First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  He shook his head, and I searched for a thought basic enough to translate into Spanish while sweating through my dress. Gesturing to the bowl I created with my hand, I said, “I don't want the thing on the potatoes.”

  “Ahh,” he said as if he now understood. The flames of discomfort that had lit up around my ears cooled down.

  I carried our order back to the table where Hadi was sitting. Still standing, I peeled back the lid on the mashed potatoes. There was gravy all over it. I sank into our bench.

  “You didn't tell them we don't want gravy,” Hadi said, surprised.

  “I thought I did.”

  “Take it back,” he suggested as if it was the simplest, most obvious solution.

  “I can't.”

  “What do you mean, you can't?”

  “I just can't,” I said, feeling tears sting my eyes for the hundredth time that day. How was I going to manage my life here? We couldn't even order dinner, and we still had to find a place to live, get around in taxis, buy housewares and maybe furniture. I felt as if someone had switched on the lights in a dark room, and suddenly I could see what it meant for my parents, Hadi's parents, and all our family friends to have moved to the United States. Had they really gone through moments like this and survived?

  I pushed a plastic spork through its wrapper. “Just scoop it off and eat around it. Please. If you really love me, you'll just eat it.”

  On the way back to the hotel, I held Hadi's hand because the sky had grown dark and cloudy and the sidewalks were uneven. Hadi said, “Watch out for that crack.”

  I looked down, and in that moment a fat rat scurried in front of us, its long tail sweeping the dusty sidewalk. I let go of Hadi's hand, then screamed and jumped up and down in place as if trying to shake off the rodent's memory. Then it started to rain. This was not a gentle rain that arrived with a soft, warning drizzle. This felt as if the sky broke open and poured its entire contents upon us. Hadi took my hand again, and we started to run, but my feet kept slipping out of my sandals.

  Hadi looked back and said, “You had to wear those shoes. You still haven't learned about the elements.”

  There was a levity to his tone and a smile on his lips, and I knew exactly to what he was referring. On our honeymoon, every time a pebble rolled into my sandals or my toes got covered in dust, he'd say, “That's why I always wear closed-toed shoes. To protect my feet from the elements.”

  He thought he was being cute bringing this up now, that this moment would remind me of happier times and lighten my mood. I didn't appreciate it. My mood was so heavy it would have taken wheels to make it budge.

  By the time we got back to our hotel, we were soaked, but still we stopped to look out the window. Jagged bolts of lightning cut through the night. Thunder roared. And through the window opposite us, rain pummeled its way through the space between the panels of the courtyard's clear glass roof, the fronds on the potted plants flattening from the pressure and the tile floor disappearing under water.

  “Oh my God. It's a hurricane,” I said. This was it. The roof of the hotel was going to blow off, and we were going to die tonight.

  Hadi said, “It's just a summer thunderstorm. I'm sure everything will settle down in a bit.”

  But the only thing that settled down that night was the storm. As soon as all our first anniversary deeds were done, gifts, kisses, and bodies exchanged, I started crying again, straight onto Hadi's bare arm. He tried to comfort me, promising me that things would get better as soon as we found a home, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. I was feeling the full weight of what I'd lost.

  After all those years of encouragement from my professors, their assurances that I had great academic promise, I had followed my husband like a big, fat Arab stereotype. My mind pounded with a thought so seditious it frightened me. If only I'd waited, it said, I could've married someone else from our community, someone who wouldn't have pulled me out of school. I could have had my dream Muslim American love story and my career, too.

  The next two weeks passed as an odd amalgam of pleasure and pain, of feeling as if we were on vacation but not. Parts of our days were spent trying new restaurants, walking to the mall, and watching that summer's blockbusters from the plush leather recliners at the nearest cinema. There was a thrill to each of these activities, within them delightful moments of discovery. In Mexico, you could buy a drink and a big tub of popcorn at the movies without it costing more than your ticket, and you could eat avocados every day without it being expensive. Nuez or nut ice cream and yogurt were now my favorite flavors, and the bolillos at the grocery store, pulled straight from the oven, gave the notion of fresh bread new meaning. However, in the midst of all this loveliness, we still had to make daily trips to the university; wait in long lines to apply for Hadi's student visa; return with stacks of passport-sized photographs of Hadi from every angle and photocopies of every piece of paper that ever had his name on it; pay a slew of bills for his tuition, books, and supplies; and apartment hunt.

  Many days felt as if they were one long chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken moments. Every time we got into a taxi, ordered at a restaurant, or went to see an apartment, there was always one critical word I did not know and could not find in my dictionary. High school Spanish had not prepared me to say things such as the following: “Where is the water tank?” “Is it a gas or electric water heater?” “Are we responsible for filling up the gas tank?” “Does the apartment have a working telephone line?”

  That is until we met our new landlord Fernando. Fernando spoke perfect English, and for that we loved him. “So the utilities are included?” Hadi asked, finally taking the lead of our apartment hunt.

  “Yes, electricity, gas, and water are all included, and I think you will find our accommodations very comfortable. All the furniture is here for your convenience. My brother has a furniture factory, so that is why all our furnishings are very de lujo. I think you say ‘of luxury.’ And the bed coverings are new. All you have to do is bring your things.”

  A segment of one of Guadalajara's obscenely large homes, Fernando's apartment had the original mansion's front door—an imposing stained-glass masterpiece—and the original kitchen, which was a large room with a six-burner gas stove, a tiny refrigerator, and a nearly bedroom-size pantry. A wall of smoky mirrors divided what must have once been an enormous living space, and to the side of that wall stood a bathroom and our only bedroom. But it was a move-in-ready place with an English-speaking landlord. Suddenly it didn't seem to matter that the rent was as much as our apartment in overpriced California. After a stressful two weeks of bickering with each other and changing hotels, this odd but beautiful apartment answered our prayers.

  A week later, Hadi left for his first day of school. I waved to him from the marble steps outside our front door and then returned to our apartment with a gnawing sense of loss. This was the first time since kindergarten that I was not attending school.

  My first week at home, I slept much more than I intended. In the mornings, I'd look at my clock and think I could've gone to two classes in the time it had taken me to wake up. Then I'd stare at the contents of my closet and wonder if it was worth getting dressed when I had nowhere to go. I'd conclude no and sit back down on my bed with the books I had assigned to myself. But reading alone, without tables full of other students at my side, was lonely, so quiet and pitiable that I'd turn on the television for company and then find myself sucked into episodes of Santa Barbara dubbed in Spanish.

  On the days we needed groceries, I took a bus into town and bought whatever my hands could carry, including a newspaper to look for jobs. Soon my family's upcoming visit gave my shopping a different purpose. I needed mats for them to sleep on, bedding, and more towels.

  We'd been in Mexico for one month when Mama, Lina, and Ibrahim, who had another month of break before he started back up at school, arrived at my door in an airport taxi (Baba had decided to come in a few months to give me something to look forward to after they left). F
or the five days they camped out on the mats I'd laid out around our living room, that feeling of being on vacation returned. Hadi would leave in the morning for class, and we'd wake up at a leisurely pace; have a breakfast of bolillos, Oaxacan cheese, and some fruit; and then call a cab to take us to the tourist attractions in my Lonely Planet Mexico travel guide. In their company, I didn't dread using what little Spanish I knew. As a part of his graduate studies, Ibrahim had been traveling all over Europe and the Middle East, perfecting his Arabic, picking up Italian and Turkish, and now I felt equally adventurous sharing how I, too, was making my own way in another country, picking up another language. Seeing Guadalajara through my family's eyes was validating: it was an exciting tourist destination, its unique artesanías worthy of bringing back home as souvenirs, its architecture the perfect photo opportunity. I enjoyed my family's company so much I wished I still shared my daily life with them. Not this husband who didn't get my intellectual pursuits the way Ibrahim did, who didn't need my big sisterly advice the way Lina did, who didn't cook our meals and help wash our dishes and ask me how I was feeling the way Mama did.

  Now more than ever before, I wanted to talk to Mama. I knew the circumstances that had brought Mama to America, but I wanted to hear exactly how her heart felt, how she got used to missing her family, how she found the courage to continue her education in her second language. But we rarely had a moment to talk. The days blurred past, filled with shopping and sightseeing. On the last weekend of their trip, Hadi and I rented a small Nissan Tsuru to take Mama, Lina, and Ibrahim through the heavily forested, winding roads to Puerto Vallarata. Because Hadi was the only one among us who knew how to drive a stick shift, he drove the entire weekend, a roundtrip of over four hundred miles, but I did not repay his kindness with gratitude. I picked on him the whole time, for wearing socks and laced shoes to the beach, for keeping his shirt tucked into his pants, for being too stuffy.

  Mama tired of my attitude and scolded me to “back off the boy,” but I couldn't escape the thought that soon she would be leaving with my brother and sister and that I had to stay in Mexico with Hadi—the man I was married to but who was not related to me, not my family. I belonged with them, too.

  After Mama, Lina, and Ibrahim left the following Monday, I cried alone in my apartment, choked by its emptiness, the memory of them at my breakfast table. This was what I had rushed into; this was my ticket to freedom and my grand, sweeping love story—eating breakfast alone in Guadalajara, not being enrolled in school.

  Our first year of marriage I had been so busy, overloading units so I could graduate early and go off to school with Hadi, that I hadn't felt the full weight of domestic life. Hadi had been the one with a more flexible schedule. He'd worked, shopped for groceries, cooked our meals, and done our laundry, but here the unrelenting cycle of shopping, meals, and dishes was all mine.

  Hadi had been the better housekeeper. To keep food fresher, he'd store it in a Ziploc bag that he'd close right up until the corner, where he'd insert a straw to suck out all the air. He folded all our socks in half so as not to tax the elastic, and he folded all our towels the same way so that they'd fit better in the closet. To me, these tasks were too inconsequential to be given any attention. I placed the toilet paper onto the roll whichever way it came into my hand. I closed the shampoo bottle without waiting for its shape to be restored. I sealed sandwich bags shut without squeezing out the excess air first and balled up our socks without any regard for their longevity.

  Hadi could not understand my haphazardness. He'd pause in front of a stack of folded clothes and ask curiously, “Is there a reason why you folded some of these shirts with the sleeves to the side and some with the sleeves behind?”

  “There's no reason, Hadi,” I'd say. “Some people do things without thinking about them.”

  “Okay,” he'd say with his arms raised up in surrender. “Just trying to see if you'd found a better way of doing something.”

  And this was the real kicker for me. I did have a better way of doing things when it came to school, but all last year, Hadi never asked me if there was a reason why I outlined every chapter I read or why I started my term papers weeks before. No. He just went to work and put towels and food storage first, and this was where it got us. Hadi was the student I had wanted to be, but he wasn't studying the way I would have studied.

  “Shouldn't you be doing something for school?” I'd ask every time I caught him without a book in front of him. But my constant reminders made us argue far more than they inspired Hadi to work. I knew I needed something to fill my time, something to get my mind off Hadi's study habits and my longing to be back in school.

  The following week, I took the bus to the local university and signed up for Level II Spanish classes, but being in a classroom made everything better and worse all at the same time. Tucked behind a wooden, one-armed desk, I missed the furious scribble of notes I'd had in college, the sense that I was fulfilling a calling. Now I was learning how to say “elbow” and “eyebrow” and describing my classmates as having very skinny elbows and very dark eyebrows. And while I valued the opportunity to learn a language, I wanted to leave the classroom with an idea worth contemplating and defending, something I could discuss over coffee with friends. Now my only classmates were sophomores and juniors in college, studying abroad. They attended classes by day and partied by night. They were living with Mexican families who gave them meals and a room. I had a husband. I paid rent in Mexico and shopped for groceries. I was not visiting; I was trying to make a life.

  We'd start the school day with a two-hour grammar course, followed by a two-hour conversation class in which Señora Gonzalez, a matronly woman with cropped hair and full cheeks, stood in front of the blackboard and posed a strange mix of both banal and thoughtful questions for each one of us to answer in Spanish.

  “What is your favorite sport and why?”

  “I like the basketball because the balls are very beautiful. Very orange.”

  “Who is someone you admire?”

  “I admire my mother. She is a very good person. She is short and nice.”

  “What will you tell your friends about Mexico?”

  “It is a country with very nice people and very good food.”

  Then she turned to me and said, “Tell us about something important to you.”

  “The history is very important. If we understand the history, we are going to be more sensitive people.”

  “Why you don't say your husband? Your family?” the girl next to me interrupted in broken Spanish. Revealing a mouth full of shiny braces, she added, “You always giving big answers.”

  “Yes, that too,” I said and nervously seesawed my pencil against my thumb. Suddenly, I saw how my classmates viewed me. I was the annoying girl with the lofty ideas, trying to turn a Spanish class into a seminar.

  Hadi loved it when I visited him on campus, but I hated watching other students going on with their careers when I didn't know where I was going with mine. I hated being asked what I was doing to fill my time because taking Spanish classes sounded so small, so accessible, so unrevealing of my 4.0 GPA. And, most of all, I hated meeting the female medical students. They were aspiring doctors while I was the aspiring doctor's wife, and a handful of them, I soon discovered, were Muslims, one of them who wore the hijab. I had thought I had to get married so I could go to graduate school in another state, and these girls’ parents had been willing to send them out of the country for the sake of their education.

  The day Hadi introduced me to Marjanne, an Iranian American woman in his class who also happened to be from California, I hit a new low. She was friendly and warm, but none of that made an impression on me. What stayed with me was her reply when I told her I'd been taking Spanish classes.

  “You know what you should do?” she asked, her eyes widening with excitement. “You should make sandwiches and bring them around during lunch. God knows, I'd buy them. The only thing close by is that taco stand, and I'm scared to eat t
here.”

  “That's something to think about,” I said in a tone Marjanne mistook for sincerity.

  Pulling her long, crinkly hair over one shoulder, Marjanne added, “I think that would go over really well. Don't you, Hadi? Bring some turkey or pastrami sandwiches in a little basket. People would buy that right up.”

  Hadi was wise enough not to respond. I forced a smile, and we excused ourselves from Marjanne's company. Later that afternoon, Hadi and I walked home in a dangerous quiet, but as soon as Hadi closed our front door behind us, I exploded. “Do you see what I've been reduced to here? People think I'm some little wifey, sitting around at home, waiting to cook for everybody.”

  I wouldn't have minded making sandwiches had I still been enrolled in a degree program. Then any of the cooking I did could have been something extra, an added talent, but here, the suggestion made me feel so provincial, so married off. I thought all of us Muslim sisters were on the marriage track together, and now Islam wasn't the excuse; it wasn't the reason. It was one thing to have sacrificed my education to uphold God's law and quite another to have clung to rules unique to my family.

  But then a few weeks after meeting Marjanne, an Indian American guy in Hadi's class introduced me to his wife, Zoya. They'd gotten married on one of his visits back to India. Zoya had been eighteen years old and right out of high school. They'd already had their first child, a chubby, blue-eyed toddler, so cute I had to keep myself from squeezing the rolls in her thigh when I first met them. This was more like it, I thought, during the first dinner we shared together. This was what I'd been taught to expect—marriage and kids first, school worked in later.

  But over an exquisitely prepared biryani and fresh roti, Zoya told me she was the youngest of three sisters and there'd been no pressure on her to marry. “I loved him,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have never left my family back in India.”