“You look like a genie,” I said nervously.
He lifted his arms skyward, his fingers fluttering, his loose black sleeves billowing like wings.
“Shubbaik lubbaik, ana bain edaik,” he chanted in a low, melodramatic voice, furrowing his brow and widening his eyes at the same time, pinning me in his gaze.
Your wish is my command.
Suddenly the regal Arab before me was gone, replaced by a cartoon Arab, a Disney character on a magic carpet. Now he was a dark bad man in an Indiana Jones movie, part of the hypnotized throng who prayed on all fours to the evil lord of fire, chanting mumbo jumbo and raising their backsides into the air. Or he was the bloodthirsty Libyan hell-bent to slaughter the brilliant scientist in Back to the Future, the one who careened through the mall parking lot in a VW bus, his checkered head cloth snapping in the wind as he sprayed gunfire like rain onto the asphalt.
His laugh was contagious. I drew my knees up to my chest and began to giggle, but his spell over me was only partly broken. He was no genie; he was my friend and my lover, and we were laughing together in his small apartment on a late Sunday afternoon. But part of me was still caught up in a feverish dream in which he was a genie sprung from a bottle, whose only purpose was to grant me my heart’s desire. He was the tall, dark stranger who with a word or gesture could make me beautiful and happy, make my life meaningful and whole. I had been in search of a savior and dreaming some version of this dream for as long as I could remember, sleepwalking through every romantic relationship I had ever had. I took a deep breath. This time I would take responsibility for my own happiness; all I needed was a companion to join me on the adventure.
3 New Life
I stood in the bathroom of Ismail’s apartment, staring in disbelief as a thin pink line appeared on my pregnancy test like a fault line beneath my feet. We had only been dating for a few months. I vaguely recalled having missed a pill or two sometime before, but I had assumed I was protected nonetheless. How could I have been so cavalier about the risk of pregnancy, after having witnessed the consequences of such behavior over and over again? I sat down hard on the cold tile floor.
Ismail was at work. To occupy myself until he got home, I did several loads of laundry at the Laundromat, which was empty except for a slow-moving woman in stained sweatpants and her two children. Her toddler careened around the room, screeching and banging the dryer doors as hard as he could. The baby sat on his mother’s lap and stared at me, drool running in rivulets down his chin and into the fat creases along his neck. A green line of snot snaked from his nostrils to his mouth while his mother stared at the linoleum floor.
That evening I told Ismail I was pregnant. He sat down on his couch and cried, whether from elation or dismay I couldn’t tell. I sat next to him and awkwardly rubbed his arm. I did not know what to do with a crying man. Later we sat out on his back steps, watching the darkness overtake the woods. He seemed both excited and wary, and he studied my face for clues about where I stood. Mostly he communicated through physical gestures: stroking my back, squeezing my fingers just enough for me to feel his strength but not hard enough to make me feel constrained. He brewed me some tea, and together we watched the steam rise from the cup and disappear into the blue-black sky.
I’d always imagined I would have a child one day—after I’d been married for years and my young, successful husband and I had grown tired of traveling, and hosting dinner parties for our smart and stylish friends. I’d have an established career and a home office where I’d compose thoughtful essays while my parents and in-laws, who each lived nearby, took turns babysittng our child.
In my journal, I wrote down a quote from W. H. Auden: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”
In the days that followed, I weighed the possibilities over and over. I’d just been awarded a fellowship to work abroad the following year as a broadcast journalist. Terminating the pregnancy would mean I could maintain my independence, travel the world, and pursue my career. Having a baby would mean trading this prestigious opportunity for women’s most ancient work: childbearing. I’d be pregnant and unemployed, far from family, possibly a single mother. If Ismail and I stayed together, I’d be raising a child with a man who was fifteen years older than I was, whose small apartment was pungent with strange spices, who spoke so passionately that I often felt he was yelling.
My formerly carefree relationship with Ismail felt suddenly heavy, weighed down by the decision before us. We continued to run along the dirt trails together in the mornings. One day we wove in and out of a dense thicket of scrub pines, falling into single file where the path narrowed, then jogging shoulder to shoulder where it widened again. Without warning, Ismail broke his gait and turned to face me.
“What exactly are you looking for in this life?” he asked, struggling to catch his breath, his eyes searching mine. “Love? Freedom? Family? Adventure?” He raised his voice and swept his arms toward me, palms upward, as if balancing my fragile future in his outstretched hands. “Don’t you see? It’s all here in front of you. Right here. Right now.”
I stared at him. Beads of sweat trickled from his hairline, past the deep wrinkles that framed his intense, nearly black eyes. His threadbare cotton T-shirt, stained dark with moisture, drooped from his shoulders. All around us scrub pines stretched toward the light, their brown trunks as scrawny as children’s arms. The thick, damp air clung to me. In the distance I heard the sound of traffic. This is not how my life is supposed to be, I thought.
Over the next few weeks Ismail and I stepped carefully across the fault line of the positive pregnancy test, which now divided our past from our future. I dozed off on the couch in the middle of the day and had frantic dreams about finding crying babies everywhere—in my backpack, at the bottom of a laundry hamper, on the floor of my car. A startling heat deep in my middle woke me during the night, and I could fall back to sleep only with my belly pressed hard against Ismail’s back, the tops of my feet against his soles. Strange new sensations coursed through my body. My stomach turned at the stench of cooked fish, which hung in the air like a curse for days after we’d eaten it. I recoiled from the trace odor of mildew woven into Ismail’s sweaters, the thin smell of decay on his breath. I cried and wondered how I could possibly bring a baby into this rotting world—and then I wondered how I could possibly do anything but that.
ISMAIL TOLD ME that in the North African village where he had been raised, marriage would have been our only option and that men and women had been killed for the offense of conceiving a child outside of wedlock. His casual conversation was always peppered with references to Allah: God willing, the weather would improve. Thanks to God, he had gotten over a cold. But now he held me squarely by the shoulders, looked into my eyes, and told me he would accept whatever choice I made—and I believed him, even though we had been dating for less time than it would take to carry this pregnancy to term.
I knew well what a woman’s options were in California, but I hadn’t yet familiarized myself with the medical resources in North Carolina. I went to a local clinic, where I sat in a small office with a young woman who popped her gum as she took my medical history. When she left the room to administer my pregnancy test, I could hear her giggling and chatting with her co-workers about her weekend. She returned to the tiny room, her face sober. She outlined my choices and asked me what I wanted to do.
It seemed like such a simple question. On the one hand, I wanted to pursue the life I had imagined for myself. But I couldn’t figure out how to measure the value of my goals against the value of this pregnancy. Was an unplanned pregnancy any less precious, mysterious, or promising than a carefully planned one? For the first time I was beginning to wonder whether the pursuit of my own desires was the best strategy in life.
I’d spent so much time thinking about my future, but now I saw that all I had was this imperfect moment: This queasiness. These full, tender bre
asts. This young woman across from me, with her bright expression. This gentle man in my life, with his musical accent, his warm hands, his tiny apartment. I’d imagined myself as autonomous, but even that was an illusion: Ismail was lodged in my heart as surely as this new life was lodged in my womb, and I would be able to extract myself from these relationships only by what felt like an act of destruction.
The young woman circled phone numbers on color-coded information sheets, tapped them into a stack, and handed them to me. I was grateful for all the alternatives available and for the fact that this choice was mine alone to make. But I did not feel “empowered.” Instead I felt brought to my knees by this burden. I knew that whatever path I chose would lead me first to grief—for the loss of the life I’d planned or for the loss of the life I carried—and that I would have to live with this decision for the rest of my life. Through feminism I’d discovered strength and ambition, but I knew little about the subtler rewards of acceptance and surrender. What gifts might come if I relinquished my expectations of how my life should be, if I submitted to my circumstances instead of trying to control them?
Alone in that anonymous office, I felt a belated rush of understanding of the women I had met in the clinic back in California: the mother who had chosen to end her pregnancy, the young girl who had chosen to continue hers. I understood that sometimes love has the power to drag us under and that there are also times when we have to dive headlong into our fears in order to find our joy. I understood that whatever choice these women made—whatever choice I made—a life was saved and a life was lost.
Soon after that, a strange thing happened. It was late in the afternoon, and I was sitting in Ismail’s apartment crying. His eyes glistened as he leaned in toward me from across the table. My exhausted, racing mind paused its endless deliberations, and in his unwavering gaze I saw a love as vast as an ocean. I could see that it was big enough to contain my fears and regrets, big enough to embrace whatever choice I made. In the silence that stretched out between us, I felt my fears begin to recede, and in their absence I recognized different emotions: gratitude for this man and awe for this mysterious new life entwined with mine. Though it would seem crazy to abandon the future I had planned in such a small moment, it would somehow be enough to lead me into a future I’d never intended—or even knew how much I wanted.
MY BELLY, FORMERLY a flat expanse between my hipbones, grew round as a globe, as if I were carrying within me a whole new world. At night I lay on my back in my underwear, watching new life surface and roll against the soft walls of my abdomen, then dive back into the depths of my body, like the arc of a dolphin rolling between sea and sky. Like a figment of my imagination, I glimpsed the curved ridge of a tiny spine, the round back of a heel, a small, bony bottom. At night I dreamed of the taut skin of my belly tearing like tissue paper against the weight of this somersaulting body, of frantically tucking tiny limbs back inside as hot blood spilled through slippery fingers.
For years I had managed to freeze my body in time, to keep it as angular and lean as it had been on the cusp of maturity. Exercise was for me like prayer for the devout: a daily ritual that shaped my days, gave me a sense of purpose, purified me. I had trained my body to conform like a drill sargent controls his platoon: demanding total obedience, pushing its limits, trusting without question the purifying power of self-denial and muscle burn, as if pain itself were a form of salvation. Without my strict oversight, I believed my body would never be capable of self-governance; it would collapse into self-indulgence. I had no tolerance for its softness, its languor, its hungers, and as a result it had become strong and disciplined, my weight hovering closely around a single point like a compass toward true north.
But now my body had been infiltrated in the dark, colonized by a new life that toppled my tyrannical regime. My formerly small breasts swelled and lay warm and heavy against my skin, the areolas darkening with newfound purpose. I grew sluggish and dreamy, forgot what I was supposed to be doing or why it was so important to keep moving all the time. I contemplated a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed like it was a riddle I couldn’t solve, tried in vain to come up with a strategy for sorting and folding it, then abandoned the project altogether and curled up instead like a sleepy-eyed cat. I ate pints of ice cream straight from the carton, moaned with pleasure when that sweet cream melted across my tongue and slid down my throat. At night Ismail’s skin was my security blanket; I pressed my face into his back, greedily inhaling his scent of sweat and soap.
In the past my appetites were like stray cats outside a window, staring at me with recriminating yellow eyes. It was easy for me to ignore them and stay focused on my agenda. But now they scaled the walls of my self-discipline and clawed at me, demanding carrot cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting and thick slices of turkey on pillowy white bread, smeared with mayonnaise and slabs of avocado. Eating was no longer something I could do while driving a car or walking or reading or talking on the phone—like lovemaking, it commanded my full attention, its sensual pleasures obliterating all thought. I was becoming someone I no longer recognized: consumed with desires for food and touch and beauty and comfort, burrowing like an animal deep into its nest.
4 Joining the Tribe
We should get married,” Ismail said one night. He lay on his back in the dark, speaking to the ceiling. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if marriage were a durable piece of furniture we should purchase to fill an empty space. Guest lists and honeymoons were not on his mind; instead he was thinking about health insurance and property rights and my protection in case anything happened to him.
Weddings did not hold the same sway over him as they did for me. He had never slipped a wedding dress onto a Barbie doll, then marched her tippy-toed across the carpet beside Ken to a makeshift altar. Nor had he spent countless hours on the playground playing fortune-telling games that pivoted on two questions: whom would I marry and how many kids would I have? He had not sat cross-legged on a carpet in front of a television set, glued to the screen as Princess Diana swiveled her delicate wrist at an adoring crowd on her wedding day.
I was nine years old the summer of her spectacular ceremony. Watching the wedding on TV, I was transfixed by the sight of a horse-drawn carriage pulling up to a cathedral. A princess emerged from a gilded door in a billowing white dress like buttercream frosting, big dollops of white decorating her slender white shoulders. This was no Disney movie; this was real life. With her shy smile, Princess Diana tilted her head demurely to show her gently feathered hair. Her straight-backed prince with his broad, ornamented chest held out his arm for her. She put her arm in his, and they turned their back on us, floating away into happily ever after.
As far as I could tell, Ismail was not burdened with fantasies of happily ever after. He had never stood in a tight cluster of women wearing matching, unflattering pastel-colored dresses, laughing awkwardly about the ritual toss of the bride’s bouquet, then elbowing and scrambling after it when it was launched into the air. Instead he had tussled over UN rations tossed from the truck that came through his village once a week; he’d watched neighbors walk away with pockets bulging with canned food, while he went home with none. He had gone hungry when a drought destroyed a season’s crop, seen young siblings die, and nearly lost his own leg to an infection because he lacked health care. Instead of unspooling fantasies about the future, his imagination produced vivid scenarios of hard times. He knew how quickly life could take a turn for the worse, so he wanted me to be prepared: to have health insurance, own half his home, be protected in case of emergency. For him, getting legally married was as practical as having a first-aid kit in the bathroom.
Every time he suggested marriage I snarled at him like a cornered animal, as if he had just flatly stated I should walk several paces behind him or ask his permission before I leave the house. I had already lost so much control. I had gone from being a single woman with a promising future to being pregnant, unmarried, and unemployed—to spending my weekdays lounging on the fr
ayed couch of his tiny apartment in sweatpants, listlessly watching my body change as if it were a nature show on television. Terrified by the prospect of motherhood, I was still coming to terms with being married to the child I carried. I often woke in a cold sweat from frantic dreams of trying to claw my way back into the past. I balked at losing any more autonomy. His practical approach to domestic partnership seemed tragic. Marriage, I imagined, was about being swept into one’s future on a gushing current of love and desire. Instead I was growing heavier by the day, gravity pinning me to this new reality.
BUT HE WAS RIGHT; I did need health insurance. At home in the middle of the day while he was at work, I looked around me and realized I wanted this home to belong to both of us; I wanted to claim its oak floors and painted-shut windows, the clover spreading through the overgrown grass, the creaking rocker, and the lazy, swirling fan on the porch. So I agreed to go to the courthouse with him—in secret, just the two of us. I insisted that the papers we signed would not mean anything to me—that only a real wedding, with a dress and a cake and music and a party with loved ones, would bind us.
On a weekday morning we drove to the county seat in Hillsborough, a small town with a sleepy main street and an old-fashioned courthouse. A woman shaped like a wedding cake sat behind a narrow desk: her fair, round face stacked onto her white neck, above a broad, spongy bosom that gave way to a buttercream middle. She slipped forms across the counter for us to complete—boxes to check, numbers to provide, blank spaces to fill in, and signatures to authorize in order for our love to be processed and packaged into legal responsibilities and financial benefits.
My Accidental Jihad Page 3