First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  We settled into Hadi's brother's car, since Hadi's car was still grounded in the garage. The clock on the dash read close to three o'clock, and this alone made me feel as if our day was done before it even started.

  “Sorry about that,” Hadi said.

  I didn't answer.

  “I'm happy to finally be with you,” he said.

  An uneasiness had constricted my throat, and all I could offer in return was a tight thank-you. Hadi and I were children around his father, and children weren't supposed to get married. Adults got married.

  After a tense, quiet drive, we joined a winding two-lane road that I hoped signaled our arrival to our destination. When we still hadn't stopped thirty minutes later, I feared we were lost.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I'm sorry. I thought we would've been there by now.”

  “Where is there?”

  “It's an old gold-mining town. I was going to take you there because I know how much you like history, but I think the friend who gave me directions might've made a mistake in telling me how far away it is.”

  Of course, he made a mistake, I thought, because this day was doomed from its outset.

  “It'll be getting dark soon,” I said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don't know, but it's almost four. Even if you found this place now, everything will be closing soon. And I'm hungry, and soon it's going to be too dark to have a picnic.”

  “Should we stop and look at a map?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  Hadi pulled into a wide turnout and parked to the side of a scraggly oak tree. He fanned out the map across the steering wheel.

  “I'm sorry,” he said after a moment. “I don't know exactly where we are right now, but it looks like we still have a ways to go. Even if we keep going, I don't know that we'll be able to make it down there before dark.”

  I watched Hadi fold up the map, feeling terribly burdened by this truth: Hadi had no tricks up his sleeve, no rescue in the works. Our date was officially a bust, and this on the day when I'd seen such proof of our youth. Already reduced to a child, I didn't know if I could talk myself out of crying.

  Hadi stepped out of the car, got the cooler out of the trunk, opened the door on my side, and said, “Come on. You're hungry. There's more room in the back.”

  After we'd settled into the bucket seats, the cooler between us, Hadi added, “This wasn't how things were supposed to turn out.”

  “I know,” I said. “Things are always supposed to turn out differently, but somehow they never do.”

  “The day isn't over yet. We still have to get back to San Diego. We can return my mom's stuff, and then maybe we can have dinner on the way.”

  “I don't know.” I preferred to think we'd never gone on a date than to think our one date had gone so badly.

  “Let's go. I'll call my mom when we get to the store and tell her we're stopping for dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said and reached over and squeezed his hand. Maybe this would be one of those funny, romantic dates—the kind of day where everything goes wrong in the beginning but turns out right in the end.

  The gods of California traffic, however, had not smiled upon us. It took us over an hour to get to the electronics store. By the time we finished the return and arrived at the pay phones outside to call Mrs. Ridha, it was nearing seven o'clock. Seven on the day of my only date, and we still had not gone anywhere. I had pinned so much hope on this day, but to Hadi's parents this was just another day to sit down, have a family breakfast, run errands, and, for reasons beyond me, orchestrate a simultaneous departure with his sister.

  Hadi picked up the receiver and unraveled the tangled metal cord. “Wait,” I said. “I'm having second thoughts about dinner.”

  In spite of my protest, Hadi's fingers went to work, punching in his calling card number.

  “Hadi, we've been out too long, and our parents won't understand that we've spent the entire day in the car. All they'll think is that we had the whole afternoon together and still want more.”

  “It's fine,” he said, pulling the cord taut in his hand. “I'll talk to my mom.”

  No one picked up at the beach house. Next he called home, and his mother answered. I listened to Hadi's side of the conversation, and when he hung up, he filled in the blanks. His mother decided she had too much to do before the party to go to the beach house. All the women were staying home that night, but our fathers were driving to San Diego with our things so that we wouldn't have to drive all the way back to his parents’ house.

  “Let's go straight to the beach house then,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to upset our fathers.

  “No, don't worry. My mom said it was okay, and besides our dads just left. They won't be at the house for another hour and a half.”

  I was too nervous to have dinner at a restaurant with table service, and so I pointed to an Italian place in the strip mall across the street. After ordering at the counter, we sat in a booth where I picked at my airport-quality rigatoni, a ball of disappointment lodged in my throat. I'd been a fool to think I could have the Muslim American love story of my dreams. At the end of the day, we were just two Muslim kids from families who believed outings like this were just unnecessary opportunities for sin.

  “We are getting married in six months,” I said, on the verge of tears, “but it was too much to ask for this one day. I just wanted us to have one special day to remember.”

  With an almost panicked fervor, Hadi pleaded for one more stop. “The day isn't over yet. Let me take you to Coronado Island. The bridge is beautiful at night. We can walk along the beach, stop for ice cream.”

  “There's no time.”

  “Who cares about the time? They made us waste time at the beginning of the day, and if we get in trouble, I'll deal with it.”

  “I don't think it's a good idea,” I said without explicitly refusing. The allure of the day being made right was too irresistible. If we went to the beach house now, I didn't know what I'd tell myself about our engagement to make it tolerable.

  But back in the car, I could not take my eyes off the clock.

  “This is farther than I thought,” I said. “It's getting late.” Fear had conquered me. There was nothing Hadi could do in the next hour that would cancel out what had happened during the day, nothing that would be worth handling the questions about where we'd been.

  “Don't worry,” Hadi insisted. “We'll be quick.”

  We sat on a rock near the entrance to the beach on the Hotel Del Coronado's grounds for all of four minutes before I said we should go. Not only did the beach at night scare me, but also my stomach was cramping with anxiety. I could hear a clock ticking away in my mind; I could hear Dr. Ridha saying, “Where were you?” as soon as we walked through the door.

  I stood up. Hadi said, “Can I at least give you a hug before we leave?”

  I walked into Hadi's outstretched arms with my arms flat at my sides. He wrapped his arms around me, but I did not return his embrace.

  “I give up. Let's go.” He stood, wiped the sand off the back of his pants, and said, “My ring.”

  “What about your ring?”

  “It flew off my finger and into the sand,” Hadi said, dropping to his knees, patting the ground around him.

  “You've got to be kidding me. We were supposed to be back a half hour ago.”

  “You think I don't know that?” he said, digging around the periphery of the rock.

  “Oh my God.” I brought my hands up to my mouth. “There's no way you'll find it. Nobody ever finds anything in the sand, and it's dark and it's late…” My voice trailed off, and instead of dropping to the ground and helping Hadi look, I leaned back against the rock and panicked. “We are so doomed. I knew we should've gone back. This is a sign. There's something wrong with us being together.”

  Now we'd have to tell our parents we'd been to the beach at night. The beach of all places. They barely allowed us t
o go out alone, and we were at a place notorious for making out and sex. Oh the disgrace!

  “There is nothing wrong with us being together. It's cold. My fingers must've shrunk, and the ring was already loose to begin with. Let's go inside the hotel. I'll call home, and we'll see if they have a metal detector or flashlight or something.”

  Hadi's suggestion filled me with dread. I hated how we appeared as a couple to people outside the Muslim community. What would the employees in the hotel think when Hadi said he lost his ring and we looked like teenagers? To the average American, we were two stupid kids, with the words breakup and future divorce written all over our foreheads.

  Leaning on the darkly stained wood-paneled front desk, Hadi told our story to the hotel night clerk. She sucked air through her teeth, the way people do when they are about to tell you the thing you've asked for is impossible, ridiculous even. She suggested we rent a metal detector and come back tomorrow.

  Between searching for the ring and walking back to the hotel, we'd lost another hour. It was now past ten. There was nothing left to do but call home and confess. At the pay phones by the lobby bathroom, Hadi called his mother. He explained what had happened and asked her to get the message to Dr. Ridha that we were going to be late. Hadi wasn't about to call his dad and get a sneak preview of the lecture that awaited us.

  We drove home over a lit bridge, an ocean of blackness below us, but the beauty of the view was lost on me. The entire drive home, I cried at the injustice of it all. This was an engagement I didn't want anymore, and now I was going to be given a lecture intended for a boy and girl who were in love, who'd stayed out too long, having fun. Now I was returning to a house full of men, with no moms to intervene.

  When we pulled into the driveway, I felt a blaze of shame go up within me followed by a desperate urge to run. I wasn't used to getting in trouble. I didn't know how to steel myself to face an angry adult.

  At the sound of the engine, Dr. Ridha opened the front door. As soon as we stepped out of the car, the lecture began. “This is absolutely unacceptable. You two should not even be out together alone, and then you were out so late. You made us both very, very worried.”

  We walked into the house, our heads down. Dr. Ridha pointed to the stairs that led up from the entryway into the living room. We followed, and he continued. “I don't like this at all. I am very disappointed in you, Hadi. This is somebody's daughter, and you are responsible for her. This is a sign. You should not be going out together alone. That's it. No more of this.”

  I had frozen in front of the couch, my eyes meeting Baba's as he stood by the dining room table. I knew instantly that he was not upset but confused. He looked shocked, as if he had not expected Dr. Ridha to be so angry.

  “I want everybody to go to bed now. We'll discuss this more tomorrow.”

  I gave Baba a half smile and then rushed to the room where I'd be staying before anyone noticed that I'd started to cry. Before I had a chance to close the door, Baba appeared.

  “I'm sorry. I just asked Dr. Ridha why you were so late. I didn't know he would get so much angry.”

  And then I got a flash of what this evening might have been like for Dr. Ridha. Without Mama around to keep Baba in check, his anxieties had gotten the best of him. Baba was the type of person who needed to know where every member of his family was every second of the day. He'd probably asked Dr. Ridha where we were and when we'd be back at least a dozen times. Dr. Ridha must have grown increasingly uncomfortable that he didn't have an answer, that it was his son who was causing my dad so much worry.

  “It's okay, Baba,” I said through tears because there was no point in explaining otherwise. I knew that bewildered look he'd worn standing by the table a few minutes ago. It was the same did-I-do-something-wrong expression that transformed his anxious face whenever Mama snapped at him for calling her too much at work or for using the overhead paging system to find her in public places.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and blew my nose into the tissues I'd grabbed off the dresser. Baba could not stand to see me cry, but he never knew what to say to comfort me either. That night, he stood beside me awkwardly, his hands folded behind his back, and said, “I was so much worried, but I did not want to make you sad. I wish your mummy was here.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, and an urge to shelter Baba from my sadness overcame me. “I'm fine,” I said. “I just feel bad, that's all. We weren't trying to be late, and I was having such a terrible time.”

  Baba said, “You want to call your mummy?”

  I shook my head and said I'd go to bed instead. But I stared at the ceiling, feeling the weight of my own future pressing down on me, and could not fall asleep. This was not the life I wanted. Not the engagement I wanted. Not the boy or the kind of father-in-law I wanted. But I was too far into things to get out now. The hall had been booked, the date announced. How I wished the mattress would swallow me whole.

  The next morning, I got ready for Jamila's reception as slowly as possible. I camouflaged my puffy face with makeup, pinned my hair into a French twist, and painted the nails on my still-trembling hands. When I had nothing else left to do, I filled the hollow that yesterday's crying had left behind with a deep, steadying breath and went downstairs.

  Our fathers were seated at the dining table, eating pita bread with cheese. Hadi sat at the table too but without any food in front of him.

  “I'm glad you're here,” Dr. Ridha said as soon as he saw me. “I have something very important I want to tell the both of you today, here in front of your father.”

  He cleared his throat and continued. “After the dawn prayer, I woke up Hadi, and we went down to the beach where he lost the ring. I raised my hands and prayed to Allah, subhanallah wa ta'ala, to help us find it. Then I started to pick up handfuls of sand, like this…”

  Dr. Ridha brought up both of his hands until they met to form a bowl shape. “I shook my hands so that only the sand could pour out. I did this again and again until I found this at the bottom of my hand.” He reached into his pocket and produced Hadi's platinum band.

  I looked over at Hadi for confirmation, but his expression was hard to read, a mixture of frustration and helplessness. And who could blame him? Who on earth could find anything in the sand? Maybe Dr. Ridha did have some kind of direct line to God.

  “Now I'm going to keep this ring for a time because I think Allah, subhanallah wa ta'ala, has done this to remind us that a man and woman should not be alone before they are married.”

  “But, Baba,” Hadi said. “I bought tickets to a show tonight a long time ago. We were going to go with Jamila and Bashar so we wouldn't be alone. I asked Mom, and she said it was okay.”

  “You'll have to give them away then. I told you, I do not think it is right that you two go out together anymore.”

  Tickets. This was the first thing I'd heard about tickets. Hadi did have more planned for us. He was trying.

  I reached for a piece of bread. I needed something to stare at so no one would see my thoughts crushing me. Yesterday had been a punishment from God. Hadi did have another trick up his sleeve. Later he would tell me that he'd gotten us tickets to see Cats, but the only thing I'd have to show for it would be the memory of its denial. What was this household, where one man could make a decision for everyone despite the person's wishes and wants? This imbalance of power felt foreign, alien. I didn't understand how two families, so similar in religion and culture, could be so different. After all these years of friendship, it never occurred to me that there would still be sides to the Ridhas I had not seen, family dynamics I'd never witnessed. I wondered how much of the Hadi I knew was colored by the role he played in his family; I wondered how he might have appeared to me had I known him as a man first and the Ridhas’ son second.

  Now that Dr. Ridha had made his stand, Hadi and I only saw each other when our families visited for a weekend. Since we couldn't go out alone together anymore, we stole kisses and gropes, but once alone, I'd turn over each
embrace in my mind, burning with the shame of sneaking around and the irony of it all. Our families were like the state of Iran, expending an extraordinary amount of effort to keep us from being an unmarried man and woman out in public only to leave us with nothing to do inside but make out.

  Back at school, I struggled to come to terms with this boy I never failed to kiss but wasn't sure I liked and the elaborate wedding we were planning. Almost nightly, Hadi and I bickered over the phone regarding three areas of disagreement.

  CRISIS A: IS IT MY BODY OR YOURS?

  This argument touched on several matters (whether or not I'd get a massage prior to our wedding, how I'd style my hair that day, who we'd spend time with before we left for our honeymoon), but the one that received the most argumentative attention was the question of who would see me first on the day of our wedding. I believed Hadi should wait for me at the end of an aisle, like a proper Hollywood groom, maybe shed a tear the first time he saw me. Hadi thought that we should exchange a private moment prior to our wedding. He likened waiting at the end of an aisle to being the last person to see a present intended for him. I accused him of treating me like an object and of being jealous and controlling. Hadi accused me of being unsentimental and being more interested in our wedding than our future.

  CRISIS B: YOU ARE TOO BORING. YOU ARE GOING TO RUIN MY WEDDING.

  In April, Hadi's aunt threw us a bridal shower in a Lebanese restaurant. For the entertainment, Mrs. Ridha hired a well-known Persian dance troupe led by an agile, somewhat elfin man in harem pants. During the final song, the spritely dancer pulled us both to the center of the dance floor. He motioned for us to follow him as he wove through the tables, shaking a tambourine, and although Hadi cooperated, his body was tense and tight. Since my vision of my wedding featured an excited, happy groom, Hadi's bridal-shower presence concerned me. During our nightly phone calls, I reminded him that he had to become an eager dancer before our wedding, whether it was natural to him or not. Hadi argued that not all people expressed joy by dancing or laughing or other more public displays of glee. Some people, he said, are happy quietly. This, I informed him, meant that he was dull. And for added measure, I told him he didn't make me laugh enough. He was not funny, and in his company, I was doomed to a humorless life.