by Alia Yunis
“Allahu akbar,” Ahmad grunted as he heaved the five liters of olive oil into the trunk. The pork bag tipped over.
“That’s funny-looking chicken, Auntie,” he said.
Laila stepped between him and the pork. “It was on sale,” she explained. “Fifty cents a pound. What can you expect for that, you know?”
Ahmad was impressed. Dearborn’s stores, like ethnic markets everywhere, sold meat and produce at rock-bottom prices, but fifty cents a pound?
“You shop well, Auntie,” he said. There were ten people on this planet who could call her “Auntie” by blood, but she had hardly ever seen them. Most of them, unlike her sons, had gotten married long ago. Maybe she and Ghazi should have left Detroit, as her siblings had.
Laila drove home along Warren Avenue, where she had grown up but had not lived since her marriage. Then it had been Arabs mixed in with Slavs and Irish. She passed the messy Arabic calligraphy on mom-and-pop groceries and boutiques, the syncopating Iraqi pop music seeping out of Lincolns and Buicks, and the McDonald’s bragging in red letters, WE PROUDLY SERVE HALAL MCNUGGETS.
Maybe there were fewer women willing to marry a guy with an Arab name nowadays. Even so, her sons should have been married long before 9/11. Laila feared that the boys now jinxed each other. The younger boys’ girlfriends would be turned off, she was sure, by the fact that their much older brothers hadn’t married yet. She would have thought it weird if all of Ghazi’s older brothers had been single when she married him.
Laila was so anxious to think of reasons for her sons’ singleness that she almost hit an old man coming out of Masri Sweets. She skidded to a stop just in time. It was the old man’s cane she noticed first: the cedar carvings of her great-grandfather.
She had called her father last week, but when was the last time she had seen him?
She got out of the car, the humid summer breeze causing her head to hurt as it whipped through her wig.
“Hi, Baba,” she said. Like all her siblings, Laila answered Ibrahim in English even when he used Arabic, but she was the only one who called him Baba instead of Dad.
Ibrahim looked up. “Fatima?”
“No, it’s me,” she said. “Laila.”
Laila read the thought on his face: How could this old woman be my daughter?
“I’ve been a little sick,” she explained. “That’s why I look like this.”
Laila expected him to turn away before admonishing her for never exercising or for eating bad food, as he always used to, but he stared her right in the face. Actually looked. And kept looking. She couldn’t remember him ever looking at any of his daughters without turning away the minute they caught him. He reached for her cheek, and she remembered the last time he had touched her. He had held her hand on her wedding day.
“Why aren’t you fat no more?” Ibrahim whispered.
The trembling in his fingers quietly drummed her face. She did not know if it was from age or from seeing her. Whatever the reason, that was when Laila gave in to her nervous breakdown, whatever the cost, right in front of Masri Sweets, amid the scent of fried dough and rosewater. Her father’s kindness was the last surprise she could handle. She kept on crying, right in the middle of the sidewalk, as women covered in black stepped around her in the summer heat, their emotions displayed in their heavy walk rather than in their impenetrable faces.
Laila was sixty-five years old now, too old to lean on her father, and he was too small now to hold her. Ibrahim still didn’t look away. Neither did the people in Masri Sweets, who were watching her from the safety of air-conditioning.
The Ithan went off, calling all believers to the nearby mosque. The a cappella chant of the Ithan had always moved Laila in the way “Ave Maria” did when she attended Catholic weddings and “Amazing Grace” did at Presbyterian funerals. They all made her feel God, even though He really annoyed her of late. God had tested her much more than she was capable of handling. His recent tests were made for stronger people.
Ibrahim took out a handkerchief embroidered by Fatima. He shook it out and handed it to Laila.
“Would you like to come to dinner tonight?” Laila asked, and looked up at him. “I’m making grape leaves.”
His eyes floated in as many tears as hers. “It’s just dinner,” she said, and lowered her eyes again.
He nodded. Then Laila remembered the pork. It stopped her tears.
“Or better yet, I’ll tell Ghazi to pick you up on his way home from work tomorrow,” Laila suggested. “That way you could rest today. You probably want to rest today.”
“No, I’ll come with you now,” Ibrahim said. “I taught your mother how to roll grape leaves, you know. She couldn’t cook nothing before we got married.”
Laila assumed that was a joke. He so rarely tried to make her laugh; she could not take back the invitation now.
She motioned him to the car. “Maybe we’re going to stop at the pharmacy for my pressure blood medication?” he asked.
“Sure, I’ll get my pills, too,” she replied. It had taken old age and disease to give them something they could do together.
They drove to the pharmacy and home in silence, which was how they were most comfortable with each other.
In her house, Laila quickly shoved the pork in the refrigerator while her father was in the bathroom. Then she washed her hands very, very well and prepared tea with sugar, or “sugar with a little tea,” as Laila referred to the way her parents liked it. Ibrahim came back to the kitchen with Al-Ahram, one of Ghazi’s Egyptian newspapers, which he had acquired along with God at the mosque.
Laila let Ibrahim read and sip his tea as she rinsed and cut stems off the grape leaves. Amani had picked them from the garden that morning before going to English class. Laila did not tell Ibrahim that her mother-in-law lived with her. She would not mention her at all. Amani undoubtedly would play cards after class with her Arab mother-in-law classmates and not come home until Ibrahim was gone.
“Do you want to help me?” she asked.
Ibrahim put down the paper. “I’m sorry, it feels good to sometimes read Arabic. I haven’t read no Arabic since I used to read your mother her mother’s letters.” He smiled and pointed at the paper. “The world has all different news in Arabic.”
Laila did not ask him what the paper said. She didn’t want to know. She put a plate of grape leaves in front of him and one in front of herself. She placed a bowl of rice and ground beef stuffing between them and put on her bifocals and began rolling. Ibrahim pulled out his bifocals, and his eyes followed her hands. Then she put a leaf in front of him, and he awkwardly tried to straighten it out.
“I didn’t teach your mama nothing about no grape leaves,” Ibrahim finally said. “No, her mama taught her in Lebanon so she could cook good for your real dad when they came here. Marwan was a great man.”
That was what Ibrahim always said when he mentioned Marwan. Fatima had told Laila many times how Ibrahim had asked to marry her after Marwan died—just because she was pregnant with Laila. It was a great act of kindness, and so Laila felt disloyal talking about Marwan with him.
She laid a leaf on her plate, taking out every crease. “Follow me,” Laila said.
Laila took a little bit of the rice and meat and placed it in the center and then began folding the leaf in. He tried to do the same thing.
“What a mess, right,” Ibrahim groaned.
Laila stood in back of him and took his hands to guide them over the leaves.
“No, it hurts,” he pleaded. “It’s the arthritis. I can’t do no folding now.”
She looked at his hands, a map of purple and red veins. She set them down.
“Would you like to take a nap while I finish?” she offered. “The sheets in the guest room are clean.”
“I’m not sleepy,” he answered. “Maybe it’s okay if I’m just going to sit here?”
“I guess,” Laila said. How was she was going to make the pork with him watching her all the time?
“Maybe
Nasser and Mo could come for dinner tonight,” he said. “Zaid and Nader, too. Four boys, mashallah.”
It was strange to hear her sons’ names come out of Ibrahim’s mouth, especially since Ghazi never said “Mo” anymore. He had told her last month that Mohammad was not a name to minimize.
“We should have named a child for you,” Laila apologized.
“That is a son’s job, not yours,” Ibrahim said. But none of your sons will name a son for you, Laila thought to herself.
“I had four boys to name. I could have called one Ibrahim.”
“If anything, you should have named one Marwan,” Ibrahim told her. “Me, I was the man who didn’t let you do nothing but homework.”
“You raised me when you didn’t have to,” Laila said. Conversation with him, let alone conversation about something that mattered, was more foreign than his accent. “You didn’t have to marry my mother.”
“Yes, I did,” Ibrahim replied. “I wouldn’t have had no nine other children with her if I did not want to marry her.”
Laila stopped rolling grape leaves. She could feel goose bumps under her wig. “It wasn’t for me?”
“Well, for you I would have married her anyway,” Ibrahim said. “I owed your father that much. But I didn’t owe him loving his wife from the moment I saw her.”
More goose bumps rose under her wig.
“Oh, you should have seen her hair. But it wasn’t just about no hair,” Ibrahim went on. “When your mama talked, she laughed a laugh—she brought Lebanon back to me. It wasn’t just that, but that’s what I told to my first wife—Betsy—who knew the minute Fatima got off the train that she had never really been loved by me like she do deserve. Then I left Betsy.”
“That’s terrible,” Laila said. Ibrahim nodded. She could not quite see the old man in front of her as someone capable of being love-struck. He had always been more of symbol to her—a father symbol—rather than a man with a life of stories, including some about love.
“Your mama to this day thinks Betsy left me like that for another man,” Ibrahim continued. “Your mama doesn’t know no different because she wouldn’t never have forgiven me the pain I caused Betsy. I myself cannot do no forgiving me for coveting my best friend’s wife. A union hero, too.”
Laila couldn’t envision what anything would have been like if Marwan had lived. It was not just that all her siblings wouldn’t have existed. She couldn’t picture how Ibrahim or Fatima could have managed all those years without each other. That was why their divorce had baffled her as much as her sons’ collective inability to get married did. She couldn’t imagine how Ibrahim lived without Fatima these days, especially now that she knew that the marriage had not simply been his duty to an old friend. He had always treated Laila slightly better than her sisters. She had assumed he was overcompensating for her not being his blood, but now she understood that it had been guilt.
“Maybe I could invite Mama for Thanksgiving, like I used to when she lived here, and you could come, too, like before,” she offered. “I’ll make a big turkey. Just like before.”
Ibrahim waved away her idea. “Before is over,” he said, and once again he stared straight into her eyes until she finally had to turn away.
“That’s a new hair color you got,” he noticed. “I liked your real color better. It was the color of your father’s hair. Not so black black, like mine.”
“I liked it, too,” she admitted. “But sometimes change …”
“You girls was always not wanting no curly hair,” he remembered. Then he reached to touch a lock, and she pushed the chair back.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, worried that he would feel its fakeness.
“I understand. I’m no good man. I’ll leave.”
“No, Baba, stay,” Laila said.
“I can take the bus home,” Ibrahim said. “You keep rolling.”
“No, no,” she insisted. “How about you take a nap for a little while instead?”
It was a lot of time they’d spent together today, more time than Laila ever remembered being alone with him.
“I should go,” he said.
“No, no, please don’t go,” she said. “Just a nap. No leaving.”
Ibrahim picked up his cane. “I can take a nap at home.”
Laila took the cane from him and gave him her arm. “No, Baba, please,” she said. “Just a nap.”
After a few moments, he took her arm. “Okay, a nap,” he agreed. “A nap.”
“Good; you know where the guest room is.”
“No,” he said. “I have never slept in your house.”
It was not a judgment, just a fact.
She took him to the room and helped him into the bed. “Do you want me to get you the paper?” she asked.
Ibrahim shook his head. She heard the creaks in his body as he lay down. “Baba, it’s okay that all you let me do was homework,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. Ghazi is much harder on our boys than you ever were.”
“That’s because he was educated enough to do checking homework,” Ibrahim reasoned. “I could only make you do it. I couldn’t tell you if it was wrong.”
“My boys used to shake as soon as they heard his car in the driveway,” Laila told him. “They would run to their homework.”
“So they got no confidence.” Ibrahim nodded. “Inshallah, grown up on their own, they’re going to get enough confidence. It takes confidence to love a woman. Then when they love a woman, they can marry her.”
In one sentence, her father had given her the only explanation for her sons’ singleness that could be true. She had let her husband take a hard line with the boys, and so she could not blame him alone, as she wished she could.
Laila did not stay in the guest room when Ibrahim looked at the family photos on the dresser: Laila and her boys, Laila and Ghazi, Laila and her brothers and sisters, Fatima alone in her wedding dress. There were no photos of him. It wasn’t intentional, but she couldn’t tell from his face whether he knew that.
Laila went back to folding grape leaves, working faster on her own, hoping the speed would eliminate the disturbing thoughts of her sons’ cowering in front of Ghazi and of her parents’ unfamiliar love story. Did her mother-in-law have a love story, too? Laila would not ask Amani when she came home. Too much melodrama would be involved. There always was with Amani, from the day Ghazi had introduced her as his bride and Amani had cried that she already had picked out someone else for him, with the implication that her someone was better. Had she and Ghazi really had a love story of their own once? Maybe if her boys thought she and Ghazi had a love story, they would have more confidence and get married. No, she didn’t know her parents had a love story when she married Ghazi. She looked at the clock. She needed to start making the pork.
She pulled the meat out of the refrigerator. She stared at it for a while, as if it might have something it was waiting to tell her. The she turned on the oven to five hundred degrees. She yanked the chops out of the packaging, grabbing them quickly and flinging them into the broiler pan, holding her nose, looking away as they landed, minimizing contact with them with all her senses. She did that with twelve pieces. A heck of a lot of pork. Too much pork. The pork chops were starting to land on top of one another. They weren’t all going to fit in one pan, and she did not want leftovers. She closed her eyes, grabbed the extra chops by their edges, and forced them down the garbage disposal. She’d dig them out and throw them away later, when it was dark and the neighbors wouldn’t see. In the meantime, no one would think to look in the garbage disposal for pork.
Laila understood that the Koran referred to pig meat as rife with disease, not sin, and that American industry had wiped out all worms and microbes. Yet she looked away again as she dumped the cans of tomato sauce over the meat. She opened the oven door with her foot so that her pork-stained fingers wouldn’t touch the handle. Then she washed her hands with tub and tile cleanser, a smell that was an unpleasant reminder of the hospital but preferable to por
ky hands.
She looked through the oven window. Yes, a lot of pork. She called Ghazi.
“Why don’t you bring some of your friends from the mosque over for dinner,” she suggested. “I was in the mood to cook today. I made grape leaves and a few other things.”
“Are you sure?” Ghazi asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Very sure.”
Laila used to invite people over for dinner, but that had stopped with Mo’s car accident, which had come six weeks before her cancer. Mo’s back wasn’t good anymore. Harder to get married with back problems, especially at thirty-nine. She then had told her second son, Nasser, who was already thirty-seven, as well as her younger sons, to watch their backs. It was one thing for a woman to marry someone who later got sick; it was another to find someone willing to marry someone who was already sick. Just two weeks later, Nasser lost his job during another Ford layoff. Who would marry an unemployed son? Then came her cancer, which was almost as unfortunate for her sons as it was for her. As a sick mother-in-law, she would put another burden on a new bride. Laila thought about how much Amani weighed on her nerves even long after she had stopped being a new bride, and Amani hadn’t been sick a day in her life.
Laila looked in on the pork and turned the oven down to 350 degrees. She checked on the grape leaves. Perfect.
By the time Ghazi and his three friends arrived, just after the aasyer prayers, she had made hummus and salad; laid out the table; garnished it with oval plates of olives, pickles, and radishes; and filled wineglasses with apricot juice. Her father would be impressed to see how she could set a table. Still, she was happy to hear a faint snore from his room.
“Hi, hello,” Laila tossed out as she led the men right to the dining table. No wasting time with appetizers in the living room tonight. Ghazi once had viewed himself as quite pharaonic but was now more Santa Claus, with a big belly and a very full white beard. The three men, mechanical engineers like Ghazi, could be described the same way, except that their accents were much stronger than his. They hadn’t been in the United States as long as Ghazi and didn’t speak English at home as he did. Laila and the boys could understand a lot of Arabic, but unlike these men’s families, they didn’t converse in it.