The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  George nodded, almost eagerly.

  “I still want a baby,” she told her husband, who was gripping his coffee mug as if to keep his hands steady.

  “So do I. Of course I do.”

  “And I want to get married again. I want to have the Muslim ceremony. I feel sorry that we didn’t do it. Also for what I promised my mother.”

  “About our … about not sleeping together before the wedding, you mean?”

  Amina wished she weren’t wearing her bathrobe. Her hair was frizzy from sleep, and she hadn’t yet changed her underwear; she felt she was at a disadvantage, sitting across from George in his pressed shirt and trousers.

  “My mother wanted us to wait for both ceremonies, and we didn’t even wait for one.”

  George looked as if he were trying to keep from smiling.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” He reached across the table and took her hands. Then he stood up, raising her out of her seat so that he could hug her. “It’s just that I’m so glad you’re not angry. Do you want to go to the ICR this weekend? We can talk to the imam and fix a date.”

  Amina allowed herself to be hugged. She waited for George to sit down again.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do it until my parents come. I want them to see it.”

  “Whatever you want,” George said.

  “You can still sleep in our room.”

  George looked puzzled. “Where else would I sleep?”

  “I mean before the wedding. Except I want to use the other one.”

  George sat back down. “You don’t want to sleep together anymore?”

  “Right,” Amina said. “Not until we’re really married.”

  “How can we have a baby, if we don’t—?”

  “I don’t want to have a baby until my parents are here to help me.”

  George was quiet for a long time. He played with the salt and pepper shakers his mother had given them, made to look like tree stumps.

  “It’s December,” he said finally. “It’ll be eight months before they could get here—at the earliest.”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, Amina! We’re married.”

  “Your God,” Amina said. “Not mine.”

  1In February Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia; the U.S. government projected a $410 billion deficit for 2008; and the French president married a supermodel. There was a rash of violent burglaries in neighboring Penfield, and the New York Giants won the Super Bowl. And then, one Friday late in the month, when a thin sheet of ice covered the thermometer outside the kitchen window so it was impossible to read, her husband came home to tell her he’d lost his job.

  Amina didn’t have class on Fridays. It was the middle of the morning, and she was sitting at the computer working on an essay when she heard the kitchen door open. She called out in fear, thinking of the Penfield burglaries; but as soon as she saw his face, she knew. It was as if she’d suddenly turned a corner at an ordinary Rochester intersection and, instead of another street of neat lawns and houses, had discovered an unpaved lane criss-crossed with electrical wires, a dog nosing in the dust, a clutch of little boys playing dung guli at the edge of an open sewer.

  George got three weeks of severance pay, and then he registered for unemployment. He would get four hundred and five dollars a week, just for filling out a form online. He told her that when his father had lost his job at Kodak in 1974, he had had to go down to the office on Union Street, where occasionally an acquaintance would walk by and spot him standing in line on the sidewalk. He said that he was grateful for the privacy of the modern system; a check was deposited in their account every week, and no one but Amina saw him sitting and filling out the form.

  Amina was working again: she’d been hired by the Monroe Avenue Starbucks a few days after Christmas. She got fewer hours than she had at Yoga Shanti and made slightly less money, but when classes began after the break she was able to walk between work and school. Her manager was a friendly young man named Keith, with bright blue eyes, a shaved head, and a gold tooth that glinted in the back of his mouth when he spoke, who remembered all the customers’ names and the way they liked their drinks prepared. Amina had never gone back to Yoga Shanti, but had left a voice mail for Lucas explaining that her husband’s schedule had changed and that it was no longer convenient for him to drop her at the studio. Lucas had called back to say he was sorry she was leaving, and even offered that she might come back if George’s schedule should change again. She wondered if Kim had given him a fuller explanation, but the calm and even way that Lucas spoke made it impossible to know.

  For months she’d been afraid of running into Kim in the drugstore or the supermarket or the mall, but gradually it became obvious that in Rochester such an unexpected meeting was unlikely. They did their marketing in Pittsford, and the Starbucks where Amina worked was in Brighton; especially once George lost his job, there was no reason for them to go downtown at all. In Desh you would be almost certain eventually to meet a relative or neighbor with whom you had a feud; spaces were smaller, services more limited, and everyone was in one another’s business. Quarrels at home were explosive, public, and necessarily brief. In Rochester, Amina thought it might be possible to stay angry for a lifetime.

  When she moved into the spare bedroom, she had suggested that she pay George rent out of her salary. George had angrily rejected that idea, and so she’d liquidated her old bank account. There was no need for it now that her parents were coming to live with them. She continued to send them half of each paycheck but deposited the rest, with the result that when George was laid off, their balance was higher than it had ever been.

  “We can manage for ten months on our savings,” he told her. “Especially if we’re careful. After that we’ll have to think about selling the house.”

  She had scanned and sent her parents a copy of her Coffee Passport: a green paper booklet strikingly similar to her old Deshi passport, with a circular insignia bearing the legend “Starbucks Coffee” in place of the “Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.” She included a printout of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For,” with Starbucks at number 29, but she couldn’t take pleasure in it herself. What did it matter that she had gotten a better job when George was no longer being paid?

  George said that there was no point in quitting MCC now, since they had already paid for the spring and summer quarters. She was taking English 101 and statistics, and both classes would continue through the summer; she planned to study for her citizenship exam at the same time. She would get her American passport in July, and her parents would apply for their immigrant visas. If all went well, she could travel to Bangladesh as soon as her classes were finished in August to bring them back.

  Of course all of that had been decided when George still had a job. She went through the blue folder of forms that she’d printed out months ago and then back to the USCIS website to look at the federal poverty guidelines, a form she hadn’t bothered even to open the first time. Because Amina made too little to convince USCIS that her parents wouldn’t require federal assistance, George had been prepared to file something called an affidavit of support. George’s former salary had been more than three times the amount required for a sponsor.

  Now she saw that a household of two was required to make 125 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, which worked out to $18,212. Had George lost his job in the second half of the year, the forms would’ve been filed, and no one at USCIS would’ve had to know about it. As it was, form I-864A, the Contract Between Sponsor and Household Member, required that he list his current annual salary. Amina immediately calculated that unless George found a job in the next few months, their estimated household income for 2008 was likely to be close to the minimum.

  “You don’t want them to question it,” George said, when she showed him the form.

  “I could quit MCC and try to get more hours at Starbucks,” Amina said, but George thought tha
t was impractical.

  “It’s bureaucracy,” he said. “Pure and simple. Anyone who met us would realize that your parents won’t be on welfare.”

  “They live very simply,” Amina said. “You won’t be able to believe it. And if my mother does the cooking, we’ll spend less.”

  George waved this away with an irritated swipe of his hand. He was sitting on the couch, where he’d been reading the Democrat and Chronicle, and Amina marveled at the change in him. He’d been using the Bowflex regularly since he’d lost his job—he told her offhandedly one day that he’d lost fifteen pounds—but she didn’t think it had improved his appearance. His waistline was trimmer, certainly, but his face looked almost too thin, and there were purple smudges underneath each eye.

  “I could ask Jess I guess.”

  She knew that George’s cousin had a good job as an administrator at Strong Memorial, where her husband, Harold, was a pediatric surgeon. George and Jessica got along well, and although he’d told Amina on several occasions that he couldn’t stand Harold, it seemed like a perfect solution.

  “She’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  “He won’t?”

  “He will—and he’ll never let us forget it.”

  Amina was enormously relieved. She thought she never would forget it, whether or not Harold took pains to remind her.

  “I’ll have to find a way to thank them,” she said. “Maybe we could invite them to dinner?”

  George didn’t say anything.

  “I could make something special—tandoori prawns or that lamb pizza you liked?”

  George made a disgusted sound. “I don’t want to have Harold to dinner.”

  “Or maybe your mother would invite all of us?”

  “Wonderful,” George said.

  Sarcasm had been the hardest thing to get in English; it had taken her at least a year to catch that tone in George’s voice that meant he was saying the opposite of what his words suggested. She hardly ever had to ask him to repeat himself now, and she no longer made the kind of mistake that had amused him in the past. Communication was supposed to be the secret to a successful marriage, but she sometimes thought things had been better between them when they’d understood each other less.

  “It would be better than having it here, wouldn’t it?”

  “Better and better,” George said. He got up from the couch and went down to the basement, where he was replacing some mildewed insulation. It was a job he would once have hired someone else to do. As she listened to the sounds he made in the basement—the clanking of tools being removed from their box, then a pause, and then the weary resumption of hammering—she thought of what it must’ve been like for him, moving into this house. He would have been so excited, thinking of the tiny baby growing inside of Kim—8.9 centimeters, according to the ultrasound—and all he would’ve been able to do was to get out his toolbox. He would’ve fixed everything that needed fixing, and many things that didn’t. He might’ve even had projects he hadn’t shared with Kim, sketches on scrap paper: a swing, a doll’s house. She thought of the moment in the doctor’s office, when Kim had told him, and then the trip to the clinic—how he would have sat there staring at his own idle hands, wondering at the turn things had taken, utterly powerless to change her mind.

  She looked back at the USCIS website’s list of “family-based forms”: the I-134, which Jessica would be required to fill out if she agreed to be her parents’ financial sponsor, was free, but the two I-130 forms Amina had to file separately for her parents each came with a $355 processing fee. Now that he had lost his job, George was the only person who wouldn’t have to sign a single form—although he was the person who would actually support Amina’s parents once they arrived. None of it made any sense, which George would say was typical of any kind of bureaucracy. But Amina had expected better of America.

  One afternoon, when George’s mother called to see how they were doing, Amina decided to explain her predicament.

  “That’s criminal,” Eileen said. “You and George, of all people. Of course Jess will do it. And I’ve been wanting to talk to you about a get-together anyway. I thought we could do it in July, as soon as you get your citizenship. The only problem is my kitchen.”

  George’s mother had been planning to renovate her kitchen since the fall, but the work was perpetually delayed. She was having various travails with tiles and appliances, which she sometimes discussed with Amina when she called and George wasn’t at home. Eileen “thanked her lucky stars” that she had Bob, who was a retired contractor and would be able to intervene if something went wrong.

  “What if we did it at Cathy’s house?” Eileen proposed. “I’d do the cooking, so you won’t have to worry about bacon bits in the salad or anything.”

  Amina was quiet. At Christmas they had excused themselves from Cathy’s church-group potluck, saying they’d never hosted Eileen and Bob for the holiday at their house, and Amina had hoped that would become a pattern—until they could stop seeing Cathy altogether. Whether George had told his mother what Amina had discovered, or Eileen had simply guessed, Amina didn’t know. George’s mother had in any case stopped inviting Cathy to dinner on Sundays. The dinners themselves had become more infrequent because Eileen said she knew Amina was busy with work and school. But she guessed that George’s mother also might have been ashamed of what she had concealed from Amina.

  “Of course it would be only us,” Eileen said quickly. “And Jess and Harold. Just the six of us and Bob, if that’s all right?”

  “Of course,” Amina said. One dinner was a small price to pay for what Jessica had agreed to do, even if it had to be at Cathy’s house.

  “Wonderful,” Eileen said (but not in the way George had said it). “It’s been way too long.”

  Amina had always prayed when she was at home at the right times, but now she began making up prayers she’d missed, and adding something extra at the end of the namaz. Most often she asked God for two things: to help George find a new job and to allow her parents’ paperwork to proceed without incident. As the weeks passed and the first of these requests remained unfulfilled, Amina felt a nagging guilt about her own laxity. There was nowhere to pray at Starbucks, and she’d only once visited the “Interfaith Chapel” at MCC—really a classroom the college had dedicated to prayer at the request of its Christian students. The problem was that the maghrib usually fell in the middle of her math class, and if Amina had gone out to pray at that time, she would’ve missed nearly half the lesson.

  Of course, her schedule was no excuse. At home she had never believed in a God who was strict about prayer times or fasting; she believed, as her father had always instructed her, that God forgave everything as long as you devoted yourself to him alone. She wondered if it was simply that she couldn’t face God after what had happened, as she knew she must—to ask him to cure her of her pride and to help her forgive her husband and his family for what they’d done. But the less she prayed, the more she missed God. She told herself that that was a ridiculous feeling since God was everywhere. And so she thought it must be that she missed only the ceremonies of God: the early morning azaan or the sight of the men in her neighborhood streaming toward the mosque on Fridays or even the familiar presence of her parents’ prayer rugs, rolled up next to each other like another married couple, in the space between the television and the door.

  2Soon after George lost his job, the cardinal had appeared in their yard. Amina had noticed the noise first: a peculiar thwanging sound, soft but solid. It wasn’t until she was working outside one day that she’d seen the bird himself, pitching his body repeatedly against the window screen. She thought he might eventually break it, but if he did any damage, it was only to himself. After each sally, he repaired to his habitual perch in the oak tree, ruffling his plumage and calling imperiously to others of his kind.

  George said that the bird must’ve gone mad from eating the poison people put in their yards for the moles and suggested that they get a bird feede
r. The feeder attracted jays, wrens, and a large population of sparrows, but the cardinal ignored that commonplace sustenance in favor of the paradise he imagined to be just out of reach. Amina found that her temper was shorter these days. She went into the yard and yelled at the bird; she waved a stick the way she might have at a dog at home. But the bird continued to throw himself against the house, a half an hour at a time, several times each day, paying no attention to Amina’s threats or the fact that the house was already inhabited. He had set his sights on it and wouldn’t be deterred.

  Jessica filled out the I-134 and sent it in, and then it was just a question of waiting. Amina thought often of the green card application, and how she and George had struggled to prove the validity of something that was absolutely real. She had felt indignant along with her husband as he berated the people who used marriage as a path to legal residency. Look how hard they make it for the rest of us, he had said. It occurred to Amina, now that ICE was no longer interested in their personal life, that they were living in much the same way as those opportunists they had once deplored.

  They hadn’t slept together for three months. She assumed abstinence was more difficult for George than it was for her, though he never mentioned it. If he had complained, it might have hardened her resolve. But his silence had begun to make Amina doubt the wisdom of her decision: she knew there were instructions in the Qur’an about the duties of marriage, and she thought that she might in fact be committing one sin in an attempt to do penance for another.

  She couldn’t help being impressed by the fact that George got up at the same time he always had; he did his workout in the basement, had breakfast, and then sat down at the computer to look at Monster and engineerjobs.com. Although he sent his résumé somewhere every few days, most of the companies didn’t call him back, and the ones that did had already hired someone or needed someone “with a different skill set.” Once he even found a listing from his former employer.

  “They’re advertising for jobs,” he said, pointing to the screen. “Look at this. They want young guys who’ll work part-time, no benefits. They’ll replace me with two kids and still save money.”