First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  “Thank you. That's really sweet,” I said, my heart filling with warmth and a sudden jolt of nervousness. If Hadi had thought so far ahead as to buy me the toy car, then surely he had more planned. What if he answered my question from our phone conversation and asked me to marry him?

  That year the prom was being held at my top choice of future wedding venues, a historic naval building that had once been a grand hotel situated less than a mile away from downtown and the beach. Hadi opened my car door, and we walked up the steps to the ballroom side by side with plenty of space between us. At the door, I took in the high ceilings and arched windows, the heavy draperies and wrought-iron candelabras affixed to the walls. To the side of the dance floor stood Diana and her date, a guy she'd met at one of her college campus tours. In the weeks leading up to the prom, I'd described the extent of my relationship with Hadi in teenage detail, but I had made Diana swear repeatedly not to give me away. Under no circumstances could she mention the name Hadi, not in front of him or my parents or my siblings. It was an all-around Never Ever. Now I led Hadi over to our table, our hands at our sides and a sizeable distance between us. Diana played the part of ignorance well, accepting introductions and handshakes without the “I've heard so much about you” I feared.

  At our table, Nadia's place was unoccupied. We'd begged her to come with her brother, but she'd refused, saying a silly prom was not worth the sin. As I glanced around the room, Nadia's words returned to me along with a creeping sense of guilt. At neighboring tables, couples held hands, put their arms around each other, and leaned over in their chairs to kiss. Seeing Hadi in the chair next to me, his hands folded in his lap, I wondered why I had tried so hard to go to a dance. We didn't belong here.

  I waited for Hadi to strike up a conversation with Diana or at least with her date, but Hadi was quiet. I tried to make conversation for everyone, and all the while, my mind prepared excuses for him. He was a college student. He was above the immaturity of a high school prom. But as I blabbered, a foundation of disappointment was being poured. Tomorrow Diana would not call to tell me that Hadi was a great guy, that he was cute, or funny, or a good catch. I wasn't shy. I didn't want to marry a shy guy.

  We finished eating, the lights dimmed, and the music started. Diana got up to dance with her date. The other couples at our table followed. Soon Hadi and I were sitting alone. Over the thump of the music, I remarked about the food and the place, the people dancing around me, the songs being played, and then I gave up on conversation entirely. I realized Hadi wasn't going to break the rules and ask me to dance—that there would be no “Lady in Red” moment under a disco ball—and so instead, I suggested we go for a walk. First, we took the elevator upstairs to see the view of the city's lights and then downstairs to the tiled veranda.

  With our elbows resting along the adobe wall that surrounded the length of the veranda, we looked out at the moonlit lawn and the silhouette of rose bushes that stood along its edges. The cool night air traveled through the holes of my unlined lace sleeves, making me shiver. Hadi offered me his jacket.

  After an exchange of, “I'm fine” and “Please, take it,” I took his jacket just to make the back-and-forth stop. He held it open for me while I slid in my arms, and right away, I blushed at the body heat we were sharing for the first time, the way the scent of his cologne now pressed upon my neck. I was pleased to discover Hadi's sleeves covered my hands. I'd always wished Hadi was more than three inches taller than me so that I'd feel small when I stood next to him. Now I knew that even if Hadi wasn't a big guy, he was big enough for me.

  I looked down to my side at the terra-cotta pots filled with geraniums, and then I looked up at the moon in the cloudless sky, all the while hoping that my silence would force Hadi to speak.

  It didn't.

  I turned around so that my back rested against the wall, folded my arms, and said, “So, kind of boring, huh? Sorry I dragged you out here.”

  “I'm having fun.”

  “How could you be having fun? All we're doing is watching other people have fun,” I said and then immediately regretted such a shameless attempt to get Hadi to talk.

  “So is there anything you want to tell me?” I asked, trying to be more forthright. I waited a moment, expecting him to bring up our last phone conversation and tell me everything I'd been waiting to hear.

  But Hadi stood there staring at me. No words. Just an awkward smile that I couldn't even read for confirmation that he'd understood me. An anxious itch overcame me. After all this effort to make a dress and sneak out here, was it possible that he wouldn't say anything?

  I couldn't wait any longer. Without any attempt at subtlety, I asked, “Are you going to answer my question? The one from before, remember?”

  “I remember,” he said, his eyebrows rising slightly, his mouth twisting in a crooked half smile. He fidgeted, straightened his back, and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  I searched Hadi's face for a sign that he was about to speak, but his expression remained unchanged.

  I shook my head. What was this guy's problem? I couldn't stay quiet for that long if I tried. Maybe he didn't really like me. But he came all the way here. He bought me that stupid toy BMW. What if I'd taken this risk, put my reputation on the line to go out with him, and these insipid smiles and a model car were the best he had to offer? What if he was just waiting for his mother to do everything for him? She'd arranged this prom. She'd arrange our marriage.

  I looked down at the floor and at my shoes. Mama had used a hot-glue gun to attach a string of red sequins in a floral design along each shoe, but the sequins were not holding together. The loops that were meant to be petals flapped about, exposing white blobs of glue underneath.

  “You know what,” I said, forcing a chipper tone, “you can take me home now. I'm done.”

  “Are you sure?” Hadi asked, suddenly coming back to life.

  “I'm sure. Here, why don't you take your jacket?”

  “No, you keep it. I'm fine.”

  I was too busy ranting inside my head to say any more. I declared us over. I didn't know how to make sense of the istikharas’ positive results, but on that quiet walk back to the car, I preferred the uncertainty of my future prospects to a lifetime with someone I did not like. Only an unlikeable person would leave another person to flounder in such an awkward moment. Only an unlikeable person wouldn't recognize the vulnerability in an unanswered question. Or a shy person, and shy was no better. This had been my chance to go out alone with a boy without being engaged or married to him, to write the opening to a love story that didn't have our parents on every page, and he ruined it.

  At home I slipped on a T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants and yanked out the army of bobby pins that had been fortifying my hair since the morning. I ran a brush through the hair that was still stiff with hair spray and opened the door. Hadi was in the hallway upstairs, leaning against the banister.

  “Getting ready for bed?” he asked.

  Our culture had to make everything so damn familial. I could get over the fact that a boy didn't drive to my house to pick me up because he was already staying there. I could get over not having my proud parents snap my picture before I stepped out the door because my stupid prom was a big family secret. But what American girl had to bring her bad date home and make polite conversation with him in her pajamas? What American girl had to wake up and help her mother serve him and his mother tea and breakfast the next morning?

  “Not yet,” I said. “I'll probably do some of my homework. That's what every girl dreams of doing after her prom.”

  Hadi did not react to my sarcastic tone. “I could help if you want,” he said.

  I shrugged. “May as well.”

  We worked through a few problems on the floor of my bedroom, the door wide open. A short while later, Baba came upstairs to say good night. “Hah,” he said, surprised to see Hadi in my room. Then he registered the book open in front of us. “Oh, you are doing your homework. Okay. Good for
you.”

  He bent down and kissed my head, and I regretted sneaking out to go to the prom. The evening had not been worth the deceit. In the sweetest voice I could muster, I said, “I love you, Daddy.”

  I watched Baba descend the stairs in his plaid, flannel pajamas, so innocent, so naïve to the plots his wife and child had cooked up behind his back. I had betrayed such a naïve, unsuspecting man, a man whose pajama pants never seemed to reach past his ankles. I looked over at Hadi next to me, and I wanted to make him pay for not being worth the lie. I thought of a hundred different ways to say, “You screwed up,” until I settled on, “You missed an opportunity, you know.”

  “If I did, I'm sorry.”

  “Well, you did,” I said without looking up from my textbook.

  “At least you got to be the Lady in Red.”

  “No, I didn't.” I pushed the paper toward him. “Tell me what to do.”

  Step-by-step, Hadi walked me through the problem I'd copied out of my book. He never read the explanation, never flipped back to previous chapters to remind himself how to solve the equation. No matter what level of math I was in, ninth-grade algebra, tenth-grade geometry, eleventh-grade trigonometry, and now precalculus, Hadi knew the answers. I couldn't remember anything from one year to the next, but Hadi owned the math he knew. He could teach it, share it. This impressed me, but I didn't admit it. I worked by Hadi's side grumpily, and when he left the next day, I went up to my room and cried yesterday's tears.

  A few nights later, the phone in my room rang. I expected to hear Diana's voice on the other line.

  “Hi,” Hadi said.

  “Hi,” I answered and waited. I tried to keep busy wrapping the cord around my finger, but after a few seconds of listening to air, I grew antsy. “So did you call just to say hi?”

  “No. I wanted to call because I'm really sorry about everything that happened. I haven't been able to sleep or eat since. I wanted to call you earlier, but I didn't know what I would say if someone else answered the phone.”

  “I'm fine.”

  “I want to answer your question.”

  “You don't have to.”

  “I want to.”

  I waited again. After a minute, I added, “Listen, if you don't want to, then don't.”

  “No. I'm just not good with words. I need to think about what I'm going to say.”

  I heard him taking a deep breath. Then he paused again before saying, “Whenever I see myself in the future, the only person I imagine myself with is you.”

  I froze as if I were in a conversation with a deer on my lawn. If I moved, I feared he'd run away.

  “I think about you all the time, and when I dream about you, I don't want to wake up. I wanted to answer your question, but I kept telling myself that's not the kind of thing you should say to someone who is going to be somebody else's wife.”

  A mix of tenderness and frustration overwhelmed me. “With all that talk about us, how could you assume I was going to marry someone else?”

  “You don't know what it's like to hear about all the families that ask my mom about you,” Hadi said. “Why would I think you would marry a guy like me? I'm not the tallest. I'm not the smartest. I'm not the best-looking. I figured one day I'd hear that you were engaged to someone else, and I'd move away and try not to ever see you again.”

  I pictured Hadi fretting over losing me to someone else, and I wanted to hear more. “But why would you plan on moving away? You would've met someone else and been happy with her.”

  “I couldn't bear to watch you married to somebody else, having kids that should've been mine.”

  I didn't know what to say. Diana and I had spent so much time picturing how we wanted a man to profess his love to us, but we never paused to consider what we'd say in return.

  “That's funny,” I said. “You assumed I'd marry someone else, and I always felt like I couldn't marry anyone else.” And then hearing how that sounded, I added, “And that's great, because I like you, too. You've always been so sweet to me. It just bothered me to think you were waiting around for your mom to—you know—fix us up.”

  “I swear to you, I never thought that,” Hadi said. “I just planned on spending the rest of my life dreaming about you.”

  My heart swelled, and my stomach filled with a kind of queasiness I'd never felt before. Maybe Mama was right, and you could learn to love someone. Maybe knowing a guy loved you was enough to flip the switch in your heart that made you love him back.

  “But that's why I kept pushing you to say something to me,” I said. “I gave you an opportunity to take matters into your own hands, and you didn't.”

  “I just kept thinking about how you were going to marry somebody better than me, somebody with a job and a house who can give you all the things you deserve, and I thought it would make things harder if I told you how I felt.”

  I liked the notion of Hadi being content to love me from afar. It was cinematic and tragic, and it filled me with a resolve to love him, too.

  “I'm not going to marry anybody else,” I said. “So if you want me to have what I deserve, you better become the best.”

  “I can do that if you'll help me.”

  “I will,” I said, suddenly excited by the challenge of fixing him. Everything I didn't like about Hadi, I'd change. This was the premise of every romantic comedy I loved, coming to life. It would be just like the movie Pretty Woman except for the minor differences in the protagonist's gender and choice of profession.

  Hadi and I talked for a total of three hours that night. An hour into our conversation, Mama came upstairs to see what was keeping me in my room, and when I mouthed that I was on the phone with Hadi, she nodded and whispered that she'd guard the phone line. Hadi and I reviewed our childhoods together, what we were really thinking at the moments we both remembered. Nothing about our conversation struck me as off—not Hadi's lack of confidence or my misguided determination to change him. On the contrary, I got off the phone with Hadi feeling as if I'd arrived into one of the scenes that Diana and I dreamt up. It was nothing like I'd pictured. There were no balloons, limousines, or music, but it was only the beginning. Hadi could always plan something amazing for our proposal.

  The weekend of my high school graduation, houseguests occupied every corner of our home—Hadi and his entire family, his aunts, uncles, and cousins; and Mama's cousin Marwa and her children. Since there weren't enough bedrooms for individual families, we camped out according to gender. Women in the bedrooms, men on the floor in the living room and family room.

  At the ceremony, my extended family and the Ridha clan took up the entire first two rows of the auditorium. From where I sat on stage, I saw Mama, Lina, and Baba, grinning, holding up signs with my name on them. Whenever I looked at Mama, she clapped and blew me kisses. Whenever I looked over at Hadi, our eyes locked until I turned away. He looked better at my prom. His hair was big today, bushy and wavy, and his sideburns were growing over his ears. I doubted he'd cut his hair since then. The shirt he wore was wrinkly too, and the denim blazer he wore over it struck me as unfashionable.

  A train of self-pity chugged through me. This was my first time seeing Hadi since our phone conversation. I had expected that warmth I'd felt for Hadi on the phone to flood me as soon as I saw him, but here I was again picking on his clothes and his hair. And here I was, onstage at my high school graduation, struck by a shock of panic. If I didn't feel that kind of cinematic love for Hadi and we were marching toward marriage, then that meant I would never feel that kind of love for anyone, ever.

  I stopped myself. No. That wasn't how Mama or my aunts felt about their husbands. That kind of love wasn't essential to a good marriage.

  Our valedictorian took to the podium, and I writhed in my metal folding chair. In the end, I'd been denied the throne of academic excellence by the plague of every nerd's existence, physical education. In spite of four years of As and honor points, I could not undo the B plus that was caused by one measly skills test in volley
ball when I did not serve the ball over the net—not even once.

  I watched our speaker's cheeks quiver with nerves, and I told myself that she could have this speech because this was the only one she had in high school. I'd stood behind a microphone at more assemblies than I could count, and our classmates had already voted me Most Likely to Never Be Forgotten and Most Likely to be President of the United States. But this last thought filled me with more longing than comfort. I wanted that microphone in my hand more than I wanted the title of valedictorian. Behind a microphone, it didn't matter that I was only eighteen and already working my way into a marriage. When my voice carried strong and unwavering through an auditorium, nobody could box me into the Muslim woman stereotype. Not even myself.

  After the ceremony, we stood outside the auditorium, taking pictures. When the fuss died down, Hadi wandered over to me and whispered, “You look cute.” His words felt like their own kind of diploma, certifying that I was a grown woman with a man in her life now.

  Later that night, I went to my school's grad night celebration, but I couldn't bring myself to play laser tag and jump around in a sumo wrestler's suit when I knew I had my entire future to plan with Hadi. I called Mama and told her I wanted to come home early. She told me exactly what I wanted to hear—that she'd send Hadi to pick me up.

  This time when Hadi asked me if I wanted to go straight home, I said no. We drove to a restaurant across the street from school and slid into a booth covered in red vinyl.

  “It felt weird to say ‘two’ to that hostess,” Hadi said.

  “It felt weird to hear it,” I said, pressing my hand down on my stomach. The unsteady, queasy feeling I'd had when we were on the phone together had returned. I was alone in a restaurant with a boy for the first time in my life.

  “How did my mom send you without it looking suspicious?”

  “She made a point of announcing you needed to be picked up. Then my mom said to send me so that your mom wouldn't have to leave the house when she had so many guests, and then your mom said that if you weren't quite done, I should just wait for you in the car. And then at the door, she told me not to feel like we had to rush back.”