First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  But a critical piece of Americana was missing. I had wanted a you-may-now-kiss-the-bride moment. It was just as iconic as the wedding march, just as necessary. Dr. Ridha approached the microphone to make an announcement to our guests about where they would be gathering to say the evening prayers, and Hadi took the opportunity to get his father's attention with a loud “psst.” Dr. Ridha leaned over us. Then, back at the microphone, he said with a chuckle, “Hadi would like to kiss his bride.” There was laughter, and I was peeved. This wasn't supposed to be a funny moment, something we had to nudge our families to remember. We pecked on the lips, and there was more ululating before our relatives lined up to present us with their gifts of twenty-two-karat gold necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and rings.

  Our evening went on like this, something American, something Arab. Shortly after the gift exchange, our entire bridal party stood behind closed doors again, this time waiting to walk into the reception hall. For this entry, we were pure Arab. The Lebanese band struck up a typically Middle Eastern tune, and in typical zeffa-style, Hadi and I walked in first, a chain of our relatives behind us clapping, dancing, and shaking tambourines. We circled the dance floor several times before the band took a break, and we went back to being American for my first dance with Hadi, a father-daughter dance, a brief interlude of American pop music chosen by our American DJ. A little “Chicken Dance.” Some Spice Girls. A curious choice of the Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey.”

  It was as if my daily waffling between two cultures, my uncertainty over why I picked one tradition to observe over another, had put on a dress and some makeup and decided to throw a party. It picked out music and food, trying to fix the regular hotel-fare chicken breast with appetizers of hummus, dolma, and baba ghanoush. Sometimes my two worlds blended for such beautiful effect.

  Sometimes they clashed.

  In between songs, the DJ took the microphone and called out, “Huda, how did you feel the first time Hadi asked you out?”

  I froze, my heart beating wildly. Would I have to take the microphone and explain to the DJ now in front of everyone that we did not date and Hadi had never asked me out? A second later, I heard the first few notes of I Will Survive, then the lyrics describing the singer as afraid and petrified. I breathed a sigh of relief. All that had been a culturally insensitive lead-in to the next song.

  Our guests resumed dancing. Most of Hadi's family remained on the sidelines, some because they were not much for dancing, others out of a fear of sin and gossip. My family relied on the immunity that being at the wedding of a close relative afforded them (dancing at the wedding of a relative was a sign of affection and therefore understandable), but this was only a temporary reprieve. Regret would consume them later. My uncle would lecture my cousins for dancing while wearing the hijab and lament how we'd represented our family. My aunts would compare themselves to Hadi's aunts, who had steered clear of the dance floor, and beg me to edit them out of the video.

  After dinner, the band returned with their tablas and ouds and their Lebanese lead singer. I relaxed, knowing I'd squeezed in all the American things I'd wanted. Now I could enjoy my religiously excused opportunity to dance. It was exactly like I'd pictured—Lina, Diana, Nadia, and Aysar joining me on the dance floor, our heads thrown back, giggles erupting. But now Hadi was retreating toward the tables. I knew I should go after him, ask him what was wrong, but my legs would not follow.

  A half hour later, we cut our cake, I tossed my bouquet, and then I grabbed the photographer and went over to Jidu who was sitting at his table. He smiled when he saw me, and without a word, he stood and bent at the knees. He wrapped his arms around the width of my dress, and invoking the name of our first Imam with a strained “Ya Ali,” he hoisted me up into the air. I planted a kiss on his cheeks. The photographer's bulb flashed, and he put me down.

  When it was time to hit the dance floor again, Hadi stayed back, talking to his cousins, but I marched straight into the shadow of the glimmering disco ball. As the night wore on, tired bodies drifted back to their seats, but my loyal friends and I kept going. I didn't listen to my aching feet and back. I wanted to take advantage of every minute, every second.

  Hadi tapped me on my shoulder. “My back really hurts. I'm ready to go.”

  “It's too early,” I said. “I'm not ready for the night to end.”

  He looked at me agape. “How can you say no? I'm telling you I'm in pain.”

  But I refused again because I didn't care about Hadi's sore back or the deed that awaited us. This was what I wanted. This poufy dress. This crown. I didn't want to take it off yet. I would never wear it again. I would never be a bride again.

  “If you go back out there, then we're not doing anything tonight,” Hadi said.

  “Fine,” I answered because I didn't believe him. Once we got upstairs, Hadi would change his mind. He was a guy after all. Wasn't sex all they wanted?

  I went back to the dance floor and joined the flower girls whose exhaustion had made them hyper. We were the only ones dancing, but this did not deter me. As the bride, I, alone, set the mood for this party. I owed it to my guests to dance, and this was not a responsibility I took lightly.

  When people started to leave, Mama pulled me away from the dance floor to take photographs with our guests and to say goodbye. By one in the morning, the only people left in the hall were our relatives, but the spirit of the party had not left them. They lined up behind Hadi and me, the tambourines and drums reappearing. They clapped and sang us all the way to the elevator. In Arabic, they sang, “Love her, boy, love her. Don't be afraid of her mother.” And then much to my chagrin, one of my uncles got everyone chanting in English, “We know where you're going. We know where you're going.”

  When the doors to the elevator closed, my ears buzzed after hours of dancing into the blare of the band. My head pulsed with the weight of my rhinestone crown. My feet throbbed from the tightness of my shoes. And my new husband of about seven hours was angry. He stayed in his corner of the elevator, his arms folded, without saying a word.

  Given the chance, I did not choose him. I did not prove to him that he was more important than the party.

  It was over. Still in bed, I turned and looked at my wedding dress draped across a chair, the skirt so full of fabric it practically sat up. All that planning, hoping, and dreaming had evaporated in a few short hours. I would never wear that dress again, never be the guest of honor at such a grand party. Sadness pressed down on me like a giant boulder—a boulder that grew heavier when I thought about how things had gone last night.

  Hadi was already in the shower. I leaned over his side of the bed and dialed Mama's room. She practically squealed she was so happy to hear from me. “I wanted to call you before we left,” Mama said, “but I was afraid to wake you. How did everything go?”

  I knew what she was alluding to, but I didn't have time to get into details. “Fine,” I lied, “but our suitcases got mixed up. I don't have anything to wear.”

  “I wondered what happened to my bag. I didn't even realize you didn't have yours.”

  Moments later, the doorbell to our suite rang. All I had to wear was my underpants from the night before—my dress had sported its own built-in bra. I dug into Mama's suitcase and pulled on her ratty, old brown housedress, the one I'd seen her mop the floors in hundreds of times.

  I opened the door, and she threw her arms around me. When she pulled away, she looked confused. “Why are you wearing that?”

  “Because I don't have anything else to wear.”

  “You mean you didn't even wear your beautiful nightclothes?”

  “If I did, would I be wearing this?”

  My new bridal set was still sitting in the suitcase on the floor beside her.

  Searching my eyes, she asked, “Are you okay?”

  I shrugged.

  “Did you do it?”

  I shook my head.

  “That's okay. Not everybody does it the first night. But how come? What happened?”<
br />
  I picked up the suitcase in one hand, and with the other, I pulled her over to the loveseat in the living room portion of the suite. Then I closed the door to the bedroom in case Hadi came out of the bathroom. He wouldn't have liked me discussing this with my mom.

  I sat down next to Mama, but I couldn't bring myself to look at her before I said, “We tried, but we couldn't.”

  “What do you mean ‘couldn't’?”

  “You know…couldn't. I'm pretty sure that I don't have a hole. There's just no way that can get in there.”

  It seemed there'd been a misunderstanding on my part. It didn't shrink so as to slip in nicely without hurting anyone. It grew.

  Mama laughed. “I assure you. You have a hole, and that does get in there.”

  “If that's how this is done, then I'd really prefer to have nothing to do with it.” I stared at my hands, still too uncomfortable to meet Mama's gaze.

  Mama was having a wonderful time at my expense. She laughed until she saw the look I flashed her. Then she worked to suppress her grin. “I'm not laughing at you. You're so cute, that's all. Sex is wonderful. You just have to relax. Maybe you're so nervous that it's making you dry. You know, you could try a little lubricant, and then when you get really aroused, close to the point of orgasm, then he can try.”

  “Mama!” I said as if the entire word was an expression of shock.

  “Come on. We talked about these things.” Ever the clinician, Mama never shied away from frank discussions about the body.

  “Yes, but it was a long time ago and I wasn't listening.” I reached for my suitcase, unsure what to make of all this information. After all the kisses and touches we'd exchanged, I was so confident that my wedding night would be just like the dimly lit, passionate tangle of bodies I'd seen in the movies and that somewhere in all the kissing and moving, the intercourse part happened. I assumed that was how teenagers got pregnant on accident because it was so easy for a penis to slide inside a woman. I had no idea that I would have to play such a conscious role in all of this, that I'd have to oil myself up like some sort of a machine. The entire process struck me as unromantic and far too deliberate. Sex had seemed so easy on film, so inevitable.

  I told Mama I'd get dressed and meet everyone downstairs. I set my suitcase on the bed and pulled out the outfit I'd planned for this very day. An off-white dress with pearls around the cuffs. A set of lace undergarments in the same color. We were supposed to check out of this hotel and into another in Newport Beach for the few days until we left on our honeymoon. I thought about tonight and the next night, and the weight of the deed in front of us bore down on me.

  I didn't get it. Did the whole world really go around doing this? Why did women talk about the size of that as if it was good for it to be big? Wouldn't they want it to be small so it wouldn't have to pierce them to make its way in? And on top of everything, I was so tired. I thought making love rested you, that it was in its own way a kind of sleep. On television, people always looked so refreshed after staying up all night to have sex. But now it seemed that time was time. Sex was sex. And sleep was sleep. Nothing canceled the other out, and now I was tired and my head throbbed. Why did everything have to be so different from how I had imagined it?

  I'd heard people say the first time hurt, and then it got better. When we arrived at our suite in Newport Beach, I told myself that all we had to do was get this first time behind us. This, unfortunately, was easier thought than achieved. After a series of failed attempts, I was fed up. We were failing at something so basic, so fundamentally human that teenagers figured it out on their own and in cars. We'd been naked for almost two days in a huge king-size bed, and nothing. It was embarrassing.

  That night I resolved to take care of business. “You're gonna have to hurt me,” I said. “Just don't look at my face, and get it in there.”

  “I'd rather not do it at all than hurt you,” Hadi answered.

  I found this declaration unnecessarily chivalrous. “You don't mean that. Eventually we'll want to have kids.”

  We talked about the best position from which to proceed as if we were two naked coworkers assigned to the same project.

  “Remember,” I said. “Do whatever it takes to get it in there.”

  After a considerable amount of rearranging—me propped up on pillows, no pillows, on my side, on my stomach, on my back—there was a breakthrough, the sensation of being punctured, followed by pressure, fullness, stretching. I wanted him out, and I was going to say so until I saw his face. Such surprise. Wonder. Joy.

  I said nothing.

  He asked, “Are you okay? Does that feel all right?”

  I said, “Yes.” A carefully chosen one-syllable word. All I could utter without a grimace, an inflection of pain.

  “Do you want me to get out?”

  “Up to you,” I replied because I wanted him out, but I also wanted to have done this right, for Hadi to feel whatever he was supposed to.

  He pulled out, and my entire body relaxed. “Are you done?” I asked.

  “That's okay. I can tell it's bothering you.”

  “No, just do it. We have to do it right this once.”

  I had to reassure Hadi several times that this was what I wanted before he leaned over me and filled my lower body once again with pressure. Such pressure, such tightness that the entire exchange struck me as completely wrong. It didn't fit in there. It didn't belong.

  But then Hadi's back arched, his eyes closed, and witnessing his reaction, his movement quickening, I felt a distracting sense of awe. My body could do this to him.

  Hadi drew in a breath and then released a deep sigh. He rested his head on my chest.

  I tapped him on the shoulder with an “Are you done?” And to his very grateful reply, I added, “Can you get out then?”

  I marveled at the return to emptiness, the relaxation it brought to muscles I didn't know I had.

  “Is there blood?”

  “No,” Hadi said, reaching for the box of tissues.

  “Really?” I asked, unsure of how to react, how he would react. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, you're fine. Not everyone bleeds.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Biology,” he said so plainly I wanted to cry. It was as if my entire body had been dunked in relief. We'd finally done it. And Hadi was Hadi, and I was me, and we lived in America, and nobody was waiting to see a bloody sheet, and I was married to a man who knew this was not a cause to question my honor.

  “Hadi, women have been divorced for this, and shamed for this, and I know it's weird to mention this now, but I can't help but think that could've been me.”

  I threw my arms around Hadi. With all the things that had disappointed me over the last year and a half, in this monumental way he had not. If this was a kind of test, Hadi had passed. We had passed.

  “Are you okay?” Hadi asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I think I'll take a bath.”

  I wanted to soak away the soreness within me and think about all of this—the kind of man Hadi had shown himself to be, the couple we were, the sex we'd had. It hadn't looked or felt anything like I thought it would. There were no frantic movements, no passionate grunts, and none of the pleasure I'd experienced with Hadi before. This was a bodily function only shared with another person.

  At our wedding, Hadi's parents had surprised us with two tickets to Madrid and then to Málaga. It was a long-held dream come true. I had told Hadi about my fascination with Islamic Spain, the notion that East and West had intersected there long before it had become the defining dichotomy in our Muslim American lives, how the beauty of its architecture proved that the two worlds we straddled had always meant to be melded. What I didn't tell him was that I also had high hopes of looking fabulous there. I'd pictured myself with my hair tied in a bun, wearing big hoop earrings and a red flower behind my ear. We'd watch flamenco and, in doing so, pick up the dance naturally and easily.

  It was my first international flight
that I was old enough to remember, and I was very impressed with the frequent snacks even in coach: little pieces of toast with cream cheese and olives, some with shaved cucumbers. Hadi and I kept busy playing card games and napping on each other, but as soon as we landed, I panicked. Standing in front of the luggage carousel, waiting to go through customs, I looked over at Hadi and decided we were too young to be traveling alone. The act of being married didn't suddenly turn us into capable adults. We were in a foreign country, and we needed our mommies and daddies.

  Fortunately airports are tailored to inexperienced travelers. We followed the signs and made our way through customs and into our shuttle effortlessly. When the Mercedes van finally neared the center of the city, my heart raced at the sight of the ornate colonial buildings, the narrow streets lined with compact cars on the ground and charming balconies above, and the main streets crowded with taxis waiting to be hailed and with pedestrians heading in and out of small shops. It was so different from suburban California, its parking lots and strip malls. Madrid had more character and personality than any of the heavily franchised cities I'd known. With my airport anxieties now behind me, I looked over at Hadi and itched with an unexpected restlessness, a longing to know the freedom of being on my own in a new place. In front of us sat a group of single women, all in their late twenties. Next to them, we were too young to be married. Dating maybe. But married? The image we presented to the world, outside of our small community, didn't make sense, and it was this image of us I couldn't shake. I felt as if I'd finally arrived to my life's most exciting destination, but I was no longer an exciting person. I was not single. I was not free.