Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  “He talked to Yusef?”

  She nodded. “Yusef called him. He wanted to know if Baba knew where you were.”

  I shook my head and sucked my teeth. Yusef had gone to Amu. He knew how much I hated him. He knew I would never tell Amu anything.

  “He asked if I knew anything about it. I said you had told me, but you left town to take a vacation.” She sat down on the bed. “He wasn’t going to believe you hadn’t told me, and if he knew you were here, he would know I was going to see you.”

  Some time passed, and Hanan and I snacked and she watched a show on HBO her parents would never let her watch. I thought about what it would have been like if the twins had lived, where Yusef and I would be now. I’d probably be exhausted and resent Yusef for only taking the fun parts of raising children and leaving me with the breastfeeding and diaper changing and exhaustion, though he promised he would be a helpful father, especially with two babies at once. We would have a huge fight, or fights, and I might be able to keep my emotions in check enough to cry only after he was out of the room, unlike when I was pregnant. For months I crumbled over anything.

  And he’d try to make me feel better every time. Even when I threatened to cut off his balls.

  Then Summer of Sam came on. I nearly gagged watching that guy running around to get his sodomy fix from any woman he met. Do that many people do that stuff? I did it a few times, albi, but I don’t need it.

  I changed the channel.

  “That guy’s such a perv,” Hanan commented. “How are you paying for this anyway? If you need some money, I’ll just take a little from Baba’s stash. I know where it is.” She bit into another cherry cordial from the box of chocolates we had opened.

  “I have some saved.” I had used three hundred dollars already. I needed to look for an apartment and another job to get by, but I didn’t want to think about that. It felt so final.

  We were over. I’d be living alone. Twenty-four, and I hadn’t managed to start a career or even have babies. All I had was a failed marriage.

  Hanan and I had an evening slump. She was asleep with chocolate smeared on the corners of her face, and I was lying down with my back to hers, my hands on my belly. I could feel that I had lost more weight. I was hardly eating; I would have some junk food and then feel burnt out for the rest of the day, too tired to eat or to do anything but lie down and feel horrible about myself. I thought I’d be the type to balloon up after having kids or during a tragedy, but instead I was becoming someone who my grandmother would approve of. A woman who slimmed down when she left a man so she could get another in a minute.

  I heard a hard knock on the door. Hanan woke up with a start. “Don’t come in, please!” I shouted. I had put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle.

  “It’s me.”

  Hanan and I looked at each other. We recognized his voice. “Holy shit!” Hanan whispered.

  I got up immediately and tried to fix my hair by running my fingers through it. When had that ever worked for me? I sighed and looked in the mirror. My hair was insanely frizzy. I didn’t know what I felt. Scared, excited, stomach-sick.

  “I have to do this some time,” I said. My legs were jelly when I walked to the door.

  He looked worse than I did. His hair was disheveled, his eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed, his whole face sagging. He seemed to have aged at least ten years. Neither of us knew what to say for those first few seconds. He shook his head at me, frowning. “It’s been five days, and you haven’t once called to let me know you were alive,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  I had been asking myself the same thing the entire time. I couldn’t come up with an answer.

  “You’re not gonna let me in?”

  I looked down at the floor. My lungs felt heavy, too heavy for my chest to contain.

  “There’s someone else in there?” His voice broke and his eyes were wide and bright.

  I moved out of the way to let him in. Hanan was scurrying around, picking up the trash. “It’s okay, Hanan. Just leave it there.”

  His face softened, and he sighed. “Do you mind if I talk to Isra alone?”

  She dropped the fast food bags on the floor. She looked over to me.

  “We just need to talk,” Yusef insisted.

  “Are you sure you want me to leave?” She picked up her purse.

  After she let herself out, Yusef said, “So I’m such an asshole that she doesn’t even trust me alone with you?”

  “I didn’t say anything bad about you.”

  “Oh, sure. That’s why Sana thinks you should be in the witness protection program because I’m—”

  “Sana doesn’t know where I am! I called her, and she wanted me to go back, so I stopped talking to her.” I was close to tears. “Don’t worry. No one thinks you’re the bad guy. You got way more people on your side, as usual.”

  His eyes filled up. “Isra, I thought because … Look, I’m sorry about the babies and the miscarriage, but how can you just leave? All your shit is still at home, what was I supposed to think? I thought someone had come and kidnapped you. I was that stupid. I didn’t think you would ever leave me.”

  I went to the window. I couldn’t look at him. “It’s not about that, okay? And if I’m such an evil bitch, why didn’t you just say good riddance when I left?” I turned back around. It was always easier to look at him angrily rather than remorsefully.

  “Because I’m such a fucking idiot that I still care about you. I still love you. Even when Sana told me that you said you were leaving, I was worried about you. I kept on thinking, ‘Where’s she going to sleep? What if someone hurts her?’ I can’t just detach like you. I see you didn’t give a shit about what was happening to me. You can’t even call me, can’t even try to work it out with me.” He fell on the bed and covered his face as he wept.

  I placed a tentative hand on his back. He didn’t seem to notice. “I am sorry about how I left, and I didn’t mean for Sana to be the one to have to tell you.”

  “How else was I gonna find out? You didn’t even leave a note.” He wiped his eyes. The rims had turned an even brighter red, like fresh blood when the skin breaks.

  I didn’t know what to say. That I had wanted to see him again. That I was afraid to see him, afraid that I would be sucked in again when I didn’t think I should be.

  He looked up at me accusingly. “Was it ever love with you? Did you love me? I used to think you were just being modest, or you were insecure, but was it just games, ways to fuck with me? Because I know I would never have left you like that.”

  I took my hand from his back. “That is so unfair. I waited for you for seven years so I could fuck with you? And it turns out you were having plenty of fun, and you forgot about me soon enough.”

  “God, Isra, those girls didn’t mean anything to me. You broke it off with me, remember? You wouldn’t give me a number, a place to meet, nothing. I just respected your boundaries, and you had plenty of those.”

  I stomped my foot on the floor. “What did you expect me to do? Become your child bride at fifteen and live with you and your parents? If Amu found out I was ‘whoring around’ with you, he would have kicked me out, sent me to foster care, or had me eating out of the trash. I’m not his daughter. He wasn’t going to forgive a sin like that. The stakes were a lot higher for me, and you refuse to see that.” I pressed my eyes shut. I wanted to bring up how he said he would hold our daughter to the same standard of purity, but I wasn’t that mad at him even then. “And don’t act like you didn’t enjoy screwing around with ‘whores’ before you settled down with your virginal wife!”

  He stood up to meet me just above eye level. “All right, Isra. You’re right. I’m a disgusting pig. But I didn’t think I was hurting you. If you had told me these things—”

  I snickered. “You wouldn’t have done it? Yeah, right.” And I did tell him. He just didn’t understand.

  He covered his forehead and eyes and shrieked. “You don’t get it, Isra!” Now he he
ld his arms out to the side. “I’ve given more to you than anyone else. I share things with you I wouldn’t even think about sharing with anyone else. Nobody’s had me the way you have, and you just throw it away, again and again.”

  “You don’t get it! I gave you everything, and even that’s not enough for you!”

  Our fight was so long it had its own intermission. I went on about how we had to live our lives according to his standards because he never saw my side of things; he went on about how he wanted to take care of me and do his best for me, but I didn’t appreciate it. When we both didn’t have the energy to duke it out any longer, I sat on the bed and hid my face in my bent legs, my knees pressed to my forehead. Yusef sat on the floor next to the tiny round table, his head resting against one of the legs, silent for nearly an hour.

  “Did you blame me for what happened?”

  I looked up, but my eyes went right back down to my hands. “No. I mean, I was on the pill, and you knew and kind of accepted it.”

  He craned his neck and blinked slowly. “I just wanted a—”

  “No, it’s not bad. I can just be so bitter sometimes, and it made it hurt so much more when I wasn’t on guard.”

  He came over to me and pressed me to his chest. We both cried. I could feel some of his tears drop on my hair. When I composed myself enough to speak, it came out in choked bursts. “Yusi, I left … I left because … I feel like such a failure. I never thought that they would die.” I squeezed his shoulder and looked up at him. “I’m so, so sorry for leaving like that. I was such a coward. I don’t know what came over me.” But I did know what it was; the desire to flee, to escape, had been there since I could remember. This was just the first time I couldn’t resist.

  He took my hand from his shoulder and kissed it, closing his eyes tight.

  “How’d you know I was here, Yusef?”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Your amu figured out where Hanan was going. He called me while I was at the hospital. Baba had a heart attack last night.”

  “Oh, Yusi….” I didn’t know what else to say. I wiped the tears from his cheeks and told him how much I loved him.

  “If I didn’t come here, you would have come back home?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking that day. I felt better that morning, but then in the afternoon, I just …”

  He looked away, wiped his tears. “I just want you to be there, even if you’re pissed, sad, or whatever.”

  And I heard myself tell him that I would be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When I was seven, Mom and Baba resumed contact that went beyond Baba’s occasional visits to see me. Mom had decided that she had to quit her job because her cancer had spread, and she needed someone to take care of me when she was gone. We didn’t move in with Baba at first. He usually came over to our apartment to visit and watch me when Mom needed to sleep or something. For the first month or so, I got sick a lot, colds and stomach aches. Baba believed that I wasn’t being properly nourished, and his solution, as it was to everything stomach-related, was tea with maramiya.

  When Baba made me a cup, he made some for himself and Mom. During teatime, while I lay down on my stomach on the floor or the couch, my parents would discuss her medical treatment and “plans for the future.” These conversations were a lot different from the ones I remembered as a little kid, when Mom and Baba would shout at the top of their lungs and Baba would leave for a few days, or sometimes a few months. Mom took him back a couple of times after that, but she would be mad about it for a while, and Baba would tell her that he didn’t need her and could go back home where he would be loved and respected and could find a good Palestinian wife. “Then why’d you leave in the first place?” she would say. “If you want to go back, don’t let your daughter and me stand in your way.”

  But after visiting Falasteen, I knew how he could have felt loved in a way that he never had in the United States and yet would want to leave. Maybe love couldn’t be conquered, but it could be driven into retreat. My family in Palestine loved me more than Amu and Amtu, but I couldn’t imagine myself staying.

  Now they talked things out rationally, even when they disagreed. It was temporary, though. Once we moved in with Baba, they would be around each other enough to drive each other up the wall again. “Munir, I don’t understand why you don’t just move in here,” she said. “That would really work out better. That apartment you live in scares the shit out of me. You can’t have a child there.”

  “No, no. I will open my home to you, but I want to stay there. I don’t like this place.”

  I could see Mom’s temper simmering, but she looked sideways at the wall, her green eyes sad, her face thin and pale, cheekbones protruding far out from her face. She sighed. “It’s full of drug addicts and criminals,” she said. “Do you want your daughter living there?” Those were fighting words, but she said them in a calm tone, and Baba didn’t have any retaliation.

  He didn’t waver, though.

  We had just gotten back from one of her treatment sessions, so Mom was feeling especially tired. When we got to the stairs, we noticed that the door of our apartment was wide open. “I know I closed the door. I locked it,” she said. She jogged up the steps, and I did my best to keep up with her.

  When we examined the door, we found SAND NIGGER’S WHORE spray-painted across the outside of it. Mom’s face bleached to an almost pure white, but she didn’t cry in front of me. I thought these people were pretty stupid, thinking that Baba was black. My kindergarten teacher had thought the same thing because of my hair and Baba’s, and she didn’t know where Palestine was, so I told her that Baba came from a place that was overrun by European invaders who claimed they were the original inhabitants of the land but actually dispossessed the people who were. I didn’t understand what all that meant at the time, but that’s what Baba said, so I passed it on when people asked, until Mom told me to stop. My teacher gaped at me and said, “All right, Isra,” but she never looked at me the same again, and she avoided speaking to me.

  “They’re dummies!” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  Mom jiggled the door handle, and it only made a muffled sound. “They broke the lock. How are we supposed to live here without a lock?” Her face contorted some more, and it wasn’t any better when we got into our apartment.

  There was a spray-painted picture on our living room wall of the three of us on a camel, and we all looked like stick figures with head covers. Then, across the wall, all three of us were being overrun by the camel we had been riding earlier.

  Mom’s face looked hard and still. She didn’t seem close to tears anymore. It was the face she got right before she was about to yell at Baba but a thousand times worse. Her breathing came in bursts. “You know, I don’t understand why people can’t just leave us alone,” she spit out, glaring at the picture. “Is our life any of their business?”

  On the kitchen table Mom found a note and slammed it back down before she went to the phone to report this to the police and to the apartment manager so they could get the place fixed up. I read the note. Nothing was in it that wasn’t on the door or the walls. Putting all this together, I figured out they did know that Baba wasn’t black. Everyone thought of camels when they heard about the Middle East, but Baba had never mentioned them to me before.

  But then, there were a lot of things Baba never told me.

  The apartment manager claimed that he was just about to get off work, so he would call the maintenance man to come check it out first thing in the morning. Until then, he advised us to stay with friends. I knew friends would end up being Baba. I had been to his apartment once before. It smelled, and there was a lot of noise all around and dirty people hanging out on the street asking for change. Everyone glared at us, too, hating Mom and me before they even knew us.

  The cops weren’t much better. There was a tall Mexican guy and a short white guy. They surveyed our apartment and asked Mom a bunch of questions while I sat on the couch, wishing I could
become invisible with Mom and we could float away, out into the sky. We would have our own universe, where there wasn’t death and cops and stupid people breaking into your apartment and painting ugly pictures on the wall.

  “Is there anyone you know who had a problem with your … preference for Middle Eastern men?” the white cop asked.

  “Well, yes. Half the people in the complex.”

  “Maybe they all teamed up to do this,” the Mexican cop said, laughing.

  Mom glared at him. She crossed her arms and looked right at them. “You know what? Fuck both of you. I don’t need any more people to judge my life. You won’t even find the dipshit who did this, anyway. You just think it’s funny.”

  “Ma’am, you’re becoming emotional,” the white cop said. “We’ll do our best to find out who’s done this to your residence, but we can’t do that if you’re impeding the process.”

  She shook her head. “He’s from a different continent, not a different planet. And I don’t want you in my ‘residence’ any longer.”

  “Suit yourself.” The Mexican cop put his notepad back in his pocket, and the white cop adjusted his holster and sneered.

  Baba took forever to come to the apartment. In the meantime, Mom lay down on the couch with her hands over her eyes and cried about what a failure her life had been and how Baba was the biggest mistake she had ever made. I stretched out in the space between the couch back and her legs, resting my head on her now-skinny butt. She assured me that I was the only good thing that came from her ill-fated union with Baba, and patted my shoulder. “He was a good man,” she said. “When we first met, he wasn’t so worthless. I never thought he would become this.”

  Her mentioning Baba in the past unsettled me. I knew nothing about how they met or how long they had been together before they had me, or if they were even together before Mom found out she was pregnant. I wanted to ask her more about the past, so maybe I would feel like I didn’t just emerge from the collision of two unwilling lives to make me into a girl who everyone thought should be riding a camel and wearing a head cover but speaking like a white girl.