Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  •

  I shared a room with my brother until I was ten. Those last two years, we pushed our beds together. Our mother was preoccupied with our little sister, who resembled a perfect doll—large eyes, beautiful cheeks. At night, my brother and I would play a game called mannequin. In this game, I would pretend to be a mannequin, singing a song I’d made up to complete my transformation, and he would explore my body. I would stay in whatever pose I had struck for several minutes, while he, then seven or eight, pushed my butt cheeks apart, tickled my belly. Then, he would become a mannequin, and it would be my turn.

  When I told my mother about these games, she said that they happened because the devil was whispering into our ears, and that we shouldn’t listen. I imagined a small, red, horned doll talking into my ear, and I didn’t separate from my brother until one day, when I pushed my bed all the way to our study room and staked a claim on it as my own.

  •

  Barbies’ blank vulvas fascinated my friends. We undressed the dolls and stared at their nothingness. I held my own secret obsession. I was in love with Barbie’s arched foot. I could articulate her foot in three different poses. Putting the shoe on her foot and then peeling it off, putting it on, peeling it off. Licking her arch. It occurs to me now that the arched foot would have been a great toy to flick against my clit. But I didn’t think of that as a child. I wish I had. And if Barbie were real, she wouldn’t be able to carry her own weight. Online, one can find a chart of her measurements that shows this. Her feet are a girl’s size 3. As a living woman, she would have to get around on her knees.

  •

  My friend R and I sometimes went to Suzy’s, a local sex-toy shop, for fun. We giggled at the two-foot-long cocks, at their patriotic names—The Great American Challenge! I was taken with the hacked-up women’s bits on sale—a silicone ass with a hole, a silicone pair of massive tits, a silicone vulva. Fleshlights writ large. Then there were the full dolls. I wondered if masturbating with them was satisfying. I was reminded of Barbie’s tiny foot, all the erotics I once placed therein, on something so small when I myself was small. Sometimes I resented my vibrator for its lack of heat. Its veins were ridges without a pulse. And worst of all, it was not connected to a warm body. But I enjoyed watching it go in and out of me. The way people who own these dolls probably enjoy watching themselves disappear into them.

  •

  I once performed surgery on my Cabbage Patch Kid’s bellybutton, on a flight from Amman to Kuwait. With needle and thread, I sewed the button tighter. My father had bought me the doll in Italy, when we were all there together. I named her Jennifer. I didn’t know I could give white dolls Arabic names. This was left over from the Enid Blyton books my British teachers assigned me. White families had picnics and wore coats. These books were like sci-fi to me. I loved Jennifer’s belly button; it was a nipple, a clitoris.

  My father now says that my Cabbage Patch Kid doll was the first one ever in Kuwait. But I preferred a cheap doll my mother and I had once bought from a market. The doll came with a bottle, and through a trick in the bottle’s plastic, holding it up to the doll’s lip made all the milk appear to be guzzled up, and it disappeared.

  My nursing lover said his favorite thing was to watch his dick go in and out of my mouth. He said he loved watching it disappear in me.

  My mouth was a magician.

  8

  A STREET CALLED CHESTNUT

  Imagine my mother in 1977. She was twenty-four years old, and pregnant. She lived in Chicago, above a Wendy’s, on a street called Chestnut. The street was just off Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. She was Egyptian, petite, long-haired, and beautiful. She was living apart from her family for the first time, and she was thousands of miles away. Her body had never been this far west. She stood at the window on the twenty-fourth floor of her apartment building and stared out at the city, and in the afternoons, she visited museums and went for walks on Lake Michigan. She spoke only Arabic and French, but she managed.

  When my parents first arrived in Chicago from Kuwait, they stayed at a hotel. My mother said she was lucky because she made a friend very quickly, Gh, a visual artist and a Palestinian. My mother and Gh spent days together. But my mother didn’t boast of many or any other friends during this year, when she and my father were in Chicago so my father could do a one-year apprenticeship with a civil engineering firm.

  “When I was hungry,” my mother told me, “I would go downstairs and eat a biggie fry. From Wendy. I ate most French fries during my pregnancy.”

  My son and I are addicted to French fries.

  In November of my mother’s year in Chicago, her mother stopped calling from Alexandria. Her sister and father called, but they always claimed that her mother was sleeping or out or busy. My mother had her suspicions. When I was born in January and my mother’s mother didn’t call to congratulate her, my mother was more than suspicious. Soon afterward, my father and her family told her: my grandmother had died, of a massive heart attack, back in early November. All the strange letters my mother was receiving from her were actually written by my aunt, who was eighteen at the time.

  Her family hadn’t wanted to tell her because she was pregnant. The idea was that they needed to protect her pregnant body, and my unborn body, from the news, from the shock of grief. Ironically, my mother instantly plunged into a deep depression, which might have aligned with an ongoing postpartum depression, a depression that lasted five years or more. During her time in Chicago, she would stare out of the window of her apartment and wish she could jump. She wanted to slide the glass open, brave the cutting wind, and release herself. She says I saved her. That she would look at my infant body sleeping, or into my baby eyes, and wonder, who would take care of me?

  Years later, in a sushi restaurant, we were a little drunk, and my mother said she thought I was her mother. That I am her reincarnation? I said, but my mother said, No, you are my mother.

  •

  My mother refused to visit her mother’s grave, to confront the fact of her mother’s body, buried. Of course—who can confront the fact of a mother’s death? She moved back to Kuwait with my father, got pregnant with my brother. She gave birth to him when I was thirty months old. It wasn’t until two years afterward, she said, that she accepted that her mother was dead. She didn’t reveal to any of her new friends during this time period that her mother had died. She spoke of her mother as though she were still alive.

  I have known this story my entire life. And my entire life, I have felt guilty for being the reason my mother couldn’t grieve her mother’s death when it happened. I’ve understood, of course, that it was her sister’s and father’s responsibility to tell her, but I couldn’t help it—I felt responsible, too; my fetal body was to blame.

  My visits to my mother’s mother’s grave are vividly and indelibly rooted in my early childhood memories, probably because of the emotional turmoil my mother must have experienced to endure those visits. And the child’s body is always so aware and so in tune with the mother’s body. To its shifts and frequencies.

  •

  In the winter of 2007, two months after my then-husband moved in with me, we went to Chicago. His friends, two unbearable men, met us there. We would all walk through the city, visiting art museums and bars and diners. My then-husband’s friend, a white Republican Zionist asshole whose social media profile praised the Israeli army, was sleeping on the foldout sofa in our hotel room. We spent a late afternoon walking from one part of the city to another, and I yearned to see the street on which my mother had lived, the first apartment building I had slept in, day in, and day out, for the first few weeks of my life.

  At some point on our walk, we passed Chestnut Street. My then-husband was walking ahead with the Zionist, and his other friend was holding hands with his fiancée. I was trailing behind. Wanting a sense of connection, I shouted to them all, “This is Chestnut Street! Where my parents first lived when they moved to America! It’s where I lived as a newborn
!” No one cared. They were all white Texans, essentially; none had the faintest idea what it meant to be continually refugeed, constantly uprooted and hurried forward and off-ward, and they kept walking. Once, when my then-husband had brought me to visit his hometown, it took him less than fifteen minutes to show me his first house, his elementary school, his middle school, his high school, and the house he lived in until his high school graduation. I had jokingly said that it would take several weeks and thousands of dollars in airplane tickets for me to show him where I’d lived the first eighteen years of my life. Now, trailing behind him in Chicago, I walked slowly, hoping that having my feet on Chestnut Street would mean something, would affect me in some way. This was the first address I ever had, the first of dozens. But nothing happened, no quaking under my feet. I wanted to cry. Instead, I ignored all of them for the rest of the trip.

  In the morning, the following day, I walked from the hotel back to Chestnut Street. I called my mother when I arrived and asked her the address of the building. She told me, and I walked to it, describing the street now, with its new restaurants and offices and businesses. When I got to the building, I told her I was there, and I described the entryway. She spoke animatedly and feverishly, excited that I had discovered it, perhaps relieved that that part of her life was real and true, that a building from her past still stood.

  She asked me where I walked there from, and I said, “from my hotel.” I casually mentioned the name of it. “The Allerton,” I said. My mother burst into laughter. “The Allerton!” she said. “That was the hotel I stayed in before we found that apartment, when I was pregnant. I once did that same walk you just did, from the hotel to the building. We did it together!”

  •

  During my road trip in 2016, I was finally able to go to Chicago alone. Once I arrived, I drove straight to the house in Ravenswood where I would be staying with my dog. It was raining, and we ran through the rain, until I picked her up and we made it inside. The next day, the sun showed off, and we walked down to get pizza.

  I drove out to the apartment my mother and father stayed in when they first moved to America. It’s downtown, and there were tourists and locals walking in the sun, taxis, even a horse-drawn carriage, but I found parking, and I walked my dog up State Street to Chestnut. We stood in the front reception area, where a couple of Arab women held strollers with their own children in them. I wanted to hug them both, and even though they were younger than me, I wanted to tell them that in this moment, they were my mother, too. When I asked the doorman if I could go up to my parents’ old apartment, he rang the current tenant, who declined a visit. This was to be expected—I only wanted to stand in the lobby with my dog and breathe and remember what it must have been like to be carried and swaddled by my mother, by my father, and the moments we stood in this same exact spot, bracing for the cold to come.

  9

  UNDERGROUND

  In the house in Connecticut, we had a basement. The basement had a storage and laundry area to the left and a seating and video game area on the right, with a sofa bed, a cheap, plush corner couch, and a plastic table. When I was fifteen, my father began taking me down to the basement to teach me about what was acceptable and what was not. He and my mother had seen Basic Instinct, and in the basement, my father told me that it was shameful and wrong for a woman to be on top of a man during sex. Another day, he took me down there when he discovered that I was planning to go to a party, and he explained to me why girls shouldn’t go to parties. One afternoon, he beat me in the basement because I was talking on the phone with a boy. Another night, he beat me in the basement, straddled me and choked me, and I asked him to kill me. This frightened or confused him, because he stopped.

  I used the basement to sneak out of the house and go to clubs and parties and on drives with boys. I would sneak down there when everyone thought I was sleeping, and I’d sneak back in at dawn. This worked for over a year. I was always terrified of being caught. The poetry of this secret exit from my family always appealed to me. It was a fantastical version of my friend L’s basement apartment—I pretended I had my own realm. And it was the place where I was punished, and so, it was also the place from which I escaped.

  •

  My first memory of a basement is not of a basement at all. It’s of our apartment in Kuwait during a monsoon. My mother had brought me back to the apartment after a short absence, and everything was underwater. I was almost knee-deep in it. I was five or six. Most memories of Kuwait are of sunshine. But this particular day was gray dark. Everything had a charcoal sheen to it. Especially the water. This memory haunts me because it’s a foreshadowing of the Gulf War, which wouldn’t come for another five years.

  •

  There was a cellar in Palestine, in the house my father and his brothers built for my grandparents. My parents and siblings and I visited the house every third summer. The cellar was where we kept the meat and sodas and milk and cheeses refrigerated. Its walls were charcoal gray, and light came in through the cellar door. My cousins and I sometimes went down there to sneak Coca-Cola. But the Coca-Cola was Israeli; I remember the letters in Hebrew. It was sweeter than any cola I’d had before.

  •

  When I was eight, my family moved to a new apartment in Kuwait, on the fourth floor of a blocky white building. Every floor housed a single apartment. There were four of these buildings, all in a square block, each with its own courtyard. My brother and neighbors and I would go look at the other versions of our building, the other versions of ourselves. One day, our neighbor L, who lived on the first floor, asked us if we wanted to see the basement. We thought she was trying to trick us. Watch, she said, and she stuck a key into the elevator on the ground floor, and we took the elevator down to the basement.

  The basement was identical to all the other apartments, except it was not. It was a bachelor pad—the first one I’d ever seen. The giant living room had a pool table and a Ping-Pong table in the middle. The small living room was filled with blue seating. There was no kitchen. The bedroom was enormous and had a floor-to-ceiling poster—or maybe that’s just how I remember it—of Marilyn Monroe in fishnets. I liked going to the basement just to see the poster. This basement apartment belonged to my friend L’s brother, who was away in college. The poster and the bedroom and the entire basement belonged to him. Men got to have spaces. While my family at the very top floor had zero freedom, here was the basement, completely free.

  When there were air raids and bombings, we would run down to the basement.

  •

  When I was sixteen, I snuck out of the Connecticut basement to see a boy I was dating, a seventeen-year-old aspiring DJ. He and his friends picked me up from the dead end of our street. They took me to clubs, we ate at a diner, and then we went to a river. He and I kissed and touched each other for hours. When he dropped me off at home, all the lights in the house were on, even though it was dawn. We knew I’d been caught. He offered to let me stay the night at his house. He said his mother would be upset but that she would understand. He said he was worried about me going in. To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t go with him, why I didn’t choose snuggling next to someone who cared for me over punishment. I had never slept next to anyone I was attracted to before. I said no, and I kissed him goodnight. I snuck back in through the basement as usual, took off my clothes and put on the nightie I’d left down there, behind the sofa bed. The sounds of my father’s and mother’s feet thundering down the steps. And then it began.

  Like rain lashing at a window. Like a flood. Like a doll cut up into five distinct pieces. Legs, arms, head. Like a cardboard box with a sword through it. Like a fist. Like a magnifying glass over something in large print. Like a clap.

  My body, covered in red marks. My father slapped me, pulled my hair, punched my arms, which I hid my face behind. I was on my period. I bled and bled. My mother did nothing, always did nothing. I said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” His one hand held both my small hands and his other hand
knocked me against the side of my face, like a heavy bookshelf falling on my cheek. I ran upstairs. I wanted to emerge from underground. He ran after me. I ran out of the house, screaming. He chased after me.

  I ran in a circle around our house. He ran in a circle around our house. No one called the police. Our neighbors on all sides were white. I was screaming. Not a single neighbor tried to help. My face was red and my tears covered my face. My father commanded me to go back inside. I don’t know why I did. We were back in the basement. He was kicking me. He was on top of me. He was slapping me. Afterward he and my mother sat on the cheap corner loveseat and explained to me what life was. That there were rules. That I was a whore. They left calmly, now that all my father’s energy had flashed out of him, like fire. Had burned me.

  I waited a few minutes. Maybe twenty. Then, I ran. I opened the basement door to the backyard and ran, up the concrete stairs, down the street. I was in my nightie. I could have changed into my clothes, laced my shoes on, but I didn’t want to change anything, didn’t want to alter in any way the scene of the crime, which was my body. I ran down another street, all the way to the bottom, to a pay phone I used to use to call my friends. The pay phone was dead. I ran across the street to the hotel where my parents let guests stay when there was no room at our house, the fancy hotel. I ran to the front desk. I asked the woman there to call the police. She appeared inconvenienced. She called the police and said that a guest had been assaulted. I corrected her and said I was not a guest. I corrected her and said I ran to the closest place where I knew people would have to help me.

  The police came. The police were two men, one Black, bald, and one white, young. They took me to a small, private office behind the concierge, a room that had white walls, a desk, and a telephone. I wondered, later, if that was where the hotel keeps the luggage of people who have to check out but don’t have to leave until later. I only spoke with the Black police officer. The other one did and said nothing. The police officer asked me to describe everything that had happened. I did. He asked me if this happened to me often, my father beating me. I said it did. He asked me if he could take photographs of my red welts and marks. I said he could. He took Polaroids of the redness on my temples, the side of one of my cheeks, my legs, my behind. I was still wearing the baby-pink nightie.