Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

  “He’s probably cursing you out,” Manar informs her, taking an earbud out. Ominous music thumps from the headphones.

  “He probably is,” Souad says cheerfully.

  “He was right,” Manar says. “You should’ve gone.” Manar puts the earbud back in and leans her head against the window frame. Her wiry hair—not thin like Elie’s or curly like Souad’s but some unfortunate in-between, a charmless frizz—halos around her, and she shuts her eyes.

  Paris had transformed for her after the wedding, its vivacity turning leaden. The days became shorter, colder; the permanence of the invasion sank in. On particularly icy mornings, Souad caught herself daydreaming about Kuwait. For a summer, Paris seemed infinite, vast, with its shops and museums and cafés. But as her new home, the city chafed, the cobblestone streets always crowded, the sky pocked with clouds.

  Elie cajoled his father for money as a wedding gift; within a month he’d conjured an apartment for them in a dark, ugly building in the Belleville neighborhood, sandwiched between a Chinese restaurant and an Indian fabric shop.

  Souad was charmed by the doll-like rooms at first, clapping her hands with delight at the pink-tiled bathroom and the skylight above their bed. She twirled through the bare apartment that first day, awash in morning light, mentally constructing their lives—lace curtains for the tiny picture windows, the kitchen stocked with French cheeses and spaghetti. They painted the walls yellow and bought vanilla-scented candles for the living room.

  In the end, the vanilla smell was overpowering and the yellow nauseated her, especially after she became pregnant; the color reminded her of egg yolks. Elie had a life outside the apartment. He had his novel, his university courses, which he loved, long nights of debate and conversation with other students in wine bars. Souad had nothing. She couldn’t explain it to Elie, her random bursts of tears. Her irritation. Restlessness. She went to classes reluctantly and then the afternoons stretched, interminably, ahead of her. The longing of the day, the object, was him coming home to her. For a year, this went on. Soon, another winter came, her second in Paris, and she swelled with Manar.

  One day, many months after the invasion of Kuwait, he came home to find her weeping in front of the television.

  “They used them as target practice,” she said, sobbing.

  She’d just watched a report on the invasion, bursting into tears whenever the animals were mentioned, the way the Iraqi troops unlatched the cages, shot the fleeing creatures. There was one image of a giraffe, bullets buried in its torso. Souad remembered the giraffes of her childhood, wondered if this was one of the ones she’d loved as a girl.

  “Shh. Let’s turn it off.” He put his arms around her bulging belly, nuzzled her neck.

  But it was freezing, and she had been crying for hours, and his breath was sour against her face, turning her stomach.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said miserably.

  He stiffened. The arms disappeared from around her waist. They had a fight, the first of hundreds that would follow in the coming years—at restaurants, during the children’s birthday parties, after an evening of drinking, before an evening of drinking—fights that would eventually become commonplace, predictable. But that time, they’d never yet been as cruel with each other, Elie’s voice vicious, calling her pitiful. And Souad, trembling with anger, heard herself yell awful things back, about her regrets, shrieking that she’d made a mistake. It was terrible and frightening, what they could do.

  But also—a relief. Such relief, after months being the too-young wife struggling to learn French and getting lost in Parisian alleyways. The anger was bracing. It reminded her of herself.

  He stomped out eventually, slamming the door. She prepared dinner in tears, cursing him as she stirred spaghetti in a secondhand copper pot. The cream sauce clotted into lumps. A realization: she hated Paris.

  It wasn’t the animals she was weeping for, or the lost city; it was herself. Her mother was right. She missed everyone: Karam, her father, Budur. Cradling the mound of her belly, Souad shook with a perverse, hungry longing for her mother, for Alia’s coolness; she ached for her to stroll into this cramped apartment and lift a single, sarcastic eyebrow.

  That was where she drew her strength. The image of that lifted eyebrow. Her mother’s voice. Well, Souad, look what you’ve done.

  She thought wistfully of the bracing anger she’d felt earlier.

  And she let the pot scorch.

  This is what Souad thinks of these days. That night, when she saw too late her mistake, all those moments that make love and destroy it. Her younger self, almost a mother, brimming with rage. The smell of burned copper.

  There was the after, of course. The house, Elie’s graduation and teaching job, their move to America. In some ways Boston came as a relief, even with its snow and broad accents. Souad left Paris easily, the city she’d never learned to love. In Boston, their life was quieter, constructed around their having small children. They lived in a series of cramped apartments near Suffolk, Souad taking the children on playdates with the kids of other young mothers in the neighborhood, spending her afternoons pouring apple juice and making small talk about teething. And the weekends were full of birthday parties and barbecues in the park with Budur and Karam, building snowmen during the winter. Every couple of summers, she booked flights to Amman with them and the children—Elie always begged off, saying he needed to write. They trudged through airports with huge suitcases duct-taped together on the impossibly long journey to visit Alia and Atef. Then two months of shisha and arguing with her mother and swimming in salt water, the children becoming ropy and brown, in need of haircuts.

  They eventually moved into a house with a small lawn and narrow hallways, a staircase with slanted ceilings Souad was constantly bumping into. They argued about bills, vacations, which extracurriculars to enroll the children in. Whether to salt the driveway before or after it snowed. They fought about Elie’s novel, the same goddamn novel Souad had heard about as a teenager in that Kuwaiti café. It was like an unwanted houseguest that haunted her marriage. It was never-ending. Elie would speak at times of being nearly finished, then something would shift, and he’d call the whole thing rubbish and spend weeks morosely staring out of the study window. Twice, he set hundreds of pages on fire in their bathtub, and she yelled at him for days.

  The years went on. Their marriage died a thousand deaths before Elie finally caught on and left.

  The Spinneys market is one of those all-purpose centers, a huge building filled with furniture shops and book kiosks and even a grocery store. The four of them walk through the entrance, a sign in French advertising laundry detergent.

  A Sri Lankan man stands beside rows of shopping carts and unlatches one for her as she approaches. Behind him, other Sri Lankan men carry grocery bags, wearing ridiculous uniforms in primary colors, like children’s clothing. Everywhere in the city, there are reminders of servitude, the maids trailing families, the men working at gas stations and construction sites.

  Even Budur has a maid, Tika, that she hires for the summers, but Souad finds the idea unappealing. She is awkward with Tika, awkward with the maids at her mother’s house in Amman—her mother, after Priya, being exceedingly picky—always fumbling and uncomfortable, prefacing any request with If you have time, maybe, at some point, could you possibly . . .

  She pushes the cart to a map of the market adjacent to a candy kiosk with colorful sweets in jars.

  “I want one!” Linah reaches toward a bouquet of lollipops in a vase.

  “Careful.”

  “I want a purple one.”

  Souad sighs. “Linah, it’s eleven in the morning.”

  “Please?”

  The girl’s smile is disarming. Souad shakes her head. “Really, Miss Linah? Sugar and chemicals?”

  “Mmm.” Linah grins. “I love chemicals. De-licious!”

  “Yum,” Zain chimes in.

  Souad smiles down at the small, upturned faces. She cannot imagine sorrow
in their lives, cannot bear to think of the ways they will love and hurt and fret. Motherhood doesn’t suit me, she once confessed to Budur, drunk. I don’t have the stomach for not knowing what comes next.

  “Okay,” she says, and they let out cries of excitement. “Okay, okay, okay.”

  “You’re supposed to set limits,” Manar grumbles.

  Souad counts, silently, to three. “I’m a terrible disciplinarian,” she sings out.

  Linah and Zain pick out lollipops and bounce ahead, chattering. Past the bookstore, there is a small wine shop, the bottles dark and glossy on the shelves. She averts her eyes.

  She can sense her children watching her carefully at times, even as she’s doing the most ordinary things: folding dishcloths, pouring tea, yawning. She knows they are scared—though Manar’s fear has metamorphosed neatly into anger—that she will lapse, go back to the days of sobbing, drinking the way she did for months after Elie left, staying up past midnight and calling Elie. How could you do this? I gave you everything, she would scream over and over into the phone and, when he stopped picking up, into his voice mail, sometimes even getting into bed with Zain and asking him to stroke her hair.

  That self is still so recent, so alarming, that it makes her shiver with shame.

  “I know you’re mad at me,” she’d said to Zain and Manar the morning after telling them, yes, yes, they would be leaving Karam and Budur and Linah, would be leaving Boston for good. “I know you’re mad. You should be mad. I haven’t been doing this very well. And I know you’re scared of moving, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry to do this. But I promise—”

  Here she paused, tears prickling her eyelids. She looked at her children, Manar silent and reproaching, Zain with trust in his eyes, and she began to weep. Zain rose, embraced her, but Manar watched scornfully as Souad shrank into her son’s arms.

  Moments later, she composed herself enough to speak again, but when she did, her mind blanked and she just said, lamely, “I promise to do better.”

  They walk upstairs to the indoor play area with toys and cushions and a makeshift library. In America, a place like this would never work, leaving your children on their own while you shopped. Kidnappers, perverts, murderers—every street pulsed with threat. Her time in Boston had felt like one long held breath.

  “Okay, guys,” she says to Zain and Linah. “I need to buy a few things. Can you sit here and not break anything?” She pauses. “No wrestling.” They nod, lollipops in their mouths. She turns to Manar. “You want to come with me? Help me pick some things out?”

  “No. I want to look at bed sheets. I don’t like the flowery ones.”

  Souad feels her temper rise, takes a breath. “Okay. Let’s just meet back here—guys, I said no wrestling—in an hour? Good?” A shrug. Souad tries for a joke. “Do you want a lollipop, Manar, to cheer you up?”

  Not even the trace of a smile.

  Souad watches Manar leave. Her daughter has become unrecognizable to her. She used to hear people talk about their teenagers and think, Nonsense. How could your own child become a stranger to you, this creature you had fed and soothed and sung to?

  But, now, here it is. Her daughter, unknown to her. The body she had nourished inside her, held for hours at a time. She knew every scar, every miraculous bone, had spent whole nights watching her chest rise and fall with her breath. And now Manar plodded that body around like luggage, her thoughts a mystery.

  Part of it, Souad thinks, might be the weight. Her daughter had been a fat, dimpling baby, then a pudgy child. It is shameful to admit, but Souad worried about it, praying her daughter would slim as she got older. It was impossible not to look at her daughter with sharp eyes, out of necessity, out of love, the way one surveys a landscape for wires, traps, a hidden net in the trees.

  And now, at thirteen, Manar’s body is plump, hips flaring, her breasts large and hanging. She has the physique of an older woman, with fleshy arms and thighs, though a startlingly slender neck and attractive face—Elie’s wide, sardonic mouth, Souad’s nose and almond-shaped eyes.

  The girl has noticed. Over the past year, she has bought a closetful of black—jeans, tank tops, shirts, even socks. Souad knows that Manar must have overheard someone saying carelessly, Black makes you look thinner, and taken it devastatingly to heart.

  “It’s the age,” Budur says often. “We were all like that.”

  Souad never tells Budur her fear, that she had lost Manar in some irrevocable way after Elie left, when Manar would come home to find Souad two vodkas in and no meal prepared, when Souad would ask Manar to make her brother a sandwich—or to brush his teeth, help with his homework—while she went upstairs to lie down and cry. How could she not hate me, she wants to ask Budur but is too afraid.

  The home-decoration store is divided into long aisles of candles and lamps and kitchen utensils. Souad pushes a cart through them, dropping in towels, a teapot, several pans. For pancakes, she thinks. Zain loves them with cinnamon and bananas.

  The dress is tight against her hips as she walks, and she tugs at it. Budur was right. The other women, followed by maids pushing shopping carts, all wear bright, revealing clothes. Souad watches as one woman waves at another, and they rush to each other, kiss each cheek loudly.

  “Bonjour,” they cry. One woman wears lipstick so red it glows.

  When Souad used to think of Beirut, in the months before their move, she envisioned a version of Jordan. The same quiet, languid lifestyle, tea in the garden, long calls for prayer.

  Instead, the women here are fiery, wear themselves like banners. They are bolder than women in Paris, even the older ones dressing in neon colors and tight skirts. It is startling, after so long in America, where she often wore the cigarette jeans and workman shirts that Elie found sexy, everything in black.

  She touches the sumptuous fabrics of a curtain display, plucking items off the shelves as she walks. Throw pillows, a juicer, picture frames. It is the third time, she realizes, that she’s buying furniture for a house, the third time she’s piecing together scattered, unnecessary objects, trying to build a life around them.

  In Boston, she’d kept the walls a dull white, thinking it would be soothing, infuse some calm in her marriage. She hates white now. It became oppressive, like living in perpetual mist. White couches, white carpets, white plates.

  Now she wants color. Colors so vivid she can taste them. She wants dishes the color of watermelon; glass tumblers that catch light and splash blue, green; yellow on the walls while they eat. She is starved for iridescence.

  Clean slate, she told herself as the plane landed in Beirut. Her life in Boston already feels so distant, a smudge barely visible on the horizon, as do all the people who populated it—her mailman and neighbors, the redheaded cashier at the local grocery store, the women she went to happy hours with. All the little things that made a life, spent. It reminds her of Kuwait. It has felt like a pitch-black hallway, these past few months, this unknown she has pitched herself into; it’s as if she is feeling along with her feet and her fingers, knowing nothing beyond the little that she touches here and there.

  After an hour, she pushes her shopping cart back to the play area. Manar is seated on one of the beanbags with a shopping basket at her feet. She has her earbuds in, and her lips move along with a song. Linah and Zain jump up from their toys.

  “I won the tournament,” Linah says.

  “She cheated,” Zain says. Souad touches Zain’s sweaty forehead.

  “To the register, habibi. Manar?” Her daughter reluctantly pulls an earbud out. “You ready?”

  “Manar’s getting frogs!” Zain cries out. A small smirk appears on Manar’s face and she brings the basket over.

  “And rainbows!” Linah says.

  The shopping cart is a multicolored fuck-you. Curtains covered with giant, kitschy rainbows, a sparkly unicorn decal for a small child. A ceramic frog, blue tongue extended.

  “Manar—” She catches Manar’s triumphant eye. It’s the age, she reminds
herself. “So this is how you want to decorate your room? Frogs and unicorns and rainbows?”

  “Yup.” The word clips from Manar’s mouth. “I think rainbows are terrific.”

  “Terrific,” Linah echoes.

  “Great.” Souad forces a smile. “Great. That’s it, then. Let’s go.”

  The cashier is an indifferent woman with long, French-manicured nails. While she waits for an item to scan, she taps a nail on the punch pad. Souad watches the colorful tumblers, the silky curtains and picture frames skim by on the conveyor belt.

  “And the basket?” The woman gestures to Manar.

  Manar catches Souad’s eye. “Manar,” Souad sighs. “You sure you want this stuff?”

  Manar nods bravely, but Souad catches the hesitation.

  “Well, okay. You made some fine choices; that unicorn will go beautifully with the blue walls.” They continue to eye each other. It is clear Manar had expected a fight. Not today, Souad thinks.

  “Madame?”

  “Manar, this nice lady is waiting.”

  Manar’s eyes dart between the basket and the conveyor belt. “Maybe—maybe I don’t need the curtains,” she says reluctantly. Souad tries to keep her face neutral but can’t help grinning. There is a beat of silence, and the two of them erupt into loud laughter.

  “Madame?” The cashier taps a nail impatiently.

  Linah and Zain begin to bounce around, excited by the laughter.

  “The unicorn’s wearing a bow tie!”

  “I want one too!”

  “Green . . . plastic . . . lamp?” Souad gasps, rummaging through the basket.

  Manar giggles. “It goes with the frog.” Souad pulls out the ceramic frog, its massive red eyes bulging.

  “It looks homicidal.” They collapse with laughter, Manar holding on to her mother’s arm for balance.

  “Madame, there are people waiting—”

  “We’ll come back later,” Souad says, wiping her eyes. “Just the things you’ve bagged for now. Sorry.”