She had no idea what the answer to this question was. Neither did she have any idea what, if anything, Portia had accepted as an answer. All Jem knew was that in the next moment she was presented with the round of Portia’s back, like the dark side of the moon, receding from her into the orbits of the outer offices.
THE NURSES WERE laughing. They slung their arms around the backs of their chairs in the Won Ton à Go-Go, threw their heads back, hair slipping free, and laughed.
Even Melvie was laughing. She had gotten rid of Snow White that morning, a lawn ornament that had been giving her particular difficulty, yet the one that had perched, black bobbed hair and all, on their front lawn the longest. “I think there was some kind of Freudian mother-substitute syndrome thing going on with me and Snow,” she had told Jem, who’d spotted the bare section of lawn on her way to work. “I felt guilty about taking her, yet she was in the poorest taste of all. I’m afraid I might have been slipping, possibly even forming an attachment. Her removal was a test of character. It’s a mistake to let such nuisances take hold. You’ll always regret it. It’s a character flaw that’ll spread wide open like leprosy, once you let it get started. You’ve got to cut it out at the root!” She slashed her hand through the air and Jem could see Snow White beheaded, the black bob tumbling across the lawn.
Melvie continued using this gesture as they all sat around the table and she began grimly describing a recent patient-episode. “I kept saying ‘Stop it! Stop that unholy din this minute!’” Melvie sliced at the air as if she could carve the noise out of it. “And she just stood there, right in the middle of gerontology, hanging on her broom and bawling like a cow—”
“That’s Missy, I’m telling you,” the young nurse, Hazel, said. “She’s like that sometimes.”
Missy was a hospital custodian. Her real name was Corinne, but she called herself Missy. Jem often watched the custodians, trying to decide if they had a better job than she did. She felt at times she was an unhappy impostor at her desk, meant to be out swabbing the floors with the others. Her father had begun work at the hospital by scrubbing commodes and washing laundry, and Jem felt that this was her legacy. She didn’t fit in; she was too restless and curious, all wrong for a carpeted office. Jem saw a version of herself in Missy’s eyes, alone and roving through places where she didn’t belong. The custodians wore white like the nurses, only their uniforms were grayer, stained, and wilted. They were almost always African American or Cuban, or had bodies in various states of extremity, intensely thin, or, like Missy, loosely rolling with fat. Missy was also mentally retarded.
Jem liked Missy because she could sustain a steady, chirping stream of conversation, whether anyone was listening or not. She called everyone she met “Honey bunny.”
“Honey bunnies! Honey bunnies!” she’d call out when she entered the business office to empty trash at day’s end. Mostly the women ignored her, but Jem was helpless before Missy’s advances, and, understanding this, Missy would rush to Jem’s desk first.
“How is Honey bunny? Missy’s fine, she’s working today,” she would say, always referring to herself in the third person. “Did Honey bunny work hard? She looks pretty today.”
Missy never bothered with yesterday or tomorrow or anything outside of today. She seemed to approach the job as her life’s appointed round, a natural circle. She would clean all evening and return the next day to the same disarray, an eternal task. She carried out her chores with efficiency and an eye to detail. Matussem told Jem that sometimes the custodians’ supervisors would put pennies in the corners to test the painstakingness of their employees and that Missy’s pennies were always gathered.
Then, Melvina said, late yesterday afternoon, Missy suddenly buckled over her broom and began lowing like a cow.
“When I finally got her to quiet and talk, she told me she had to go to the bathroom—” Melvina said.
“Oh no—” Hazel said. “Not…”
Melvie nodded. “We helped her into a stall, fool that I was for not seeing it right away—she was just making such a racket and who would’ve thought Missy—anyway, we sat her down and sure enough she started having it in the toilet—”
“Having what?” Jem asked.
“A baby!” the nurses shouted in unison, then laughed; Melvie folded her arms and frowned.
“We got her onto a table and she finished delivering right there.”
“Popped right out,” Harriet added. “Slick as a weasel. Poor thing was already half-drowned hanging upside down in the toilet. But it came back with a good loud scream.”
“She’d had no idea what happened,” Melvie said. “She didn’t know she was carrying, she didn’t know the father, she didn’t know how she got pregnant. When we gave her the baby she said, ‘Look, a puppy.’”
Jem was silent. She distantly heard the nurses speculating on the tones of the baby’s skin and on potential fathers, ranging from Elroy in linens to Jésus in security. She thought then that this was not the universe her little sister would have organized. God had to be someone like Gilbert Sesame, King of the Wiseacres, ruler of the gaming board, who kept them all placing bets, thinking they could still come out ahead, while he laughed up his almighty sleeve.
Chapter 18
ON THE NORTHEAST corner of the intersection, Ricky Ellis worked, hidden in the back of Lil’ Lulu’s Garage. Draped with oil, he would sometimes slide out from under a car, eyes moving from the dark of repair work to that of the garage. He would get up and start walking around the pumps and up into the fields behind the station. He would step on thick berry briars and branches and deer droppings and push aside the maple limbs. He would come almost to the edge of the field and stop, cloaked by bushes and night. He would stand silently, watching Jemorah Ramoud folded into her lawn chair, eyes closed, or taking down laundry with the grace of a jinni.
“OKAY, NOW IT the creation, the destruction, and the meaning of world as in big eyes of Mat Ramoud, big, big Daddy Ramoud!” Matussem shouted into the microphone, swirling a snare brush around on the surface of the drum. It shivered, alive, and Matussem hunched forward as if about to play upon the backs of jungle beasts.
Fergyl was working out a saxophone riff on his Hammond organ, which Owen and Jesse refined and outlined on bass and maracas. This was the band’s specialty: rhythm, supercharged rhythm springing from the tips of Matussem’s sticks, rhythm that conjured up trees and swinging vines, waves and palpitating wings.
“Calls me Big Daddy,” Matussem chanted on. “I am Père, Abu, Fader, Señor, Senior. Call me Pappy, Pappa, Padre, PawPaw, Sir! I big Arab coming at you, guy, flying in towel, fifty thousand mile a second. Come down from big daddies of time, of Cozy Cole, Coltrane, and Charlie Bird Parker. I honk, I roar, I do shimmy shimmy on kitchen floor! A million big daddies from all time and more right here, starts here in juicy jazz and America the beautiful, the fat, the big eater, peripatetic, so on, so on. You got the picture.”
It was just rehearsal, down in the Ramouds’ rec room. Matussem would never have said all that in public, even in a public as laid back as that of the Key West Bar. But he knew his patter tickled Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl, who, he figured, didn’t get all that much fun out of life working at the garage with the Cyclops-boss.
Fergyl tried a little aberration on the actual organ keys before retreating to the safety of pushing the sax button. It was the kind of attempt that would move the patrons at the Key West to stamp their feet and let go two-fingered whistles. Inspired, Matussem bellowed: “Call me Big Daddy! I’ve got a car and two daughters, I’m free! Is my life’s work, is the work of the world, is nice work if you can get. My greatest work, a father! Now for fathers out there in fatherland, a little song we’re making up as we go, I call ‘Big Daddy’!”
Uncle Fouad groaned loudly. He’d already extended his ten-day visit and now seemed to have no plans to leave. He lolled in a chair in the shadows, emitting terrible groans from time to time.
“This goes out to my two beyootiful daugh
ters, ach du liebe, Augustin, they are cute! And to the favorite movie star of Big Daddy Ramoud, who is Myrna Loy!”
“I’m bored,” Fouad rumbled from the dark. “Ya’Allah! So boring!”
Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl snuck glances toward the corner. Fouad was almost completely cloaked by shadow, making him more menacing. He shifted his weight in tidal movements and threw his hands out, projecting like H. G. Wells. “I say, this is boring!”
Matussem laid into the drums and said, “Let there be air!” and tried to bring about gusts and winds, gales and rolling monsoons of drumming. To appease Fouad, he shouted, “And these also go out to some fabulous type guy, my wild, out-of-control brother-in-law, Wildman Uncle Fouad. Lets the rains come, lets heaven open the basement door and sees what we cookin’, let’s soak it up you ding dong, yabba dabba doobies!”
From Fouad’s corner came a moan, thin and dry as from the crypt. “I’m too bored to be true,” he said. “You guys are suck. We have back home twenty, thirty times good as this. In the Old Country sound like music, not like here, like gas pipes.”
Owen stopped playing and stared at the ground. Matussem knew he wanted to ask why Fouad didn’t just go back—what all the Ramoudettes had been grumbling for the past week whenever Fouad’s back was turned. Instead, though, Owen looked teary eyed. The rest of them stopped playing, too.
“Now look, Uncle Fouad,” Fergyl began, then looked toward Matussem.
Matussem pretended to be studying a ceiling fixture. Fouad’s mere presence was as oppressive to him as the jinni-heavy lamp had become to Aladdin. Fouad’s personal hobby was cultivating guilt and penance. Ever since Nora’s death, Fouad had made sidelong comments, used furtive, needling questions: How was her typhus caused? How might it have been prevented? Nora must have had a sickly constitution after all. The message that Matussem tried to ignore was that he’d been wrong to marry an American, that it was time to marry again, an Arab this time. Still, the mystery and waste of Nora’s early death took root in his heart. From seeds of doubt sprouted a garden of shame and regret, leading Matussem to question almost everything: his choice of a job, a home, a school for the girls, and, finally, a place to raise them. Uncle Fouad, hoe in hand, dug at Matussem, nurturing fear wherever the ground looked fertile. Every year he began anew. He had as many stories as Shahrazad, regaling his audience with the charms of the Old Country, while pointing out the vulgarity and all-around inferiority of the New.
“You see!” Fouad would announce at the sight of a car accident, a woman in a skimpy bathing suit, and/or a gunfight on TV. “You see the place you raises this daughters? Drugs, pimps, pushers, every kind of slime coming up through the sewers at night and taking over. In Old Country there nothing like that, just the beautiful grandchildren, dancing around your knees. Here, I don’t look out these window after sunset, jinnis and white eyes everywhere. But what do I know? I am only the uncle. And then you says you want to raise your daughters here where this winter rips the skin off your face and tears your heart out. Okay, fine, that’s a big o-kay by me!”
Now Fouad was moaning in the shadows. He curled his fingers around one arm of his chair, as if to rise, but merely groaned, “Somebody get me a Michelbo.”
“Uncle Foua-ud, Uncle Foua-ud!” Gilbert Sesame called. He clumped down the stairs, a grocery bag in each arm. “Y’all can stop torturing your family and friends now. Lookee here, look what there is—Heinekens and Doritos!” He placed each sack at Fouad’s feet like an offering, then snapped off a bottle cap and handed the bottle to him. The night after Fouad’s arrival, Gil had taken a job as Uncle Fouad’s valet and party consultant. Fouad rented Gil a room in the High Chaparral Motel and bought him a black Trans Am to chauffeur his boss around in.
“This man knows quality,” Gil said to Matussem, smoothing down his designer shirt newly donated by Fouad, only slightly worn at the elbows. “Right now he’s just cranky, see. Time for his nap.”
Since his arrival, Fouad had sought relief from chronic boredom by staying out all night and sleeping most of the day, guided by Gil, who added “Hell-Raiser Extraordinaire” to his job description. They favored a nameless strip-joint/after-hours club halfway between the Ramouds’ house in Euclid and downtown Syracuse, one of the dozen or so structures that orbited Euclid, including Grange Hall, a firehouse, dilapidated farmhouses, and a Pap’s A.M. The club—a Quonset hut with a neon light in the window—was just the kind of place where Fouad loved to smoke cigars and wrap his shirt around his head.
“Uncle Fouad and me, we’re like this.” Gil held up two entwined fingers to Matussem.
“You don’t says, my friend, Allah be praise.” Matussem and the Ramoudettes packed up and carried the beer empties upstairs.
JEM WAS SITTING at the kitchen table. “What the hells I am going to do?” Matussem said to her. “Fouad is putting out hairy tentacles and vines and roots. He’s all over the place, like invasions of the body snatcher. He’s mashing the buns-shape in my La-Z-Boy all wrong. What if he never leaves again? What if is us and Uncle Fouad and that Gilbo Sesamoon forever and forever? Ach du liebe, Augustin, my brains falling out. Let’s go to Key West Bar for escape.” He and the Ramoudettes left through the back door.
The basement door slammed and Uncle Fouad walked in and sat down. “That guy with beer. Your boyfriend Gilbo. He’s okay driver, but I don’t like him. He is a blob. A blob, I’m tell you.”
Jem nodded. “I know, believe me,” she said.
“He is like this tree-stuff you have in this country, stick everywhere he touches. And I tell him to wash my car and he doesn’t do it. He say he draw a line. What line? A blob. He leave oily lips on back of my hand.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Jem said. “He started it. I was going along for fun.”
“Yes, fun. In these country all the time this big thing. Fun.” Fouad sighed and tucked himself back on the chair. He ran one hand up and down his belly. “I’ll tell you what, Jemorah, my favorite niece, you want two thousand dollars easy?”
“That will depend on what you have in mind.” Melvina was standing in the door, arms folded across her chest. “Do tell.”
Fouad’s smile expanded, revealing a spectrum of teeth. He said, “Perfect! Melvina, I make deal, five grands for two of you.”
Melvina sat between Jemorah and Fouad and folded her hands. “State your terms, Uncle.”
Fouad nodded. Jem watched him change from uncle to businessman. He tucked in his belly and thrust out his lower jaw. “Easiest money you ever makes. As favor to my two favorite nieces. I says, be nice to your poor old Uncle Fouad and drop this blobby American boys you got here, there, everywhere…”
“And?” Melvina pressed.
“And, as you are knowing, I have many sons. All unmarried, two in especial—the oldest, Saiid and Kier, who may yet turn to be human beings. There’s no telling. We must take a wait and see attitudes. I want to get them married up good.”
“Put clearly, you want us to marry them for all of five thousand dollars,” Melvina said.
Fouad frowned, waving his hand delicately. “Tut, tut, a meeting, a little bit dinner, my dear ones, all we requires. All the rest is not here, not there. Back in home we know the scores, like Jem is in marriage emergency. Thirty years of age in months and then what. So okay, we start with trip to restaurant, maybe a little drinks, maybe you see where is Saiid and Kier on evolution scale, the rest takes care of itself.”
“Why are you bringing this sort of matter to us,” Melvie asked, leaning back, her voice cagey, “instead of speaking to our father?”
Fouad lifted his head and hooded his eyes. “Melvina, you think poor, old, miserable Uncle Fouad just falls off the banana boats? This is all New World. We know how things get done with who.” From his wallet he fanned out five thousand-dollar bills upon the table and in the same beat Melvina put her hand on them.
“All right, then. The deal’s done,” she said. “One date—five G’s. But I’m warning you, no body contact, no funny
stuff, no marriage contracts. We don’t even have to talk to them. This is free enterprise.”
“Of course so, O heartpicker,” said Uncle Fouad.
AFTER FOUAD AND Gilbert drove off in a spray of gravel to the Shake Your Booty, Jem went to hang the wash. The early summer evening was still warm and Jem moved among sheets fragrant with moisture. As she worked, her memory opened like the white sheets sliding between her fingers: rooms full of parties, Arab men in their living room in Syracuse, women in the kitchen, the air gathering the rich smoke, the black coffee, men talking, voices intensifying, and finally shouting. Fighting percolated in the air. The television was always on. The newscasters brought daily body counts, TV screen leaping through leaves, the camera sinking and leaping through whispering bushes, vines, recording the shattering sound of bullets, white explosions. Her mother was always slipping out, always in another room.
Jem remembered once when Uncle Fouad had run into the kitchen hysterical and attempted to telephone Walter Cronkite.
“Hullo? Yes? Hullo,” she remembered him shouting. “Yes, is this Walter Cronkite? No, I want Walter! Walter, Walter, is that you? Hullo, yes, Walter! I called to say that you and the entire American newspeoples are bullshit! What’s that? Yes, I say, bullshit!”
“Fouad,” her father had called from the next room. “Come back. That can’t be Walter, Walter is on TV right now, talking.”
“Yes, and everything he’s says is bullshit!” Fouad shrieked. His face was shining. “Yes, do you hear, old boy?” he shouted back in the phone. “Complete, all the way, bullshit!”
JEM SAT ON the lawn, watching sheets billow and blouses lift their arms in the breeze. The air was still warm, scented with goldenrod and ragweed and lilacs that wagged purple heads in the wind against the sides of the house. The fields were dissolving into pink twilight.
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