Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  Thom was gone and Leena was now cooking, cleaning, laundering, shopping, even ironing, something Deborah hadn’t done for decades. It left time, swaths of time. She was, as Harris put it, freed up. An affair? Harris was so absent these days he deserved it, she thought in her loneliest moments. But you had to have real desire, a knack with lies — not to mention an interested, willing man — to pull that off. Instead she signed up for an Arabic class.

  “It’s going to be really, really, really hard, Mum.”

  “Face it, Mum: You don’t even speak French that well.” The twins, in their fourth year of obligatory school Arabic, were not encouraging.

  Arabic wasn’t hard; it was impossible. For ten weeks she sat in an overly air-conditioned room at Mother Tongue Language School, moving further back each class in the hopes of not getting called on. Nabil, the instructor, was a lovely Egyptian guy, full of stories and teasing humour, used to hand-holding Arabic-challenged expats. And her classmates, half a dozen German businessmen and a handful of Indian doctors, were also lovely guys, helping her with homework, clapping when she answered a question almost correctly. If only she could just sit and listen to Nabil’s stories about the revolution in his country, his lyrical riffs on Islam, the joking of her classmates as they faltered, though far more nimbly, in the new language. It was such an effort to utter even a throaty kayf halek, so difficult to keep up with the daily vocabulary. She didn’t sign up for Arabic II.

  At a school concert — the twins were now playing alto and tenor sax — she met a British woman in expensive, hip clothes who seemed to want to talk about something other than A levels versus O levels, Cambridge versus Oxford. (“My sons,” Deborah had grown weary of explaining, “will be attending Canadian universities. We have some excellent schools back home.”) “Ever think about volunteering at St. Edmonds’ thrift shop?” Judith asked when Deborah mentioned her stab at Arabic, her search for something satisfying.

  “I’m not Anglican,” Deborah said. “I’m not really anything.”

  “No worries,” said Judith. “Father Dave’s one of those We’re-All-One pastors. One of the shop ladies is even Jewish.” And her blue eyes had widened, as if she’d just said something slightly shocking. “Of course, she doesn’t tell that to too many people here.”

  Judith was pleasant enough — and decent enough not to give Deborah the usual eyes-up/eyes-down greeting of other British School mums — and seemingly eager to pursue some kind of friendship. She was also boring as hell, Deborah discovered after two lunches at Café Arabia. Her sons, her husband’s job, their summer house on the Costa del Sol, the thrift shop, her former career as a wedding planner back in the UK. Deborah learned all about it. There was barely time to nod and smile between the stories; at some point Deborah gave up trying to do either. As for the church thrift shop, after shuffling through old trainers and being bossed by two elderly British ladies for an afternoon — “No, no, it goes here!” — she knew there had to be something else that needed her time and attention.

  “What about going back to the Horizon School, Deb?” Harris suggested one Saturday afternoon. “I hear they’ve gotten some new funding. Who knows?” The twins were out in the desert for their favourite annual event, the camel beauty contest. Having begged off going with the boys this year, they’d just had taken-by-surprise sex on the sofa. And because Harris was so with her in that moment, she’d said, “All right.”

  Had Novembers always been like this? Deborah remembered bright, if cold, days from her childhood in Gatineau. Novembers brought the promise of Christmas and hot chocolate and new skates, a glorious Canadian childhood that seemed now to belong to some other girl.

  Fiona was unplugged again, Deborah having no particular destination in mind this morning. The walls of their rented condo had felt too close; even the prospect of more frozen fields would be better. But the sky! Had she never noticed the November sky before? So heavy, so dispiriting. Jobs, sons, friends, house — these had kept her eyes straight ahead for nearly two decades, no time to look up.

  “I am not going to turn into one of those women whose kids have left, whose careers have petered out, who now spend their days driving from sale to sale,” she’d told Harris again the night before. “I am not going to turn into a cliché.” Harris had come home later than usual, the old cloud over him.

  “It’s just going to take time, Deb. Give it time.” He’d looked so spent, she’d let it go: time would make it better. She would find her way again, make friends, find work, get her groove (what a stupid expression) back. He said so.

  But time for what? She wasn’t sure what she wanted to happen next. She’d spent four years waiting to come back, but here she was: still suspended.

  “Where should we go today, Fiona?” she asked, plugging in the GPS again.

  That morning there’d been a story in the Hamilton Spectator about a new mosque opening somewhere on Hamilton Mountain. It was a warm story, full of quotes from city councillors, local imams and worshippers — photos of men in skullcaps, men bent in prayer — and she’d felt a momentary swell of appreciation for this tolerant country, this Canada, where if you wanted to wear a hijab or a yarmulke, or Native headdress, for that matter, you could. So why wasn’t she enjoying it more? Why was she finding all this tolerance smug, even showy? The place was still run by white guys with money. She’d spent four years scrutinizing Abu Dhabi’s ills and contradictions, its secrets and abominations, but she’d never looked at her own country that critically. (Sure, Harper was a jerk, but that was an easy position.) What was valued here? How did people really live? Did it hold up so much better?

  “I miss Abu Dhabi, Fiona. I hated it, but I loved it too, and I want to go back.”

  “Please drive to highlighted route,” said Fiona, apropos of nothing, and Deborah saw on the screen that the Sana Grill was still listed as the destination.

  “You’re demented, Fiona, you really are,” said Deborah, and pulled into traffic.

  The Horizon School had either undergone massive changes or her standards had fallen after three-and-a-half years in Abu Dhabi. There were separate classes now, organized by grade level, instead of by age or disability, and teachers, actual teachers, not just well-intentioned aides. The principal was a friendly chap from Auckland who practically cheered when she told him about her background. Of course, they needed her. “Would next week be too soon?” he asked. “Our Grade 3 teacher just told us her husband is being transferred back to Melbourne at the end of the month. Way of life here, but it makes running a school a nightmare. Our kids need stability. But you know that.”

  The class was small — six boys, five girls — and higher functioning than she’d dared hope. Four of the eleven were Emirati (all but one had Down syndrome), two were from India, while the rest were from Russia, France and the UK. Several of the children had cerebral palsy, two had language delays and two were clearly on the autism spectrum. But everyone was reading (if slowly), everyone could add and subtract (if not always correctly), and, best of all, they loved one another.

  “I’ve never had a class like this,” she told her men over dinner. “Plus the principal’s a dream, the staff’s friendly, and the other teachers actually seem to know what they’re doing. Who would have thought?”

  “It’s still the honeymoon, Deb,” Harris said.

  “Yeah, Mum,” said Jon. “It’s just the first week.”

  What did they want from her? Fine, she’d curb her enthusiasm in front of them, and quietly go about being productive and happy. She would be useful at long last, would make her small contribution. Not that the boys noticed much of anything that did not directly concern them. They were deep into university applications and girls that winter. And not that Harris was noticing much of anything that did not concern his job. The intrigue at Al Nahyan University had reached new heights of Abu-surdity that winter. The new new provost had gotten the boot, and the search was on for anot
her; number twenty-three, was it? Truth was, she’d heard so many faculty stories over the years, the dirt, the skinny, the scoop — usually about people Harris was up against for tenure — that they’d begun to overlap. Sometimes when Harris would talk about a particularly obnoxious, lazy or scheming colleague, she’d have to remind herself that this wasn’t so-and-so from Carleton.

  Still, she had to admit, none were juicier than the stories out of Al Nahyan. Harris himself had been embroiled for most of the school year in a grievance involving an Emirati student caught stealing a classmate’s iPad. The girl’s family — connected to the ruling family in some way, though these ways were always mysterious — was now trying to get Harris fired. He had discredited their daughter. He had brought shame upon the family.

  In the past, Deborah would have stood by her man, working herself into a froth defending him, only to watch the crisis fizzle before merging into the next. There was no shortage of crises in academic life and no pay-off for caring. In fact, it sometimes irritated Harris that she got emotionally involved. And in this case, the allegations were so clear — there was footage of the girl tucking the iPad into the folds of her abaya — that even in this logic-free zone, justice would have to prevail. Besides, she had her own stories now, her own life again. Somewhere she sensed this might not be an entirely good thing for them as a couple, but as she began telling herself: Tough.

  Looking around the teachers’ lounge that first day, she realized this was what she’d come for. It was so different than the faculty lunchrooms back home, where colleagues sometimes barely spoke — not because of bad blood, but because they were madly marking, photo-copying or calling parents. They were often windowless rooms, furnished with rejects from someone’s cottage and smelling of damp boots. But the teachers’ lounge here was like a family kitchen, filled with delicious smells and a dozen conversations. Someone would be stirring a curry on the stove or steaming rice, someone else slicing mangoes and watermelon. Large plastic containers were popped into and out of the microwave. “Try this, please.” One of the Indian teachers shyly pushed a large bowl of dal toward Deborah her first day. “But what will you eat?” Deborah asked. And the woman had bobbled her head in the Indian gesture of pleasure, agreement, all good things. The Hindi equivalent of prego, Harris called it. “There is always enough,” she said.

  A striking young woman in a bright headscarf sat at the end of the lunch table that first day. Every time Deborah looked over at her, she smiled and waved a little welcome. When the room emptied, she came over. “Tomorrow I will bring some of my food for you.” Hynda, Deborah learned over the next few lunch times, was Somalian, though she had never actually been to Somalia. “The troubles there, you know.” Raised in Kenya, she’d come to Abu Dhabi as a bride of nineteen with her engineer husband. When he’d left her after six years with four young children, she’d gone back to school for a teaching degree. “I love kids. Well, of course, I’d have to love kids,” she smiled. They had “a girl,” Hynda explained, a nanny who lived with them and did most of the cooking. It helped that there was no man to take care of any more. “Who needs them?” Hynda said, laughing. “Big babies.”

  The school was like a village: Risa, the single, Grade 1 teacher, who sent nearly all her salary home to a family of seven in Sri Lanka; Suha, from Amman, who had a PhD in linguistics and could speak seven languages, including Bulgarian and Portuguese; Vera, who’d converted to Islam when she married her Sudanese husband and whose family in Hungary had disowned her; Hari, an Indian Brit who’d lived in eight countries in fifteen years, following her diplomat husband from post to outpost. (“Best?” she told Deborah. “Paris. Worst? I think here.”)

  At the end of the semester, her students gave Deborah a collage of the flags from their countries. One of the mothers had attached them to Bristol board and each child had signed his or her name next to their flag. “To Our Dear Miss,” was rainbow-lettered at the top. On the last day of school, Hynda invited her to dinner. “Please excuse the late notice, Deborah. I have wanted to ask you since the first day. But, you know, with the children and the teaching, so little time.” There was an obligatory, end-of-year Al Nahyan faculty party at the British Club that night, the kind of event Deborah had come to dread, not knowing who to make nice with any more.

  “The next night then,” said Hynda. “You are my sister now.”

  The children — three girls, one boy — were as handsome as their mother, with bright eyes and velvet skin. “My husband was very tall,” Hynda explained. “And, yes, handsome.” She wasn’t wearing a headscarf when she met Deborah at the door, no males, other than her young son, being present. “Oh, my hair, don’t look,” she said, laughing and smoothing the front of her short do. “There are all kinds of good reasons for wearing a headscarf, as you can see.”

  Hynda gave her a tour of the aging villa. “We’ve been here forever. The landlord is good to us.” There was no clutter — hardly a book or a painting — though overstuffed brocade couches filled two of the five rooms to near capacity.

  “Are you Muslim?” the oldest girl asked Deborah over dinner.

  “No,” said Deborah. “But I am very interested in your religion.” This was actually beginning to be true. She’d had a vague notion in the first year to read Karen Armstrong’s books on Islam, but only since meeting Hynda and some of the other women in the school had it become a desire. Next year, she told herself. Next year, it will be part of my reinvention. Not a conversion, of course not. But she would educate herself, read, ask more questions.

  “What are you then? You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  “Amina, we respect everyone, remember?” Hynda said with a warning look.

  “It’s okay,” said Deborah. “I like being asked questions. Well, let’s see… I was raised in the United Church of Canada, but I can’t say I’m really anything anymore. I don’t go to church except on Christmas and Easter. I’m kind of bad about that. I do believe in God, though.” She realized this might be too much contradictory information for an eight-year-old, and was aware of something lacking, of looking less in the girl’s eyes than the woman she should be.

  “Allah is great,” piped up the boy. He was five, Hynda had said.

  “Yes,” said Deborah, not knowing what else to say. “Yes, he is.”

  “Mohammed too,” said one of the other girls.

  “Peace be upon him,” said Hynda. It was clear she wanted this conversation to end.

  Afterward, over coffee served in the sitting room by their Bangladeshi maid, Hynda apologized for the children’s questions. “They’re just curious,” she said. “I want them to know about other religions, but it is delicate, you understand. They are still young and impressionable. It is enough to grasp our faith.”

  She said it so naturally: our faith. It was inside her, part of the identity of the family she was raising. Deborah couldn’t refer to her own wavering path this way. As for her family, the boys had never seemed compelled to attach themselves to a formal belief. Her fault, probably. It might have been an anchor for them, perhaps even for her.

  It was a different summer, the fourth one, the one that had just passed, less hectic than the earlier ones: fewer lunches, fewer doctors’ appointments. She no longer spent hours shopping for things she couldn’t find in Abu Dhabi. The first summer she’d stuffed their suitcases with boxes of maple sandwich cookies that grew stale next to the packages of maamoul in her Abu Dhabi kitchen. Some of their Ottawa friends she hadn’t even alerted to this summer’s return, not having the energy for all the back-and-forth emails: Deb, we’re at the cottage for the month of July, then in Vancouver for the last two weeks of August. When are you heading back to Abu Dubai? Let’s try to squeeze in drinks. Hi, Deborah, we’ll be in PEI all summer. Sorry to be missing you. She and the twins rented a condo near the Byward Market. Not cheap, but at least there would be less reliance on friends and family, more meals in. She could even have p
eople over, if anyone was around.

  It was wonderful to see Thom, of course, by now an old university hand. He was full of advice for the twins, who would be going to the U of T in the fall, but also full of wistful questions. “Have they finished the construction on Al Salaam Street yet? Who played at WOMAD this spring? Is Felice still there?” Thom had not forgotten anything, including the daughter of the Tunisian ambassador. “You’ll miss Abu Dhabi,” he warned the twins. “You’ll miss it like hell.” He’d already announced that he planned to go back as soon as he finished engineering school. “Get a job. You know.”

  “We’ll be right behind you,” said Terry. “Better look for a flat for three, right, Jon?”

  “You mean you’re not going to live with us?” Deborah asked, pretending to be stricken.

  “Face it, Mum, you and Dad are going to be long gone by then,” said Terry.

  “Dead, you mean,” she said, laughing now.

  “No, no, back here, living the boring, good life and dumping on Abu Dhabi every chance you can get,” said Thom.

  “But I like it,” said Deborah.

  Her sons turned to look at her.

  “Since when?” said Thom.

  “Since…I don’t know. It creeps up on you. One day you realize, this is my life and I seem to be living it here. I mean, there.”

  “What about Dad?” Thom asked. “He seemed so on the moon this year.”

  “Hates it,” said Jon.

  “Your father’s had a hard year,” said Deborah, and as she said this she understood two things: She didn’t really know why it had been so hard for him (the iPad caper was just that, a caper), and two, she could say this about most of his years. He was freighted with discontent. Discontent was his default. And here came a third thing: She was tired of it.

  Still, it turned out to be one of their best summers. Thom was working at a Canadian Tire during the day, but free most evenings. He’d come for dinner, the four of them going through a bottle of wine, the twins teasing her that they missed Leena’s cooking. Good company. It would be hard leaving again in August, saying goodbye to these young men, who by some miracle, had turned out pretty well. At least this year the boys would have each other — they were already talking about meeting up in Ottawa for Thanksgiving — plus they’d told Harris that all they wanted for Christmas this year was to spend it in Abu Dhabi. “Man, I cannot wait!” Thom kept saying.