Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  I sighed. This was the last thing I needed today. “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like he’s been that lucky recently.” I’d thought the same thing about him before. An only son with two parents and three loving sisters. He seemed to have it all. Until he married me.

  He folded his arms and shuffled his feet nervously. “I’m sorry, but, in other ways, he’s been lucky, you know.”

  I unlocked my trunk. “Just lay off, okay? I’m your aunt.” Identifying myself that way still seemed weird, especially to a boy not even five years my junior.

  He pouted and looked down, his dark eyes lowered in shame. I felt cruel, and I thought that if our son had lived, he would have grown up to look similar to Muhammad. “I’m sure you’ll find someone else,” I said, though I knew that one person could never actually replace another. I might be the older-woman crush he would hold on to with fervor. Older woman. When had this happened?

  “Yeah, sure I will,” he said petulantly, and turned his back to me.

  I went back into the store and picked up the bag Khadija insisted I take. “Where’s Muhammad?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I swear it’s always something with these boys,” she said.

  She followed me out to order him back inside. As I eased my car away from the curb, she yelled at him about the cheese and yogurt getting warm sitting on the floor of the store.

  Once I got home, I couldn’t make myself get out of the car. I couldn’t go back in our house. I sat there for a few minutes telling myself this was where I lived, to just go inside and do something to occupy myself, but I pulled out of the driveway instead. I stopped, my car halfway in the road, and ran to the front door, key in hand. I went to the bedroom and found the photo album Mom had made me, the letters from Falasteen, the receipts for the money I had been wiring. While I was digging for that stuff, I found the shoebox where Yusef kept my notes. I couldn’t look at them. I hadn’t thought to write him one since we lost the babies.

  I drove around for a couple of hours. The traffic got heavier. Suddenly it felt like the car was slowly shrinking, and I was sure it would squeeze me to death. I parked at a motel, went to the office, and got myself a room for the night. I thought about Yusef the whole time. I didn’t feel like I was that woman, the one who married Yusef and slept next to him every night, the woman he had stood by for fifteen hours of labor to deliver two dead children; I wasn’t even the girl he noticed at Sana’s house, who almost made him lose to Bassam at a video game. Yusef wasn’t real; he was just a sweet dream that had gone horribly wrong. I was only a grown-up orphan and Amu and Amtu’s burden who had managed to finally escape their house.

  I was at ease when I lay down on the queen-size bed, my stuff thrown on the floor. I needed to confirm that I was still alive. I called Sana, put the phone on speaker, and set it down on the bed.

  “I can’t go home, Sana.”

  “What? What happened? Did you and Yusef have a fight or something?”

  “No, he’s at work. I can’t go back.”

  “Wait. Why?” She kept on talking when I didn’t answer. “Is something going on?”

  “No. I can’t be a wife. I can’t go back.”

  “Look, Isra, I know you’ve been really depressed about your babies, and I understand, believe me, that must be so hard.”

  I closed my eyes, my stomach closing in on itself so hard I felt it in my chest.

  “I don’t think you should leave him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Isra? Are you there? Tell me where you are, and I can come and talk to you and everything. I think you’re just feeling really down today, and you need someone, so let me see you—”

  I hung up and went to sleep.

  She called me back several times and left messages, but they didn’t disturb my sleep. I calmly listened to them when I woke up. “Isra, seriously, call me back and tell me where you are. I’m about to have a nervous breakdown over this.”

  Later Yusef started calling, just after nine o’clock when he got home and didn’t find me anywhere. “Hey, Isra, just wanted to know where you are.” He took a much different tone with me in the second message. “I was worried shitless about you, and I just called Sana’s house, and she told me about your call earlier. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but call me back.” He had to record the rest of his thoughts on another message. “I’m your husband, how can you treat me like this? Everything was … well, it wasn’t all right, but it was better. At least call me and talk to me if you won’t tell me where you are.” He called and called well past midnight. After an hour of silence, at 1:44 a.m., he left one final message. I heard the tears in his voice, his words slightly slurred. “How am I supposed to sleep when I don’t know where you are? Call me. Sana won’t even tell me where you are. I know she knows. I don’t know what I did to become the bad guy. I didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

  I called Hanan; she picked up after two rings.

  “I left Yusef.”

  She yawned and spoke in a groggy voice. “Right now?”

  “No, it was earlier, but my phone line has been tied up.”

  Hanan asked where I was staying, and when I said I was at a motel, she hesitantly asked, “What happened?”

  “I just … I can’t do it anymore. I don’t know what I was thinking when I married him. It’s too much. I can’t do it. Sana thinks I should go back, but—”

  “If you don’t want to stay, I don’t see why you have to. She’s not the one who’s married to him.”

  It was such a relief to hear Hanan’s agreement. I slid down the wall to the floor.

  “I can come over tomorrow.”

  “Don’t tell your parents where you’re going.”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course. Just give me the address, and I’ll tell them I’m going to a friend’s house. Baba usually works a lot on Saturdays anyway, so he won’t ask questions.”

  Out screwing another woman, I thought. That’s what he’s doing on Saturdays. Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia stayed together, with two surviving children, a boy and a girl, and yet Yusef and I were separated and childless.

  I thought of the last time Yusef and I saw each other in high school. You can call me. I’ll pick you up, and we can go somewhere to be alone. He promised me he wouldn’t try to kiss me or do anything I didn’t want him to do. I just want to see you. But of course, the only number he had to give me was his home phone number, and the only one I could give him was Amu and Amtu’s landline, and I’d heard from Sana that Imm Yusef was unusually fanatical about her son’s behavior. She told Sana’s mother any Amreekiya or any other kind of kafir woman that would try to steal him away had to do it over her dead body. He would marry a Palestinian Muslim woman, one who would know how to take care of him and give him sons.

  “Do you think she would consider me too kafir?” I asked Sana. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Nearly all the older Arab women who met me didn’t like me from the start, except for blood relatives and Sana’s mother.

  Sana shrugged. “I don’t know, but you don’t want to get your ass mixed up in that. His mom’s bat-shit insane. Yusef’s cute and all, but you’ve got to think that through.”

  The next day he called around nine-thirty, when I would usually finish breakfast on a Saturday, before our children died. I usually made a small one, some eggs and labna, not a feast like Amtu’s or what I made him the day before, and we either talked or made love after. He left a short message this time, the exhaustion evident in his voice: “Call me, Isra. I need to know you’re okay.”

  Hanan came over in the early afternoon. She gave me a hug and said she was sorry for everything.

  I shrugged. “I should never have gotten married.”

  She nodded her head vigorously. “Yes. Okay, I’m not saying Yusef was a bad guy or anything, but who are the people who live the longest, especially the women who live the longest? The ones who never marry. Marriage is fatal.”

  I chuckled halfheartedly.


  “And, you know, your kids, too. I know you took that really hard.”

  I sighed, suddenly feeling exhausted. “Yeah. I mean, you just never think of babies dying, but …” I lay down on the bed, my hands over my soft belly.

  “We should go do something. Get your mind off everything. You’ve been in the house way too much these days.”

  But we didn’t know where to go. We drove around in my car, going over possibilities. Mostly Hanan would suggest things, and I’d grunt in agreement, which she didn’t consider enough enthusiasm to go forward with the plan. My mind was more focused on Yusef at the wheel of his car, except it wasn’t him now but him at seventeen, in the car he had then when he took me home from Sana’s house, or from school, or to the restaurant where he told me he liked me and thought I was beautiful.

  Listening to the radio didn’t help. Hanan sang along with all the pop songs, reveling in the sexually suggestive lyrics and giggling. To me, though, it seemed like every song mentioned love or lust, which made me think of Yusef. I don’t know why, because our relationship was nothing like what was in those songs. He never told me to leave my man for him, I never said I could do more for him than the other girls (I couldn’t anyway). We had a secret relationship for a year, then he came back after seven years to ask my father’s cousin for my hand in marriage, and I made him wait for my answer just to see if he would. We argued, cried, lost babies. Romance gone awry. More tragic than Amtu Samia’s soap operas. I switched to the heavy metal station, figured if any of those songs were about love, I wouldn’t know it anyway. I couldn’t understand their screaming, and it was a comfort to know I wasn’t the only one who felt like that.

  Hanan whined at the change. “Ew! God, you are white, listening to this!” She imitated the singer and made it sound like a throaty scream and a dog’s bark put together.

  I leaned against the window and stared ahead blankly.

  After Hanan left, I found an unopened pack of cigarettes and a half-used box of matches in the nightstand in my motel room. Slowly I peeled off the red plastic strip on the cigarette box. I took one out and smelled the end with the tobacco. It didn’t smell good or bad, but it drew me in. Lighting it, I inhaled and coughed so hard I nearly choked, but I took another stab at it. The cigarette left a burnt taste in my mouth and made me feel so relaxed. I understood why the men in Falasteen smoked them so much out on the porch: it was calming and shortened your misery. One of my first cousins had become such an expert at exhaling smoke that he could make an infinity sign. I tried to do the same, but it came out as a flood of white air.

  I smoked a couple and read Yusef’s texts. He was practically carrying on conversations with himself. “Maybe you’re upset about me not being able to do that that one morning but don’t be. Call me.” He was more pissed off a few hours later. “You’re acting like a selfish bitch! I’ve never done anything this bad to you.” The next one came a few minutes later. “You make everything so hard.”

  I even got a voicemail from Sana’s mother. “Isra, Sana has told me what happened. You must go back to your husband. He is a good man. Sana will not tell anyone where you are. You must call your husband.”

  A text message came from Sana a minute later: “I didn’t tell my mom, but Yusef’s practically been stalking me so she found out. Just deal with him.”

  Now everyone knew that I had left Yusef. Imm Yusef would be irate: the half-breed girl who couldn’t even bring children to full term had the gall to leave her perfect son, the one who was conceived because of America’s waters. She would quickly look into divorce and search for another wife. After all, she needed a grandchild from her only son.

  “I think he’s a dick,” Hanan said as she unpacked the fast food she bought on her way over to the motel. “That’s a totally messed-up thing to say, that it’s all your fault.”

  We ate our hamburgers on the bed. The meat was chewy. I hated cheap fast food. “Well, I haven’t even talked to him yet, so I can understand why he’s mad,” I said.

  Hanan wolfed down her burger. “Yeah, you should call him, when you have divorce papers.” She had thought this out more thoroughly than I had. “You are going to divorce him?”

  “I don’t see how we could come back from this, so I guess that’s where we’re headed.”

  “Come on, have more conviction than that!”

  “I can’t, Hanan! It’s not that easy! We’ve had children together. I can’t just forget him like that.” That must have been why it took Mom so long to finally sever ties with Baba. Look at how worked up I was getting just now, and our children weren’t even alive.

  I lay down and cried, letting my half-eaten burger fall off the bed. “I miss him so much. It would hurt to see him, but I want to so badly. If I see him now, I know I’ll go back to him.” If he would even take me back.

  “Why? You don’t need him.”

  I was sure of that. I had lived all these years without my mother. I could go without Yusef. But Mom was dead. There was no way I could go back to her. With Yusef, I’d know he was out there, just a few miles away, and the temptation would be too much for me.

  “I can’t explain it. I don’t need him, but I don’t want to kick him out of my life. These things are complicated, Hanan.”

  “Really, Isra, I think if you wanted him in your life, you wouldn’t have left, but you knew he wasn’t good for you. Okay, he’s not a terrible guy, but he’s so self-involved and cocky, and marriage just kills you anyway. It’ll probably be better for both of you guys.”

  I looked up at the ceiling and stared at a brown stain. “It would have been easier if I hadn’t fallen for an only son,” I said. “I should have married some guy who was the middle son or something in a family of all boys.”

  “I know. Look at Rasheed.”

  “No, what Yusef’s family thinks of him is like what your parents thought of Rasheed on steroids. He was the baby, and he came after his parents were married fifteen years. You don’t cherish anything more than when you had to wait for it.” I sighed. “Besides, he’s not a loser like Rasheed, and he’s better looking.”

  She scoffed. “Yusef’s not that good looking. Arabs will fall all over you if you got light eyes.”

  “It’s not only that. It’s his skin, his hair, his hands.” His chest, his arms, his everything.

  Hanan frowned, steadfastly unimpressed.

  We took another drive, hoping that it would make me feel better, singing along to the radio and laughing at our awful voices. I smoked a couple of cigarettes. It was awkward at first because I needed my right hand to drive, but that was also how I smoked. In about an hour I had mastered smoking with my left hand.

  “How do you know where everything is?” Hanan asked.

  I had lived in most of the areas of the city, counting all the apartments Mom and I lived in, then Baba’s apartment, then Amu’s house far out into the suburbs. Not to mention living by the university with Yusef and now over on the northwest side of town. We were driving far from there and heading toward the ghetto, where Mom and I lived with Baba and where I went to high school, where most of my teenage relationship with Yusef was carried out.

  Hanan got quiet as we started to pass more decrepit buildings, dingy churches, and barking guard dogs. “Don’t you think we should get out of here?”

  “No, I want to see something.” In my sophomore year of high school, I walked the mile and a half from school to Baba’s old apartment complex, but right before I got there, I was stopped by a man who thought I was a prostitute. That sent me running the other way.

  That didn’t matter now. I parked at the curb in front of the apartments.

  “Are you sure you want to leave the car here?” Hanan’s eyes were wide.

  “This is where I lived with my mom and dad,” I said.

  She unbuckled her seat belt and got out with me. They had closed the complex down a while ago, but one of the security gates was wide open, and I found the apartment in no time, 216B. I tried the lock on
the door.

  “You’re just gonna go in?”

  “Nobody lives here.”

  “Isra, I’m getting scared. What if your car gets stolen or the cops catch us doing this?”

  “Believe me, all the cops do around here is call the clean-up crew for the dead bodies.”

  “That makes me feel so much better!”

  I threw my shoulder into the door, and it opened easily. I smelled rat shit and saw alcohol bottles and dirty blankets scattered around the floor. “Hobos live here,” I said. I went to the window I used to look out all the time. No lock. The room looked the same, glaringly white, except now it was a storage room for empty beer cans, gin and vodka bottles, blankets, and pillows.

  “Isra, let’s hurry and get out,” she said. “What if those homeless guys come back?”

  The bathroom was trashed. When I opened the door, a bunch of bottles clattered like a wind chime. The mirror was so dirty I could barely see myself in it. I rubbed some water on the mirror and saw myself, if somewhat blurry. I didn’t bother to look closely.

  Hanan ran into me in the hall. “We have to get out. I’m freezing, and someone’s gonna find us. I can feel it.”

  I saw myself looking out the window, seeing all the decay around us, Mom yelling at me to stay away, and Baba looking off in the distance when I stuck my head out to get a better look.

  We spent the next two days in the hotel room, watching TV and eating junk food. I didn’t check my texts at all and kept my phone on silent. Hanan didn’t have school that week, but on Monday she had to leave anyway when Amu called and demanded that she come home from her “friend’s house.” “It’s not a lie. We are friends. We just happen to be cousins too,” she said, and added sulkily, “I don’t want to go back home. It’s so boring over there.”

  I didn’t know what was so exciting about being here. All I did besides eat and watch TV was cry and reminisce about Yusef and feel remorse about how I wasn’t calling him.

  Hanan came back as early as she could on Tuesday. “Baba knows that you left Yusef,” she said. “He says he talked to him.”