Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “That’s to say that abortions should be kept free and legal in this country,” the young woman said.

  When they kept staring at her she said, “Because before abortion was legal, women sometimes would use coat hangers to try to make themselves miscarry.”

  “Really?” Dolores said, “Does that work?”

  The young woman laughed and shook her head as she unlocked her car. “Well, if you want to die, it works.”

  Now what did that mean? Dolores wondered. It sounded like some kind of smart college answer with more than one meaning. She hadn’t liked the way the young woman’s hair flew into her face and the way she wore so many buttons with things written on them. She looked like a hippie freak. And there, she had a nice running car and could buy all the abortions she wanted. As Dolores and her mother walked to the store entrance, Hilma started in on her: “Dolores Otts, you do not mean to say that you went out and got knocked up again.”

  Dolores rolled her eyes. “No, Ma, I do not mean to say that or anything else on this earth.”

  It was a soft spring day, but Hilma was wearing the down jacket and nightgown she always wore. She stared at her daughter, and Dolores noticed that Hilma had pulled her hair so tightly into curlers that it smoothed wrinkles out of her forehead and lifted her eyebrows.

  “I swear to God, Dolores Otts, you pull some damn, stupid-ass coat hanger stunt, knocked up or not, you’ll send me right to the crazy nut house. I swear I’ll go live with Ellie Broom down in the shit shack, how ’bout that?”

  “I guess you think I’m a complete retard?”

  “I think it’s exactly the kind of stunt you love to pull.”

  AT WHAT POINT?

  Either end of the wire looked sharp. She hadn’t gotten out all the kinks and coils, but it looked straight enough to do a fair amount of damage. She wondered if it could be much worse to put this between her legs than anything else.

  Maybe it would kill her. It seemed like she was looking at that in either direction. One way she’d be in charge, the other way would be in the hands of a red, bawling baby, a critter, as Peachy called them.

  It was like living in a barnyard. Except it wasn’t like those kiddie songs, “and on this farm there was a cow….” Here it was animals with bottomless eyes and slots of mouths, just eating and shitting, and when a new one came along, it sucked the life right out of Dolores’s body.

  Tin walls, the kids slept on old sofa cushions and bus seats, they cooked on a Sterno camp stove. Sometimes she put her hands on her hips and said, “Is this my life?”

  The kids were all outside somewhere; she was alone for once.

  So she was thinking about it, thinking and thinking and thinking, as she guided the wire gently, even tenderly, between her legs, and up into herself. She stopped a moment before it went too far and reached over to change the channel on the TV. The screen blinked, and through its snow she could make out one of those TV talking people, a man with a thick, white cap of hair. Now that was funny. She couldn’t think of the name of this man, as familiar to her as a member of her family; she couldn’t name him for anything.

  She lay back down and brought the wire back into her; she was thinking.

  “C’mon!” the man was saying. His face was a mask of shock, eyebrows disappearing up under the bolt of hair. “C’mon, you don’t really believe that!” he shouted at a woman in his audience.

  “I got news for you, bright boy,” Dolores said, moving that wire slow and certain, thinking her way to the very point. “She really does believe it.”

  DOLORES DREAMED OF a red ribbon that sat bright-bowed in the hair of the baby who was supposed to be dead. She dreamed death covered Euclid. It stood in the sewers where the children ran along the concrete troughs. It walked the marsh around the trees. It echoed in the singing from the makeshift church in the water-control building. It was in the tightfisted faces of the men in the Euclid Inn, where the one-armed old-timer balanced the stick against the table, made six in the side pocket, and took a swig on a bottle.

  All over Euclid, people were sleeping, floating with Dolores in a community of dreams. There were people in Euclid who never stopped sleeping or who woke at night and worked like moles in basements and garages, brewing beer, working on cars, or creating private inventions—machines that would tow their inventors up, up into the eye of the country.

  Chapter 12

  THERE’S ONLY SO much you can do to become an American!”

  Early Saturday, a week after the Archbishop’s party, Jem could hear Melvie shouting at their father in the front yard. It might have been that Matussem had gone for a walk in his boxer shorts—as he liked to do in the fleeting warm weather. Or Melvina might have caught him calling another toll-free TV number for Christian broadcast transcripts, self-sharpening knives, and Voodoo Aids. Matussem was also susceptible to charity and foster-child programs, and many times Jem had come home from work to find her father pondering blood plasma donations or psoriasis research. He had donor cards in his wallet for virtually every bodily organ.

  Jem was on the phone, trying to concentrate on what Fatima was saying but distracted by the wrath in Melvie’s voice. “There is such a thing as one flamingo too many. I drew the line at the seven dwarves and now you come home with another bird!”

  “Is that your evil sister?” Fatima said. “Ya’Allah, I can hear her all the way here. Bring me my brother.”

  “Hold on a sec, Aunt Fatima,” Jem said, putting the receiver down. She walked to the window, opening it a crack, to watch her sister and father tugging at opposite ends of a large, plastic flamingo.

  “What American about this? I don’t ask to see passport,” Matussem said. “Besides, see right there: Made in Taiwan! This ethnic bird. She beautiful.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. You’re deliberately trying to provoke me,” Melvie said. She let go of her end and Matussem sat flat on the lawn with the flamingo in his lap.

  Every May since their move to the country, their father went through fits of exuberance, driving to the local hardware store and bringing home lawn decorations of deer, flamingos, and Disney characters the way some people bring home stray animals. The front lawn was littered with cartoon figures and exotic birds. Matussem didn’t arrange them with any particular design, but sprinkled them at random, even propped them up out in the fields and weeds, much to the delight of Peachy across the street. Then, a few years ago, in a fit of irritation, Melvie had taken it upon herself to cart a couple of the figures away to unadorned lawns deep in the suburbs, thieving them away in the dark. This became her springtime ritual. Matussem either didn’t notice or pretended not to, merely adding to the menagerie when the notion hit him; in this way the lawn population remained stable.

  “Dad, it’s Aunt Fatima on the phone,” Jem said. Matussem looked up from where he was still sitting on the grass. “Ach du liebe, Augustin,” he said.

  Fatima was soaking in Oil of Paris Midnight Bath Balm. “Baby brother?” she said. “I’ve decided to put curse on these dirty-hair neighbor boy who I see always peeking, peeking at Jemorah, so that they will have a stroke tonight and maybe drop dead. Okeydokey?”

  “Okeydokey? What okeydokey? What?” Matussem cried. “Fatima, why me? Why now? What neighbor boy? You can’t leave it alone? No voodoo, no curses, no evil eye, I begging, just give me one breaks.”

  Fatima kicked her feet in the bath. “Fine, fine! You want your daughters all around with serpents, criminals, and gruesomes, that’s fine! And here Fouad coming tomorrow from fifty thousand miles away. You want Uncle Fouad think we just crawled out of the gutter, that’s wonderful! Maybe you hoping I’ll drop the phone receiver and electrocute myself to death. Wait a second, I’ll call Zaeed and have him bring the radio in, too! Zaeed!” she shrieked through the wall. “Bring the Sony in here!”

  “Fatima, please,” Matussem was saying. “Would you talk like a human being?”

  “He thinks he’s the only human being in the world!” Fatima shouted
at the phone. “Fine! Good-bye, King Human Being! Now let me talk to your daughter.”

  Zaeed stuck his head in the door. “My mistress calls?”

  “Bring the radio here and drop it in. I want to fry.”

  “Ah,” Zaeed said and shut the door.

  As soon as Jem picked up, Fatima told her about the very attractive boy with the Lebanese eyes who was holding up a construction sign out on Route 690. “Such a smile! For the gods! Just your age. The way he wave to me—”

  “He wanted you to slow down.”

  “I can see the babies now. Come, come, I drive you there these minute after my bath. I remember exactly where he is working, have it wrote down.”

  “Aunt Fatima, no.”

  “‘No,’ she says, all the time ‘no, no!’ Thanks God your mother not alive to see these. Now instead she have to be seeing it in heaven. Ya’Allah, I can hear her beating on her holy chest! Enough aggravations already, let me go finish my beauty bath.”

  In her thrashing around most of the Oil of Paris Midnight bubbles had gone flat and sat like an oil slick on top of the water. Fatima thought about herself sitting there until she rotted away in her own miserable bathwater. Probably Zaeed wouldn’t even miss her. Probably she would have to wait until busybody Auntie Nyla got bored and came poking around.

  “They see how spotless Fatima Ramoud Mawadi keep her bathroom,” Fatima said out loud in her orator’s voice. “See there? Three bottle Mr. Clean! Not these cheap generic crap the Abdulabouds buy.”

  “Let’s face it, you’re a first-rate person in a second-rate world,” she heard Zaeed shout from downstairs.

  Fatima nodded, but it wasn’t much consolation. She yanked the plug from the drain and watched the water curl into a tiny whirlpool.

  “These water like my life,” she said, watching it. “Whoosh, there it goes.” She walked naked to the bedroom, defying the full-length mirror, and picked up a pad by the side of her bed, her book of lists. She considered the first one:

  What I can stand about my life

  1. Want be in Lady Pontifical Committee (Good deeds etc., etc.)

  2. Good bust (not much sags)

  She added 3. and wrote: “Husband who understands a couple things and is not too much of a big pain in the A all the time. Cooperates.”

  Under that was a second list:

  What I CAN’T STAND about my life

  1. My America nieces (Jemorah and Melvina) who are going to send me to the mental hospital with so much worries about who are they ever going to marry.

  2. Melvina’s Queen of World attitude—why does she have to dress like that every minute and why won’t Jemorah file her fingernails and use cuticle stick?

  Then some words in Arabic that Fatima crossed out in a fury.

  Chapter 13

  LATER THAT MORNING, Jem—driving with a wary eye out for Lebanese construction workers—was on her way back from the grocery store. She stopped for gas at Lil’ Lulu’s Garage down the street from their house. Lil’ Lulu’s owner, Fred Beevle, didn’t believe in self-service gas. He used to say about it: “Everyone gets cheated, you, me, everyone.” So his attendants, the same three for over twenty years, Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl, jumped up for every car. Their skin had turned gray from oil, and they perpetually had some car hoisted on their pneumatic lift. Sometimes when Jem drove up, she could see Fred himself, fat as a buddha, enthroned behind the glass walls of the office, leaning back against the cigarette machine and winding dollar bills around his fingers.

  Fred was not anywhere in sight that day, and the rock music rushed from the garage. When Jem looked up, she saw that the hand on the pump was not the hand of Jesse, Owen, or Fergyl. It was a new hand, long fingered and well shaped. Her eyes climbed that limb, arm and shoulder, collar and hair. The attendant’s head was lowered to the task, but the posture was familiar; she’d seen that stoop somewhere before.

  Then the curtain of hair—black, dirt-straight—lifted, parted with a shake and there were those eyes again, looking at her. After more than ten years, it was Ricky Ellis, one-time disturber of her dreams, hoisting a gas-pump hose. She could see the oil in the seams of his hands as he handed her the credit-card slip, and her own hands were just slightly trembling. Then she could have sworn she heard him say, “Jemorah.” His gaze was still and she looked back at him through what seemed like a dark mantle of years. He drew her into his gaze, and in that instant she was asking, “Do you remember me?”

  Ricky left the garage door open, the pump on, the rock music blasting into the underbelly of a Ford, went around to the car door and got in next to Jem. He left the bells chiming unanswered, and when Fred called to check up on things, the pay phone went on ringing.

  JEM PULLED OUT onto Route 31 and they drove past fields, still silver-blue in places, and velveteen cows. In winter, the snow had etched lines of frost into the trees, the creeks stood white and still, the long grass sparkled with ice. Now everything seemed to be dissolving and in movement. She stared straight out the window, balancing her breath high in her lungs, trying not to think about the strange man in her car. They passed shacks with folding, rain-broken walls, tar-paper roofs, old trailers with sides the color of rain. Dolores Otts’s trailer was set back from the road in a clump of weeds, trash, and toys, dropped there like a lost key. Rags of curtains billowed out the small windows and the trailer looked still and ghostly.

  Ricky was quiet. He seemed uncomfortable in the passenger’s seat and spent a lot of time twisting the radio dial until he settled on a country-western station. A man was singing like the words were coming straight from a vise around his heart, a pure, Western tenor.

  “Guess he’s got his jeans on too tight,” Ricky said, sliding down in his seat.

  “Guess I owe you one,” he added, a moment later. “Or your dad, I guess.”

  “Why, what do you mean?” she asked, her voice oddly high.

  He shrugged. “Way lard-ass Fred tells it, Fergyl, Jesse, and Owen have got this ‘damn fool idea’ into their heads to be musicians, and it all has to do with this ‘damn, fool, foreign A-rab’ that lives next door. These days they’re calling in sick a lot, playing around with the damn, fool, foreign A-rabs, so old Butt-Face has to break down and hire local scum like me to do the job ten times better than his regulars at one-tenth the pay. So tell your dad thanks.”

  Jem didn’t know quite how to answer that. She just stared ahead and said, “Okay.” Some moments passed, then she said, “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “Yeah, well…” he shook his hair back. “Spent a couple years in juvenile detention. Not exactly sure why. That was fun. Got this tattoo. Tried working out on the rail yards. Got kicked out. Seems like people just don’t ever like my looks.”

  She glanced at Ricky once, quickly. There was a tattoo on the back of his wrist; she caught a greenish blur of it, heard the soft hum of his breath in the silence between them. What kind of man is he? she wondered, her breath slowing. Those are the clothes he wears. She had a flash of jeans, a flannel shirt, on a floor somewhere, soft and stale from him. Frightened, not thinking, she lifted one hand and touched his hair.

  Ricky turned away. “This wasn’t the greatest idea; I ought to get back,” he said. “I left the whole shop open. Fred will shit.”

  Jem went hot with embarrassment, made a U-turn in the center of a wide, empty highway and started back. She decided to let Aunt Fatima pick out the men from now on. The sad singer stayed on the radio, singing about desolation and longing, his voice hammered to steel. Ricky put all his concentration into tuning the station. The countryside rushed at them, acres of overgrown fields beaded with moisture. Then Ricky flipped off the radio, sat up, and said, “What did they tell you about my father?”

  Jem turned to look at him. She eased her foot off the gas, and they coasted in neutral. It was the first time she had dared to look at him straight on. With the windows open, his hair flew back and revealed his features, the straight nose, the blue disks of his irises. Out
side, the long-stemmed wildflowers were blowing. Then a man on a shaking piece of farm machinery appeared before them, whirring and crawling and taking up the whole lane so they were forced to slow behind him.

  “They told me that he blew himself up working on a car, I guess,” Jem said at last.

  Ricky looked at her sharply, then he nodded. “Well, that’s wrong,” he said and looked back out the window.

  Jem tightened her grip on the wheel, listening.

  Ricky kept silent, chewing on a fingernail. Then he grinned and said, “Well, maybe I never had a father.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His eyes were polished river rocks behind the locks of hair. He looked at her and said, “Just what I said. I might never, ever have had no father to begin with. I might’ve got born all by myself, just the same way I’m gonna die. I just wanted to make sure you got your story straight.”

  Chapter 14

  FATIMA LAY ON her bed, gazing at a magazine. Did anyone understand her? No, probably not. She pulled out her book of lists, reread item three of the What I can stand list, and crossed out “Husband who understands a couple things.”

  What she wanted was so simple, honest, and pure: she wanted everyone to be happy! Yet she was thwarted at each step. She had a speech that she often made to her nieces:

  “It’s terrible to be a woman in this world. This is first thing to know when the doctor looks at baby’s thing and says ‘it’s a girl.’ But I am telling you, there are ways of getting around it. It helps to have a good bust, but don’t worry. At least you didn’t get that Irish Catholic skin of your mother’s, may she rest in peace. Everyone knows the Irish are pretty-pretty when they’re young, but let them hit thirty and that skin? Gone! Horrible! Okay, so let’s say it, you’re built like starving rats and not so pretty now, but you girls wait, when you’re forty, forty-five, everyone will say how handsome you are, I guarantee it. But what good will handsome do if you don’t already snagged some man to see it? There are things you don’t know yet that I know perfect, and first and last is that you must have husband to survive on the planet of earth.”