Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  Nothing would ever get better.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Just after eight in the morning, Yusef’s cell rang and vibrated so furiously it nearly fell from the nightstand next to my side of the bed. I startled awake and accidentally elbowed Yusef’s ribs when I reached for it. He whimpered and let out sigh-snore from his nose and mouth.

  “Fuck whoever calls this early on a fuckin’ Saturday,” he said, and turned over on his other side, his back to me and his phone.

  “It’s your mother.”

  He turned back over and answered the phone.

  I heard Imm Yusef’s voice going on and on. I closed my eyes and lay back down on my side, but I couldn’t tune it out completely. Yusef put in the occasional aiwa, yeah, to let her know he agreed and was listening. I opened my eyes when he stroked my belly, his eyes red and droopy but his lips smiling. I had told him not to announce it to anyone until I reached my second trimester.

  He said I was morbid and negative, as usual, in a half-accusatory, half-playful way, but he agreed. We would keep this to ourselves for another two months, and then he would be given free rein to shout the news from the rooftops.

  I hardly spoke Arabic, and my understanding of it was only a little better, so I was afraid that he would announce the news to his mother right in front of my face without me knowing, but Yusef was barely contributing anything to the conversation. Announcing a baby took more than two words at a time.

  He hung up and lay back down. “My parents are coming over.”

  “Why?” I asked. Then, to seem less resentful, I added, “I’m so tired, I want to sleep more.”

  He groaned and rubbed his eyes. “She got a deal on two Laz-E-Boys, and she has to bring them over right now. She picked up one of Khadija’s sons to help me lug the things up here. Baba can’t be doing any heavy lifting.”

  I snuggled up to the pillow and savored rest for a couple minutes before I forced myself to get up and dress. It wasn’t so bad to be up this early; at least there was another hour left of semi-cool air before the heat set in for real.

  Yusef was still lying in bed in his boxers; by the beginning of June, he’d stopped wearing his pajamas to bed because it was too hot. He was a big boy. If he didn’t want to get up to look decent in front of his parents and nephew, that was his problem.

  While I brushed my hair, I remembered that I would have to at least make something to drink. As soon as I put the tea on to boil, I heard a knock. Abu Yusef’s gravelly voice called from the stairhead, ordering Yusef to open the door. “Ya Yusef, ifta al-bab al-aan!”

  I opened the door. “Sorry, I was putting the tea on the stove.”

  Abu Yusef shook his head, slightly embarrassed, but still smoking without interruption. His lungs had to be as black as charcoal. “I am very sorry, bintee Isra. I believed Yusef was keeping us waiting out here.”

  I showed them in and tried not to breathe the cigarette smoke. Abu Yusef made himself a place at the kitchen table with one of his ashtrays that we kept on the microwave. I followed Imm Yusef and her grandson back into our bedroom, where I wasn’t surprised to find Yusef still lying on the bed in his underwear, snoring away.

  She made a loud exclamation. “Yee!” I wondered if our downstairs neighbors heard all the commotion this early. “ʿayb, ʿayb, ʿayb,” she kept saying. “Shame, shame, shame.” She ordered him in Arabic to get up and dress, and some other things I didn’t catch, but she looked to me. “Why does he wear these, these underwear that are as shorts? From when he is boy, I buy him briefs, but as soon as he leave high school, he is wearing these shorts.”

  Yusef got up and threw on some jeans and a T-shirt. “You know, Mama, you shouldn’t be calling and waking us up so early. We need our rest, especially Isra, because she’s pregnant.”

  Imm Yusef jumped up and down, something I would have never expected from a woman her age. She grabbed me and kissed me on both cheeks over and over. She gave me one of her bone-crushing hugs. “Already! God has smiled upon us.”

  She did the same to Yusef except she pulled him down to sit next to her on the bed and spoke to him in Arabic for almost fifteen minutes. His nephew Muhammad looked my way and congratulated me. I smiled, trying to look as happy as possible while I considered how I would punish Yusef.

  She left, announcing the news to Abu Yusef. I shot Yusef a look, not caring that Muhammad was still in our bedroom. Muhammad took the hint and left. Yusef’s bright smile deflated into petulant annoyance. “I don’t see the problem in letting everyone know a little early,” he said. “I don’t like keeping secrets.”

  “It’s not a secret. It’s just keeping things private for a little while.” I turned away. He could be so stupid and inconsiderate.

  “Hey, look on the bright side: I bet she won’t be calling here early anymore.”

  “She will be here more.”

  “Is Baba smoking out there?”

  “What? Yeah, of course.” That’s all he ever did.

  Yusef brushed past me. “He shouldn’t be smoking in the house while you’re pregnant,” he said, closing the door. “I’ll tell him to stop and air out the living room. See, this is why we should tell people.”

  So now I was quarantined. In about ten minutes, Imm Yusef came and said that the living room was now sufficiently smoke-free because they kept the door open. I got up, ready to leave, but she sat on the bed and motioned for me to take the seat next to her. “My son tells to me you want to keep pregnancy to yourself.”

  Yusef always knew how to make things worse. “I only wanted to keep it quiet for a little while in case something happens.”

  She closed her eyes gently as she nodded her head, though I knew she wasn’t agreeing with me. “This I know. Do not be angry. We will not tell to anyone else. I have two miscarriages.” She held up two fingers on one hand and then put them on her ample midsection. “One between Fatima and Lubna, and one between Lubna and Yusef. Still, I am very excited that this happens for you. Yusef ibnee waheed.” Yusef is my only son. She put her hand on her heart, pledging herself to this child already.

  She already had at least ten grandchildren—ten I could remember—but I didn’t think she’d gotten as choked up about them, even when they first got out of the womb, as she did about the one I had in my belly—not even a fully formed fetus, no eyes, no face, no gender yet. I couldn’t help but be a little touched despite everything, though I couldn’t let it make me forget what fueled her love. A penis made that much of a difference in how a mother would love her own children, even her children’s children.

  Imm Yusef wanted to have a celebration, which meant going to someone’s house to eat a lot of food. It sounded good to me. I didn’t get the chance to have breakfast. She was on the phone with someone in our living room. She was already spreading the news. I knew “walad” meant boy or just a generic child; why would she need to say it so much? I didn’t know who she was talking to. I wouldn’t sit by Yusef or even look at him. I kept myself busy making sure his father had his fill of tea, which the old man was inhaling like air now that he couldn’t smoke. Imm Yusef’s tea lay there half-finished, cold, while she went on and on to whomever she was talking to.

  I went back to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, door ajar, not caring that Yusef’s family was still here. I caressed my belly the way Yusef did, going up and down a few times and then making two circles at the same time. The door creaked, and he shut it and came over.

  Normally I would have pulled away if I was angry at him, but I just lay there, still and slack, staring up at the ceiling. He placed kisses on my neck and went up to my ear. “Don’t be mad, Isra. It’s not good for the baby.”

  So now we came to the point where we were past apologies and arguments. We only had anger that we were too spent to acknowledge. His mother came to the door and announced that we would be going to Khadija’s house for breakfast. I shrugged him off when I sat up and heard his nephew in the hall, giggling. “That’s how he gave her a baby so fast.”<
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  Imm Yusef commented on how wobbly the apartment stairs were, especially when you had to walk down. “It is not good for older ones, and when Isra becomes bigger.” She demonstrated my increasing size with one arm protruding from her belly. She rubbed her husband’s back and made sure he was steady. She seemed to treat him like a very old man, and I realized that he was significantly older than her, somewhere from ten to fifteen years. Abu Yusef added something to Imm Yusef’s comment in Arabic as Yusef gently escorted his father down the steps.

  “He said one of our cousins says there’s a nice house for a good price a little ways away, three bedroom,” Muhammad volunteered.

  I nodded, embarrassed at how he instantly knew that I didn’t fully understand. “Oh, okay.”

  Imm Yusef turned around and told me that she had seen the house. It was only thirty miles from here. We should look at it sometime soon.

  Muhammad’s eyes lingered on me. I wasn’t sure if it was my breasts or my belly he was looking at. He blushed and turned his face from mine. In a few seconds he looked back at me and asked me how old I was.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m going to be eighteen in January.”

  “That must be exciting.”

  “Habibi, don’t ask a woman her age. That is shameful,” Imm Yusef said while she took hesitant steps.

  “But she’s not old, Sitti.”

  When we were off the steps, she hit him upside the head and muttered ayb to him a couple times. Yusef laughed. “I guess you’re not so good with the ladies. Better hurry up and learn. You’re almost a man now.”

  We didn’t come back until three in the afternoon. Yusef and I didn’t speak the whole ride home, or at his sister’s house for that matter. There was so much conversation and congratulations, no one seemed to notice the tension between us. For a brief moment of doubt, I asked myself why I wanted to keep this a secret. Everything was going well; people were happy for us, even if it was a sexist happiness. But just because things were going well for now didn’t mean that it wouldn’t blow up in our faces (and I suspected it would be more in mine than in his). Besides, if I asked him to keep it quiet for a couple of months, he should do as he promised me. I had told him not to say anything to anyone, even his mother, because telling her was the same as announcing it to his whole family.

  I lay down on the bed once I got to the bedroom. If Yusef came and took this as a signal that I wanted him, I would yell at him to give me some peace.

  I looked down at my stomach. It felt like I was growing a small pouch of fat there, but a bit had been there since I could remember. I imagined myself getting a big belly, waddling down the rickety stairs. The fear of falling down them suddenly became real. My heart raced; not only would I lose the baby, I might die, crack my skull open, or break both legs. With the indifferent people that lived here, I imagined most of them would walk past me, not even bothering to call an ambulance.

  If I made it all the way to giving birth …

  I couldn’t imagine that pain. Having sex the first time was bad enough; at least it was relatively short. This would be hours, maybe an entire day, or days. I wouldn’t let Yusef bring his mother into the hospital room. The last thing I needed was her jabbering on about how easy child-bearing had been for her and her daughters, or looking down at my vagina for God knows how long.

  If he violated that rule, I might kill him.

  Because he wasn’t going to make all his plans in life without me.

  After dinner I went back to our bedroom and read while he watched TV and worked on his thesis. Three hours must have passed. I was nearly done with the novel I started in that sitting when he came in. He sat at the foot of the bed and rubbed my bare legs. His arm hair tickled, but I wouldn’t look at him or laugh.

  “I’m almost done with my thesis, at least for the summer. I’ll have to make some revisions in the fall after I meet with my advisor, but I’ve got all the research and conclusions down on paper. That’s the difficult part, really.” He paused and looked down at my legs while his hand moved up to my thighs. He leaned over and kissed them.

  “I’m not in the mood.” I turned over on my back. I figured my thighs looked fatter from that angle; they would be less alluring to him.

  “If you’re angry, tell me. I’d rather have it out in the open than this.”

  “You know I’m angry,” I said. “I’m tired of doing this with you, and it makes no difference at all.” I still had my eyes on the book, but I’d lost my place.

  “But I don’t see why I’ve got to hide things from my family.”

  I bit my lip, resisted giving him my reasons.

  “They’re your family, too, Isra, now that we’re married. My parents think of you as a daughter, my sisters as a sister.”

  I kept my peace on that, too.

  He waited. I said nothing.

  “Fine.” He left the bedroom. A couple hours later, he came and got a pillow to sleep on the couch.

  I didn’t say a word then either.

  We kept up the cold war for a week and a half. I cleaned, but I didn’t cook. We went out to visit some people about every other day. He worked on his thesis; I thought about Sana, the way we’d vent about men and their idiocies and selfishness. She was busy now, working fifty-hour weeks and helping her older sister with her second child. I pictured myself in a place of my own, spacious and pristine, far out in the country, away from nosy mothers-in-law and disappointing husbands.

  “Mama wanted to say congratulations on the baby,” Hanan told me over the phone as I sat on the bed and organized my photo collection. I had just received our wedding pictures and dreaded making an album of them. Our marriage did turn out to be just like that day: long and exhausting with every action predetermined by someone else.

  “You told her?”

  “I didn’t tell her. Imm Samir did. Everyone knows. I didn’t talk about it with anyone except you.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  I wanted to break the silence with Yusef and scream my head off, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I would be the one who gave in.

  “Are you still there?” Hanan asked.

  I confirmed that I was and asked if Amtu Samia genuinely congratulated me.

  “Oh … I think so.”

  “Tell me what she said.”

  “She said that you probably got pregnant so early because you guys had been trying before you were married.” She paused, waiting for my reaction. “She was in a bad mood, Isra. I don’t think she actually knows anything.”

  I woke up with sharp stomach cramps. When I was a preteen and first had them, they felt like knives penetrating my uterus with a steady force. The ones I had now were much worse. My crotch and bottom felt wet. I lifted the top sheet and saw the fresh, deep red stain on my pajama bottoms; there was a circle of blood on the sheet underneath me. Turning over made me nauseated and dizzy. I cried out and panted. I had to be dying. I had to be. This was it. I never thought I would die alone in my bed at twenty-two.

  It took all I had to reach and grab my cell phone. I called out for Yusef several times, thinking he was still out on the couch where he slept the night before or drinking coffee in the kitchen. The time on my phone was well past nine in the morning. He’d been gone for over an hour.

  I was surprised when some of the pain subsided. I could sit up with just a piercing, not a stab, of pain in my belly. I remembered Hanan had no key when I heard her banging on the door. “Are you all right, Isra?” she kept on asking while I walked, half-hunched, to the door. She gasped when she saw me. “Oh my God!”

  She helped me stand straighter, and she looked at the bloodstain smeared on my pants. “Does it hurt really bad? I should get a pad or something.”

  She set me down on the couch and said she’d go in the bedroom to get me a change of pants and underwear before we went to the emergency room. “Find another pair of pants. Don’t get me jeans.” She was back fast, or I might have just been so out
of it that I lost my sense of time, and she helped me into the loose-fitting track pants, asking if she needed to be gentler every time I winced in pain. “It’s not anything you’re doing,” I said.

  There was a hospital only two miles away. The hard part was getting down the steps and making it to Hanan’s car. Each downhill step felt like a knife penetrating deeper into my uterus, the steps on flat ground only a little more bearable. Most of the time I had my eyes pressed shut, and Hanan kept her arms around my waist. Her breathing was uneven. I could feel her pulse beat against my back.

  I lay down in the backseat, my eyelids fluttering, my head spinning. I wrapped my arms around my waist, wishing I could have some real rest.

  “Isra, shouldn’t we call Yusef or something?”

  I groaned. “You can call him, but I don’t want to speak to him.”

  She called him once they took me into the ER. While I was lying on the hospital bed, taking in drugs through the IV, she told me that he seemed upset. He thought there might be hope that I could still be pregnant. She picked dirt from under her fingernails. “I don’t know, I thought if there was bleeding, that automatically meant a miscarriage,” she said, looking at the curtain separating us from the other patient in the room. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

  “It does mean a miscarriage.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head at his naïveté.

  Her shoulders tensed, and she looked back at the curtain. “He said he’ll be here soon.”

  The pain subsided, and Hanan distracted me by talking, which she hadn’t been able to do uninterrupted for weeks. Her mother was getting on her nerves, complaining about the house being a wreck. Hanan couldn’t wait for her mother to leave for Imm Samir’s most days. Rasheed had gotten serious and was taking summer school. He might graduate within a year. We chuckled.

  “Rasheed might actually make something of himself,” Hanan said.

  I shrugged. I considered telling her that making something of yourself was a lot harder than it seems as a teenager, but I was too drugged and exhausted to make her understand. Yusef walked in, his eyes wide and filled with tears. He tried to thank Hanan for getting me here, but halfway through he choked and cried. She patted his back before she left to give us time alone.