by Lena Mahmoud
“Those were nothing,” I said. “We were just curious kids.”
She shrugged. “Sana is not the worst. I have seen much worse, but she is not good.” She put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “With Yusef gone for night, is this why you have not become pregnant?”
She threw me with her change of subject. He wasn’t gone that late, always home before ten. We weren’t so old that we couldn’t have sex after that hour. “No, no, no. I don’t know why. I’m just not pregnant yet. Sometimes it takes time. When you try, it doesn’t happen. When you don’t, it happens like that.” I snapped my fingers and shrugged.
“Inshallah it will be soon.”
“Yeah.”
“I must take my husband home. He needs rest. He is so sick these days.”
I nodded somberly. “I know. I’m so sorry about that.”
I saw them out, helping Imm Yusef help Abu Yusef into the passenger seat of the car. He looked so sickly, pale and skinny, with paper-thin skin that seemed to show almost every vein in his arms and face. I thought about repeating the request that Yusef had been making to her recently: to close the store and move in with us. Though she was significantly younger than her husband, she was old herself, and she’d only be breaking her body down more caring for Abu Yusef and taking care of the store. Khadija’s older sons came to the store regularly to help, especially with the heavy lifting, but she had a lot to deal with still. She didn’t want to give it up, though.
Anyway, I couldn’t bear the thought of having to live with her. She’d be nosy, find out about my birth control pills or that we had sex in the shower. It would be almost as bad as living with Amtu Samia again, except with more to hide, more for her to find.
“I never knew Mama didn’t like Sana,” Yusef replied dutifully as he stretched his body on the bed, his muscles popping.
“Do you think the same thing about her?” I asked.
He cracked his knuckles. “I don’t know. I never thought much about her. I remember her being a real pain in the ass when we were younger.” He chuckled. “My cousin Amer was thinking about talking to her father about marrying her. Can you imagine those two together? Her with such a boater?”
“He’s still thinking about it?”
“I don’t know. He wanted to a while ago, but then it never happened.” He laughed and closed his eyes as he set his head back down on the pillow.
I rested my head on his chest and put my arm across his torso. “She also asked if we were having sex since you’ve been working nights.”
He scoffed, his chest vibrating underneath my cheek. “Mama cuts right to the chase, doesn’t she?” When I said nothing in response, he said impatiently, “You know she doesn’t believe in privacy. I don’t know an Arab parent who does.”
“In some cases, they do believe in privacy. When do you ever hear about all the shit their sons are doing? Hardly. A girl has one misstep, and everyone remembers forever.” Though I didn’t consider beating up Motabel or talking to Sana about sodomy missteps. They were just part of defending myself and growing up.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know better than me.”
We were both silent for a few minutes.
“Maybe we should think about trying again,” Yusef said. “We wouldn’t have to lie, and people would think we might be having sex.”
“Wow, that’s a fantastic idea.” I lifted my head and moved over to my side of the bed. “Let’s have a baby because that’s what your parents want. Are they going to raise it for us, too?”
He sat up and folded his arms. “What’s wrong with having a baby? We’re adults. My father is sick, and she’s just thinking about if he’ll be able to see our child while he’s still alive.”
“Yusef, I know it’s hard that your father is having all these troubles, and he’s suffering so much. I get that. And I want to help them. I’m fine with them moving in here. I’m fine with visiting them. I’m fine with them coming over here almost every evening and spying on me. I’m fine with that, but we can’t have a child for them.”
He threw his arms in the air. “I want children for us. It would be good.”
Now I sat up and turned my face to his. “Us or your mother? It’s not even about your father. He’s never come and breathed down our necks about having a child. Never. Your father has lived to see ten of his grandchildren, and those don’t matter because his daughters had them?”
I couldn’t help but recall that I saw Mom suffer for two years with illness; she was barely in her thirties, and she didn’t even live to see me make it into the double digits.
Our argument blew over in a day, but less than three weeks later, when I finished my pink pills and started the brown placebos, my period didn’t come.
Sana couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that I was taking actual birth control pills correctly and conceived a child. She came over to look at my compact; I still had a month’s worth of pills. We took them to the kitchen. “Do you mind if I take one out?” she asked.
I sighed. “Sure. It’s not like I’m taking them anymore.”
She sniffed the tiny pill and examined it studiously. She sighed and shook her head, her eyes wide, still in awe. “I can’t believe it. This soon. How many times were you going at it in a day? I wonder if it is scientifically possible that you had so much of Yusef’s sperm in you that all the estrogen couldn’t fight it off.”
I pulled a chair out at the dinner table and sat down. “We should have just kept on using condoms. At least I would have known that his sperm was not getting into my uterus at all.”
She shook her head, her mouth open in disbelief. “No, no. The condom’s too much responsibility on the guy. They want to get laid, and they don’t care about putting it on right.” She walked over to the table to sit with me.
“Did you use condoms or the pill when you started having sex?”
“Condoms. They’re easier to get when you’re a teenager. The last time I did it with my high school boyfriend, that dumbass didn’t put the condom on right. It slipped.”
I felt her past fear in my stomach right at that moment.
She nodded. “I know. I had to talk my older sister into getting me that morning-after pill because she was nineteen, and I was only sixteen. That was the first time she found out I was doing it with someone, and she was such a bitch about it, told me I was a whore and going to hell.” She glared at the wall like it was her sister.
“I thought the morning-after pill was hell, though. I was so friggin’ sick my mom tried to have me hospitalized. I kept on telling her I was fine, and then I’d go puke all my stomach acid out—I couldn’t stand eating. That made both my parents concerned. But at the hospital, they’d be able to find out what I did and tell my parents.”
“God.” I couldn’t believe she had never told me all this.
“I broke up with that asshole after that. It was too much drama. I thought the whole point of having a boyfriend was so you could have fun with a guy and not have to be all serious and everything—but he was such a prick. He started seeing another girl a week later.” Now the wall became that ex-boyfriend, and she shot hate darts at him with her eyes. “And believe me, the sex wasn’t so good that he made me want it every day.”
Mom must have considered adoption or abortion with me. She was almost twenty-four when she got pregnant, significantly older than Sana then, but was unmarried, with few marketable skills. If I ever thought about Mom considering getting rid of me like Baba did, I might have hated her for it. Now I felt a mix of empathy and resentment.
Sana leaned over to reach my eye level; I was slouched and looking down at the table. “You’re married. He wants it. He’ll be a good dad. He’s nice, and he’s got good jobs and all that stuff.”
“God, Sana, it’s not that simple! He wants a kid because he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a dad. He’s never even babysat for anyone.”
She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “He�
��ll learn.”
“It’s not just about if it’s good for us now. I have to think about the future.” I sank into my chair and folded my arms in front of my stomach. “What if something happens to one of us?”
“You guys are young. Relax.”
“What if something happens to me? He can’t raise a child on his own. He doesn’t even know how to fold sheets! I don’t think he would leave, for right now I’m pretty sure about that, but I know he would need a lot of help if he was alone for some reason. Who would he get it from?”
“His mom probably. His mother would worship the kid, especially if it’s a boy.”
“She’s almost sixty. He would remarry, and I don’t want some stepmother treating my child like shit. What if something happened to him? What would I do? I barely make enough to support myself in some one-bedroom shithole in the ghetto. How would I support a kid, too?”
She sighed. “Take a breath. You know you have me. I’d help out, and you’ll eventually find a good job. It took me a year to get a full-time one, and I went into nursing.” She laughed. “Or you could remarry. There’d be lots of guys interested. Maybe that little nephew of his, get yourself some young meat for your second marriage.”
I cringed and rolled my eyes. “The only thing worse than a stepmother is a stepfather, Sana. Especially if I have a daughter.” I sat up straight, the adrenaline bursting through my veins. “He doesn’t think about any of these things. They never enter his mind at all.”
“If everyone thought of all that, no one would procreate. The human race would be extinct.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After we came back from Mom’s memorial service, Baba was mad. He couldn’t believe Mom’s family had snubbed us, me especially. “Are you not her daughter, and they turn away from you as such?” We were walking up the staircase on the way to the apartment, and I was a couple of steps behind him, unable to keep up with his long strides. He muttered to himself in Arabic and shook his head while he ran his hand through his curly black hair. “What kind of family does this? Acts in such a way?” he asked for the third time, struggling to unlock the front door.
Once Baba got the door open, I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling, not wanting to be around him. I was sentenced to live a life with him now, at least until I was eighteen, which was ten years away. I needed to learn how to avoid him right away. What would happen? Grandma claimed he would lock me in the house until I married or send me off to his country, but that didn’t seem likely. Mostly I would have to live out my days in his apartment that was below freezing, go to a school where I was teased for being white but not white enough for Mom’s family, and spend all my time by myself.
In the middle of my self-pity, Baba came into the bedroom and told me he had errands to run. He gathered some things from his closet and told me not to let any strangers in, or let anyone know I was here alone.
Mom would never have left me home alone. No one ever said it, but I knew Baba was kind of dumb and didn’t know anything about taking care of kids.
Hours passed. I didn’t go to sleep. I just cried and thought about how I used to sleep in a bed with Mom all the time. My stomach growled; I got up to make myself some food. I wasn’t very good at it, but since Baba either made me wait forever for him to get around to making me something or refused to do it all, I had learned how to prepare my own food.
The refrigerator was empty except for some old cheese slices and mustard. At Mom’s, we almost never had home-cooked food. Our diet was pretty monotonous, sandwiches or some boxed food, but at least there was something to eat.
I took out a cheese slice and tasted a small pinch of it; it still tasted good. I put some mustard on top of it and folded it in half. I did this with a few slices until my stomach stopped hurting. I turned on the TV, but nothing good was on. I watched the news and saw that a murder had occurred that day less than a mile from Baba’s apartment. That didn’t surprise me anymore. Some major crime happened at least once a month for the past seven months I had lived here. Sometimes it was a drive-by, sometimes a domestic dispute, and sometimes there was no apparent motive at all. I was certain that this was a death apartment, a death neighborhood; just a year before, I hardly ever heard about death, but now death penetrated almost every thought I had.
I went to the window to see if there were any cop cars passing, headed toward the crime scene. I saw none. The cops didn’t do anything around here; they came to the schools and warned kids not to get involved in gangs or else they would end up in jail or rotting in this ghetto for the rest of their lives. They would come around to clean up their guts but not to prevent them spilling in the first place. Mom told me so, and she told Baba even more than me.
That would be me. This wasn’t a temporary situation. I would live here, go to the school where the kids called me names like ghost or gringa, and either run with gangs or get involved with drugs. Drugs more likely. What gang would take me? When I explained to them what my actual ethnicity was, made them understand what an Arab was, they would be even more horrified. Say I was a terrorist or something and tell me to go back to “my country” and join up with a terrorist group.
I wondered why Baba lived here, why he wouldn’t find someplace better, where people didn’t break into the apartment just to steal women’s or girl’s clothes and then leave. I knew Baba had a job, but I didn’t know what it was or where he worked. Maybe he didn’t make enough money. Maybe they didn’t like him enough to pay him well.
Or maybe he was a drug dealer. I had picked up hints from Mom’s conversations with her friends that Baba was involved with drugs. Taking them, not dealing them. At school some of the boys said they knew drug dealers. One boy told me that his older brother dealt drugs. He said he talked to some of his brother’s clients, stupid crackheads who didn’t want to pay, and he’d threaten to bust a cap in their asses. They listened to him and paid up right away. He was only my age and shorter than me, so I knew he was lying. I was afraid he would tease me or beat me up if I said so, though, so I said nothing.
“You can come by my house, and you can be my girlfriend.”
“My dad won’t let me go to a boy’s house.”
“That’s cool. You can stay at my place.” He claimed to have had sixteen girlfriends, but none as pretty as me.
I declined the offer multiple times. I hated Baba for living here, for leaving me here.
I noticed that the box with Mom’s ashes was gone. That didn’t alarm me, because Baba took that everywhere with us since we had gotten it a couple of days ago. He was worried that burglars might steal it, thinking it was something valuable they could sell on the streets. This place was filled with scum, he swore. But he wouldn’t move.
I started to worry when the sun went down. I thought I had conquered my fear of the dark, but being alone brought it back. I heard noises outside, people arguing, yelling. I smelled the now familiar scent of sour weed. I was calling Baba a good-for-nothing and a deadbeat and an idiot just like Mom used to. A disappointment in every way.
I went back to bed, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, but I cuddled up with one of my big bears and figured that if I was in the bedroom, it would be easier for me to hide from burglars because I could just crawl under the bed when I heard someone trying to break in. Unless they tried to steal the bed! Then they’d find me under there, and I didn’t know what they would do, but it made my stomach churn to think about it.
I was hungry again, too. I had already eaten all the cheese in the house, and I tried eating some mustard by itself, but it tasted sour and went down my throat like acid. My stomach still rumbled as I walked back to the bed.
I fell asleep on top of my stuffed bear late that night with the light still on. I woke up to daylight, and someone knocking at the front door. Baba probably. He was always misplacing his keys; Mom said he had enough new sets for the next five tenants. I wondered what he did all last night, why it was so important he couldn’t come back before morning. I wasn’t sure if I sh
ould open the door. Baba said not to unless I knew the person, and I wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the peephole yet. Who cared what he said, though? He wasn’t here.
I opened the door and saw a man who was light brown with thick straight black hair and a mustache. His eyes widened at me. “Are you Isra?” He said my name the way Baba said it. Is-ra.
I nodded.
“Allah! How old are you?”
This man was a nosy stranger. “Eight.”
“Wallah? You are so tall. I have a son who is two years older, and he is not so tall.”
I believed him. I was taller than every boy in my class and all the girls except for one. I was even taller than the teacher.
“Well, I am your amu. Your father is my cousin. I got him a job.” He explained how Baba had lost that job by never being there on time and sometimes not showing up. He hadn’t seen Baba in a few years. “This you must not do, Isra. You must always be hardworking.”
He wasn’t even inside yet, and he was already giving me a lecture. I didn’t even know why he was here in the first place. I let him in eventually. He might be a serial killer who wanted to murder me by pretending to be my father’s cousin, but he did know my name. “I have come to take you to live with me,” he said. “I have a nice place for you to sleep, and I have one son and a little daughter and a wife.”
I had nothing to say. I sat there on the couch and stared at him as he told me the news. His eyes examined the apartment, as if he was looking for something to indicate why I didn’t say anything back. “Do you want to live in my house?”
I hesitated, but then I nodded. “Sure.”
“I will help you pack your stuff up. It does not look like there is much to take.” He looked around, and I saw his lips pucker in disgust under his mustache.
I took my few pairs of clothes, the photo album that Amu had to look through to make sure all the pictures were appropriate, and a few things of Mom’s: her keys, her purse, her makeup bag. Amu snatched the bag from me. “Why do you need this?” he asked.