Between Two Kingdoms

by Suleika Jaouad

  The next day, I put on a black tailored dress I’d scored from a thrift store, tamed my tangled curls into a braid, applied an extra swipe of blush across my pallid cheeks, and set out for the interview. Huffing up the stairs of the Tribune office, I noted the familiar light-headedness returning, my breath just out of reach, but there were more important things to focus on that day. The sound of clacking keyboards filled the office, an open-floor plan crammed with filing cabinets and desks piled high with books, computer monitors, and dirty coffee mugs. Looking around at the cast of seasoned reporters sitting at their desks, I didn’t allow myself any illusions. I knew my chances of getting the job were slim, but for the first time, I could see a path toward a profession that excited me. Suddenly I realized that, without meaning to, this was what I’d been preparing for. In school, I’d crammed my semesters full of language courses—Arabic, French, Spanish, Farsi—with the idea that one day I could live and work in far-flung locales with greater ease. I’d spent each of my summers studying and doing research abroad, which had allowed me to travel everywhere from Addis Ababa and Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to the West Bank. As for Tunisia, it wasn’t just a country that I knew and loved, it was the homeland: where my father was from, where all of my extended family still lived, and from where I proudly held a passport. All this came out in the interview, and the editors I met with seemed delighted. I was, too. I left thinking that I’d been working toward just that moment my entire adult life, then laughed at myself—all four years of it.

  I never returned to the Tribune office. Within a week, I was back in the hospital. This time, I lay on a gurney in the emergency room, my eyes bleached blank with pain. Throbbing sores colonized the inside of my mouth. My complexion was blue-gray, like dead meat. Will squeezed my hand as the doctor on call said: “I don’t want you to panic, but something’s clearly going on. Your red blood cell count has dropped significantly.” I stared at her, not knowing what any of this meant. “If it drops any lower you won’t be allowed to board a plane.” She placed a hand gently on my arm, and went on to say that she had a daughter about my age, and that if she were my mother she’d want me on the next flight home.

  * * *

  —

  Arrangements were made for me to fly back to New York first thing the following morning. I also insisted on purchasing a return ticket to Paris for two weeks later. I needed to believe that this would be a round-trip journey. Will had offered to accompany me, but in my mind that didn’t make sense—he had to take care of Mila, and I would be back soon. As I said goodbye to him at the airport, I told him not to worry. Then an elderly man in a navy-blue uniform carted me off in a wheelchair through Charles de Gaulle. My ears burned as he pushed me to the front of the security lines and onto the plane, past the swarm of families waiting to board and the business travelers holding fancy leather briefcases. I thought surely the emergency room doctor had been overreacting when she’d insisted I use a wheelchair. I remember worrying that someone was going to call me out at any moment for being a fraud. But those in the priority boarding line who looked at me, if they noticed me at all, did so with a discernible sense of pity.

  The plane took off. Curled in the fetal position across two empty seats, I shivered under a thin blanket, unable to get warm. I’d always loved planes, the sense of smallness that comes with altitude, the earth growing smaller and smaller until it vanishes beneath the clouds, but this time I kept the window shade drawn. I was too tired to do anything—to watch movies or to eat the snacks that the concerned stewardess kept offering me. But tired as I was, my cheeks, swollen from the sores, made it difficult to sleep. The emergency room doctor had prescribed codeine for the flight home and I swallowed a couple of pills, hoping for some respite from the pain. Waves of nausea broke over my body as my mind began to row in and out of consciousness.

  I dreamed that the plane was a flying penitentiary suspended over the Atlantic and that I was being punished for all the booze and cigarettes and bad shit I had pumped into my body in the last year. I dreamed I was at my five-year college reunion and that my friends stood with their backs to me, laughing and sipping cocktails on a lush, lime-green lawn, the dorms rising up in the distance, sizzling under an orange sun. I called out to them, but when they turned they looked right through me. This made sense in dream logic. Maybe they don’t recognize me, I thought. I had aged since graduation—badly. Sitting in the same airport wheelchair, I was all bones in a bag of skin, with only a few long threads of silvery hair hanging from my nearly bald skull. My pupils were milky with cataracts, my mouth a toothless gaping hole. I called out again. It’s me, I shouted, Suleika. But this time no one turned around at all.

  When I opened my eyes next I felt the thud of the plane’s wheels hitting the runway. I was home.

  5

  STATESIDE

  I’VE BEEN CALLING my parents by their first names from the time I learned to speak, something that never struck any of us as odd until a perplexed schoolteacher pointed it out.

  My mother, Anne, a petite woman with ice-blue eyes and the slim, sinewy musculature of a ballerina, hails from a bucolic Swiss village an hour outside of Geneva. She grew up in a stone house filled with old books, antiques, and a gramophone that was always playing classical music. The living room windows opened onto a town square overlooking a medieval castle and a sparkling lake where my mother spent her weekends swimming laps and sailing with the neighborhood boys. She was a garçon manqué, tomboyish, her hair cut short, her nose always buried in a novel. Her father, Luc, a physicist and an environmental activist, was strict, bordering on militant, but also ahead of his time. He refused to own a car because of the carbon emissions and forbade the use of plastic in the house. In the attic, he kept a woodworking shop where he would make hand-carved toys for Anne and her three siblings. Her mother, Mireille, a librarian, was uninterested in her husband’s activism. She loved beautiful things, had an impressive collection of cashmere sweaters and a sprawling rose garden, and was known for her stupendous Swiss apple tarts. There was a right and a wrong way to behave, Mireille always said, and she subjected her children to rigorous etiquette lessons. By the time Anne was a teenager, she was bucking under the constraints of her parents’ edicts and the cloistered atmosphere of the village.

  After finishing art school in Lausanne, my mother won a grant to move to New York City, where she intended to become a famous painter. She rented a small railroad apartment on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A in the East Village. It was the height of the eighties, and the neighborhood was a grid of graffitied tenements and derelict, rubble-filled lots. The streets bristled with energy, and everywhere there were young writers and musicians radiating creativity and ambition. She had never been anywhere like it.

  * * *

  —

  Hustle is our family’s defining trait. My mother had the work ethic of a draft horse and never stopped moving from dawn until dusk. She scrounged together a living by working as a house painter and selling roses table to table at restaurants and cafés, enough to rent both the apartment and a studio that she shared with a couple of artists. She soon found a more lucrative enterprise to pay the bills and began running a small business out of her apartment. “International Language School, how may I help you?” she would answer the phone, pretending to be a secretary. The school, if it could be called that, consisted of my mother and her friends, a crew that came from all over Europe. She hired them to give French, Italian, German, and Spanish language lessons to businesspeople and wealthy uptown families. She would eventually save enough to put a small down payment on her apartment, which was selling for forty thousand dollars, what seemed like a fortune at the time.

  Five years into Anne’s time in New York, her wit and cropped hair, aristocratic nose and elegant cheekbones, captured my father Hédi’s attention at a downtown jazz club. It was no hard feat for Hédi to win her over. Tall and tawny, with a mop of black curls
and a charming gap between his two front teeth, he had just run the New York City Marathon and was in the best shape of his life. He lived a few blocks away, on Seventh Street between Avenues B and C, so close that they were soon seeing each other all the time. They bonded over their shared lingua franca, their nomadism, and their love of cooking, cinema, and the arts. They had the same bohemian values, spending what money they had on good wine, theater tickets, and travel, but they squabbled often, both of them too stubborn and independent for their own good. My mother’s priority was her painting, and she had no interest in being anyone’s wife. My father was still debating whether to stay in the United States or to return to his homeland to settle down and make a life. Two years into their courtship, I was conceived in Hédi’s apartment on Tompkins Square Park. An accident, I imagined my mother thinking, already mourning her freedom, as she peed over a stick. (Later she would revise this sentiment: A surprise, she would tell me.)

  At forty, Hédi was almost a decade older than Anne. He taught high school at the United Nations International School and freelanced as a translator of French and Arabic. He was overjoyed by the pregnancy, but Anne had difficulty seeing herself as a mother, and she was unconvinced about marriage. Most of her friends back home in Switzerland had partners and children without ever officially getting hitched. Marriage struck her as stifling and old-fashioned. She insisted they didn’t need a piece of paper to legitimize their relationship. A few months later, she changed her mind, but only so that my father could comfortably share the news of the pregnancy with his mother. They proceeded with a civil ceremony. A Polaroid from that day shows them standing on the steps of City Hall in downtown Manhattan, beaming at each other in oversize suits as they hold their version of a bouquet: two branches, still tufted with leaves, that had been snapped off a scraggly city tree.

  I know all this because my mother and I are close—no topic off-limits, no major life event unexplored. With her thick accent, pixie cut, unshaven armpits, and paint-splattered overalls, she wasn’t like any of the other mothers I knew. When I got my period at thirteen, she was the first person I told, and the next day she surprised me with the world’s most awkward celebratory luncheon, making emotional toasts about my nascent womanhood as my father and brother squirmed uncomfortably in their seats. As a teenager, I’d once told her that I planned to save my virginity until marriage. “Don’t be an idiot,” my mother replied. “You need to know what you like before you commit to something for life.”

  We were constantly on the move in those early years—from the East Village to the Adirondacks, followed by stints in France, Switzerland, and Tunisia, but we always returned to the United States, where my father had secured a tenure-track teaching position at Skidmore, a small liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York. Despite her initial hesitations, Anne loved being a mother, and after my brother was born, she decided to scale back her career to focus on raising us. She approached parenting with the same creativity and zest that infused her abstract paintings of insects, flowers, and honeycombs—all of which ended up looking more or less like vaginas. During the snowy upstate winters, she would strap on her cross-country skis and a backward baseball cap and glide to our bus stop a few blocks away to pick us up. She turned the attic of our house into a studio, where she held art classes and where we spent our afternoons sitting cross-legged on the wide-planked floors, playing with gouache and watercolor sets. She taught us about pointillism, showing us the masterpieces of Georges Seurat and giving us Q-tips dipped in paint to make our own dotted landscapes.

  Each night before bed, she would read us fables and fairy tales in French. If we had been extra good, she would massage us with almond oil. “What should we garden today?” she would say, kneading our backs as if tilling rocky soil, making us squeal as she pinched the skin beneath our shoulder blades to “plant seeds.” She had a delightfully dark sense of humor and was notorious for her pranks, which she sometimes took a little too far. Once, on April Fools’ Day, her favorite holiday of the year, she emailed my brother and me with the “grim news” that our father had lost his job, so we’d have to drop out of college immediately and get full-time jobs. Then she forgot all about it and went to the movies, leaving us to fret for hours. It was this sense of mischief and audacity that made her company feel so freeing and magical; it made her accessible, not like one of those grown-ups who constantly reminded you of your immaturity. After I left home, after I graduated and moved to a different time zone, the phone became our umbilical cord. We spoke every day, often multiple times.

  My relationship to Hédi was a different story. He was an enigma to me. He grew up under French colonial rule in Gabès, a town in southern Tunisia with an oasis on the Mediterranean coast. Neither of his parents knew how to read or write. His father, Mahmoud, worked in the mail room at the town hall. He was loving but stern, a firm believer in the adage “qui aime bien, châtie bien”—spare the rod, spoil the child. His mother, Sherifa, was gentle and selfless, with a Berber tattoo on her chin and long henna-dyed braids that she kept covered with a scarf. My father joked that whenever he came home from school, Sherifa was always giving birth to a new baby. The family lived hand to mouth, and only seven of her thirteen children survived those postwar years of scarcity and disease. My father, the second eldest, wasn’t the most studious of the bunch, but he was the most resourceful and determined to succeed. After graduating from the University of Tunis, he eventually made his way to London, then Paris, to further his studies, before immigrating to the United States, where he earned his doctorate in French literature.

  I worshipped my professor-father with his dapper white linen suits and fedoras, head-turning looks, and dizzying memory for languages, but I was a little scared of him, too. He was a bon vivant, generous and brimming with charisma, but like his own father, he was quick to anger, his temper always threatening to boil over. He raised my younger brother, Adam, and me the same way he had been raised, a tough, compliments-make-you-soft school of parenting. He had no patience for childish antics. “Interesting people don’t talk about gossip or idle events, they talk about ideas,” he would say to me whenever I was being too chatty or was otherwise getting on his nerves.

  It was only during high school, once I had gotten serious about my studies, that my dad and I found some common ground. I loved sitting in the armchair in his office, reading his books. He had a floor-to-ceiling library filled with hundreds of volumes of classics, poetry, novels, and literary theory. Whenever I couldn’t understand a word, I looked it up in one of the dictionaries on the bottom shelf, keeping a vocabulary list in the back of my journal. Under his guidance, I began to read in French, discovering the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Camus, Sartre, and Fanon. Although I had spoken some Arabic during the time we’d spent living in Tunisia when I was a kid, I had since forgotten it almost entirely, and became determined to relearn my father’s native tongue. In college, inspired by his own academic interests, I’d majored in Near Eastern Studies with a double minor in French and Gender Studies. I’d sent my father every single paper I wrote and he labored over them for hours with a red pen, sending me revisions and suggestions for further reading. For my senior thesis, I’d traveled to Tunisia to gather the oral histories of older women, including my grandmother, and I interviewed them about the Code of Personal Status, a series of progressive postcolonial laws aimed at establishing equality between women and men. “Je suis fier de toi,” my father told me when I managed to graduate with highest honors and a handful of thesis prizes. It was a rare vocal display of parental pride.

  As a graduation gift, my parents gave me a fire-engine-red suitcase, a big, boxy affair with smooth-gliding swivel wheels, bought from the sale rack at T.J. Maxx. It came in handy later that summer when I got the Paris job. I remembered how optimistic my parents seemed as they bade me bon voyage. “Ton premier boulot! Ça va être super!” they said when they dropped me off at the airport. They insisted on taking a
last, curbside photograph of me with the suitcase, and I rolled heavily kohl-rimmed eyes to the sky, flashing them a half-assed smile before sprinting into the terminal. I was so preoccupied by what lay ahead that I almost forgot to turn and give them a final wave goodbye. Little did any of us know that I would be back seven months later. This time no one would be taking pictures or chatting about my future plans.

  * * *

  —

  An airport attendant helped me collect my suitcase and then parked my wheelchair in the arrivals hall at John F. Kennedy International Airport. “Miss, you sure it’s okay to leave you here?”

  I nodded. My father was late to pick me up, as usual. Punctuality had never been our family’s strong suit.

  As I waited, the revolving doors spat out one weary traveler after another. Nearly an hour later, I spotted my father in his black fedora, tilted to one side of his extremely bald head, and saw him amble through the crowd. His eyes, dark and thick-lashed like a dairy cow’s, scanned the room, searching for someone who resembled his daughter. “Hédi,” I shouted, flapping my arms in the air, “Hédi, over here!”

  I watched as the shock registered on my father’s face, his features softening as he took in my swollen cheeks, my bluish lips, and the sweatshirt that hung off my emaciated torso. He stooped down to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Salut, ma belle. Désolé, I got turned around on the freeway,” he said. Pushing my wheelchair with one hand and pulling the red suitcase with the other, he rolled me toward the parking lot where the old family minivan was waiting. I climbed into the backseat and lay down, too drained to say much of anything during the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Saratoga Springs.