First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  I felt like a fool to be discovering now that the Ridhas never felt they had spoken for me; they had been aware the entire time that this relationship may not happen.

  To my silence, Mrs. Ridha added, “And yes, Hadi did tell me he never said anything to you at your prom, and I was really surprised. I thought you kids grew up here, you knew what to do.”

  And right then, on a greater Los Angeles highway, a view of the world as Mrs. Ridha saw it crystallized in my mind—a world where a mother thought it would be great if her son married her best friend's daughter. It shamed me to think of how willing I'd been to stereotype not just my culture but Mrs. Ridha herself. I'd so willingly accepted this story of being claimed since childhood that I'd failed to see that the trope of the matchmaking mother didn't fit Mrs. Ridha at all. The truth was what it had always been—she truly and sincerely loved me.

  My talk with Mrs. Ridha quelled my restlessness for the rest of my stay. The first few days, Hadi and I gathered the things we didn't have in Guadalajara but wanted—a television for the living room, a stereo, a VCR, and a desktop computer—but when it came to actually packing his brother's four-seater hatchback, Hadi took over. He enjoyed the challenge of making things fit into tight spaces; it was a real-life brain teaser complete with rules he refused to break. No space allowed between objects. No items could go up front by the driver or the passenger. Nothing could block the rearview mirror. Nothing could be left behind.

  Before we set off the next morning, Hadi showed me around the car, proud of every nook and cranny he'd managed to utilize, and then we set off, Hadi's eyes fixed on the road ahead and my eyes fixed on a guidebook that warned of checkpoints, bandits, police officers looking to be paid off, and the general hazards of driving at night—wayward cows, unlit roads, and the lack of roadside assistance.

  For three days, we drove by day and stayed in hotels by night. Every threat we'd been warned of went unrealized, but the possibility of danger draped over us like a blanket that narrowed our world to each other, the cozy security of our car. Hadi and I got along in this world. Here our roles were simple and defined, our living space limited and undemanding. It was peaceful in the car. The views shushed me. Once again, I couldn't complain about living in Mexico when it had brought me to this terrain that wound us through wet, grassy flatlands; tree-studded mountains; lush rain forests; colorful roadside shrines; and small villages with cobblestone streets and brightly painted churches.

  But those days we spent in the car were only a passing reprieve. That winter semester, Hadi and I fell into a turbulent routine. We'd moved into a new apartment after Fernando surprised us with a sizable hike in the rent. We bought furniture, curtains, and a refrigerator—each one a challenge for my developing language skills. I took Level IV Spanish by day, tutored children in English after school, and taught adults at an English language institute at night. But having more to do didn't make me happy the way I thought it would. On the contrary, tutoring and teaching filled me with dread. I didn't want to coax six-year-olds out from under the table or lure them to learn with promises of a cookie. I didn't want to plan lessons for adults who rarely showed up to class and were too tired out by their day jobs to study. And I blamed Hadi for it all.

  I was a twenty-one-year-old, facing the monotony of married life without having known the wooing that was supposed to precede it. I was certain that if only the circumstances of my engagement had been different—had I been whisked off on exciting outings and been surprised with a storybook proposal—then maybe I would have been too in love to feel such regret.

  On Valentine's Day and a few months later on my birthday, my hopes rose that the perfect gift or outing would break the spell of constant rumination. But when each occasion opened with Hadi asking me what I wanted to do that day, I felt crushed, as if he was announcing that we were officially a boring married couple, news that was all the more disappointing because we'd never had the chance to be an exciting unmarried couple.

  I'd always imagined married life as the beginning of a newer, better me. I would become a woman straight out of the glossy images of a bridal magazine. I'd eat dinner at a table set with matching china and flowers, and this would be my new normal, not dressing up, not playing pretend. I'd load our dishes and clothes into their respective appliances, wearing cute, working-at-home clothes because I'd no longer be the type of person who put on her pajamas as soon as she got in the door. I'd go on vacations at Beaches Resorts, holding hands with my spouse as we emerged from the waves as if we were two gods of joy, casting light on the world with our shiny, toothy smiles.

  Even on ordinary weekends, I'd find these bullishly persistent hopes rising. Before we went to bed, I'd think that this was the weekend that we'd wake up early, dress in stylish clothes, and go out exploring.

  But no such shift ever arrived. Our weekends invariably disappeared into all the tasks of self-maintenance. We slept in, we did laundry, we grocery shopped, and we had sex. It puzzled me that this act of intimacy that had once seemed like the ultimate goal of marriage, its reward and its prize, had become part of the routine of living, a constant, like feeding and bathing ourselves. Before marriage, I'd pictured sex as a special event, the ending to a fancy night out, something that required its own attire of satin and lace. In reality, sex was more of a naked activity, ripe with fluids and smells, but unlike every bodily function I'd attended to in the past, this one was a team effort, requiring so much unexpected conversation: “I can't breathe,” “Your elbow is on my hair,” “You're squishing me.”

  When I had been in school and too busy to pay much attention to our sex life, my eyes were always on the clock, my mind constantly calculating: If this isn't going to go anywhere, then I've got to find an excuse to get out of this cuddle. If it is, then I've got to get things moving so I can be back to my books in under an hour. Hadi had complained that I was pushing him away, but I ignored his concerns. I was the first crush, the first girlfriend, the first female body in his life. There was no way I'd ever be able to satisfy that much need, that much want.

  But now that time was no longer a constraint, I found myself marveling at the trickster that was desire. It pulled Hadi toward me even as I pushed him away. It had driven me to do too much with a boy too soon and then stranded me in a relationship and a life for which I was not ready. Maybe if I hadn't kissed Hadi before we got married, I would have broken off my engagement and stayed in college another year, rooming with Aysar, my future still a bright, blank page.

  What made even less sense to me was that I could be so riddled with regret and confusion and still wrap myself up in Hadi, day after day, week after week. How could I enjoy sex, linger in Hadi's arms after, and then moments later fold up in shame and accuse that same intimacy of trapping us together? Was I some kind of animal, using Hadi, and then released from desire, returning to my senses? Or was this alone some kind of proof that we were in love and always had been? Did my body know something I didn't?

  One Sunday morning that was quickly turning into the afternoon, I rested my head on Hadi's chest, wishing he would say something that would make me forget all the doubts I'd been having, something that would make me believe once and for all that our story together had been a tale of childhood sweethearts, that we'd been drawn together like magnets.

  “Tell me how you always loved me,” I said.

  Hadi stroked my hair. “I've always loved you.”

  “Even from that first time you saw me when I was only six years old?”

  “I don't know about that. That was before I'd even started to like girls, but I thought you were nice.”

  I lifted up my head and looked up at Hadi with a disapproving glance. Our lives together could be crumbling, and he still wouldn't just tell me what I wanted to hear. Regardless of the circumstance, he stuck to the facts.

  “Okay, but as soon as you liked girls, you loved me, right?”

  “I did.”

  “So when would that have been? Do you remember the exact mom
ent?”

  “I know that summer when you guys stayed at our house while I was away at camp, I was jealous that everybody else got to be with you and I didn't.”

  “So,” I said, pausing to do the math. “That would've been when you were going into the eighth grade and I was going into fifth. You loved me then?”

  “All the boys loved you then.”

  “And you wished that you could grow up and marry me?”

  “I wished it every day.”

  “Did you have dreams about me?”

  “I did. I used to look forward to going to sleep so I could dream about you.”

  For a brief moment, the present went quiet, and I could see Hadi the boy pretend-marrying Lina in the park, the small things he'd given me, the captivated way he used to look at me without ever saying a word.

  I leaned in and kissed Hadi as if to try on the idea that it had always been him. I plucked away the memories of our families and the pressure of their friendship. I pictured myself falling in love with Hadi of my own accord and willed this revised memory to stick, to become my reality.

  For our first Muharram as a married couple, living at a distance from our families, I wanted to do something that proved we were as committed to carrying on our religious traditions as our parents had been. The only Shia community I knew of was in Torreon, Mexico, over an hour away by plane. Ibrahim had stumbled upon a reference to the community in an academic paper, but I didn't have an address or a telephone number, and there was no trace of the Shia community's masjid on the relatively new internet. All I had found online was the number to an Islamic center in Mexico City and the name of the man who'd founded it.

  I was still so immersed in my conservative MSA's culture that I truly believed it would be more appropriate for Hadi to call. Hadi loathed making phone calls in English, let alone in his developing Spanish, but I insisted. “You're the man,” I said. “I make all the other calls here, and I'm just asking you to make this one, little phone call when you are the one who is supposed to be doing the talking.”

  Hadi didn't sigh as much as he exhaled forcefully before picking up the phone on his desk. I left the room so I wouldn't feel the urge to tell him what to say. Later, when he came to find me, he had not just the number but also a funny story. “The guy said, ‘Brother, I must warn you that the community in Torreon is Shia.’”

  We laughed at this glimpse of how the wider Muslim community perceived our tiny sect, and we made all sorts of jokes about what Hadi could have, should have said. “I know, Brother! I'm a Shia heretic myself!” Or perhaps, “All the more reason to go, Brother! These people must be converted!”

  A few weeks later, Hadi and I boarded a small commuter jet to Torreon. After a short flight, we made our way to our hotel where the masjid's architect and founder met us in the lobby. I had to resist the urge to rush him with a hug. Standing before me was a Spanish-speaking Baba, the same height, the same build, the same thinning white hair, and a beard just like the one Baba grew after he came back from his Haj pilgrimage.

  He was surprised by us, too. He took in Hadi without any facial hair and me without a hijab and said, “I thought anyone who would fly all the way from Guadalajara to come to the masjid would be like the people you see in Iran.”

  I remembered something he'd said on the telephone, how we were welcome to visit the masjid and remember Imam Husayn but that they were a community of Mexicans and that there would be no golpeando, no hitting. Mama's yearly Ashura pilgrimages to Southern California had made traveling for this occasion feel like something ordinary and expected, the very least one could do, but only now did I see how our journey must have appeared to a man in this quiet Mexican town with a Shia community of less than a hundred people who, our host would later tell us, rarely attended the masjid. He must have assumed Hadi and I were spirited with extraordinary religious zeal, the kind of Shia he'd seen in images from Iran, beating our chests and demonstrating in the streets.

  He took us out to lunch where he introduced us to his wife and his unmarried daughter. Speaking in a mix of Spanish and English, he told us the story of his parents’ immigration to Mexico in the early 1900s from Lebanon. Like Hadi and I, both he and his wife were born to Arabic-speaking, immigrant parents. They, too, had grown up with a handful of other families that shared their beliefs and found each other in this incredibly small pool of “people like us.” He lamented that there were no similar prospects for his daughter in their shrinking community. He, himself, had not been particularly interested in religion until a serious car accident renewed his faith in God. During his recovery, he taught himself to read the Quran by following along while listening to recitations on cassette tapes.

  That night, we met again in the masjid, a simple but beautiful mosque, complete with arches, a dome, and a minaret. The building amazed me; it was so unlike any of the community centers, converted churches, and industrial buildings we had in California. It had taken a move all the way to Mexico for me to finally pray in a proper mosque.

  After reciting our evening prayers as a group, we sat in the large, open prayer space where I counted eight people besides Hadi and myself. We sat without any partition to separate the men from the women, and taking in the scarves loosely draped over the heads of the few women in attendance, their short-sleeve shirts and ankle-revealing skirts, I was glad I'd left my abaya back at the hotel. I was the only woman in the room to observe the Ashura custom of wearing head-to-toe black as a sign of mourning, and I already felt overdressed in my black scarf, blouse, and skirt.

  Our host gave a brief speech in Spanish on the significance of the day of Ashura. He told the story of the battle of Karbala and of Imam Husayn's martyrdom, and although the content of the retelling was the same, the story felt stripped down to its bones without the Seyyid's passionate and sorrowful reading, and his frequent pauses to sob into the microphone. Here there was no crush of crying bodies, sitting shoulder to shoulder; no rhythmic poetry following the sermon, set to the percussion of hands upon chests; no Styrofoam boxes piled high with rice and a saucy, lentil qeema to be distributed after the services.

  Mama would have wanted me to pay attention to my prayers, my heart heavy with emotion for Imam Husayn, but absent of the rituals that had defined my experience of Muharram, I felt more longing than faith. Without Mama and these familiar traditions, I didn't know what to bring to this day, what feelings, what prayers. I feared that I had gotten married and left home before learning enough from Mama to pass on my language and religion.

  Even with our yearly pilgrimages to a community that received a steady stream of arrivals from abroad and that kept Arabic alive on our tongues, I knew less about the Quran than our host who'd grown up in such cultural isolation. What was to stop my kids from becoming just like his daughter, with even less Arabic words lingering around in the corners of their minds, perhaps even less committed to marrying someone who shared the labels that had once defined their grandparents?

  My gaze fell on Hadi seated on the floor, concentrating on our speaker, and I took comfort in our shared identity, in knowing that we'd work together to carry on these traditions. In all my doubts as a newlywed, I had questioned my insistence of marrying an Iraqi, Shia—surely marrying another Muslim would have been enough—but now I saw the wisdom of my youthful prejudice. Hadi and I were bound together by so much more than our shared childhood; we shared the same history.

  The next day, after the short flight that carried us back to Guadalajara, I spilled every memory of our short visit into a disorganized word-processing document. I wanted these scribbles to become my purpose in Mexico. I had an image of this community becoming my future dissertation, my time in Mexico taking on an instant and tangible source of value. But as soon as I reread my observations, the logistics of doing any further research daunted me. I didn't know anything about doing fieldwork, nor did I have the Spanish skills to conduct interviews, and it wasn't as if I could keep flying back to Torreon.

  Ibrahim could turn
anything into research. He would have written a paper on just this weekend's visit, but truthfully, I hadn't wanted to reach for my notebook while I was there as much as I'd wanted to mull over what this visit had shown me about my own identity and all its layers. I wondered if this was a sign that I didn't have the same passion for history, but doubting yet another plan for my future felt as circular and painful as my marriage angst. I had to stay committed to this career path. I had to be certain about something.

  I'd found an even better purpose for my time in Mexico than research. Charity work. A wife of one of Hadi's classmates had told me about a woman who'd volunteered the entire time her husband had been in school and about how she'd done so much good before she left. I loved the sound of those words, “so much good.” It was the perfect antidote to the sense of aimlessness that had beleaguered me since our trip to Torreon, a way for my time here to have meaning.

  It was the fall, after our first summer visiting California. I'd hung my head in shame when friends asked me what I'd been up to. I heard a voice in my head saying, “I flew to a mosque in Mexico and took some notes that I don't know what to do with,” but just imagine if I could have said I had been caring for sick babies in a hospital, building low-income houses, or working with children in an orphanage. These commitments spoke of renunciation and thoughtful choice. They said, “Yes, you may be in graduate school, but that path is not for me. I've chosen to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate.”

  After weeks of phone calls, I found my way to the tall metal gates of an internado outside Guadalajara where I'd offered to give English lessons to the girls who boarded there. Some of the girls were orphans, but most of them were children of poverty, taking their meals and going to school from the internado during the week and going home on the weekends.