You were silent for a moment, which surprised me. Somewhere inside, I knew I was revelling in the notion of, for once, being the righteous one. “For God’s sake, why don’t you shave your head,” I said.
“Look,” you said. “I haven’t figured it all out yet, and I don’t have to justify myself to you or to anyone else. But if I’m to be sexualized either way, at least I will choose my poison,” you said and turned to look at George for a moment, then Elaine and me. “And besides, what’s so special about your lifestyle: getting wasted daily, squandering your time and money on frivolous things, walking around half naked, auctioning yourselves to the highest bidder?”
“We all sell ourselves one way or another, honey. Don’t kid yourself,” Elaine said, smoothing her tight dress over her thick thighs, “whether it’s our brains or bodies.”
“Selam. Listen,” I said. “If you’re doing this to impress your mom —”
“Don’t,” you said, with a forcefulness that struck me silent.
I knew I was reaching. I took another sip of my drink. “Alright. Sorry, but with all that’s going on in the world these days, now is really not a good time to wear a hijab.”
“For some of us, being Black and female is challenging enough,” Elaine said and got up. “I think this calls for another drink.”
You sighed noisily. “When do you presume would be a good time?” you asked me.
Somewhere behind my growing irritation, a question was forming: Was your sudden interest in the veil a political stand in solidarity with practising Muslim women?
“Look,” I said, “sometimes you’re too impulsive for your own good but I can understand if —”
“Sometimes you’re too much of a coward.” Your voice was tight and cold.
Blood rushed to my head. I could smell your stubbornness, your patronizing tone. It reminded me of my parents’ scorn. I wanted to crush it. Rage blurred my vision.
“Seriously, you two have to let this go,” Elaine said. “Another beer, George?”
George shook his head and shifted in his seat.
Your voice softened. “Look. I’m sorry, but this is something I need to do.”
I knew how to hurt you. “So how does dating work for hijabis?” I said, dragging my words and looking at George from the corner of my eye. “Can you still fuck or will it have to be sanctified by some old, bearded man first now? Oh, and can you date a non-Muslim, or do you only have eyes for the intense, religious types with prayer caps and flood pants?”
Your eyes shot arrows.
“Will you require a chaperone? I know someone.” I couldn’t stop myself.
“Okay, you two, really. Chill the fuck out. You’re messing with my buzz,” Elaine said and walked toward the house.
George cleared his throat again and followed her.
We could hear a reggae remix of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” playing as they opened the back door to the house. A barrier of crushed expectations stood between us, blinding us to what we had been to each other. I watched the flames from the candles on the table tremble against the light summer breeze.
You picked up your purse and walked down the driveway. I sat there and watched you walk away until you disappeared around the corner. Then I watched the deserted street for a while until two guys came stumbling out of the house, laughing. One of them leaned against a tree that loomed over the dimly lit backyard like a bouquet of darkness.
“Tupac or Biggie?” I heard one of them ask, struggling to light a cigarette.
I knew what your answer to that age-old question would have been: Tupac. I smiled a small, private smile. A smile that could only have been shared with you. It made me miss the old you. Or more precisely, my idea of the old you. Of us.
Selam, my beautiful, indomitable Selam, do you remember how you used to laugh at the religious boys who looked at you with pity and disapproval for not covering up? And the others, the non-observant ones who followed us to the diner we always went to after the club. How they’d lecture you about eating pork, their breath still reeking from the alcohol they’d consumed without reservation. The way you bit on your greasy breakfast sausage, holding their gaze with a smirk that made them hate you and want you at the same time. I couldn’t bridge the gap between that brilliant, gutsy, and outrageous girl I knew and what I feared you were becoming: austere, closed minded. Small.
For a while I hoped your newfound passion would be short-lived and that we’d eventually resume where we’d left off. Then, when I didn’t hear from you, I started reading about Islam and the hijab. Why girls like you would seek refuge in religion, the intellectual pursuit it promises, the cultural bond it creates, the sense of meaning and purpose it provides. But I thought you and I already had these things and more. Only after your attack did I realize that my focus was misplaced. I couldn’t see past my distaste for all things religious to register my own intolerance. I was too wrapped up in my fear of losing you to try to listen to your motivations or acknowledge that your piety doesn’t negate my disbelief. I never wanted any deity — or any human being for that matter — to come between us. I wanted you and I to be like binary stars, forever linked by the gravitational force of our love for each other.
As Mark, Elaine, and I drove to your parents’ place, I braced myself for rejection. I might not be the friend she wants to see right now, I told myself, but I am the one she needs. I rehearsed my apology: “I was selfish. I said mean things. I promise to do better.” But most importantly, I wanted to tell you: “We’re all that we got.” And I hoped to hear you complete our mantra: “And that’s not a small thing.”
a kept woman
Yasmin straightens the queen-size bed as she makes arrangements to leave Ali, her husband of six years. With the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, she brushes her palms over the duvet cover on her side of the bed, ridding it of the memory of her body.
“Hey, I’m on my way,” Laura says from the other end of the line. “I had to pick up Nicky. She’s snoring in the back.”
Yasmin imagines Nicky, Laura’s twenty-three-year-old roommate, recovering from yet another night of partying, her body curled on the tattered back seat of Laura’s old Hyundai, her wavy red hair cascading down her face and onto the car floor like wine. Yasmin had been married to Ali for four years by the time she was Nicky’s age. She suddenly can’t remember where her life has gone. She turns to face the bay window. Then her eyes drift to the tall, heavy bookshelf at the foot of her bed.
Sometimes at night, in that hazy state between wakefulness and dream, she believes an earthquake has hit the city — this is San Francisco after all — and she pictures the bookshelf crashing on top of her and pulverizing her bones and those of the baby she imagines she’s carrying inside. She wakes up struggling to breathe through a constraining weight on her chest and sharp pains spreading from under her right breast toward her collarbone. The first time this happened, over a year ago, she turned to wake Ali, but she felt she was trying to reach out to a stranger, so she held back. Now that the midday sun has softened the bookshelf’s edges a little, she feels bold enough to stare at it, in provocation almost, as if her nocturnal visions have infused the furniture with Ali’s stocky, unyielding attributes.
“A’udhu billahi! Get a grip, you’re yielding to Shaidan,” her mother would have said, if she were there, clearing the air of evil spirits with Quranic words and sweeps of her unsi-perfumed shawl
Yasmin picks up her Canadian passport from Ali’s chair. His desktop computer screen and open laptop sit side by side, facing her like a black-and-white portrait of a stern couple that brings to mind her parents’ old wedding picture — the only one they’d managed to pack before they fled Somalia’s civil war and settled in Ottawa when she was ten. She grabs a backpack and a small suitcase stuffed with her clothes and takes a deep breath, gathering strength from the memory of what happened just a few hours ago.
“Get out of my sight or wallahi, I’m going to flatten your face,” Ali had said, swinging his fist so close to her face that, for a second, when she noticed the absence of pain in her body, she’d believed she must have been unconscious.
She unlocks the front door then turns back to face a large wood-framed mirror in the hallway of her small apartment. She ties her curly jet-black hair into a bun and quickly applies ChapStick on her thin lips. She looks around the room again. She detested the old, heavy furniture at first, but when they moved to San Francisco four years ago, they didn’t want to buy nice things in case Ali’s new job didn’t pan out. After a while, Yasmin found the clutter comforting. It made her feel less alone when Ali worked late or went on business trips. These days, she loathes everything: the furniture, the gurgling of the baseboard heaters, the old building’s musty air, the smell heightened and unrelenting in her mind, as though it carried tangible proof of her own inexorable decay.
She had been a first-year student at Algonquin College in Ottawa, pursuing a travel and tourism diploma when she first met Ali. She didn’t know what she wanted to do once she graduated but she relished the idea of any job that would take her away from her parents. Two years earlier, her older sister, Hodan, had gotten pregnant at seventeen and run away to Vancouver with her boyfriend. Since then, their parents had been fatalistically waiting for another blow to crush their bruised expectations. “All of that for nothing,” they’d been saying, conjuring up the memory of all the years they’d struggled in Canada as a refugee couple with no money, little education, and raising six young children. So Yasmin, the second-oldest child, was left to uphold her family’s honour and hopes for a better future.
The night she met Ali, she was at a restaurant with a friend. Ali was there: older, well-spoken, and distinguished looking in his dark suit-and-tie ensemble. In contrast to guys her age, he had steady, knowing eyes.
“In this country, you have to blend in and work hard or you’ll be left behind, doomed to slowly rot like roadkill,” he’d told her with a slightly less-pronounced accent than her parents’.
Later on that night, as she took out her hijab from her backpack and covered her head and neck with it — right before her bus turned into Alta Vista Drive, five blocks away from her parents’ house — she’d decided to marry him. He was Somali and educated, so she knew her parents would approve. Plus, he was liberal, she had deduced from their brief conversation, not the kind of Muslim man who’d impose head covering or other religious shenanigans on his wife. He was going to be her ticket out of her parents’ stifling grip and a life steeped in a miasmic fog of superstition and sorrow.
On weekends, they drove downtown for lunch at the ByWard Market or stopped by one of the food trucks on Metcalfe Street for beef or chicken burgers before they went to the Rideau Centre to window shop or see a movie.
“It’s not about religion,” Ali had said to her when she once tried to get spicy Italian sausage instead of a beef burger. “Pigs are filthy animals. They eat their own shit.” And Yasmin became someone who disapproved of pork for sanitary reasons.
Another time he said: “Alcohol is unnatural. Think about it. Have you ever seen an animal willingly drink alcohol?” Yasmin had never been around any animal to have noticed this, but it made sense, so she stopped drinking.
Once they got married, he often took her to functions and couples’ outings with his colleagues from Nortel where he worked as a software engineer. She saw pride on his face then. Her Canadian accent spoke of his integration, her youth and beauty of his status. Once in a while, on these outings, Ali would share a bottle of wine, a pitcher of beer, or a pepperoni pizza with his colleagues without hesitation.
“When in Rome,” he’d whispered to her the first time this happened. With his accent, the expression sounded off.
“You don’t have to drink,” he’d explained later. “Nobody would find a woman suspicious for not drinking, but I have to play the part. I can’t afford to stand out, at least not yet. These people wouldn’t understand.”
She didn’t attribute this justification to a weakness of character as her sister would have. In Yasmin’s eyes, this was another quality that set Ali apart from her parents. It was proof of his ability to think things through logically and strategically, and to compromise when necessary, which made her feel closer to him. She loved it when he took her to Dow’s Lake, where they’d sit in the sun and feed the ducks from their picnic basket. She would put her head on his shoulder and sigh, validated. It wasn’t what she’d been longing for since before she could ever remember. It wasn’t the passion of Love and Basketball or Love Jones she’d dreamed about in her early teens. But she found romance and certainty in these moments and in the way Ali let her hold his hand when they walked or the way he lightly kissed her forehead when he came home after she’d gone to bed.
This was before she quit school and followed him to San Francisco and before he started coming home later and later, his body looking ever more broken, as if he’d spent his days toiling in a cornfield instead of in an ergonomic chair at a highly lauded software engineering company.
“You should see those kids, Yasmin,” he’d said then, speaking of his new colleagues, his forehead wrinkling like ripples at low tide. “You’d think they were brought up on some wild animal’s milk. I have to keep up or else … ”
This was before they stopped talking, before he started looking at her with glazed eyes that made her think the sight of her aggravated his tiredness.
“Hey Jaz, I need to use your bathroom,” Laura says, bursting into the apartment. Without waiting for a reply, she engulfs Yasmin’s narrow frame in her strong arms. “Are you okay?”
Yasmin nods and points to the bathroom.
Laura runs, almost pushing Yasmin out of her way.
Yasmin’s eyes follow the back of Laura’s closely cropped, dyed-blond hair, stiff and yellow like dry grass against her dark brown skin. She gazes at her own reflection in the mirror. She tucks a few loose curls behind her ears and takes a deep breath again. Her lips curve into a tentative smile as her anxiety subsides a little, like the easing of a suffocating tropical heat. For reasons she can’t fully explain, Laura’s presence always has a soothing effect on her — something about the way Laura looks at her with conviction, the way Laura’s firm hugs make her feel solid, whole. Yasmin has not experienced this kind of easy and invigorating relationship with another woman since Hodan left home nine years ago. She wonders what her sister would think of Laura. The two certainly exude a sense of urgency toward life that seems to escape her.
Yasmin met Laura at the San Francisco Carnaval about six months ago. Leaning against a residential building in the shade, Yasmin was watching throngs of people coming and going past food booths with clever names such as Curry Up Now and Hongry Kong. Smoke from barbecue grills and Indian clay ovens danced in the sun to the rhythms of salsa, tango, and reggae music blasting from giant speakers. Everything and everybody seemed to be rubbing and colliding against each other without any need for or interest in her.
“Hey, whatcha doin’ there with all that space around you all to yourself?” Laura had shouted from a stand a few feet away. “Come and join the commotion,” she’d said, waving her tattooed arms, her dark skin shining in the heat.
Yasmin couldn’t remember the last time a stranger in San Francisco had talked to her with such familiarity and warmth. She went to Laura without any reservation, as though she was obeying a higher power. She helped Laura collect donations and sell T-shirts for a women’s shelter. And she watched her haggle and banter with customers and passersby, captivated by her loud, jovial voice and the freedom that seemed embedded in her wide, energetic movements, as though Laura had never known the weight of modesty or the confinements of womanhood. That night, back in her apartment, Yasmin looked at her own body in the mirror, stretching her arms over her head and to her sides, awkwardly pirouetting, trying to ima
gine what it must feel like to yield to your own body, to take up space as naturally as Laura did. A few weeks later she started volunteering at the women’s shelter with Laura.
“Alright, you have everything you need?” Laura asks as she comes out of the washroom, clapping her hands. “Ready to go?”
“Ready,” Yasmin says, trying to match Laura’s enthusiasm.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Laura says as she opens the front door.
“Actually, just a sec,” Yasmin says and runs back into the bedroom.
She pulls off the duvet and sheets, throws them in a heap in the middle of the bed with the pillows, and looks at the result with satisfaction before walking out of the bedroom.
“Thanks again for letting me stay at your place,” Yasmin says as the building’s heavy door closes behind them.
Here and there, splotches of a mustardy-yellow paint betray the two-storey building’s former glory; now most of it has turned a dusty brown colour. The middle-aged Mexican woman in the next building yells something in Spanish from her window. Her son, a ten-year-old with clothes big enough to fit three of him at once, runs down Cesar Chavez Street with only a wave of the back of his hand. Yasmin stares at the woman for a moment while slowly rubbing her flat belly to soothe an ache she’s just found there.
As they take their seats in the car, Laura points with her chin at Nicky’s inert body in the back seat and says, “Apparently she drank too much last night, if that’s even possible.”
Yasmin usually enjoys Nicky’s devil-may-care attitude, but today her presence irks her. “Sooo, yo, Jaz, I heard you finally left your ol’ man,” she imagines Nicky saying in a hushed tone when she wakes up, turning the whole thing into a high school gossip session. Or, “Sooo, are you ready for fresh meat?” she’ll ask with a shrill laugh that always makes Yasmin think of a knife scratching on glassware.
Things Are Good Now Page 7