The Pact We Made. Layla AlAmmar
About the Publisher
We were eight years old in my first memory of the marriage pact. Mona and I were at Zaina’s house. Her oldest sister had just gotten married, and we were bursting with talk of all that we’d seen and heard at the wedding. We looked like mummy brides, wrapped in her mother’s headscarves. Mona had found ribbons and flowers which she’d braided and pinned into our hair. We took turns being the bride while the other two played the parts of sisters, supporting the train, giving admonishing smiles during the Yelwa, and bobbing up and down in exultant dances.
‘When she came through the door, everyone was so quiet,’ Zaina said, standing at the door to her room, holding a bouquet of fake roses. ‘All the lights went out and there was just a spotlight on her, and then “Heb AlSa’ada” came on and she started walking. Like this.’ She took solemn steps forward, her feet drowning in the heels we’d pilfered. Mona held and re-draped her train as she walked. I was supposed to sing the song, but I was imagining walking down a long aisle with a spotlight on me while everyone stared. It wouldn’t be like weddings we saw on television where the man stood at the end. It would just be me and a never-ending aisle leading to an empty settee. I could trip and fall, walk too slow or too fast, forget to smile at the photographer or drop my bouquet. Anything could happen.
‘Dahlia!’ Mona whined, drawing out all the syllables in my name. I started singing, but Zaina had already reached the desk chair we were using as a kosha. She turned to look over her shoulder while Mona metamorphosed into photographer, snapping shots of Zaina smiling, laughing, and looking coy. I knew what was coming next; I always got the groom’s role.
‘Yella ya mi’ris,’ Mona hissed, waving me back towards the door.
I obeyed, hurrying down our makeshift aisle. Mona immediately sprang into action, chanting the groom’s song as I walked back towards them. The man had it easier; he didn’t have to milk the moment. He was encouraged to walk as quickly as possible to his bride. I got to Zaina and gave her a kiss on the forehead before taking the chair beside her. Mona re-draped the train and continued to snap fake photos as we interlocked our arms and mimed sipping juice from tall, flutey glasses.
‘We should get married together,’ Zaina said, sighing up to the ceiling. ‘All three of us, on the same day.’
‘Yeah!’ Mona cried, clapping her hands together. ‘And we can have one big party!’
‘We could all walk down the aisle together,’ I offered.
‘No!’ Mona and Zaina shouted, frowning at me. ‘We’ll take turns,’ Zaina said with a nod.
‘Who goes first?’ Mona asked.
Zaina chewed her lip and picked at a scab from where she’d scraped her elbow. ‘We’ll go by the alphabet.’
‘Yeah!’ Mona exclaimed, linking fingers with Zaina and waiting for me to join.
My stomach clenched into something hard and tight and unfamiliar, but I added my fingers to our ‘promise’ link and we shook on it.
We were terribly young then, and they were only words.
The pact changed, evolving as we matured: at ten, we dismissed the alphabet idea as stupid and decided the eldest should go first; a few years later we would sometimes draw straws or have a competition to see who could flick their marble the furthest. We chose arbitrary ages that seemed far off in some unseeable future—twenty, twenty-two, twenty-seven. By fifteen I wanted out of the pact, but was kept in by Mona and Zaina’s un-wavering enthusiasm. At nineteen, Mona decided the pact wasn’t cool and joined me, but in our early twenties the two of them were back in competition.
Our families thought the pact was charming at first, some adorable little fancy for little girls. They saw it as early confirmation that life would turn out like they expected it to, that their daughters would turn out as planned. Later, it became funny, an amusing anecdote to share at gatherings, something to laugh about with friends and aunties. Finally, it became tiresome, just one more thing for our mothers to worry about in their efforts to see us settled in happy marriages. Whose daughter would go first? Even then, there were comparisons. Mama wanted to beat the record she’d set with my sister Nadia, who was married at twenty-three. When Mona got rowdy, her mother would say she needed to set a good example for her younger sister, but what she really meant was ‘Don’t do anything to lower your chances.’ And Zaina’s parents were forever reminding her how small the country was, and how everyone knew everything about everyone and she should never forget that.
I’ve often wondered whether it might not be better to eradicate the nuclear family altogether, to just let us disperse like loose seeds, striking our roots into some foreign earth, unfettered by customs and bonds and the burden of ancestry. How much damage do parents do, unintentional though it may be? A word that cleaves the psyche, a withheld embrace that ripples through generations, an episode that festers like an open wound. Might these things not be so easily avoided if we all just scattered ourselves to the wind?
There was a lot of weeping in our house, mostly by me, but my mother did her fair share. There were times, when I wasn’t speaking and spent my days locked in the bathroom, that I would wander the house at all hours of the night. Gliding down the halls and up the stairs like some restless spirit, I would pass my parents’ room, and from within I would hear her sobs – like something was desperate to break free of her – and Baba’s quiet, comforting nonsense. I never knew exactly what her tears were for – love, grief … despair. With my mother, it was like my little cousin Bader, who could never tell if the face you were giving him was a happy or sad one. I couldn’t decipher her tears, and for the longest time I wasn’t even sure she was on my side.
Our lives are sustained by rituals. Up in the morning, shuffle to the bathroom, pick out an outfit, coffee run, and head to work. Family lunches on the weekend and rushing outside when the first rain of the year comes. Gathering around the table for futoor during Ramadan and buying new clothes for Eid. Compulsory calls to relatives just back from vacation, three days of funerals for those that have died.
A man comes to see you, and it’s a whole other set of rituals. You wait at the top of the stairs, never greeting him at the door – that’s for your chaperones to do. When your mother and sister and aunts have ushered him into the fancy sitting room, you still wait five minutes or so. You stand on the stairs, and maybe your nerves die away or maybe they gather strength like a western dust storm, obliterating everything in its path. Finally you come down, you kiss his mother’s cheeks and nod politely at him. Don’t smile too much, that reeks of desperation. Let the chaperones do most of the talking; let him lead the discussion. He speaks English to impress you. Try not to spill the tea when you pour it for him.
‘So, I’ll be working at St Thomas,’ he said, plopping two sugars in the hot liquid, ‘but I’m also giving a lecture at Oxford while I’m there.’ The stirring spoon looked tiny in his hand, like something from a dollhouse.
‘But you’re so young,’ Mama exclaimed, nudging another slice of pound cake his way.
He shrugged with a smile that was meant to be modest, but I could see he was pleased with her comment. By midnight I would have forgotten what he looked like. ‘Yes, well, I worked hard at school.’
‘Dahlia always got by well at school,’ she said, patting me on the knee. ‘Decent grades, but I thank Allah every day she didn’t get it in her head to be a doctor or some such.’
‘It’s difficult work.’ He nodded. ‘Long hours.’
‘Yes, and a woman’s hours shouldn’t be spent on other women’s husbands and children at the expense of her own,’ added Mama.
‘True,’