After we had completed the forms, she gestured for us to sit down in a nearby waiting area, which was empty except for two young people who looked like they were playing hookie from high school. A blonde girl who had not yet lost her baby fat snapped her gum so fiercely that it sounded like a cap gun. Beside her sat a young man in a baseball cap, the brim tucked low over his face, concealing his eyes. He stretched his long legs in front of him, the knees of his blue jeans the rust color of North Carolina clay, his unlaced work boots crossed over each other. He looked like he was planning a deer hunt for their honeymoon, and they would be leaving directly from the courthouse.
We four sat in silence, contemplating the carpet, glancing now and then at one another with mutual suspicion, like people stuck together in a holding tank at the county jail—stunned at the unexpected turn their lives have taken, waiting to be released from this shame, convinced that everyone else inside is more messed up and dangerous than they are. None of us could have dreamed that our wedding day would look like this or that we would be the witnesses to one another’s marriages. I sat brooding under those fluorescent lights, silently interrogating my doubts. This sterile waiting room, with its coarse matching chairs and health pamphlets on the side table, made me feel like a patient seeking a diagnosis and a cure for this love that was wreaking havoc in my life. The stack of paperwork on the clipboard, all those checkboxes I had marked and blanks I had filled in, made my affection for Ismail seem like a loan I would be repaying later with interest.
On a side table, a woman with a black eye and a recriminating gaze stared up at me from a pamphlet, beneath the words LOVE SHOULDN’T HURT in bold, black type. I reached for the pamphlet and stared uncomprehending at those words as if they were written in a foreign language. Love like an anvil had cracked my locked heart open and unleashed an excruciating flow of tenderness. To rise to the occasion of this love was to endure the sting of daily misunderstandings and the terror of this unexpected pregnancy. There was the fear of the unknown as well as the pain of severing from my past and letting go of fantasies about my future. From where I stood, trying to imagine love without hurt was like trying to imagine the ocean without waves: without it, we would be talking about a whole different body of water, smaller and shallower and safer.
I stared blankly at the pamphlet as the final moments of my single life slipped past. Ismail held my hand in his, stroking the back of my palm with jittery fingers.
“Mr. Soo-yah?” Four heads in the waiting area jerked toward the sound of the clerk’s voice, which cut through the thick silence like a knife. She peered over her bifocals at us.
“Can you please come up to the desk, sir? I believe you made a mistake on your paperwork.”
Ismail looked confused.
“You needed to provide your mother’s maiden name here, sir—and instead you’ve provided her married name. Can you come and correct this?” She held the sheet out to him like a teacher returning an assignment to be corrected.
“It’s not a mistake,” Ismail called out across the room, without rising from his chair.
The clerk shook her head vigorously. “Are you sure, sir? How could her maiden name be the same as her married one?” The young couple and I swiveled our heads back and forth between them like we were watching a tennis match.
“Because they were cousins,” Ismail replied in a too-loud voice, shrugging his shoulders as if it were the most logical explanation in the world. The young woman beside us pursed her lips and sucked in air as if through a straw. She raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend, who jerked to attention and tipped the brim of his hat back on his head to get a better look at us.
A tense silence filled the room. All eyes were on us. We were like guests on a daytime talk show whose terrible family secret had just been revealed, and now the audience was awaiting the delicious climax of our despair.
I whipped my head around at him.
“Your mom and your dad were related?” I sputtered. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
He winced at my accusatory tone. “I’m sorry,” he turned to me, defensive and apologetic, raising his palms in supplication. “It never came up before.”
That was true. So many nights we had stayed up late, plumbing the depths of one another’s histories as if mining for gold, greedy for the riches we found there, each tiny, glimmering nugget of connection convincing us we were striking it rich. I had wanted to know everything about him—his dreams, heartaches, his secret longings and nearly forgotten memories—and I had asked him every question I could think of, but not once had I thought to inquire about inbreeding. In the harsh light of this courthouse, with my pregnant belly squeezing against my bladder, poking against my ribs, and compressing my lungs—this suddenly seemed like a colossal oversight.
“It was normal there . . . Everyone in our town was related . . . They were part of the same tribe—the Suayah tribe,” he fumbled, trying to sound reassuring, reaching out to run his hand down my back. The couple beside us were now leaning slightly forward in their seats. My borrowed maternity shirt rode up, revealing the blue-white translucent globe of my belly, which looked as if it would burst under any more pressure. The minutes stretched out, taut as that skin.
When the clerk called our name again, we went to the window and signed our names on our marriage certificates. “Congratulations,” she said with a tight, glazed smile, slipping the completed paperwork across the counter like a barista might slip us a vanilla latte to go. Then she handed me a small plastic bag, which I took without questioning, and we fled out the door.
Ismail and I did not speak on the ride home. I stared out the window at the walls of scrub pines that hemmed in this narrow road. Ismail always listened to public radio in his car, and while I usually objected to its litany of bad news, its droning analysis of the same intractable problems, this time I was grateful for the chatter. This marriage was not headline news; there were far bigger catastrophes in the world than my morning at the courthouse.
Now I was a wife. I had never liked that word—its harsh, whining sound, its implied servitude. Similarly, I had a visceral reaction to the word nurse, though I had loved everything about being a candystriper in high school: wearing the pin-striped uniform with the ruffles like vestigial wings at the shoulders; smoothing those crisp sheets tight across mattresses so that the next patient could slip between them like a letter into an envelope; pouring glasses of ice water for patients whose lips were cracked and dry. I liked to linger in the rooms of invalids who seemed to be suffering from a terminal case of loneliness, who brightened in my presence as if my company were the only medicine they required. I loved the sense of being that helpful, that needed—but the word nurse made me think of a saintly woman in white making her endless rounds allowing those in need to suckle the life from her. Her nipples might be cracked and sore, her breasts might hang flaccid at her sides—and still the comfort she offered would never be enough; eventually all that hunger would consume her. No, I would never be a nurse or a wife, I once thought—I would never be ravaged by another’s demands.
I reached into the plastic bag on my lap. Congratulations on your marriage! the leaflet read. On the back side was a business reply card, which I could drop in the mail to receive a free trial issue of a women’s home and garden magazine. The bag also contained trial-sized samples of a wife’s tools of the trade: a vacuum-packed sample of instant coffee, a single serving of laundry detergent, shiny envelopes of aspirin and antacid tablets.
I saw myself hunched over the kitchen table in a nubby robe in an empty house, after everyone else who lived there had fled the home in pursuit of meaning and fulfillment. I saw myself drinking instant coffee as the laundry machine shuddered in the background, digging through bathroom drawers for an aspirin to assuage the dull ache of missed opportunities. But then I caught Ismail’s eye, and he squeezed my hand and smiled. His gaze moved from my crestfallen face to the items in my lap and he began to chuckle, and I could not help but laugh ruefu
lly as well. Back at our house, I tossed my wedding gift bag into the garbage.
5 Expecting
Heaving my eighth-month belly before me, I hurried past the bright storefronts of the mall, holding on to Ismail’s arm with my ringless left hand and barely noticing the curious stares of shoppers who looked away sheepishly when they caught my gaze. In our small southern town, we presented a strange picture: a tall, very pregnant blue-eyed blonde in her twenties, led by a balding, dark-skinned middle-aged man with a discernible accent. I waddled on swollen ankles as quickly as I could; I was running out of time. We had driven straight to this mall from our obstetrician’s office, after her eyes had widened in surprise during my pelvic exam. “It looks like this baby is coming sooner than we expected,” she said. “Do you have everything you need at home?”
She rolled back her stool and peeled off her latex gloves, revealing the largest diamond ring I had ever seen. I stared at her hand, briefly imagining that glittering gem on my own finger, then shot a nervous glance at Ismail. The only evidence in our house that we were expecting a baby was the checkered blue bassinet in the corner of the bedroom, which we had recently purchased at a yard sale. From the moment I had discovered, to my great surprise, that I was pregnant, it felt like we had been scrambling to catch up with reality as it unfolded. I’d imagined we would spend the final month of my pregnancy preparing a nursery, but now it appeared we might not have that time.
“We’ve got everything we need,” Ismail replied with calm conviction, as if he truly believed that all a newborn needed was a mother’s milk and a father’s gentle hands. “Well, we are missing diapers,” he added, then flashed me a nervous smile.
“Pick some up on your way home,” the doctor said briskly. “Krista’s cervix is already dilating; just a few centimeters more and she’ll be in labor.”
As Ismail drove to the nearest mall, I rested my head against the window and recited a jumbled and increasingly panicked list of purchases we needed to make before my cervix yawned open another few centimeters: a crib and a changing table, a soft cotton layette and a tiny wardrobe, plush animals and hypoallergenic detergent, and a musical mobile to soothe our baby to sleep.
With one hand on the wheel and the other resting over mine in my lap, Ismail tried to reassure me. “We’ll be fine—Insha Allah.” he said, rolling that rhyming, openmouthed Arabic phrase across his tongue, the soothing murmur he added to any statement involving the future. I knew it meant “God willing,” and normally I found it endearing, but today it exasperated me. God wasn’t going to prepare our nursery; God wouldn’t help us pick out baby clothes.
“My mother gave birth to thirteen babies—each time at home—without any of those things,” he reminded me. I stared out the window and chewed the inside of my cheek. In the childhood memories he had shared with me from North Africa, the sound of his mother in labor was as familiar and constant as the sound of his Muslim father’s call to prayer. He’d told me this one night recently on our drive home from birthing class, where he had stared blankly at the words our birthing instructor wrote in capital letters on a chalkboard: BIRTH IS A NATURAL PROCESS. He’d glanced around at the expectant parents jotting notes on either side of him, then back at me with a baffled expression that said, What else could birth possibly be? But he had also told me that his mother had lost one of his siblings during birth, and four more had died in infancy or early childhood—facts that were so utterly incomprehensible to me that I had sputtered “What?” and stared and made him repeat himself.
At the mall, we made a beeline toward the drugstore, where we knew we’d find the essentials we needed. As we passed a jewelry shop, Ismail tugged me spontaneously toward the door. “You need a ring to wear into the delivery room,” he announced, squeezing my hand.
Throughout my pregnancy I had insisted I didn’t care about a ring, but when he pulled me toward the glass countertop and I looked down at row after row of glittering diamonds resting on blue velvet, I knew I had lied to both of us. My heart leapt with awe and anticipation, like a child’s on Christmas morning. For as long as I could remember, from movies, television, and magazines, I had known that only diamonds reflected the brilliant white light of true love. Over and over again I’d seen images of a beautiful woman’s eyes shining with gratitude and awe when a man presented her with a sparkling ring at least as precious and enduring as her own devotion.
It was a stretch to imagine us as beautiful or radiantly happy as couples on commercials seemed to be. Actors on the screen fit together like two pieces of a perfect human puzzle; Ismail and I, on the other hand, kept bumping against one another’s rough edges as we struggled to make our lives fit together.
Our relationship had been gestating along with the baby; for these past nine months we’d been getting to know one another in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office, at birthing class, while unpacking the boxes that contained everything I owned in his small home. During these turbulent months, the evidence had been rapidly mounting in my life that fairy-tale endings only happened in picture books. There would be no Prince Charming to sweep me away into happily ever after, only this gentle and maddening Libyan man who was totally committed to the hard labor of making a home and raising a family with me. But a small voice deep inside still insisted that the jagged pieces would fit together if I wore a sparkling gem on my finger.
I scanned the display case hungrily, my gaze landing on a square diamond in an antique platinum setting: not big enough to be ostentatious nor small enough to inspire pity. Its classic setting evoked a certain nostalgia, a purchased connection to the past. Its shimmering white platinum looked virginal, pristine. Everything about it suited me; it was perfect. The jeweler slid the case gently open in one smooth motion, as if trying not to wake me from a sleepwalking dream. Instead of handing the ring directly to me, he placed it suggestively in Ismail’s upturned palm. This was Ismail’s cue to act out the longstanding middle-class American courtship ritual.
When Ismail turned to me and slipped the ring onto my outstretched finger, the bright fluorescent lights of the jewelry store turned fuzzy and soft, the water in my ankles seemed to recede, and even his thinning hair seemed to curl with new vigor. I held my hand up to the light and saw an appendage transformed: my fingers slender, elegant, finally all grown up. Ismail was absolutely right: I needed this diamond in the delivery room—more than Ismail’s comforting touch, a supportive midwife, or my own deep, measured breaths.
“It’s very beautiful,” murmured the jeweler in a near whisper, as if it were the face of my newborn.
“How much?” broke in Ismail gruffly, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the store to hear, the voice of a man who was wide awake. The jeweler told him the price. An explosion of air burst through Ismail’s lips: somewhere between a cough and guffaw. He fixed the salesman with a broad smile that said, Let’s stop messing around and get serious now, shall we?
“Listen: I will pay you half that, in cash, and I plan to take this ring home with me tonight,” Ismail announced loudly, pounding the glass countertop with his index finger.
Silence fell as the jeweler tried to figure out how to respond. Nearby shoppers glanced furtively over at us, unsure if they were witnessing a negotiation or a holdup.
I gasped, as if water had been thrown in my face. I was painfully aware of the curious stares of other shoppers, suddenly aware, too, of the bloated fingers of my own raised hand in this harsh light, my borrowed maternity shirt creeping up to reveal the orb of my enormous belly and the stretched elastic band of my borrowed maternity pants. In the blink of an eye, Ismail had transformed my glittering fantasy of happily ever after into a nightmare of public shame.
This was not the first time Ismail’s bartering had made me intensely uncomfortable. It had happened a few weeks prior, in a cavernous rug store that smelled of incense and damp wool. A Turkish shopkeeper had unrolled a carpet with a flick of his wrist: the perfect size and color for the hallway between our bedroom and
what we hoped would become our nursery. Ismail and I had looked from the rug to one another in wordless agreement; this was just the piece we were looking for, at a price we could afford. I turned toward the cash register and dug into my purse for a credit card, expecting Ismail to load our purchase into the car.
I glanced back just in time to see him pat the shopkeeper on the back and ask, with a broad smile, what he really intended to charge us for the carpet. The shopkeeper’s eyes widened briefly in surprise, and then he smiled at Ismail as if he had just recognized a long-lost friend, even as he began to shake his head back and forth in emphatic disagreement. It was as if both men had stepped onto an invisible stage—their gestures suddenly larger, their expressions more melodramatic. For the next few minutes they hurled prices back and forth—their voices rising in anger, dropping in concession, then rising again in disbelief—until finally, smacking his palm against his forehead, the shopkeeper consented to Ismail’s price. He rolled up the rug while I stood behind Ismail feeling sheepish, flashing the shopkeeper apologetic looks and grappling with the temptation to slip him more money. The men loaded the rug into our car and shook hands. Then Ismail gestured toward my swollen belly. “Now what do you intend to give us as a present for our new baby?” he asked casually.
The shopkeeper chuckled, shook his head, and invited us back inside. He dug into a tall stack of carpets, unfolding a small brown rug intricately woven with blood red and fiery orange like the setting sun. He folded the rug and handed it to me with great sincerity and warmth, asking me to promise to return to the store after the baby arrived so he could hold our newborn.
My Accidental Jihad Page 4