by Lena Mahmoud
But we never got the chance to try.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I managed to find a job as a part-time contributor to the local newspaper. Basically, every week I had to cover three or four events they told me about, and send in my articles that day. It was a start, I consoled myself, a start at a career. I tried to keep my job at the doctor’s office until I found something full-time, but the events I had to cover tended to take place in the afternoon, and I couldn’t do both. I put in my two weeks’ notice, but they arranged to have the doctor’s niece come in after a week to take over my job. On my last day, the nurse gave me a hug. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “The new girl is sixteen.”
I laughed. “I was only eighteen when I started. The new girl might not be so bad.”
“Isra, that was four years ago. The girl is half my age. And a young sixteen, too.”
As we hugged, my stomach was folding inside itself. I was sure I had made the wrong decision.
When it came to Yusef, I wasn’t sure about anything. The tension had cooled between us; we didn’t fight, we didn’t fuck. We didn’t anything. On the way home from looking at the house, Yusef told me I projected everything Amu and Baba did onto him, and it just wasn’t fair that he had to make up for the sins of others. I could barely look at him after what he said. I could just as easily have told him: I’m not your mother. I won’t worship the ground you walk on. I’m my own person. He was so conceited.
I woke up early the next morning to go to a regional spelling bee. I sat in the sparsely populated audience and took note of how many were competing, who won the thing. My butt fell asleep in the stiff metal chair, and I adjusted myself every few minutes, trying not to look too antsy or make the chair squeak. I spent the rest of the time thinking of clever ways to describe the facial expressions of the contestants and the audience’s reactions to the children without exaggerating. Everyone looked as uninterested as me.
Jaseel al-Jundi ended up beating out all her competitors. She had to be Middle Eastern. Her mother went up there to give a congratulatory hug. She was white, I was sure, not just a light Arab woman. I wouldn’t have guessed Jaseel was a half-breed like me. She had straight black hair and dark brown skin. She smiled, showing her white teeth to a couple of photographers. My chest fluttered, seeing those two together.
I went up to interview the girl and introduced myself to her and her mother.
“I’m smarter than all my brothers,” Jaseel announced to me.
Her mother and I laughed. “Well, I’ll put that down in my notes.” I asked her the mundane questions about how she prepared and how much she studied. Then I moved on to her mother and asked if she was proud.
“Of course, I’m very proud. You know Jaseel could say the alphabet when she was a year old.”
“Impressive.” I smiled down at the little girl. Her mother’s hands were on her shoulders, and the child was looking away, tapping her foot on the stage’s wood floor. She was already bored with this interview.
Her mother hesitated. “Are you Arabic?”
I nodded. “Yes, Palestinian. And white, too, on my mother’s side.”
She was sure that she had seen me somewhere before. It turned out she frequently went to Yusef’s parents’ store.
“He’s one of their sons, right?”
“He’s the only son. The other ones are their grandchildren.”
“The older one? He’s a very sweet boy.” She laughed. “Doesn’t give me too much trouble when I say the names of things wrong.” I imagined Imm Yusef would. One time during our engagement, she went on for nearly half an hour about how much she hated when people called hummus “hum-is” instead of “hoom-moos.” (She also hated being called Arabic instead of Arab.) I found it disturbing because I felt the same before our conversation. “You two look too young to be married.”
“Oh, we’re old enough. I’m twenty-two; he’s twenty-five. It’s only been—” I paused to count the months on my fingers. “Almost seven months.” And I hadn’t been sleeping with him for over four of them.
I stopped by the mall on the way home and went to the perfume store toward the entrance. I wore jasmine on rare occasions, but I was starting to run low on the two bottles I had bought at the end of high school. This store had only the designer scents, which all smelled the same to me, flowery and strong, and I got a headache soon after I arrived. I didn’t find the kiosk that used to be there, the one with a rack of perfumes that I liked, so I went into a lingerie shop. I could only find a couple bras that were in my cup size, 38D. I wandered over to a display of silky and lacy underwear. Pretty, and not too pricy.
I didn’t see the point, though. I wasn’t having sex, and I doubted if I ever would again. The first couple of months I assumed Yusef enjoyed the sex we had together. He initiated it most of the time, so he must have liked it, right? But maybe I was just who was available, enough satisfaction to keep him from being too horny. What he really wanted was a woman who wore lingerie and let him put his penis wherever he wanted. For a short second I considered being more open, letting him do more to me, but I couldn’t make myself something I wasn’t. People had been trying to force me to do that ever since I could remember, and it hadn’t worked yet.
Still, I bought a couple of pairs of underwear and a lacy bra that almost fit.
Yusef came home while I was chopping onions. He didn’t make eye contact and barely acknowledged my greeting before he walked to the bedroom. I waited for him to come out as I started frying the onions and put the rice and lentils on low heat on the stove. I didn’t hear any noises, and it was at least ten to fifteen minutes since he had gotten home. He never took that long to undress and put his things away, but still he didn’t come out to see me.
My breaths quickened when I reached our bedroom door. I hesitated a minute, standing in the doorway. He sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his legs. “I miss you,” I said, forgetting all the things I planned to say to him.
“I’m here.”
“Well …” I looked up at the cracked ceiling and sighed. “I still think we should wait to have a baby.”
“I figured that much.” He turned his face to the wall.
I folded my arms and glared. I wasn’t sure whether I should cry or scream at him. I left, not wanting the onions to fry into charcoal.
By the time the food was done, I was close to tears, but they wouldn’t drop from my eyes. I bit my lip and wondered why I even tried, why Yusef had the nerve to act so high and mighty. It’s not like he knew anything about being a mother, or even about being a father, but that never occurred to him.
And it’s not like he was some saint. He had committed his fair share of sins—sins he wouldn’t be able to deal with if I had been the one to commit them.
I heard the bedroom door squeak open. Yusef came out to the kitchen and pulled me closer to his chest, burying his face in my neck and sucking my skin. He reached for my breasts, and goose pimples pricked up all over my body; my breath reverberated in my chest. I turned around and wrapped my arms around his waist.
I pressed my body against his and felt the sharp, wet pain between my legs.
We moved out of the apartment and into the house his cousin set us up with. Yusef enlisted the help of two of his nephews to move the furniture and the heavier boxes. Not Muhammad, though, because he needed assistance, not someone to ogle his wife, he told Khadija when he spoke to her on the phone. I talked Yusef into getting rid of the old couch, saying the black corduroy and the smell would make our house look run down and ugly. I could find something decent for a good price. He pulled me to his chest and said, “Whatever you want, whatever you want.”
His nephews exchanged amused glances. Though his back was to them, Yusef sensed it and turned around and ordered them in Arabic to lock up the U-Haul. Once they left, we kissed on the floor in our empty living room for a while. “I’ve got to check on them,” he said. “I’ll find some place to get rid of the couch, and I’ll come pick you u
p after I get rid of them.”
“Okay,” I said, kissing the day’s stubble he had on his chin and cheeks.
“I should grow a full beard for you.”
“No! I shave mine for you, you should do the same for me.”
He stroked my chin, jaw, and neck, soft and smooth. “You do keep up with it better than me.” He leaned in for one last kiss. “But a beard is the mark of a true man.”
“You’re not even thirty. I don’t want you to look like an old man.”
I saw Yusef walk into the driveway as soon as I turned the corner; he was back from dropping his nephews off. He looked distracted. When I parked my car next to his and took my old duffel bag out of the passenger seat, he walked to me. “I can’t get the heat to work in the house.”
“Really?” It was so cold outside, and the house was worse. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and sat in one of the Laz-E-Boys and flipped through the channels on TV.
Yusef joined me after he came back from picking up our fast food dinner. “You know how long it took me to find a place that’s open on Christmas Day?”
I surveyed the pile of boxes stacked around me. We didn’t have many: a couple of suitcases of clothes, some boxes of kitchen utensils, my personal box with some books, journals, letters, and pictures, and Yusef’s heavy box of textbooks and a bound, pristine copy of his thesis. It was too cold to do any unpacking, though. I didn’t want to move.
During our dinner Yusef went to the hall every few minutes and messed with the thermostat, cursing under his breath. “I’m going to call Amer. He should have told us this before we moved in,” he said, picking his phone off the top of the TV. “He better come here and fix this tonight.”
I wrapped the blanket tighter around me. “How is he going to have it fixed? It’s a holiday. Everything’s closed.”
“He can fix it himself or he can find a way to get someone.”
He had a long argument with Amer, peppered with curses. “My wife is freezing! I want us to be alive in the morning.” He hung up the phone and sat on the arm of my chair. “You know what he told me? ‘I sheck the heat yesterday and is fine.’” He pointed toward the hall. “I checked the heat, and it’s not fine. I can’t believe I agreed to have this sharmoot as a landlord.”
I told him to sit with me and keep me warm. He splayed himself from the leg rest all the way to my chest. I massaged his shoulders and the top of his chest. He was still going on about his cousin. “He’d better be here soon.”
“Yusef, at least we have room and privacy here.”
“Yeah. The apartment was almost like living with family, everyone all in our business.” He laughed. “And we have space for kids to run around. Someday at least.”
We both had time off for Christmas, and we spent most mornings on our frameless mattress, making love or cuddling or discussing our plans for the new house. It took us a few afternoons of unpacking to make the house look decent enough for visitors, who were eager to see the place and congratulate Yusef on his master’s degree. Imm Yusef was elated that her son had become so successful, though he hadn’t pursued medicine like she wanted. She was itching for a grandchild, though. At least one. “Habibi, your father is getting so old and sick now. I want him to know the grandchildren from his only son.”
The day she said that, I expected there to be an argument, or at least a snide comment, about how I was taking birth control and keeping him from what he wanted. He only told his mother that we would have a child when the time was right. “When God wills it, right, Mama?” he said with a sad smile.
We even had sex that night.
When I called Sana the next day, she said she believed I had him so “in check” because I had withheld sex from him for such a long time. “Nothing matters more to a man.”
“If he has that much of a problem with it, he can go and find another wife. Probably there’ll be a lot lined up to snag him. I haven’t come this far to let some man’s desires dictate my life.” I sighed. “I never kept him from anything. He wanted to wait seven years before he came back to me and committed to me. He wanted to sow his wild oats”—and sodomize other women—“and I gave him that. He can’t give me this? We’re both young; we have plenty of time.”
Things improved once Yusef went back to work full-time. He was teaching four classes, all meeting once a week at night. He still did some parttime research, but that was in the late afternoon right before his classes, and any interview or event I had to attend for my job was usually later in the afternoon or very early in the morning, so we had most mornings and afternoons to ourselves. He started a workout regimen, waking up every day at seven to run five miles. He bought a weight set, and he used that in addition to the weights he had before to build his muscle tone. He ate even more ravenously than before and said he wanted to gain twenty to thirty pounds of muscle. The refrigerator was stocked with things like Muscle Milk and other muscle-building products. He had a shelf in the pantry filled with his protein shake powders and bars. Even in mid-January he walked around the house shirtless, claiming that the extra layer of muscle he was acquiring made him warmer.
He did have something to be proud of. I couldn’t stop looking at him, his developing pecs and his strong arms, when he loafed around the house and oohed and aahed over dinner while I made it, stealing bites from it every other minute, or worked out in our office/gym.
“So where do you run exactly?” I asked while I lay on the sweaty weight bench he’d just finished using. He was lifting thirty-pound dumbbells.
“You know. Around.” He paused and panted. He gathered his strength and did more reps. “Sometimes I go to the drugstore, or if I go the other way I’ll make it to the high school. You should come sometime. It makes you feel great.”
Instinctively I pressed my hands against my belly to see how much fat I had there.
“No, I’m not saying you’re fat, Isreenie.” He took a few steps closer to look down at me, the weights still in his hands. “Why do you always have it in your head that you’re big? I love that your body is soft.” He flexed his arms. “Your amtu’s just jealous.”
I sat up and watched him wince with the effort of lifting the dumbbells. “You know about that?”
“Mama told me how she was acting at the dress fitting, and I figured anyway.” He finished his reps and set the weights down, drawing a deep breath. “I mean, you’ve never even been fat, not since I’ve known you. When we were younger, I remember you were really developed, not fat,” he said, smiling, staring in the distance.
“You’re fantasizing about a girl who’s barely a teenager.”
He nodded. “I was thinking how I felt that first day I saw you. You and Sana were talking or something in the dining room. You were so beautiful when you were looking at those magazines. I couldn’t think about anything else. I almost lost to Bassam that day.”
I drew my knees up under my chin, not sure if I was touched or horny or what. I felt the same for him right then: the sweat dripping down his pecs, the light hitting his eyes at the right intensity to make them a warmer green, his skin a perfect, even brown.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.
I joined him.
At first I felt lonely in the evenings, but Hanan came over once in a while and helped me make dinner like old times, except Amtu wasn’t hovering over us. Now that we lived here, her parents didn’t have as much of a problem with her coming over. If Sana was off that night, she visited sometimes. The first couple of evenings, her mother came with her, because her parents suspected she might be going out to see male friends.
I had other guests who were less welcome, though I couldn’t show that. Abu and Imm Yusef stopped by, supposedly for dinner, a couple times a week. I always made enough for them, because they never called before they came, and made a pot of tea for Abu Yusef, his only comfort since he was forced to quit smoking. The tea was wasted when they didn’t arrive, but Yusef usually ate the leftovers the next morning for breakfast or that
night in addition to the plate I saved for him. I knew his mother was checking on us, and now that she had such a heavy workload with her husband’s care and their store, this was the only time she could find to make sure she knew what we were doing.
One evening Imm Yusef picked up a folded note I had left for Yusef; I had forgotten it on the coffee table. “Don’t read it!” I said, my cheeks already warm and probably blood red. Of course, she read it anyway, sounding out the letters slowly without her reading glasses.
She set it back down, her shoulders stiff. “It is nice that you have a love for my son,” she said, her eyes moving everywhere but my face.
I was pissed, but relieved that it was one of the cleaner notes I wrote him.
Another night she stayed after Hanan left and cornered me in the kitchen while her husband was in the living room drinking tea on the couch. She patted my back like she was congratulating me on something. “Ya Isra, I think it is very good for you to have your cousin over here,” she said. “She is very nice girl, but Sana …” She tightened her mouth in disgust. “Sana not very good girl. She acts bad.” She moved her open hands up and down to explain the state of Sana’s mind. “I believe she bad influence. You are good girl, but whenever thing go wrong before you marry my son, she is always involved. I have known her since she was very young, and I see that she is bad, and I do not want her to make you bad.”
“She’s not bad. She’s only a little loud. Nothing dangerous.”
She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “No, I see always something cooking in her mind, and is bad. Very bad. Yusef is very nice man, and he does not want to say anything, and he is like you, he believes the best in beoble, but I am old, and I see these things.” She pointed to her head while she said it.
I leaned against the counter. “Really, Sana’s good. We’ve never gotten into trouble.”
She shook her head. “I know you were in fights at the Sunday school. I know at Eid she said some nasty things to you about men. I have heard these things when I asked around about you. I do this when Yusef tell me he want to marry you.”