The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  I was sorry to hear from your parents that you did not observe our holy festival last year. What happened? I am sure there must be some sort of celebration at the ICR I mentioned about—or at least you might fast at home? Both years I was in UK I enjoyed breaking the fast at the restaurant with the other Deshis there—that was the only time our boss (my cousin) was generous with us. Walking around the streets on those days when I was fasting, doing my errands, I used to feel something special—it’s hard to explain. But it was like I had a secret from everyone around me.

  I think of you often, but try to keep from writing—I know you are busy with work and your life in America. Your parents give me all your good news, and I truly admire everything you are doing for them, Munni. They are wonderful people, and I will miss seeing them.

  Now I will confide in you my own news. Last week, Sakina Apu sent a letter to the parents of a girl. She and Shilpa said the girl is good in all senses, but—my bad luck—she won’t even agree to meet me. The reason: because I am not an MS holder. (She herself does not have a master’s degree, but never mind.) My sisters became furious, saying that it is an excuse—that this family cares only for taka, and now we know. Perhaps, but I cannot be angry. Maybe it is my temperament that keeps me from finding a life partner. I cannot care about all the things that other people care for—Allah knows what will happen to me.

  I have begun printing stories from the BBC. At first I am pinning these stories up around my desk, so that I would be sure to remember them, but my boss has asked me to take them down. He said my other colleagues think I am showing off my knowledge of English! I think you will also laugh at this notion. I took down my papers, but they are there on the BBC for anyone to read. I do not advise you to read them, because I do not want you to be shocked by the abuses they describe. (Though I am sure you have seen the terrible pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison.) You say that President George Bush is no worse than our two “Begums,” and perhaps you are right. But is the crime not more severe, the bigger the man who commits it?

  I am glad that you have found a good George ;-) in America, and I am sorry to bother you. You are right that I have an obsession with “depressing news.” At night as I am trying to fall asleep, I think of those prisoners still in their cells, crying out to our God. And so it is perhaps a good thing that my sisters have failed again, and that it is only myself and the tiktiki who are disturbed by my tossing and turning.

  Allah hafez.

  Your friend,

  Nasir

  She reported to her parents that her classes had begun, but it took her a month to tell them that she’d lost her job. Her mother had started to cry, of course: she said she had a feeling they would never see each other again. When Amina told her that was ridiculous, her mother simply sobbed harder and handed the phone to her father, who asked whether her Chinese friend could help convince the boss to take her back.

  “She isn’t Chinese,” Amina said patiently. “She has a Chinese tattoo. And anyway, she was also laid off.”

  Her parents couldn’t understand the difference between “laid off” and being fired, even when she explained it to them exactly as George had explained it to her.

  “And I don’t know why you need to gossip to everyone about my job right away.”

  “We are not gossiping!” her father exclaimed. “Who told you that?”

  “I have been receiving e-mails from Nasir.”

  “Nasir!”

  “Why has he been visiting you so often?”

  “Not so often.” The connection was weak, and her father struggled to make himself heard. “He came one time. Your mother insisted on cooking for him.” She could hear her mother arguing stridently in the background; she couldn’t make out the words, but of course her mother was saying that it was Nasir, and he’d shown up at their door. How could she not invite him in for something to eat?

  “If you’d only waited to tell everyone,” Amina said. “I could’ve gotten another job and no one would’ve known.”

  “Yes!” her father shouted. “Please tell us as soon as you get another job! We’ll let everyone know!”

  Amina was so exasperated that she almost hoped that the call would be dropped. Instead the connection got stronger again.

  “Have you told Nasir not to visit again?”

  “How could we tell him that?”

  “He said that he was going to miss you, so I thought you must have told him not to come again.”

  “Ah.” Her father coughed unnaturally.

  “Is he going somewhere?”

  “He has a good job at Golden Internet. Where would he be going?”

  “Golden Horn,” Amina corrected. “But he knows you’re not going to America yet, so why does he say he’ll miss you?”

  “Oh yes,” her father said, as if it had suddenly occurred to him. “Your mother gave notice to Mrs. Khan last week. We are moving home to the village until you come for us. You’ll need to send much less money, only half. And you can save for the future.”

  “Tell Mrs. Khan you changed your mind!” Amina exclaimed. “How could you go back there now?”

  “It’s only another two years,” her father said. “Your nanu has room for us. Why should we spend so much money here in Dhaka when we are only waiting to come to America?”

  “How could you give up your apartment?” The apartment in Mohammedpur was a good one, and the rent was fair. It had been a comfort to know they had it, as she struggled to imagine how she would save enough for an apartment and even sometimes wondered whether Rochester was the right place for them. Now everything was different. Her nanu would have them in the village, but not forever—and so if they were going there she had no choice but to somehow find a way to bring them here.

  “It’s more than two years—twenty-six months, at the earliest! Who knows how long it’ll take?”

  “That’s true,” her father said cheerfully. “Or perhaps it will be even less time!”

  3When she’d first arrived, there had been some talk about Amina working for Cathy at Shampooch, and as soon as she lost her job, those conversations began again. Amina smiled and nodded politely whenever Cathy brought it up, but she told George privately that it was impossible. When she imagined telling her mother that she’d gotten a job washing dogs—and then imagined her mother telling her Devil Aunt—she thought she would do absolutely anything to avoid taking Cathy up on her offer.

  “Amina doesn’t like animals,” George had said at dinner last Sunday night, but the look on his aunt’s face was so shocked and hurt that Amina had tried to mend things.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I like dogs and cats very much in America. Dogs in Bangladesh are not very nice, because the climate is too hot for them. They go crazy and their fur falls off.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” Eileen put in.

  “Amina wants a job where she can stay clean,” George insisted. “She wouldn’t like washing dogs.”

  Cathy looked surprised. “Well it’s not like I can’t easily find a couple of Cuban girls to do it. They’re illegal, and so they don’t have a lot of options. Of course they’re going to have babies, and so we’ll be paying for the bilingual programs—as if Rochester schools don’t have enough problems.”

  “You employ illegals,” George said. “Where would Shampooch be without them?”

  “I wouldn’t employ them if they weren’t here. I voted W. twice, but I can tell you, I wouldn’t do it again. They can call it a guest worker program if they want, but everyone knows it’s amnesty, pure and simple.”

  Later in the car Amina asked whether Aunt Cathy had been offended by her hesitation about the job at Shampooch.

  “She’ll get over it,” George said. “I was more worried about you.”

  George had cracked the window, and the humid summer air reminded her of home. “Does Cathy dislike me?”

  “No,” George said quickly. “No—she’s just bitter about her own life. And she’s competitive with my mom. She
’d like Kim to settle down with someone, have kids—all that stuff.”

  “I can understand Cathy,” Amina said. “My mother’s sisters are also competitive that way.”

  George nodded. “That whole thing with the Indian guy almost killed her.”

  “Ashok.”

  “Do you want to stop at Cold Stone for ice cream?”

  Amina agreed because she knew it was George’s favorite. “That would be nice,” she continued, “if we were all having dinner together at your mom’s one day. You and me and Kim and another husband.”

  “Mm,” George said. “Let’s take it one step at a time, okay?”

  George took her job-hunting for the second time, at the Pittsford Wegmans, Radio Shack, and the Gap. Amina filled out applications everywhere, but George said it was a bad time to look, since high school and college kids who were already working part-time would increase their hours as soon as summer started. He thought that Amina should wait until everyone went back to school in September.

  “Take it easy,” George said. “Do your homework and spend time in the garden. You’ll get a job in the fall, and then you’ll wish for days like these.”

  She didn’t feel she could mention her parents again, after their last conversation, and so she simply told George that she liked to be busy. “When there’s nothing to do, I get jumpy.”

  “We don’t want that,” George said tolerantly, but she knew there was another reason he wanted her to relax. They’d been talking in bed the other night when George had asked suddenly whether she was ready to start trying to have a baby. She didn’t feel any less frightened of having a child without her mother to help her, but it was at least two years until her parents would be able to apply for citizenship—even if the problem of where they would live could be solved.

  “Okay,” she had told him, and George had smiled and made a little production of getting up and going to the medicine cabinet, throwing away the blue package of Trojans that always sat in the upper-right-hand corner.

  “Is there anything I’m supposed to do?” she asked him, thinking of how strange it was to be asking this question of her husband. Of course she might have asked her mother on the phone, but she knew that as soon as she mentioned it, her mother wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else. Amina thought longingly of Micki, a year older than she was and already a mother of three. Of all her cousins, she’d always felt closest to Micki. When they were little girls living with Nanu and Parveen, they’d been like sisters, but Micki had stayed in the village after Amina left. When she was sixteen, she’d taken over the village baby school from Shoma Aunty, who had taught the two of them when they were small. Micki showed such patience with even the most disobedient child, was so pretty, with such skills in the kitchen and the house, that in spite of the scandal with her parents’ marriage, everyone said that Parveen would have many choices once her daughter came of age.

  Amina still thought she knew her cousin better than anyone: even as a teenager she could see that Micki was obedient not out of a desire to please but because she’d already concluded that it was the only road to happiness—at least if you were a girl. Micki might have had the opportunity to leave the village as Ghaniyah and Amina had, especially if her father had stayed at home, but she would never have talked the way they did, mocking its backwardness in order to distance herself from her own place and people. Surely God loved someone like that better than he loved a person like Amina, who spent so much energy trying to escape the very spot where he had seen fit to bring her into the world.

  Micki would have been able to tell her in the plain village way how to go about getting pregnant, without any of the silliness and affected embarrassment of her Dhaka friends. But Micki didn’t use e-mail, and they hadn’t been in touch since Amina had left the country. She knew her cousin had married a man from their own village called Badal, who worked as an auto mechanic in Satkhira, but even if she were able to get his cell phone number from her grandmother, Amina would be shy about calling out of the blue. She certainly wouldn’t be able to mention family matters under those circumstances. She thought for a moment of Kim, whom she hadn’t seen since that afternoon in the garden. Her confidence that day suggested that she might want to become Amina’s intimate friend, but you could hardly discuss starting a pregnancy with someone who was still grieving over the loss of one.

  “I think there are kits and things,” George said, flushing. “To tell you when your best time is.”

  “My mother got pregnant very easily,” Amina said quickly. “Too easily. She always says they should’ve waited.”

  “Do you want to wait?” George asked. Amina thought of what her mother had said, about how George would see the logic of having them live in the house once a child was born. She was starting to wonder if that was true, and even whether it was what she wanted—now that she could actually imagine having her parents in the room next door. Looking at her husband, waiting for her answer, she realized that apart from everything else, she wanted to please him.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll be twenty-six in July. We should start now.”

  George smiled. “Crazy to think it could be next spring,” he said. “I mean if it happened right away.”

  “Would you like to have a boy?” Amina asked, to distract herself from the possibility of next spring.

  “A boy would be nice,” George said. “But I was thinking one of each.”

  4Amina didn’t stop calling the places she’d left her applications, but the summer sped by without a job materializing. One night at the beginning of August, George suggested that they pick up chicken from the Boston Market restaurant for dinner. While he was choosing from the drive-through menu, Amina noticed a sign—WE ARE HIRING—pasted to the inside of the glass. Instead of driving to the pickup window, George parked the car, and they sat and ate their dinner inside so that Amina could fill out an application. There was an elderly couple eating by the window, but the only other person in the restaurant was the middle-aged woman standing behind the cash register, her lips moving slightly as she counted coins from a paper-wrapped roll.

  “Will you give it to her?” Amina asked George when she was finished, but George shook his head.

  “They have to see that you have initiative,” he said. “Take your time. I’ll swing around and get you.”

  Amina approached the woman, who was wearing a great deal of face powder, perhaps because she suffered from spots. (She could not have been trying to lighten her skin, since she was as white as George.) You could look past the registers and see into the kitchen, and what was visible was surprisingly clean. Rather than the bones and peels you would expect—she and George had eaten chicken, potatoes, and salad—the counter was stacked with paper and foil-wrapped packages, as if it were not a restaurant but a pharmacy.

  “Excuse me,” she began, but the woman had obviously already noticed Amina. She smiled and took the application before Amina could say anything else.

  “I saw you filling it out,” she said cheerfully. “Do you have experience?”

  “I was working at MediaWorks,” she said, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask how long it had been since she’d had that job.

  The woman frowned. “No casual dining experience?”

  “I’ve never worked in a restaurant.” Amina tried not to sound as if she were proud of that fact, but she couldn’t help remembering Nasir’s e-mail. She had chastised her father, but that was because she had lost her job. If she’d been able to keep it, a part of her would have been thrilled that everyone knew how successful she’d been so far in America. She thought of Ghaniyah and what she would say when she heard that Amina was working in a kitchen, where her clothes would be dirty at the end of the day and her hair would smell like grease.

  On the other hand, Amina reminded herself, she wasn’t Ghaniyah. Her parents couldn’t afford a spectacular Deshi wedding with seven hundred guests, or expensive jewelry that would be worn only one time. Considering where she had started, it was
incredible that she was where she was right now: standing in a Boston Market restaurant in Rochester, New York, at seven o’clock in the evening while people at home were yawning and drinking their first cups of tea.

  “I’m a fast learner,” she told the woman behind the counter. “My boss at MediaWorks said I was the best employee he had ever had.”

  The woman nodded. “Normally, we wouldn’t consider someone who’d just done sales—this really is a different kettle of fish. But Tanya left on Friday without a word to anyone—not that I expected much more from her—and we’ve got to have someone on Tuesday. Could you start on Tuesday?”

  “I can start at any time.”

  “I’m Nancy, by the way. I saw you sitting over there and I thought, She looks responsible. I have that sense—I can always tell about people.”

  “Thank you,” Amina said.

  “If we hire you, you’ll have to be here before eight in the morning. Are you a late sleeper?”

  “We are up at five,” Amina said.

  “See?” Nancy beamed. “I can tell. So what are you, anyway?”

  “Pardon?” Amina said, although George had told her a thousand times that Americans never used that word.

  Nancy repeated her question more slowly, raising her voice so even the old people in the back turned around to look.

  “I was an English tutor,” Amina said, and then because she did know what Nancy meant, she added: “That was in my country—in Bangladesh.”

  “Bangladesh.” Nancy hesitated. “That isn’t the Mideast, is it? I’m sorry to ask, it’s just that my husband’s a protective—that’s a volunteer for our fire department—and our daughter lives in Jersey. So it hit us pretty hard, everything that happened down there … you know, on 9/11.”

  She hadn’t yet encountered anyone who blamed her for the September 11 attacks because she was a Muslim or because she came from a country that had once been part of Pakistan, but this was a misperception she’d anticipated and been prepared to correct. She had known that Americans wouldn’t be familiar with her country’s history, and she’d been ready to explain about the Liberation War, and to tell people that her father still had a scar on his leg from his service as a Freedom Fighter against the Pakistanis. It was the Pakistanis who’d let in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, she had planned to clarify.