The Pact We Made. Layla AlAmmar
to choose me. Not only does the mother have to approve of me, but then I have to appeal to the guy. How can it work with odds like that?’
He accepted my mini-rant with a pensive nod, looking back out over his garden. My eyes followed. Was he thinking, like I was, how much simpler it would be if life followed such sure rules as seeding, watering, and reaping? Was he wishing he could control all our lives with such certainty?
It had worked with my sister. Nadia had played by the rules; she had never so much as had a personal conversation with a man until she’d met the one she would marry. Their marriage was arranged by Mama and her sisters when Nadia was twenty-three, and the first time she’d met Sa’ad had been at our house when he’d come to see her. Baba had given him an ultimatum; he could talk to Nadia on the phone for one week, by the end of which they would either make their engagement official or sever contact. Four months later they were married. That was fifteen years ago; Sa’ad had given her a beautiful house and an easy life, and Nadia had given him two sons and a daughter.
It had all worked out exactly as it was meant to. As sure as the cycles Baba went through with his garden. Almost too easy, some would say, which is probably why they got me.
I am the tree that falls in the forest, needing proof of my own existence. When I look in the mirror, I don’t always recognize the reflection. I don’t mean in the way older people sometimes see their younger selves; I mean, I don’t recognize me. The way my eyes, dark brown no matter the light, dip down at the inner corners like commas on their sides strikes me as new each time. I look at my hands and knuckles and think them strangers. The single tiny hair that sprouts from the top of my right foot is not mine.
I need reminders that I’m here, that I exist, that this isn’t all just a dream within a dream.
Seeing myself bleed is real. Blood is a living thing you can’t explain away. It pushes out, sticky and inconvenient. It demands attention. Simple and real. I only cut myself a few times, back in the days when I couldn’t get the feeling of fingers creeping along my thigh out of my head, when I couldn’t stop feeling the squeeze of a hand on the barely-there rounds of my newly adolescent butt, or the sensation of slimy rubber lips brushing my cheek. I swore I wouldn’t make the cutting a habit because a) I liked the feeling; the pain (that was real), the blood, and the mark it left behind, and b) even then I knew it was something that would demand escalation, and I have a fear of scars.
I find a perverse delight in accidental bleeding, though. I cut my finger on a bit of broken glass once. It sliced through the knuckle, skinning me clean. I stood at the sink, finger under the tap, and let it bleed and bleed. The red streaming from my fingertip, swirling pink in the drain, felt more real than the wooziness in my head, more real somehow than the pain in my hand. I could see it. And I often believe what I see over what I feel.
My feelings are like my reflection, like the commas in my eyes and the hair on my foot. I struggle to verify them.
Thursday. Another dress on my bed. This one was cream with a floral pattern, big pink roses splashed across the bodice and down the full skirt. It was even frillier than the last, and I wondered whether Mama knew me at all, or whether she thought that was the mold I had to fit in order to land a husband, after which I could revert to being myself, the way some married women eventually stop shaving their legs.
I rubbed the fabric between thumb and forefinger. It was new, strong, and rich. Which shoes would I pair it with? In the closet was my black dress, fresh from the dry cleaners. I ran my hand over the comforting organza, fingering the small buttons down the front, and wondered if it was possible for a dress to be disappointed in me. Pulling it off the hanger, I spread it on the bed, pulling and draping until it covered the other one, until the flowers appeared more mauve than pink.
I would always hear them before I saw them. The suitors. Mama entertained them in the formal living room downstairs before I made my entrance. Even though no one could see me coming down the stairs, that was where the jitters hit hardest. My palm would get clammy on the banister, my heart would shiver in my throat, and the dress would suddenly feel too tight or too short or too low in the front. There was a moment, two or three steps from the bottom, where I was convinced I’d either fall or pass out, and I always hoped it was the latter because that, at least, could be blamed on something other than clumsiness.
I would make my decision based on their voices. Nothing more. Not looks or height or body, not beautiful hands or trimmed toenails peeking out from open-toed sandals. Pausing just around the corner, I would wait for the man to speak, and then I’d make my judgment. I didn’t resort to any predetermined list; it wasn’t about tone or pitch or how nasal the voice was. It was something unnamed. Call it a gut reaction. I stuck with it.
This one was an immediate and unqualified ‘No’. I arrived in time to catch the end of some sentence about working at a bank, but it was enough. The voice was harsh and unforgiving, abrasive even. Like it was waiting to dole out some retribution. No.
The face that went with it was deceptively charming: straight, aristocratic nose, sun-burnished skin, wide smiling mouth. When he rose to greet me, I saw that he was tall with a broad frame that attested to some sort of regular athletic endeavor. Probably water sports, I thought, taking in his bronze face and hands.
Nadia was there to chase away the awkwardness with all manner of social niceties. She and the suitor got along perfectly. Mama and his mother got along perfectly. If only Nadia wasn’t married, it might have been a perfect match. It turned out they had both gone through the same bank branch back in the days before Nadia became a housewife, and they reminisced about crazy managers, dunderheaded office boys, and insane clients. Finally, she turned to incorporate me into the conversation, asking leading questions to which I gave small, unremarkable responses. Mama’s disappointment skipped across the sofa and into my lap, staring me in the face. But I was helpless to stop it. I couldn’t be the engaging thing she wanted me to be. I’m not my sister. Maybe at one point I could have been, but the moment was gone, and we couldn’t retrieve it.
My heart throbbed in my fingertips, and I pressed them into the fabric of the sofa. My scalp tingled like a million insects were crawling across it. This uncomfortable feeling, which I should have been used to by then, strangled me. I had an urge to bolt, to feign illness – and wasn’t I sick? – and leave. But I stayed put and struggled not to fidget.
He tried, asking me what I liked to do in my free time, and I confessed my illustrations. He seemed genuinely impressed and asked what it was I drew.
‘Monsters, mainly,’ I said, gritting my teeth when Mama’s fingers pinched the skin behind my knee. ‘Big hairy ones with ugly teeth.’
Mama laughed it off, pinched me again, then quickly changed the subject. She hadn’t seen my new Ariel obsession, only the Goyas that were multiplying on the walls in my room. She’d begged me to take them down, but I refused.
The Caprices. Eighty etchings in which Goya condemned the follies of eighteenth-century Spanish society. I often thought the Europe of that time was remarkably similar to twenty-first-century Arabia: the ignorance and shortcomings; vices and marital foolishness; the rationality infected by persistent superstitions. It was all there, in those grotesque images, with the anthropomorphized asses and the scheming witches and the yawning maws of terrible men. I’d printed out a third of them already, taping them to the wall even though Mama had yelled at me that it would ruin the paint, and why would I do that for something so hideous.
They were hideous; I couldn’t argue with that. At times, I confess, I struggled to see the ‘art’. But there was something there that stayed in my mind long after I’d stopped looking at the prints, and perhaps that was essentially what art was. It was not light and shadow – those belong to Doré – nor was it the playground of Blake, full of prophecies and symbols. It was not the chilling details of Dürer