Alligator. Dima Alzayat
When the coffee boils, we will pour it and drink at once so it scalds our tongues. Our knuckles will ache and we will rub them in apology. We will remember how our fingers clutched at playground bars and how we were strong enough to catapult our bodies through the air, to land on tanbark whose splinters were incidental to the miracle of flight. We are older now, we will say. There are wrinkles, delicate but discernible. Skin thinner and less even. The makeup does not hide it and instead we will cover our marks with clothing. Cotton and wool and silk that know how to do what we still don’t. We will wrap a scarf around our necks and tighten it until we feel veins throbbing and pulse slowing, and release. When we open the window cold air will hit our faces and we will lean against the windowsill and inhale. We will try to forget that the air we breathe is not ours.
Outside we will walk the length of the street while staring at the sidewalk. A dime-sized egg speckled violet just fallen from its nest and cracked, its yolk spilling onto the asphalt, will have us looking for signs of life. A black eye; an unformed beak. We will feel exhausted, reach for mental lists of who does what where and resist the urge to lie beside the broken shell in mourning. Instead with newspaper we will pick it up and place it at the foot of the fenced-in tree. Dust to dust, life to mud. The warbling in the branches will be low-pitched and hoarse, and it will quaver in our ears for hours.
The day will pass and the light will become dark. From the window we will watch the crescent moon cradle the sun before both disappear. That is when we will call to you with our loudest voice. You are black stone and white granite but are you not also our mothers? By the salt, by the fire, why have you forsaken us? Again we will hear only silence.
**
When I shaved my head my grandmother refused to speak to me. ‘Tell her she looks like a boy,’ she said to my father when I came home to visit. All weekend she walked around the house with her beads in hand, muttering spells and prayers and shaking her head. ‘Tell her she will never find a husband with her hair like a boy,’ she said.
I was about to graduate college and two months pregnant. My friend Alex drove me to the clinic twice in one week. The first time, the nurse spread a cool gel on my stomach and moved the ultrasound wand in circles. She directed my face to the screen, but I was already looking at the gray mass moving there. She began to explain the image, its fuzzy sections and barely visible parts, and if she saw my eyelids close she pretended she hadn’t. On the second visit, the doctor was an ugly woman who put me to sleep and performed the procedure. When I woke up, she said kind words and held my hand.
‘Maybe now was not a good time to look so hostile, no?’ my college counselor suggested when he saw my shaved head. I was going on as many job interviews as I could, determined to not move back home after graduation. It wasn’t until my sixth interview that a receptionist called me back to her desk after I had met with the office manager. ‘This might not be my place but maybe you should think about wearing a wig, just until you’re done with treatment or until it grows back. I’m just trying to be helpful. It makes people pretty uncomfortable to see others that way.’
At the graduation ceremony my parents’ smiles beamed from the audience when I was introduced as the class speaker, and I could hear their claps above all others when I finished my speech. At the reception a professor told them how proud they should be and lauded them for raising a strong daughter. My father assured him that he was more than proud, that I had proven myself as worthy as any person. ‘Man or woman,’ he added. My mother smiled and nodded, and turned to me as the professor walked away. ‘So many good things ahead,’ she said. ‘Thank God your hair is growing back.’
**
Eventually Zaynab’s face returned to normal. She had spent the worst of those days crying, my mother said. Moans slow and long like some ancient call. But it was not long before she became placid, speaking only when necessary, unable to draw together enough energy even for her infant daughter. It was only when she regained control of her facial muscles, when she could smile and grimace at will, that she seemed to re-ignite. If she was biting before, she was now caustic. If her jokes had been improper, they were now vulgar.
She was not allowed to divorce her husband, not that she had wanted to. Instead she smeared the name of his second wife to any and all willing listeners, of which there were many. At him she hurled every insult, from sunup to sundown, until he ceased to come home. When relatives visiting from other towns would ask where he was, a content smirk would stretch across her face as she answered. ‘Oh, he works a lot. Works late into the night, really. May God bless his loins.’ Or, ‘Who? Oh! Is that the impish man on the nightly shows?’ People were aghast, my grandmother said, or pretended to be anyway. They knew the stories and they all claimed to know the truth. They demanded that Zaynab be the one to answer.
So when Zaynab began to spend her free time in the corner shop chatting with its owner, a man known for his throaty laugh and dirty jokes, no one voiced an objection. Not because they approved, but because they did not dare. Only my grandmother tried to reason with her. ‘What will people say?’ she begged. ‘You have a daughter to consider. Who will want to marry someone with a loose mother?’
One day Zaynab packed a suitcase and my then three-year-old cousin and without telling friend or family, neighbor or stranger, eloped with the man from the corner shop. ‘Maybe now people will stop talking,’ my grandmother said, her face wet from wailing. ‘Don’t be silly,’ my grandfather said. ‘They’ll talk even from their graves.’ After six months in the U.S., my aunt Zaynab gave birth to a second daughter, my cousin Farah. And then every other year for the ten years she was married, she gave birth to one more.
**
I have been moving now for five years. At times I stayed in places long enough to memorize where the shadows fell at dawn, to learn which birds sang in the trees. But eventually I left. For three months I dug foundations and mixed concrete in one place. For a full year I planted seedlings and watered the plants that grew from them. I learned to weave chairs from bamboo, to build protective barriers around turtle nests and runways so the hatchlings could find their way to the ocean without getting lost. In all this time, I have not gone home. On the phone my mother’s voice has grown colder, my father no longer asks when I will come back. Only my aunt Zaynab laughs at the sound of my voice.
When her third and final husband died, Zaynab refused to mourn. My grandmother, older and widowed by then, did not interfere. Even when Zaynab was seen laughing in public, wearing yellow and violet, her hair newly bleached and permed, my grandmother shook her open palms at those who spoke. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Words have a taste, just like food.’
A month before I had left I’d swallowed fist-fuls of pills and at the hospital they pumped my stomach twice to get them out. I had taken them while in bed, had pulled the covers above my head and closed my eyes. Falling asleep I had seen a lionfish swimming among the corals, a koala perched on a eucalyptus tree. The air was clear, and I could breathe. I woke up in a hospital room filled with the smell of disinfectant and the sound of my parents’ screams. They yelled at doctors, at nurses, at me. ‘Please get better,’ they said. ‘Please make her better.’ As everyone else moved about the room in fevered frenzy, only my grandmother stood still, rubbing my feet with one hand and working her beads with the other. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of female names in our language, but ours means triumph and nothing else.’
When she died two years ago I sat near a drying river thousands of miles from home and tried to imagine what she was like as a girl. I had seen only a single photo from before she was married; already by then her eyes were those of a woman, an island in rolling ocean. She had been married at fifteen, had borne seven children before she was twenty-four. With her hands she had sorted a lifetime of rice and lentils, had gutted fish and deboned chicken. She knew how to upholster furniture and help grapevine spread and climb, how to cover bruises and scars so no one could see them, how to measure the value of her life and still rise.
**
They sleep, and in shadowed lands unsheathe their swords and thrust them at who comes. False warriors swathed in robes try to crush them with their stones, stab them with their daggers. But the morning star appears, flushes the sky a milky pearl and lights their