by Mia Alvar
It would be his first missed day of work in the time I’d known him. The next morning I chopped ginger and boiled chicken for Ed’s soup while Aroush took her morning nap and played peekaboo with her while he watched television. “These women!” I could hear him chuckle from the den, where he watched Dynasty while I changed Aroush’s diaper. “They’re something else!” The lid on the pot of rice began to rattle.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, standing in the doorway of the den with Aroush in my arms. On-screen the wife and ex-wife of the same man were waist-deep in a lily pond, clawing at each other. “Can you keep an eye on Aroush while I get your lugaw ready?”
“Where’s she going to go?” said Ed.
“Just watch her. Please.” He reluctantly followed me into the living room, where I set Aroush down in her recliner. When Ed approached her, as one would a curiosity in a museum, I couldn’t help but feel protective. “Don’t get too close,” I said.
Ed stopped and held his hands up.
I smiled. “I don’t want her to catch your cold, that’s all.”
In the kitchen I added rice to the broth and shredded the cooked chicken from the bone with a fork. The porridge was close to done when Aroush screamed—the strained, desperate sound I had heard only once before. I dropped the ladle.
In the living room Ed was crouched over Aroush with the spray bottle. Her body had stiffened at the knees and elbows.
“Don’t!” I ran and knelt to shield Aroush’s body with mine. Mist from the bottle landed on the nape of my neck.
“I wanted to see for myself,” he said. I picked Aroush up, her wet cheek against mine, and backed us both away from Ed. He looked like the child who has just learned to throw salt on a garden slug and watch it implode. “You’re right—it’s uncanny. She’s got something against that spray bottle.”
I glared at him, rocking Aroush. His eyes were bloodshot, and I could imagine the brain behind them, busy at the work of redrafting. Updating his diagram, based on new data before him. Arrows pointing in directions he had not foreseen; an invisible line along the living room carpet, with him on one side and us on the other. Ed stood, and the spray bottle toppled to its side. I turned from him, shielding Aroush as he walked across the living room. Her skin and dress were damp.
“Sally, you never wanted a child,” he said. Sweat trembled on his forehead and above his lip, despite the air-conditioning. “Now, all of a sudden, you want one? I’ve stopped being enough for you? All because you made this limp, drooling, delayed child smile?”
Of course he had heard me, even in his sleep; why should I be surprised? All my life I had heard wives complain of husbands who paid no attention to them. Why couldn’t I appreciate mine? “Go and rest,” I said in a voice I hoped sounded calm. “I’ll bring you your lugaw in a minute.”
He went, trailing a sweaty odor behind him. I swayed in place until Aroush’s body relaxed against mine. It was Wednesday. In a few hours Mrs. Mansour would pick her up, leaving me alone with Ed in this house for the weekend.
—
The following Saturday, Aroush was late. By nine o’clock she had yet to arrive. I turned on the television. Had Mrs. Mansour somehow found out what Ed and I had done? I wanted an Annie Sullivan for my Aroush, I imagined her saying, her fine, aristocratic face hardened against me, but now I find you are hurting rather than helping her. I watered the plants, dusted the shelves, dried the dishes. I configured the toys in the living room, then dismantled the arrangements and started over. Finally, when it was nearly eleven and time for Aroush’s morning nap, the gate bell chimed.
A yellow blanket had been thrown over her shoulder and Aroush, but Mrs. Mansour herself was not covered. “We are very sorry to be late, Teacher,” she said, hurrying in from the gate. She wore a pale green caftan over trousers, and no veil. Her black hair was gathered in a low ponytail. I saw that she had skipped her makeup, too, from the pallor of her lips and the naked circles around her eyes, which resembled stains. The rest of her skin, from her long neck to her hairline, still had its soft alabaster clarity.
Aroush was already asleep. Mrs. Mansour laid her on the nap mat and sat on an armchair close by, catching her breath. “We rushed so not to be late,” she said.
“Would you like some coffee?” I asked. I had never offered Mrs. Mansour coffee before, but I would have offered it to any woman in my house who looked as pale and exhausted as she did that day. “It isn’t strong like Arabic coffee. But you are welcome to some.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Yes.”
In the kitchen I fixed a tray with two cups of hot water and a jar of the instant Nescafé that Ed and I usually drank. The spoons rattled on the saucers as I brought the tray to the living room. I was strangely shy, like a child heading to the master bedroom on Mother’s Day. “It isn’t Arabic coffee,” I repeated apologetically, setting the tray down in front of her.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mansour, reaching for the jar and spoon. It appeared that she had drunk instant coffee in the homes of foreigners before. She sipped at great length, closed her eyes, then looked across the coffee table at me and smiled.
Again I felt apologetic, this time for being caught staring. “I’m not used to seeing you without the veil,” I explained.
“Nor I.” She laughed. “I never veiled until nineteen years old, when I married and came to Bahrain. Now I feel strange without.” She touched her hair and looked wistful.
I began to stir my own cup of coffee to direct my eyes elsewhere.
“My staff have gone on strike,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Three servants left to do the work of twelve. On the weekend I could not go to London. I have to stay with Aroush. That is why we are so tired.”
“You could have called me,” I said. I was surprised to learn the union had gone radical after all. I hadn’t opened a newspaper or spoken to Minnie in days. All weekend long, it was Ed who had required all my attention and reassurance. Had things changed, he wanted to know, since I started working for Mrs. Mansour? Between him and me? Did I feel that he had changed? No, I virtually pleaded with him, nothing had changed; I wanted him to believe, as ever, that I was on his team. “You never wanted a child,” he said again, as proof. At first I tried to claim I had never said anything about a child. Then I admitted that I had said it, but hadn’t meant it—I had been sleepy and half-dreaming, like him, at the time. All the while I reassured him, I tried not to watch his mouth, forming its receiving O toward the food on his fork, then closing when the food fell back onto his plate with a splash. All the while I tried not to consider what it would mean if I did want a child, but not with him. And all the while I longed for Saturday, the start of the workweek, when he would be back at the pipeline and I would be alone with Aroush.
“I could have watched her for you,” I said to Mrs. Mansour. “I would have taken Aroush off your hands this weekend.”
“Oh, Teacher, I did not think of it.” Mrs. Mansour looked genuinely surprised at the idea. “You are Teacher, not baby nurse.” Was I flattered by this distinction, between my work and a servant’s?
From her cot Aroush snored once. We both looked over. She stirred but did not open her eyes.
“Teacher, do you believe in tests?”
“Tests?” Again I panicked, thinking of standardized tests, the kind that would evaluate Aroush’s progress under my teaching. She’d found me out. And now Mrs. Mansour wanted to measure how much improvement fifty dinars an hour bought. “Of course tests will be important,” I said, “to gauge her development in the future. But we don’t want to place too much emphasis, too early, on—”
Mrs. Mansour shook her head. “For example, God, He takes away everything that you have. Or oppositely, he give you riches and gold. Tests.”
“Oh,” I said, “tests from God.” I took a sip of coffee. “You think the workers’ strike is a test?”
“Not the strike. Aroush,” she said. “My husband, he says she is a test. A trial from God, which one day He will r
eward us for this difficulty. My parents, they think she is adhab. A punishment. Pentance, Teacher, in your Book.”
Whether she meant penance, or penitence, or repentance, I understood.
Mrs. Mansour said she no longer spoke to her parents. Having a child like Aroush served her right, her father had said, for marrying into the wrong sect, for following her nose to the vulgar smell of oil money, for abandoning her war-torn country to live an easy life of leather floors and marble ceilings in a mansion on the Persian Gulf. “I am happy most days,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Most days Aroush, she is my little miracle. But sometimes…this weekend, she cried and cried. She would not stop. And I…” She paused, then whispered, “I wanted to be in London. In the shops. Away from her.” I could hear a hot tremble in her voice. “So maybe it is true. Maybe I am being punished.”
“No.” I meant this, though my voice rang false. Lately I’d been dreading when Mrs. Mansour might catch me in my lies and scold me, as any boss would a dishonest worker. But she treated me like a god. As a teacher in the Philippines I’d often felt myself at the mercy of mothers; Mrs. Mansour was the first mother I had known to put herself at my mercy. I saw more clearly how much power she had given me, the damage I could do, her dependence on what I chose to say.
“Tell me, Teacher, what kind of mother thinks her daughter is punishment?” Mrs. Mansour turned up her hands. The henna had faded to the slightest of traces. She seemed to be exposing to me some raw layer underneath the jewelry, designer clothes, and potions: her flesh, not an idea. Deceiving Mrs. Mansour had revealed to me a Mrs. Mansour who was not so easy to deceive. And loving her child made it harder still. No better moment to come clean with her than now.
But “you can be forgiven for thinking that” was all I offered. Then I added, softly, “No one ever sat with a howling child and didn’t think for a moment she might be in hell.”
Mrs. Mansour set her half-finished coffee cup on the tray. “Thank you, Teacher.” Her voice had cooled. “You say the perfect words to give me hope always.” She stood and bid Aroush and me a good day. By the time she returned for her daughter in the afternoon, she had put on her sunglasses and her veil. Her lipstick and henna had been freshened. Hard to imagine, then, the wan, depleted woman who’d accepted coffee in my living room that morning.
—
A Filipina maid ended the strike by jumping from the third-story window of her employer’s home in Riffa. She had been new to the country, said the Manama Times, and so had no local friends to suggest reasons for her suicide. She left no note. The “union” organizers refocused on finding the girl’s family and raising the funds to fly her body home for burial. Eleven workers who had walked out of their employers’ homes were dismissed for breach of contract. Six went home to the Philippines.
As for Minnie, she had changed her mind at the last minute and gone on working. “I got scared,” she said. “It’s not just the money. Of course I thought of the people back home, but also: what would I do with myself if I wasn’t working? What would I do with my hands? It’s for young people, these rallies, this strike.”
We were entering a classroom in the Awali neighborhood school, which allowed us to give a memorial service there when the country’s only Catholic church, owing to the way the girl had died, would not. It was a kindergarten classroom, with an alphabet scroll above its blackboard and artwork pinned to a clothesline. More Filipinos crowded into it than the girl, twenty years old, had probably known intimately in her lifetime. The union leaders handed each of us a white taper candle, and we passed a flame along until the whole room flickered. Minnie and I glanced at the Xeroxed program and joined in the opening song, a show tune about rainbows. Since none of us had known the girl, the union leaders took it upon themselves to stand and eulogize her, giving us tidbits from the cassettes and posters and other belongings found in the room that she had occupied for less than a month. She was born in Tarlac. An older brother had gone to Hong Kong for work some years before she herself left home. “She loved all American movies,” read one of the union leaders from an index card, “and even saved her ticket stub from the time she saw Blind Date at the Royal Theater.”
The sob was out of my throat before I could swallow it. I dropped the program into Minnie’s lap and gave her my candle, then covered my face with both hands and wept like a child. Unable to stop, I stood and rushed down the aisle between rows of Filipinos staring from their tiny chairs, thinking, most likely, that the dead girl and I had been close.
I walked past the doors of other classrooms, trying to find my breath. The school building formed a horseshoe around a grassy playground. I sat down on a swing and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Faintly, I could hear the classroom congregation shuffling to stand and sing another song.
Minnie followed a few moments later and sat on the swing next to mine. We swung together in that slight, noncommittal way, our feet on the ground. She turned herself around, twisting the chains over each other, then lifted her feet to spin them untwisted. “I know how you feel,” she said gently. “I think everybody in there is feeling it. Will I die alone, with no one to mourn me but a bunch of strangers in a classroom? Will anybody even remember who I was?”
I dried my eyes and murmured some agreement. In fact, I had not been thinking of that at all. In my mind I was seeing only Aroush’s tumored hands, the droop of her head. “Can you imagine,” I said to Minnie, “if you had to go on living after your life had stopped? If, at a certain age, that was it—the best you’d ever do—the most you’d ever accomplish?”
“I can,” said Minnie. I knew she was thinking still of the girl who died. “I was eighteen when I came here. I’m forty now. I’ve never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses.” Minnie turned to look toward the parking lot, so that even years later I would wonder if I’d heard correctly what came next. “I’ll probably die in uniform”—she sighed regretfully—“with a dustrag in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.”
I squinted, then squeezed my eyes shut. I shook my head. Small, deferential Minnie, who’d backed out of a peaceful strike: she could not be capable of it. I coughed, thinking I might choke, my eyes burning. At the same time, my vision seemed sharper, clearer than before.
Minnie wasn’t dead to me after that; in fact what she became was more alive than ever, revealed to me in new textures and colors. I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions no one, until now, had seen. She’d been silently striking all along; she didn’t need my protection. What arrogance, to think I should take up her cause, even the score. I was no smarter than a child, who didn’t understand nuances. She was not my mother. (And God only knew, of course, what little mutinies my own mother had waged, in secret: the better life she’d planned for me could not have been enough to get her through her own, every day.)
I had to believe that my friend had suffered, that humiliations I could barely imagine drove her to cruelty. You’ve been through a lot, I could say, but the child isn’t the one who put you through it. Of course Aroush would be the one to pay the price; Aroush, the only one less powerful than Minnie, the only one who couldn’t punish Minnie back. Aroush, who’d done nothing to deserve punishment.
I did not, in that Awali playground, tell Minnie that her suffering was not Aroush’s fault, or that her rich employer was a human being too. I drove her home, and then myself. At dinner, I did not tell Ed to spare me his pronouncements about the Bumbai and Arabo. Their theories had had years to harden; my love for Aroush and sympathy toward Mrs. Mansour couldn’t topple them in one day. All I knew to do, and had to do immediately, was right my own mistake.
—
I invited Mrs. Mansour to spend an afternoon with Aroush and me by the small kidney-shaped pool in our compound. “Parents’ Day,” I said. The kindergarten classroom, with its finger paintings and bulletin boards, had made me nostalgic for a “real” school. A glimpse into our days together wo
uld prepare Mrs. Mansour nicely for the truth. If she could see her daughter’s actual education with her own eyes, she would find joy in Aroush as she was, aim for humbler milestones, no less miraculous for being within reach.
Mrs. Mansour had dressed Aroush in a ruffled pink bathing suit and waterproof swim diaper. “Thank you for bringing us here,” she said, when I unlocked the gate to the swimming pool. “This is quite a nice vacation.”
She was being polite. Surely there was nothing the Astroturf and cement walls had over the boutiques of Bond Street. I eased Aroush’s arms into a pair of orange water wings and brought her car seat to the edge of the pool so that her feet touched the surface. Her toenails were painted a dark beet color. I splashed her right foot into the water, then her left, causing her to smile and shiver.
Mrs. Mansour removed her sunglasses and applauded. I took Aroush from her car seat and submerged her to the waist, supporting her against my chest. We faced Mrs. Mansour. I cradled her against one arm and flicked water from my fingers onto her neck and face. She blinked and smiled again. Holding her that close, and smelling the particular warmth of her scalp, I almost lost my nerve, tempted to keep the truth, and the real Aroush, to myself.
“Teacher,” Mrs. Mansour called, “when first I see you, I know you are the right one for Aroush. From looking at you—so independent, so able—I know you are a modern woman.”
I bowed my head. Again my eyes hurt as if they’d been blinded and gained total clarity all at once. The sun winked in a million facets off the water. I could hear every slight movement that Aroush and I made through it.
“This is how I will like my girl to be. Alive in the world. I would like that she understand business, understand computers, understand politics.”
The locks at Aroush’s hairline had begun to curl from moisture, and I had to speak.
“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “I’m afraid I have not been completely forthright with you.”
“Forth right?” she said casually, settling back into her chair.