by Eman Quotah
After dinner, Muneer sits next to Saeedah on a rickety love seat with wooden legs and leans over to kiss her cheek. It is cold, and her fingers, which he takes in his hand, are icy.
“Do you want me to find you a sweater or a blanket?”
She squeezes his hand, braces her legs, and pushes up from the seat with both hands.
“I don’t think Jameel knows what he’s doing,” she says. “This marriage is a bad idea.”
“You don’t know that,” he says, though he thought close to the same thing when Jameel showed him the engagement ring. Though he, too, doubted this match, he doesn’t want to agree with Saeedah. What is done is done. Jameel and Diane are married.
“She’s Christian. He’s Muslim. What will the children be?”
“They’ll be Muslim, like their father, of course.”
She holds her hair up in the back, twists it around and lets it fall back to her shoulders. “You should have told him not to marry her.”
The girl’s family drinks and gossips and dances. None of them speak Muneer and Saeedah’s language. He is alone with her words.
Snow falls the next week. Muneer is tiring of this white stuff, and March snow seems worse to him than any other kind. It makes him yearn for spring, whereas April snow—that would seem like a fluke. Maybe it’s the cold or the stone-colored sky, some weather-related discontent makes it hard for him to be alone in his annoyance with Saeedah any longer. He makes the mistake of telling Jameel what she said.
They’re working a shift at the pizzeria, which has managed to stay open the past month, and Muneer tosses the elastic dough toward the buzzing neon lights of the kitchen.
“Do you agree?” Jameel asks. “That I shouldn’t have married her?”
Muneer adjusts his plastic gloves and sprinkles flour on the board. He lays the dough on the surface and ladles tomato sauce onto the round.
“You’re married, and God bless you,” he says.
“You’re a coward,” Jameel says. “You won’t tell me the truth.”
“It’s her opinion, not mine.”
“You think marrying your cousin is a better idea than marrying a woman you love?”
Muneer wants to say he did marry for love, but is love what he felt at the beginning? “God knows what’s best,” he says.
Jameel doesn’t talk to him the rest of the shift, or on the way to campus. When Muneer drops him off, Jameel shuts the car door too quietly, draws his hood up, and trudges away.
Muneer has half an hour until class, so he passes by the old yellow mansion that houses the ESL program. He parks the VW on the circle and walks into the wood-paneled hallway of the building. Two of Saeedah’s classmates, Sonja and Weronika, are shrugging into their coats, their backpacks bulging and unzipped on the floor. Their faces are a question: What is he doing here?
He’s not sure. Maybe he wants to test whether Saeedah would be happy to see him.
“If you’re looking for Saeedah,” Weronika says, “she didn’t come to class today. We thought maybe she had the baby.”
Outside, the temperature has suddenly plummeted ten degrees, and the wind has picked up. The top layer of snow swirls and scurries down the sidewalk. He curves his head into his neck and his arms into his torso and runs to the car.
It is barely three o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky has darkened as though night is coming. He pulls up to the house. The windows are dark, and he doesn’t bother going inside. He drives. Something takes him to her. Intuition, love, God, worry—he doesn’t know what to call it.
Today, the lake is muddy, the sky dark and dense like gray felt. The snow on the beach is ashen, and so are his thoughts.
When he sees her, he stops. He can’t move, as though he’s strapped to a chair, like a prisoner in a movie, watching her without being able to lift a finger to rescue her.
She stands at the edge of the water with waves lapping her bare feet. She slips off her jeans and white turtleneck and stands in her white bra and underwear. She walks into the choppy water, pauses, moves forward. As though overcoming the cold. The water envelops her body bit by bit, until it touches her shoulders.
“Come inside,” he says, but of course she can’t hear.
A small prick of shame, like the shock of touching a car door in the dry winter air: here is his wife taking her clothes off in public. But no one is on the beach, and he’s too cold and frightened to care. To warm himself up, he pulls his arms out of his sleeves and into the body of his coat.
He walks to the edge of the lake, his boots leaving tracks in the thick, wet mixture of snow and sand. The air smells woody and wet, and someone must be burning a bonfire somewhere because he smells smoke. He turns toward the parking lot and squints to the left and right, searching for a lit fire, smoke, evidence of other humans sharing this beach with them.
He looks back to the lake. She has reached the sandbar about a hundred yards from the shore, and the water is at her waist.
He drops his coat onto the sand and wades into the water. It is so cold it might as well be a block of ice. He presses on. His jeans and long johns are so heavy. The water stings like peroxide on a wound.
Behind him someone is yelling. “What the hell! It’s fucking cold.”
Muneer looks back to the shore. A man has appeared out of nowhere, walking along the beach holding a metal detector out like a blind man’s white-tipped cane.
“What the hell are you doing?” the man says. In his other hand, he holds a rusty tea tray—an odd thing to have found on the beach.
Muneer turns to his wife. She hasn’t moved from the sandbar.
When he reaches her, her body is purple. He lifts her. He isn’t sure he can reach the shore. Next he remembers, they are lying on the cold, cold ground.
The man is standing over them. He wears a ski mask, folded up to reveal a face that resembles Johnny Carson with a salt-and-pepper beard. His metal detector and tea tray lie on the ground, and he’s holding Muneer’s coat and a sand-colored blanket—pilly and rough, but better than nothing. He hangs the coat on Muneer’s head by the hood and wraps the blanket around Muneer and Saeedah. They are too cold to warm each other.
“Do you need a ride?” the man says, picking up his things. He dangles the tea tray from one hooked thumb. “You’re not from here, are you?”
Muneer rubs Saeedah’s hands between his. He rubs her feet, her arms, her legs. She’s made of chilled rubber, not flesh and blood.
“No, thank you,” Muneer says. He doesn’t think the second question deserves an answer. “Can we keep the blanket?”
The man shakes the tray in lieu of a nod and continues down the beach.
Muneer bundles Saeedah in the blanket and scoops her up. She feels heavy as anything.
This experience binds them together—or should. Because he has saved her and the baby, and tonight, she will be OK. The child will be OK, will be born beautiful and whole, will be named Hanadi. He will pray two raka’ahs in thanks tomorrow morning, and another two daily for a month. He will beg his professors to give him extensions on his coursework and to let him graduate if he finishes by the end of the summer, and they will agree.
But doubt will return bit by bit, like the whisperings of a devil. Aunt Faizah, who will need no convincing to fly across the world to help take care of her baby granddaughter, will yell at him for failing to prepare and boss him while he sets up a crib from Sears in the spare bedroom she and Hanadi will share. His mother-in-law will guide him toward the things Saeedah did not: blankets and onesies and tiny caps and socks with yellow ducks on them. Bottles and nipples and pacifiers and canisters of formula and boxes of diapers.
“Good God, the two of you, both so ignorant,” Aunt Faizah will say. “Didn’t you take care of your younger brothers and sisters? It never occurred to you that you needed these things?”
“The baby was not supposed to come for a month,” he will insist, and in his mind he will place the blame on Saeedah. If she had been willing to talk to h
im these last months and weeks, she might have told him what they needed.
Aunt Faizah will wrap the baby so tightly the little thing can’t move, can do nothing but sleep, and Muneer will wish he could be swaddled and kept safe from the world. He’ll spend most of his time at the library, and when he returns home, Saeedah will usually be sitting in the rocking chair, holding the baby when her mother lets her, looking always like she is in shock. Jameel and Diane will come to visit, and the pity in their eyes will tell him the shell-shocked look is on his face, too.
After his mother-in-law leaves, he will muddle through the year of his internship, writing for a little local paper in Beachwood, covering shopping mall Santas and fire department fundraisers. He will inhale the fragrance that emanates from the top of his daughter’s head, the essence of her, and watch her shove her fists in her mouth and grab her mother’s dangling gold earrings so that Saeedah has to carefully extract them before Hanadi can tug them straight through her earlobes, as a thief once did to Saeedah’s sister at the Haram Mosque in Makkah.
Muneer and Saeedah will sleepwalk through the year. One day, near the end of his internship, something in them will snap decisively, and the state of their marriage will revert to exactly what it was before Hanadi was born. Saeedah will say she would rather stay in America—a place she has never been drawn to, has not always seemed to like—than stay married to him.
He will feel the knife of her disdain turning in his stomach, though he feels the same. He will grant her wish of divorce and move back to Jidda without them, intending to find a way to bring his daughter home.
But he won’t. Saeedah will shatter Muneer’s life as though she were smashing through a sheet of ice. She will hide his daughter from him so well it will be as though the child were back in the womb, unreachable.
Leaving the beach with his wife asleep in the back of the VW, speeding to the hospital with the heater turned up so it whooshes and rattles, Muneer is blind to the future. He prays, “Oh, Protector, protect them. Oh, Protector, protect them.”
God alone knows what lies ahead.
“YOU ARE DIVORCED”
1974–1975
WITNESSES
If anyone aims the sentence “You are divorced” at Saeedah three times, she is not there to hear it. Spoken or unspoken, the words must travel to her across continents, from Jidda to Cleveland Heights, as though transported by jinns or the world’s most muscular carrier pigeons. The men of her family go about the official business of nullifying her marriage without her, same as they signed her marriage contract six years ago at the neighborhood mosque while she sat on her mother’s bed with three sisters curling her hair and kohling her eyes for the wedding celebration.
“Your brothers Hazem and Mohannad were with me in the judge’s chamber,” her father says on the phone, describing the divorce proceedings. Three of Muneer’s brothers were there, too, though the names go in one ear and out the other. Baba is trying to reassure her that the divorce has truly happened: male witnesses prove its reality.
Thank God? Thank you? Neither sounds correct.
“OK,” she says.
Saeedah’s mother takes over the phone with a rush of habibtis and God protect yous, and Saeedah wonders how vigorously she has pushed Baba aside with her hennaed palms, what kind of side glance he is giving her from under his shimagh, which he hardly ever takes off, even at home. Always professional, always ready for a journalistic scoop.
“When are you bringing my darling home?” Mama says, speaking of Hanadi.
“Maybe next summer, inshallah.” Saeedah is finishing her psychology degree, paying for Hanadi’s day care with money her father sends. After her long maternity leave, her grade point average suffered from the everyday skirmishes with Muneer in the final days of their marriage. She has had to retake courses and endure endless conversations with her advisor, Dr. O’Rourke, an Irishman with six children, a penchant for mixing plaid and tweed, and hair like streaks of rust combed over his bald head. He seems befuddled that a woman of her nationality could ever sit alone in a room with him and often wonders aloud if she might be more comfortable studying in her home country.
“Hanadi should be here,” Mama says. “In her country, with both her parents.”
Saeedah’s temples throb because she knows she should agree with the divorce, but Hanadi’s seventh birthday lies two and a half years away, a sinister finish line when Saeedah will be expected, by religious custom, to hand Hanadi over to her father.
“A mother is the best to raise a young child,” Mama says. “Her father should finish raising her so he can fulfill his duty to find her the best match.”
“Khalas.” Stop. “She’s four. Why are we talking about her marriage?”
“God protect her and bless her and shower her with goodness,” Mama says.
Two and a half years will be gone in an instant.
Coming back to reality—the hum of the window air conditioner; the phone cord twisted round her finger; the neighbors’ footsteps creaking above her, their rock music thumping—does not ease her anxiety. In a few weeks, Muneer is coming to see his daughter. Saeedah hangs up the phone and retches into the toilet.
She calls her friend Weronika, who’s recently moved to Toledo for a nursing job. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, W gets the kinds of fear you can’t explain to Americans.
“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” W says.
DRAEGER’S
Saeedah lets the doorbell ring and ring. She tells Hanadi not to answer it, though the four-year-old knows her Baba is at the door.
The ringer loses patience and presses the bell relentlessly; the rings jumble into one sound.
“It’s too loud,” Hanadi says. “Why won’t you let Baba in?”
“OK, OK.” Saeedah yells a lie as she rushes to the door. “We were in the bathroom.”
Framed by the doorway, Muneer’s younger sister Lujayn wears a fringed T-shirt and bell-bottoms, and her hair swirls in hot-curled, inky ringlets past her shoulders. Her face is frozen in annoyance—eyes squeezed, jawline tight. She kisses Saeedah on the cheeks and lifts Hanadi onto one hip.
Behind them, Muneer paces on the front porch. “Where were you?”
“I told you,” Saeedah says. She’s angry that he won’t believe her lie.
Hanadi at four is too big to be picked up like a baby, but she lets her aunt hold her. She is in jean shorts and a white tank top embroidered with red and orange flowers. Her chubby bare legs hang down Lujayn’s thigh.
“I love you, Baba,” she says over her aunt’s shoulder. It’s the first time she’s seen him in two months. Her smile is sunshine falling on the frozen adult landscape around her. “Mama wasn’t in the bathroom.”
“I know, love,” he says.
Saeedah feels her jealousy in every fiber of her body, and she doesn’t want to cure it with a prayer for forgiveness. Hanadi smiles adorably at her father and aunt, and subjects Saeedah to tantrums over the smallest things. The food Saeedah puts on Hanadi’s plate, how long they stay at the ice-skating rink or at the shopping mall play area. Why should Muneer and Lujayn enjoy sweetness? Why should they not feel the impact of Saeedah’s jealousy? She hopes for Hanadi to kick and scream at them today.
Lujayn and Muneer exchange a look. Do they think she doesn’t notice? But they don’t call out her lie.
“We don’t need to waste time standing here,” Lujayn says. “She’s going to enjoy the rides at the amusement park. Right, love?” Lujayn kisses Hanadi on the cheek.
“Carousel!” Hanadi says.
“You’re not taking her there.”
“I told you not to say anything yet, Lujayn.” Muneer puts a proprietary hand on Hanadi’s head.
“What did you tell Lujayn not to say?”
“She didn’t give me a chance to ask you. We want to take Hanadi to the amusement park.”
The casualness of his gestures and his voice makes Saeedah want to scream.
She fights the urge to yank her daughter out of Lujayn’s arms. She and Lujayn played together as children, throwing and catching pebbles on the rooftop the way the neighbor girls here play with jacks on the sidewalk. Lujayn bossed the other cousins and lied about what was in front of them: a pebble she failed to catch, the number of pebbles in her palm. Always needing to go first, needing to win. It irks Saeedah that Hanadi seems content in Lujayn’s arms—not giggling or flirting with her aunt, but not fidgeting, either. Muneer touches his forehead to Hanadi’s and she puts her hand on his shoulder.
They are already cutting Saeedah out of the picture, and they haven’t left the porch. She tries to remember why she’d flirted with him behind her parents’ backs. He’d been curious for new places, willing to take a risk by driving alone with her, though he’d acted nervous the whole time. Why is he settling for going back to Saudi and telling the stories society will allow, like her father?
“If you’d asked me before, I’d have said no. You’re going to take her an hour away? Or to the other park—two hours away?”