The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  “I don’t like the look of those kids,” George said.

  “I can go. You stay with the car.” Amina was glad to go on her own. She was afraid that an imam might object to performing the marriage so hastily or impose some sort of time-consuming preparations, and if she had to argue, she would prefer to do it without George there. She believed that she could persuade a Turkish imam to do the ceremony, if she could only meet him face-to-face.

  But George wouldn’t let her go alone. When they reached the mosque, once again the gate was locked.

  “Goddamn it,” George said, and kicked the gate; the chain and padlock rattled loudly, and across the street two black women in fancy dresses and hats turned to look at her husband.

  “It says open from noon to three,” Amina said, pointing to the sign. She called out in English, “Anybody there?” and then more softly, “Assalamu alaikum,” but the courtyard remained empty. There were two small plastic bins affixed to the gate, with the printed instruction TAKE ONE; the first bin was empty, but the second still held several xeroxed yellow fliers. George took one automatically, and Amina was startled to see a printed banner advertising the same Islamic Center of Rochester that Nasir had found for her, almost two years ago now.

  “I know that place.”

  George was reading the flyer. “It’s right on Westfall Road—why didn’t we go there first?”

  Amina didn’t want to explain about Nasir or her reluctance to take his suggestion. He had come back for his book one afternoon, only a few minutes after her father left on a long errand to a photo shop in Kaptan Bazar, on the other side of town, where a friend had promised he could get his old camera repaired cheaply. Amina had told him it was a waste of money, but her father said that he wanted to be able to take pictures at the airport.

  Nasir came at such a perfect time that it was hard to believe he hadn’t been watching the house. Until that moment, Amina had forgotten about the book under the table leg; she kept her eyes on her cousin’s face, praying that he wouldn’t look down.

  “Please have something to eat,” her mother said. “I’m just making Munni some Bombay toast.” Nasir protested weakly, once, but her mother was already in the kitchen.

  “My mother says you’ve left England for good.”

  “I was successful there in earnings, but not in life. I’ve come home to be successful in both.”

  Why, Amina often wondered, did Bengali men feel the need to brag about everything, especially when they were talking to a woman? From the moment she’d met George, he’d told her that his job was nothing special and that it was too boring to talk about with her, even though he was an engineer with a master’s degree.

  “What sort of business will you have here?” Amina asked, and she was pleased when Nasir colored and said that he’d only just returned and was still settling in.

  “Munni, get your cousin’s book,” her mother called from the kitchen, and for a moment Amina panicked. Had her mother forgotten? She could hardly look down, for fear that Nasir’s gaze would follow her own and find The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam pinned under the foot of the table.

  “On the shelf in the bedroom,” her mother added casually, and then Amina did look down: somehow, in between the time her father had left and Nasir had arrived, the book had migrated from the floor to her parents’ room.

  “Have you read it?” Nasir asked.

  “Only parts of it,” Amina said. “My father read it. I don’t think he liked it as much as he liked the books you used to bring him.” She smiled, but Nasir remained serious. He didn’t seem to care what her father thought.

  “Which parts?”

  She thought about fibbing, but she had a feeling that he would only direct her to the correct chapters, and perhaps even sit in the chair in front of her, eating her mother’s Bombay toast while he waited to get her reaction.

  “ ‘Marriage to the Women of the People of the Book.’ And ‘The Prohibition of a Muslim Woman’s Marrying a Non-Muslim Man.’ ”

  “What did you think?”

  “Very interesting,” Amina said. The book had been interesting. According to the author, there were two reasons a Muslim woman couldn’t marry a non-Muslim. The first was the obvious one: the fact that a child would likely be brought up in the religion of its father. The second reason was one she hadn’t anticipated, but couldn’t help appreciating for the elegance of its logic. Since a Muslim respected all of the prophets—not only Mohammed, but Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as well—a Muslim man could respect the beliefs of his Christian wife. But since Christians believed in only one prophet, Jesus Christ, a Christian husband would have to disdain his wife’s prophet as a false one. And since each man was the head of his own household, it would be intolerable for a Muslim woman to live in the household of a Christian man.

  “But it didn’t change your mind.”

  “Why should it change my mind? My fiancé, George, plans to convert.”

  Nasir looked surprised, but only for a moment. “He says that today.”

  “He has said it all along.”

  “I know Englishmen.”

  “George is an American.”

  Nasir shrugged off the difference. “And what about your children?”

  “They will be Muslim, of course.”

  “But will they pray? Will they fast?”

  Amina regretted the joking tone she’d used earlier. She was insulted by the familiarity that Nasir assumed, whether because he had known her as a child or because they’d once been thought of as a match. She was a woman now, engaged to be married to someone else. Her mother should not even leave them alone together in the same room.

  “My father will be here soon. You should go.”

  She still remembered the nights he would visit her father. Afterward she would have to ask forgiveness, but when he was in the room all of her resolve disappeared, and the only prayers she’d been able to offer were that he would stay for dinner and, after dinner, that he would sit up with her father talking, so that she could lie on the bed in the dark listening to his voice. When Nasir had called her a clever girl, the English words she knew had fled to some inaccessible place; when he’d touched her hair, it was as if all of the water in her body (the body, they had learned in Mr. Haq’s science class, was 61.8 percent water) had turned to soda.

  “Good-bye, Amina,” Nasir said, though he had always called her Munni. “God protect you.”

  “Allah hafez,” Amina said. “Good luck with your new business.” Just out of curiosity, she looked straight into her cousin’s heavily lashed eyes, but that Nasir was gone and it was an angry stranger who looked back at her.

  Ordinarily she took her mother’s side, but on the subject of Nasir she agreed with her father. How dare he tell her where to worship in America, as if he were her father or her brother? He had never even been to America. Standing on the pavement in front of the Turkish Society of Rochester, Amina saw the possibility for a compromise.

  “I misunderstood,” she told George. “I thought the ICR was farther away.”

  George sighed. “The wedding is next weekend. When are we going to go to Brighton?”

  This, Amina thought, was the difference between an American and a Bengali husband. George might shake his head and look put-upon, but if she told him she had to be married by an imam, he wouldn’t try to change her mind. She knew that if she asked him, he would take a day off of work next week just to go to the Islamic Center.

  “Who knows if they could even do it next week.”

  George looked at her hopefully.

  “Also, what are its qualifications? How do we know it is reputable?”

  George nodded. He did not point out that Amina hadn’t had any such reservations about the Masjid of Al-Islam, the Sabiqun Islamic Center, or the even Turkish Society of Rochester.

  “It doesn’t matter when we do it,” Amina said, testing the idea by saying it out loud. “As long as we do it at some time.”

  “I want to do it,�
� George said eagerly. “We’ll do it in a couple of weeks, as soon as the wedding’s over.”

  “The other wedding.”

  “That’s what I meant,” George said.

  11At the bridal shower, Jessica had wanted to know her favorite flower and had listened politely as Amina explained about the krishnachura and the romantic origins of its name. She’d felt silly when Jessica had shown up at town hall on the morning of the wedding, carrying a bouquet of lilacs and apologizing because there were no krishnachura to be had in Rochester. Amina had assured her that lilacs were her favorite American flower. Then George’s mother had arrived with her own wedding veil, which she shyly offered to Amina for the ceremony.

  “She didn’t want a veil,” George said, annoyed with his mother, but Amina took her mother-in-law’s side, just as a bride would have done at home. Jessica gathered up a few of the ringlets the stylist had created and pinned the veil so that Amina could wear it hanging down her back. Then the small party—Jessica; her husband, Harold; George’s mother, Eileen; Aunt Cathy; Ed (without Min, who had excused herself on grounds of an unseasonable flu); and George’s college friends from Buffalo, Bill and Katie—followed them into the office where they completed the paperwork for the marriage certificate. Amina misunderstood and thought that this was the wedding itself, so she was confused when the clerk ushered them into a small, carpeted antechamber with a bench and a framed poster of sunflowers and asked them to wait.

  “Is there some problem?” she asked George, but George’s cell phone was ringing. He frowned and went back into the office to take the call.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Sit down,” said Eileen, but Aunt Cathy grabbed her arm and wrenched her upright.

  “Careful!”

  “What is it?” Amina said, trying to keep the panic from her voice. For weeks she’d been convinced that something would get in the way of the ceremony; this morning she had prayed—not that nothing would go wrong, but that she would be prepared enough to see it coming and resourceful enough to find a way around it.

  “If you sit, your dress will be ruined,” Aunt Cathy said.

  Amina was about to ask where George was when her husband-to-be came back into the room.

  “What?” Amina said again, but Ed was telling everyone that George couldn’t even forget TCE for as long as it took to get married.

  “It wasn’t TCE,” George said.

  “Was that my daughter?” Cathy said. “You shouldn’t have even answered it. Thinking she can make up for it with one phone call. Her own cousin’s wedding.”

  George turned to Amina, lowering his voice. “Kim wanted to apologize for not being here. She thinks she made a mistake—and she’s dying to meet you.”

  But Aunt Cathy was listening. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive—if she were ‘dying,’ she probably could’ve made it. It’s not like she has any other responsibilities.”

  “She wants to have us over next week,” George said.

  “Come on,” said Eileen, putting her hand on Amina’s back. “It’s your turn,” and Amina was relieved to see that a door had opened on the opposite side of the room, and a short, bald man in a suit, a man who looked as if nothing on earth had ever disturbed his composure, was gesturing for them to enter. She understood that the wedding was continuing as planned, and she looked carefully around the room because she knew her mother would need to hear exactly what it looked like. There were two potted trees with braided trunks and three rows of white plastic folding chairs, half filled by George’s family and friends. The deputy city clerk stood behind a wooden lectern underneath two certificates framed in gold. With the light from the window on his glasses, Amina couldn’t see his eyes.

  She hadn’t expected to be nervous, and at first she wasn’t. George had told her what her cue would be, and Amina allowed her mind to wander while she waited for it. When she’d left Desh, there was still the possibility that her parents would be able to come to Rochester for the wedding. Ninety days had seemed like enough time to plan, but when George went online to reserve airline tickets, they were almost fifteen hundred dollars each, even if her parents made stops in Dubai and Hamburg, Germany. George was willing to help pay for the tickets, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about it, and so Amina had called her parents on a phone card and given them her opinion: it was a waste of money. She and George were getting married at the county clerk’s office, and afterward there would be a dinner at Giorgio’s Trattoria in Brighton. The whole thing would take maybe four hours (including driving time), and Amina and her father agreed that to fly twenty hours in order to do something that took four hours didn’t make a lot of sense.

  “What about the Muslim wedding?” her father had said. “When will that take place?”

  “It will take place at the Islamic Center of Rochester,” Amina said. “It will also be very short.”

  “Nasir’s place?” She could hear the scorn in her father’s voice, but the main thing was to please her mother. Neither ceremony was important to her father, who cared much more that Amina be legally married. Only once she was married could she get the green card, and only once she had the green card could she apply for her citizenship. As a citizen, her father knew, she could sponsor her parents, and in his mind the sponsorship was the only thing keeping him and her mother from making the journey to America.

  “The ICR is a good place,” she reassured him, and then, searching for additional details to impart, added: “Even the other mosques in Rochester encourage you to go there.”

  In the end, as she’d expected, the problem was not her father but her mother. Her mother had agreed at first, and they’d even made another plan: as soon as Amina and George could come back to Dhaka, they would go to a studio and take wedding photographs. They would buy wedding clothes, and Amina would go to the beauty salon; they would have more money to spend on the clothes and the photographs, since her father wouldn’t be paying for a wedding. Once they had the photographs, her mother could look at them all the time; it would be no different than if they’d all celebrated a wedding together for real.

  She had thought her mother was satisfied, and then a few nights later, Amina got a call after they had gone to bed. There weren’t many minutes left on her father’s phone (it was morning in Dhaka, and the Flexiload place in Kaderabad Bazar wasn’t open yet), and so Amina had to use another card to call them back. Her mother was crying, and it was hard to understand her. Her father told her not to worry, but when she asked why her mother was crying, he said:

  “She’s crying because she’s going to miss your wedding. She’s going to miss it because I can’t afford the ticket.”

  “No!” Amina said. “We decided—it didn’t make sense. Twenty hours for four hours. Three thousand dollars for one party!” She could hear hammering in the background: a new building was going up across the street. Her parents complained that the new apartments would be much better than theirs, but Amina was disposed to look on the bright side. The neighborhood was improving.

  “Tell her it will be only a small party,” she told her father.

  “Your wedding party. What kind of terrible parents don’t come to their own daughter’s wedding?”

  She started to argue, but her father wasn’t listening. Her mother was saying something in the background.

  “What does she say?”

  Her father paused so long that she would have thought the call had been dropped, except that she could still hear the sound of hammering on the other end. It was morning in Mohammadpur: the sun behind the haze, the kids walking to school in twos and threes, the crows on the telephone wires, and the call of the vendors—Chilis! Eggs! Excellent Quality Feather Brooms!—or her favorite, the man who took your plastic jugs and gave sweet potatoes in exchange. Once again she had the disorienting feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present. Only on the telephone did the streams ever cross. At the other end of the line, another Amina was hidi
ng her head under the covers, stealing just a few more minutes before the cacophony outside forced her to put two feet on the cold, tiled floor.

  “Tell me, Abba.”

  Her father’s voice when it came was stoppered, strange, as if he’d swallowed something whole. “She says it would’ve been better if you’d never been born.”

  George shifted sleepily in the bed. “Tell them you’ll call them back tomorrow.”

  Amina gripped the head of the bedpost. From their room she could see the house behind them, windows blazing in the dark.

  “Tell her the food is going to be terrible,” she whispered to her father. “Tell her there is a popular dish called ‘pigs in blankets.’ ”

  But George was awake. “Are you talking about food now?”

  “It doesn’t matter about the food,” her father said. “The point is that you are her only child.”

  “Do you, Amina Mazid, take this man, George Stillman, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  “I do.”

  The corresponding question was asked of George, and then the city clerk declared: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

  George leaned toward her, and Amina leaped back. From the chairs behind them, Cathy made a hiccupping sound. George’s face tightened in a familiar way, like the mouth of a drawstring bag, and when Amina glanced behind her, she saw an identical contraction on the face of her new mother-in-law. She hurriedly stepped toward George, smiling to let him know that it was only that she was surprised, not that she didn’t want to kiss him in front of his family and friends.

  Many hours later, after cocktails at Aunt Cathy’s, the reception dinner at Giorgio’s, and then cake, coffee, and the opening of gifts at George’s mother’s house (Eileen had insisted that Amina call her Mom from now on), when they were home in bed together so much later than usual, George had asked why she hadn’t wanted to kiss him.