Saints and Misfits

by S. K. Ali

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  To Rahmathun Lil A’lamiin

  MISFIT

  I’m in the water. Only my eyes are visible, and I blow bubbles to ensure the rest of me stays submerged until the opportune time. Besides the lifeguard watching from his perch, there’s a gaggle of girls my age patrolling the beach with younger siblings in tow. They pace in their flip-flops and bikinis, and I wait.

  The ideal time is when no one’s around and no one’s looking. But right now there’s a little girl cross-legged on wooden bleachers peering at me from beneath a hand held aloft at her forehead, a smile on her face. I can’t tell if the smile is a result of how long she’s been watching me bob here in the water.

  To check whether she’s staring, I test her with a long gaze to the left of the bleachers, where Dad and his wife Linda are barbecuing. Their oldest son, Logan, round and berry-brown from a day in the sun, is digging a hole nearby, while the newest addition, Luke, lies on a quilt wearing a swim diaper.

  Dad said I’d love it here because the beachfront cottage they’d rented was one of the only two Cherie and Ed had let out this weekend. Secluded. Serene. Safe.

  Ha. Cherie and Ed forgot to mention that the beach portion doesn’t actually belong to them and is public property at all hours of the day. Party central.

  I look back, and, hallelujah, the girl on the bleachers is gone. There’s also a lull on the shore now. The lifeguard’s turned to talk to someone behind him, and the beach girls are on the far right, peering at a sand castle.

  I stand and cringe at the sucking sound as my swimsuit sticks to me, all four yards of the spandex-Lycra blend of it. Waterfalls gush out of the many hems on the outfit, and, as I hobble out of the lake, more secret pockets release their water. I’m a drippy, squelchy mess, stumbling toward Dad and Linda, picking up tons of sand as I move. I refuse to look around in case I see someone, everyone, watching me.

  Maybe my face reveals something, because Dad starts right away.

  “Janna, why do you have to wear that thing? You could have said, No, I’m not wearing your burkini, Mom.” He waves around long tongs as he speaks.

  “Mom didn’t get it for me. I ordered it online.”

  “I saw her hand it to you as we were packing the car.”

  “Because I’d left it on the hall table, Dad.”

  “It’s her kind of thing. What’s wrong with the way Linda’s dressed?” He snaps the tongs at Linda. She’s wearing a one-piece, just-had-a-baby, flouncy-at-the-hips number, and, really, I’d rather be in my burkini. It’s black and sleek. Sure, when it gets wet, you kind of resemble a droopy sea lion, but at least it isn’t pink and lime green like Linda’s swimsuit is.

  “Linda, you look great.” I smile at her, and she smooths out her flounces.

  “Too bad you’re not her size—she could have lent you one of her suits, right, Linda?”

  “Dad, I won’t wear it. I’m a hijabi, remember?” I take a plate and add a piece of chicken from the platter.

  “At the beach? Even at the beach?” Dad’s gesticulating again and looking around—for what, I don’t know. When he spies a woman unfolding a lounge chair nearby and starts talking louder, I realize it’s for an audience. He wants an audience while he rants at me.

  Maybe I should’ve listened to Mom and not come. My first vacation with Dad’s family since my parents split when I was eleven and it’s like I’m a visitor among the earthlings frolicking on a beach in Florida.

  Before this, I’d only spent the odd weekend here and there with Dad at his house in Chicago. I was “Daddy’s princess” back then.

  The woman in the chair listens intently as Dad lectures. Linda’s got a hand on his arm, and it’s traveling up to his shoulder with a firmer grip, but he’s still talking.

  “How come you have to hide your God-given body?” He turns a few burgers over. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and red shorts over his God-given body. “It’s not me who forces her to dress like that, that’s for sure.”

  The woman looks at me, then at Dad and opens a book.

  Linda places a hand on my glistening black back and hands me a can of pop. “I’ll get you a burger when they’re done,” she whispers.

  I move to sit on the bleachers before I realize the beach girls are sauntering this way again. I’m a swirl of sand art against a black canvas.

  I duck under the wooden slats of the seats. Cradling my plate on crossed legs, I flip back the swim cap that’s attached to my suit and undo my hair. Sand trickles down with the beads of water. Some of it falls onto my chicken.

  Flannery O’Connor, my favorite author: That’s who I need right now.

  Flannery would take me away from here and deposit me into her fictitious world crawling with self-righteous saints and larger-than-life misfits. And I’d feel okay there because Flannery took care of things. Justice got served.

  I forgot to pack her gigantic book of short stories because everything was last minute. I’d wanted to escape so badly that when Dad mentioned this trip with his family, I’d asked, “Can I come?” without thinking.

  Mom had tried to put her foot down about taking a vacation right before exams, but, luckily for me, my brother Muhammad is home for the summer from college. He talked her into letting me come. She listens to practically everything he says.

  If it had been only me telling her I needed to get away, far away from Eastspring, she would’ve talked over me.

  She didn’t know I had to get away from a monster. And the truth is no one can know.

  MONSTER

  Fizz’s house, last Sunday. Her twin sisters finished reading the whole Qur’an so there’s a party. We listen to them recite; we eat; we laugh. Then Fizz and I sneak to the basement to watch TV. After ten minutes her mom calls for Fizz to come up and say good-bye to her grandparents.

  I hang out with Rambo, Fizz’s cat, on my lap, watching a movie review. A latch clicks, dulling the sounds from upstairs. Someone must have politely closed the door.

  I’m laughing at the movie reviewer’s imitation of an actor’s wooden personality when Rambo’s head turns, making me look at the stairs.

  Fizz’s cousin.

  I stand, dropping Rambo from my lap, not even saying salaam.

  I know him, know what he wants; he’s brushed too close to me too many times at Fizz’s family events.

  He’s standing in my only path of escape.

  He comes straight toward me. No words, nothing.

  I make a sound like a mix of please and no and help. I don’t know who I’m talking to. There’s nobody but him, and he is slamming himself into me like we’re playing hockey. That’s the stupid thing I see over and over in my head: the scenes from my brother Muhammad’s extreme hockey moments video when the players slam into each other and lie tangled on the ice. Except we’re on the ugly flower sofa and it’s only one person slamming and I’m not wearing hockey gear, only a thin sweatshirt, and he’s reaching under it.

  The only screams I can muster are repeated whimpers of “Mom, Mom, Mom.” I don’t know if they float up to heaven, but as he tugs at my pants, the doorknob rattles and Fizz’s mom’s voice comes down. “Janna, open the door. The girls want to come down to watch a movie. Why is this locked?”

  He gets up and backs away, adjusting his clothing. I
run to the stairs, then stop. He’s already gone to the spare bedroom next to the TV room and shut the door. It’s only me to face everyone. Just me, Janna Yusuf, insignificant nobody, daughter of the only divorced mother at the mosque, someone whose sole redeeming feature is being friends with Fidda Noor, aka Fizz, of the famously pious Noor family. A family that boasts about Fizz’s only male cousin: a Qur’an memorizer, a beacon of light for all youth.

  I wipe my face and run upstairs to unlock the door and lock myself in the bathroom.

  SAINT

  I’m back from Florida and nothing’s changed.

  Muhammad is in front of the kitchen sink, chugging raw eggs from a carton for a new regimen he’s on. Mom comes in and starts taking things out of the fridge, like she does every morning, to assess the day’s offerings for meal options. Yellowing broccoli is on the menu today, so I pour myself a third bowl of cereal. I’m seated at the folding card table in the corner that Mom calls our “breakfast nook.”

  Muhammad wipes his mouth with the bottom of his T-shirt and turns to Mom. “So, are you calling them today?”

  I shift, hiding my interest behind the Cap’n Crunch box, and hope they forget my presence in the room. I’ve been away for three days, so maybe they’ve gotten used to my absence.

  “Called them already. Last night.” Mom assesses a shriveled turnip, squeezing as she rotates it. “They said to come by after noon prayers to discuss the date of the next meet. Maybe Wednesday if her dad can reschedule an appointment.”

  She stands up and almost gets pushed back into the open fridge. Muhammad lunges forward for a hug that makes a bear hug look dainty.

  “Thanks! I’ll go shower.” He strips his shirt off right there.

  “Ugh,” I say. Bad move. They both turn to me.

  “Aren’t you going to be late?” Mom asks. “I told you the flight last night would get in the way of school.”

  Muhammad puts his shirt back on. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No.” I get up. “I’ll walk.”

  “No, Muhammad will give you a ride,” Mom says with that voice.

  I shrug, picking up my backpack. Muhammad disappears into Mom’s room and comes back out holding car keys. He’s still in his pajama T-shirt, the one decorated with raw eggs.

  We wait for the sole reliable elevator. The other one is always stuck on the fifth or fourteenth floor. The wait for either elevator is long on our floor.

  “Who is them?” I blurt after five minutes.

  “Who?” Muhammad looks around. Sometimes I can’t believe he’s studying economics at one of the best colleges in America.

  “The them you’re going to visit. The them you’re going to shower for.”

  “Oh, you mean Sarah’s parents?” He smiles a smile I’ve never seen before.

  “Sarah? Sarah who?” Please not Saint Sarah.

  Because I know why my religious brother would want to visit a girl’s parents.

  “Sarah Mahmoud. Your study circle leader at the mosque.”

  The elevator opens so I have no time to gah.

  I get off at the lobby level with a huddle of people. The elevator closes on Muhammad’s surprised face as he travels on to the parking level on his own.

  Oh no they didn’t. That’s all I can think as I walk to school.

  My brother fell for Saint Sarah without me knowing, and my mother is helping to arrange the possibility of them getting together. For life.

  Sarah’s “sainthood” means that to bestow her gaze on my brother she needs her parents’ permission, which can only be sought once a would-be suitor has his parents call her parents to set up a series of chaperoned meetings. Even to get to know each other.

  Mom’s all for it because Saint Sarah loves Mom. Well, all mothers, apparently. When she first moved here, Saint Sarah surveyed the older women at the mosque to see what their areas of expertise were. Then she had them sign up to present things to the community. Mom did a talk on her thesis topic in college, “Patience and Forbearance as Markers of Resilience.”

  Saint Sarah: clear, glowing skin; perfectly proportioned, neat features with a big, ever-present smile flashing perfect teeth; a steely determined head; and a Mother Teresa heart. I forgot to add: The whole package is bow-tied in a billowy, diaphanous, organically grown hijab.

  There’s a very real possibility the most perfect Muslim girl on the planet may become my future sister-in-law.

  REAL SAINT

  It’s Thursday. Mr. Ram day. He lives on the floor below us. He’s old and tiny but sits up super straight like he’s the general in a wheelchair army. My job, every Thursday after school, is to wheel him to the community center for Seniors Games Club, hang out there, and wheel him back.

  Mr. Ram’s son pays me abundantly for this and the other times I spend “elder-sitting.”

  As I take him to the elevator, I compliment Mr. Ram’s clothes, to begin the walk right.

  He’s wearing a dark blue striped button-down shirt with a blue-and-white polka-dot bow tie.

  On his head is a white fedora with a navy-and-gray feather sticking out of the band.

  His shoes are a shiny black with white wing tips.

  He removes his hat and salutes my compliment. “After you,” he says as we get into the elevator, although there’s no possible way for him to go after me.

  Once outside, we proceed without talking. I make sure to go around the bumpy parts of the sidewalk, giving a wide berth so that the wheelchair is easy to maneuver. Wheelchairs are heavier than they appear, and to make them look graceful, the person pushing has to do a lot of thinking ahead. I look down most of the time, but Mr. Ram looks up, waving at people as we pass.

  When I was eleven and we first moved here, I’d go swimming at the community center at the same time as Seniors Games Club. Mr. Ram and I used to wait together for a ride back from Mom, and when he found out I was a reader, a real one, he became almost giddy. The week after, he brought along an illustrated copy of the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic.

  “The Mahabharata is about the time after the Ramayana period.” He watched me flip pages from the seat of his walker. “The Ramayana epic covers an age when it was easy for good to prevail, the lines of right and wrong being clear to see and understand. But the Mahabharata is when people knew the rules but didn’t know the whys. They forgot them.”

  “Is that why there’s a lot of fighting?” I held up a page with a chariot-filled battle scene.

  “Miss Janna, every age has had that. It appears to be a by-product of civilization.”

  “It’s like Lord of the Rings. My brother would like it.” I stopped at a picture of a woman wrapping a blindfold on herself.

  “That’s Gandhari, who wanted to share her husband’s blindness. Out of empathy,” said Mr. Ram. “You see, she did something odd but for the right reason. She knew why she was doing it.”

  “She chose not to see?”

  “For the rest of her life. Except once, when she removed the blindfold for her son.”

  “I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine doing that.”

  “It is like that wisdom about walking a mile in someone’s shoes. Her purpose was to understand another’s condition.”

  “So that makes it good?”

  “Well, it makes her intention good,” Mr. Ram said, getting up from his walker upon seeing Mom’s car pull up. “Why we do an action is what determines its quality. A quality action or not.”

  “Well, I know why Muslims do things. Like why we pray five times a day.” I closed the book and helped Mr. Ram turn his walker to face the right way to go through the doors. “It’s to remember God more.”

  Mr. Ram nodded. “Yes, Miss Janna. Because when we just do things without a why, we become husks. Easily crumpled, no fruit inside.”

  • • •

  There’s a soothing rhythm to pushing the wheelchair, and now, in the lull it offers me, the monster’s face reenters my mind. Unannounced. When I block it, his fingers appear. When I fight that,
his feet advance from the basement stairs. Each time I slay him, he reappears in parts.

  I need an eraser that fills the entire screen of my brain.

  • • •

  Mr. Ram puts up his hand. That means stop.

  Standing at the corner where our group of buildings meets the street is Sandra Kolbinsky’s grandmother, Ms. Kolbinsky. Newly arrived from Poland six months ago.

  She used to wear housecoats, but about a month ago she began wearing ankara- and kente-print dresses in dramatic color combinations. Today it’s yellow and blue. I think she thinks Mr. Ram is African.

  I stop and adjust my backpack, shifting the weight of an old clunker of a laptop.

  “Ms. Kolbinsky, I’m still waiting for you to come along with us to games club,” Mr. Ram says. “I can’t think of a better honor than walking with you.”

  She laughs. “My daughter, she still didn’t fill out the papers. She’s taking a very long time.”

  “Do you want Miss Janna to get you another form? We can do that, right, Janna?” Mr. Ram twirls his hand in a questioning gesture.

  “Yeah, sure, Ms. Kolbinsky,” I say. It’s going to be the fifth form I get for her.

  “Oh, thank you,” Ms. Kolbinsky says. “Mr. Ram, you promise me you will teach me Parcheesi when I get there?”

  “Oh yes.” Mr. Ram leans forward. “I’ll teach you until you can beat me with your eyes closed.”

  Ms. Kolbinsky giggles as I wheel ahead.

  “Miss Janna, you have two more weeks until summer vacation,” Mr. Ram says. “Are you prepared for your exams?”

  “Will be in a couple of days,” I say. “I rewrote all the important notes for every class and color coded them by relevance. Just have to study them now.”

  Mr. Ram is the only one I reveal my ultra-intense studying tendencies to. He approves.

  He also knows about my Flannery O’Connor obsession. He’d been a book editor in India before he retired so he has a lot to say about her. It’s just not the right things. He thinks she’s depressing and joyless, killing characters suddenly just when you’re getting to know them. I say she’s a kick-ass monster killer, wreaking justice on her pages.