by Hala Alyan
There is the sound of thumping and Souad appears in the kitchen doorway. The early morning light filters through the window above the sink. Alia points at the clutter of blocks and dolls near the entrance. “That’s not mine,” Souad says again, although her voice wavers.
Their mother closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them and speaks, she sounds falsely cheerful.
“Riham,” she croons. “Are you ready to go? Mama,” she calls. “We’re going. But I’m leaving Souad here.”
Souad hoists herself onto the kitchen counter, dangles her bare legs. “No, you’re not,” she says.
Their mother’s cool shatters. “Goddamn it, Souad, every day with you. All I ask is for you to pick up your toys, because someone could trip on them and break their neck. Is that what you want?”
“But they’re not mine!”
“Stop lying, Souad. Whose are they? Teta’s?”
“I don’t know—”
“Fine.”
Riham looks up from her book and watches with interest as her mother begins to clear the toys. She makes for the door. “Since they don’t belong to you or Riham, then they’re just trash, and I’m throwing them out.”
“You can’t do that!” Souad jumps down from the counter.
“Why not? They’re not yours, why should you care if—”
“They’re mine,” Souad says sullenly. Their mother continues to walk away. Souad raises her voice. “They’re mine! They’re mine! Give me.”
“Then clean them up.”
“Okay!”
“Is there a reason everyone’s hollering like maniacs?”
Riham’s shoulders instinctively relax at the voice. Her grandmother walks into the kitchen, a robe the shade of eggplant fluttering around her. She is wearing the paisley veil, Riham’s favorite. Her grandmother is the one bright spot of these summers.
Alia looks abashed. “Everything’s always a battle with her,” she grumbles. “We have a long drive ahead of us and she’s already making trouble.”
Salma picks up a stray doll and hands it to Souad. “Sousu doesn’t mean it, do you, sweet? She’s sorry.”
Souad looks down. She nods. “I’m sorry.”
Alia touches Souad’s hair and says, her voice softer, “Should I make honey or cheese sandwiches for the beach?”
Riham writes down the beach on the list in her small, tidy handwriting.
Summers, they stay with Teta. Her building, which overlooks the city, belongs to the family, Riham knows, and her great-aunts live on the other floors. Her grandmother’s apartment, where each of them has a room, stays the same from visit to visit, filled with framed photographs of their younger selves. At night from the balcony, the city looks like a distant, smoldering thing.
“Your second home,” her grandmother says when they arrive. Every year she gets fatter, her face crinkling up. It saddens Riham to think of her grandmother alone during the year, moving through the large apartment.
But Salma never seems forlorn or lonely. She spends her days cooking with her sisters or in the garden, an enclosed area behind the house sprawling with plants and flowers and one large, gnarled olive tree. She weeds and waters the plants herself, waits for the tomatoes and cucumbers to grow large before picking them. Sometimes she asks Riham to help her clean the vegetables and Riham gets grit beneath her nails.
“Now this is food,” her grandmother likes to say, beaming at the colorful salads on the table. “From the soil to our mouths.”
There was another garden, Riham has been told, though the details of it are hazy to her, almost fictional. All she knows is this garden was in Palestine, and it burned down. It is linked to the war she learned about in school and to her father being away a long time ago. The adults rarely speak of these things, giving vague responses to questions. It is clear they find this talk painful, and Riham isn’t the type of girl to ask for more.
This summer, her mother’s cousin Khalto Mimi is here. Khalto Mimi’s husband died the previous year and now they spend much of their time at her small house. Riham had envisioned a silent, somber home, everyone draped in black, but instead Mimi and her daughters wear bright dresses and laugh often.
There are dozens of photographs of the father, a handsome man with a thick mustache—kissing a pudgy toddler Lara, his arm around Khalto Mimi, smiling in front of a cake dotted with candles—and the girls bring him up casually in conversation.
“It was when Baba first got sick,” Lara corrected Mira once while talking about an old family vacation. They are both sunny and beautiful, with sleek black hair. Riham is envious of their trim bodies, the easy way they tease their mother.
“How wonderful,” Alia says often, “that Lara and Mira are so close in age to you.” Karam’s absence means that Riham has no excuses not to spend time with them. She wants to explain to her mother that Mimi’s daughters are a different breed of girl, akin to some of the ones in Riham’s private school in Kuwait, pretty, daring, streaking their hair with henna and lemons.
She knows Lara and Mira are aware of this, but they are nice to her, politely inviting her along. They have the magnanimity of the innately beautiful.
“Would you like me to straighten your hair?” Lara asks her sometimes. They eye her with an optimism—as though she is a ratty car with a decent engine—that Riham finds alarming. In the shops they coax her to try dresses on.
“Hmm,” they say. “Flowy designs definitely suit you, with your . . . body type.” She knows they are trying not to say fat.
Afterward, they get ice cream cones and sit on the balcony, their brown legs stretched onto each other’s chairs. Lara and Mira speak voraciously of the future.
“Paris,” Lara says, as though she were a woman in her twenties. “Definitely Paris. It’s the only place to become a real dancer.”
“Ugh, Paris. Too cold. I’m going to move to Spain. Or California.” Mira, fifteen years old, with a waist so small Riham could wrap her hands around it.
“What will you do there?”
“Sing,” Mira always says. She sometimes sings for the adults when they gather for tea. She winds her hair into a bun, tilts her long neck back, and parts her lips. It is like watching someone paint the sky.
“What about you, Riham?” the girls ask her. “What do you want to do?”
The answer is complicated. Riham is mousy and shy, her body pudgy in the thighs and hips. Her left breast is treacherously larger than her right one. A smattering of acne mars her forehead, and her limp hair never curls like her sister’s.
Still, she burns with daydreams of growing up and moving to Europe. Riham has never been there but imagines a life with a studio apartment, eating jam on baguettes and drinking green tea, days filled with reading novels and drawing.
When Riham thinks of her future self, it is of a person transformed, so removed from her current self that the only remnants will be phantomlike. In her daydreams, future Riham simply erases current Riham, forgets her entirely. And if this causes a twinge of preemptive mourning or protest, the smallest tendril of sorrow for herself now—with her love of soggy cereal, the way she drapes strands of hair like a mustache over her lips while reading, her thrill at the scent of old books—it is slight and she resolutely ignores it.
But, of course, she cannot say all of this, and so she quietly replies, “I want to live in an apartment by myself,” and the girls exchange glances of confusion and pity.
In the past few months, she has amended her fantasies to include boys, someone kissing her full on the lips. It happened without warning; suddenly she was dreaming of faceless boys touching her, dancing with her. She always wakes breathless and ashamed, a dampness between her legs. During the day, her thoughts race and circle, heliocentric, always returning to boys.
Well, one boy.
Lara and Mira speak frankly about boys, in a way that Riham’s friends in Kuwait—girls Riham has known since kindergarten, shy girls who like to swap books and talk about films, their
only transgression an afternoon when they bought cigarettes and smoked until they became dizzy—never have.
“So luscious,” Mira croons about a rock star. “Those eyes are like caramel drops.”
In the afternoons, Lara and Mira gather with their friends at a neighborhood pastry shop. They buy kanafeh and sticky rolls, gossiping and laughing. Sometimes boys from their school come in, sweaty from playing football. They are rowdy with one another, teasing when the girls, demurring, call out for them to be careful.
Riham watches these interactions with fascination, an anthropologist observing a new tribe. The girls toss their hair and smile at the boys.
“You’re disgusting,” they say when the boys spit. And the boys grin.
Sometimes one of the braver boys, usually Rafic, will catch an insect and chase the girls around with it, but slowly, giving them time to escape. The girls shriek and run away, flushed with attention.
“Stop!” they call. They punch the boys playfully on the shoulder.
Of all the neighborhood boys, Riham likes Bassam the most. He is Lara’s age, one year younger than Riham, and yet oddly poised. He never roughhouses or spits, like Rafic, and she has seen him smoke a cigarette only once. He isn’t handsome like Rafic either—slightly chubby, always wearing the same scuffed sneakers. His face is oval as an egg, and his eyes are faintly slanted. Tufts of curls stick out around his head. The other boys call him Romeo, and Riham can tell he is well liked.
“Why do they call him that?” Riham once asked Lara.
Lara rolled her eyes. “Oh, Bassam.” She explained that he’d once, on a dare, kissed a girl in the middle of the playground.
“Anyone could have seen it. The teachers would’ve kicked him out.”
“Did he get in trouble?” Riham asked. She felt jealous of the girl.
“No,” Lara had said. “But he’s been Romeo ever since. Which is hilarious because he’s so chubby and has all that weird hair and he barely speaks. You know?”
“Definitely,” Riham replied, her plainly affected indifference giving her away.
“We’re going to be late for Mimi,” her mother says. “They headed out an hour ago. Everyone ready? Souad, help me wrap these up.” On the kitchen counter there is a stack of sandwiches her mother has prepared. Souad begins wrapping them in paper towels. She wears a cotton dress, and when she turns, Riham can see the outline of her hipbones. Riham is dreading the car ride, the long day at the beach.
“If you’re going to pick any more shells,” her mother is telling Souad, “you need to wash them before you get in the car. Teta’s car is full of sand.”
“The shells are for Karam—”
“I’ll wash them with her,” her grandmother interrupts smoothly. “Right, Sous? We’ll get a nice bagful for your brother.”
Riham feels a sudden longing for her brother, doe-eyed—though in the past few months his features have begun to elongate and harden, several scraggly hairs prickling his chin—her ally during these summers.
Her mother kisses Riham on the forehead. “Enough with the melancholy.” She winks at her. “The beach will be fun.”
Amman transforms her mother. Back in Kuwait she complains of being tired and snaps at them when the television is too loud. She wears slacks and T-shirts, kohl around her eyes. But here, she keeps her face bare, wears short dresses that cling to her thighs. Her skin browns the way Souad’s does, while Riham’s turns red and peels in itchy flakes.
In the evenings, they sit on Khalto Mimi’s balcony and visit with the neighborhood women, women that Alia went to school with years ago. They eat figs and pour tea and cut thick wedges of orange-peel cake. No husbands ever come, no fathers or brothers. Only children, laughing and playing as dusk falls, the light turning first red, then orange, then purple. Her mother looks radiant in the evenings. The other women call her Aloush and tease her about her school days. Riham perches on the balcony railing, watching them. They seem like strange, mythical creatures to her, with their laughter and talk. They speak of soldiers and husbands and love.
“Come here, habibti,” Alia will say sometimes, her arms extended, and Riham goes to her mother gratefully.
“Aroos,” the women call her. “Little bride.”
“We’re going to marry you off,” they tease.
“Good God, so long as he’s not Kuwaiti.” Alia wrinkles her nose, and everyone laughs.
“Are they so bad?”
“They’re awful. With their terrible country. Not a single decent restaurant!” Her mother likes to imitate the locals, their harsh Arabic and mannerisms. Riham feels her ears burn when she does this, angry at her mother for speaking this way of their life in Kuwait, for the disloyalty to her father.
Her father, with his ink-stained fingertips, his slow chuckle. The way he pops peppermint candies in his mouth that clank against his teeth as he drinks tea. His habit of retiring to his study after dinner sometimes, the door only slightly ajar, so that Riham has to flatten herself against the wall to see the familiar silhouette of him, bent over his desk, writing. She loves the sound of the pen scratching against the paper, the way he always looks so solemn in those moments, unaware of her watching.
She misses him terribly, even more than she does Karam, misses talking with him about books, the way he quizzes her on characters and plot lines.
“And Anna Karenina?” he would say while cracking a pumpkin seed—her favorite, though she only sucks the shells until the salt is gone. “Do you think she made the right choice?”
If he were here, her father would understand why Riham wished to stay home, why she preferred to be alone rather than trailing Mira and Lara—as though she is some leper, some babysitting charge—and why she hates her polka-dot bathing suit, the one her mother bought when they first arrived. It is the exact same one as Lara’s and the contrast is depressing, how it clings perfectly to Lara’s thin frame, bulges and strains on Riham. She always wears a shirt over it.
So far, she hasn’t entered the water once. Even on the hottest days she remains in the shade with her book. When anyone asks, she says she has a stomachache.
In her fantasy, Bassam notices her suddenly. There is a lull in the chatter at the pastry shop and their eyes lock, like the click of a clock’s hand snapping into place. He sees her and nods.
“Want to walk to the sea?” he asks, taking her hand. Everyone in the shop watches them go, surprised at the mousy girl from Kuwait. As she heads out with Bassam, Riham turns and smiles at Mira and Lara.
They walk together until the sun goes down, night settling around them. He tells her she is pretty as the moon—Riham edits herself liberally in her fantasies; she has a trim waistline, curls the shade of mink—and she tells him about Scarlett O’Hara, how she made men fall in love with her in minutes.
“I never thought I’d meet you,” he says, and this is when he turns to her. In the distance, lights from the fishing boats glitter. Riham dips her head and looks up at him through her eyelashes—a trick she learned from watching her mother—and smiles without speaking. Bassam places a finger on her chin and tilts her head upward. They kiss.
Here the fantasy always stalls. All that Riham knows of what bodies do together is gleaned from passages in novels and ambiguous biology lessons. She understands there is nudity involved, and some complicated incursion—an upward motion, the woman below, usually clutching the man’s neck—something enormous and final.
There are times she feels a tremble, tiny quakes within her body, feels the firecrackers beneath her hipbones and shakes. She knows it is sin.
“I think Lara and Mira are going to a party tomorrow,” Alia says to Riham in the car. She glances at her in the rearview mirror.
“Hmm.” Riham makes a noncommittal sound. Next to her, Souad is humming to herself and rolling up a tissue.
“I think it’s a birthday party. Mimi said you should go with them.”
Several hours at some girl’s house, sweating and discreetly lifting her arms to smell
her armpits, struggling to think of things to say while the other girls giggle and chat.
“They’ve assigned us books for the summer that I have to read.” It is partly true; the books exist, but Riham has already read each one twice.
“Good for you, habibti.” Her grandmother twists back to smile at Riham. “Keeping up with your schoolwork.”
“She can read them after,” her mother says. From the back seat, Riham sees her bright red fingernails drumming on the steering wheel. In Kuwait her mother never drives, never paints her nails.
“I need to start tomorrow,” Riham says desperately.
Her mother sighs and waves her hand out of the window, letting another driver pass. “Riham, we’re here for only two more weeks. Every minute you spend with those girls, you act like your teeth are being pulled out. This is what girls your age do, they go out together, they have fun, they talk and—”
“Aloush, leave her,” her grandmother says. She turns the car radio on. Riham sees her mother’s brow furrow in the mirror.
“Mama, I’m not punishing her. I’m trying to get her to enjoy herself.”
“She is enjoying herself. Aren’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Riham says as enthusiastically as she can.
“I’m not!” Souad calls.
“Listen.” Salma holds up a hand, and they all fall silent. A newscaster’s voice fills the car with urgent tones.
“In southern Lebanon . . . Several shot dead . . . Tanks have rolled over . . .”
Her grandmother clicks her tongue and lowers the volume. “That poor country. All that slaughter, and now Israel’s joined the party.”
“They said an entire village was burned to the ground. The bodies stacked high.”
“Mimi’s cousin is saying they’re lucky if they get an hour of electricity a day there. Most of the time it’s just candles. Even the water’s filthy.”
“Riham,” Souad whispers and Riham looks over. Her sister is smiling mischievously as she chews on a strand of hair. Between her fingers is the rolled-up tissue, twisted and elongated to look like a cigarette. Souad puts the tip of the paper between her teeth, still chewing on her hair, and purses her lips. At ten years old, Souad is all curls and full lips: Riham has begun to envy her sister. Souad pretends to blow out smoke.