Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Twenty-nine. I had little Wally when I was twelve, hey, it wasn’t my idea—what do you think! You would’ve been in sixth when Wally was in first. Little Wally got held back in school, like forever, until they got sick of him and booted him out completely. So he rode the bus with a whole lot of different people. Sad to say, that kid is half-moron and half-psycho. He’s my oldest.”

  “That would have been my assumption.”

  When Dolores lifted her head off the pillow a roaring started in her ears like she had seashells clapped over them. She liked the sensation, but when she tried to do it again, Melvina reached over with a hand cool as steel and pinned her flat by the forehead.

  “Hold still, you’re overexerting,” Melvie said. She scrutinized her patient, reading the lines that touched her skin and the yellow of her eyes. “Perhaps you enjoy suffering,” she said.

  “Honey,” Dolores said, suddenly tired with this woman’s hand on her head, her eyes inside Dolores, taking her over, making her let go. “Maybe I just plain don’t know the difference between that and anything else.” She closed her eyes. “Tell me one thing.”

  “If possible.”

  “Am I still preg?”

  “No.” Melvina turned and walked out. There was no point in telling her that she hadn’t been to begin with.

  Chapter 17

  JEM PARKED AND walked past the hospital grounds crew and gardeners on her way to work; as always, she wanted to toss her files and get on her hands and knees with them, to dig into the soil and feel the spring sunrise blooming on her back. She envied these workers their simple intimacy with the summer—a rare and precious season in Syracuse. Every year, summer emerged from the dark corners of the woods, delicate in its skin of light. The gardeners’ fingers knotted into the soil; apprentices to the season, they lived with it like lovers, their minds still as the air. For Jem, there were few moments more difficult than walking through the hospital door and leaving the summer morning behind. Even though it was only June first, she already anticipated the winter rolling over the countryside with its iron and ice, the long tongue of cold.

  She felt disturbed and disoriented by Gil’s sudden appearance the day before, as if a prehistoric creature—a thing of memory and distant fancy—had suddenly lifted its thorny head from Onondaga Lake. For along with his unsettling presence, Jem had lost her brief dream of the West, white Salt Lake City, a place like its name, town and lake bound in great crystals of salt, like an ice palace, alone on the salt-swept prairies. A place that she probably never would have seen, but loved to think about, nonetheless.

  Without her white dream, something protective and constricting had been stripped from her, and she knew she would have to do something herself to change her life. She was going to quit her job.

  Seven years after graduating college, she found that she was jealous of people who liked their jobs: the man throwing pizza dough in the store window, the meter reader quick and easy on her scooter, the lucky college students, laughing, taking up the morning like it was all theirs. Even Melvina liked her job, loved it, in Melvie’s way. She was up at four for a six-to-three shift. Sometimes Jem saw her darting through the corridors, sailing in whites like a nun, her face pious. Melvie had begun playing nurse when she was three, bandaging her older sister in dish towels. She had taken an accelerated course in nursing just after high school, two years of studying nine to nine, year round and on Sundays, to become an R.N. as fast as humanly possible. Every morning Jem saw her younger sister, dressed in a uniform the starkest white, adjusting her cap like a sergeant, always on duty, on guard against the invisible and the insidious.

  Jem waved whenever Melvie passed her corridor. Melvie would tip her head briskly in reply.

  Melvina had turned down a medical school scholarship while still in nurse’s training. “No time for that nonsense,” she said. “Doctors are so namby-pamby. I don’t have time to wait for them. There’s a world out there that needs saving and I’ve got to get to it.”

  THE DEPARTMENT MANAGER, Portia Porschman, had over the years taken to hanging around Jem’s desk. Portia was about five foot two and weighed in the neighborhood of 250 pounds, but she managed, somehow, to keep it all to herself, dense and pressed against her bones, packed into navy dresses with bits of lace at the wrists and neck. She was one of the toughest women Jem had ever seen, possibly rivaling Melvina. They called her the Iron Maiden when she wasn’t around. She was manager of the business wing and her life’s goal was to be promoted to chief, an office currently held by Mrs. Pinoire, an older woman with frillier blouses than Portia’s, held in check by an undertaker’s suit.

  The business office never knew when Portia would go on the hunt, looking for mistakes, someone to suck into her office. Sometimes it might happen twice in a week, sometimes not for months; she was sneaky, She could move in perfect silence, blending 250 pounds, frills and all, into the landscape of computers, printers, and gray carpets as completely as a chameleon. She moved like the air, stepping on feline feet, flattening between machines. Sometimes the only clue that she would be “checking up,” as she liked to put it, was the silence itself; the staff would glance toward the glass doors of Portia’s office across the hall, darkened like the eye of an angry Hawaiian god. A moment of alertness would ripple through the office, the silence before an earthquake when birds flush from the woods together. Glances would pass among the women, blood-seeing, spreading doom across the office. There was nowhere for them to run. Like an evil jinni, Portia hovered and watched. Whenever Portia spoke to her, Jem’s shoulders inched up around her ears and she saw light glance off Portia’s teeth. She could never remember what Portia said or anything of what she wanted. She retained only a body-deep terror of the woman that proved to Jem that her unhappiness went beyond the job itself; she had the sense that Portia could do worse things to her than fire her.

  She’d say things like: “Jemorah Ramoud. It seems like you just got here.” She tended to speak in the abbreviated style of a Zen master:

  “Nice weather. Today.”

  “How do you feel. Today.”

  Or sometimes just “Jemorah Ramoud.”

  The hospital business wing was called “the land that time forgot.” The rumor was that once an employee got in, she never got out again, not voluntarily. She either died in office or was sucked into the murky waters of Portia’s office, never to be heard from again. Jem’s supervisor Nancy liked to point to Portia’s door from time to time and say, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.”

  The office was filled with women aged eighteen to eighty-eight. Jem had the impression the office didn’t allow its staff to retire; they preferred that employees keel over on their keyboards. One woman, Virge, the eighty-eight year old, told Jem she’d started work at the hospital adding machine as a blushing bride of twenty-one. She swore to Jem on her grandmother’s grave that Portia—who couldn’t have been more than forty-five as they spoke—had handpicked Virge to come work for her. “If I’d known then what I know now…,” she said, lifting her gray eyebrows ominously.

  So not only was Portia all-powerful, but immortal as well. Jem had begun to think of herself as a Jonah, trying to slip out from between the mighty jaws of her boss. The more Portia floated around her desk, the more uneasy Jem became.

  That Monday, after Portia had wafted by for the third time, now saying, “No rain. Yet,” Jem began to have second thoughts about quitting. Nothing was worth facing Portia; better to stay on at the business office, until she was as bent over from punching keys as Virge.

  If she did, this would be the seventh birthday she would see pass in that office. Since starting her job, Jem experienced a nostalgia for her years in college so piercing it could make her catch her breath. She wished for the elegant, self-determined passage of her days again, the pleasures of the mind, of sculpting a theory or looking into the mechanisms of a psyche. As an undergraduate, she’d been enchanted by the term “professional student.” Every class had suggested new classes, eve
ry subject expanded; attending courses was like throwing a handful of gravel into a pool and watching the ripples. The only thing her aunts wanted her to graduate with was a husband. “You’re still pretty, aren’t you?” her Aunt Rima had said to her long-distance from Jordan, her Arabic flashing in and out of what sounded like the Atlantic Ocean. “So what do you need brains for? You’re twenty-one, still pretty, so what’s wrong with you?”

  She took geology, anthropology, political science, hand weaving, calculus, astronomy, poetics, physics, studio art, journalism, zoology, Restoration drama, chemistry, and abnormal, adolescent, and Freudian psychologies, among others, enjoying all.

  Her statistics teacher told her there was a vital, physical beauty to a well-wrought equation, like that of a painting or a poem. “Numbers are my first language,” he said. Jem felt that way about people; she was a natural listener. If she could have, she would have stayed on in college, reading about emotion and motivation. Yet she chose a major in psychology almost by default, by adding up the number of credits she’d accumulated in each area. She somehow assumed that her career would fall naturally into place.

  When classes came to an end, Jem graduated without a plan or a husband, so Melvie insisted that their father arrange a job for her sister in the same hospital where he worked and she was candystriping. “Temporary, till you go back to school and get a useful degree.” Virtually every year after that, Melvie insisted that Jem fill out graduate school applications. Jem would get through the whole process of transcripts, tests, and essays, then become discouraged at the last moment and throw out the application.

  “You like me, bambino,” Matussem said from his La-Z-Boy whenever Jem fretted over her lack of planning. “Your mind all wide open, you hears too much, you hungry for whole big, crazy world.”

  “But it’s ridiculous,” Jem answered. “All that time in college and I never actually thought about what I’d do with it after I left. And I stay in a terrible job in the meantime. How did I get this way? Why aren’t I more like Melvina?’”

  “Bambino,” Matussem said, “the world need of only one Melvina. And one you.”

  AFTER CHANGING HER mind for the fifth time that day, Jem slipped her notice onto Portia’s desk while she was on lunch break, then returned to her own desk and stared at the piles of filing left to do. She tried to imagine what would happen to her after she had left the office for good, but all she could come up with was Gilbert’s old broken dream, the West, white deserts, cactus, temples made of salt. The place, he had said, of escape.

  She remembered going to Palmyra, to the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, an event her mother had enjoyed. Hill Cumorah, sixty miles from Syracuse, was a sacred place, where the Angel Moroni presented Joseph Smith with tablets containing the Book of Mormon. The Mormons reenacted this event in a brilliant pageant. Every summer, Jem’s family would pack blankets and a picnic lunch and drive to Palmyra along with Aunt Fatima and Uncle Zaeed. But the events of the day were so plain and regular, even in celebration, that they mingled in her mind, echoing each other. It was all one day, one pageant, when they would pull into the dusty town with its sparse taverns and shops, desolate as Euclid. Jem marveled at all the license plates from Utah; she’d been acquainted with only the occasional Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Ontario plates speeding through upstate. She remembered pointing them out to Melvina who, though just a baby in her mother’s arms, still looked at the plates with her stern and disapproving baby stare, as if condemning the impracticality of people making such a long drive.

  They’d spread blankets and lawn chairs among hundreds of other picnickers all along the incline of the hill. The afternoon would be taken up with eating and sunning, while pageant organizers and church officials fanned out across the hill, handing out pamphlets, information, and copies of the Book of Mormon. Her father always made sure to get a new copy—each of which he’d store on a special shelf in the basement. At the pageant, he would read aloud from his book, words that Jem remembered as arcane prophesy.

  He and his brother-in-law Zaeed would comment on American theology, arguing over fine points and appreciating what they found good.

  “You’ve got to admire a religion whose guru is named ‘Joe Smith,’” she remembered Zaeed saying. “It’s like calling your god ‘Joe Blow’ or ‘John Q. Public’ or ‘Omar the tent-maker.’”

  Fatima painted Jem’s stubby nails the same color as her own long, lustrous ones. Dragon Lady Red. Jem showed the shining red tips to her mother and sister. Her mother was nursing Melvina and as Melvie eyed Jem’s nails over the slope of the breast it seemed to Jem that if she’d stopped sucking she would have said, “Too garish. Take that stuff off.”

  Jem roamed around the hillside by herself, picking her way among burr, hollyhocks, and thistle. Her mother had taught her the names of trees and flowers. She’d told Jem, “You should learn about the place where you live. It’s like knowing the color of your friends’ eyes.”

  Though quiet, she was curious about other children. She would canvass the hill, sometimes coming upon caches of luminous towheaded children or sunset redheads who all talked a language that sounded half-melted to her, as if they held the words inside their mouths a long time and parted with them grudgingly, conversing with little more than a slow “Howdy,” or an “Is that right?”

  One time some children pointed out slips of white fabric at their parents’ wrists and ankles. These, they told Jem, were called “garments” to be worn under clothes at all times; they were full-body casings to keep the flesh sealed away and pure. Their baths had to be performed in stages to keep as much of themselves covered as possible. The garment wearers’ children, however, were quite eager to expose themselves, boys named Jeremiah, Joshua, and Job, and their sisters, Rebekah and Ruth.

  While the adults were reciting scripture, the children would run to the trees at the base of the hill where they would partly unlace and undo, and display their private parts. Jem was always more impressed by the names these children gave their privates than the parts themselves: she still remembered “my wangle-do,” “tin whistle,” and “Sailor John,” for the boys, and “sweetie-pie,” “wah-wah,” and “Aunt Betty,” for the girls.

  Jem remembered little of the pageant itself, beyond nestling into her mother’s lap as the dusk faltered and the colored spotlights began to dash the mountaintop. Melvina was perched on their father’s lap, following the lights with a close, shrewd eye, skeptical as a theater critic. Jem could not remember ever hearing her sister cry and she could scarcely recall her sleeping either. But she remembered quite a bit of those black baby eyes being sharply watchful over a world that, to Melvie, required attention and governance. She was a guardian angel, Jem thought, mysterious and potent as the Mormons themselves.

  Jem remembered the palm of her mother’s hand soothing her forehead; footlights; men moving in colored gowns; a thumping hide-covered drum; turning, seeing the pasteled spectacle in Melvie’s eyes. They shared only a few years of this, until everything slipped away in Amman, their mother’s bed sheets reflected on the bitter drops of her sister’s eyes.

  ALL AFTERNOON THE back of Jem’s neck was prickling. She took extra care with her filing: ten minutes work she stretched to an hour. The electric stapler bit her carbons at exact right angles, papers were bedded perfectly in folders. She restrained herself from consoling patients over the phone with false promises of understanding and forbearance. She knew her co-workers clamped down on late payers, trapping them in debt, threatening ruined credit, dispossession, and general devastation. Jem felt guilty every time she told a weeping patient not to worry, that everything would be “just fine.” Their desperation was suffocating; she grasped at lies, the abatement of despair, fairy dust.

  “A rock and a hard place,” she’d say to herself. “It’s you or them, Jemorah, sink or swim.”

  The shadow of Portia was upon Jem. She dared not stray one inch from the Way of Johnson-Crowes Hospital, which was to reveal nothing at all times, with
out favor or mercy. “I can’t help you, but if you give me your name and number, I’ll give a message to your patient rep,” she said to each hysterical caller.

  She knew Portia would be coming for her. The anxiety was contagious: people seemed to move in slow motion, speaking over great distances from each other. All afternoon Jem was on best behavior, but as the hours passed she felt increasingly like a traveler in the snow. She thought of saying to the women, “I can’t make it. Go on without me.” But she saw in their eyes that they were already miles away. By three, a thing like freezing had overtaken her and she lolled in her chair in a stupor. The filing was all done, and the only thing left was to answer the phone and look busy, but even that was beyond her. The phone, for once, had stopped ringing, and even though she knew it would enrage Portia, Jem slipped off her shoes, stared out the window, and a wide, blank wasteland filled her mind. Across this surface, she saw faint buttes and canyons; she saw butter-lipped children; she felt the gentling of a hand across her forehead; then quickly the hand melted into a shadow. Jem turned and looked up at Portia Porschman.

  Portia’s lips began to move in almost imperceptible degrees and it would be an eternity—Jem knew—before any sound came out at all. Jem tried to decide what her defense should be in case Portia flung her notice back in her face. She rehearsed the words, “You can’t stop me, I—quit” a few times, then considered singing out, “‘Take this job and shove it,’” then went back to “I quit.” She hoped that Portia wouldn’t say anything so devastating that Jem would be too frightened to leave. But then when the sound finally caught up with the movement of Portia’s lips, Jem heard her saying, “Jemorah Ramoud, isn’t it? You remind me of your mother. How long have you been with Johnson-Crowes?”