The landlady stops her every day she comes home from school. Baba checks in with Mrs. Blakely every evening, sometimes bringing her fresh fruit or a gallon of milk when Mama sends him for groceries.
“Any word, dear?” The old woman’s voice is raspy, like fingernails scratching sandpaper. Mrs. Blakely wears an auburn wig that looks like a helmet on her small head. Her bony hand grips the handle inside her screen door; she never opens it, never invites Afaf in. Afaf often wonders what the old woman’s apartment is like. From the back stoop, Afaf can see a well-lit kitchen and the same narrow hallway as her family’s.
Afaf answers Mrs. Blakely with a shake of her head, one foot dangling from the stairwell as she’s ready to fly up to her apartment.
“Give my regards to your mother,” Mrs. Blakely tells her. The old woman has softened toward Afaf and Majeed, no longer scolds them as they thunder up the stairs or slam the back door.
Khalti Nesreen comes to stay with them. She’s a newlywed, not as pretty as Afaf’s mother, though she’s nice. Her black-dyed hair is teased and pulled into a high ponytail. She wears a bright-patterned polyester dress that hangs stiffly above her knees. She takes off her suede leather boots at the back door of the apartment and they remain there for a week while she cooks and cleans the place. She pads around the apartment in Mama’s slippers, a size too big for her petite feet. She wears a pair of tube socks to fill them out. At night, Khalti Nesreen sleeps in Nada’s bed and at first Afaf is angry that another person has invaded her sister’s space. But in the middle of the night, when a car horn wakes her up or a metal trash can topples in the alley, Afaf looks over at her aunt’s sleeping body, relieved the bed is not vacant.
Even with her younger sister there, Mama can’t be consoled. She sleeps through late morning, sitting up in bed only to sip addas from a chipped bowl on a tray Khalti Nesreen sets on her lap. The green lentil soup looks like vomit and Afaf and Majeed refuse to eat it when they come home from school. Her aunt lets them pour bowls of Fruity Pebbles.
“Don’t worry, my darlings,” Khalti Nesreen coos. She digs in the cereal box, scooping a handful, munching as she watches them. “Nada will come home and your mother will be back to her old self again.”
They nod, slurping the milk from their spoons, the colorful rice flakes turning soggy in their bowls.
Afaf wants to tell Khalti Nesreen that she doesn’t want Mama’s old self back, that she’s terrified of that woman, that perhaps the return of Nada would finally transform Mama into someone who naturally smiles at her and Majeed. Nada’s absence has confirmed Afaf’s suspicion: her mother is a very unhappy woman.
But it couldn’t have always been so, Afaf thinks. Hadn’t she been different—happy—the first time Baba saw Mama at an engagement party? They were each a friend of the betrothed couple. According to the story she’s heard a dozen times from Baba, he’d been invited to play his oud with the trio he had newly formed: a violinist named Hisham and a tabla player named Waleed. They were happy bachelors, performing cover songs at weddings and small gatherings. He’d tried to catch her mother’s ear with his elegant strumming, but she’d been oblivious. Mama had no intention of marrying, let alone marrying a musician.
Before the end of the evening, he gave a short speech:
“May the couple lavish each other with love and remain always true to each other. And for the rest of us, may we bask in izz khaddar.”
A lush-green happiness.
Every guest turned toward Mama in her green velvet dress, her cheeks flushed with embarrassed flattery. Baba proceeded to sing “Negoum Al Layl” by Farid al-Atrash, sealing his proposal.
“Stars of the night, weeping over my love and hope . . .” Baba croons when he tells Afaf the story, tickling Afaf’s stomach.
Her mother’s friends giggled and poked her arm, wishing they’d been the subject of such an ardent serenade. Despite her resolve, Mama smiled and nodded her approval at Baba from across the crowded room.
From what Afaf has stitched together from the rest of Baba’s stories—Mama never shares any details with them—her parents were happy in the beginning. Baba rented a small flat in Ramallah. Afaf tries hard to picture this first home in a place as far away as ones she’s read about in books, like Neverland. Below their flat was a bakery that sold the best bread in the city.
“Every morning I brought your mother khubuz so fresh I had to carry it with a towel!” Baba tells Afaf.
Mama agreed to a plan: Baba would pursue his music for two more years before they started a family. They didn’t require much as a newlywed couple; they could live off Baba’s gigs for a little while. But children were another matter.
“Between you and me,” Khalti Nesreen tells Afaf in a low voice when she helps her aunt dust the front room, “I always thought your mother would never get married. She had every boy following her around the village, and she’d never bat an eye.” With her fingers, she reaches out and combs Afaf’s long bangs off her forehead. Afaf flicks them back—she wants to look like Davy Jones from the Monkees. “But your father won her over.”
So why is she so sad? Afaf wants to ask her aunt.
While they wait for news of Nada, Baba comes home from work on time every night. He stops rehearsing with his band. He lifts Majeed and swings him overhead, landing him back on the sofa bed, where they watch TV, the sound on low. He kisses the top of Afaf’s head and she pulls at the tips of his thick mustache, which tickles her cheek. He sits with Khalti Nesreen in the kitchen until it’s time to sleep, sipping tea with mint leaves floating on the surface of their glass cups. They speak in low, respectful voices as though a person is dying nearby.
Some evenings, Baba sinks down between her and Majeed and plays his oud, softly singing in Arabic:
If only when I close and open my eyes
I will find you coming back
Coming back, O my loved ones
Though Afaf doesn’t understand every word, this ballad becomes familiar, like the meals Mama has cooked for them her whole life.
4
TWENTY-TWO DAYS pass. Khalti Nesreen has gone back to her husband, with the promise to return in a few days. Ammo Yahya came to the door to collect her. He didn’t step inside, awkwardly apologizing to Baba.
Ziyad and Amjad stop by in the evening when Baba is home, carrying Pyrex dishes full of mahshi and kufta their wives have prepared. A few of the arabiyyat around the neighborhood also drop by to comfort Mama, bringing a thermos of Sanka as though she is incapable of even brewing coffee. From a wire basket at the sink they pull mugs that Afaf washes when she comes home from school, and between sips the women shake their heads and suck their teeth. Ts, ts, ts . . . may Allah return her safely to you, Um Majeed.
Afaf’s friend Sameera visits with her mother and they play outside while Sameera’s mother washes bowls and glasses, and Mama sits at the kitchen table, sobbing.
“Where could she have gone?” Sameera asks Afaf. Her friend’s dark hair is cut in a short straight bob. Last summer, she crashed her bike into a rusty fence and a broken chain link sliced off the tip of her pinkie. Afaf never tires of studying it, begging her friend to let her touch the smooth scar tissue. It looks like someone bit it off. Ever since, Sameera is no longer allowed to ride a bike.
Afaf had overheard Sameera’s mother telling Mama about it: Shayfa, shayfa! See what happens when you give a girl too much freedom in this country? She loses a finger.
Luckily, it hasn’t changed Mama’s mind about Afaf riding her bike.
Afaf turns the knobs on her friend’s Magna Doodle pad and shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know where she went.” They take turns drawing on the sketch pad, black grains assembling like ants beneath the screen. Afaf pulls the lever and Sameera’s fat rainbow and flowers disappear. She sketches a kitten with long whiskers. Afaf still desperately wishes for a pet, but Mama refuses to have any four-legged creatures in their home. They have a fish tank, but the novelty has quickly worn off. Afaf wants an animal to hold and
cuddle; feeding indifferent fish is like any other chore she’s expected to do around the apartment.
“I guess the police would have found her if she was hiding,” Sameera speculates, laying her chin on Afaf’s shoulder as she draws.
“Why would she be hiding, dummy?” Afaf doesn’t intend to be cruel, but she wants to escape any talk of Nada, at least for a little while. She turns a knob on the pad, trying to join two arcs to form a heart, but it ends up looking like an uneven inverted triangle.
A young detective working the case buzzes the apartment one evening. Baba offers the detective a chair in the kitchen and Afaf and Majeed watch from the doorframe of their parents’ bedroom. He is very young—ruddy cheeks and blue eyes. His thick blond hair parted on the side gives him the appearance of a schoolboy, not a homicide investigator.
“Detective Harold Jones.” He shows her father his badge and tucks it back into the pocket of his corduroy jacket.
“Someone phoned about a suspicious man near the old Union Stockyard.” His eyes dart between her parents. “We investigated, and . . .” He turns toward Afaf and Majeed.
“Loolad,” Baba says softly. “Go watch TV.”
They bolt to the front room and sit on the sofa bed. Afaf listens hard, catching parts of the detective’s sentences:
“We investigated and . . . a body . . . these photographs . . . can you identify if it’s your . . .”
A chair pushes back. Mama’s low moaning.
“Are you sure it’s not her, Mr. Rahman . . . have any distinguishing marks?”
The moaning grows louder. Then shuffling slippers. The bathroom door slams shut. Mama’s vomiting becomes the only sound in the apartment. Afaf runs to the kitchen.
The detective stands, gathering his photographs. Before he closes his folder, Afaf catches the image of an arm, badly bruised, and fingernails caked with dirt. “I’m sorry about all this,” he tells Baba. “You should take comfort in the fact that she’s still out there. We’ll do our best to find her.”
The dead girl in the pictures turns out to be Bianca Lopez, sixteen years old, gone missing a day before Nada.
Afaf knows that it is almost worse for her parents—it not being Nada’s body, battered and broken—because it means more waiting, more not knowing.
Halloween is cold and rainy. Khalti Nesreen agrees to take them trick-or-treating for one hour. She wraps herself in a white shiny trench coat, holding her collar closed with one hand, the other clutching an umbrella. She waits on the sidewalk each time Afaf and Majeed run up to a house and ring the doorbell. They comb a three-block radius of bungalows, their plastic sacks bulging with Bottle Caps candy, homemade popcorn balls, and Bazooka gum.
Afaf is happy to move about the neighborhood in disguise. Her Wonder Woman mask shields her from questions about Nada.
In the last month, she can’t ride her bike without being stopped:
No leads from the police?
Any word on your sister?
How are your folks doing, poor things?
She’s become the sister of the girl who disappeared. She hates the pitiable head-shaking stares from the neighbors. Sometimes they stop her and Majeed on their bikes, waving them down with a rake on their front lawns.
Sameera doesn’t come over as much anymore, as though Nada’s disappearance is contagious to other Arab children in the neighborhood. Afaf blames her parents, and Mama blames Baba: You let her go out with these amarkan, doing God knows what. Afaf imagines Sameera’s mother whispering with the other arrabi mothers: Shayfa, shayfa! See what happens when you give your daughter too much freedom. This country will snatch her up.
The white girls have grown fascinated with Afaf. Before, they used to ignore her or poke fun at her. Now they huddle around her at recess and beg her to tell them about Nada. It’s the only time she doesn’t mind talking about her sister—to get close to Julie McNulty and Amber Reeves. She exaggerates the details each time she reconstructs the story and ends with a “Poof! She’s gone.” In every version, Nada is still alive—only not anywhere the rest of them can see her.
“Do you miss her?” Julie McNulty asks her. Amber Reeves listens for Afaf’s answer, her classmate’s lower lip perpetually trembling.
Afaf does miss her sister, but not in the way her classmates expect her to. Nada’s absence is like an earthquake rattling their house: nothing appears damaged, though every object seems slightly moved from its original place. Mama and Baba bicker even more—a noise as familiar as the chirping of birds on the telephone line outside the apartment window—but the silences in between are tomb-like. Sudden tears fall down Baba’s unshaven cheeks when he hugs Afaf and Majeed good night. After school, she finds Mama standing at the kitchen, water running over a dish she’s been holding for a long time.
On the sidewalk, they walk past a pair of children both dressed as Bambi and a tall boy from Planet of the Apes. Their fathers are in raincoats, smoking cigarettes and nodding hello at Khalti Nesreen. One mother drives slowly alongside her children, her windshield wipers squeaking back and forth.
At Mr. Cliverson’s house, Afaf halts. Majeed is Bigfoot, the hem of his plastic costume pants dragging on the cement sidewalk. He runs ahead.
“Wait, Maj!” Afaf calls out.
He turns around and scampers back to her. “What’s wrong?” His voice is muffled behind his mask.
Afaf pokes the edge of the damp lawn with the tip of her sneaker. “Let’s skip this house.”
Mr. Cliverson is a mean old man. He sits on his porch in the summertime scowling at the neighborhood kids who ride past his house. He calls them “little brats” whose parents “don’t give a goddamn.” He stoops to pick up littered soda cans and candy wrappers off his lawn.
Before they can turn and head to the next house, Mr. Cliverson opens his door and steps outside, a bowl of candy in the crook of his arm.
“Yalla, loolad!” Khalti Nesreen says. “Don’t keep him waiting, maskeen.”
Last summer, Mr. Cliverson sprayed Afaf with the hose when she passed his house. It wasn’t meant in fun; when she glanced over her shoulder, he was waving his middle finger at her, a gesture that nearly threw her from her bike, one the older boys in the neighborhood sometimes flourished at them when she and Majeed rode past on their bikes. It was hard to imagine a grown-up behaving in such a way. Ever since, she’s avoided passing his house.
Majeed looks at Afaf; the slits in his mask don’t properly line up with his eyes and nostrils.
“Come on,” she finally says. Today she is Wonder Woman; nothing can scare her. Still, she hopes the old man won’t recognize them.
“Well, well. Don’t you look like trouble,” Mr. Cliverson says. He’s wearing a pair of plaid flannels and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. Afaf has never been this close to him and he seems much smaller, his shoulders stooped, the skin of his neck hanging like a turkey’s wattle.
She looks past the foyer and into the living room behind him. An old woman sits in a wheelchair. Her head dips to one side, her mouth slightly agape. Her fingers twitch on the armrests. Though Afaf harbors a fascination with the homes of white people, there’s something unsettling about this one. She doesn’t want any candy—she clenches her sack shut. She wants to get away from this house as quickly as possible.
Mr. Cliverson nods at Khalti Nesreen. “That’s not your mother,” he points out. He does recognize them after all.
“My mother’s sick,” Afaf says, a bit too hastily.
“I bet she is.” He scoops a handful of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch candies and drops them into Majeed’s sack. “How about you, missy?” His eyes are milky with cataracts.
Reluctantly, Afaf opens her sack and watches candy trickle down. “Thank you.”
He cradles the bowl in front of him. “Any word on your sister?”
Afaf shakes her head, her stomach sinking. It’s not the same tone the other adults use when they ask about Nada, the kind that sounds like they really care. The old woman coughs and
Mr. Cliverson glances over his shoulder before steeling his eyes on her again. “I doubt she’ll be back. That girl is gone.”
Before Afaf can reply, Mr. Cliverson shuts the door and they’re back on the sidewalk, trailing behind Khalti Nesreen.
Afaf’s breath is hot beneath her mask. She no longer feels the cold whipping against the back of her neck. She fights back the tears, but they roll down her cheeks and drip onto her plastic costume, disguised by the drizzle of rain.
When they get home she goes straight to her room, defying their tradition of pouring all of their loot onto the kitchen table. She rips off her mask and tosses it aside.
Majeed faithfully follows her. “You wanna count it in here?”
She shrugs her shoulders, avoids looking at Nada’s empty bed. Her brother turns his sack upside down and she watches his candy cascade onto the carpet. She turns on the record player, slides on ABBA, and listens to “So Long,” Nada’s favorite .
Majeed sorts the chocolate and nougat treats from the hard candy and bubble gum. In the kitchen, Khalti Nesreen prepares a pot of tea, and Mama emerges from her bedroom. Afaf dreads the day Khalti Nesreen leaves them for good, returning to her own life.
“Do you wanna trade?” Majeed asks her.
Afaf shrugs her shoulders again. She doesn’t care if her brother takes all of it. Her favorite holiday has been ruined. Is this what it will be like from now on, Nada’s absence casting a shadow over everything Afaf enjoys, days she looks forward to? She lies down on the carpet and props her legs on the mattress. She taps her fingers to the tune of “I’ve Been Waiting for You.”
Majeed gnaws on a Tootsie Roll. “Is Nada really gone? Like Mr. Cliverson said?”
Still on her back, she reaches for a Bazooka gum from the pile and unwraps its joke:
How much dirt is in a hole 6 feet by 6 feet?
I dunno . . .
No dirt, stupid! I said it was a hole.
The Beauty of Your Face Page 4