The Night Counter

by Alia Yunis

  Fatima slapped Scheherazade. “I did deserve that,” Scheherazade conceded. “But no one should describe her own olive oil as crude. Paradise without people is not worth setting foot in, so leave the house to God and put its key in the underwear drawer and go talk to her instead.”

  “The key.” Fatima remembered. A powerful wave of heat fired by sadness rippled through her body. She still trembled from it when she was finally able to form words again. “The key is still in the guest room. We did not find it yet.”

  “Maybe it is not here,” Scheherazade said.

  “Allah yustur,” Fatima said. “I know it is here. Do you think I imagined it being here? You think I’m crazy? Because you’re the only crazy thing in my life other than my children. Yallah, let us go.”

  “Take that girl with you,” Scheherazade said. She dabbed what once had been coral peach lipstick onto Fatima’s lips before Fatima flicked her hand away.

  “You go with me,” Fatima insisted.

  “I’ve never been anyone’s servant,” Scheherazade reminded her.

  “This is of urgency,” Fatima said. “Tomorrow is the 1001st night.”

  “That’s your urgency,” Scheherazade replied. “I’ve got forever, so I can’t damage my hands with manual labor. You have a girl downstairs who can help you.”

  “I’ll ask Amir,” Fatima decided.

  “He’s going to tell you to wait until tomorrow,” Scheherazade said, “with this big audition he keeps talking about.”

  “He will understand the urgency,” Fatima said. But Scheherazade’s face told what she already knew: He would not understand. Scheherazade pointed her manicured index finger downstairs.

  Fatima shook her head. “I have never allowed anyone to dig through those boxes other than myself, and I will not let her be the exception.”

  Then she screamed like a woman escaping a fire for her grandson. Amir in his thowb and beard was there in thirty seconds.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Tayta,” Amir panted, out of breath. “What happened? Why is your face so flushed? Let me call a doctor.”

  “It’s called beauty,” Fatima answered, smiling broadly enough to crease some of the cocoa deluxe foundation.

  “Oh,” Amir said, examining her more closely. “Huh, I’ve just never seen you, oh, I don’t know, so beautiful.”

  “I need to go to the guest room,” Fatima said. “I have to find the key to the house.”

  “What house?”

  “Stop saying stupid things,” Fatima reprimanded him.

  “Oh, Lebanon again,” Amir said. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Fatima saw Scheherazade enjoying Amir’s predicted bad behavior from her perch on the windowsill.

  “I have to get the key,” Fatima said.

  “This is the biggest callback audition of my life,” he replied. “What could be so important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll be busy then,” Fatima insisted.

  “Look, we’ll do it on the weekend,” Amir promised.

  It was tragic that he did not know this was his last chance to be good to her.

  “Fine,” Fatima said. “Send the girl up here.”

  “Oh, Tayta, I knew you’d come around,” he said.

  “The girl can still lift things,” Fatima said. “She’s young, and it’s early in her pregnancy. Get her.”

  A few minutes later, Amir came back up with the girl, who still was clutching her Hello Kitty bag. He edged her toward Fatima.

  “Go on, kid,” he said. “I’ll see you both later.”

  “Wait, habibi,” Fatima begged. “Don’t come home too late tomorrow. I need you to be here tomorrow night. Min shan rubna, it’s the last time I’ll ask you to do anything for me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Amir said as he left.

  There was only one best: that she would die in his arms. When Fatima looked at the windowsill, Scheherazade was not perched there. She had no choice but to look at the girl.

  “Both you and Amir have such nice dresses and stuff,” Decimal said, looking over her shoulder as if she hoped Amir were still there.

  “I can’t hear you,” Fatima said.

  Decimal made her way toward Fatima. “You look very pretty,” she said more loudly. “My mom—that’s Brenda—she’s got your same goddess finesse with makeup.”

  “God give me strength,” Fatima said. She stood up with her cane. “Take me to the guest bedroom. I’m sure that’s where the key is.”

  “What key, Mrs. Abdullah?” Decimal asked.

  “Ya Allah, you don’t know anything, that’s obvious, or your belly wouldn’t be about to stick out,” Fatima answered. “The key to the house in Lebanon. Take my arm and help me out. Turn left at the hallway.”

  Fatima did her best not to flinch when the girl touched her. To get into the guest room door, Decimal had to shove aside a box filled with facial hair parts: beards and mustaches of various lengths and a few Styrofoam heads modeling long-haired and curly-haired wigs.

  “He should have put about 3.5 feet of chrome from the living room in here to help with the lighting in this mess,” Decimal said.

  Fatima thought that funny but pursed her lips tightly.

  “Whereabouts is the key, Mrs. Abdullah, ma’am?” Decimal asked.

  “Look for a box of old clothes,” Fatima told her. Fatima remembered the last time she had held the key: April 4, 1974.

  Decimal clung to her Hello Kitty bag to work her way through clothes racks and boxes overflowing with board games, sports equipment, camping supplies, and Boys’ Life magazines and books. Decimal stopped in front of the cedar chest, unable to hold back a sneeze. She wiped her spittle off the chest.

  “My grandfather built that,” Fatima said, and Decimal got her first sighting of Fatima as a proud rather than a defeated woman. “He made it when I was born so my mother would have somewhere to put the things for my wedding.”

  “What’s inside, Mrs. Abdullah?” Decimal asked.

  “You can’t have the wedding dress,” Fatima said. “In Lebanon, all babies are made after weddings.”

  “How do you know?” Decimal said. “A lot of people are better at covering up things than me and Brenda. That’s what Brenda always says.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fatima said. She was annoyed with the girl’s mumbling, although it was she herself who had purposely tried to silence her by lowering the volume on her hearing aid. “Please just look for a pair of blue pants. They are in one of the boxes in a blue backpack. They’re made of blue that looks like bad spaghetti.”

  “You mean corduroy?” Decimal said. “What kind of box would they be in?”

  “Yes, cordelias,” Fatima agreed. “Now look.”

  Fatima could not bear to dwell on the Levi’s in the backpack. Yukhrub beit deeni, curses on my faith, she thought, for giving me no other distraction than talking to this girl. Maybe she could make her moral with a story, the way Scheherazade had taught her sister Dunyazad morality through her stories to her king. But Scheherazade had had 1001 nights. Fatima only had one. Still …

  “I was pregnant for my second wedding,” Fatima ventured. “You can get married without a dress, like I did, and take no pictures.”

  Decimal scratched her arm. “They say in Psychology Today that divorce is almost as inevitable and complicated as sex and stuff,” she said. “I’d just rather skip a postdivorce stage because apparently it’s one of the most depressing times in a person’s life.”

  Fatima was stuck on a child using the word sex so casually in front of her. Then again, this child had “done it,” as Fatima used to hear Millie and her kids refer to the bad girls at their school. It had shocked Fatima what Millie talked to her kids about. Now it shocked her what her own kids allowed to happen to their kids.

  “Your baby should have a name,” Fatima advised her. “A family name.”

  “It’s going to have Paolo’s last name, Mrs. Abdullah.” Decimal smiled. “Nassar. Remember how I
told you Paolo was born in Brazil but his grandparents came from Syria? They were two of six million Arabs who did, you know. Paolo’s mother told me that. She was full of interesting facts and figures before I got pregnant and she started hating me and stuff. And I got some other facts that will make you even happier. Did you know if Paolo’s Syrian and I’m one-quarter Lebanese, my baby’s going to be three-eighths more Arab than me and just three-eighths less Arab than you?”

  Fatima had no problems following Decimal’s math. It just didn’t make her happy to see how it characterized her family. Avon mascara flaked off of Fatima’s eyelashes and onto her cheeks as she held her tongue because she wanted the girl to keep working.

  The girl opened a box before Fatima could tell her to ask first. She dug in and pulled out book after book with covers with Arabic calligraphy. She sneezed from the dust.

  “You can’t sneeze on those,” Fatima shouted. “Allah yustur.”

  Decimal opened a dark blue book. “Have you read all of these?” she asked. “I’m a big reader, too.”

  “Too bad you can’t read Arabic,” Fatima said, as though she herself could. “Then I could give them to you.”

  “Are they mostly fiction or nonfiction?” Decimal said.

  “They’re all Korans,” Fatima said. “You shouldn’t touch them if you haven’t washed your hands.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.” Decimal bowed her head.

  “It’s not me you are offending,” Fatima said. The Korans were gifts from friends in Detroit who had come back from the Hajj to Mecca. Fatima had never opened any of them, as her mother’s Koran was all she had needed in her life, but had given them their own storage box. She wished her children, their children, the Mexican ladies on the bus, the homeless guy with the dimple on his cheek, Amir’s handsome neighbor boy—any of those people—could read Arabic so that she could disperse the Korans among them.

  “The green ones are my favorite,” Fatima said.

  “I didn’t know the Koran came in colors,” Decimal replied.

  “Green was my mother’s favorite color because she said a green field meant a good harvest,” Fatima said.

  “I like green, too,” Decimal said. “I knew we’d have a lot in common. Besides just getting pregnant as teenagers and not having husbands.”

  “I had a husband,” Fatima said. “And I married another one before my baby was born. And I was nineteen, not seventeen.”

  “Nineteen years old is less than 20 percent more of my entire life span so far,” Decimal pointed out.

  “How long were you with the father before … you know?” Fatima said, biting into the Coral Satin Sheen on her lip.

  “That time, it was twelve minutes,” Decimal said. “Paolo likes me, so he doesn’t go super fast and stuff, like he says he could. But the baby part only takes a nanosecond. It’s not that I miscalculated, if I think about it. It just that for a few seconds it felt so good, I couldn’t stop. But it kind of hurt, too, like three times as much as a hay fever shot. Brenda says giving birth is seven hundred more times painful than that. But I guess with having ten children and stuff, you must know a lot about the feel-good parts and the feel-bad parts and all.”

  Fatima rubbed her eyes, as if that would make the girl and the forty-year-old makeup go away But they were both still there irritating her.

  “How do you say ‘key’ in Arabic?” Decimal asked.

  “Muftah,” Fatima said.

  “Mufta,” Decimal said.

  “No, muftah,” Fatima said.

  “Muftahy,” Decimal repeated.

  “No, that means ‘my key’” Fatima said.

  “I’m no good.” Decimal sighed. “Here I was thinking you could teach me Arabic and then I could teach my kid and stuff.”

  It had taken Fatima’s family three generations in America to birth someone who wanted to learn Arabic from her instead of despite her. And now she had so little time to teach the girl anything. Nor could she teach her Arabic if she put her on the street. “The first words you should learn are from the Koran,” Fatima told her.

  “Well, we have plenty of those to choose from,” Decimal said. She headed toward the box marked “Lebanon.”

  “As soon as we find the key, we will start,” Fatima agreed. The girl began looking in even greater earnest, an earnestness none of her children had had when Fatima had tried to teach them anything.

  “I was born in the very house whose key we’re looking for,” Fatima said. She didn’t care if the girl listened, but she did not want to dwell on the key itself as the girl looked for it. “My grandmother, who was Deir Zeitoon’s midwife and matchmaker, brought me into this world, and then the whole village knew it in fifteen minutes. My grandfather had prepared kunafi for all the neighbors to celebrate.”

  “See all that we have in common,” Decimal said. “Your grandmother birthed you, and my grandmother is going to birth my baby.”

  “My mother rested in bed for forty days and was given the best food and strong chicken broth so that I would drink the healthiest milk when I sucked from her breast,” Fatima countered. “When Ibrahim wrote to my mother to tell her that I had had my first baby, I made sure he let her think the people in Detroit did the same thing.”

  “They don’t do that in Minnesota,” Decimal said.

  “Nor Detroit, ya bint,” Fatima replied. “I did not rest at all. In America, even if I had had a son, no one would have cared. Even when a son gets his first tooth, they do not have a party here. I was alone with my first baby all day. Except when Millie started coming over with her baby. We did not know each other. We used to watch one another in our yards between the hanging laundry, walking with our babies in our arms to get them to stop crying. One day, she just came over. Even though I didn’t speak enough English to have a conversation back then, we would sit and exchange crying babies. She’d walk with mine, and I’d walk with hers. So we felt someone was helping us out with our babies. I told Millie she and I should have had our babies in Deir Zeitoon.”

  “What exactly is Deir Zeitoon?” Decimal ventured.

  Fatima reached to twirl her hair at Decimal’s pronunciation of her beloved village. “It’s where I grew up,” she explained. “My great-grandfather built our house himself with the help of his brother. They used limestone brick and cedar and olive wood trim.”

  Fatima paused and waited for Decimal to yawn or interrupt her, as she had come to expect from her family at the mention of this house. But Decimal didn’t.

  “I’m not giving it to you when I die,” Fatima told her. “So stop asking about it and just look for its key.”

  “I’m sorry,” Decimal said. “I didn’t mean that I want it.”

  “Oh, so now you think you’re better than my house,” Fatima scoffed. “Aabe. Shame. You should be so lucky to have been born there.”

  “I’ll stay quiet,” Decimal promised. “But if you want to tell me more, I’ll listen.”

  The girl was careful as she continued to look through the boxes, and soon she pulled out a key hanging on a Detroit Tigers lanyard.

  “I got it,” Decimal exclaimed.

  Fatima took the key from her and warmed it in her hand. A simple box key. An American key. Not a skeleton key in a pair of blue cordelias.

  “This is the key to the house in Detroit,” Fatima said. “That house went to my husband in the divorce.”

  “Who’s he going to leave his house to?” Decimal asked.

  Fatima had never once thought about that, and she was sure Ibrahim had not, either. Although they had stopped having long discussions years before the divorce, Fatima still knew most of Ibrahim’s thoughts, as well as most of the things he did not think about.

  “I bet the kids will all fight for that one, the way Gran talks about how great Detroit was,” Decimal said.

  “My children couldn’t leave Detroit fast enough,” Fatima corrected her.

  She wove the Detroit key under a mosaic of embroidery on her dress to keep it in
place. Fatima would mark the key for Ibrahim in case he lost his spare. She wanted to leave him something besides the children and their problems.

  “Gran said they couldn’t stay in Detroit on account of Dr. Wang getting such a good offer in Minnesota,” Decimal told her. “But she sure goes on about how she and her sisters used to build tents indoors in the summer to pretend they were camping and went on field trips to the River Rouge plant, which half the kids’ dads worked at. And Mr. Abdullah and you took them all to Florida for your first family vacation, and they had peanuts and Coke in Georgia. She’s pretty nostalgic in her old age.”

  Fatima had never heard one of her children referred to as being in “her old age,” nor had she ever thought about her children having a lifetime of memories, stories they told over and over. She knew that her children had left not only because of the factories closing. They had left in part to escape their parents’ darkness. “Just look for the right key,” she said, spitting out a crust of lipstick that had fallen into her mouth.

  Decimal opened another box, this one filled with yellowed, musty textbooks on American history, algebra, and English grammar.

  “Wow, these calc books are ancient,” Decimal said, and sneezed. “Printed in 1971. Cool. Could I borrow these?”

  “No,” Fatima snapped.

  “Sorry.” The girl was at least polite. Why had Hala not taught her daughter and her daughter’s daughter right from wrong? Perhaps God had not debilitated her yet so that she herself could teach the girl right from wrong. Instilling morality had been postponed too long with this girl.

  “Go downstairs and get Randa and my mother’s Koran from my underwear drawer,” Fatima said. “That is the one we’ll use. Make sure you wash your hands before you touch it.”

  “You’re going to teach me to read Arabic and stuff?” Decimal smiled.

  “Wait,” Fatima commanded. She took the Detroit key out of the embroidery. “Put this in the underwear drawer. But don’t look at anything else in there.”

  Even though Fatima didn’t like this girl, unlike Amir, she obeyed her well, and so she would not look. Perhaps if I had been giving her the orders from the beginning, Fatima thought, there would be less shame today.