Safiah's Smile

by Leora Friedman

  – Chapter 5 –

  The Eagle Café was the most exclusive dining hall on campus. One humid Sunday evening, Malia decided to spend the six dollars and fifty cents in her wallet on their grilled hamburgers and crinkle-crisp French fries. After spending an entire morning and afternoon bicycling through the winding paths of the Washington University campus, Malia’s stomach screamed for sustenance. Surviving solely on microwavable dinner packages, toaster strudel, and boxes of Cheerios for the past several weeks, Malia craved for a well-cooked meal.

  Searching the restaurant for a friendly face, Malia noticed a girl named Alice who she met in Greek Mythology 101 with loose blonde locks that reached her waist and a brunette named Amber with untamed curls and deep blue eyes from Organic Chemistry. The sea of jubilant teenagers laughed riotously at Amber’s comments. Amber had apparently been relating hilarious tales from her crushingly humiliating high school years that sent a stroke of contagious laughter throughout the entire table.

  “And that’s why,” Amber concluded, “I will never show my face at the Burger King in my hometown again. Ever.” The throng of students roared with laughter. Malia grimaced at their carefree behavior, and turned towards the corner of the dining hall. A dark shadow lingered heavily over the table she selected, concealing it.

  It was conveniently empty.

  Gracefully lifting a fry to her lips, she heard a thin voice from behind and the fry fluttered from her fingers to the paper plate.

  “Malia?”

  Safiah. The Muslim girl.

  Malia slowly spun around, somewhat soothed by Safiah’s calming presence.

  “Safiah. Would you like to join me?” she asked out of common courtesy.

  Safiah smiled and crept timidly to the seat opposite Malia. She glanced curiously at the large James Madison Jaguars logo printed on the front of Malia’s shirt in vibrant yellow ink. Malia’s hair was knotted in a messy bun, and for once her eyes appeared clean. There were no smudges of stray water stains on them. She had a small plate of potato fries and tomato ketchup on the side along with a medium-sized sesame hamburger. Safiah looked down at her own plate. A large salad coated with a thin layer of honey dressing. In her two years as an American citizen, Safiah still remained unaccustomed to the peculiar concept of fast-food. She lightly nibbled on her lettuce in her olive dress and black headscarf in content.

  Malia unintentionally noticed that once Safiah entered the restaurant, the Eagle Café’s many customers mostly huddled towards the right-end of the cafeteria. Safiah seemed unhindered.

  “Does it bother you much?” Malia bravely inquired.

  “Does what bother me?” Safiah appeared sincerely oblivious. Malia immediately regretted her question.

  She placed her fork lightly on her folded napkin. “The people. It’s almost like….” She wished desperately that she were anywhere else. Anywhere but here. Sitting in the corner of the Eagle Café with Safiah. “Like they are avoiding you. Because you are… you’re….”

  “Different,” Safiah finished her sentence.

  Malia blushed, wiping the bangs from her eyes. “Yes.” she blushed. “But not in a bad way,” she quickly added. “I mean, it must be hard.”

  “I’m used to it,” Safiah explained. “Anyways, it’s understandable, isn’t it? The distance they keep. The fear they have. With everything that’s happened….” her voice trailed off. “It’s understandable,” she explained. Her lips were slightly twisted, her eyes pained.

  Admiration swept over Malia as intensely as a tidal wave. “How can you say that?” she whispered in disbelief. “It’s unfair,” she declared. “How can you say that it’s right to treat you like this?” she sputtered. “Like you’re some kind of… some kind of….”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Safiah pressed. “Here, let me try to explain it to you.” Malia wondered what color Safiah’s hair was under the scarf. She imagined a rich, wavy black, or maybe a deep honey brown.

  “Alright,” she consented.

  “In my History of the Holocaust course, we are reading Anne Frank. I think there is this one quote that describes what I am feeling. How I must feel. Or else I’ll just whither away and become a cynic. One moment.” Safiah reached into her multi-colored suede beaded bag and returned with a diary filled with various notes and drawings. Malia saw a picture of a bird, flying solitarily from its nest. She saw a sketch of a young woman resembling Safiah. A young toddler was by her side, clutching the older girl’s hand dearly. Beside that picture was a sketch of two girls. One slightly taller than the other, yet both were adults. Two Muslim sisters.

  Malia quickly turned away.

  “‘It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals,’” Safiah recited, perfectly enunciating each syllable. “‘They seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe,’” Malia could see the admiration in Safiah’s eyes, the near idolatry, “‘in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’”

  They both paused, contemplating. After several minutes, Safiah broke the silence. “It’s true,” she reflected.

  “That may be so,” Malia finally spoke after several minutes of quiet consideration. “At the core, every person in this room may have a good heart,” she looked around, eyeing a pair of college freshmen shake hands respectfully and introduce themselves. A sophmore girl spilled the contents of her purse in the center of the hall, and a stranger stooped to help gather the missing lipstick, drivers license, and spare cash. “But it doesn’t mean they’re always right,” she concluded.

  Safiah persisted. “They’re afraid,” she sympathized. “It’s only natural.”

  “Prejudice is not natural. It’s immoral,” she fought. Safiah was smiling. “Safiah, I’m sorry,” she relented. “I just don’t understand. My life is so much simpler than yours, and yet I can never seem to find strength to have faith in what’s meant to be.” The sketch of Safiah and her deceased sister lingered in her mind. She saw a group of stereotypical jocks staring at Safiah. The boy with the backwards baseball cap and Lakers jersey whispered something to the lean blonde girl in the magenta tank top and black skinny jeans. “You seem so sure.”

  “I have no choice,” she explained. “What I must contend with here in America is almost nothing in comparison to the horros waiting for me in Afghanistan.” Malia shrunk in understanding and humiliation. Why did I have to bring this up? she thought. I barely know this girl. I know nothing of her life. And I have the audacity to offend her like this. “There is a war there, Malia. But, you already knew that.”

  Visions of her brother in a soldier’s uniform carrying a weapon, sprinting through the trenches, shooting a man. She could not bare to consider what he and Danny were confronting as she sat here in the cafeteria, enjoying a simple fast-food meal with Safiah. If only I could be a fly on the wall. The pain of not knowing suffocated her mind.

  “I can only appreciate the gift of safety that America has provided me and my family,” Safiah explained. Malia’s eyes were glassy. Safiah knew her focus was currently directed elsewhere. A place less welcoming. “Malia,” she whispered. Her senses returned to reality. “You have to have faith in a better tomorrow.”

  Malia sighed. “For weeks, I would lie awake at night. Listening to my own breathing,” she closed her eyes. “I would wonder if they were still breathing on the other end of all this.” She opened her eyes and smiled. “I never really believed.” She looked at Safiah. Her eyes projected pain. The pain of her relatives still residing in Afghanistan. And the pain of her sister. Only an infant. One of the injustices of the world. Along with so many others. Like Beth’s mother. They were all unecessary, Malia thought. It just takes courage to fight them, to prevent it from happening to someone else. She thought of Danny and her brother. “But part of me does now.”

  Her cell phone vibrated gently in her pocket. Her home phone number. Either her mother
or father. “I should probably take this,” she stood and gathered her belongings. “Thanks for the chat,” Malia smiled and strolled out of the Eagle Café, leaving Safiah to munch on her Romaine lettuce in silence.

  “Mom? Is that you?” Malia sat on a vacant park bench. She was alone in the campus garden, surrounded by weeds and wilting flowers. It was still daylight, though the sun was beginning to set slowly into the depths of the earth.

  “Mom, I can’t hear what you’re saying. Why are you muffling your words?” She touched a finger to her ear to block nature’s quiet but distinct noises – a bird softly chirping, a bee vexingly buzzing.

  She heard the word missing on the other end of the line. Missing?

  “Did you lose your car keys again?” Malia inquired. “I’m sure they just fell in the street vent outside the house again. Remember what we did last time? Just get a stick, put some double-stick tape on it, and slide it through. Piece of cake,” she assured.

  More muffling.

  Her brother’s name.

  “Mom, I can’t understand you?” Her heart began to race. She sensed the strange behavior on her mother’s end and the two words – missing and Sam – had some odd connection to one another. But her mind refused to make sense of it. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

  Her mother eventually regained her composure.

  Something was missing. But it wasn’t just the keys to her mother’s old Honda Civic.

  No, it was something much more valuable.

  Her brother.

  “Mom, I don’t understanding, how can Sam be missing in action? I don’t believe you. Why are you saying this?”

  Her mother was silent. Waiting for the wrath, the disbelief to pass. The inevitable denial. “How can the other soldiers, his generals, how can they not know where he is? He’s either alive or… or… he’s not.”

  Her mother tried uselessly to explain.

  “But he can’t just be gone. People don’t just disappear.”

  More explaining.

  “Well, yes, I know that they do. But not like this. Not when so many people care about them.” The wave of skepticism passed. The truth began to settle into Malia’s mind like a sour flavored candy on the tongue and she accepted it.

  Her mother had to go. Relatives needed comforting, needed explanations, had questions. And they assumed her mother knew the answers.

  A light pink pigment filled the previously blue sky, and the orange sun blazed less and less vividly as the hours passed. Malia lay feebly on the wooden park bench, staring desperately at the stunning shades of purple and pink painted artistically around the puffs of white clouds. The blending shades spiraled in her mind.

  One of the clouds resembled a heart, she thought, shattered into two separate halves. Another a lion, racing to devour its prey. Another a bird, soaring to its nest to care for its young. She analyzed the clouds painstakingly, until fatigue overpowered her and she allowed herself to enter a harmonious sleep. A sleep not of nightmares. A sleep not of dreams. But a sleep of sheer nothingness. An empty mind to complement an empty soul.

  Hours passed. Still, Malia sat cradling herself to sleep beneath the silver moon. In her mind, she saw visions. Visions of bliss. Of a distant happiness. Golden memories etched into her mind. Memories that shined ever so brightly due to the dim prospect of their return.

  She and Sam entering the double-doors of James Madison Elementary together on their first day of kindergarten. They both had been terrified for this sudden change in their lives – from the freedom of children to the structured confinement of students. They clung to each other those first few days of school, anxious to separate from the familiarities of their youth. But one day, Sam sat just a few desks further from Malia. And Malia asked a girl with choppy blonde pigtails to sit with her at lunchtime. Eventually, they branched out into their own. Yet in their hearts, they always remained those two frightened five year-olds in spirit.

  The seventh grade. A chunky boy and his exclusive club of followers had tormented Malia and her friends for weeks on end. Stealing their backpacks, sending prank phone messages, and circulating displeasing rumors. Malia especially despised the rumors.

  “You’d better leave my sister and her friends alone, Joey.” Sam’s pudgy twelve-year old face tried to frighten the husky bully, Joseph Gandalini, in earnest sentiment. Danny was by his side, laughing his face off at his best friend’s meager attempt at intimidation.

  After consoling Danny for his failure to defend his little sister, Danny shoved Joey against the locker and muttered something threateningly in his ear that Malia couldn’t decipher. Joseph Gandalini never bothered Malia and her friends again.

  Her brother’s face was as red as the Fuji apple she had crunched on for lunch for that day. “It’s the thought that counts, Sam,” she comforted him.

  And then high school came along, and they became freshman. Swarms of sixteen and seventeen year-old giants hovered over their bony five-foot tall frames. Teachers reprimanded them for the most insignificant of discretions – marching through the halls without passes, disposing of their spoiled peanut butter and jelly sandwich and other allergenic products in the wastebaskets, or failing to place their paper products in the recycle bins. Everything just seemed more complicated. But for months they had anticipated the next four years. Danny’s older brother would constantly boast of the marvels of high school. And now they were finally here. Living it themselves.

  At least until Mr. Hoffman assigned their first history report.

  “Mr. Hoffman, I swear, my computer broke down yesterday. I lost everything.” Malia’s voice trembled. Her cheeks were red. Mr. Hoffman stood firmly, his arms strapped across his chest in an iron grasp. “It’s all gone. Did you want me to rewrite the entire thing at midnight?” She looked up into her ninth grade world history teacher’s eyes, searching for a shred of sympathy. But he had no pity for Malia and her excuses.

  “Ms. Sanders, you are in high school now. You have to take responsibility for your assignments.” He spoke in a slow, condescending tone. “Your computer malfunction is irrelevant. I have no choice but to give you a zero.”

  Zero. The one word she had always dreaded. It shot a sharp sting of chills up her spine.

  “Now is that really fair, Mr. Hoffman?” Danny tried to negotiate. “I mean, it wasn’t really her fault. In fact, you can probably blame my Dad.” Malia looked at Mr. Hoffman. His lips were pursed, his eyebrows raised. “He was the one using it when it....”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Sanders,” Mr. Hoffman scolded, his cheeks red with fury. “My mocha cappuccino to settle his nerves.

  “Thanks for trying, Sam. That’s what counts,” she smiled.

  Sam looked disappointed.

  He was always trying to save her. How was she supposed to save him if she was thousands of miles away?

  Ever since Safiah returned Sam’s letter, Malia had kept it strapped tightly in her pocket. Every now and then, she would check to ensure it was still there. She depended on it desperately. That one slip of paper convinced her that everything would be alright.

  Sitting meekly on the wooden park bench, as the sunlight nearly turned to dust, she slowly unfolded the letter. Her fingers quivered as she squinted to read the curly handwriting. Her fingers, wet with her tears, painted small water spots on the thin sheet. She swiftly dried the smudges with the edge of her sleeve and searched for some hint, some clue to her brother’s whereabouts.

  She found none.

  “I was born to do this,” she whispered, slowly enunciating each syllable with skepticism. “Couldn’t he find something else to do with his life?” she shouted to no one. “He loved basketball. Why couldn’t he pursue basketball?”

  The air replied with a frosty whirl of wind that flew the letter from her grasp. It lay flimsily by a monstrous tree. Rain droplets fluttered from its branches and prickled her arms as she stooped to re
trieve it. Her hand brushed lightly against its trunk, causing tiny wood pieces to splinter her palm.

  “I’m doing this for me,” she continued to read. “Well what about us, Sam? What about your friends and family?” she once again questioned to no one in the vacant campus garden. “Did you even think about us?” She sunk her body to the ground, leaning heavily against the tree. Grass stains intermingled with blotches of mud dirtied her pants and the trim of her blouse, but she didn’t mind. Her mind was too obsessed with anger. Her raging fury with her brother. Selfish. Irresponsible. Naive.

  Brave. Determined. A fighter.

  The anger passed, and the sun rose once again. Despite the deaths of soldiers and the tears of widowed wives, the sun would always rise. And life would continue. A life, and the lives of so many, that Sam was trying to protect.

  She heard voices, laughter. Crowds of people were scurrying to their classes, bags strapped to their backs and piles of weighty books tucked under their arms.

  “Malia?” A hand was extended towards her.