I hate Sundus! she said, but she said it the way a child would. She looked at my handwriting and began to laugh. She had every right to laugh, since the article looked like a toddler’s brash scribbles: after all, I had written it on the bus yesterday, with the pen jolting and sliding across the paper every time the bus shook or bumped. She sighed in near-wonder. Ya quwwat Allah!1 One, two … whoa, only seven words crossed out! I began to dictate to her as she wrote, and I shaded her eyes with my hand so that she could see what she was writing down. Now and then, she would stop me to give her opinion. I knew what she was likely to say. If you would write it like this instead of like that … if you expand a little on this thought … if you open the door to that idea … I know Dai, and I know her desire to make everything in this world perfect, superlative in the appearance it makes, even if it is just a one-thousand-word essay.
We feared we would not find two empty seats together, more than we feared the hardship of sitting on the steps going into the bus or being jammed in the aisle. From where we were, I could not make out Sundus’s form, so I cut the effort short and began simply calling out her name. All the way at the other end of the bus, she raised her hand. Here …here …come on! I scolded her a little for making me go to all that trouble searching uselessly for her. Her justification was that she was spending all her time outside of lectures in the library, looking for sources for her final research paper. I handed her the article. She read the beginning of it and then inserted it carefully in her bag. It needs some concentration to read, she said. In other circumstances we would have chattered a little about Aqil and given him a sharp little ear pull in absentia for acting the pharaoh toward us. But in the bus, where even a whisper was audible, we always had to restrain ourselves sharply, putting on a simulated gravity. Who would understand here that there might be a good reason pushing two girls to joke about the brother of one of them, without putting the conversation on trial, criminalizing the speakers, or interpreting it in some other shameful way!
She invited us to sit with her, and of course it was not appropriate for us to refuse. Dai pinched my arm forcibly and I began to laugh as a way to get back at her. The forty minutes before Sundus would get out went by slowly. We talked about our final papers that we had to turn in to graduate, the demands of various professors, the narrow range of topics, the scarcity of sources, and our doubt-laden dread of that day when we would face our oral defense. Dai commented on the matter sarcastically.
Even a rabbit scares me, and yet I’m the one who will get the lion!
It was Dai’s good fortune that Sundus was invited to lunch at the home of one of her sisters, for otherwise she would have been the last girl to get out of the bus when Sundus had left. Dai pressed against me, let her head drop and stay on my shoulder, and said dejectedly, I hate you!
1 Invoking the strength of God.
12
The cell phone’s ringing woke me. Groggy with sleeping too long and too late, I felt my ears echoing with the dreadful tolling of winged creatures that flew through my dreams. I could not figure out where the sound was coming from. I flung off the bedcovers, ran my fingers across the surface of my bedside table and searched through the drawers. I turned on the lamp and finally stumbled on my phone somewhere under the bed.
Two minutes and I’m there. Open the door for me.
Sure.
I dragged my comforter along with me as I left my room. It was the first time Dai would see me in such a state, jolted right out of sleep like this, in a skimpy nightshirt, my hair uncombed and my mouth tight with dryness. The minute I opened the door for her, she deposited a kiss on my cheek big enough that I felt its wetness even against the cool freshness of my skin and sensed its warmth against my cold flesh. It was the kind of kiss that says, Ya Allah, how much I love you! And it came from Dai, who had never actually said such a thing to me, not once.
I took her by the hand and we went into the kitchen. Would she like something to drink? I asked. I did not really even need to ask what she wanted, since I knew she drank mango juice if she wanted a cole drink, as she calls it, and cappuccino if she wanted something hot. So before she could answer, I pointed to an upper shelf too high for me to reach. Dai had no more than two centimeters on me in height, but as I watched she stretched her frame upward and placed the tin in front of me. Next, she taught me the trick of heating the water and cappuccino powder together in the microwave to boost the amount of thick froth the powder would produce. It was the latest in a series of useful lessons: on an earlier occasion, she had coached me on the ploy of putting batteries in the freezer to lengthen their life. Another time when we were together, she showed me how to whack jar lids to make them easier to open.
Still hand in hand, we went up to the room. I put my finger to my lips with a shhh after every naughty chuckle that Dai’s little tales sent rocking through the stillness. I detached myself and headed into the bathroom. For a couple of minutes she left me alone, but then she came right up to the door and began to chatter away. Like a bratty child who can’t stay away from mama for even a moment, I thought. I was not accustomed to this bathroom chitchat. Whenever Dai caught the sound of me moving around, or the echoing tap-tap from the tiled floor, she asked me at once, urgently and insistently, what I was doing. I did not know how to respond. What does anyone do in the bathroom? I opened the door for her and began to brush my teeth. She leaned comfortably against the doorframe. Her eyes on the bathrobe I had carried in with me, she asked bluntly, Are you going to take a bath now?
I sensed what she was getting at. No. A little later on.
She came a few steps closer. I made it obvious that the last thing I wanted right now was a kiss from her, not while my mouth felt thoroughly scoured by the artificial mint scent of toothpaste. Dai’s response was to say that she would love kissing me even if I were coated in mold.
She came nearer still, put her arms around my middle, and began staring at my reflection in the mirror, exactly as I do myself. Her gaze, fluctuating with unveiled contrariety between the transparency of fine molasses and the opaqueness of deep black, left me doubly flustered, because I could not enter in and probe what lay behind those changeable pearls. She stared as though my reflection were someone other than me, as though that reflection did not belong to me or resemble me; indeed, as though someone she had never seen before was staring back at her. As though, there in the mirror, a creature was caught and frozen, imprisoned inside the glass, obliged to await the moment when I would turn my eyes to it, so that it could emerge from its murky surroundings.
Is there something different about you today?
You haven’t figured it out yet?
Just the day before I had cut my hair without telling her—or, to put it more plainly, without getting her permission. So I was expecting to find a harsh punishment lying in wait for me, or a fight that I couldn’t see my way out of. I had chosen the timing deliberately, because today was the day we had agreed on; today she would take me to the mazraa,1 and introduce me in person to her friends. Naturally, she would not want to risk our showing up in front of everyone looking in any way unacceptable, one of us clearly irritated with the other. She would not want to gamble on losing her chance to display how proud she was of me. Here is sahbati, she wanted to be able to say. Here is my friend.
In the mirror I saw those eyes suddenly widen. She was truly staggered. Likely, I thought to myself, she has been betting on my lack of nerve, counting on me not to exceed the restraints imposed, or at least implied, by the rights possession gives her. She has been assuming I would not take any liberties with my body. I would not act on my own. I would not act like this, without first seeking her reassurance. Now she sees that she has lost her gamble.
Her hand went around my neck as we both stared at the image of us reflected in the mirror. She moved her hand slowly, so slowly that I almost did not believe that it was moving at all. She pressed slightly and my pulse was palpable to us both beneath her hand. I closed my eyes and brea
thed, very slowly because I did not want her to suspect my discomfort. I sensed her trying to calibrate exactly how far up my neck to go in order to find the best position for choking me. Ferociously, almost maliciously, the higher her hand crept, the more feverish seemed her pleasure. She kept her hand exactly in position for what felt like a long time, her palm and fingers mantling my neck entirely as my jaws made contact with her index finger on one side and her thumb on the other. Then a sudden movement took me unawares—she yanked the short hair covering my neck and put her lips to me. Her quiet, restrained little mouthings struggled to free themselves and grew into fierce whole kisses. A colossal hunger was what seemed to drive her, propelled equally by anger and a longing for revenge. I tried to push her away from me with my own protest. No—that’ll leave marks on me!
So you don’t want me to do it?
Dai, stop—it hurts.
Who said I don’t want to hurt you?
I ducked away but I could not get very far, not far enough, because with both hands clenched, she gripped the rim of the basin that we were shoved against and blocked me, enclosing my body in her strong arms. The only space for maneuver I had now was a little circle, inside of which I had already half spun away.
Do you know what they call that mark?
My mood had not yet gone sour. But being imprisoned like this by her presence, and the fact that we were standing so very close together, motionless and face to face, and her expression as she looked at me, resentful and provoking, sent a spark of irritation shooting into the emotions already churning between us. She answered her own question.
Love bite.
Love bite! Hah—it’s a hate bite.
I was on the point of giving myself five stars for this reckless little verbal arrow I had launched, except that I caught a flash of anger, derision and rejection all at once in her eyes. She yanked me away from the sink. Once we were back in the room, she handed me a red velvet box. Haak! she said sharply. There! Take it!
I opened the box and saw an engagement ring. She pulled it out of the box, and under the light she showed me the name engraved there, a heart bracketing the letters on either end. She spread my fingers apart and slid it onto my left ring finger. She pulled my hand downward and kissed my palm.
Some scene flitting across a screen, that’s what it seemed like, a flimsy, inept scene created by an actress who truly outdoes herself at falling flat. Dai did not even manage to close her eyelids as the kiss descended, but rather aimed her gaze directly at my eyes to search out her effect on me. I could not keep this fantasy going, though. We were not in a scene from the cinema. This was something more than that, something much more substantial. Dai had brought all of her considerable cleverness and intelligence to the task. She built a trap for me and I promptly fell into it, easy enough prey. With an engagement ring engraved with her name on it and a kiss on the palms of my hands, Dai would bring this scene of hers to its dramatic fullness before an audience of her friends—her other friends. She would be able to say, this girl is my possession. She’s mine. Don’t you see what swirls around her finger, the sign and shadow of my ownership?
It stayed in my mouth, that bitter tang left by a perfectly contrived and executed deception, the taste of stupidity and an unbelievably easy capitulation on my part. It happened so fast and I was not equipped for it. I was not capable of reviewing quickly enough in my mind the assumptions that lay behind it all, especially when she was right there next to me. There was no chance to stop her and ask, Wait, what is this? What does it mean? How am I supposed to handle this? And why now?
What was so strange about it all was that this attempt, a premature one that would miscarry, arrived only in time for the words so long to form themselves quietly between us. For Dai’s too-hasty bid gave a strong push to our relationship. Everything that occurred now, whether on the positive pole or the negative, utterly horrible or terribly good, stable or shaky, recurring or new—every little event now had a different and uncommon impact, an echo that would not quit. That so long forced me into a reevaluation of our relationship, and I came out of it with the realization that whatever occurs in the course of a day may never come your way again. At any moment, our relationship could collapse. It could dwindle to nothing just as it had emerged from nothing. Somehow, now, my ability to sense her hurting was twice what it had been. The return on my pleasure at that hurt doubled as well.
She argued with me. I was feeling so resentful that my desire to maneuver against her came back in force, my desire to tease her, to pick a quarrel with her willfulness. I liked best to bait her by behaving in a way that slowly intensified her possession of me while making her nerves gyrate, swerving from rejection to acceptance, submission to tyranny. She would hang between her entreaties and her ability to surmount my no, every time I said it—not to the point where she would take me by force, but to the very brink of doing so. She was the one who had taught me the ground rules of the game. And she was the one who wanted to be the ground on which I paced out my moves. Her maddening way with me would just grow more intense, putting me on the verge of reversing the game.
But then suddenly she opens a door in front of me, a doorway straight into hell. She puts her hand on the flesh of my leg, ready to move my thighs apart. I have always hated this. I hate it when she puts her hand just there like that, to push my legs apart like this.
I jerked and pushed her hand away from beneath my leg. No!
Why not?
I made it up—the first lie that came into my head. It tickles!
Just as I had delivered an offhand lie then, I improvised a quick climax that (my body emptied of a sense of there-ness with Dai) I was not to reach. I don’t know how the idea came into my mind. I don’t know how I managed to carry it from idea to act. It was as difficult to force Dai into retreat as it was to force myself to enter a state of mind with her that was wakeful to her desire. A lie such as this, I figured, would cause no harm if only she would swallow it. Just then, though, I did not even care whether she swallowed my lie or choked on it.
After two hours and more prodigal cravings, here we were at the farm and she was giving me a private introduction, under her breath, to all of the girls who were there. It was the third time Dai had recited these names to me, hoping that they would float on my memory, coming to the surface just at the right moments so that I would not have to face the embarrassment of forgetting one of them.
The girl eating corn flakes is Janan. The one in the white blouse, Ghada. That one, who just got up to go into the kitchen, is Basma. And the girl who is tying her hair back right now, that’s Miral. The one over there who has no chest is Duha, and over here is—
I know her. Yes, I know her—it’s Dareen.
Not a name easily forgotten! And then there was the touch of her hand as she greeted me warmly. Since I arrived, we’d exchanged a few furtive glances together with smiles quickly suppressed, their minute transgressions swiftly concealed. Only rarely did I ever encounter someone whose form would mold itself into an urgent and alluring question mark before my eyes. Someone who could get to me so easily. That moment of greeting with Dareen had not been a friendly handshake; it had been a brush against the membranes around my heart, a pressure upon the sensitive nerves of my soul. The best way I can put it is that the flesh of her hand had gone deep inside of me and flung everything there into disarray.
I had expected—or feared—that I would not prove able to feel quickly at ease among strange girls with whom I had never shared Basta market day hours, or middle school classrooms, or Um Hussain, who had been our teacher in the kuttab, our religious kindergarten where we first learned how to read and recite the Qur’an. Yet, even with all of my apprehensions, I forgot myself completely, balling up my abaya and piling it off in a corner, and entering right into the commotion they were creating in the kitchen with the help of lettuce and tomatoes and the salad slicer.
Are you from Qatif? one of them asked me immediately.
That’s Amal
, Dai whispered in my ear.
Yes, I am.
Your mother is, too?
Yes.
Where do you study?
Here in Dammam.
So, why do you talk the way you do?
I looked at her, puzzled.
Like, you speak the way Egyptians do. Mish ‘awza. Taale ala baali. Aysh. Barduh. Libayh. Like an Egyptian and sometimes a Lebanese.
Dai rescued me, rushing into the conversation. You know the girls at the college. They come in from the villages and think they can shrug off their old ways of talking. They get swollen heads.
Amal’s wary questions were not new to me. So often, my speech had stood out from that of others, even my siblings. It was not deliberate. It was not an adopted dialect. It was just that words slid onto my tongue so easily, and then slipped off just as easily, words from the television, from my girlfriends, from my Internet buddies and my reading. I would stack them unconsciously in my store of daily vocabulary and they would emerge in my conversations. Even in chat rooms, I used a language that you might call neutral, unattached—or perhaps to put it more accurately, a language that was not identifiable as belonging to any one place. A mixture of dialects, where I could not pinpoint the origins or sources of the words I uttered.
The low, round table was brought out and a variety of dishes rapidly covered its surface. I heard invitations from every side, entreating me to try this dish or that one; more came my way than anyone else’s, since I was the one outsider in a group of obvious familiars. Dai finished eating before I did and got up to wash her hands, leaving me on my own for five entire minutes. Her slowness to return was suspicious and embarrassing all at once. When I finished my meal, Husna showed me around. Here were the bathroom, kitchen and a room to the side. Here was the passage that led to the swimming pool, and over there was the other corridor, on the farm side, where I had entered; here were the birdcages and animal pen. She showed me all of this through the screen door, which led from the kitchen directly outdoors. She pointed out the rows of trees and gave me their names. She began recounting happy memories of visiting a woman named Um Jawaad, who sold native roses to make a living. We were always running out of money, she said, all we got for pocket money was two riyals. The rays of the sun were so blinding that I could see nothing; she promised me that we would go out just before the sunset. We would pick sweet basil leaves and make necklaces for our mothers. Then she excused herself and left me in the chaos of the kitchen and my loneliness.
The Others Page 11