Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Why, thank you very much, Virginia,” Portia said, clasping one hand around Virge’s entire shoulder. “What did I tell you? My women love me.”

  “Why yessuh, yessuh, good, white massuh,” Virge said suddenly. “All us slaves is so thankful! Now Lordy, oh, Lordy, won’t you let my people go?”

  Portia didn’t move, twitch a lip, or flick a muscle. Her face turned gray; she seemed to be turning into a wall of flesh. Then Virge extricated herself from Portia’s grasp, reached over, and offered her hand, tiny and curled as a bird’s claw, to Jem. Jem took it. “See?” Virge said to her. “That’s the only thing my hand is any good for anymore, holding hands or adding up. The arthritis got it curled into the shape of my adding machine. It’s time for you to move on, before the same happens to you, doll. You better go or I’m going to, and I’d just as soon stay, what with this hand and all.”

  Melvina jerked her head at the door. “That way out,” she said.

  Slowly and with some production, Portia shut her eyes.

  Jem grabbed her pens, notebook, and address book. One of Gilbert Sesame’s telegrams slipped out, the words “My darlin’” face up. She left it on the floor. She stopped before Portia, whose eyes were still shut, then realized she had nothing to say to her. She walked, leaving a trail of silence behind. She tucked her ID into the time clock, punched out. Then she and Melvina—acting as military escort—opened the door into a slight shower washed with sun.

  “You know she’s not a such a bad sort once you get to talk to her,” Melvie said as they walked toward the car.

  “Portia? You’re kidding?”

  “Not at all,” Melvie said. “She’s got some managerial talent, I’d say, but lacks soul. Genghis Khan, you know, was an underrated manager.” She opened the driver’s-side door for her sister. “So now what?”

  “You’re not going to tell me?” Jem said, standing by the door.

  Melvie tilted back her head, drizzle on her nurse’s cap and on the backs of her lowered eyelids and caught in her hair. “No. Don’t tempt me. I’m working on personal growth this week; reducing the need to control and colonize, for today. So I relinquish all claims on your future—graduate school, marriage, Jordan, as long as you give me two weeks notice on all decisions and an option to accompany you or veto the plan entirely if it’s some unbalanced scheme.”

  “Well, I’m going home. Do you want to come along?” Jem asked.

  Melvie shook her head. “Sorry. You go, but I can’t just leave. Nursing to me is not an act of volition, of ‘free will’ if you like. It is as necessary and immediate as using my limbs.”

  “For you, maybe. Some nurses quit.”

  Melvie wagged a finger at Jem. “They’re kidding themselves. Radical self-delusion. Once you become a nurse, it’s branded into your flesh—like a tattoo—you can’t simply rub it out—”

  “In all cases?”

  “Either that or they were never nurses to begin with. False nurses, I call them, poseurs, who never really had a calling, but were lured by the status, glamour, and other worldly enticements.”

  Jem got into the car. She thought for a moment, fingers on the ignition. She started the car then leaned out the window. “What about going back to school yourself? You’d make more money if you got a graduate degree and went into nursing administration.”

  “Hah!” Melvie propped her hands on her hips. “I’m no easy-chair pencil pusher! It’s the front lines for me or nothing.”

  Jem waved, put the car in reverse, and the sky broke into beads over the windshield as she drove away.

  ON THE HIGHWAY, Jem remembered something to tell Melvie: the time they went to the amusement park in New Hampshire, when they and their mother were visiting her relatives. Jem was nine, Melvie two; it was just a few weeks before they would leave for Jordan.

  Jem had been attracted to the words “Fun House,” which sounded like a charming, candy-colored place built for children. She and her cousins, all between six and nine, wanted to go in. She remembered distantly that Melvie, a toddler who hated to be carried and wrestled with strollers, had reached both hands toward Jem and kept crying over and over: “No! No! Me, me, me!” Jem couldn’t tell if Melvina wanted to be included, if she wanted to exchange places, or if there was some other message in this. Until their mother’s death, Jem had been called Jemmy, which Melvie had shortened simply to “me.”

  When Jem entered the narrow shaft of darkness at the door to the Fun House, she saw she’d been mistaken about the place; Melvie’s voice from outside echoed back at her from every odd and crooked angle of the structure, “No, no, no!” The sound didn’t fade until the children had walked to the interior recesses. Jem had little recollection of the house itself: sweeping plastic spiderwebs and dangling tarantulas, people in warts and peaked hats jumping out at them. What she did remember clearly was walking, suddenly, into a room of shifting blue lights; nothing else was in the chamber but black walls and blue lights, soft and suspended in the room. It gave her an enchanted feeling, like sleeping in the snow, and if her cousins hadn’t been with her, she might have forgotten about the rest of the house and hung back, captured by the lights.

  She pressed forward with the rest and stepped out of the room of blue lights into a place with no light at all. It was separated from the other room by a heavy, swinging door which, as they entered, flashed a blue beacon in, briefly illuminating the other place; Jem thought she saw faces, tongues, and staring eyes, covering the walls around her. Then the door shut behind them, snuffing out every particle of light and the flash-lit faces.

  It was a darkness more thorough than she’d ever experienced before; darker than anything she could have imagined. It seemed thick, like water, a substance that would float her away. The other children put out their hands, they laughed and cried out, “Oh!” and tried to find their way to the next room. Only there were no doors out. Jem ran her hands over the smooth surfaces; there was no crack, not a breach or flaw in the walls that went on, seamless and smooth as a womb; the children moved around and around, finding that the door through which they’d entered was gone. It was as if none of it had ever existed, not the door, not the sign outside, the dancing letters laughing out the words Fun House. The outside world disappeared.

  Someone began to whimper, and then it rose like a wind in their ears; one by one, automatically, they joined in, crying, climbing to full-scale wails. Jem couldn’t remember how long it went on; she had lost herself in crying. Noise and darkness went on and on, full and keening with lost souls.

  The next thing she remembered was hearing an even more piercing sound, a voice, “no, no, no!” cutting right through the crying. As it grew louder and closer, the children gradually quieted. Jem’s mother and baby sister appeared in a rectangle of intense blue that opened from a corner. Melvie was clamoring in her mother’s arms, trying to snatch the flashlight away from the fun-house employee with them, never once ceasing her alarm: “No, no, no! Me, me, me!” When she finally spotted Jem in the ribbon of blue light she quieted down and said with two-year-old weariness, “Oh, there you are.”

  “We went looking when you didn’t come out, and Melvie led us straight to you,” Nora said. “This place is a maze, but she kept pointing out the way. It was really something.”

  “Kid’s a goddamn bloodhound,” the worker grumbled, holding his flashlight away from her. “Well, goddamn it.” He switched the beam around the room while he propped the blue room door open. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Goddamn it, Hal, looks like we got a circuit out in Purgatory.”

  “Don’t swear,” Melvie said.

  Moments later something flickered and the room was bathed in a red tide of light. Now Jem could make out the writhing eyes and faces on the walls; they grimaced and moaned silently, eyes bulging. Then cousin Huck said, “Hey, look here!” and pointed to the words Push Me painted squarely in the center of a yawning mouth. He did and the apparently seamless wall swung open to the next chamber. “Neat-o,” he said, the tra
ces of his tears now barely noticeable in the half-light. He walked through.

  The man offered to escort Jem the rest of the way with a flashlight, but she shook her head, taking her mother’s hand and allowing Melvie a fistful of her shirt. They walked back to the entrance from which she’d started.

  Jem wanted suddenly to thank them for that rescue. Gratitude, love, and regret all rushed at her, like the beating of wild wings, the feeling that her mother had been there, pressing her hand for just the briefest moment. The thought came to her that she always tried to suppress: Not fair! To have had so little time with her, no time to show her love or remorse for whatever bad might ever have been between them. Jem missed her then so fiercely that her eyes burned and it felt like something was torn out of her.

  There was no way to bridge the space. It could not be covered by travel or in the course of a love affair, not even in marriage. The space was inside her now, she could feel it, a thing to be valued, the edges of her loss. Jem looked into the sky, its canopy of rain, and thought of a pair of bright wings that might enter the gap and lift her thoughts up high, a love letter on every point of water, filling the distance. Even if it were only to come to the solitude, silence, and the gentle foundering of the body into the earth, even if it were only that. So be it. Take my thoughts to her, Jem thought, let her know.

  Chapter 35

  WHEN JEM GOT home that day she heard the television before she opened the front door. The house rippled with laughter and jingles. She entered quietly, trying to stay calm as she turned up the staircase, following the unearthly sounds. Melvina was still at work, and their father was in Jordan. As she entered the living room her eyes went to Matussem’s recliner, which was not empty. Its back was turned toward her so she could only see the top of a head. The TV was showing a rerun of The Donna Reed Show, gray-and-white characters gliding about the screen.

  She stopped where she was, first blank with confusion, then fear began to liquefy in her bones. She started to back up and had just about made up her mind to return to the car and drive around until whoever it was had left, when the recliner creaked, a hand held up a demitasse cup, and its owner said, “Don’t you keep any decent coffee in this impossible country?”

  Jem walked around the chair to see a man bearing the unmistakable features of the Ramoud clan: black hair combed and oiled to drench the curl out of it, a soft, rising nose, and exquisitely lidded eyes—only in this man’s case there was only one eye; in the other socket was a halfhearted copy in glass, immobile and staring.

  “Nassir? Is that you?”

  “A salaamu alaikum, my betrothed.” He transferred the cup to his left hand and offered his right. “You don’t mind if we don’t do the kiss-kiss, do you? After all, we’re in your country now. I’d like a vacation from sentiment Middle-Eastern style for a while.”

  Jem took the cup from him. “So Auntie Rein wasn’t kidding,” she said, her mind winging, wondering, what have I done?

  Nassir was pushing the recliner levers and twisting around. “How far back does this baby go? See, that’s what makes this country great—your chairs go farther back than ours. Marvelous! They do all your relaxing for you.” He straightened up in the chair and looked at her. “Yes, indeed, Granny is a great kidder. That’s why she lasts like she does, laughs while the rest of the family cries themselves to death. Her favorite movie is Zorba the Greek. She tells everyone that she and Anthony Quinn are goddamn cousins, such an incorrigible liar.”

  “Uh, excuse me one moment,” she said. “I’ll go get the coffee.” She went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. “Code red,” she whispered to Melvina. “Family alert.”

  She made the coffee and brought it out with a little dish of cardamom and saccharin pills.

  “Good. Foamy on top,” he said, tipping the black sludge in his demitasse. “So either the family is suffering from mass hysteria—which happens—or you, little cousin, actually took it into your head to announce your intentions to marry me, leave the world behind, and go live where the girls wear long skirts and Liz Taylor-as-Cleopatra eyeliner. Come now, my dear, tell me what the truth is.”

  Jem kept a wary gaze on this man as she stood before him. He was around her own age, certainly not bad looking, even with the glass eye. There was a rakish slant to his smile that interested her. She realized then she was scrutinizing him like a head of cauliflower in the grocery store and sat down, quickly, across from him. “Well, yes, I may have said such a thing, something like that,” she said, now studying her nails. “Who knows? Maybe I even meant it, do you think?”

  Nassir waved both his free hand and coffee cup at her. “Please, please, please, I implore you, Jemorah, keep your wits about you. We’re both adults, both Christians of a sort; I think you need to reattach to your sense of reality. Remember, my betrothed, the family is a cult organization. In two days they’d have you shaving your head and mumbling to yourself in a bed sheet if you let them. That’s what the game is all about: how not to give in!”

  Jem looked at him; she knew he was reminding her of something important, something she had known all along and quite well. He was balancing the tiny cup on its saucer, dropping in saccharin pill after saccharin pill. His skin had a golden cast, and the black-etched droop of his eyes reminded her of a gazelle.

  “There, there, dear one,” he said. “You mustn’t forget, I am, indeed, on your side.”

  JEM AND NASSIR were sipping coffee, reminiscing over the few weeks of their childhood together, when Melvina and Fatima burst through the downstairs entrance together. “Nassir? Habeebi, Nassir?” Fatima’s trill rolled up the steps before her. “Come to me, oh, my little baby, oh, my precious one!” she cried, running in, grabbing his cheeks, and kissing him over and over.

  “Guess what. This is our cousin Nassir,” Jem said to Melvina.

  Melvie stood by scowling, arms folded over her chest. “The one Rein wants you to marry.” She turned to Nassir. “How do we even know that he’s who he claims to be? How do we know this isn’t another one of Fatima’s setups?”

  “You wish for such things, bad girl!” Fatima said, clutching her nephew and drawing herself up. “This boy a prince among princes, may heavens protect him from acid rains of your tongue!” She turned back to Nassir. “This my nieces, Jemorah and Melvina. Both available, though Jemorah is more so.”

  “Yes, that’s the general idea, isn’t it?” he said, smiling at the women, eyes coal-bright, teeth shining in the handsome dusk of his skin.

  FATIMA RAN INTO the kitchen to make Nassir a “safe” pot of coffee, snatching the cup Jem had prepared from his hand. They could hear her opening every cabinet door and drawer, happily singing in Arabic about the woman who washes her husband’s feet. Melvie stood a foot or so away from the base of the recliner and refused to sit or uncross her arms. “What did you say your full name was?” she asked Nassir. “What is the purpose of your visit and your final destination?”

  Fatima returned to the living room in time to see Melvina examining Nassir’s passport. “Ya’Allah, my terrible, terrible niece!” Fatima said, grabbing and pocketing the passport. “She worse than Israelis, worse than evening news. She want to crush me, so help me God.”

  “You realize, of course,” Melvie said to Nassir, “my sister is not on the marital slave block. Not yet at least. She has absolutely no intention of marrying or going anywhere with you, and if I have any say in this—”

  Fatima began ranting in Arabic about a “family curse” and being “driven through with stakes.”

  Nassir looked at Jem. “What is happening here? Did I miss something?” he said.

  “This is how they make conversation,” Jem said. “Don’t worry, you don’t have anything to do with it.”

  Clucking, Nassir climbed out of the recliner, took Fatima’s hand, and led her to the couch to sit beside him. Fatima quieted down and curled herself against Nassir like a cat. Melvie sat in the recliner and glared at them.

  “There, there, anything y
ou want, dear Auntie,” Nassir said, patting her hand. “I’ll do whatever you say, don’t torque yourself up on my account.”

  “Tell me again, exactly how much education did you claim to have received?” Melvie asked Nassir. “Were you aware that Jemorah has just been accepted to a graduate program at Stanford, one of the most important universities in this country?” she said, pointing to a copy of the acceptance letter on the mantel. “She starts week after next.”

  “Mabrooka,” he congratulated Jem. “That’s wonderful, little cousin.” To Melvie he said, “I completed my baccalaureate and graduate degrees in science and anthropology at Cambridge and Oxford respectively. I’m in this country to work on a post-doc at Harvard. I think I’ve got a résumé packed away somewhere, if you require one.”

  Fatima was smiling and stroking the side of his face. “Dear, dear boy,” she said. “Fun and games. But we knows the big reason for you to visit: to continue family name, marry my darling little baby niece and take her back where she belong, make your grandmama, my honored auntie, happy.”

  Nassir caught Fatima’s stroking hand, and as he kissed it his gaze glanced above the ridge of knuckles to the two young women seated before him. “You’ve got my credentials—or, at least, some of them—so what of yours?” He turned to Jem. “You still haven’t answered my opener—my curiosity about whatever opened this floodgate of family feeling. What was it that turned Jem the unattainable, the American cousin, back to the Old Country? What dislodged the first stone? What trumpeted outside your Jericho?”

  Melvie said, “Nothing,” as Jem said, “Everything.”

  The two women looked at each other and Jem repeated, “Everything.”

  “Ha!” said Fatima merrily. “So I says.”