Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  I looked at the Polaroids and thought, That doesn’t look like much. Just redness. My father never really left bruises. He never punched, just slapped. My head was covered in hair, so I couldn’t show the police officers the redness there.

  The police officer wanted to know where my family was from. I told him. He said, That is going to cause a lot of trouble for your father. My entire body stiffened, reddened again, as if I’d been beaten anew. The police officer said, Your father is an Arab and he’s beating his child. That will be a real problem for him. I imagined my family having to move back to the Middle East. And where would they live? I imagined myself living in a foster home. Having to withdraw from college. I imagined my mother shamed, her husband in jail.

  I don’t want that to happen, I said to the police officer. I just want my father to stop hitting me.

  The police officer didn’t say anything that I can remember.

  On the drive to the precinct, the police officer let me sit up front, and he smoked a cigarette. I asked him if I could have one, and he said yes. I lit the cigarette and stared ahead as he drove. Part of me wished this police officer could be my father. I was still barefoot.

  At the precinct, I sat in a waiting room. I didn’t know what would happen next, if I would be sent to be processed somewhere. I waited for hours. Finally, another officer came and said I was ready to be picked up. I sprang up and walked out to the front room, only to find that my mother was there, that she was the one picking me up. She signed for me, as if I were a package, luggage she didn’t want, and I walked out with her, even though I was afraid to; I walked to our car. She said to me, pointing at my feet, that I would always be barefoot in life. This felt like a decree. I did not understand why it was me she was angry with. Why wasn’t she angry at my father for beating me? For creating such stifling, unhealthy rules that disallowed me from doing anything at all? She drove me in silence, tried to guilt me about my father. I asked her if he was in jail. She said he was at home.

  •

  At home. I didn’t understand. She said the police officers came and questioned him, and he invited them in for coffee, and they all chatted about how my father had a pristine record, and how I was a badly behaved slut, and how I chose to stay out all night, even though I was a minor.

  I was a minor who went to college and read Balzac; I was a minor who had been beaten her entire life. Nothing mattered; I was not just a minor, I was minor.

  At home, I changed, put socks over my dirty feet, and got ready to go to my job. I’d called and asked a coworker to pick me up. My father said nothing to me, except, in a disingenuously kind voice, that I could take my own car to work. But my car, I understood, and always had, was not actually my car, since I could only use it with permission. It was another way for my father to further imprison me, make me dependent on him. I left for work in my friend’s car. I hadn’t slept all night. I felt faint. From the middle of the store floor, I saw the register floating. I was hallucinating.

  During my break, I walked down to S’s job, which was four blocks away, and told him what happened that morning. How my body hurt. He didn’t react. It seemed as if he wanted me to leave. So I left. What I learned from this was that no one would ever want the burden of caring for me, of healing me, not for the next twenty years, not ever. I had to do everything myself. Later, I understood that we all do.

  •

  Twenty years after this incident, in Marfa, I looked up Connecticut laws regarding child abuse. The FAQ section of the website instructed people and witnesses to always believe the child—a child being anyone under the age of eighteen—and to never approach the parents about the abuse, but to report it directly to the Department of Children & Families, which works in tandem with officers to hear the child’s own version of events, to fight for the child’s rights to live in an environment without being in physical pain or emotional anguish, and to find that environment for that child, if necessary. None of those things happened for my child self.

  A month after I reported my father to the police, the three of us—my father, my mother, and I—were due in court. The day of the hearing, my father dropped us off at the courthouse and drove off to find a parking space. My mother and I sat on the steps and waited. The irony of this moment never occurred to me, sitting there, waiting for my abuser to join me. There was a puncture in each one of us. Except there was no light coming in.

  When he was several yards away, my mother and I watched my father walking up the hill in his suit. Look, she said to me, Look at him walking. He hasn’t slept in days. He’s been pissing the bed. I watched him walk, as she told me to. I imagined urine dripping down his expensive trousers. I owned two pairs of jeans. I turned to my mother. In that moment, she succeeded. I felt guilty about my father leaking.

  I had been told that once I arrived at the courthouse, the first step in my case, our case, was to climb down the marble steps . . . to the basement. In the courthouse’s basement, we waited for an hour and then were “separated”—we should have never carpooled and then sat together as a unit to begin with, as the case wasn’t the state vs. us but myself vs. my father. A child welfare worker sat me at her desk and asked me questions. Did my father hit me? And what was I doing that night? How many boys had I had sex with? Did I think it was a good idea to leave the house in the middle of the night to have sex with boys? Where did I think such behavior would lead? She didn’t ask this last question, but in my memory, she might as well have: If I was going to behave like such a whore, why was I surprised to come home and be treated like one?

  That was really it. I don’t recall anyone asking me if I wanted to press charges, only that I did not want to press charges. I didn’t want my father to be deported. I didn’t want my mother and siblings to suffer. We climbed up the steps, and my father stood in the front of the courtroom with other defendants on the docket and a public defender. My mother and I stood in the back. Soon afterward, the case against my father was dismissed, because I didn’t testify or press charges, and he walked up the courtroom’s aisle, a groom of anguish, and we walked out into the street.

  His name appeared in the town’s newspaper that week. In the police blotter section. There were no details, only that police had gone to his home, and the date and time that they did. When I saw it, I felt a grim satisfaction that the only time my father’s name appeared in our local paper was because of what he had done to my body; it was because of me.

  Though the law and those who were charged in implementing it failed me, my father must have understood that if I were to call the police again, he would certainly be arrested, or more. Because, in the short years that I was forced to live with or near him after this event, my father never hit me again.

  10

  WHAT LOVE IS

  The first time he hit me, I thought it was by mistake. As if throwing a woman against a wall was the same as accidentally breaking a glass or scratching a bumper against a steep curb. Besides, I’d grown up seeing my mother beaten, so I thought that maybe, just maybe, this was what love was.

  The second time he hit me, something felt off. It helped that he did it in public. We were at a clothing store in the Village, and a throaty, tough woman, her Queens accent a bright mockingbird, told me I didn’t have to live that way, that I didn’t have to let him talk to me or touch me like that. I wanted to climb into the pockets of her thick coat.

  I could have stayed in the store and refused to go home with him. I could have called someone and asked them to help me—but who? My mother didn’t know I was dating anyone—I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, anyway, at seventeen—and I knew everyone else would advise me to just break up with him. But I wasn’t ready. Not yet. I hadn’t had enough.

  If I didn’t call him every night to tell him where I was—I was usually just in my dorm room—he would show up without notice and rough me up. There were also things that confused me: bouquets of flowers and nice dinners and candles. Plus, the sex. The sex was good.

 
The third, fourth, fifth time he hit me, I understood. That he would always find something small I’d done or said and punish me for it. That days later, he would always do or say something big to apologize.

  He was my thirteenth lover. Now, looking back, thirteen lovers by the age of seventeen seems like an exaggeration. But I was in a race against time, against my father. If I could have sex with as many people as possible, I could remove myself as far away as possible from his grip. Somehow, this delivered me right into someone else’s grip, and their grip was crueler than my father’s. It left bruises. At least my father loved me—or was supposed to.

  You’re thinking I left this guy soon after. That it was a foolish, rookie, college girl mistake. But no. I stayed with him. I married him. I had his baby.

  He wasn’t the first cruel lover I’d had. When I was fourteen, a boy in my high school—we’ll call him S—sexually assaulted me at his house and I didn’t know who to tell. A year later, when I decided to lose my virginity, I picked him. It made perfect sense to me at the time. He was not a gentle first lover. Although I gave consent, memories from the first time I had sex always come back to me painfully, the way memories of an assault would.

  I recently looked S up and found out that he is a Connecticut police officer. When I googled his name and the words “police officer” while I was writing this, to see whether he was still a police officer, articles came up about how he was recently arrested for assaulting his wife and pulling her, by the hair, around their home.

  I have an adult son now. Sometimes he is the only reason I refuse to believe that all men are hair-dragging maniacs.

  Even when, and especially when, I look at his face and see some of the features of his father.

  •

  I was out with my college roommates when I met D. He was wearing a white T-shirt tucked into some booty jeans. His hair was slicked to the side. He looked like Johnny Depp if Johnny Depp were brown and a meathead.

  D walked straight to me. He asked me questions. He put out a small fire I had accidentally started in my hair, where I had ashed the cherry off my cigarette. He hit me against the head a few times until the fire was out. I found a man who hit me within moments of meeting me. I was good.

  He didn’t come to my dorm room that night but took my phone number. A few days later, he called and showed up at my dorm with flowers; some nights, he threw pebbles at my window and told me to come down and took me to dinner. He went down on me like he’d found heaven between my legs. He spoiled me with his tongue and his affection.

  He lived in a basement apartment in Yonkers. He drove me there all through that autumn, in his red Camaro. The basement was a few flights down, with a kitchen area to the left and a bedroom on the right. The bathroom was across the unfinished part of the basement, in which he’d set up his weights. That part of the basement apartment was the most eerie. The living space was warm and sexy; the other space was dark and filled with metal, with heaviness.

  He licked between my legs and then we had sex for hours. I’d stay the night, my cheek against his chest. When I woke up, I’d have a rash all across my face, because he shaved his chest. He took me to breakfast, always took me to breakfast. He was a bouncer at a bar. He worked hard. He wanted to be smart. He was twenty-seven.

  I was seventeen.

  •

  I’d lied and told him I was eighteen. Then, one night, after we’d smoked weed together and gone to a diner, I slid my license across the booth to him. He looked at my date of birth.

  “Oh, well,” he said. It did not at all faze him.

  I lit a cigarette and waited for my disco fries.

  •

  One afternoon, it snowed. He came and picked me up from my dorm. On the way to his apartment, the car hit a patch of ice and we circled around once. He righted the car and kept driving. I was terrified and told him so. He was calm, said he’d been driving in snow for years.

  When he called my dorm room and I didn’t answer, he was upset. He wanted to know where I was. I’d tell him. Then, when he called and I hadn’t told him where I was, he’d show up to the college. He’d find me wherever I was, kiss me, tell me he was worried. I’d kiss him back.

  I went down to the Village with my friends one afternoon and got my nose pierced somewhere off of MacDougal Street. The stud I chose was tiny, with a flat turquoise at the tip. I had always loved turquoise. My mother and other North African mothers used it to ward off the evil eye. The needle going through my nostril felt like fire, but the pain was so quick I admired it.

  I remember my ears being pierced, in a marketplace in Kuwait, a kind of bazaar. My mother took me when I was around two. She hadn’t been able to pierce them when I was a newborn, which was customary in her family and her city, because we’d been in Chicago. I remember liking the place. I sat on a chair, and a man I didn’t know punctured me. He held a gun to my earlobe and hurt me. I remember the sound of the piercing, the pain inside and outside my ear. The earrings were gold hearts. I wore them for years.

  D liked my nose ring. He had tattoos and enjoyed pain, too.

  During this time, my parents would pick me up every Friday and take me to their house for the weekend. That was the only way they could agree to let me live on campus. They thought college students only had sex Friday through Sunday. I didn’t understand why they wanted to spend so much time with me. Most people my age had parents who couldn’t wait to get rid of them. My parents seemed to be obsessed with me.

  My parents were obsessed with me.

  When I showed up with the nose piercing, my mother said my father would not like it. I ignored her. I was scared of my father seeing it, but I felt that my nose was mine. At dinner that night, my father said nothing. In the morning, he said nothing. In the afternoon, I asked him if he liked my nose ring. He said I was disgusting, and that if I didn’t take the stud out, he would take me out of college.

  I went down to the basement and started my laundry, tried to ignore him. I watched television with my sister. I heard my parents rustling around upstairs, their footsteps going from my bedroom to theirs. They called me up to them.

  When I went up, my father was lying in bed, holding a picture of D I had photocopied. I had tucked the image into my backpack’s front pocket. He asked me who the man in the picture was. I said it was a picture I’d copied from a magazine. Then he took out a bag of weed from his pocket. My bag of weed. I had forgotten it in a flannel shirt I’d taken off in my room. He asked me when I started smoking. I said the weed was my roommate’s, and that I’d taken it from her because she was a pothead. Then, he took out my birth control pills. He asked me how long I’d been taking them. I said I’d started taking them two months ago to regulate my period. The entire time I spoke, I remained calm. I did not want to be taken out of college. The aid I was receiving wasn’t enough for me to go without my father’s financial support, and he knew that and lorded it over me.

  He smirked. He didn’t give back any of my things. I asked for the birth control pills. He gave them to me, then asked me to go to the bathroom and take out my nose stud.

  I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and, crying, twisted the stud until I’d taken it out of my nostril completely. I washed my nose. I washed my face. I kept the stud in a jewelry case for years afterward.

  A few weeks later, I went back to the same place off MacDougal and got my navel pierced. This was the most painful thing I had ever experienced. A woman in a tank top and a bandanna clamped the skin above my belly button. She brought out a silver needle that resembled a rod. She sterilized my skin, asked if I was ready, then plunged the silver needle through. I had picked out a gunmetal-colored ring with a crescent moon and a star holding the ends together. She threaded that through the top of my navel and locked it into place.

  The following weekend, my mother saw the navel ring as I was coming up the stairs from the basement. She shouted at me, asked if I was trying to damage my body. It was strange for her to ask this, since she had stood by
while my father had beaten my body so many times. I said to her, as calmly as I could, “It’s my body.”

  “No,” she said, screeching. “It’s my body.”

  A few months earlier, she had found, in my closet, a pack of weight-loss pills. She’d confronted me about this, calling me a whore for being on birth control. I assured her that I was not having sex (I was) and that the pills were essentially ephedrine. She checked the labeling and asked her pharmacist and came back to me, relieved. “You’re right,” she must have said, “these are just weight-loss pills.” And she gave them back to me.

  I try to imagine that scenario now. If I found weight-loss pills and not birth control pills in my hypothetical daughter’s closet, I would completely lose my shit. I would hug her; ask her why she thought her strong body needed to be made smaller. I would be thrilled if I found birth control pills, because she would be taking care of her body. This is all assuming I would rifle through a daughter’s closet to begin with.

  •

  The most vivid diet my mother put me on is one where I ate nothing but pineapple and watermelon and strawberries all day, because of their supposedly enzymatic, scrubbing qualities. At night, I would sometimes get a hamburger patty. I vomited bile, pregnant with nothing but the possibility of my fatness. Over one summer, I had gone from 168 pounds to 140. Men paid attention to me. White men wanted to date me.

  But I was still seventeen, and my mother was telling me that my body was hers. Because ownership of the child’s body belonged to the parent. I’m sure that is how it was with her mother, her father. I cannot find any other way to explain or understand why she said this to me.