“Kim is here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she’s visiting. She came to bring flowers for the Snyders.”
George sounded irritated. “She didn’t need to do that.”
“We were just having tea.”
“Well, if she’s just sitting there, she can go and do it. It’ll be easier—let me talk to her.”
Amina handed the phone to Kim, who assumed a patient expression, as if George were an older brother who habitually talked down to her. At one point she rolled her eyes at Amina and smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, yeah—I know. I can do it on my way out.” She paused for a second while George asked a question.
“India,” she said. “Comparing notes.”
She hung up the phone, and then put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, Amina—that was dumb. Did you guys want to talk again?”
“It’s okay,” Amina said. “I’ll see him tonight.” She had about a thousand questions for Kim about Ashok and her mother-in-law and the apartment building in Bombay, but Kim was already slipping into the leather clogs that she’d left at the door without having to be asked.
“I should go,” Kim said. “You were getting a lot done before I interrupted you. I can take the flowers myself, as long as I’m going over there.”
“Please come anytime,” Amina said, walking Kim to the back door this time. “Thank you for the bath salts. I’ll try them.”
Kim gave a little laugh and then turned away quickly, as if she were suddenly ashamed. Amina watched her hurry out through the garage and down the driveway and then, hardly looking, cross the street with the bouquet clutched in one hand.
She went back into the kitchen and began clearing away the tea and the uneaten lemon squares. But she could feel her heart beating fast. It was the kind of story she could remember the girls at Maple Leaf whispering to one another: a clandestine affair followed predictably by tragedy. Now here was an American tragedy, and as sorry as she felt for Kim, who had lost both a husband and a child, there was a part of her that was secretly thrilled. Of all the people Kim might have told, she had chosen Amina.
22That evening George got home at five, later than usual. He told her at length about a colleague who might possibly be fired while she finished preparing dinner. She waited to bring up the subject of Kim until they were sitting at the table.
“Did you ever meet Ashok?”
George was looking at his new BlackBerry in his lap and didn’t look up. “Who?”
“Kim’s husband—Ashok. Did you meet him?”
“No,” George said. “He answered the phone once, when I called her after 9/11. She started a job in Manhattan three days before it happened—did she tell you that? I think that was part of what made Ashok want to leave, after a while. She told me every time he took a backpack on the subway, people would stare at him.”
“That doesn’t happen to me,” Amina said.
“We don’t live in Manhattan,” George said. “Plus, you don’t exactly look like a terrorist.”
“Well, did Ashok look like one? Kim says he was from a wealthy family.”
“Who knows? People were panicking. Look—I’m glad you and Kim are becoming friends. That’s what she hoped would happen.”
“You didn’t hope?”
“I want you to be friends with whomever you want. I don’t want to pick them for you. Kim doesn’t always make the best choices, but she’s generous—you have to give her that.”
“Give her what?”
“She’s generous,” George said. “That’s all I mean. She rushed right over after I e-mailed.”
“Why did you e-mail her?”
“Because that’s what you do.”
“But you didn’t e-mail me.”
George had the same exasperated look he got when there was water on the basement floor or one of the kitchen drawer pulls came off in his hand. “You hardly know them. Did Kim tell you how serious it is? He may have to have a pig heart.”
“A pig heart!”
“Well, maybe not the whole heart. I think it’s just the valve.”
“What is the valve?”
“Like on a faucet,” George explained. “The part that allows the blood to circulate.”
“They’re going to put the valve of a pig into Dan Snyder?”
“It’s amazing what they can do now. Strong is a great hospital—he’s lucky he lives in Rochester.”
Amina thought of what her cousin Nasir would say about that. There was a section in The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam entitled “Medical Necessity,” but she doubted anyone who’d contributed to that book had thought of the possibility of an actual piece of pig being put inside a human body.
“He’s lucky he’s not a Muslim,” Amina said, but George had taken his plate into the kitchen.
“Make sure to wear your boots tomorrow,” he said when he returned. “It’s supposed to be the storm of the season.”
She was disappointed when she arrived at MediaWorks the next morning to find only Carl in the stockroom. Lisa had been sick all the previous week, and Amina had taken over some of her shifts; she had made more money than she had any other week of her life ($343.20), but she’d missed Lisa, whose aggressive banter with Carl at least broke up the long stretches of the day without customers.
Ordinarily when Carl was in the stockroom, he was either looking for something in particular (which Lisa had invariably misplaced) or straightening the shelves; Amina was surprised to find him sitting on an unopened UPS shipment box, drinking his coffee.
“Lisa is sick again?”
Carl looked at Amina as if he didn’t recognize her, and then nodded.
“Will you be needing me to work her shifts?” She would have to call George in that case, since the bus didn’t run on their route after five; he would have to pick her up when he was finished for the day.
“No. You can go home at the regular time.”
“But who will—?”
“I can close up. It’ll be slow tonight, because of the snow.”
It occurred to Amina that this scenario—herself and Carl, an unmarried man less than ten years older than she was, alone together in the stockroom—would be unthinkable to her parents, her aunts, and even her cousin Ghaniyah. She’d had the same realization in other situations: when she had skipped her dhuhr because there was nowhere private to pray at MediaWorks, and she felt too strange putting down a mat in the stockroom. Or when she’d drunk half a tall glass of Aunt Cathy’s sangria, before she had understood that it was made from wine. Because those things were unthinkable, there was a way in which they hadn’t happened: they had happened only to her American self, a person about whom her Bangladeshi self was blissfully unaware. She asked forgiveness for these errors in her prayers, but if she failed to mention them to her parents, she didn’t feel she was committing further sins. “Is Lisa very ill?”
“No.” Carl focused on Amina, as if he’d only just now noticed she was there. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but Lisa isn’t coming back.”
Amina stared at Carl. “Lisa is fired?”
“Laid off.”
“But Lisa is good,” Amina said. “She says funny things sometimes, but she’s the one who taught me to do my job. I couldn’t have learned it without her.” She wondered if this sounded insubordinate, but Carl didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re much better than Lisa. But unfortunately I have to give you notice, too. I’m sorry about this. We’ll stay open another two months—wishful thinking, in my opinion—and then I’ll need you for a few days of packing up after that.”
“But what about the new owner? The international—” She paused, afraid to mangle the word.
“No dice,” Carl said. “They dropped MediaWorks a couple of weeks ago. The owners were banking on that deal, and now they’re sunk.”
Amina didn’t understand, but she didn’t want to ask Carl to explain. She thanked God for providing her with such a s
ympathetic husband; she almost looked forward to telling George, since the loss of her job at least confirmed her prescience in opening the savings account. Of course George would say that he could send money to her parents until she found another job, and as much as Amina wouldn’t want to, of course she would agree. She couldn’t bear the idea of withdrawing her small savings ($2,147.53 to date) when that was the only tangible proof of her progress toward the apartment.
More than anything she dreaded telling her mother about MediaWorks, which was unfortunately not one of those things she could avoid mentioning without feeling she was lying. The loss of a job was an all-too-familiar event, and her mother would be sure to see in it signs of future trouble. At least with her father, there was always optimism, even if it was groundless. If one thing went wrong, her mother had a maddening tendency to feel that everything else would follow it. That was a characteristic of her grandmother’s, too—one that her mother had always mocked and then suddenly folded into her own personality without even noticing.
George had been right about the weather. When Amina left MediaWorks, the snow was coming down fast; a powdery layer the thickness of three fingers coated the frozen gray mounds on the sidewalk around the bus stop. The only other person in the shelter was an old black woman, sitting right in the center of the bench with all her things around her so that there was no room for anyone else. She was wearing a clear plastic scarf over her hair, printed with flowers; her nanu and her aunts would love something like that, and Amina had almost gotten up her courage to ask where it came from when the woman startled her by speaking.
“Coming down.” She shook her head, as if the weather were a permanent condition, a new burden for the two of them to bear. “And not stopping anytime soon.”
“Do you think so?”
The woman raised her eyebrows at Amina. “Don’t take it from me. Take it from Glenn Johnson at 13WHAM.”
Amina nodded, although she’d never heard of Glenn Johnson. Apart from MediaWorks customers, this was her first real conversation with a black person. “Excuse me,” she said. “Where did you get your scarf?”
“This?” The old woman touched her head, laughing. “You want one?”
“For my grandmother,” Amina explained. She wondered if it was possible the bus wouldn’t come on a day like this and was glad she wasn’t the only one waiting. During the hours she’d been at work, snow had fallen on the trees, building to an unlikely height on even the thinnest branches. It was indisputably beautiful, and it made her think of her first drive in from the airport with George. He had been in a keyed-up mood—the same way she’d been at the airport in Dhaka seventeen hours earlier. But by that point in her journey she felt as if she’d been woken in the middle of the night and forced to perform a role in a bad movie: the set was cold and harshly lit; she was seated next to a stranger; and she couldn’t believe any of it was really happening.
“You’ve never seen roads like this, I bet,” George had said. “See how everyone stays in their own lane.” But she hadn’t been watching the road. She’d been looking at the bare trees along the side of the highway, thinking she’d never seen anything uglier in her life. She had thought of what cunning it must’ve taken for America to have kept this unflattering season a secret from the rest of the world.
She was relieved now to see the headlights of the bus coming down West Henrietta, at exactly 4:35. The snow made it seem later than it was.
“Your grandma can get this cheap at Kmart—doesn’t she know that?”
“No,” Amina said, and when the woman looked surprised, she added, “She can’t go out on her own. She stays alone with a caretaker.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“Nothing. Only that she is old. And she gets sad sometimes.”
The woman made a sympathetic sound. “Don’t I know.”
Amina stepped aside while the woman greeted the driver by name and waited for him to lower the slow, automatic stair (so different from boarding any kind of bus in Desh). As she put her pass over the electronic sensor, she half turned back to Amina, as if to reassure her.
“But your grandmom is lucky,” she said. “She has you.”
1She started college in the summer term, a year after she’d arrived.
She would turn twenty-six in July, and she was still two years away from becoming a citizen. According to Ghaniyah’s Femina magazine, she was no longer a newlywed, but the goals that she’d set for her first three years in Rochester seemed very distant. Even if everything went as she hoped, she wouldn’t have an American passport until July of 2008. As soon as she received it, her parents would expect to begin the visa application process. But now that she’d lost her job, the questions of where they would live and how she would pay their rent were more insoluble than ever.
The first night she came home from ESL, she told George that it was like having the whole world in one room: she had never imagined that there were so many different kinds of foreigners in Rochester. George had thought she might place out of the ESL requirement altogether, but he’d forgotten how much better her speaking was than her writing. Her score put her at the intermediate level, and so she signed up for ESL 125 and Calculus I. In ESL she sat next to a Lithuanian girl, Daina, who chattered constantly with another girl Amina had assumed to be Russian. Only later did she discover that Laila was actually Turkish but had been raised in Moscow. There were two Afghans who sat at the back of the room and spoke only to each other, and a Turkish boy, Abu, who could not refrain from giggling every time he tried to say something in English. Jamila was a Somali woman who wore a head scarf—her family was also Sunni, she told Amina after class one day—and Pico was from the Congo (only now you weren’t supposed to say the “the”). Pico’s British-inflected English was the best in the class, and he was never afraid to raise his hand.
Their teacher, Jill, had asked to be called by her first name. Amina guessed her to be in her late forties, but it was hard to be sure. She had short, bobbed hair, dyed black, and the kind of childlike features that made her look younger than she was; it was only when you got up close that you could see the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Jill told them that she’d been teaching at MCC for seven years and that she lived in Brighton with a cat and two parakeets. She said that she’d begun her career teaching English in Thailand, where she’d gone when her marriage hadn’t worked out.
“A lifetime ago—big mistake,” she said, smiling at them. Abu laughed, as did Daina, putting her hand over her mouth, but Pico frowned, as if he disapproved of such a confidence from a teacher. The rest of the class only smiled uncertainly with Amina. Jill told them she’d spent five years in Bangkok and then returned to Rochester and gone to SUNY Brockport for her teaching certificate, taking poetry classes at the same time. She had even published a book of poems, called The Floating Market. “It was a big seller, I can tell you. My mom and dad have ten copies.” Jill smiled. “But I love poetry and I’m going to inflict it on you guys.” One of their first assignments had been a three-paragraph response paper on the poem “Crusoe in England,” by Elizabeth Bishop. Amina had received a check, which meant that her work was acceptable if not distinguished, but when she looked over at the paper on Pico’s desk, she’d seen a bright red check plus plus.
On her way home from school that day she’d run into Pico on the bus; she’d gotten on after him, and there were no seats, but her classmate had insisted on standing up and giving her his. Amina had wished he hadn’t, partly because Pico’s skin was so dark—almost purple—that people on the bus turned to stare at him, and partly because it meant they had to manage a conversation. Pico had stood over her, holding on to a pole, and she’d said the first thing that came into her head:
“My husband ordered the movie Congo from Netflix.” Amina didn’t think she’d ever seen Pico smile, and so it surprised her when he laughed out loud.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“We didn’t watch it yet.”
; “Well, if you do, remember that they made all that up,” Pico said. “That’s not what my country is like.”
Amina thought about talking to Jill, as she might have to a teacher at home, to ask whether there was anything extra she could do to improve her grade on the response paper. But when she imagined approaching the teacher in this politely humble posture—not fake, but not entirely genuine either—the words she thought of were in Bangla rather than English. And so she threw the assignment away and resolved to do better the next time.
Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents. In Bangla, of course, they were still the parents, and she let them fuss over her, asking whether she was maintaining her weight, and if she’d been able to find her Horlicks in America.
Was there a person who existed beneath languages? That was the question. As a teenager, Amina had thought there was. She had believed that she’d been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she’d imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself. She thought that this recognition was how she would recognize him. Of course she hadn’t counted on her husband being a foreigner, a person who called her honey rather than Munni. In a way, George had created her American self, and so it made sense that it was the only one he would see.
2
Munni,
Assalamu alaikum. It is after midnight now, and I am sitting at the computer at home. Probably everyone in the building is sleeping except for my Sakina Apu, who stays up late watching television. It is raining, but they say the floods will not be so bad this year, inshallah. The window is open and so I am getting the smell of the “belly” flower from the veranda.
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