Afaf carries her half-eaten dinner to the kitchen and spends a long time in a bathroom on the second floor. She sniffs a potpourri bowl on the porcelain sink, runs her fingers over scented soap shaped like flowers.
Majeed knocks on the door. “What are you doing in there?”
Afaf finally emerges. “I hate it here, Maj.” She presses the tip of her shoe into the beige-carpeted hallway.
He shrugs. “It’s not so bad. I miss Mama, too.”
Afaf grabs his hand and they climb down the stairs, stepping in sync.
In the main salon, Afaf sees Ammo Yahya pouring a honey-colored liquid into sparkling glasses for the men. They light cigars and lean back into leather chairs. The women help Khalti Nesreen clear the table and prepare a pot of qahwa, the tiny demitasse cups already arranged on a silver tray.
“Afaf? Why don’t you take the kids into the sitting room?” Khalti Nesreen says. “I’ve got Twister in there.”
“I never play Twister,” the older girl declares once they’re out of earshot of Khalti Nesreen. “I don’t want a boy touching any part of me.” The sisters sit side by side on a wicker love seat, their chins jutting out with moral righteousness. Their pristine white socks hold up stiffly below their knees.
Afaf and Majeed look at each other. He shrugs. They sit opposite the girls on two matching wicker chairs, staring them down. The older one speaks in an Arabic dialect Afaf can’t follow, then raises her eyebrows at them.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she says in English.
Afaf doesn’t respond.
“Dummies don’t know how to speak arrabi!” the girl sneers.
Afaf grips the armrests of her chair as angry tears well up. “Shut your stupid, ugly face!” These hateful words startle her. They come from a place deep in her throat, and hurtle out of her mouth like a rocket ship. “Just shut up already!” she spits again.
This surprises the girl, too, because she tugs at the arm of her sister, who looks dumbstruck, and they leave the room, one closely following the other. Majeed grins at Afaf, impressed. He hops off the sofa and walks to the record player.
By the time “Good Morning Starshine” plays, Afaf joins Majeed as he sways his small hips, arms flailing above his head. She moves from side to side, soft-clapping. Khalti Nesreen pokes her head in. She looks like she’s about to say something but only smiles before leaving them alone.
Good morning starshine
The earth says hello
They listen to the entire album until they no longer hear the words.
Nurrideen School for Girls
IT HAD been easier than he imagined. He pulled into the loading dock behind the school, confident his white van wouldn’t draw any suspicion. It resembled the ones that delivered food or serviced the building. He wore his old Excel company uniform jumpsuit under an oversized brown winter vest, concealing a .22 Ruger in his holster. The elongated metal toolbox he carried contained an Armalite M-15 rifle, unassembled, its parts perfectly fitted inside after he’d taken out the drawers that held his drill bits and bolts. Earlier that morning he’d tossed them all into the large dumpster behind his apartment building. He’d have no use for them after today. He plodded across the wet lot in work boots, crunching blue salt crystals dissolving what was left of a snowfall early that morning.
He’d woken to the snow, convinced he could hear the snowflakes settling on the windowpane. Eileen snored softly, her back to him, and he carefully rolled out of bed. His old dog Jeni painfully pulled herself up, arthritis slowing her joints. Her paws scratched the floor as she gathered her bearings and he waited patiently for Jeni before closing the bedroom door behind them. She followed her master down the narrow hallway, eager at the prospect of a much earlier outing than their normal routine.
The moon hung low through the kitchen window, illuminating the snow that continued to fall. It was very quiet, snowflakes padding the walkway outside of his apartment unit, and caking the roof and hood of cars lined up in the common parking lot. The plows were not out yet and he was grateful. The silence was comforting as the snow blanketed the world outside—a pure, clean white.
He didn’t require sleep anymore; it was enough to have Eileen’s touch. He’d try to absorb her perpetual warmth, though she sometimes flicked an arm at him, half woken and irritated. He let her sleep this morning, gathering his clothes in a bunch and dressing in the washroom. He’d decided against leaving a note—he couldn’t summon any eloquent words to properly convey what he was about to do. His actions would speak for him.
He took Jeni for a walk, past the corner where children from the apartment building usually waited for the school bus, their backpacks bouncing up and down. On any other morning, he’d watch from the railing outside his second-floor unit, recognizing most of them, since he’d been inside their apartments, fixing a broken window latch or sealing a leak under a bathroom sink. He’d sip his coffee, panning the group of children, eyes fixing on brown twin boys who stood solemnly apart from their peers. At seven-thirty, the school bus would pull to the curb, a safety arm extending into the street. Earlier scattered and unruly, the children would fall into a single file and disappear onto the bus. The twins were always the last to board.
This early morning he seemed to be the only person awake. Jeni’s gait slowed after they’d gone a block, her paws slapping against the snow. He felt terrible for his dog, a cross between German shepherd and Labrador, with black, white, and gray rings of fur around her neck. Jeni was almost fifteen years old. It seemed like a slow, tortuous decline, and now he regretted not having put Jeni out of her misery. He should have driven up north, found a patch of forest, and let her loose to cavort among the frozen-barked trees for a little while. Then he would have called her to him and gotten down on one knee to give her a final rub of her muzzle before pressing the barrel of his pistol between her eyes as she looked up at him. That’s how he’d want to go—quickly and painlessly, avoiding the agony and pity of disease and age. If the day went as planned, it might go down like that.
He quietly reentered the apartment and spent a long time on one knee, rubbing his old dog’s ears and muzzle. Jeni’s faithful, tired eyes deeply moved him. A human being had never regarded him in such a devout way. He hoped Eileen would be merciful and put his dog down, save Jeni a bit of dignity.
Inside the Muslim school, a few staff members milled in the short corridor from where he’d entered on the dock. He could see the security guard at a desk, his baseball cap obscuring part of his face. The guard was reading the Sun-Times, and looked up at the sound of his steps. He lifted his toolbox in a gesture of greeting and the guard waved back. No questions and no demands for an identification badge or a work order. Still, icy fear tingled down his spine as he rounded the corner past the cafeteria. He could turn around, pretend he’d forgotten a tool in his van, drive off the lot, back to Eileen and Jeni. But he walked on.
He’d had the rifle shipped to him last week and he’d opened it up, sweat beading his forehead. Eileen was at work and he sat on the edge of their bed assembling the rifle, the locking motions offering him a strange kind of comfort, like what he’d experienced as a boy when his father took him and his brother Joe hunting. It was the only time he could bear to be close to his father and not want to kill him.
His brother Joe had been brave, joining the army, leaving him alone with their parents. He’d started sleeping in Joe’s room, burying his face in his brother’s pillow, trying to muffle the low and deadly voice of his father through the vent, his mother’s whimpers of pain. The next morning she’d be at the stove, cooking their oatmeal as usual, her sprained arm in a sling that she’d made from old cheesecloth. Other mornings her lip was like a smashed cherry, her eye swollen like a plum.
Today he wouldn’t be running away, and any thoughts of retreating to his van were gone. He moved quickly down the hallway, eyes searching for a janitor’s closet.
This school was like any other he’d ever been inside. There were
bulletin boards with college posters and announcements for scholarships. The floors gleamed under fluorescent ceiling panels. The old brown-brick exterior of the building contrasted with the modern renovations he suspected had taken place over the decades. Except for the portraits of students showcased on the walls of the corridor—every single girl wearing a headscarf, grinning ear to ear—it was no different than other schools. He passed the gymnasium and he could hear girls running across the court, dribbling a basketball, cheering each other on.
Next to a drinking fountain he spotted a door with a sign EMPLOYEES ONLY. He was about to enter when the gymnasium door suddenly pushed open. A panting girl came out. She wore track pants and a long-sleeved jersey with Nurrideen School printed across her flat chest, damp circles under her arms. He couldn’t tell if her white scarf was wet, though her face glistened with sweat.
He halted, frozen, his eyes darting from the young girl to the door she’d bolted through. That old, familiar feeling of dispossession, of not belonging, coated his chest. Even this girl—thin black eyebrows raised as she took labored breaths from running—seemed to exude more confidence than he, a grown man, felt. She gave him a little wave before heading to a water fountain. He turned back to the door and quickly entered a closet full of cleaning supplies.
He’d hated school when he was a kid, though he’d made decent marks. He dreaded getting called on to solve an equation at the board or to read a poem from Wordsworth out loud while his classmates followed along in their textbooks. The only tolerable teacher had been Mr. Hillocks, a history teacher who’d been rumored to have been a spy for the Russians and in possession of Nazi silverware. Mr. Hillocks’s classroom contained world maps and framed antique cartography. He would trace his finger along the distance between countries like Peru and New Guinea and where he was—maps made him seem closer to places he couldn’t pronounce.
At first that had given him hope of a place bigger than Wisconsin, especially after Joe left. He imagined his brother living in a foreign country after his service, and he hoped a postcard would appear someday from Joe featuring an exotic city or a dazzling beach. But a postcard or a letter never came. Perhaps Joe had needed time to forget what he’d left behind in Vietnam. One day, government papers arrived proclaiming that Joe had been honorably discharged. His mother held the papers, looking them over and over, though she could not read English. She traced the official seal with her fingertips. He’d wanted to run away, too, to escape his mother’s misery and his own intense loneliness.
Before he’d enlisted, Joe had never mentioned Vietnam. Even as they watched the images streaming from their television, his brother had never expressed an opinion about the war. They both sat on a woven rug in the parlor as Walter Cronkite reported events they could only see and hear: the chop-chop of helicopter propellers swooping over hamlets; the gray and black smoke billowing from once-lush forests. He could never imagine the stench of burned villages, bodies charred to unrecognizable clumps, or the diesel-like smell of Agent Orange sprayed over thousands of acres of vegetation. And how did it feel when your flesh burned, chemicals eating through your skin? Those horrifically visceral realities never penetrated through the television screen. Perhaps Joe had understood it more deeply, felt something that compelled a call to duty. Enlisting had at least given Joe a purpose their father could not rebuke.
But Joe left him, too, without even a note. The only thing he’d left under his bed was a walnut safe box with his .22 Ruger—a nine-shot revolver Joe had saved up two summers to buy. Discovering this, he pretended it was a farewell present from his brother.
His father carried on like he’d never had an older son. He’d realized then, fifteen years old and alone, how easy it was for someone to be discarded like an old blanket. People were disposable—even the ones you loved. One day, he’d leave, too.
A bell rang, yanking him back to the present. He could hear girls laughing and talking outside the door, a mixture of English and Arabic. He waited until a second bell rang, signaling the start of a new period. He slapped in a magazine of bullets, stowing additional ammo in his vest pockets. He closed the toolbox and placed it on a shelf near a stack of toilet paper, removed his vest. He touched the revolver in his holster and stepped outside of the closet, the rifle close to his side.
The school hallway was empty. He passed a wall mural with blue and green geometric tiles, then came to a stairwell where music drifted down to him and climbed the stairs.
He could have started in the cafeteria, but the faint sound of a chorus pulled him in another direction. His movements slowed as he followed the singing voices. Soon he would see their faces up close and he could soak up their terror, their pleas for their lives.
And he wanted them to see him, too. Not from a distance—some lunatic man wielding a gun like in all the other stories they’d heard on the news, never truly imagining it happening to them. He wanted to be close enough so they could catch an awful, desperate power in his eyes.
1985
1
MICHAEL WILSON whispers in her ear, “Don’t worry, A-faf. I can do it in a way so you’ll still be a virgin. I know how it is with your family.”
Afaf is in his bedroom, his parents gone for the evening. Michael strips to his underwear, then sits behind her on his bed. He pulls off her shirt, unclasps her bra. Afaf lets the white boys touch her only over her clothes. She lets Michael Wilson go farther while she stares at a picture of him and his girlfriend Kelly McPherson—they’re at the Six Flags amusement park, holding stuffed animals he’s won for her—tacked up on a bulletin board. As Michael kisses her shoulders, lifts her thick strands of hair, Afaf wonders if Kelly’s body feels the same to him. Perhaps the only difference is their hair: Kelly’s blond tresses fall in shimmering waves down her back, not a single curl interrupting its flow, while Afaf’s hair has turned frizzy from constant relaxers, her ends splitting into tiny brittle pitchforks.
Michael Wilson is a senior point guard on Hoover High School’s basketball team, comes into the Dairy Queen where Afaf works after school and on weekends. His friends give loud and whooping orders for burgers and shakes. She didn’t think Michael noticed her until last week. He came up to the counter a second time and asked if she’d like to hang out with him sometime.
We can watch a movie or something at my house.
Afaf knows he doesn’t really mean that when he asks her out—none of the white boys do. They don’t take her to public places and they don’t want to watch movies at their houses on dusty VHS recorders in their family room. She knows what they say about her at Hoover High School: A-faf will let you make out with her. She might even give you a blow job.
And she knows Kelly McPherson is Michael’s girlfriend, but Afaf doesn’t care. She grabbed the napkin on which Michael had written his address and slipped to her across the ice-cream display case. She nodded at him and tucked it in the pocket of her uniform apron.
Afaf studies Michael’s room as he sucks on her neck, sure to leave a few hickeys. She’s learned to hide them behind waves of hair, though her parents don’t regard her very closely. She’d once caught Majeed staring at one beneath her ear when she’d carelessly pulled her hair into a ponytail. They were watching television and he only looked at her like he does at Mama—a combination of pity and worry, and powerlessness. She tries not to think about what he’s heard, in the boys’ locker room, around school. Has he seen her name scrawled in marker on a washroom stall: Call A-faf for a A-fuck?
On one wall of Michael Wilson’s room are mounted shelves with state championship trophies and all-star plaques. Afaf imagines how proud Michael’s parents must be of their son. Had they known as soon as he was born that he would be a star athlete? Did they ever imagine he’d be messing around with an Arabian girl? What would they think of him now, almost naked, making out with a girl in his room? Would it matter less if it were Kelly McPherson?
Majeed has just as many baseball trophies. They’re piled on a dresser in his bedroom,
some on the floor near his bed. Baba and Mama make only the championship games, clapping proudly when Majeed takes the plate, rotating his arms, digging his left toe in the turf. Mama clasps Baba’s arm, sucking in her breath until Majeed’s bat makes swift contact with the ball. At Hoover, he makes appointments with his guidance counselor, researches colleges and scholarships. He’s going to have a career, an aspiration that seems so alien to Afaf, so optimistic. She isn’t good at anything. She’s always made decent grades with the least amount of effort, but nothing interests her beyond reading—luckily her elementary school teachers hadn’t killed that joy in her. In two days she can devour a Sydney Sheldon novel—she’s read all of them—and if she likes an assigned book at school, she’ll look up the author at the public library and check out others written by them. She remembers when Nada took her to the library so she could get her own library card. How proud she’d been to neatly print her name where the woman pointed, how thrilled she was to finally check out books on her own.
Michael Wilson doesn’t have any books in his room, only a calculus textbook tossed on the floor and a wrestling magazine folded over on his nightstand. He fumbles with her bra. Could Majeed be so bold with a girl? Has he even kissed one? Something suddenly turns in Afaf’s stomach and she jerks away from Michael, snatching up her clothes and flying down the staircase.
“Hey! Where the hell are you going, A-faf?” Michael Wilson shouts down at her.
She hates the way her name sounds from his lips, like the others she’s heard reducing her to an object: A-faf. A-slut. A-virgin. A-lost girl.
The Beauty of Your Face Page 6