Mama was so concerned by my outburst that she booked Lina on the flight back with me, and then she flew out to join us a few days later. Although their ten-day visit provided a much-needed distraction to ease me back into my life with Hadi, this did not keep me from updating my list throughout their stay. “You Have Poor Time Management Skills,” I wrote when Hadi refused to drive Mama, Lina, and me to the beach. After all these years of not studying, now, when my family was visiting, he decided he had to study and would need to drop us off at the bus station instead. “You Are No Comfort to Me,” I scribbled when Hadi's open arms were not enough to stop my tears the night after Mama and Lina left. Mama had asked me a number of times if I wanted to go back home with her, and I'd told her that Hadi and I still needed an opportunity to talk. But, reviewing my list, I could not think of any greater proof than this final point that we were not meant to be. Movies and television made it clear that your one true love was supposed to be the salve to your every hurt.
I had no intention of showing this list to Hadi; its purpose was to organize my feelings so that I wouldn't lose my resolve during our breakup conversations. For weeks, after Mama and Lina's visit, I brought up the items on my list, one by one, as if they'd only just occurred to me in the course of us talking after dinner, or before bed, or on weekend mornings, but those conversations wound up being soliloquies rather than dialogues. Because of Hadi's passivity, I could not bring myself to say that I planned to leave, that I'd fallen apart during my last visit home, and that Mama was expecting me.
It was on a Sunday morning when Hadi's quiet presence during these sessions became intolerable. I was sitting up in bed, and he was stretched out by my feet, his head propped up on a hand as he listened. No comments. No arguments. No solutions. And, most importantly, no anger. This both baffled and annoyed me. Hadi took so much abuse from me. Where was his self-esteem, his will to defend himself? I snapped because it was time. Somebody had to break.
“What's the matter with you? Don't you get that I want to leave you? And you're just lying there.”
And then suddenly he wasn't. Without a word, Hadi got up and left the room.
Anger rose within me. After all that, Hadi preferred to walk away rather than defend himself, rather than say something, anything, that could save us. Was it any wonder I wanted to leave? I had been so good, so patient for trying so damn hard to get through to someone so thick.
I threw the covers off my lap, and in my nightgown I stormed into the hallway, calling out, “You do get that I want to leave?”
“Yes,” he said, turning to face me, his expression serious but dispassionate.
“You realize that if I leave this time, I am never coming back?”
“Yes,” he repeated, his tone so even that I wanted to shake him.
“So that's it. I tell you I'm leaving, and you don't care. You don't even want to stop me.”
Hadi took the steps down into the foyer, unlocked the sliding glass door to the patio, and walked out, slamming the door behind him. From the other side of the glass, I watched Hadi fill up a watering can from the spigot in the wall and carry it over to the plants.
I opened the door and asked, “You're actually going to water the plants now?”
At this, he put down the watering can, stepped inside, and slammed the door shut again so hard the glass shuddered. I stepped back.
“What do you want me to do? You've been telling me for weeks how you're miserable, how it's all because of me. You want to go, so just go.”
I didn't know what to make of Hadi's tone. I'd never heard it before—this mix of insult and surrender. I brought my hand up to my mouth and cried because he was right. I had blamed him for everything that was not working in my life, and he was finally angry enough for me to see that I'd taken the most even-tempered person I knew and broken him.
Hadi stood with his hands on his hips. He was not moved by my tears, and at this point, I didn't expect him to be.
I took a deep breath, wiped my face, and said, “I didn't say that I was leaving tomorrow.”
In the weeks that followed, I made a number of different lists: Reasons to Stay. Things to Work on at the Internado. How to Fix Hadi and Me. Possible Places to Go for Weekly Date Nights.
At the top of my list of reasons to stay in Mexico was the internado. I'd missed the girls over the summer, and quite selfishly, I missed the way being around them shrunk my problems down into the realm of the petty.
During my first weeks back at the internado, the girls did not fail to deliver generous doses of perspective. First came Gabriela, asking me, “Joya, why don't you have a baby? You don't want one?”
I had no intention of bringing up my own baby angst, and so I told her I was waiting until I was older so that I could keep coming there to be with them. Gabriela locked eyes with me from the old plastic patio table where we held our reading group and in one breath said, “My mom was sixteen when she had me, and she has four kids, and she is only twenty-eight, and she never got married.”
When I proposed the advantages of a different timeline, Gabriela was unfazed. “But the Virgin was only fifteen when she had Jesus.”
I tried to convince Gabriela that despite this very special example, teen pregnancy was not ideal, but as I watched Gabriela's attention wander, I realized there was nothing I could say that would undo the reality of a world where women got pregnant at sixteen. Gabriela was eleven years old now. Visible through her T-shirt were the signs of developing breasts. Soon she'd have her first period, and shortly after that, she'd reach the age where she said to herself that it was normal to have sex and babies. As I did this math, something clicked for me. In all these years of blaming Hadi, I hadn't given enough consideration to the sheer power of imitation. When I was in high school, I'd constantly calculated how many years I had left before I reached the age Mama was when she got married and then when she had my brother. After my engagement, I'd thought about those numbers again—married at seventeen, before finishing high school, and three kids by twenty-eight—and felt as if my timing was appropriate. I'd given myself more time to finish school but not too much time that I'd fall behind her in child-rearing.
But the biggest dose of perspective would arrive the following week, when Elena, one of our new arrivals, ran away. After Mass one Sunday, she took off, charging down a highway full of reckless drivers, overloaded trucks, and speeding buses to an aunt's house. Now the internado would not take her back. The director believed it set a dangerous precedent for the other girls, but her aunt had called, concerned. She could not keep Elena.
The director asked me to visit Elena and recommend that she stay with her aunt now that the internado was no longer an option, but as soon as I entered their compound of concrete apartment buildings, I realized how foolish this hope had been. Two small boys opened the door to their ground floor, two-bedroom apartment and pointed me toward the kitchen where their mother—Elena's aunt—who appeared no more than twenty-five years old was spoon-feeding her five-year-old developmentally disabled daughter in a high chair.
Elena's aunt asked me to wait for her in the front room, where I sat on an aging loveseat under a framed glass box crookedly hanging on the wall. Inside the box was a faded wedding picture of a once carefree young woman and her equally hopeful husband. A yellowing headpiece and veil that had once been pinned alongside the photograph now pooled at the bottom of the frame, next to the pieces of two broken toasting glasses.
This was not Mama's manila envelope, tidily resting at the back of a photo album, each picture still crisp from lack of exposure. This was not my poster-size wedding portrait, hanging above the fireplaces in both Mama and Mrs. Ridha's home, my dress, headpiece, and veil carefully stored in the closet of my childhood bedroom. The same hopes and dreams had inspired all our attempts at preservation, but our respective memorabilia had met such different ends.
Even though I was surrounded by a tower of evidence as to why Elena could not stay, I still played the role I'd b
een assigned, asking if Elena could join their family of five and listening to her aunt explain why she could not as if it was not already painfully obvious. The next day, I went to the director, having spent all night rehearsing my plea for Elena to be taken back, only to be told that arrangements had already been made for Elena at an internado for niñas caidas, fallen girls.
For weeks, I turned over the images that had been seared into my memory that day in her aunt's apartment, the frame of shattered hopes and dreams on the wall, the bedroom with bunk beds where Elena and her two cousins had slept, the tender way Elena's aunt had fed her daughter, the way she avoided directly saying Elena could not stay but that she'd have to check with her husband.
For so long, my thoughts had traveled down two channels, one for all that was Muslim and Arab, and one for everything I'd pegged American, but there was no geography, no identity that promised any kind of a life. All this time I'd been chasing down an American love story that followed Muslim rules when the idea itself was baseless. American culture was not the sole proprietor of any experience, but I'd given it total ownership over love and romance. The only thing that had ever been wrong with how Hadi and I met, or how he proposed, or even me following him to Mexico, was that it didn't meet my expectations, expectations I'd simply made up from years of hearing a single kind of story about love and success. I questioned whether I'd ever truly wanted to divorce Hadi or if I'd merely wanted to force an ending to the tiresome story I'd crafted about us.
That concrete specific was something I felt as if I could tell Hadi—something I should. On our next date night, I sipped a cold sparkling limonada and said, “I don't really think about leaving anymore.”
We sat in the courtyard to the side of a grand colonial building that had been recently converted into an upscale Italian restaurant. The tent raised above us was trimmed in white lights. Hadi nodded but did not meet my gaze.
I ran a hand along the starched table linens and said, “I've been thinking that maybe I didn't go to grad school, but coming down here and really seeing what life is like in another country was probably way more important.”
Hadi reached across the table and squeezed my hand without saying a word. I added, “I don't say this enough, but I'm really proud of you. I may have pushed you to get here, but I've realized that I'm not the one in the room with you taking your tests or examining your patients. I'm not the one who got a perfect score in surgery. You're doing that all on your own.”
Now Hadi touched the tip of my wedding ring with his index finger and said, “But I wouldn't have even come down here if it wasn't for you.”
“Maybe, but that's not what I am trying to tell you. What I am trying to say is, yes, I helped you with your applications, and yes, I came down here with you, and yes, it was a kind of support, but it was also a burden. I feel like I blamed you for so long that I didn't leave you with any power to feel good about yourself when, really, the things that matter now you achieved on your own.”
Hadi brought a hand up to his chest. “But I don't want you to discount what you've done for me.”
“Okay, but I need to feel like I am lucky to be with you too. And I am lucky. Because you love me and this is just the beginning for you. You are going to be an amazing doctor. I know it. Your patients will be so lucky to have you, and I'm not saying that because I'm your wife. I'm saying that because you're smart. You remember stuff in a way I just don't. After three years of college and all those As, I remember nothing. And you went ahead and read what you wanted, and it all stuck.”
A waiter in a white dinner jacket slid two steaming platters in front of us, with tiny diced peppers scattered like confetti around their edges, and our conversation was suspended. Hadi and I could've never afforded to dine in a restaurant of this caliber in California. The dessert that arrived shortly after was even more stunning in presentation, three flavors of fruit sorbet nesting in a delicate and delicious sugar cage. I cracked into the shell of my sweet confection and thought about the contradiction I had been to Hadi, both a help and a hurt. How woefully unprepared for the task of marriage I'd been. Nobody ever warned me of the gravity of blending two lives together. Nobody ever told me I'd hold another person's sense of self in my hands, that I'd have the power to both build and destroy the life I now shared.
It was New Year's Eve, and I was ovulating. Hadi and I were staying at his parents’ house with our families—parents, grandparents, siblings, and, now that Jamila had two children, a niece and nephew.
I didn't like having sex at Hadi's parents’ house, but I liked it even less when it was this crowded. As a young married couple, we had our own room, but given the sheer number of people staying at the house, staying in one of the four bedrooms guaranteed little privacy. But still it had to be done. Now that I'd made the decision to stay with Hadi, I hadn't been able to get pregnant again. I talked to my doctor about our failure to conceive, but apparently a woman in her twenties had to have been trying for at least a year before anyone would take her fertility problems seriously. Sex was my new homework. I tracked my cycles and then pretended I was interested in sex at the end of every month. I'd have to feign desire while we were getting ready for the New Year's Eve party. It was the only opportunity we had to lock the doors and then shower, and everyone would understand that these were the actions of people who were getting dressed, not having sex.
Hadi regarded my newfound enthusiasm for sex with patient bemusement. As soon as I closed the door behind him, he took a breath, puffed out his chest, and said, “I know. I know. You want my body.”
We started out on the bed, but even with the door to the hallway and the door to the shared bathroom locked, I felt too exposed; the bed was too noisy.
“Get in the closet,” I said.
“Really?”
“Do you not hear the bed squeaking?”
Stretched out on the floor of the closet, I made the unfortunate discovery that its length was a tad shy of our five-and-a-half-foot average. The door stayed open. Above us, dress shirts, slacks, and coats lined the four walls. Our suitcases were crammed in the corner to the right of our heads.
“Do you want to have a baby or suffocate us?” Hadi asked.
“We're fine. Let's just do this.”
Lying there with the carpet pressed against my backside, I felt that this too was another one of life's milestones that had not lived up to its romantic image. Conceiving a baby on Valentine's Day, after our first time trying, would have been a memory to cherish, but no, it was my destiny to go about it like this, in the closet, rushed and hiding. This was not an act of love but of gardening. Hurry up now. Plant your seed.
That night at the party, Ibrahim, Lina, and I settled at one of the folding tables set up in the living room. I watched Hadi from across the room as his mom called him back and forth to bring this, take that, repark this car, and so on. He'd grown a goatee over break, and he wore the kind of three-piece suit that was fashionable at the time. He was handsome, sexy even, but something about being in the Ridhas’ living room made me restless. It was in this same living room where, as a six-year-old girl, I'd met Hadi, where I'd watched Jamila get engaged, where I'd sat after my first kiss. In Mexico, Hadi was just the man I was trying to make a life with, but here, in this living room, with our wedding picture hanging above the fireplace, so many memories of my engagement rushed back, all the dread and angst, the day when Dr. Ridha asked me if I wanted to leave. Why was I still here? Why hadn't I run when I had the chance?
When the time for the countdown arrived, Hadi was standing on the other side of the room, talking to his cousin. I motioned him over to the table where I was sitting, but Hadi stopped behind the chair where his mother sat next to her friends. I waved at him again, but Hadi stood his ground, shaking his head. On the large television at the front of the room, the countdown began. At the stroke of midnight, I hugged my mother and father, sister and brother. During each one of their hugs, Mama asked, then Baba asked, and then Lina asked, “What
's wrong with Hadi?” Only Ibrahim did not comment, and I could only shrug as an answer because I was confounded and speechless. Something had happened. I just didn't know what.
It took every ounce of strength I had not to march over to Hadi and scream, “What's the matter with you?” For the next two hours, I forced a smile while waiting for our guests to leave and while tidying up with our families, but the entire time my mind shifted between anger, indignation, fear, and sadness. Knowing that I'd pushed Hadi away countless other times made the sting all the more bitter. Who knew that being rebuffed could hurt so much?
When the door to our designated bedroom finally closed behind us at a little past two in the morning, my eyes burned and my body craved sleep, but first I asked, “What happened out there?”
“Nothing,” Hadi said. “You were over there with your family, so I thought I'd be over there with mine.”
My jaw dropped open. “Are you kidding me? What did you want me to do, get up and cross the room just to make the point that I left my family to come stand next to you?”
Hadi sat down on the bed without comment. Memories of our engagement arguments, of his sulky possessiveness over things like who saw me first on our wedding day and what I wore on our honeymoon flooded over me and made me want to cry. “Why? Why did you have to pick today of all days to do this? It's a new year, a new century on top of that, and we just tried to have a baby. Did you ever think, ‘Maybe now's not a good time to hurt my wife's feelings’? ‘Maybe I can bring up my concerns to her later rather than make our mothers and sisters and God knows who else wonder if we are having marital troubles’?”
First Comes Marriage Page 24