by Lena Mahmoud
“It’s Mom’s.”
“A little girl doesn’t need makeup.” He slammed the bag down on the dresser.
“Why does Baba not want me to live with him?”
Amu looked down at me, and his brown eyes softened. He sighed. “Your father has gone the wrong way. He cannot raise a child. Look at the mess he has made of his life, having babies when he is not married with kafir women.”
“What’s kafir?”
He chuckled and told me I said it wrong. Not “ka-fear” but “kaa-fer.” He made me say it over, and I got it right. “You have it in you to be a Falasteeniya.”
“But what is kafir?”
“It is those that go the wrong way.”
“But Mom didn’t.” I hated how everyone always said that. I heard a few people at her memorial service say that she had been a “good girl,” just a little chubby and antisocial, and then she met Baba. Her fall from almost-perfect grace.
He snorted. “Your mother has a child, and she is not married. You need to have a husband to have children with.”
I looked up at him, bewildered. No wonder he wanted to get out of this place so bad. A few of the kids at my old elementary school didn’t have married parents, but here it was the norm to have parents that were broken up and/or never married.
“It is good you are young. You must not live this way. Look what it brings you.” He surveyed the bedroom again.
He took me down the stairs and helped me with the two bags we’d packed. He had parked his car across the street, and he made sure to keep looking at his surroundings, but it was morning, maybe ten o’clock, so nothing bad went down. Crime rarely occurred between the hours of five in the morning and noon.
He had a button to unlock his car, and when he turned the engine on, the seat warmed up. I had never been in a car so nice.
And I cried because I wanted to share this with Mom.
“Eh, what is it, habibti?” he asked. “What are these tears? Your cousins and your auntie want to see you. They already love you.”
“I want Mommy,” I whined like a baby. I hadn’t called Mom “Mommy” for a couple of years now, but it came out automatically.
He leaned over and hugged me. No one in Mom’s family cared about my tears. I wasn’t really Mom’s daughter. I looked nothing like her. I had no right to grieve for her. “It is okay. Don’t worry. She is with God now.”
I heard about God around school, especially at Christmas time, which was supposed to be God’s son’s birthday, and sometimes I saw tel-evangelists on TV ranting and raving about God, but my parents never mentioned Him. I didn’t know God took the dead to be with Him. It wasn’t a comfort to me. I hated God for taking my mother away from me. If God had so much power and had so many things, why did He have to take my mother away? I was only a little girl who was now forced to get in a car with a stranger—something I had been warned against ever since I could remember—because I had no choice. I was going to starve in Baba’s apartment, or get killed.
Amu was more patient than Baba and withstood my crying without yelling at me. He assured me I would feel better once I got to his house, where his wife had food and a warm welcome waiting for me.
I wasn’t sure if I believed him.
But I had to take him at his word. The bitter taste lingered in my mouth.
Amu half lied. His house was warm enough, and his wife did make a small lunch of cucumber salad and labna, which I wanted to wolf down, but I kept my composure and took polite bites. My kafir mother had taught me manners, after all.
But it didn’t feel like everyone loved me already. Rasheed seemed annoyed by my presence and had to be forced by his father to acknowledge me. Amtu Samia was mad, her jaw set tight, her demeanor as aloof as her son’s. Hanan, though, looked at me with her light brown eyes, inherited from her father, lit up when she met me. She led me into her bedroom and told me all the names she had given her baby dolls.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I was flipping through the channels and settled on a non-cartoon version of The Secret Garden, one of the few movies I liked as a child, despite Mary Lennox being a spoiled brat with a nanny or an ayah. Yusef came home soon after it started. I was applying moisturizer to my skin, and using a special cocoa butter oil for my belly because I heard it was good for preventing stretch marks.
He brought his food out into the living room to eat at the coffee table and sit by me. He had never seen the movie, so I spent a couple of minutes explaining the plot. I finished at the same time Mary was telling Dickon that the children on the boat taunted her by singing “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.”
“Do you ever think about where your father is?” he asked.
I stopped rubbing the lotion on my skin for a minute. “Rarely,” I said nonchalantly. I had told Yusef about Baba during our engagement because I figured he would find out anyway, no matter how Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia tried to spin my family history to Yusef and his family. “Only when people ask.” I was barely five when Mom kicked him out for good, but he’d always gone back and forth, promising to stay and be stable and lots of other things he never delivered. Growing up, hardly any of the children I was around had fathers who lived with them or were present in any real way; when handing out permission slips or report cards, the teachers asked for our “mother’s signature,” not a “parent’s signature.” Poor kids don’t have fathers.
I noticed him closely observing my movements, seeing if my face or body language would betray any hidden emotion. “I didn’t think fathers were important,” I added. “A man’s love for his child is directly related to his love for its mother, so it’s more tenuous.”
He chewed his food slowly and stared at me, his eyebrows raised. “That’s a big, hateful word to say to an expectant father,” he said. “‘Tenuous.’ I’d love my child through anything. But then, you know, I can’t imagine ever falling out of love with you, so maybe we won’t get to test the theory.”
I didn’t argue. I was right. I’d seen how Hanan and Rasheed had fallen from Amu’s favor as his marriage conflicts grew, especially how Hanan had lost his deep affection. A daughter had more to lose from her father in those cases.
Setting his empty plate aside, Yusef put my oily foot in his hand and rubbed the toes. “What about your mother’s family, do you ever think about them?”
I didn’t, not anymore. I kind of knew my mother’s mother, spent time with her on a few occasions. She barely noticed my existence until close to the end of Mom’s life. “No, they’ve had plenty of time to start a relationship with me,” I said. He thought I saw myself as Mary, a girl unloved by her now-dead parents who then tries to solicit love and approval from her extended family. But I wasn’t about to beg for anything, not from Mom’s family, not from Amu Nasser, not from Baba.
“If I went into porn, that’d be my name: Dickon,” he said, and laughed.
The role would fit perfectly for him: the slightly older, poorer boy who fell for me, a sour-faced girl, who fell for him in return. Instead of singing, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary / How does your garden grow?” he would sing, “Isreenie, my little meanie / Where did your family go?”
“There’s cousin love,” he said when we got to the part where her cousin Colin reveals that he wants to marry Mary when they grow up. “If they went to an Arab country, their parents would already have the two of them set up to marry each other.” He laughed so hard that his whole body shook, and mine too, so that I spilled a bit of the cocoa butter oil on the couch, the first stain.
I picked up the remote and changed the channel. “This movie is stupid anyway.”
My pregnancy brought a light to Imm Yusef’s life. Abu Yusef was intermittently bedridden and becoming less able to do basic things for himself. She had to put on his shoes because he couldn’t bend over. He didn’t like going out much, so she invited us over to their house for tea and dinner and sweets and anything she could think of. Abu Yusef didn’t come out of his bedroom most of the time, but Yusef went in t
o see his father while Imm Yusef kept me in the living room, taking in all the information about my pregnancy. She listened to me with as much intensity as she had when Yusef and I were engaged. Now she was trying to gauge what kind of mother I would be, if I would raise her grandchild the way she wanted, the way she raised her kids.
“I hope to God very much that you have a boy,” she said, her hand on her heart. “Waiting for a boy is too hard.”
“There’s more to life than men,” I said. “Where would they be without women?” She should have known that. Abu Yusef would have been a bum begging on the streets if he came to America without Imm Yusef, and now he would have been in a nursing home. What did he ever do for her but saddle her with more mouths to feed?
“Yes, but is easier for mother to have boys. With my daughters, always we have problems. With Yusef, laa, everything is fine.”
Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia said the same thing to Hanan and me up until Rasheed’s fifth year in college. Then Amu got fed up with Rasheed’s slacking and refused to acknowledge any of his son’s good points. Before that, though, Hanan and I were the bad ones. We always had to be punished for not following the rules; we always talked back; we always did our chores poorly. But Rasheed was a good boy who never did any of those things. I told Amu that Rasheed never broke the rules because he hardly had any; he didn’t talk back because his parents never scolded or even lectured him; and he didn’t do his chores poorly because he had none to do in the first place.
Amu told me that my response just proved that I could never stop talking back, could never take what was given to me with any sort of appreciation.
“What if we have a daughter?” I asked Yusef in the car, picking at my nails.
“I would throw her in a Dumpster,” he said promptly, “or feed her to wolves.” Then he paused. “C’mon, I would love my daughter. I want daughters, you know. I love women. I love you, I love my mom, I love my sisters.” He made a cautious and slow right turn. He was already driving like an old man because I was pregnant. “I don’t want some madhouse like Khadija’s with five sons. They all got black eyes and bruises all the time, and my sister and her husband have a bunch of gray hairs in their early forties. Even Mama says Khadija has got too much of a good thing.”
I sighed, exasperated. “I know you would love our daughter, but I don’t want you to be some patriarch that just wants her to stay inside and clean all the time.”
He glanced over at me for a second and turned back to the road. “Okay, I’m not going to be like my father and go through my daughter’s stuff and interrogate her every time she goes to a friend’s house to make sure she isn’t out screwing. I would trust her, but I don’t want her to have boyfriends or anything.” He cringed, but then smiled. “I want her to be smart like her mother, her head always in a book, ignoring all the guys and breaking their hearts.”
I gave him the most searing glare I could manage. “That’s so hypocritical! What do you think about me having you in my life when we were teenagers? You were practically my boyfriend. We spent lunch together almost every day; you walked me to the school bus every day; I was in your car alone with you.” Not to mention all the other women he had been with, the ones he whored around with, doing all sorts of things to.
“Isra, that was different. I was the perfect gentleman. I didn’t have my hands all over you until we were engaged, and we were in love. It wasn’t just about hormones.”
“You were not the perfect gentleman. Remember when you tried to kiss me in the car? And then you tried to kiss me the next day when you were ‘apologizing’ for trying to kiss me.”
He nodded dutifully. “Shoot me for slipping. It wasn’t like I grabbed your breasts or anything, though I thought about those kinds of things a lot, and I had to take care of those feelings myself. I know men, Isra. Most of them don’t control themselves, and they’re not going to be pawing my daughter.” He gripped the wheel harder with his right hand. “I know you have good intentions, too, but if you knew the things men think when they see a beautiful woman—and our daughter is definitely going to be one of the most beautiful—you would be so disgusted that you wouldn’t even want her to get married.”
I was fuming. He wasn’t going to have his way on this one. “So our son can go out and have girlfriends?”
He shrugged. “I don’t want him to be a sex maniac, but I don’t think it’s bad if he has a few.”
I couldn’t let him finish. “You. Are. Such. A. Sexist!” I took a breath, told myself yelling wouldn’t do anything for me but make me angrier. “Yusef, you don’t know what it’s like being a girl. Yeah, yeah, I know you grew up with three sisters and your mom, but you don’t get it.” They would never tell you the truth; you never told gods the ugly truth. “I don’t want our daughter idealizing how fun it is to be around boys. I want her to know. I don’t want her to be thrown into marriage, not knowing anything about how things work.”
He tapped his fingers hard against the steering wheel. “It’s harder for a man to control those urges, and they don’t suffer as much in those situations,” he said grudgingly.
I put my hand up to shut him up. “Wait, wait. You’re saying that women can either be good girls or whores, but men can whore around and be a good man? And what about those women our son whores around with? What about them? They can be used and discarded? Is that what you did with your girlfriends?”
That broke his cool, though he still tried to keep himself under control. “I didn’t use and discard women. I was always open with them. I didn’t lie to them. None of them thought it would lead to marriage, and that’s the way they wanted it, too.”
“How are you so sure? Because the girls who give it up to the guys don’t want to be loved and married?”
He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. “I don’t think those women are whores. I know that, but I want … Well, I don’t want her to go through all that pain and trouble. I want to find a good man for her, or, you know, she can find a man and let me check him out. I don’t want her getting hurt. But I want to know the man she’s with is decent.”
I folded my arms and shook my head. I couldn’t look at him. “She’s going to be a person, Yusef. Her own person. And women are a lot stronger than you think.”
Ten minutes after my scheduled time, we were still in the waiting room. I had drunk a lot of water for the ultrasound, and my bladder was about to burst. I held onto Yusef’s hand like a death grip, figuring if I peed on myself, it would be some comfort. I didn’t want to miss this ultrasound; I was already well into my second trimester and had missed my first-trimester one. “What’s the point of making an appointment if she’s not going to stick to it?” I sighed and pouted. “It might as well be walk-in if I have to wait like this. I don’t even think I’m going to make it.” The ultimate humiliation: peeing on myself at the doctor’s office.
“Just hold on a little longer. I’ll go see what the holdup is,” Yusef said, squeezing my hand. He went to the window and did as he said he would, but when the receptionist took an impatient tone with him and answered that the “technician is busy,” his shoulders stiffened. “This appointment’s for fifteen minutes ago, and this technician should know that she’s dealing with a pregnant woman who was advised to drink a lot of water. Can you please check and ask her if she’s going be able to see us today?”
The receptionist nodded while she glared. “Okay, sir. I’ll see what’s going on.”
“Wow,” I said when he sat back down.
“No one’s keeping me from seeing my baby in the womb, and no one’s making you piss on a chair.” He took my hand again and kissed it.
The technician was out in a few minutes. My bladder was heavy, and I struggled to stand up straight. Lying down made it easier to control my bladder, but the cold gel that she spread on my round stomach didn’t help. Yusef held my hand the entire time, but he had his eyes riveted on the screen as soon as my womb went live.
Almost immediately the technic
ian gasped: she had found two fetuses.
“Two?” Yusef said, and got up and leaned over my head to get a better look. “Really?”
The technician gestured. “This one’s a boy.” She moved her pad more. “Let’s see …” Yusef squeezed my hand hard, still standing. “Yes, that’s a girl. Fraternal twins.” She beamed at both of us.
I closed my legs tight and smiled, but there was no holding my pee inside any longer. Yusef turned to me and grinned. “We’re gonna have two!”
“I need to go.”
He nodded and helped me off the table. I pulled his arm hard enough that I heard a soft popping sound. He waited outside the bathroom door, talking the whole time, while I kept myself from gasping too loudly from the relief of emptying my bladder. “Twins. I don’t even think twins run in my family. It must have come from yours.”
I finally managed to heave myself off the toilet and wash my hands. As soon as I was out, I told him while I pointed my forefinger in his face that he couldn’t be restrictive with our daughter or I’d kill him. He put his arm around my shoulders as we walked out. “And our son has to do housework, too,” I said.
“As long as I don’t have to do any.”
“I’m not crazy about cuss words, but I especially don’t want them to hear words like whore or slut or sharmoota.”
I had to make the best of this situation, no matter how much my pulse raced or how hard my heart was pounding in my chest.
We avoided one argument just to get in another less than an hour later. Yusef suggested we stop by a baby store where we could look at cribs, strollers, and toys before he went to work, but I was wiped out from the effort to hold in my pee and said I wanted to go home and take a nap. I didn’t know I was giving him the bait for his next request.
“Isra, I was thinking that you should take some time off work, especially since we’re having twins. Well, until the kids are in school, you can stay at home and care for them. I don’t want you to exhaust yourself, and then we’d have to think of who’s going to watch them and blah, blah, blah. I’m sure Mama and my sisters’ll help out, but as far as permanent, everyday care for the kids, you know, I think it would be best if you stay home.”