The Night Counter

by Alia Yunis

  “No problem, Mrs. Abdullah,” Mr. Kim said. “Anything you would like me to add to your funeral instructions?”

  “No, thank you,” Fatima said. “I’ve got other things to get to now.”

  He nodded and pushed a box of doughnuts over to Fatima. She took two powdered sugars.

  She led Scheherazade to a secluded veranda table at the café next door. Fatima plunged into her doughnut, letting the powdered sugar coat her mouth and nose. She offered Scheherazade a bite, but Scheherazade was drawn to the café’s young male patrons’ physiques. Fatima snapped her fingers.

  “Aren’t you the one that wanted a story about my men?” Fatima reminded her.

  “Right. So while his wife daydreamed of someone else, Ibrahim helped Marwan get a job to give his new bride—you—a good life,” Scheherazade said, and attempted to wipe Fatima’s face clean of powdered sugar.

  “It was Marwan who got Ibrahim his job with Mr. Ford and took care of him when he first came to America,” Fatima explained through another mouthful of doughnut. “So Ibrahim got Marwan the job at GM soon after we arrived, but then later Ibrahim felt even more obligated to Marwan.”

  “You mean Marwan then got Ibrahim a better job at the GM plant?” Scheherazade asked.

  “No, no, that job was terrible enough for Marwan,” Fatima remembered. “Poor man. He had already bought the house in Dearborn because Mr. Ford had told his men before the depressing times that they would work at River Rouge forever. But Marwan drove all the way to GM in Flint every Sunday night—seventy-five miles away, and cars weren’t what they are now and no radio in it for distraction—and for only twenty dollars a week instead of thirty dollars like before. He would come back late Friday nights and just stare at the walls, maybe listen to the baseball game. Which is what I did all the nights he stayed at his cousin’s house in Flint—ten men from Deir Zeitoon lived in that house during the week. He told me that at the factory he would do the same thing over and over for hours and hours, always bent over as his back ached him if he stood straight. Sometimes he came home with really big cuts all over. I thought he was clumsy at first. But once when Ibrahim stopped by to read a letter from Mama, he told me that Marwan worked with very dangerous machines.”

  “So then Ibrahim felt guilty about getting Marwan a bad job,” Scheherazade interrupted.

  “No, no, hamara, Ibrahim showed me then that he had cuts like that, too. More than half the men had lost their jobs in the last seven years, so they were all happy to have income again,” Fatima said, and bit into her second doughnut. “But Marwan knew it was wrong to treat workers that way. So he joined the union. It was a new organization to protect the workers and make sure they got fair money. After I had been in America just five months, the men said they refused to work until things got better. Marwan was never home even on weekends after that, always out organizing.”

  “You must have missed Deir Zeitoon the most then,” Scheherazade said.

  Fatima nodded. “Millie would invite me for coffee with the other wives, but I didn’t feel comfortable with no English—except around Millie alone,” she said. “None of them knew how to make real coffee anyway except for the Greek lady two houses down. The only time I laughed in those days was when Ibrahim would come by to read a letter from Mama and tell me some new joke he had heard at the Syrian grocery. One day, Ibrahim came to my house and didn’t smile as usual. He told me that Marwan was in the hospital. The police had shot at the strikers with something called buckshot because the workers were throwing iron nuts, bolts, and milk bottles at them and squirting them with water. And Marwan’s arm was cut so deep, it was a miracle they were able to sew it together again.”

  “So sad,” Scheherazade said.

  “But it was because of men like Marwan that GM and Mr. Ford had to give the workers fair money and good treatment,” Fatima said, and licked the last of the powdered sugar from her fingers. “Marwan’s courage proved that we didn’t just care about sending money back home, which is what most people thought about Arabs. I know because that’s what Millie told me her husband told her. He told her we’d just take off back to ‘garlic eater land’ as soon as we made enough money. Marwan went back to working for Mr. Ford when I got pregnant with my oldest so he could be nearer to me. Even though his left arm was always weak after that strike, he was starting to get Ibrahim and the others to talk about unionizing Ford. One day, Ibrahim came to tell me that Marwan was in the hospital again. This time he died, Allah yerhamu. He was barely thirty-nine years old and had a heart attack. He was putting a door on one of Mr. Ford’s new model Tudors. I have never ridden in a Tudor in my life. I can’t.”

  “So you did love him,” Scheherazade said.

  “If he had lived longer, I probably would have loved him more,” Fatima admitted. “I think God was willing me to love him a little. But it took a while. That’s why it took a while to make a baby. And he was always tired or gone.”

  Mr. Kim came out with the black skirt, which had been pressed perfectly. He cleared his throat, pretending not to have heard the tail end of her story. “Will you be able to carry it by yourself?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Fatima said. “I’m not dead yet.”

  She took the carefully hung skirt and waited for Scheherazade to take her arm, but she was too busy looking at a man whose muscles rippled under his tight T-shirt. “Men’s body parts sure have grown since I was mortal,” she gushed, ignoring Fatima’s proffered arm.

  Fatima walked off in a huff but did not get far. After eleven steps, her cane caught on the edge of the plastic bag covering the skirt. As she made her way to the unquestionably harsh concrete of the sidewalk, she began to form the thought that she probably would die in six days of complications from a broken hip. But before the thought had enough seconds to crystallize, Fatima found herself caught by firm yet comforting arms.

  “I got you, ma’am,” a voice said, and she looked up into the turquoise eyes of the handsome neighbor boy.

  Fatima attempted to recompose her dignity as Scheherazade ogled his beauty She glared at Scheherazade. “Act like a lady,” she scolded.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the handsome boy said, standing her upright. “My grandmother used to always tell me the opposite. How about I give you a lift home? I’m your neighbor.”

  “Yes, with the nice big cars.” Fatima blushed, completely embarrassed by her helplessness. “I was just smoking something special today. First time. I didn’t know it could make me so dizzy.”

  “Right on. It mostly makes me hungry.” He shrugged. “Got to watch the body, you know, so I don’t do it anymore. And I’m not saying anything about the white powder around your nose.”

  “The dry cleaner has free doughnuts,” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said in the same irritating tone Amir used when she told him she was inviting a potential wife to dinner.

  He helped Fatima into his SUV Scheherazade climbed in the backseat, taking her first ride in one of the petrol caravans.

  “Smoother than a camel indeed,” Scheherazade said to Fatima.

  “Chevy.” Fatima nodded. “You’re a good boy. Patriotic. I like that. Look at these cars on this street—Mercedes, BMW, Lexus. You wouldn’t see such behavior in Detroit. These boys here with their Japanese and German cars have no loyalty and respect for their grandfathers’ toil. During the war, my husbands and the others were all making war vehicles to defeat the Germans and Japanese, and now their factories make more cars for their grandkids than Ford.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the handsome boy said again. He stopped in back of the other SUV parked in front of his house and helped Fatima out.

  “You should meet my grandson,” Fatima said. “You could teach him a thing or two about loyalty. Look at his Honda.”

  “I’d love to show him my next new car if it would make you happy.” He smiled. Then he got out and helped Fatima, who was still a little shaky from her near fall, down. “Everything good?”

  “S
í,” she said. “Thank you.” Scheherazade stood next to her as she watched the handsome boy park in his driveway. Nice boy. If she had more time, she’d find him a wife, too.

  “Al-hamdulilah, we’re home,” Fatima said. “I was so worried if I fell, I would be bedridden for the rest of my days, and I don’t have that kind of time with the house and Amir still left to settle. Ya oukhti, my sister, I’m tired.”

  “But you accomplished much in the last two days,” Scheherazade pointed out. “You left your mama’s letters to Nadia, let your grandson know that the funeral papers are ready, and bequeathed to your unmarried daughter the dress you married her father in.”

  “I did not marry both husbands in that dress,” Fatima corrected. “Ibrahim and I do not have wedding pictures. I was in mourning and pregnant. There was no celebration. My only wedding pictures are alone or with Marwan. I told Laila, who is Marwan’s only child, that she could wear the dress for her wedding, but she said it would be an insult to Ibrahim, who had been her father since she was born.”

  “It was very normal for her to believe that,” Scheherazade concurred.

  “Laila is like that,” Fatima boasted. “Normal. She married an Arab boy, of course. Egyptian. Everyone came to the wedding, all the children. His mother came from Egypt for it, and even though she was from a good family, I was grateful that she would live far away from Laila. Do you know what Laila makes at Thanksgiving?”

  “Thanksgiving?”

  “It’s an American holiday where they sacrifice a turkey,” Fatima explained. “So do you know what she makes at Thanksgiving?”

  Scheherazade licked her lips. “Does it have pistachios and cinnamon?”

  “She makes turkey,” Fatima boasted. “Subhan Allah. Normal, see. Do you know how I know this? Because she would invite Ibrahim and me every year, like a normal daughter does. … You could go see for yourself.”

  “You should rest for Suheir’s funeral tomorrow,” Scheherazade advised.

  But Fatima did not leave, did not even slouch, despite the ache in her hip. The two women regarded each other under the streetlight until Fatima nodded good night. “I should rest. It’s going to be a very big funeral,” she said, and hobbled into the house.

  When Fatima was out of sight, Scheherazade clapped her hands for her carpet. It was not her duty to visit this daughter, but the way Fatima had talked about Detroit’s glory, it made her wonder. Scheherazade had seen many of the world’s most beautiful sites: Mount Ararat at sunset, the Oracle of Delphi at dawn, the Nile channeled by the Aswan Dam in the spring. Why not pay this daughter in Detroit a visit?

  She departed just as the handsome neighbor boy stepped back out and tapped on a window of the petrol caravan under the eucalyptus tree. She heard him say to the man and woman in black, “I got a scoop for you,” as the wind swept her toward Detroit.

  The next afternoon, following storm clouds that were moving in that direction, Scheherazade found Fatima’s normal daughter in a place with more food than an army marching through the Sahara needed. She recognized Fatima’s nose on Laila’s face.

  LAILA STARED AT a slab of pork at the supermarket and calculated the cost of a nervous breakdown: $150 an hour for the shrink, $200 a month for pills not covered by insurance, another $200 for a homeopathic doctor and nutritionist, at least $500 for a lawyer to write up her will in case she became suicidal, and $850 for a self-actualization yoga retreat in California. Throw in another $600 for a couple of colonics and a massage. Expensive.

  The one thing Laila had inherited from Fatima, besides the nose, was the ability to do math and shop at the same time. A nervous breakdown, along with all her other medical expenses, was not in the family budget. She would have to settle for prayer, her husband’s response to everything these days. Or she just might get as much satisfaction from purchasing pork.

  It was so cold in the meat aisle that Laila found herself readjusting her wig as if it were a ski cap. She shivered and reached for the pinkish-gray pork. Her hand jerked back. How did people touch this stuff? She watched a frazzled woman with three kids grab a large armful of packages—it was a pretty good pork sale. One of the kid’s suckers popped out of his mouth and landed where Laila used to have 36D breasts.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the woman apologized, reaching to pull off the Jolly Rancher.

  Laila brushed the woman’s hand away. “It’s okay. My boys were always doing things like that,” she said, and then plucked the sucker off her sweater and handed it to the mother, who handed it back to the kid. This woman isn’t the germophobe I was with my boys, Laila thought. The woman’s two other kids were tossing one of the pork packages to each other as if it were a football.

  “What do you do with this stuff?” Laila asked, pointing at the flying meat.

  “The pork chops?”

  “Yes, the pork.”

  “Well, you can broil them and then cover them in barbecue sauce,” the woman recommended. “That’s what they do in the South.”

  She pointed to a row of barbecue sauce bottles lined up above the pork section. Laila thanked her as she and her kids rolled away with their cart, which was overflowing with cereal boxes redeemable via the coupons the youngest child was waving around. Laila grabbed a bottle of barbecue sauce and saw the price: $4.99 a bottle. It was a good thing she’d never eaten pork. She could get two bottles of ketchup for that price, and that would take care of at least fifty hamburgers. She bought a couple of cans of tomato sauce instead. It was not as if Ghazi had ever eaten pork. He wouldn’t know how it was supposed to be served.

  As she put her groceries in the car, Laila almost slipped on a greasy rain puddle made the previous night during the first thunderstorm of summer. She could smell more rain on the way. She and Ghazi used to talk about moving to Florida when the kids grew up. In truth, she had flown on an airplane only once in her life, she’d never lived anywhere but Detroit, all her doctors were here, and her relationship with Ghazi wasn’t such that either relaxed at the thought of living in a place where the only people they would know would be each other. And Ghazi’s mosque was here. She slammed the trunk hard.

  When Laila had discovered her cancer, Ghazi had discovered Islam. Until then they had been the kind of Muslims who fulfilled their duties by giving to the poor and not eating pork. They knew when the Muslim holidays were only when Ghazi’s mother called from Cairo to say Eid Mubarak. Now Ghazi was the kind of Muslim who went to the mosque five times a day, didn’t drink, and gave all the money he used to spend on his fancy gym membership to the new mosque, as if trading in fat for prayer would make his family healthy again.

  Laila drove by the new mosque as she headed to Dearborn for what her mother called real food. She couldn’t serve just tomato-sauced pork for dinner, any more than she could miss the mosque’s minarets from the freeway. Michigan’s Muslims bragged that the mosque was the largest one in North America.

  At Greenland Supermarket, she bought halloumi cheese, a bag of pumpkin seeds, and a five-liter bottle of olive oil from Lebanon, which she noted didn’t cost half as much as the pork, despite the sale. She usually got the ingredients to make foul for Ghazi, but today, for the first time in her marriage, she wasn’t in the mood. Amani, Ghazi’s mother, could make it for him later in the week. After all, she had come here from Cairo to help, as Ghazi described the purpose of her chaotic arrival.

  The store was packed, as usual, and Laila waited in a very long line with women in head scarves, black abayas, or tight rayon tops with glitter designs. It all fit in here, but Laila remembered that when she was a girl, it was very rare to see a head scarf, let alone an abaya, in Dearborn. The Arabs of her childhood had been blenders; they just mixed into the rest of the country. She didn’t know where those Arabs were now, all those popular girls from high school.

  The shoppers at Greenland, mostly women, checked one another out as usual, either in judgment or out of curiosity. Laila used to think that gave the hijabis the advantage because she couldn’t see th
e secrets under their scarves. However, with the wig, she felt that they were on even ground, and she stared right back. It turned out that after all these years, she was a better starer than anyone else. A few minutes later, no one would look at her.

  She turned her attention to the collage of posters at the exit behind the cashiers. Most featured big-eyed children in rags, lone figures among rubble—with one sign asking its readers in both English and Arabic to sponsor a child in the refugee camps, which Laila did; another asking them to give money to the schools in southern Lebanon, which Laila did; and another asking for contributions to restore Egypt’s classic black-and-white films, which Laila also did.

  There were posters asking for money to rebuild Iraq. This Laila did not give to. Many of her neighbors had kids in the military, and Laila felt sad for them every day, but she did not agree with the destruction of Iraq, and so she could not bring herself to give to its reconstruction. This was also how she had responded to the loss of her breasts. Ghazi had said that reconstructive surgery would make her feel like a woman again, but she still felt like a woman, even if he couldn’t see that anymore. Laila had found her cancer 430 days ago, the same day the United States invaded Iraq.

  The bagger, Ahmad, asked her how she was doing. Everyone in Dearborn knew her “situation,” as they called the cancer in whispers, because of Ghazi’s generous contributions to the mosque. Ahmad was a sweet kid, twenty-four, about the same age as Zaid, her youngest. Ahmad had been in the United States only fourteen months, and he always said how lucky her boys were to have her so close. He missed his mom. Laila definitely would have had a nervous breakdown if her sons had talked about missing her. But on the days when the boys took her to radiation instead of Ghazi, she smelled their fear through their clothes, which she still ironed for them. If her boys were married, they would not miss her so much if the cancer came back. When she had told them that if she died, they would want someone to lean on, they had told her that the cancer would not come back. They did not mention any girlfriends.