The Pact We Made. Layla AlAmmar
made each other art.
At one point I told him what had happened to me.
I see that conversation in snapshots too. Wretched silences. Bursts of rage, fists on a black steering wheel. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ A dead sky. ‘I know, but …’ Tears dripping onto the backs of my hands. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ A prominent nose in profile, sleepy eyes looking out of the sunroof. ‘I know, but …’ Hand moving, fingers inching across the center divide. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Fists on thighs, clenched. ‘I know, but …’
A couple of years later I was reading the newspaper, and my eyes drifted over the back page. His name was there, in bold black print, his much-too-young age in brackets next to addresses for the men’s and women’s funerals. Over the next few days I would see the small article about the accident, and the picture with the charred green jeep flipped on its back, and everything would feel terribly, terribly pointless.
I shook the recollections from my mind and returned my eyes to Mona. The anger flared in me again, like the catching of a candle’s wick. ‘It’s not about love,’ I said. ‘It’s about respect and affection and the fact that he doesn’t deserve this. And even if I don’t tell him or Zaina—’
‘If?!’
‘It won’t change the fact that you did it. That for months, you lied to him, to all of us. I mean …’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘What kind of person does that?’ Her eyes were shiny again, but my sympathy was nonexistent, and I couldn’t look at her anymore. I stood and grabbed my bags.
‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ she said, but I was already moving.
The worst thing about knowing of Mona’s infidelity was that nothing changed. For the whole of the following week, she continued to participate in our group chats with Zaina as though the betrayal meant nothing. She sent pictures of the record player Rashid had purchased (her husband squatting at its side and pointing at it with a big, goofy grin) because he’d suddenly decided to start collecting vinyl. She cracked jokes and suggested evenings for us to come to her place.
I’m lying. That wasn’t the worst part. It was her nature to avoid an issue by pretending it didn’t exist. We had that in common, I think. But this thing … the idea of adultery had always been very far away, an alien concept I never needed to concern myself with. But then it was there, a stranger sitting between us. I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept quiet in our chats, but then I thought that seemed suspicious, so I overdid it. I spun plates on sticks while it seemed like Mona couldn’t care less. I obsessed over the real-life implications of it.
I used to try and picture Mona and Rashid having sex. The first time was the night of the wedding, after they had walked out of the ballroom – him in his gold-lined black bisht and ghutra, her in a body-hugging lace number cut low in the back. Later, when I was home, in bed, with hairspray-stiffened hair and a full face of makeup I was too tired to wash off, I wondered how they would proceed. She’d told us, me and Zaina, that she and Rashid had done ‘everything but’ in the time they’d been together: she’d told us about the first time she blew him, in the front seat of his car, and how she’d cried after because it was the first time she’d done that and it wasn’t supposed to happen like that and what would he think of her; Zaina and I could recount, with disturbing accuracy, every detail of their first kiss – right down to the song playing on the radio when it happened (Meatloaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything For Love’, which we teased her about mercilessly); we knew when and where she’d let him touch her. We’d even been go-betweens when they fought, a two-headed Switzerland shuttling messages and apologies back and forth.
She’d said she was saving herself for him, or rather for whomever she’d end up marrying.
Would it be fast and frantic? Or slow and gentle, Rashid showing off his stamina? Would she cry that first time? Would he be patient when she tensed, or would the frustration show on his brow, in the line of his lips, the strain in his neck?
But now there was this nameless, faceless man to contend with. This nameless, faceless man pressing down on her, taking what she’d decided to give so freely. This usurper, this pickaxe scraping at their marriage. I hated him. I hated him for catching her eye, for worming his way in, for being whatever she thought Rashid wasn’t.
I chewed over her insistence that she loved her husband, worrying at it like a chipped tooth. Intimacy and trust, I’d learned from a young age, were very different from sex or what passed for it in our society. It was easy enough to divorce one from the other, but for her to have that trust with Rashid, to say she loved him, all while giving her intimacy to someone else … I couldn’t fathom it. My brain refused to process it. No, that’s wrong. My brain had no trouble comprehending it. The part of me that struggled was something else. Something mobile. Something that slithered from my mind and sat heavy on my sternum.
Baba walked around his little kingdom, hands clasped behind his back like a general inspecting his troops, and admired the green shoots and little buds sprouting all over. His skin was darker than usual from hours spent in his garden while the weather was agreeable. He stomped up and down every so often, pushing to test the firmness of the dirt. If it was too soft, I heard him grumble about the houseboy over-watering – ‘Leaves the hose on and goes to talk on the phone, that donkey.’ Every so often he called to where I sat in my white plastic chair, soaking up the sun, and said something like, ‘Look how tall the tomato plant has gotten,’ and I would nod and smile like an indulgent parent. ‘The radishes will start popping up soon,’ he said, squatting low to the ground for a better look. When everything was deemed satisfactory, he pulled up a chair by me, sinking into it with a ‘Ya’Allah,’ and a happy sigh.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while. Unlike Mama, my father never felt the need to fill pauses with mindless chatter. I inherited that, and some of my fondest memories of him contain no words – just blessed silences. That morning wasn’t one of them, though.
‘So nothing came of that boy then?’
I kept my eyes closed, feeling the sun through my lids. ‘I guess not.’
‘Your mother hasn’t heard from them …’ I couldn’t tell if that was a statement or a question; either way I chose not to respond. ‘It’s fine.’
‘I know it’s fine.’
‘I think she has another one lined up for later this week.’
My heart pounded, once, twice, all jangly, and I suddenly felt like crying. ‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘You know how she is. She likes to wait till the last possible minute to tell you. I think she thinks it makes you less likely to find a way to escape.’
‘I don’t know why she thinks the situation is so desperate.’
He chuckled, folding his arms over his gut. ‘Your birthday is just around the corner.’
‘Have you approved of the guy?’ I asked, pushing my fingers through my tangle of curls.
‘On paper, yes.’
I nodded; it was important for things to line up on paper. ‘Do you know when they’re coming?’
‘Thursday, I think.’ The houseboy passed us on his way to the gate, talking on his phone, and Baba took the opportunity to yell at him about over-watering and how he’d break that phone if he kept doing it. The houseboy pocketed it, nodding like a bobblehead, and scurried out the gate. Baba leaned back in his seat, attention once more on me, and said, ‘Shidday hailich.’
‘What does that even mean?’ I replied, sitting up and turning to him. ‘Can you stop and think about that phrase for a minute? Really think about it. What exactly am I supposed to “try harder” at?’
‘You know—’
‘No, Baba, listen. You and my aunties and Mama, you spit out that phrase like it’s no more than a punctuation point, like it doesn’t cut me every time I hear it. How am I supposed to try harder at something I have