Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa Jarrar
meant when you told accordion-neck you didn’t like men?” I said. She pulled herself up on one elbow, looked at me, then smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
“Have you done this to many women?”
“No. But I was scared at first that there was something wrong with me. I went to many imams and they all said the same thing: what I felt was haram and I should control it. Then I found an imam who told me that nothing in the Koran says a woman can’t love a woman. There’s one verse that says if two women are found together they should be locked up in the house. Then the imam told me that two women locked up in a house could only lead to one thing.” We both laughed. I smelled myself on her breath and hugged her close.
In the following days, I averted my eyes when Mother looked at me. I was ashamed and confused, but then I would hear Peri chanting, “Don’t be embarrassed,” her voice like a phantom-white sheet, and I would feel better. I wondered if she seduced women all over Egypt and then told them the story about the imam to make them feel better. I decided that if she did, it worked. As I pedaled my bike to the market, I looked at men’s bottoms and stared at their hands. Peri had reminded me of so much I’d thought I needed to leave behind, and I was grateful to her for that.
In the afternoons, Perihan and Anna went to Alexandria, to the new library where Peri was doing her research. I searched her eyes for a sign, a way I should behave toward her, but there was nothing, and Perihan simply treated me the way she always had. It was not as though she was pretending nothing had happened between us, only that it would not change the way she saw me or thought of me. It was a bit of a relief, to sense that, though I was still confused about how to feel. One afternoon, she invited me and Shadia to go to the beach. I said I couldn’t go; I was washing the army officer’s car and was not yet done with the windows. She seemed embarrassed for not knowing this—that I was obliged to wash cars. I told her I could go when I was finished.
We spread a few chairs and plowed the sharp wooden end of an umbrella into the sand. A few kids walked up and down the sidewalk holding a crab on a leash. The crab danced and pulled and tugged, facing the shore. While Shadia and Anna swam, Perihan asked me if I ever wanted to leave the building. I said I was like everyone else: I lived where I’d grown up and would probably die there. I told her this gave me comfort on most days, and I faced the blue sea. Perihan said this was an alien idea to her, that she wouldn’t know where home was, even if she wanted to go back. She said that when she came to Egypt, she knew where to go, but that if I ever came to America, she would never know that I was there. “America’s enormous,” she said. The sky was dotted with plastic kites and I watched them float and thought of what she meant. I thought of the kite ripping from the thread and flying away, disappearing into the immeasurable sky. Perihan was like that. I was like the crab on the sidewalk.
The day Peri and Anna left, I made them mulokhiya, picked and dried the mallow leaves myself, and Peri told me I had to eat it with them. We devoured it on the balcony, then the girls went down to play until Perihan’s aunt came to get her. Perihan sat close to me and I saw a couple of eyelashes on her chin. I bent to brush them off but they wouldn’t move. She blushed and said she was hairy-chinned. I told her not to be ashamed, and she rose and began searching for her tweezers. I laughed, then watched the girls drum on tin cans in the street and was saddened that they would not be able to communicate once they got older, once language separated them and play was no longer an option.
“You should teach Anna Arabic,” I said.
“You should teach Shadia English,” she joked, tweezing at a small hand mirror.
“Peri. How will they talk when they get older?” I watched them bang on the drums harder, the suitcases big and bulky on the side of the road. I wondered if Peri would ever come back.
“They’ll find a way,” she said. “Believe me, they’ll still have the language they have now.”
I nodded to be polite, but I didn’t believe it.
LOST IN FREAKIN’ YONKERS
New York, during the summer of ’96, sees some of its highest temperatures on record, and it is toward the end of this summer that I sit, my enormous pregnant belly to accompany me, on an 80 percent acrylic, 20 percent wool covered futon. I look over the tag again, and under the materials it says, Made in ASU. So I’m sitting on the futon, sweating—we have neither an air conditioner nor a fan, and our window is held up by an embarrassingly huge copy of Dirtiest Jokes Volume III—and wondering: should I marry my boyfriend? And: was the tag-maker dyslexic? I quit worrying and start to masturbate, reminding myself that the pregnancy book says in the last trimester the mother is at her sexual peak, and that each strong orgasm brings her closer to real contractions. How totally unfair this is, considering I can hardly reach my own crotch.
The phone rings, and it’s my mother calling from a pay phone, wondering if she should make the Ninety-Sixth Street imam wait much longer.
“Don’t bother,” I say. “Tell him to forget it; tell him to go home.”
“Why, habibi? Come on, do the conversion, and get married. We’re all waiting for you.” She sounds unconvinced and hurried. Who is “we”? I imagine that Mama had picked up a few Hell’s Angels and a couple of squeegee boys for witnesses on her way into the city.
“He’s not even here,” I say. “He’s not converting. I don’t want him to convert. He’ll be a shitty Muslim and a shitty husband too.”
“Oh, it’s not about shitty Muslim or no shitty Muslim—come, yalla, let’s get this finished. Conversion, marriage, boom, boom, two stones with one pigeon, do they say?”
“Sorry, Mama, he’s at a bar getting shit-faced. Just go home before Baba gets suspicious.”
“Final, that?”
“Yes. Sorry. Bye.”
The sun goes down (incidentally, something my boyfriend rarely does) and Saturday is wrapping up and I haven’t seen James’s face since Thursday night. I decide to get up and call the bars. After I call the fifth bar and the bartender tells me what all the others told me (“He ain’t here, Aida,”), I decide I have to switch strategies.
I beg James’s mother, who sits on her stoop three blocks away and chain-smokes mint cigarettes all night, to let me borrow her Cadillac. She shows me her nails; she’d just had them done at the salon by the laundromat.
“What’s that a decal of?”
“It’s a Christmas tree. What’re you, blind? I had sharp eyes when I was your age.”
I get into the Cadillac and adjust the seat. I could steer with my navel at this point. I stick my head out of the window and say, “Isn’t it too early for Christmas?”
“It’s never too early to celebrate the Lord’s birthday,” she says. “We’re getting the lights and garlands this weekend.”
“I bet you are, you fucking psycho,” I say when the window is up, the air-conditioning on high and aimed directly at my face. Mama says she knows a handful of people whose faces were paralyzed this way.
I get to Phil’s Tavern just before closing. This is where I met James, who is ten years my senior. I go inside and stand by the door, scanning faces. I find him less than a minute later, chatting up a blond girl with makeup so thick she’d have to claim it at an airport.
When I met James, I’d just gotten off my shift, was drinking my first beer, while he was on his eighth. A cigarette butt had accidentally sparked a small fire in my hair; he’d put it out by slapping my head over and over again. This seemed to foreshadow the nature of our entire relationship, and I should have known right then that this was not a person to have a child with.
“Hey, asshole,” I say now. “Wanna introduce me to your friend?”
“Shit . . . honey