Laura starts the engine and, singing along to Skunk Anansie’s “Because of You,” zigzags through the Mission Street traffic toward the west side of the city as though she were on her way to save someone’s life.
Yasmin and Ali had established early on they’d wait a few years before having children, at least until she finished school. Once in San Francisco, she wanted to wait until Ali secured a work visa that would allow her to seek employment or until they received the green cards they’d applied for so she could resume school first. At the beginning, since she didn’t have a routine of her own yet, setting herself up to Ali’s schedule had made her feel that she had an active role in building their new life together. She woke up with him and cooked breakfast and dinner for two even though his job provided free meals all day, hoping he would eventually miss home-cooked foods. She ironed his clothes, cleaned the apartment. On weekends, she made anjero with ghee and honey, and tea with cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and whole milk the way her mother did for her father, but Ali preferred fried eggs and coffee.
“Somali food is too rich, not healthy,” he’d say, shaking his head as if he were the first of his countrymen to have discovered this universal truth.
Although Yasmin thought the notion of completely excising traditional foods from one’s diet to achieve a modern lifestyle ridiculous, something about the pride of husbands she’d learned from her mother prevented her from arguing against him.
Eventually, she gave in to pressure.
“Do you want to be like those white women with ten degrees and no children?” her father said half-jokingly at first, his voice raspy from decades of smoking.
“Who’s going to take care of you in your old age, Hooyo?” her mother pleaded.
Ali agreed. “I make enough money for both of us now,” he said. “Besides, it’s not just about you.” There was an accusation in his eyes and a demand for reparation in his tone — reparation for something she’d done as much for his sake as for her own; for something he’d continued to refuse to even acknowledge had happened let alone discuss since before they’d moved to San Francisco.
“Hey, cheer up. He was bound to find out eventually and now it’s done,” Laura says, shifting gears as they near a red light.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my parents about it.”
“You know, sometimes, you just have to blurt it out and let them deal with it.”
“What I did is unforgivable. They wanted grandchildren so badly. They’ll side with him.”
“He almost hit you.”
“But he didn’t.”
“So? Anyway, parents are all the same. Sooner or later, they’ll come around. My parents didn’t talk to me for years after I came out to them.”
“It’s not the same.” Yasmin interrupts Laura with a sharper tone than she intended. When she turns to apologize, she catches a devastating expression in Laura’s eyes. She remembers what Laura had told her about her own parents — how they’d tried to beat what they called “the Devil” out of her for months until she ran away from home at sixteen. For the first time, Yasmin realizes that, despite her alluring sense of freedom and her confident exterior, Laura could be as vulnerable as anyone else. “I’m sorry, Laura, I didn’t mean to be rude. I know you’re trying to help but … ”
“No worries,” Laura says.
Yasmin wishes she knew words fluid enough to convey to Laura what seeing the old spectre of failure and disgrace — that silent companion of all displaced people — on her parents’ faces will do to her. And what the yoke of faintly veiled scorn and pity from others will do to her family as the news reaches the whole community with the speed of a calamity.
They stay quiet for a while, the space between them expanding with the distance of otherness. The music turns to silence as well, as if in reverence.
“Anyway, divorce is now inevitable, which means I’ll lose my visa, so I’ll have to go back and live with them until I find a job. I don’t have the luxury of time and distance to wait until they come around.”
“You can stay at my place as long as you need to, okay?” Laura says, reaching out and squeezing Yasmin’s shoulder.
Yasmin sinks back in her seat and leans against the car’s door frame. She follows absentmindedly the rows of rundown Victorian houses, the old road in dire need of repair, shop-owners piling up colourful fruits and vegetables on stands in front of their stores, small-time street vendors and hustlers selling trinkets to tourists and locals. Her mind lingers at the sight of yet another handful of Latino migrant workers standing at a street corner. In a way, she is one of them. Her stay in the United States depends on someone else’s whim and she’s far from a home she dreads going back to.
The first time she thought of leaving Ali was a year after they’d started trying for a baby. Ali had come home early that day and was at the dining table eating the food he’d brought from work in a Styrofoam container. She’d watched his stooped body from the living room for a while: the tired motion with which he stabbed grilled chicken and vegetables with his fork, the way he chewed his food, his wide-set, small, droopy eyes and his receding hairline elongating his face. He made her think of an old goat. She felt pity.
“Ali, Macaan … I think this country is destroying us. Without work or school, I feel useless. I thought I could handle waiting but … ” She stopped. She wasn’t sure going back to Canada would solve their problems anymore. All she was certain of was that she hated her life: her status as Ali’s dependent; the idle solitude; expecting to be pregnant every month and not knowing whether she should feel relieved or sad when she found out she wasn’t.
He sighed and dropped his fork in the container. “It said right on the forms you signed: ‘It takes five to six years for a green card,’ remember?” he said, with the tone of someone addressing a capricious child.
“Let’s go back. I know you’re unhappy here too. This job is killing you.”
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice a decibel louder. His tone had a forcefulness to it that betrayed a desperate obstinacy.
“We could own a house for the rent we pay for this mouldy apartment,” she added.
“Oh, now this apartment is not good enough for you?” His eyes were beads constrained in narrow slits.
“No, that’s not … ”
She sat there watching him chew his food again, hoping he’d say something more, something she could counter. She then focused her attention on a bruised spot on the doorway leading to the kitchen. The thick layers of beige paint that had coagulated on the frame over the years made it look like splattered, viscous batter. After a while, she went and stood in front of her husband.
“Come on, baby,” she said.
He put down his fork again and leaned back in his chair. He looked her up and down slowly and, dragging his words, said: “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. A lot of girls would be happy to be in your shoes. I’m the one stuck with a barren woman.”
“There is nothing wrong with me. I was able to … ,” she said and stopped. The memory of her first pregnancy and the overwhelming bitterness hidden deep within it was robbing her of words.
He held her stare for a moment before he waved her away and went back to eating.
As she turned to leave, Ali’s last words entered her consciousness, slowly, as though she could still believe she’d misinterpreted his meaning, the way one questions a traumatic childhood experience. She wondered if this was his way of getting back at her for something she wasn’t aware of. Then, the words expanded and multiplied in her head with the force of a violent wave crashing before they were distilled into a single new awareness: she was an expendable, kept woman. His family could find him another wife in a heartbeat. She felt as if she were caught in a wild wind and had lost both her sense of direction and balance. She stood there in front of him for a while in an attempt to steady herself, then went t
o bed quietly, one hand pressing her chest where a piercing pain was starting to make itself known.
She swore she’d leave him then, but didn’t. By morning, the thought of returning to her parents’ house a divorcee had spread in her mind like a sudden bout of migraine.
“Did he beat you? Then, what’s wrong?” She imagined her mother’s wronged face behind the melodramatic voice at the other end of the line. And her dad pacing in their living room, tightening his ma’awis on his waist with quick, sharp gestures, occupying himself with the adjustment and readjustment of his wrapper to defuse his exasperation.
She pictured Hodan’s I-told-you-so look. “How can you stand this FOB? He’ll never shed his country ways. Why can’t you just live for yourself for once?” she’d said when she came to visit eight months earlier.
“As you did?” Yasmin wanted to say but didn’t. She had just recently admitted to herself how much she resented her sister for having deserted her, for having left her to deal with their parents’ anger and shame, but she hadn’t yet built up the conviction she needed to voice this.
At first, she only eavesdropped on Ali’s conversations with his mother. Then she got into the habit of sifting through his emails and text message exchanges with his brothers whenever she could, until one morning, she caught her own reflection in the mirror, the dark circles around her eyes and her halo of tangled, unkempt hair. She saw the needy, frantic woman she’d become. She decided there and then to change but didn’t know how to go about it.
For a while, she went to the public library on Bartlett and 24th Street. She marvelled at the archways and columns of the old building and walked the length of each aisle, the tips of her fingers brushing against the rows of books. Although she had never been much one to read, she thought she could learn to enjoy it but, with all those books at her disposal, she didn’t know where to start.
“What about Nuruddin Farah?” suggested an old friend from Ottawa she still talked to from time to time. Yasmin was annoyed at herself for not having thought of it on her own. After all, Nuruddin Farah was the most popular Somali writer alive. Wanting to do things properly, she set out to read Farah’s books in chronological order, starting with From a Crooked Rib. But after she’d struggled through half the book, all that stayed with her was the loneliness of childbirth and the blood and stink of the aftermath: the heat, flies, and rotting umbilical cord. These images only made her own struggles with pregnancy more painful.
Ali was changing too. He started attending Friday prayers in the city, reading the Quran on weekends, taking trips to Ottawa for family visits without her. Yasmin observed these changes but only peripherally, the way one catches glimpses of images on a TV screen while waiting in line at the bank. For by then, she’d found an outlet for her solitude and ennui: Facebook. She became hooked on the semblance of friendship and connection it offered, until the never-ending exhibition of success and excitement plastered all over the web site heightened her unhappiness.
That’s when the walls started to cave in on her. When she and Ali were having sex, she was not sure if it was her he was pressing himself against anymore. She saw a part of herself hovering on the ceiling, watching; she saw bodies, movements; she heard panting; she smelled sweat. All of it was there and yet not there, like watching a dismembered doll where a human should be. She then started ensconcing herself in the bathroom where she’d spend hours pulling out hair from her head, yanking one or a few strands at a time, focusing all her empty thoughts on that moment before the sting, savouring the prickle to come until she lost her footing completely and drifted away in her mind, slowly, imperceptibly, her idle days bleeding into each other, then into weeks and months.
Nicky sits cross-legged on the living room floor of the apartment she shares with Laura and places burritos, tortilla chips, and salsa on the coffee table in front of Yasmin.
“Eat,” she says, reaching into the paper bag for a tortilla chip.
“Thanks, Nicky. You didn’t have to. How much do I owe you?” Yasmin says and takes a bite of her breakfast burrito. The chunks of fried egg, beans, and avocado protruding from the wrap melt in her mouth, easing her stomach’s growling.
“It’s on me. You’ve been cooking for us the last three weeks. And I got good tips last night,” Nicky says with a mischievous smile.
Two weeks ago, Yasmin watched Nicky with fascination as she poured drinks and flirted with her customers, her every move and gesture — even the act of wiping the bar counter clean — charged with overt, inviting sexuality. Yasmin had never thought working as a bartender could be an empowering job for a woman, yet she could not deny the element of control and even fun the interplay between Nicky and her customers elicited.
That’s the bar where Yasmin had met Jason. He’d reminded her of the boys she used to know at Algonquin College, before she met Ali. As Jason conveyed his interest in her over the cacophony of the Friday night crowd, a mix of beer and mint on his breath, she remembered with sadness how she used to look down on guys like him, how she used to equate their forced bravado and flimsy attempt at seduction with an irreparable intellectual and moral flaw. So when she agreed to meet up with him at Dolores Park a few days later, she thought of it not as a date, but as a chance at redemption for her old snobbery.
She was watching couples cuddling on beach towels when he came to sit beside her. To her surprise, she felt gleeful. Unbeknown to herself, she had missed him. The view of downtown San Francisco in the distance took on a different hue. It pleased her to think that, in the eyes of passersby, she and Jason could be seen as a couple. The fog building up in the hills behind her carried a mysterious, romantic note.
“How is volunteering working out for ya?” Nicky’s voice interrupts her thoughts.
“It puts things in perspective,” Yasmin says, her eyes on a pile of zines on the carpet under the coffee table. Sex Workers, Health and Safety, she reads.
Sometimes, Yasmin watches the women at the shelter while she empties cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli into a big pan to heat up for lunch or pours ketchup on a bland meatloaf before she serves it for dinner. There is Diane, a sturdy woman of forty who spends her time between meals at the same corner table, shuffling a deck of cards, mumbling and gesturing at an invisible opponent; Alex, chatty and barely out of teenagehood and yet her body already criss-crossed with scars of drug abuse and street life; and Edwidge, who smokes cigarettes through her nostrils for the pain it causes her. Their tales are of unspeakable, heart-wrenching damages but also of survival and resilience.
“I bet. Did I ever tell you Laura saved my life?” Nicky says before she engulfs a chip in her crimson-painted mouth.
Yasmin shakes her head.
“We’ve known each other since high school. You knew that, right?”
Yasmin nods.
“Anyway, I had this asshole for a boyfriend. He was abusive but I was totally under his spell. I couldn’t leave him. Laura was having a lot of problem with her folks too. Her dad was … Well, she couldn’t be herself in a hick town in Montana. You know that part. One day, she just came up to me after school and said, ‘Do you wanna move to San Francisco together?’ And that was that. If it wasn’t for her, I’d probably have ended up in a ditch somewhere.”
Yasmin can’t imagine Nicky under anyone’s spell except her own. Is it possible she’d read Nicky wrong? Do we ever really know people?
She once thought she knew Ali too. Two months before they were to move to San Francisco, she’d gotten pregnant. They were in bed when she told Ali. He stayed silent for a while. She wished she’d told him while the lights were still on so she could read his face.
“It’s bad timing, right?” she said to break the silence.
“That’s what I was thinking too.” He cleared his throat. “This job, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it’s going to be hard, you know. Moving to a new country … ”
“I know,
” she said.
“I don’t know if we’ll have health insurance coverage right away. If, God forbid, you have a difficult pregnancy. Anyway, let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?” he said and turned to sleep.
She rested her thoughts on the cadence of his light snore to avoid confounding her confusion with speculations.
The next day, she waited for him to say something. Then waited for two more weeks, replaying his last words on the subject in her mind again and again, as though he had spoken in riddles, before she gave up and booked an appointment at the clinic.
It wasn’t the act itself she found hard to bear later. She’d done what she’d had to do for the good of her marriage. The snare of tradition, religion, and the validation that offspring bring to a marriage — she’d believed she and Ali were above these things. Wasn’t that why she’d married him? They would start a family when they were both ready, she’d told herself. But she had expected him to show sympathy and gratitude toward her for having been brave enough to have gone through the abortion on her own. A loving, comforting word would have sufficed. Instead, Ali looked the other way. He cut her off with random work-related anecdotes whenever she broached the subject. That’s when it first occurred to her that her husband might not be the enlightened man she’d believed him to be.
“Sometimes, you’re too practical, too cadaan,” her mother used to say, complaining about Yasmin’s Western ways.
Although Yasmin wasn’t going to put this into words for another four years yet, deep in her heart, that was the time when Ali stopped being her life partner and became instead a placeholder for a life she had yet to imagine.
Nicky cleans her fingers with a paper napkin, smearing the Chipotle logo with a red and green mixture of condiments, then takes out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her jacket pocket.
“Can I have one?” Yasmin asks.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Nicky says, passing her the pack.
“I did. When I was a teenager. Before I got married.” Yasmin takes her first puff and exhales, satisfied. “Oh God, I’m so dizzy,” she says, rubbing her eyes with her hands and shaking her head.
Things Are Good Now Page 8