The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Lisa mentioned about it. She says another colleague bought it for his girlfriend.”

  “ ‘Mentioned it,’ ” George said. “No ‘about.’ God, don’t scare me like that.”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s an abortion pill. You use it after you have sex, if you think you’ve had … an accident.” He set down his fork and put one of his hands on top of Amina’s. “I’m sorry, but you really threw me. I thought you were saying you wanted an abortion. I didn’t think your religion even allowed that.”

  She always felt slightly offended when George referred to Islam as “her religion,” failing to acknowledge that it would eventually belong to both of them. He hadn’t gone back on his promise to convert, but he still often spoke of Islam with the same kind of timidity his mother and his aunt employed, as if her faith were a wild animal whose behavior couldn’t be reliably predicted.

  “In Islam you may use contraception for good reason,” she said. “Financial hardship or the mother’s health. Most people I knew at home used it. But abortion is very bad.”

  “I don’t believe in it either,” George said firmly. “It’s all right for other people—I’m not a maniac like Cathy—but not in my family.”

  “Aunt Cathy does not believe in abortion?”

  “No way—she’s a crusader. She marches and everything.” George adjusted his glasses the way he always did when he was getting ready to explain something. “The issue’s been blown out of proportion in this country, because it’s simple enough for everyone to understand. It’s just a way to choose sides. I understand that people make mistakes, and I respect their choices. But that kind of thing won’t happen to you and me.”

  She didn’t tell George that she had been an accident—a happy one, her parents always said, but nevertheless an accident that had almost killed her mother. The birth, which had happened in the village in the traditional manner, without her father present, had been so difficult that they had feared for her mother’s life. She had presented in the breech position, and after nearly two days of labor, the midwife had suggested that the baby be dismembered, sacrificed so that her mother might live. No one had said “live to bear sons,” but at that point it was already clear that the baby was a girl. Her mother had been beyond speech, and if not for her brother Emdad, the midwife might have been allowed to make the decision. Emdad had suggested that they wait another hour, and ten minutes later Amina had been born, not only alive but screaming.

  Her mother often said that she had been a miracle, and it wasn’t fair to expect God to provide them another in their lifetime. They had made their plans themselves, exhausting A, B, C, and D before they had finally hit on one that worked. And now here she was in America, serving her husband a second helping of chicken pulao. In another three years her parents might be here, too, with a baby asleep in a solid American cradle upstairs. It was not impossible, she thought, as George complimented her on the meal. There were several paths to everything, and some of them were hidden when you started out. Her mother would say that God created those paths, but to Amina it seemed as if the paths were there; it was only that you needed God to help you find them.

  17Once she started working they got into a pattern, having sex twice a week: once over the weekend, and once during the week. It wasn’t always on the same days, but the intervals were similar. If it happened on a Sunday, it would often happen again on Thursday; if it were Friday, the next time would be a Monday or Tuesday. Normally it began with George suggesting they go to bed earlier than usual. Once they were there, in their pajamas with their teeth brushed, he would turn to her and ask if she was tired. If she didn’t want to, she could simply say that she was, and he would accept it without protest. Normally, though, she didn’t refuse. It didn’t hurt the way it once had, nor did it give her any kind of physical pleasure. Her satisfaction came instead from the knowledge that she’d mastered a previously intimidating facet of adult life.

  They had done it on Sunday night, and so she was surprised when he turned to her on Monday, later than usual.

  “Are you tired?”

  “A little,” she said, not looking at him. Did he really mean to do it again tonight? Mondays were always the hardest for her; she was shyest with Lisa and Carl, as if there was a part of her that started a new job all over again at the beginning of each week. She made a point of preparing food in advance on Sunday afternoons, so that she wouldn’t have to cook when she got home the next day. She had a book open on her lap, The Secret Life of Bees, which George’s mother had recommended, but she hadn’t really been reading; she was just waiting for him to finish with his own book and turn out the light.

  George put his hand on hers so that she had to meet his eyes. “You don’t like it.”

  “I have always enjoyed reading novels,” she said. “It’s only that Mondays are tiring for me.”

  “Not the book,” he said impatiently. “I mean, you know, us—together—having sex.” She could see that he was embarrassed because the lines on his forehead deepened and joined in the middle. “I’m doing something wrong.”

  This idea was so surprising that Amina failed to say anything.

  “I don’t have a lot of experience either,” he said. “I’ve never told that to anyone, but I guess I should now. There were only three girls before you.”

  “What is the normal amount?” She didn’t mean to tease him, but George looked stung.

  “It depends. One of those girls had been with ten people before me—and she was only twenty-five.”

  “And is she married now?”

  “Oh yeah,” George said. “She got married way before I did. And moved away.”

  “Who was she?” Amina asked eagerly. She had always been curious about George’s sexual life before he met her; it was something her mother had wanted her to ascertain in advance, but Amina had drawn the line at that kind of question.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” George said. “I just wish I knew how to make you—you know, when we’re doing that.”

  “I am doing something wrong?”

  George shook his head. “Make it good for you. I wish I’d asked someone—I mean, before. But American girls expect you to be experienced. And I hate talking about it.”

  “Me, too,” Amina said. “I didn’t even like when my girlfriends talked about it at home.”

  “That’s how I feel—it’s private.” They had turned off the overhead light, and only the reading lamps were lit. “I like your shoulders,” he said suddenly.

  “My shoulders?”

  “They’re so small and perfect. And then—” He touched her shoulder, and ran two fingers down over her collarbone, very gently along the side of her left breast. She needed a small in everything in Rochester, but she’d observed that American women her size didn’t have breasts like hers; they pressed against the thin cotton in a way she knew excited him.

  “That shape. Don’t worry—I know we did it last night. I’m just saying—you’re really beautiful.”

  “We can,” she said, and was rewarded by his expression.

  “But I want to do something for you—I mean, I want to make you come.”

  “Come where?”

  George looked at her. “Are you kidding?”

  She thought he was about to laugh at her and she resented it. “No.”

  “You know—what happens to me.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, at the end.”

  “How could I do that?”

  He did laugh. “It’s different. Look.” He pulled her down on the bed so they were lying next to each other. Then he put his hand inside her underpants.

  “Could we turn out the light?”

  “Could we leave it on?” he said. “You’re so pretty. You can close your eyes if you don’t want to look at me.”

  “I didn’t mean—” she began, and then she closed them. What George was doing didn’t feel bad, although she wished he weren’t watching her. She tried to think of
something else, and what appeared was a picture that had come to her sometimes at home, when she was in the apartment alone, studying. She had imagined a man coming toward her through the lush green fields of a tea plantation—she thought she must have gotten it from an old movie. The man didn’t have any recognizable features; she was rather seeing herself through his eyes, as they sank down to the ground and caressed each other. First the man would unbutton her jeans (in this fantasy, she had always been wearing the jeans she did not yet own), sliding his hand between the denim and her panties. She tried to concentrate on George here in her bedroom in Rochester, but the stranger returned; somehow the fact that she was picturing the wrong man, in the wrong place, increased her excitement, and she moaned audibly.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re going to come.”

  But she did not. When he was finished she could tell he was disappointed he hadn’t managed to do what he’d intended, and she put her head in the hollow just below his shoulder, so that they might lie together without having to look at each other. He took her hand and wrapped it across his chest, so that they were even more closely intertwined.

  “It’s also called ‘climax,’ ” he said, resuming a lecturing tone that was comforting in its familiarity. “I’m doing something wrong. But if we keep practicing I’m sure we’ll get it.”

  It was 11:30, and she knew she would be exhausted at work in the morning, but strangely she didn’t mind.

  “Just not on Mondays,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  “Mondays will be abstinence day,” George said. “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder—that’s something they used to tell us in sex ed. That’s sex education—we used to have to go every week.”

  Amina lifted her head to look at him. “In school?”

  “But they didn’t teach us the stuff you really need to know.” George stroked her arm slowly, from shoulder to wrist, and suddenly she thought of how different it would be if her parents were in the bedroom next door. They would have to whisper and keep the lights off the whole time.

  “I love you,” George said, and Amina didn’t hesitate:

  “I love you, too.”

  18Her parents might have met each other earlier, if not for the war. In March of 1971, when it began, her father was a twenty-year-old engineering student at Rajshahi University. Abdul Mazid and Nasir’s father, Noresh, had been two of the first to put down their names when the university had issued the call for volunteers. As college students with engineering training, they’d been sent to Dehradun, the famous Indian military academy in Uttar Pradesh, for guerrilla training. They learned to operate the Indian self-loading rifles, as well as light and submachine guns, and drilled with explosives and grenades. Noresh was bored by the strategy sessions with the Indian officers, but Abdul Mazid had a knack for thinking several steps ahead; he always seemed to have the answer their instructor was looking for. He befriended the Deshi commander of his own district as well, and when the commander returned to Khulna, both Abdul Mazid and Noresh went with him. Amina’s father, her mother often told her, had been the bravest man in his company, once begging the commander to be allowed to mount a dawn raid on a fortified Pakistani forest camp. Her father had fought so fiercely, and inspired his men so successfully, that they’d routed the Pakistani unit with only twelve men, taking four POWs, a cache of G3 “tak-doom” rifles, and a carton of King Stork cigarettes. No less than Lieutenant General Sagat Singh, the Indian IV Corps Commander, had sent congratulations to her father from the front.

  Abdul Mazid and Noresh fought for six months together, during which time Amina’s father assumed command of the unit. When he was wounded during a guerrilla operation, blowing up electrical pylons behind Pakistani lines, it was Noresh who brought him first to a makeshift field hospital in Satkhira and then home to Kajalnagar. By the time Noresh reported back to the commander at Shyamnagar, Lieutenant General Niazi had surrendered to the joint command of Indian and Bangladeshi forces at the Race Course Maidan, and Bangladesh was free.

  Her parents saw each other for the first time at her aunt Moni and uncle Omar’s wedding, in the spring of 1978. Her father had immediately made inquiries, but her mother’s father had politely let her father’s family know they weren’t interested. In spite of Abdul Mazid’s impressive military service, and the college degree that he’d gone back to finish after the war, his family had a reputation in Kajalnagar as people whom bad luck followed.

  Abdul Mazid’s grandfather had been an estate manager for the local zamindar and had been clever enough to lease a great deal of that man’s land before Partition; in 1950, when the zamindari system was formally abolished, Amina’s great-grandfather had become the owner of more than two hundred acres of land. That land had been divided between two sons, Amina’s grandfather and his brother, neither of whom had managed it well. When his brother died in his early forties, his three sons were left with thirty of the least desirable acres, small parcels that they had sold as soon as they were old enough to do so. Amina’s grandfather had done only slightly better, holding on to forty acres. But as land prices began their dramatic ascent all over the country, his brother’s widow had become obsessed with the idea that her three sons had been cheated, inheriting the poorest of the family land. Her sons grew up believing that Abdul Mazid would inherit land that should rightly have belonged to them.

  Amina had never known her paternal grandmother, who had died along with a stillborn baby before her father was two years old. He’d been raised by the wife of a poor tenant farmer on his father’s land, a woman with five children, who looked after her father in exchange for payments of rice and grain. Amina couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to remember your own mother; there had been no one to tell him, through looks and touch and angry scoldings, that he was the most precious person in the world to her. Her father had once joked that his own father hadn’t noticed he existed until he came back from the war. She’d never spoken about it with her mother, but she sometimes thought this tragedy had defined her father’s personality—the reckless disregard for his own safety that had made him such a success as a soldier but a failure as a provider ever since.

  To her mother, her father at twenty-seven was a hero of the war; more than that, he was soft-spoken, educated, and, she had once told Amina, the first person she’d ever met who singled her out from her three sisters as worthy of attention and interest. The two of them exchanged six letters and met twice in secret; a month after her elder sister’s wedding, Fatima Areebah defied her parents for the first and only time and took a bus to Khulna with Abdul Mazid. They were married and spent the night in a hotel. The next day they returned to Kajalnagar, where they lived with Dadu for more than a year. During this time, Omar and Moni resettled in Dhaka, where Omar’s family owned an apartment building. Omar was a natural businessman, acquiring more real estate and eventually forming his own development company, and Abdul Mazid and his new bride soon followed them to the capital, where Omar put Amina’s father to work as a construction supervisor. Her father was grateful for the job, which would sustain him while he looked out for a way to make his fortune.

  Her mother returned to her own village for Amina’s birth, in 1980, and her father took a leave from his job with Omar. He went to see his new daughter and then visited his father in Kajalnagar, where he ran into a childhood friend with a business idea too tempting to resist: Baag Import-Export was going to bring in powdered milk from Australia and send back jute fiber to be used for the backing of carpets. Abdul Mazid quit his job with Omar and sold the first quarter of his land to invest in the scheme. When it failed, a year later, her parents decided that they should return to Dhaka while Amina stayed in Haibatpur with her grandmother until their luck improved.

  Amina had joined her parents permanently in Dhaka when she was six years old, but their troubles had continued. There was no shortage of promising opportunities: normally her father had been the one optimistically waiting for news of success, while her mother had
always remained cautiously fearful. As a child she had shared her father’s enthusiasms, but by the time she was twelve years old, she had begun to shift to her mother’s point of view. They had stopped hoping for miracles and only prayed that whatever new endeavor her father had become involved in wouldn’t leave them worse off than they already were.

  The year she was twelve had been the worst, because they’d fallen seven months behind on the rent. Her mother had sold what little jewelry she had to pay Amina’s school fees; there was enough for another year, if they were careful, and then her father had heard about his cousins’ fishing project. These were the same cousins who had disputed her father’s ownership of his land; the fish farm they had recently started was enjoying unprecedented success, and they were planning to expand into shrimp.

  Amina could never remember the proper names of her father’s eldest cousins, who were called Bhulu and Laltu within the family, but her parents always referred to the youngest by his more formal name: Salim. She clearly remembered seeing Salim in Kajalnagar as a child, because of his physical defect and the story that was attached to it. Salim was tall, well built and fair skinned; if it weren’t for his left eye, permanently stuck in an unnatural, upward-looking position, he would’ve been more handsome than his older brothers. His deformity was common enough, less damaging in a man than in a woman, and he should have married easily in spite of it. When he turned nineteen, his parents made an offer to a poor family with an especially pretty daughter in a nearby village. The family declined, and Salim’s parents took the answer as a serious insult. They mocked the other family’s pretensions all over the village, but of course the reason for the girl’s parents’ demurral was clear to everyone. Amina’s father said that Salim had always been sensitive about his eye and that, after two weeks in which his rejection was the subject of discussion all over the village, he couldn’t stand it. One night he had gone to the girl’s house in the village with a plastic cup of battery acid and thrown it through the open window where the girl was sleeping next to her five-year-old brother. Neither had been killed, but both children were badly burned, and the girl’s beautiful face was permanently disfigured. The message was clear: if she wasn’t going to marry Salim, she wasn’t going to marry anyone at all.