Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

“It sounds either super-creepy or super-stupid,” Pamela Milford said, sucking on her hair.

  Jem had thought it was hard to take in. A beautiful monster. Silent music. Later, she understood this was Ricky’s kind of loveliness. He looked at her and things went backward. As she sat there on the bus, she felt the quiet fill her head, her breath scarcely moving. His eyes had thick, animal lashes, irises clear as air. When Jem tried to tell Melvina about this discovery, her eight-year-old sister said to her, “Ricky Ellis is a juvenile delinquent; you stay away from him. Have you seen his fingernails? I’m sure he carries diseases. I’d report him and all his delinquent friends if the truancy officer weren’t such a shady character, too.”

  At the time of Jem’s preoccupation with Ricky Ellis, Melvie had been auditing basic nursing courses for a year. The community college used the Clay Elementary classrooms—where Melvina attended—after school was out. Melvie was too young to enroll, so she’d sit in the back of the room and pass herself off as somebody’s daughter. Between Cavalcades of Reading and Math Fun, she lugged a tome entitled Fundamentals of Critical-Care Nursing.

  When Melvie knew a thing there was no sliding around it, and she knew that Ricky Ellis was no good. So Jem consigned Ricky to the moments when he lifted the embers of his eyes to her as the bus flashed by, or the moments in dreams when Jem floated over the dividing line between boy and myth. She dreamed of him stretching his long, rangy legs, fine as hooved limbs. The image troubled her in a way that no real boy ever had, and Jem lived with it over the weeks until at last she went to Miss Potamkin and told her she’d seen a faun.

  Miss Potamkin listened closely, then caught Jem’s hands between her own, and said with round eyes, “My dear, I’m so happy for you, so very, very happy!”

  With autumn came the New York freeze; the boys found new shelter and left the steps of the O—G. Then there was nothing for Jem to see but the concrete steps littered with candy and cigarette wrappers, and the screen door with a broken latch, banging above them.

  In college, Jem made halfhearted attempts at dating. Young men were drawn to her olive colors, inkwell eyes; they stood close to look at her hair, anoint themselves in her presence. But always she would feel herself stiffening under their gaze, trapped like an animal in headlights, her pulse slowing, her aunts’ voices running through her like a river. After college, she decided she no longer had the energy for men. At work or out socializing, she ignored their glances, their tentative observations and questions. Only Gil Sesame had approached her as if from the side, lowering his voice, murmuring to her like a sly cowboy gentling a pony.

  THAT EVENING, AFTER Melvie—still clutching Gil Sesame’s telegram—drove off to her kung fu class, Jem walked downstairs. Matussem was in the basement, playing along to Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, counterpointing Max Roach and Art Blakey.

  “He wails,” Matussem said after Jem turned down the volume. “That Bird, he is wailer.”

  Jem looked at her father’s clear eyes and thought of the sky over Jordan. It was a sky that could turn from powder to steel without a wisp on its surface.

  She told him about Gil’s courtship. “I just don’t understand why now, after all these years, all this sudden passion,” she said.

  Matussem put aside brush and stick and took her hands. He said, “With love, there no reason. Tell me about these Gilbo Sesamoon, he good boy?”

  Jem sighed. “Oh, Gil.”

  “Jemmie, wait,” he said, squeezing her hands. “I’m afraid you are waiting for some signs from me, for me to say that you are suffered enough. Well you are, all right? You are suffered enough.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, staring at her father.

  “Is like you staying at these crummy job to prove something that don’t needs proving. He wants to take you to Utah, right? There desert out there and big skies. And Tim Mox.”

  “Tom Mix.”

  “Mox, Tox. In Jordan the same idea. In Jordan we watched his movie. Him and Flush Groodin—”

  “Flash Gordon.”

  “—seventy, eighty, hundred times! We loved these. We kids go running all over these movies place, like Beit al Zoon, the bear-man. They don’t get the movies like that in these country. What was we talking about?”

  “Utah.”

  “Utah or Jordan. Take pick. Nine of one, half-dozen of other. Why not try it? What’s the hurt? Believe me, sometimes I don’t know why I move to these balls-freezer place. Only your mother can get me to stay in these refrigerator. So why stick here? These way you will get warmed up and get a man all in one time, and Aunt Fatima will get off my neck, too. Don’t think she isn’t going to drag some ghoul out the family closet right now for you to marry.”

  “Dad.”

  “Maybe I want some place for vacation, too. There some Mormons, sure, but they don’t bother you if you are speaking their language. They are clean like you wouldn’t believe. And look over there,” he said, pointing to his shelves. “Seven Books of Mormon! Seven!”

  While she was contemplating the spines of the books, her father pulled a telegram from his back pocket.

  “Oh yeah. These come for you when Melvina was fussing. I signed for it. I didn’t tear it open, but if you hold it to light you can read pretty much it all.” Matussem shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I like his style. I like the way he say you don’t have to take clothes off.”

  Jem opened it, anticipating the message she nearly knew by heart. The words changed, but the substance remained: run away. This time, though, the words grew softer and wound tendrils around her fingers. She imagined a white lake, Western wind toppling a thousand white flowers. The paper said, “If love came in glass bottles, I would send you a hundred bottles to line up under your window. They would be full of devotion and if you uncorked one then it would pour out like a genie and say, Come with me to the Casbah of Utah. Come escape. Remember, you don’t have to take off your clothes. Love, Gil.”

  Chapter 6

  ON THE DAY of the archbishop’s party, Fatima took extra time on her index fingers. They were the most important, and as the fingertips of American secretaries, cashiers, and dental hygienists proved to Fatima, nail polishing was a lost art in this country, sacrificed to the high tech of press-on latex and metal. Fatima was true to the ways of her mother and mothers before her: layers of Dragon Lady Red, tough as concrete and hard enough to tear out eyeballs.

  After the fingernails came the eyebrows, tweezed to exclamation points. It helped distract her if, while plucking, she thought of her brother’s daughter, Miss Queen-of-the-World Melvina, who’d probably grow her eyebrows in a line straight across her face if she could, simply to aggravate Fatima. It made her angry just to think about it: Melvina and her first-generation attitude, and the sin of the way Matussem was raising her and Jemorah: no tradition, no respect for the elders, ya’Allah, if Fatima’s parents were still alive!

  “But, thanks to God, they not,” Fatima muttered, painting on new bayonet-brows. “Baba, it would killed him all over again. Mama, I swear to God, have a thousand heart attacks and rise from dead. Not to mention what she do if she saw what they buried her in.” She was thinking about the caftan that had gone to her mother’s final resting place, a beige, church-lady affair. Matussem had already made up his mind to investigate America. “He stand around, all hands-in-the-pockets,” Fatima muttered, “watched the six miserable sisters grab Mama’s clothes.” By the time Fatima had returned from school, they’d taken all the good things and left only the church dresses for her and dead Mama. “Look what they left us!” she remembered shouting at her mother’s body, just one afternoon stiff and waiting to be bathed. “For you I can see maybe, after all, where are you going? But what about me? They treat me like I am a corpse, too!”

  Thinking about this was making her angry all over again, and she pressed the lipstick so hard against her mouth that the tip broke off. “Ya ba yea! Ya kelbe!” she shouted, throwing down the tube. Then she remembered she was t
rying to swear only in English, so she shouted, “Shit, damn, curses! Shit, damn, curses!”—the three swear words that her almost-American nephew Nabil had taught her were the worst and most awful, more powerful than “May your favorite son’s camel get fleas,” or “May you obtain a great house that fills with leprosy and disfigures you slowly, limb by limb.”

  The three little words didn’t help much, so she ran out of the room in her underwear screaming, “They treat me like a corpse! Like a shit, damn, curses corpse!”

  Zaeed was used to his wife’s grudges, some decades old and more. (“She laughed at me when I was five and she’ll be laughing at me tonight at the bowling alley,” Fatima once said of a 102-year-old aunt.) Fatima was Zaeed’s first cousin and had lived in the same house in Beit’oon on the edge of the Dead Sea with him and sixteen other relatives since she was three, and, so far as he could tell, she didn’t behave much differently from any other Arab woman that he knew, except perhaps a little more so. It was American women he couldn’t get used to, nearly as calm and modulated as American men. They’d take a step back for every step he took toward them. They were all so pale and hairless, but at least they were better than the English—he shuddered to think of his short stint as a dishwasher in London—who were pink.

  “Pink eyes,” he whispered to himself, watching his wife dash from room to room in a bra and slip.

  “You know this functions make me so much stress,” Fatima said, wrestling with her bra and shoving around the cups that reminded Zaeed of radar cones. “This Old Country types, why don’t they leaves us alone? Always reaching, reaching out, like hands from the grave. Nag, nag, nag! Then when they got what they want, they spit in your face, so superior Arabs.”

  Zaeed knew this was one of a hundred different versions Fatima had of the Old Country. The children born in America would hear how they were descended from saints and how neglectful young people were of the Old Ways. When cousin Samir married an American, Fatima attended the wedding dressed in black and gave them a card written in Arabic, “Samir, this would kill your sainted mother, bless her sacred name, if she were still alive.”

  Zaeed followed Fatima back into the bedroom. “Of course we don’t have to go,” he said.

  Fatima turned to stare at him. “You are a too amazing man, Zaeed Mawadi. Only you could think that I, Fatima, youngest of seven sisters in the Old Country, would be snubbing the archbishop of our grandparents.”

  “But they never even met him. He is not from the same districts even.”

  Fatima raised one eyebrow in the mirror as she threaded the wire of a gold hoop through her ear. “Do you know how that sounds like to me? That sounds like the kind of thing an American would say.”

  Zaeed sighed and laid back on the bed.

  “Besides,” Fatima went on, shoving a load of gold bangles up her forearm, “what does it matters? Nothing. Old Farouq Mawadi had the right ideas. Pack it up and move to Miami. The only weather a person can take in this God-hater place, anyway.”

  “Or move to Utah, like Matussem talks about,” Zaeed said, then repented. He closed his eyes against his wife towering over him with those eyebrows.

  “Inshallah, Zaeed!” Fatima shouted. “By God’s holy will and in the name of the prophet, I swear to you I go, I throw myself down in the middle of Route 81, if it would make you so much happy! I promise you, if you want to tear my heart out while it beating there better ways than saying evil-evil about my only brother.” She caught her breath and went to the closet and began slashing through a thick store of dresses.

  “Besides,” she said, yanking one dress off its hanger, “Matussem couldn’t last two minutes without me. Ask him these yourself. Has he come with one reasonable husband for even his eldest—who going to be now thirty years of age! He’s helpless, such a mama’s boy, an infant.”

  “He’s ten months younger than you,” Zaeed said, still with eyes closed.

  “So? So what?” Fatima said, viciously pulling the dress over her head. “Ten months, ten years, ten centuries! He’s my baby brother and not you or all your fifty thousand important words can change that,” she said, zipping with a flourish.

  MATUSSEM SMILED AT himself in his bedroom mirror, first directly, then in profile. “Well, well, well, who we has here?” he said, sweeping one hand over hair so thick with tonic that it gleamed like chrome. “Omar Sharif? Or it is Valentino?” He pulled on his western shirt and his arrowhead bolo tie. “‘Into your tent I will creep!’” he sang. His belt buckle was five inches of silver, embossed with a bucking bronco and “North Dakota Centennial.” “I am the Sheikh of Syracuse! The lovely ladies will be all passing out when they are seeing me.”

  In the next room, there was a pile of clothes on the floor. Melvie had tried on all four of her mix-and-match outfits and found them wanting. Now she was rummaging through Jem’s closet. “Clothes, what do I want with clothes? I’m a nurse, for God’s sake,” she said, tossing another of Jem’s blouses on the pile, “not a wax dummy! I don’t need a husband and I don’t need clothes. If you ask me, we’d all be better off going naked. Skin is waterproof, permanent press, and, furthermore, doesn’t stain like cotton.”

  “Then we’d all have to look at Auntie Fatima naked,” Jem said, propped on the bed.

  Melvie stopped; Jem could see her stiffening. “The human body is beautiful, young lady,” Melvie said. “I look at bodies from sunup to sundown, all kinds of bodies, and I do all kinds of things to them! I have a patient now who has had every one of her limbs amputated as well as both breasts—”

  “Really? Have I seen—”

  “And I have to disinfect those stumps every day. I also have a patient who was born without eyes or a nose. He told me that he wears a cloth sack over his head to go grocery shopping. His attendant says grown men have stopped in the streets and wept at the sight of him. But you know what?” She turned her clear, hard gaze away from Jem.

  “What?”

  “He’s actually beautiful. His skin is a diaphanous blue, and his tiny mouth looks just like a rose. I’ve often thought people in general are like trees and flowers. They require light, air, water, nutrition, stability, and warmth. I’ve also observed that human faces are nearly identical in function to buds; they open up and they attract pollination. People habitually look toward light, and they often turn toward the windows in their sleep. Bodies are little more than stalks when you come right down to it. Would you put a shirt and tie on a stalk?”

  Jem lay back on the bed and faced the ceiling. She tried to imagine herself as a plant. She propped herself up. “Yeah, but I wasn’t talking about a brand-new plant, I was talking about one that’s getting a little droopy and keeps wearing those down-to-there blouses. You know which ones.”

  “Some plants are even more beautiful when they age,” Melvie said, indignant. “Just like some people. Obviously, you still need to learn how to examine things, to look at the world through a nurse’s eyes. Haven’t you ever seen anyone with advanced tuberculosis? Their skin becomes amazing, brilliant, even as they’re dying.” Melvie was standing in just a white slip, her dark hair down and heavy as thunder on her shoulders. Beyond the window, the day was failing, turning toward the hour of parties and celebration. A shadow lengthened over the room, over Melvina’s temples. Melvie smiled and said, “Like babies’ skin—the promise of blossoming. The reason there’s all this wedding pressure on you.”

  “Babies.”

  “And, of course, in the aunts’ collective mind, your time for sowing and reaping is disappearing before their very eyes. Not much medical basis for that belief anymore, however.”

  “But what would I do with children? I hardly have a job.”

  “Obviously, you’re going to have to be strong. Resist.” Melvie pulled her original outfit—a white, uniform-type dress—back over her head. “Give no quarter and take no enemies. Take liberty or death and nothing in between!”

  “Melvie.”

  “I’m only concerned about you, Jemorah. You
’ve got so much potential.”

  “I know, I know—and my life’s meaning depends upon a professional degree.”

  “Excuse me, when did I ever say that?”

  “Well—”

  “I simply believe your destiny lies in graduate school.”

  Jem pulled a pillow over her head. “Melvie. I threw away the application. You made me apply to psychology at Stanford. Sure, I’d love to go there, but it’s one of the hardest universities to get into. Not to mention the priciest. I don’t even have the money for Onondaga Community College.”

  “The hard battle is the only one worth winning. I fished the application out of the garbage. Organize your priorities, Miss. Fight or flight?”

  Jem pulled the pillow off and gazed at the ceiling. “Fight. I guess.” She sighed.

  THEY DROVE TO the church through the city neighborhoods of Jem’s childhood, and she began to think about her mother and the few times they had gone to church together. She remembered there was a church in New Hampshire; they had visited her mother’s parents, Nana and Pawpaw. It was before Melvie was born. Her father didn’t go. Jem’s mother carried a purse of black patent leather, mirror smooth, and wore a coat of black, flocked material, soft as cream. When Jem pushed it in one direction it darkened; in the other it smoothed and lightened. The church had polished pews. Jem fidgeted, snuggling into the coat, looking at her face in the purse. She had forgotten to wear her hat with ribbons down the back so her mother bobby-pinned a tissue to her head to cover it. Every time she twisted around to look, a forest of adult faces bore down upon her. Above the faces, hidden in a secret place, under the colored window, there were angels singing and the breath of God in the organ. Her mother wore gloves that smelled like mothballs. When Jem took communion the host was papery. It stuck to the roof of her mouth as she pressed her palms together, her bare knees on the kneeler.

  Once Jem had asked her mother, “Why do we only go to church when we’re with Nana?”