhood memory, of participating in a recital at the home of my piano teacher, waiting for my name to be called as twenty-nine other kids stood to receive their awards while I remained seated alone on stage, smiling in shame and feeling the entire audience’s eyes on me. “You’d be surprised.”

  It’s stopped raining by the time we leave, and we walk together for a few blocks. We’re both headed in the same direction; she to pick up her daughter from school, I to a dentist appointment. I like walking beside her. I am taller and it makes me feel somewhat authoritative. We get to the crosswalk where we will part ways. We turn to face each other and I find myself anxious, still hoping that something might happen. It doesn’t. I lean forward and hug goodbye, possibly holding on for a little too long. Keep in touch, she says as always, though now I’m not sure she means it.

  Back home at the end of the day, I’m still thinking of her. I search through our email correspondence. Some of my letters make me blush; effortful pontifications on Proust and Baudelaire, confessions about wanting to succeed as a writer so I could quit spinning records, reminders to send the essays she’d mentioned over that first coffee at the Nespresso café. My efforts were palpable and teeming with subdued flirtation—is there any way she couldn’t have known?

  I come across one particular chain from six years earlier. Not long after our lunchless lunch date, I’d sent a first draft of a piece about my relationship with Kate. “I notice that sex is missing,” she’d written in response. “Also, you mention her orientation, but what about yours?”

  �
�Sex is hard to write about,” I’d responded, ignoring the question of my sexuality. “I don’t want to be vulgar—is there anything worse?”

  I sent her another essay a month later, about unattainable love as a quest for the familiar, a quest for home, for a homeland that may not exist. A quest for a mother. I wrote the second one, like the first, in the hopes that she would read it and that she would approve, that she would deem me interesting or worthwhile if not both. How many stories have been penned for unrequited love? How many must I write to earn my existence? There’s more to you than these obsessions. “I’m sending you this piece because you’re a writer and I value your aesthetic opinion,” I asserted in my email. I had built a barrier around my true feelings, one even I couldn’t break through, my love for her impervious to us both, my resistance impenetrable.

  She did not care for the piece.

  “From you, I expect more out of a story about love,” she’d written in response. “Tell us about something that left you shattered.”

  SOON AFTER I MOVE INTO HER APARTMENT, ANOUK AND I watch a home video of my family from 1990. In a scene marked “Sunday Morning,” my father films us in the master bedroom of our house in the D.C. suburbs. Periodically, he points the camera at the full-length mirror and catches shots of himself. My mother lies in bed propped up against the headboard, a pot of coffee and two empty mugs on the nightstand. I sit in front of her, wearing a new vest and leggings that she bought for me from Limited Too, the tags still intact. Karim runs in circles wearing his pajama bottoms and a pillowcase around his neck like a cape, lisping, “I’m Thuperman!” A brand-new boxy Macintosh glows on a desk in the corner.

  I stand up and face the camera, posing for it, then walk to the mirror to admire my new outfit. I look to my mother for approval, but she is looking elsewhere. My father captures a few moments of my catwalk before losing interest in me and returning to her. He zooms in as she removes a stray hair from her nightgown sleeve. In that moment, she is unaware that he is filming, that anyone is watching, that this simple gesture is being recorded and will exist in perpetuity. Her face is movie-star gorgeous; her eyes piercing, her nose and cheekbones sharp, her top lip resting on her lower lip in that casual non-smile.