‘Do you like SpongeBob?’ she asks.
‘He’s funny.’
‘I like Iron Man. What about Hannah Montana?’
‘Girls always like Hannah Montana. Isn’t that silly?’
This minor difference of opinion quickly turns into a sharp exchange accompanied by an anxious swinging of legs, and words like ‘dumb’, ‘stupid’, and ‘freaky’ fly around the room. They were two kids who had never laid eyes on each other before, then suddenly discovered that they were sharing a couch and decided to make the best of it.
She is still observing them intently when the knock comes again at the door. The tiny blonde woman is back. Her nose is still red from crying and there is no mistaking the miserable expression on her face. She speaks in the same neutral tone. ‘Excuse me again. Can you call my daughter? Thanks.’ The girl leaves quietly, just as she had come. They descend the narrow wooden staircase together and disappear forever. No more will she see her going up or coming down, or hear her athletic body bouncing on the bed right above her head. After that, her upstairs neighbour’s movements grow slower than usual. Even the sound of running water in his bathroom trickles into nothing. She wonders whether he has moved out of the building altogether, or killed himself. Utter silence reigns above the ceiling of her room. It takes him a long time to return to his normal self. She starts seeing him again as she leads her son by the hand to school. She sees him parking his bike downstairs and carrying the six-pack of beer up to his apartment late at night. Sometimes they meet by chance and he will nod at her briefly. Once in a while he’ll say a few words: ‘The weather is gorgeous today’ or ‘How’s your son? Does he like New York?’
*
The spring breezes pass over Flatbush Avenue and her son spends more and more of his time playing chess and watching Iron Man and SpongeBob on TV. Every evening, for an hour or so, she sits outside the building on the wooden bench in front of Coco Bar and watches the world go by on the broad avenue. The bench is frequented by smokers and dog-walkers, or joggers catching their breath after a long run. She sits alone and watches the passers-by, drinking coffee and smoking her cigarette. Her upstairs neighbour passes by and stops to chat. ‘Do you like to dance? Have you ever tried tango or salsa?’ She gets the impression that he’s asking her out on a date. She sees his face up close for the first time. He looked to be about sixty, but the setting sun makes him look older in spite of his tall, athletic build. She tries to smile in response to his friendly question. ‘I’d like to, but I’ve never had the chance. I didn’t even dance on my wedding day. I sat on a chair and watched my husband dance with every one of my friends.’ He chuckles at this, and she realises that there’s more to him than meets the eye. She finds out that his name is Charlie. ‘There are schools for dancing, you know.’ He hands her a card and says that he’s a dance instructor and that he’d be happy to give her some lessons – for free, of course. She nods her head. ‘Alright, maybe,’ she murmurs. She is growing tired of watching other people living. She decides that maybe it’s time to start colouring her hair again and getting out a bit.
The first time she goes to the spacious dance studio with the gleaming parquet floor she feels a thrill at seeing her face, smiling and happy, reflected back at her in so many mirrors. She stares at the body that was a stranger to her. Ever since the day of her first period, her body has been an obscure question mark. Unlike her girlfriends, for her the onset of puberty came relatively late. In class the girls talked about their cramps and the flow of blood and compared the size of their growing breasts. Hend always tried to make herself invisible in these gatherings; she feigned total indifference, even though she had memorised the entire chapter on reproductive anatomy in her biology textbook. The biology teacher said, ‘I’m not going to explain this particular lesson in class. Read it at home.’ The girls giggled in low voices. The drawings of the male reproductive organs in the book astonished and frightened them. The chapter was at the very end, after the chapters on the digestive, respiratory, and nervous systems. It was appended to the chapter on cell division. Normal everyday words took on unprecedented sexual meanings: ‘the tube’; ‘the socket’; ‘male and female’. But the words that unsettled Hend most were the ones that came from her geography book: innocent words like ‘topography’ and ‘plains and valleys’ suddenly began to give off the smell of sex. She quickly discovered that she was the only one of her classmates who hadn’t yet been visited by ‘the sculptor of girls’ – that master craftsman of folk legend who chisels out the curves of waists and breasts and bellies and buttocks, adding a touch here and there to the planes of the face, along with a smattering of pimples.
When her period finally came, it was brown, like coffee; just a few dark spots she discovered in her underwear. Later, it was like rivers of dark red blood, and she had to use loads of those cloth rags that her mother kept hidden in the bathroom. A single swollen pimple appeared on the tip of her nose every month. It would come and then go, and her body would return to normal, her face resuming its placid roundness. She began to develop a new relationship with her bodily fluids. She became obsessed with fantastic love stories and poems about solitude and longing and passionate embraces. She took perverse pleasure in the explosive fits of weeping that came over her, and in contemplating the mysterious rhythms produced by her hormones and the pimples full of watery pus. She did not love her body and she had never thought about it much before. She came to understand that the violent emotions that seized her were cyclic, tied to the paired ebb and flow of hormones and planets. Hers was a water sign: she was born to be curious, timid, dreamy, and delusional. It was a pretty hopeless sign all in all, despite its tendency to selflessness and empathy.
Hend’s periods stopped when she was thirty-three years old, for reasons that she understood only later. On a day like all the others, she came out of her bedroom holding the baby’s bottle; the baby who slept curled in a ball between them on the bed that smelled of talcum powder and saliva, of urine and sweat and vomit, of medicines for fever and indigestion. The bedspread was covered with stains, and patches of desiccated milk spotted her blouse. She went into the kitchen and put the water and anise leaves in the kettle. As she waited for the tea to boil she wandered into his study and began to poke around in his open desk drawer. Her hand immediately fell upon a packet of letters. All she remembers now from those letters are a few passionate phrases that he had written to some woman or other. The baby began to cry, the tea boiled over and the milk in her breast burned. She went back into the bedroom and tore up the letters into tiny pieces over his sleeping, twitching body, then she began to hit him with both her hands. ‘Get up! Get out! I don’t want to see you in this house ever again.’
So he left, and then he came back with angry excuses. The ‘lapse’ became a string of repeated lapses, and they ceased to shock her. The bouts of hysterical weeping turned to stony silence, and the silence to repulsion. Then the repulsion became a hard, resigned detachment. It was during this time that her periods became shorter and less frequent, and Hend discovered that the sticky liquid – that irritating guest – was deeply connected to her body’s well-being, much like the milk that seeped out from her nipples at inexplicable and inconvenient times.
*
The dance studio is panelled with mirrors. She can see her body clearly in them. She ponders the old scar underneath her eyes, the one that used to make her feel shy all the time, the one that she was always trying to hide in her childhood. She would stand in front of the mirror and place her hand on her cheek to erase it from the image in the glass. She tried yogurt-and-honey face masks, and all kinds of exfoliating creams. After each experiment, the image looking back at her from the mirror would be sharper. She pored over the beauty pages in magazines and diligently researched the best concealing foundations. In later years it became more pronounced, like a scabby wound stamped on her cheek right under the eye, an area that all the beauty experts warned was especially sensitive. Every year she would note wi
th surprise that the scar had gotten worse, and that, as the wrinkles accumulated on her face, it became a broad convex arc. She told herself sardonically that it was her very own beauty mark and that it made her face unforgettable.
And she actually began to believe it. She took to decorating it with a tiny pencilled mole – a mole like the one the voluptuous actress Mimi Shakib wore in old Egyptian movies, a perfectly round mole that looked like a stain spreading miserably inside the scar. She rubbed in more foundation creams and thought about getting it surgically removed. Maybe she would get a nose job and collagen injections for her lips while she was at it. Perhaps she should pluck her eyebrows to give them a nice high arch. That would mean she’d have to change the colour of her hair and her contact lenses too. Her dreams of a brand-new body never materialised, of course. Her belly grew big with the baby and she spent all her time after that chasing after the crawling infant and feeding him and poring over the resemblance between his little face and her grown one: the same receding upper lip, the same slightly prominent nose and thick eyebrows joined at the middle. He would put his hand on her scar and ask, ‘What’s this, Mama?’ When she hugged him she discovered that the curves of his spine and his fingers were shaped exactly like hers. Her child feels her scar with his palm and kisses it, then runs off to grow up on his own, leaving her behind. She frets about her body’s other imperfections – the flabby flesh around her stomach, the muscles grown slack from pregnancy and childbirth.
She examines her body as though she’s never seen it before. She ponders its little scars and defects, all more noticeable now in the short dress she’s wearing: stitches in the knee after falling off a swing at her uncle’s house, a break in the right arm when she’d climbed their front gate in one of her attempts to escape, a burn on the back of her hand from the first time she’d fried potatoes, droopy eyelids from plucking the brows over and over, rolls of flesh around the stomach that used to be tight-knit bands of muscle holding him firmly in place when he was a fetus, the old scar under her eye. She watches her face moving through all those mirrors: features stripped of all their usual veils, wrinkled by the months and years, leaving Hend with the profound feeling that her life is now all behind her.
Charlie takes her by the hand and begins to teach her the first steps: ‘One, two, three, four.’ He is unusually tall and he doesn’t move like an old man at all. His body is sinewy and graceful. She turns in circles a few times, getting her steps mixed up, not knowing where to look – at her feet or at the mirrors? Or at his face? He moves amongst the students in the group, pulling them close to him one by one, as though they were all his lovers: ‘One, two, three, four.’ Everyone settles into the rhythmic movements – she is the only one who keeps making the same mistakes, and the knowledge of it makes her even more confused and clumsy. The dance seems to her like a string of mistakes repeated with the same obstinate stupidity. It is exactly like her life: a game in which two people come together and move apart according to strict rules regulating momentum and balance. She can’t quite grasp the requisite equilibrium and she stumbles again and again. She has never liked the game in real life and she doesn’t like it as a formal dance either. She just cannot bring herself to let a man take her by the hand and hold her in his arms, and she cannot believe that all she has to do is to respond slowly and gracefully. A step back and a step forward. She turns in helpless circles and loses her balance. She suspects that everyone is laughing at her. She tries to watch what the other dancers are doing. She feels ashamed of the smell of sweat coming from her armpits. She wonders whether the bulkiness of her torso makes her less agile. Her legs are too stiff to execute the sudden dips and twirls properly and she suddenly feels infinitely tired.
After class, she walks back home with Charlie. As they talk, she has the strange feeling that she’s met him before. Here, away from the dance floor, he reminds her of a frog – of all the men in her life that she has never really liked. She wonders at the chameleon-like nature of men. She remembers the first time she actually saw her husband cheating on her. She hates that word, ‘cheating’. It makes her think of old Zahrit al-Ula movies. Zahrit al-Ula always played the role of the tearful, deceived wife who lived in the shadows and talked a lot about virtue and self-respect. Hend detested the wife role: real heroines were never wives. Mistresses in movies were a lot more appealing. They had plunging necklines and wide, glittering eyes that could hold a gaze without blinking. But Hend doubts that she has ever been suited for the role of leading lady. She just isn’t qualified. That’s why her favourite old movie is The Well of Privation, where the heroine commits every kind of sin in her dreams at night, then wakes up in the morning fresh and unsullied.
She tells Charlie all about the first time she saw her husband flirting with another woman. It happened in her own house and the woman was her friend. All his mistresses were her friends – or plotted to become her friends after the fact. She still doesn’t understand what the point was. She remembers the evening clearly. She was wearing a pretty new dress and moving gaily around the room, full of that glowing self-assurance that only fools live on. The guests were heatedly discussing something – what, she can’t recall. She didn’t know any of their faces, had never seen them before. Her husband, meanwhile, was engaged in a different type of conversation. Her friend had been dancing alone to an old Umm Kulthum song. Hend had always loved that particular melody and they often listened to it together as the friend told her stories about the early days of her first marriage and her life since. She sat down opposite Hend’s husband and they began to steal long, languorous glances at each other. It wasn’t difficult for Hend to see that her husband knew this woman well, that he had handled her body and whispered to her in the arrogant and lewd accents of masculine possession. Hend was as good at reading these signs and tokens as she was at stuffing cabbage leaves or pigeons and making rice casseroles. She was like Zahrit al-Ula in the old movies. She watched the brazen, defiant exchange that dared everyone to notice. They could all see what was going on right in front of their noses. But people like to share in little conspiracies. The truth remains unsaid and the unsaid is, when all’s said and done, immaterial.
Hend recalls the scene unfolding. Her friend went over to the buffet and her husband followed her and picked at the hors d’oeuvres. Then his hand reached out to stroke the cleft between her breasts, and she shivered and laughed nervously. Hend was just coming out of the kitchen with a tray of finger food, but she pretended that she hadn’t seen anything. She just turned and walked straight back into the kitchen. ‘The way of the world,’ she whispered to herself, just as her mother had taught her. It’s true that this had all happened rather early in her married life, but what did that matter? All men were the same, weren’t they? It was the first time her husband had appeared repulsive and obscene to her, and also the first time that she had felt unbearably stupid and terribly slow. Incidents like these multiplied and the snapshots she stored in her head became clearer and sharper. The violent confrontations grew more frequent – confrontations in which he always denied everything, because denial is the fuel of conspiracy. He accused her of being crazy. Hend turned in circles, frantically looking for his missing underwear and socks. She spent her days searching for proof of his infidelities, but whenever she found something, pretending that everything was fine became that much harder and her need to flee that much more urgent. She began to avoid him entirely.
In the beginning she took her frustration out on the pillows, as though they alone were the cause of her misery. She went through terrible mood swings – shrinking from his body in disgust and then making passionate love to him. She began to hate the mattress that they slept on. It had belonged to him before they married, and those dark stains and musty smells had not been made by her. Yes, she knew the way of the world now: knew, as her mother had taught her, that a man’s only disgrace was the size of his wallet, and yet she clung fiercely to her madness. She stitched up a brand-new clean white cotton mattress tha
t she could call her own, and tossed and turned on it with her heavy, bloated belly.
Charlie listens to her without a word. Does he even understand what she is saying? Maybe her accent is too thick. Or maybe he just isn’t interested. She starts to tell him about her nightmares.
She sees her friends, and sometimes the men she’s secretly loved, clasping hands and forming a circle around her. Each one tries to touch her in turn. The game is called Blind Bear. She is the only person wearing a blindfold; she is the dim-witted one. She runs panting after the shadows that form in the inky darkness. The Blind Bear turns round and round, frantically searching for the hands that push her from behind. She cocks her ear to catch the loud voices that surround her. She whirls her stick in the air to measure the empty space. She tries to avoid the groping hands that seek her. They push her and she falls, over and over. The game ends when she finally begs for mercy. They make a circle around her and taunt her: ‘The Blind Bear’s fallen into the well!’ The well is deep and her fall is exhilarating. She falls, over and over, endlessly. She always wakes up from this dream in utter panic. The Blind Bear is dim-witted and makes the same mistakes over and over. She falls in love with the same man over and over. She believes that all she has to do is bend so as not to break. It’s hard for her to say these things to Charlie because she doesn’t know how to translate them into his language. She hopes he has understood.
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