Footsteps

by Umm Zakiyyah

  “But—”

  “Don’t ask him on e-mail. This is something you need to hear.”

  “—we don’t talk.”

  “And you shouldn’t. But this is something you’ll have to make an exception for.”

  “I don’t feel right talking to him like that.”

  “Like I said, there’s nothing for you to talk about. You’ll be only listening.”

  “But how? If you and Dad are right there, he may not say what he really thinks.”

  “Then we won’t be right there.” She smiled. “And we will be right there.”

  Aminah looked even more perplexed than before.

  “You’ll ask him on the phone,” Sarah said. “And your father and I will be sitting right next to you when you do, inshaAllaah.”

  “I want to ask you something,” Ismael said as he sat in the kitchen as Sarah loaded the dishwasher later that night. He wore a smile on his face, more because he couldn’t believe he was actually going through with this than any amusement he felt in doing what he knew he had to do.

  “Shoot,” Sarah said as she rinsed the dishes in the sink and aligned them on the machine’s rack that was pulled out next to her. She had been humming a song to herself just moments before, while he sat looking over some paperwork from work at the kitchen table. Her back was to him, and he sought comfort in the fact that he didn’t have to see her when he spoke.

  “What if,” he began, laughter interrupting even those words. He couldn’t believe he was actually saying this. He felt his heart drumming in his chest, and was oddly encouraged by the pounding. It gave him the sense that he was not doing this alone.

  “What?” Sarah smirked and glanced over a shoulder, her ponytail moving beneath the red handkerchief scarf she often wore in the kitchen. Both of her hands were immersed in the dish-filled sink, and her lower arms were wet with water, the sleeves of the long sleeved gray T-shirt she now wore pushed up to her elbows. Her jeans were cut off at her shins, and Ismael noted how relaxed she looked right then. He wished he could savor this moment for all time. Perhaps it would be the last memento in their comfortable relationship. He hoped he was wrong. He noticed that the front of her shirt was wet where it met the sink, and he couldn’t keep from smiling although he feared she wouldn’t understand the expression.

  She laughed. “What?” Her hands stilled in the sink and her eyes were slightly wide with anticipation, the expression she wore when she knew he was about to say something hilarious, or in excessive flattery of her. He hated that it would be neither this time.

  “What if,” he said, raising his voice more to drown out his heartbeat than to underscore anything he was about to say, “this amazingly beautiful woman walked up to me.” He leaned forward at the table, and Sarah giggled in anticipation. “And said, ‘Marry me’?”

  She laughed. “Then I’d shake you a lot harder and say, ‘Wake up, honey, it’s time for Fajr.’”

  He laughed because he didn’t know what else to do. After all, it was funny. All of it. But his heart wasn’t laughing, and so, technically, neither was he. Though, externally, he betrayed that fact. The pounding was becoming more incessant as he realized that he was moving backwards, not forward, in opening this subject. “No, seriously.” He couldn’t keep from chuckling. “I mean, let’s say she’s a good Muslim and you like her a lot. What would you do?”

  “You mean seriously?” Sarah’s amused expression did not match her inquiry, but Ismael counted it as a step in the right direction.

  “Yeah, seriously.” He brought his hands together by interlocking his fingers as he waited for an answer.

  “How old is she?”

  He hadn’t thought of that. He bit his lower lip as he considered it. “Thirty,” he said finally, as if he were making this all up on the spot. He decided against mentioning anything in the twenties. It would make the woman sound as if she were a child, given that their own children were in this age range—albeit on the lower end.

  “And you say I like her?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Does she have children?”

  He creased his forehead and pursed his lips playfully. “Uh, let’s say, hm.” He paused. “No.”

  “Has she been married before?”

  “Maybe once,” he said although he knew Alika had never been. But he feared that piece of information, even if only hypothetical, would make it impossible for Sarah to consider the idea. He imagined her jealousy would be fierce. And, in a way, he couldn’t blame her. Neither he nor she had lived an upright life before accepting Islam.

  “Hm,” he heard her saying as she returned to her washing. “I’d have to say I’d be one unhappy camper, to tell you the truth.” She glanced over her shoulder, still smiling, a sign that either she was being serious and playful, or only playful.

  “Why unhappy? You’d still have me.”

  He heard her laugh out loud, tossing her head back with the sound. “Yeah, me divided by two. I don’t think so.”

  “You could never be divided by two, Sarah, even if I had fifty wives.”

  “Well, good thing the limit’s only four, because I wouldn’t want to live to see you prove that.”

  They were silent for a few minutes, and the only sounds that could be heard were the running water and the clanking of glass and silverware as she placed them into the washer.

  “But what if you did live to see me prove it,” he said, a trace of humor still in his voice. “Would you let me?”

  “Let you?” Laughter was in her voice. “I don’t see how I’d have any choice.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said playfully, “because it’s your decision.”

  “You really think it’s that simple?”

  “Of course it’s that simple.” She set the last bowl in the machine and turned off the faucet. The kitchen grew uncomfortably silent for the few seconds it took her to dry her hands on a towel then squeeze Cascade into the machine, Ismael finding comfort in that sound. She closed the door of the washer, turned the knob, and the sound of the machine humming and its water running relieved the awkwardness he felt in the quiet.

  “It’s your marriage, not mine,” she said, crossing her arms with a grin as she leaned her back against the sink. “Yes, and it would be that simple for me too. Because I’d simply leave you.”

  Ismael heard himself laughing at her words, finding them ridiculous. But unable to escape their portending his current fate if he did what he planned. “You can’t be serious.”

  She smiled broadly until she showed her teeth. “Try me.”

  “Oh, come on. You wouldn’t throw away twenty-six years of marriage just like that.”

  “Twenty-six? So this is a fairy tale you’re actually imagining right now?” She laughed and sauntered playfully to the table with her arms still crossed as she swung them slightly with her approach. She stood before him now, resting her palms flat on the table so she could lean into his face wearing a playful smirk. “Oh, the dreams of men. What a pity.”

  “Don’t tease me, sweetheart,” Ismael said, this time sensing his forced laughter was not concealing his true fears. “I’m not joking.”

  “I’m going to bed,” she said, humming on her way out the kitchen. She halted briefly at the doorway to turn out the light. The room grew dark suddenly, the only light the dim glow from a single low voltage bulb on the foyer’s ceiling, which they often left on so they could see their way at night.

  Ismael stood. “Sarah,” he called, trying to sound as calm and amused as he wanted to be right then. “Wait.”

  He heard her humming grow louder as she ascended the steps until it became a song. “These are a few of my favorite things.”

  “Sarah.”

  “When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad,” she sang the lyrics from the movie “The Sound of Music.” She wore a smug grin as she glanced over her shoulder where he followed behind her on the steps, Ismael knowing he looked as pathetically ho
peless as he felt. “I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel, so baaaaad.”

  Sarah woke in the middle of the night with a start. She sat up, placing her hand over her heart to calm its pounding, and she squinted toward the clock. The glowing red digits told her it was 3:14. She blinked in the darkness and sought comfort in the familiar room. Next to her, Ismael slept with his back to her, facing the clock on the nightstand. She hated when he slept on his left side. He always started out on his right, as did she, but when they woke in the morning, she saw that they were back-to-back.

  She sighed, studying the gentle rise and fall of his broad shoulder beneath his T-shirt. He seemed so helpless and defenseless right then. Although she didn’t know what he needed to defend himself against. It was only a dream, she reminded herself in the still room. But she couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that it was somehow real.

  In the dream, she was planning Sulayman and Tamika’s walimah and was excited when she was finally done. She was bragging to Kate and her family about it, but when they walked into the ballroom, she realized there was already a wedding going on, so she couldn’t use the hotel that night. Suddenly, Kate was in front of the room wearing a traditional white wedding gown. Sarah felt confused and wanted to protest, telling her sister not to marry the Syrian, to wait until she could find a husband of her own. But Sarah was distracted as she realized that it was a young version of Kate, as youthful and innocent as she remembered her sister to be in her mid-twenties. Although Sarah couldn’t see her own self in the dream, she knew she was her current age, almost fifty, like her husband had said, and she was extremely conscious of her gray hair. She was feeling sad about Ismael’s comment when she looked up and saw him standing opposite Kate. She felt her heart about to burst, and she ran up to them, tears of sadness and anger running down her cheeks. But a security guard stopped her, telling her she couldn’t come in. “It’s a private ceremony,” he said, taking her by the arm and forcing her out the room. “Only close friends and family are invited.” She tried to tell him she was family. But the man kept saying, “Sorry, miss, but your name’s not on the list.” In desperation, she pled with him, telling him that was her husband, it really was. The security guard, she noticed just then, was her brother Justin and he said, “Not anymore.”

  “How could you do this to me?” she nearly growled in protest, now outside the hotel in the dark night. And it was cold.

  “I’m not doing anything, sis,” Justin said, looking away from her, as if he felt too much pity to look her in the eye. “You’re doing this to yourself.”

  “I am not! Let me in! You’re stopping me! Look at you!” He moved to block her way, his arms crossed authoritatively.

  “Look at yourself, sis.”

  “I just want to go inside. That’s my sister in there.”

  “If you want to join them, Sarah,” he said a moment before his body was flattened to a glass plane, which then became a mirror reflecting her own face, and it was her lips that moved as Justin’s voice said, “then you’ll just have to learn to share.”

  Chapter Seven

  Shall I speak of how it closed my lips

  And opened my ears

  Or how it cooled my anger

  And filled my eyes with tears

  Or shall I speak of how it stilled my tongue

  And moved my heart

  Of how it held my hand,

  Withheld me… from falling apart

  Or how my heart dances to soft beats

  In my chest

  Or how the Words protect me

  Before a night’s rest

  Or shall I speak of my hope

  That is with me still

  Or how I believe with certainty

  Because it is all so real

  Or shall I speak of how it closed my lips

  And moved my heart

  Or how it cleansed me

  And made me whole…part by part

  Khadijah returned the sheet of paper to its place on the dining table at Tamika’s apartment early Wednesday afternoon. She took a sip from the can of diet cola in front of her, eyes still grazing the words.

  “It’s good,” she said to Tamika, who sat across from her awaiting feedback. “But I don’t know if we should use it for Friday.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. But it’s all I have.”

  “When’d you write it?” Khadijah picked up the paper again and read the words.

  “About a year ago.”

  “I wish I had the idea to write my parents a poem when they started trippin’. They still think it’s some phase, and I been Muslim for six years.”

  “I never showed it to my family.”

  Khadijah’s forehead creased as she looked at Tamika. “Why not?”

  Tamika shrugged, apparently unable, or unwilling, to share too much. “It’s more for me than them, though it was because of them, if you know what I mean.”

  Khadijah drank the cola in silence as she thought about what Tamika had said. “Why’d you become Muslim?” She didn’t look at Tamika when she asked the question, and instead let her gaze follow the can she was bringing to her lips. She finished the drink and set the can in front of her and noticed how Tamika started to lift a shoulder in a shrug.

  “I lived with Aminah at Streamsdale, and she told me a lot about it.”

  When Tamika didn’t continue, Khadijah nodded reflectively, concealing her heightened curiosity. “That where you took your shahaadah?”

  “Yeah.” Tamika reached for the sheet of paper and lifted it to assess what she had written.

  Khadijah studied the young woman whom her husband wanted to marry less than two years before. Tamika wore her hair down with a folded navy blue handkerchief tied as a headband to hold her shoulder-length hair away from her face. Her eyes were her most distinct trait, their brown shades lighter than the honey skin tone that she and Khadijah shared, though Khadijah couldn’t help feeling a tinge of jealousy that her own complexion was not as smooth. Tamika’s slim build was also a contrast to Khadijah’s thick frame that had often intimidated students in her high school, where she was just one inch shy of her now five-foot-nine height—four inches taller than Tamika and one inch shorter than Omar. Khadijah imagined Tamika was popular in high school, known for her striking appearance, which could have easily earned her “best-looking” in the senior class or candidacy for homecoming or prom queen. She had that look. Yet there was this nonchalance about her that suggested she was either unaware that she was attractive or that she placed too little value on superficial traits to see what others saw.

  She and Khadijah would not have been friends in high school, this Khadijah knew with certainty. Girls like Tamika had inspired in her a furious distaste for school and its theatrics of academics and popularity. Ironically, school was not the least bit challenging to Khadijah—Angela, even when she was assigned to the advanced placement classes filled with the school’s top students, most of whom had been “tracked” as gifted and talented since elementary school.

  Angela’s rage, and rebellion, took root in middle school, when she and those around her were plagued with dramatic hormonal and physical changes that seemed to transform them to completely different people overnight. Angela had been so self absorbed due to her sudden acne, widening hips, and towering height that it had taken her to the end of eighth grade to sense that she were somehow invisible. Her transparency, as she would learn a year later, was not invisibility at all, but strategic sidelining by the adults and students that she had trusted. Of course, then, she had trusted them only because trust was not yet a concept or privilege to her, but more like the human’s eating or breathing, it was merely the way of things.

  Tamika and Angela would not have been friends because the tragic world of favoritism and injustice would have rendered such a thing impossible, even in the face of Tamika’s innocence and sincerity. Tamika would have been, as it were, collateral damage in the catastrophe of tawdry and unjust academic plots t
hat, in Khadijah’s view, were the very heart of the society’s education system. Tamika would have been a victim too, no doubt, but Angela would not have realized that at the time.

  “Why’d you convert?” Tamika asked.

  Khadijah smiled dryly. “It’s a long story.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  It wasn’t that she thought Tamika would grow bored from a long-winded telling, but that she doubted she could be completely honest in her recollection. There were no gaps in Khadijah’s memory, and she would not lie. But she feared that she would not be able to tell the truth either. Like Tamika’s story, hers was a story of spiritual awakening inspired by tragedy. Though the tragedy in Khadijah’s life could not be pinpointed to one night. It was slow, measured decadence of Angela’s innocence and promise, though she now doubted that the latter was a trait any human had, but rather, hope.

  “It was mainly Umm Barakah,” Khadijah said. But she knew that was only partly true.

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “At the masjid.” And that was true. But at the time, Angela was looking for a temple of the Nation of Islam, and not because she was soul-searching, but because she had found what would give outlet to the rage she felt inside. She needed only the address.

  “Really?” Tamika’s eyes widened. “So you went there on your own?”

  Khadijah laughed to herself. “Yeah. I did.”

  “Were you Christian at the time?”

  She forced laughter. “If you wanna call it that.”

  “Your family wasn’t religious?”

  “Too religious if you ask me,” Khadijah said, rolling her eyes as she remembered how her mother lived and breathed the church. But by the end of Angela’s junior year, Rhonda had given up on her daughter’s soul. She hadn’t been able to convince Angie to keep a curfew of 10:00, let alone wake up on Sunday morning to put on a dress. And Angie hated dresses. At least she had begun to hate them during middle school. To the young Angela, God and religion—at least how they were taught—were parts of the superstitious world of adults, her mother and father, and her teachers, counselors, and principal.