More praise for Arabian Jazz
“Suffused with energy, sympathy and sneaky wit…. It’s clear that Ms. Abu-Jaber is a writer of talent.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If Scheherazade somehow materialized in contemporary upstate New York, the plots she’d invent to forestall her execution might well be like those woven into Arabian Jazz: poignant, haunted—and a bit daffy. [The characters] are beautifully sketched, and come vulnerably to life as soon as they start speaking; Abu-Jaber has a gift for dialogue, and her Arab-American rings musically, and hilariously, true. A resonant debut.”
—USA Today
“Reading Arabian Jazz is like a trip to a strange land where the inhabitants just won’t sit still. You will hear and remember them long after you’ve finished this wonderful book.”
—Boston Globe
“[An] inspired, stunning debut. This book is a lot like jazz: full of passion and feeling, replete with dynamic and rhythmic language that sparkles with color and invention. Abu-Jaber’s alternately dancing, detailed, melancholic and lyrical prose mirrors the crackling passages of a great jazz soloist.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[This is a] vivacious, funny, and moving first novel. Confrontations between the irresistible Fatima and the immovable Melvie are among the many uproarious scenes that demonstrate this writer’s flair for comedy.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“A clever and comedic debut novel…. Arabian Jazz shimmers like an oasis, except it’s no mirage. This is the real deal: terse, twinkly prose, characters you care about, a host of local illusions and rib-tickling situations. As a reality check on anti-Arab stereotypes, Abu Jaber’s novel succeeds admirably; American immigrants of any nationality will readily identify with her Arab-American characters.”
—Syracuse New Times
“Diana Abu-Jaber has the right combination of satirical eye and ear for the play of cultural dissonances, and a deeply affectionate commitment to the central characters’ destinies. She is also a gifted visual impressionist in her luminous scenes of upstate, semi-urban pastoral. Arabian Jazz makes the Arab American voice engagingly at home in fiction, and marks a strong debut by Abu-Jaber.”
—Women’s Review of Books
“Arab American fiction is a rarity, but this strong first novel bodes well for its future…. Strongly recommended for its fine depiction of Arab Americans as not so different from you and me.”
—Library Journal
“Abu-Jaber’s novel will probably do more to convince readers to abandon what media analyst Jack Shaheen calls America’s ‘abhorrence of the Arab’ than any number of speeches or publicity gambits.”
—Jean Grant, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
ALSO BY DIANA ABU-JABER
Crescent
Diana Abu-Jaber
Arabian Jazz
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright © 1993 by Diana Abu-Jaber
All rights reserved.
First published as a Norton paperback 2003
This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously for verisimilitude. Any resemblance to any organization or to any actual person, living or dead, is unintended.
Portions of this book previously appeared in The Sun, September 1990.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abu-Jaber, Diana.
Arabian jazz/Diana Abu-Jaber.—1st. Harvest ed.
p. cm.—(A Harvest Book)
ISBN: 978-0-393-32422-8
1. Family—New York (State)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.B895A89 1994
813'.54—dc20 94-6439
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
To my cousins Pam, Marc, Tariq, and Suzy; my parents, Pat and Gus; my sisters, Suzy and Monica; my grandmother Grace; and Michael.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt and abundant praise, admiration, and thanks to my wise editors, readers, and friends: Larry Woiwode, Jane Smiley, Kevin Oderman, Alane Salierno Mason, Richard Olmstead, and Eric Ashworth.
Thanks and love for their enduring support and friendship to Janice, Janet, Dick, Bob, Deborah, Claudia, Amy, Mary, Julee, George, Molly, Tim, and Gretchen.
And thanks to the Ucross Foundation Residency Program for artistic and environmental support.
Arabian Jazz
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 1
WHEN MATUSSEM RAMOUD opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. He was amazed by this. By six o’clock, the floors of his house vibrated with drumming and music. “Naima.”
He had become increasingly bemused over the years, wandering into abstraction, traveling in and out of conversations like a visitor to foreign places. Only at his drums did he seem to focus, concentrate with the purpose of remembering, steering rhythms into line, coaxing a steady—in his word, peripatetic—pulse out of air.
His wife’s face was imprinted on his consciousness. He thought of her as he drove to work in the mornings through ice and rain. His sense of loss was sometimes so potent that he became disoriented. His need to drum grew sharp as a knife cut; he tapped and shuffled behind his desk. He made his secretaries nervous, and visitors to his office would stay for only the briefest sessions until his tapping became too much. Matussem’s daughters, Jemorah and Melvina, could tell when he was really napping—not just feigning sleep to eavesdrop—because his feet would start jerking rhythmically, tapping out time to Charlie Parker. After their mother’s death, they heard him both mornings and evenings, alone or with his band, tapping in the basement, drums humming, tripping and rushing, giddy, loud-voiced. This sound had followed the girls through the years, from their father’s first riffs on a child’s kit he’d found in the basement to the Snazzy Sound of Mat Ramoud and the Ramoudettes.
None of the relatives in Jordan understood Matussem’s life in America; but even those who never left the Old Country except for summer vacation knew that after work at the hospital maintenance office, Matussem made money as a drummer. When he played jazz they heard noise, and when he played Arabic music, they could dance; this was good enough for them. So when his sister Fatima, who lived in Syracuse, heard that the Syrian Orthodox Church was throwing a welcoming party for an archbishop from Jordan, she got on the phone and called her brother.
“We need loud, we need big name, we need free,” she said, stabbing at the keys
of her terminal. “You fit to all three, perfect!”
“Who’s saying?” Matussem said. “You never even heard us and you saying loud. You think because it is your family name it makes a big name? And we get four hundreds for three one-hour sets. Sometimes. One time we did.”
There was the kind of silence over the phone that made Matussem’s skin crawl. Silence was the opposite of his sister, a by-product that resulted whenever she was concentrating her powers. He’d always thought she worked at the library because it gave her a place to charge up. She’d immigrated to America from Jordan in 1960, a year after he did, in order to keep an eye on him. He squeezed the phone receiver, trapped between her silence and whatever was coming next. Finally she said, “Matussem, Matussem, Ya Matussem, remember when you are five and I am six and I give you all my grabia cookie to eat? Do you?”
Matussem had no such memory. He put his hand over the receiver and sighed as deeply as he could. Then he said, “Yes?”
“And you remember when you are six and I am seven and I make this boys stop pick on you and call you shorty?”
“Fatima, please, take pity—”
“What I am saying exactly! I am taking pity on you all your life and these how you repay me. These how you treat she who give the breads from her mouth, her flesh and blood—”
“Fatima, Fatima”—he switched the receiver from his right to left ear. “We play free for your party. Okeydokey.”
“Inshallah!” she cried. “I should be so lucky!”
“What Inshallah, what, Fatima?” he asked in the tone of someone crossing the desert.
“Inshallah I live till these Sunday! Maybe I drop dead tonight and you dance on my grave. Maybe you and Allah will that I should make carpet for your feet!”
“What time on Sunday, O sister of mine?”
“Seven o’clock,” she said, aching to fly full throttle into recrimination. She resorted to punching at the terminal keys again. “On a dot. Look respectable for once. Tell Jemorah and Melvina to wear dresses—there good families there to look them over.”
Rather than remind his sister of what she already well knew—that one might as easily put a jinni into a bottle as put Melvina into something she didn’t want to wear, he said, “Your wish, my command. Good-bye, O great big sister of mine.”
THE AEROGRAMS FROM Uncle Fouad or Auntie Rima always began arriving in winter, mentioning the possibility of a visit. By June, the relatives started to descend and Family Function Season officially began, thick with upstate humidity and sweating relatives who thought somehow that this was preferable to the desert.
It was mid-May, the first real thaw in a season that had been thick with snow; Jemorah was at her desk in inpatient billing. Like Matussem, she and her younger sister, Melvina, worked at Johnson-Crowes Hospital: Jem out of necessity, Melvie—as she put it—out of “destiny.” Jem’s job was simple, if meaningless; she totaled the previous day’s billing on an adding machine and stuffed the itemized invoices—one semiprivate, two catheters, three hypodermics, and so on—into the patient’s folder. She filed, sorted, distributed, and stapled. Mostly stapled. She also answered the phone: “Good morning, inpatient billing, may I help you?”
She heard the songs of furies, of the lost and broken and wayward. People with mothers dying or children dead.
“My son’s been in the hospital since birth and now he’s going to die if he doesn’t get heart surgery. What am I supposed to do with these bills? Seven hundred dollars consulting! And I don’t have any insurance. My God! What is this one?—two hundred fifty-eight dollars for an anesthesia tray?”
“You need to speak to one of our patient reps—”
If the caller hung on, if the funnel of tears, illness, and terror had not sucked this caller down into its eddies, then Jem had to take a message and deliver it to a representative. When the patient reps saw Jem coming, bearing a white phone-message slip, they groaned. “God, get away from me.” “Please not another one.” “Jesus, you’re a curse.”
Jem had just finished a foot-wide stack of filing; there were a variety of ink blotches on her hands, one heart-shaped dot near her nose; her wild hair was gnarled into a bun and speared by a pencil, and her lower lip was caught in her teeth, her expression something close to perpetual surprise. In contrast, Melvie—skin, hair, uniform, even her mind—seemed sleek as stainless steel.
Melvie called that Monday from her office in critical care upstairs, her voice cool as chrome. “Warning, warning,” she said. “It’s Family Function Season again.”
“What? That doesn’t start until June.”
“It’s May thirteenth and I’m sure you realize Aunt Fatima doesn’t take chances on a late start. She had one of my women summon me from a code blue to tell me the Archbishop’s welcoming party is Sunday night.”
“No,” Jem said, shaking her head. “I can’t do it; I’m not ready. It’s too early in the season, isn’t it? No, I just can’t do this one.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Be more specific, Jemorah. Do you mean you’re incapacitated, or that you just won’t cooperate?”
“You know what I mean,” Jem said, voice shrinking. “I never have any fun at these things. Why should I go? What’s the point of it?”
She heard a background sucking, gurgling noise in the pause before Melvie’s answer. She imagined her sister holding the receiver with one hand and vacuuming out a patient’s lungs with the other. The sound had an exquisite crispness to it, eloquent disapproval. Jem knew that one reason Melvie made such an excellent nurse was not because of any kindly nature, but because she was annoyed by illness and held patients personally responsible for their own diseases. A weakness of will, she’d heard Melvie say more than once.
Jem recognized that Joan of Arc tone in Melvie’s voice now, as she was saying, “Fun doesn’t even enter into this picture, Jemorah. Don’t you know that by now? There is no Fun—there is no Why. We’re talking about Family.”
Jem held her breath a moment, listening to the electric silence that vibrated along the telephone lines.
“Spare me the passive-aggressive tactics, Jemorah,” Melvie said. “You’re wasting your silence. Guilt runs off my back, as you are well aware.”
“I know, I know.”
“Just stick with me,” Melvie said. “And remember the bedouin saying: ‘In the book of life, every page has two sides.’”
Chapter 2
AT FIVE EVERY workday, Jem left the business office, stabbed her card into the time clock, and dashed to join the nurses at the Orange, Sutter’s Mill, or the Won Ton à Go-Go, bars edging the strip between the hospital and Syracuse University, all rotted by weather, perfumed by beer. The city, slanted into its hard sky, could almost have been by the ocean. But there was no ocean by Syracuse, just the finger of Onondaga Lake, gray as bone. Farther north was Lake Ontario, which, though hidden, made itself felt in the rain and snow that wound sheets around the city, the wind driving people’s faces down into their chests like the heads of sleeping birds. Sometimes in the winter Jem couldn’t get warm, no matter how many layers she wore, and it was only in the tunnels of the city bars, protected by tavern walls, in nests of peanut shells and sawdust, that she would find some distance from the cold.
THE WON TON à Go-Go was one block from the hospital, and Merv the assistant manager kept it open twenty-four hours for the nurses. The nurses called it the Emergency Room. Merv liked nurses because they started screaming and laughing after a few drinks, and screaming made him feel like business was good. He especially liked Melvina because even though she never screamed, she looked like she could kill with her bare hands. Eyes dark as Taiwanese girls’, too. Merv was from Taipei and he had learned about America from John Wayne and Bruce Lee movies.
Jem and the nurses were sitting in the back, drinking sake, which Merv kept for hospital staff who stopped by after their odd-houred shifts.
“Hey, you pilgrims,” Merv said, stopping at their table once Melvie returned. “More karate
-sake? How ’bout it, Mervina? ’nother Taiwan-on-Zombie?”
“No, thanks, Merv.” Melvie stabbed at the remains of her drink with the straw. “I’m driving.”
“Yes, Mervina in driver’s seat,” Merv said, bowed, then left.
“He talks like a fortune cookie,” Hazel said. “You ever notice that?”
A fierce May wind sang in the windows, rattling them and dashing rain like gravel. The nurses all got quiet, looking at each other, then burst into laughter. “Doesn’t it sound like the bar is haunted?” Jem said.
They hooted and rolled their eyes. They thought Jem was funny, especially after they’d had a few sakes. They’d drain a couple of bottles with ease before the night was half over. Melvina smiled grimly; she made special exceptions for her older sister, who required extra care and attention. “Validation therapy,” she called it. Her goal, she said, was to make her sister aware of reality. As Jem joked with the nurses, Melvina lined her fingertips up. “You realize,” she said suddenly, “what Fatima’s little party really is, Jemorah.”
A gust of rain shook the windows and Jem had an instant prescience of fear. “What?” she said.
“You’re twenty-nine years old now,” Melvie said. “Twenty-nine. Thirty this September. That gives the aunts a little less than four months to deploy forces. This is marriage-emergency in their book. If you turn thirty without a contracted male, you’ll be diagnosed as a terminal spinster. Fatima’s going to be bringing out the big guns now, all kinds of groom-specimens. It’s no more Mr. Nice Aunt.”
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