First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  Hadi hated that Islamic custom allowed any woman to see my body, while he, the soon-to-be husband, was literally stuck waiting in the car. If Hadi had it his way, Mama, Lina, and Mrs. Ridha would be sitting in the waiting area outside. I'd stick an arm out of the fitting room and grab the oversized dresses, and the clothespins to secure them, right from Samira's hands. “Now that I am getting married, you may no longer see me in my undergarments,” I'd call out. “Not even you, woman whose uterus was once my home!”

  In anticipation of this weekend, Hadi and I had reenacted the following telephone conversation nightly.

  He'd say, “How would you feel if you knew I was changing in front of other people?”

  “Be my guest,” I'd reply. “Be free. Be naked if you want.” Just leave me alone.

  Apparently my lack of interest in keeping Hadi's nakedness all to myself was hurtful. In a wounded tone, he'd say, “I don't see why you don't want our bodies to be something special, just between us.”

  “I don't see why you are asking me to do something that our religion doesn't even ask of me. Even girls who wear the hijab do whatever they want in the company of other women.”

  Sharing a fitting room with a girlfriend, sister, or mother was female bonding at its finest. This was the equivalent of me asking him not to watch sports with his male friends. Ever.

  “This has nothing to do with religion,” he'd finally say. “I've always thought of our bodies as a symbol of the private life we share together. I know you're the only person I want to see me, and I thought you'd feel the same way.”

  At the time, I could have gagged on Hadi's love and all the things that we were only going to share with each other. I had heard so much about boys and their different needs and indestructible reputations that I never stopped to consider what it might have felt like to be the kind of Muslim boy who had grown up eschewing such cultural double standards, holding onto our religion's ideals of the virgin couple through high school and then college. Surely, Hadi was carrying his own special brand of expectations into his first relationship with a woman, but I did not have the maturity to recognize that. His extraordinary sentimentality only baffled and frustrated me.

  While normally I wouldn't have given a second thought to being in my underwear in the company of other women, that morning I relished my small act of defiance. It was a day for me and the girls. We'd do what ladies did in fitting rooms—admire and gripe about our bodies.

  Samira came into the room and hooked a bundle of dresses on the door. She took one look at me and said to Mrs. Ridha in Arabic, “Congratulations. Your daughter-in-law has a beautiful body. Your son is very lucky.”

  Mrs. Ridha laughed. “We are the lucky ones. What he wouldn't give to be seeing what we are seeing.”

  This elicited laughs from everyone except Lina, who crinkled up her nose with disgust.

  “I hope he doesn't like big boobs, because what she has will barely fill a hand,” Mama said. Her tone was light, and it set off another round of laughter, but this was not meant as a jab. Iraqis do not value directness. We say things we don't mean so that people will correct us, we refuse things we are offered to be polite, and we never ask for what we want without apologizing for it profusely. My big nose and small chest were marriage liabilities, and this was Mama's way of acknowledging this, of saying, “Now you've seen everything we have to offer.”

  My MSA friends and I could argue all we wanted about how Islam shielded women from unforgiving standards of beauty, but Mama's comment reminded me how far the Western ideal of the slim but buxom femme had traveled, how universal it had become. On the few occasions when Mama had commented that my future husband might be disappointed by my small chest, I'd taken offense and said, “You're my mother. You're supposed to tell me that whoever marries me should accept me the way I am.” She'd looked at me as if I was being naïve. “Men like boobs,” she said. It was silly to pretend otherwise.

  Mrs. Ridha now made a shooing gesture with her hand to dismiss the topic. “You think anybody could ask him such a question? Hadi thinks everything about Huda is perfect. One time, I asked him, ‘If Huda wanted to change her nose, would you accept it?’ He got so angry. I told him, ‘Don't worry. Nobody is trying to change her.’”

  This was another arena in which Hadi's love suffocated me. Among friends, I was used to moaning about my big nose and the way it leaned to one side, my dimply thighs, and my fleshy stomach. For the most part, these were invitations to contradiction, but Hadi objected to the practice entirely. He said things like, “Hey, I love your_____. You can't talk about it like that,” and I'd follow with something I never expected to defend, my right to criticize myself.

  Samira slid a series of dresses over my head and clipped them closed. There were several nos, a couple of maybes, and then gasps. “Now this, this is something special,” Mrs. Ridha said. The dress had a satin bodice with long sleeves and a skirt made of fine tulle whose underlayers were dotted with clear sequins that danced in the light while its top layer was intricately embroidered along the bottom edge and train.

  “Beautiful,” Mama agreed.

  I smiled. I twirled. I did a little dance because that was what you did when you tried on a dress that you liked. You checked out how you looked while dancing in it. It had a lovely swish.

  No. Wait. It was too soon for this kind of excitement. My ring had taught me a valuable lesson about patience in shopping.

  “This is off the shoulder,” I said to Samira.

  “We'll specify in your order that you want the sleeves on the shoulder.”

  “Can that be done without pouffiness? I don't want any pouffiness.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you guys really like it?” I asked Mama, Mrs. Ridha, and Lina.

  “You're beautiful,” Mrs. Ridha answered, “so whatever you wear is nice. What matters is that you like it.”

  “I like it, but how much is it?” I said, turning to Samira.

  Samira's lips moved with computational noises, and then she said aloud, “Three thousand for the dress, and then there will be additional fees for alteration and the custom sleeves.”

  Now it was my turn to gasp. My ring had cost less.

  “Don't think about the price,” Mrs. Ridha said. “The important thing is that you are happy.”

  And I was happy in a way that surpassed the glee of finding the perfect dress. I'd been taught that it wasn't enough to marry a man because you loved him. You had to love his entire family. This moment felt like proof that I was making the right decision. I may have questioned how I felt about Hadi, but I loved Mrs. Ridha. Not because she was buying me the most expensive article of clothing I'd ever owned, but because she understood that I was not just a wife for her son but a girl with dreams, some reasonable, most not, but all aching to be made true.

  Samira gathered up my hair and fed it through the opening of a rhinestone tiara. Staring at my reflection, I felt content, not just with my dress but also with my choice. Life was so much easier when I thought only like an Arab girl, who was happy to be marrying into a good family, who was free to love her spouse before her wedding but under no obligation to do so, who knew her love didn't have to be ready yet. It hadn't had a chance to grow.

  Back at school, I felt as if I'd been cut in half with zigzag scissors. My sophomore year, I roomed with Aysar, one of two Iraqi American girls I'd met on campus (the other Iraqi girl happened to be Aysar's cousin and the person who introduced us). Aysar didn't hang out with the MSA crowd, and she wasn't looking to get married while still in college. In her company, I felt nostalgia for things I had not yet lost. My wedding date had been set for the summer, and seven more months of life as a single girl didn't feel like enough.

  I loved living with Aysar. We called the lone sink at the front of the room our kitchen. We brewed tea every night in a dormitory-violation Mr. Coffee and coordinated our bathroom trips so we could talk and visit with our neighbors as we walked down the hall. We danced to loud music,
and rather than stop when we grew tired, we held onto the back of our desk chairs and moved only our behinds while saying breathlessly, “Must keep dancing.”

  Aysar was exactly the kind of friend an obsessed-with-grades student needed. She made me write my term papers on her computer so that I wouldn't have to stand over my Brother word processor, loading its typewriter with paper and printing out one page at a time. She brought me soup when I was sick and insisted that I take the occasional study break to have dinner off campus or catch a movie. And whenever I got back from the library, Aysar was waiting for me with music on and tea brewing.

  I joked that Aysar was the best wife and that it was a shame I hadn't been born a man, because I would've made such a good husband. I wanted to be the one in the couple who worked, whose goals and ambitions determined where my future family lived. But instead, night after night, I sat on the sidelines and coached Hadi to find research projects that would lead to the kind of undergraduate publications I hoped would get him an acceptance into medical school. And while all this struck me as unfair, it didn't seem unbearably so until one evening when Aysar and I were stretched out on our beds, taking a moment to relax after dinner.

  “We should go to Europe for spring break,” Aysar had said. “A girl trip before you get married.”

  Aysar and I would've had an amazing time in Europe. She'd say, “Let's go to a club.” And I'd say no, but then she'd insist and I'd have to go along with her because it wasn't safe to separate. By day, we'd sit in cafés and people-watch and laugh until we cried. “You may be beautiful and stylish,” we'd say to the well-dressed passerby, “but you don't have any shops with the word ‘mart’ in it. You can't buy underwear, auto parts, and milk all in the same store.” And we'd live on salads and bread and cheese, the kind of food that didn't fill Hadi but the kind that would make me feel so healthy, so light, so free.

  “I can't think of how I'd ever be able to do that,” I said without looking at Aysar. This admission felt heavy, deadening.

  All this time, I'd believed getting engaged was my ticket to freedom, but I'd never felt so constrained. I'd merely gained another person to answer to, a third parent who had an opinion on who I studied with and changed in front of, whose career path would dictate where I would live and go to school. It was one thing to defend my culture and religion to my peers, to explain its principles and ideas in class after class, but it was quite another thing to own this fractured mind, to hear the American voice within me whisper, You are too young, much too young to be tied down, to limit yourself for any man, and my Muslim voice console, This is just fine. You are marrying the right guy. God Himself told you this. If only I knew then that this dichotomy was confining me, too, cleaving my thoughts into two sides where my every misgiving was an American idea and therefore risky and dangerous, and my every reassurance was a Muslim idea and safe and good.

  Hadi blamed the physical distance between us for the tension during our phone conversations. He insisted that all we needed was one day out, one day to prove that our lives together could be fun. His mother was planning a reception to welcome his sister Jamila's new baby in January. Since my family would be coming for the occasion, he had asked his parents that we be allowed to go out alone the day before the party.

  I told him he had to plan everything, hoping that this day would capture my heart and, once and for all, quiet my mind's incessant chorus of regrets. It never occurred to me that this was too much to expect from one day, one moment, one man. Our wedding date had been set for the end of July, and I needed something to reassure me that my decision to stay with Hadi hadn't been a mistake, that even though Hadi still hadn't gotten any interviews to medical schools and I had no idea what he was going to do after he graduated in June, there was something so romantic and wonderful about us that we were meant to be together.

  My family and I arrived at Hadi's house on a Friday night. We would be taking over Hadi's room, my parents on the bed, Lina and I on a stack of blankets on the floor. That night, Hadi walked me to the door of his room and told me that he was looking forward to tomorrow and that I should dress casually. My body let go of tension I hadn't realized I'd been holding. Hadi had put thought into this. He'd planned.

  The next morning, I slid into the kind of outfit I rarely wore but Hadi said I looked cutest in—jeans, tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt—and then I repacked my bag because our families would stay at the Ridhas’ beach house in San Diego that night. I expected to find Hadi waiting for me in the kitchen, but only our parents were seated at the marble slab table, sipping their tea, dipping pita bread in lebne, or wrapping it around slices of Syrian cheese and bundles of mint.

  “Sit down and eat,” Dr. Ridha said.

  And because Hadi was nowhere to suggest otherwise, I sat and felt some of the day's excitement fizzle. There were girls whose boyfriends picked them up from their homes and whisked them off to fancy brunches and dinners, and then there were girls like me, who had breakfast with their future in-laws on the day she had come to think of as her first and last date before getting married.

  When Hadi showed up in the kitchen a half hour later, he was dressed but not ready to leave. He whispered something in his mother's ear. A moment later, he was in the garage. Then he was out of the garage and saying, “It's not there.”

  After more directions from his mom, Hadi went back into the garage and returned with a cooler in hand. He set it down on the counter and bent toward his mother's ear again. I stuffed a piece of cheese into a triangle of pita bread and watched Mrs. Ridha leave her chair and pull bread, mayonnaise, and cold cuts out of the refrigerator.

  When Hadi and his mother set to work, making sandwiches for our day out, I excused myself and headed to the hall bathroom. There I took a series of deep breaths so that I would not cry. This was the first date Hadi had planned for us, and he was packing us a picnic with his mommy. Dear God, I prayed, why can't we do anything that makes me feel like an adult who is old enough to be getting married?

  I wanted to call Mama into the bathroom, but I already knew what she'd say. That I expected too much from the boy. That I wanted to marry someone who'd never had a girlfriend but wanted him to act like a man who had been out with a thousand women. That I wanted an American-style date, but that we weren't Americans and Islamically we shouldn't have been going out alone anyway. That because I was born in America, I equated being an adult with doing things without parental involvement, but in Iraq, some people lived with their parents their whole lives and there was no shame in that.

  Listening to her imaginary talk was enough to send me back into the kitchen with a vow to be patient, to give Hadi a chance. He'd never taken a girl out before. He didn't know how pathetic this seemed.

  When I came back to the kitchen, Hadi was lining up our sandwiches next to two canned soft drinks in the cooler. He smiled at me. He was excited, proud of himself for the day he had planned. Hadi slid the cooler closed and announced that he was ready to leave.

  “Why are you leaving now?” his father asked, getting up from the breakfast table. “It will be time to pray in a half hour. Pray and then go.”

  Hadi looked at the clock and then looked at me. This was the practicing Muslim's midmorning outing dilemma. When you only had less than an hour to the afternoon dhuhr prayer to spare, you had to decide whether you wanted to wait and pray at home or leave and spend the day wondering if you should (a) find a quiet place where you could pray without drawing an audience; (b) miss your prayer, feel guilty about it, and make it up when you got home; or (c) rush home to squeeze in the prayer before sunset when the evening prayers would become due.

  But now that Hadi's father brought it up, the choice was no longer mine to make. Opting for anything but staying would have declared an indifference to my daily prayers and an eagerness to be alone with his son. “It's up to you,” I said and then looked away, setting about clearing the breakfast table and helping with the dishes. No more discussion of our leaving followed, and so I finished
in the kitchen and returned to the bedroom, where I took off my socks to make wudhu and covered my hair to pray, before finding Hadi in the hallway.

  “We're leaving,” Hadi announced. This brought our families out of their rooms to bid us farewell.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Dr. Ridha called out from his bedroom doorway. “Wait until Jamila and Bashar leave.”

  Hadi's sister and his brother-in-law were leaving their baby with Mrs. Ridha and spending the day at an amusement park. I couldn't understand what their departure had to do with ours and apparently neither did Hadi.

  “Why would we wait for them?” Hadi asked while approaching his father. “We're not going out together.”

  “And what's wrong with you all leaving at the same time?” Dr. Ridha's voice was calm and level. I knew this tone; it made any inflection on the other end of the conversation sound unreasonable and defensive.

  “But we have our own car,” Hadi said, involuntarily completing the effect.

  With the same evenness, Dr. Ridha answered, “There is no rush now. I said wait for them and go out together.”

  The negotiations had ended. Any reply now would imply that we had some kind of inappropriate rush to be alone together, and so we waited and waited because the catch in all this was that Hadi's sister wasn't ready. She had a baby to nurse, milk that had to be expressed, a diaper to change, and a bag to pack because she and her husband would be spending the night together at a hotel before meeting us for the elaborate reception Mrs. Ridha had planned the next day.

  When our moment of departure finally arrived well over two hours later, our families gathered at the door and kissed us on the cheek as if we were leaving on a transatlantic journey. Hadi's mother reminded him that we'd all be going to the beach house that night, and then she gave Hadi something to return to the electronics store we'd be passing on the way.