“This is spookier than I remember it,” she said, shifting uneasily in her seat at the movie theater. “Can we go?” But Matar wasn’t listening, and just patted her hand. “I left with you when you wanted to leave Jaws,” she hissed at him vindictively. Someone in the darkness shushed her. “I’ll be in the car.” She picked me up and followed the pinprick lights up the aisle and back out into the daylight, leaving Matar, his mouth hanging open as Melinda Dillon went screaming into a field, colored lights disappearing into the rolling sky.
The second daylight hit my face I woke up and started to bawl. The only other way to get me to sleep was to strap me into my car seat, put a hat on me, and drive. Whenever Ma pressed the brake I’d start up the wailing again, so she kept the Scirocco in motion, circling the crowded parking lot and waiting for the movie to be over. She turned on the radio to distract herself. A talk show came on the air about the subject of kidnapping. One of the guests was a woman from Texas who was invited to tell the frightening account of her son’s brutal kidnapping by his father.
A drawling voice on the radio said, “Well, me and Ali were running together a few months and then one day, outta nowhere, he just disappeared until a few years later, when I ran into him with some of his old friends. By then my little boy Frankie had black hair and looked just like his daddy. It was obvious.”
The woman started to sob, and Gale rolled down the window for a cigarette.
“He says he’s here to take my little Frank to his real family. That he’s going to be a prince over in Arabia somewhere.” Ma’s cigarette burned down to the stub and blew off without her noticing. “They said that because I wasn’t married to Frankie’s daddy I had no right over his custody. I dunno, maybe if I’d married him I’d be a queen somewh—”
Gale killed the radio. In a few years, Betty Mahmoudy’s Not Without My Daughter would cause a buzz and the “Invasion of the Muslim Baby Snatchers” would climax briefly as a hot topic on daytime talk shows. Gale’s instinct had never been to marry Matar. Until this story, she had assumed her hand was the upper one in the relationship. She had wanted children. That was all. Only now did she reflect on how little she knew about Matar’s family, or how little he’d been able to articulate in English about the world he came from. And that had been just fine—until now. Perhaps things would be more complicated than she’d planned for us.
For all she knew, Matar could be part of some larger genetic conspiracy to spawn with blond American women and then rob them of their offspring. Thoughts like this began circling Gale’s mind like paranoid vultures. She drove in a circuit outside the cinema, waiting for the aliens and the Americans to have their cosmic jam session. She had smoked a whole pack of Marlboros by the time Matar emerged from the theater, squinting. White American families poured out around him, talking animatedly in a shared language about the possibility of making contact with the other worlds. To Gale, Matar couldn’t have been stranger.
“Doo. Doo. Doo. Dee. Doo.” Matar whistled the interplanetary jingle as he slid into the passenger seat. He leaned over, smiling, to kiss Gale.
“Don’t do that!” she snapped. “Have you told your family about us?”
This question blindsided Matar. “Why you make problems? They don’t know where I am, even.”
“Good,” she said and began to drive through the herd of townsfolk exiting the theater.
Matar quietly buckled his seat belt and checked that I was strapped in as the car lurched and braked with Ma’s agitation. “Why you are asking these question?”
She gassed it around the back of the cinema along the river. “What would your family say if they knew about us?”
“They would want to see our daughter.”
“Would they want to see me?”
Matar paused, measuring how to say the wise thing. “Yes, if you became a Muslim and we got married. Why not?”
“And if I was not a Muslim?”
“Why you are thinking like this way?” She parked the car again, having just driven a large circle around the cinema and come back to where she had started.
Then, like gentling an upset animal, Matar leaned across and held the back of her neck like he did when calming a lamb. “Will you marry me?”
Matar had wanted an Islamic wedding presided over by an imam, but that was a tall order in Puyallup. When there was no one to marry a Bedouin couple in the desert, they just circled a tree, commanding it three times with the words, “You! Tree! Marry us!” and then got down to business. So Matar agreed to a trade-off with Gale: in exchange for a simple nondenominational ceremony, Gale would quietly convert to Islam and raise their children as Muslims. In the end, the marriage consisted of a civil ceremony performed by a notary public in the kitchen of the farmhouse, and, later that evening when the newlyweds were alone, a private circumnavigation of a lilac bush in the backyard.
Having a child out of wedlock or even marrying outside the tribe might easily be forgiven, but marrying outside the religion was bound to pose an issue for Matar. If he got Gale to say the shahada, just two little statements, it would change everything. The only problem was that, like the kiss of true love breaking the spell on a sleeping beauty, if Gale was going to say “La ilaha ilAllah wa Mohamed al Rasul Allah,” she was going to have to not only understand but also mean the words “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his prophet.”
He set about composing instruction cards with the different rakat for Gale to perform during the five prayer times and recorded himself reading Quran on cassette tapes. Now their roles were reversed. Gale had been Matar’s guide to America; Matar was now stepping in to guide her toward Islam. Eventually, Gale grudgingly agreed to try to pray if Matar agreed to learn to swim. To Gale, being able to float was a survival skill necessary for fatherhood, just as being Muslim was an essential part of motherhood to Matar. It seemed like a fair and equal trade to both parties.
It was around this time that Gale found she was pregnant again. This pregnancy came with two recurrent ordeals. The first was a tormenting anxiety dream about alien abduction in the wake of watching Close Encounters; the second was a craving for pickled pigs’ feet, which Matar found repulsive. She would sit upright in the night, eyes jabbing the back of her lids, thrashing in the sheets, and grab for me to make sure I was still there. Then she’d shuffle to the kitchen, root through the refrigerator, and fish a hoof out of a jar of brine with her fingers. Matar would catch her there in the cold light, confiscate the jar, and lead her back to bed.
“When you are afraid, recite the Verse of the Throne and you will feel brave,” he said.
Gale rebuffed him and shoved a breast into my face for my morning feed. “It’s simple, darling—when you learn how to swim, I’ll learn how to pray.”
The Puyallup pool belonged to the valley’s high school and was relatively empty on Sundays. “Where is the life-man?” Matar asked nervously as they padded barefoot across the damp tiles.
“Lifeguards are off Sunday. We have it to ourselves!” Gale sat on the edge of the pool, baby bump protruding far over her thighs as she dipped me in and out of the tepid water like a biscuit. “Come on, sit down here next to me,” she coaxed Matar. He just flicked at the water with his big toe. “Don’t be stupid. Get in!” She tried wrestling his leg with her free arm until he climbed timidly down the ladder and slipped hip-deep into the pool.
Walking Matar through all the basic lessons—how to breathe out under water, how to float, how to tread water, and how to kick—Gale coaxed him to the deep end.
“Okay, now swim back. No wall!”
But Matar refused to leave the wall of the pool, bobbing along the length of the twenty-five-meter lane with his hands on the ledge. “Khalas! I am finish!” Matar called back.
Fed up, Gale stood and hoisted me onto her hip over where Matar was clinging to a railing, trying to catch his breath.
“Do you know how my father taught me to swim?” she asked. Matar shook his head and blew his nose. “Like this!” My m
other tossed me into the deep end of the pool, a little over a meter from where Matar was hanging on for dear life. I bobbed easily to the surface, and by the time my father had reached me I was floating comfortably on my back.
He barely made it back to the side of the pool and handed me up to my mother. “You crazy?” he sputtered, and it echoed off the bleachers.
Ma ignored his sputters and toweled me off.
“You wants your daughter she drown?” Matar was losing his proper English skills in his fury.
“It’s fine, darling. She knows how to swim. Babies are born with it.”
Matar refused to believe Gale and would not be pacified even when she showed him my infant back-float skills in a full bathtub. Even today when the story of Ma letting me drop into the pool comes up, my father gets angry.
That night he kept his back to her in bed.
“You still want to teach me how to pray?” she asked in an attempt at making up.
His stony shadow softened, and he turned over to spoon her. “You frighten me today.”
“But you faced your fear. That was the right thing.”
Matar leaned in to whisper into her ear, in Arabic, “I seek refuge in Allah from the outcast Satan.”
Gale repeated after him, “Authu Bi Allah min al Shaytan al rajim,” stumbling on the hard consonants and mispronouncing words, but Matar didn’t correct her or explain to her what she was saying. Instead he gently continued this way until the verse was completed.
“Do you feel more safe now?” he asked her, noticing that the rise and fall of her breathing had slowed. She said yes with a sleepy silence and guided his hand to a spot on her abdomen where a little foot was straining against the skin.
They lay together like this for a long time until Matar felt the time was right. “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his prophet,” he said softly into her ear.
“La ilaha ilAllah wa Mohamed al Rasul Allah,” Gale repeated. Matar basked in his triumph and went to kiss his newly Muslim wife, but was instead he was greeted by a soft snore as she drew her next breath.
6
BETA CEPHEI • THE FLOCK •
Before my sister Dima was born, our father Matar had made numerous forays into the profession of long-haul trucking. He liked the big rigs. Even though they were cab-over-engine Macks, not Mercedes, they still reminded him of home. He added flourishes to his English by listening to the crass lilt of CB lingo and UFO conspiracy-theory sermons. He managed to get freelance work from a few contacts he’d made at the Port of Tacoma. Without his own cab it was hard to get jobs. Still, no one could deny that if they needed a long, straight trek at a steady pace, the Ayrab could do it.
For Matar it was also an excuse to see more of America, to drive far from all the cities, where he could see the starlight. It was also the only way to quell that old urge to keep moving.
While Matar was tearing up and down the I-5, Gale had worked straight through both pregnancies as a meter reader in Tacoma. But when she took up wearing hijab, her employers at the city found that the sight of her in a veil poking around electrical meters in people’s backyards was giving customers the creeps. They gave her the choice to remove it or lose the job.
It was then that Baba decided it was time for him to return to the Gulf. With Abu Dhabi, Doha, and the entire region transforming rapidly in the sway of a great black gold rush, he decided to light out for his old territories. He figured he’d have a pretty good shot at a well-paying job, especially now that he could speak English with the big men in charge of the oil companies. He promised he’d send for us once everything was settled, but there was no way of knowing when that might be.
It had been three years since Matar had come to America. He’d explored the country, married a native, and fathered two kids, and yet somehow he managed to leave with no baggage. We dropped him off at the airport with the same nearly empty leather briefcase he’d arrived with. Nothing inside it but his sirwal and a thobe to change into when he landed. Ma tucked a photo into his wallet of the four of us at the Space Needle in Seattle, Ma and Baba bowed together over Dima and me. Our father left almost everything he’d accumulated over the years behind with us. Our closet remained packed with his shirts and the Quran tapes he’d recorded for us. Too young to really remember him, we knew his smell without knowing who it belonged to, and knew his voice before we’d ever spoken to him.
I must have been nearly five years old when we finally received word from our father. He sent us a package that included a videotape, a studio portrait of himself, and some corporate gift pens. “That’s your babi.” Ma introduced us and let Dima smudge the framed photo with her fingers. Of course it wasn’t a proper studio portrait; it had been taken for work. Or so it would seem, judging by the Japanese company logo and the photo of a flaming offshore rig erupting over his left shoulder. He sat stiffly, as if he’d been holding the pose for a long time. It reminded me of the photo on the mantel of our Grandfather Kaarle standing with a “Klondike or Bust!” banner as his backdrop.
A letter was taped to the back of the photo frame.
Dear my dotters,
This fideo from your Baba in dawha.
Your family they wants see you.
You have 11 auntie and uncles in dawha and your
Gramma and Grampa they are in Saudia
Also you have too many cousins.
We wait you and miss you too much.
Next year come. And if you can like it stay.
My wife,
I miss you and America also. Donot forgit your prey.
Promis. I love you honne. Baba Matar
Next we settled down to watch Baba’s tape. Ma pulled Dima up onto her lap, and I sat too close to the TV, squinting through my plastic-frame glasses. When the static drew back on the screen, we heard men speaking in Baba’s language. The view was of the color beige, a speeding shot from a car in the desert.
Ma recognized one of the voices as Matar. “There’s your baba’s voice. I’ll bet he’s forgotten all of his English.”
The microphone crackled from the wind as the camera spun around to face our father.
“Welcome my girls!” he said.
Ma put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile.
“This is our country road. You can see your new home. Lots to see!” He turned the camera around to capture the car’s approach to the Doha Sheraton, an iconic structure jutting from an outcrop at the edge of the city. “This is new. When I met you, Gale, it was not here,” Baba shouted into the wind. They pulled up slowly alongside a line of Ferraris and other fancy cars parked in front of the lobby. “This is my new car,” he said, pointing the camera at a gleaming DeLorean parked under a palm tree. Ma laughed. My eyes widened. “Sorry. Joking. Your Baba’s not rich . . . yet.”
He took us inside. The lobby was a seductive Islamic fantasy-future of hexagonal mirrors and disco-lit elevators. My eyes widened. It was beautiful. At the center of the lobby was the largest standing chandelier in the world: a crystal palm tree. We exited to the garden, where the camera panned briefly over Indian men gardening on a path beside a giant chessboard. He pointed the camera out to the water. “You cannot believe it, Gale. Now I am working on a rig, way far out there in the sea. I’m not afraid anymore of the water.” He demonstrated by patting his bare foot in the seawater for Ma’s benefit, and she responded by hugging Dima. Back in the car he pointed the camera at himself again. “Everything is changing here now, Gale.”
The video carried on for a few minutes out the window of the old car—which drove at warp speed past lonely vistas of desert—as though he’d forgotten to turn it off. Then suddenly he said, “Tell the girls I love them very much.”
“They know,” Ma replied to the TV, a choke in her throat as the black slug at the end of the tape doused the image.
That videotape was a revelation to me, and as the white noise resumed I saw it as a portal into another dimension—one I felt immediate ownership over, if only because I had been t
old it was mine. Having a second world to belong to immediately made me cast doubt on my place in the first. It seemed like such a very different world from the rivers and the raspberry farm. I can’t say it was exotic, or mysterious, or any of the other alluring adjectives associated with the Gulf. But seeing the video permanently cracked the world into two halves for me. I watched and re-watched the tape so many times the belt wore out. It made me feel funny, a new yearning, like my mind was salivating for something new. I wanted to go there as soon as I could. Maybe it was as simple as missing my father; either way, Ma was forced by the video to acknowledge that we would never be fully hers. Eventually her daughters would have to learn to live in both worlds.
A few evenings later, while Dima and I were parked in front of Cosmos watching the man in the red turtleneck and camel jacket explain tesseracts, Ma called us to the telephone. “Girls! Come talk to your baba!” She sat in the kitchen in jeans and one of his old shirts. She had her hijab down on her shoulders, and her wrists were tangled up from nervously twisting the phone cord. Ma scooped Dima up to her lap, where she held the phone to my little sister’s ear. “Say salam alaikum, Baba.” Dima’s fat cheek pillowed against the receiver. She breathed heavily into the phone but didn’t say anything. I clawed my way up onto Ma’s lap, wedging myself into range for my turn. “Asalam alaikum?” I showed off, holding the receiver to my face.
“Safya! Will you like to come and live with your baba?”
“Can we fly there?”
“Yes.”
“In a airplane?”
“Yes.”
“Do we have to go through outer space to get there?”
Ma cuffed me. “Don’t be silly. This is a long-distance phone call.”
“No, but you do fly over the North Pole,” he answered.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 4