Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa Jarrar
slap his face. He calls me a stupid Ay-rab and tries to slap me back. I kick his groin and go back to the car.
Let me explain a little. So I was eighteen, had just finished a year of college, and found out I was pregnant. Naturally, I told my mother; unfortunately, I told her in the middle of Interstate 95. She slammed on the brakes and parked the car right there, on the highway.
“What? Na‘am yakhti? What’s that, sister? You’re pregnant? I knew it. I knew it,” she said.
“Mama, pull into the emergency lane, please,” I said.
“Ass. You big, stupid ass. I knew I should’ve had your pussy sewn up the last time we were in Egypt,” she said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Hey, get the fuck out of the road,” said a man in a jeep.
“You were gonna sew up my pussy?”
“Who is the father? Where did you find the bastard? Aren’t you at an all-girls college?”
“Wait, I’m still stuck on the sewing-my-pussy-up-in-Egypt-last-summer part.”
“Your father’s going to shoot you. No baby for you, no baby for me. You’ll both be killed, finished, peace be upon you,” she said.
“You’re in the middle of the road, you Puerto Rican moron,” a pasty woman in a van said.
“I am Egyptian,” Mama yelled, and gave her the arm.
“You seriously thought of sewing up my pussy?” I said.
“You will have an abortion, yalla, right now.” She checked her mirrors, restarted the car, and was speeding ahead.
“I will not,” I said.
“Yes, you will, women have them every day, and I’m not ready to be a grandmother.”
“I’m not ready to be a mother, but that’s not stopping me,” I said.
She parked again, this time in the emergency lane.
“I’m going to finish school. Everything will be fine, just the way it was, but with a baby.”
“You’re so naïve, you schew-bid, schew-bid girl.” Mama was crying, and I felt like shit.
Poor Mama. She’d covered for me ever since we moved to the States, essentially for the past four years. She covered for me when I got the clap and took me to a GYN. She covered for me after discovering a bag of weed though I told my baba it was just za‘tar. She covered for me when I went to prom not with the Arab American ninth-grader and friend of the family Baba had chosen, but with a young black man I’d picked up at a club on an earlier night when Mama had covered for me. It was time for me to face the music, and the music coming from Baba was sure to be deafening.
I couldn’t tell my baba face to face. Mona, my only Arab girlfriend, came to my dorm room the day I left him a note, penned in my best Arabic, explaining everything. I’d taken the train to his Midtown office and left the note on his desk. If I’d left it at home someone would have gotten hurt. Mona said it was the perfect thing to do. That it was what she had done when she came out to her father and told him she was trans and had decided to take estrogen.
“Did he ever get over it?” I asked her, drinking milk out of a carton.
“Oh, no, honey,” said Mona, whose birth-name was Munir. “He left my mom and married another woman, said maybe she’ll give him straight sons.”
“Oh,” I said, and wanted to throw up all over Mona’s amazing knockoff designer skirt.
My father took it better than Mona’s. Having quoted poetry on every single special occasion, he was not going to stop doing it now. The note he sent back said,
Each river has its source, its course, its life.
My friend, our land is not barren.
Each land has its time for being born,
Each dawn a date with a rebel . . .
If you have the child, we will no longer be your family.
You will be dead to us forever.
“Holy shit,” I said out loud after reading it. I couldn’t believe it. Darwish? Infuriated, I took the train north, to our house. I sat by a window and watched the streets fly by: Flagship Road, Mary Lane, Raymond Street. What did it mean? Was I supposed to be the land, or the rebel, or both? I didn’t know; I couldn’t care. When the train stopped, I got off and walked the thirteen blocks from the station. When I arrived, I stared at the doorknob. How many times had I turned it to leave? How many times had I returned home after running away? It was spring then, and fireflies were floating all around, as if taking pictures of me on this momentous day. Four years in America, no traceable accent, no one would guess me Arab, and people constantly mispronounce my name. Our house is white and small, the family inside threatening to turn away for good. And inside me, new life. I turned the knob, took my shoes off in the hall, and saw Mama reading the Al-Ahram she gets from the Indian guy’s stationery shop. I hugged her and she shook her head, went into the den with me. Wood paneling, bookshelves, fireplace, Americana par excellence. Baba switched the TV off.
“You sent me a poem?” I said. “I’m pregnant and you quote me Darwish?” I was trembling.
“You’re goddamn pregnant. Who has the right to be enraged? Not you, my dear.”
It was final. Baby = no family = no money for college = I am dead. No baby = family back. I never liked this family anyway, so I chose baby.
It was a hard trimester. There were no easy mornings. My mornings were filled with races to the toilet.
“Jeez, Ai,” James would say, peering into the bathroom. “Jeez, hon, you gonna puke the whole kid out if you keep doin’ that.”
“Why am I here?”
“What’s that, cutie? Why you here? ’Cause you’re sick. I’ll make you a waffle, come on.”
I didn’t need a waffle. I didn’t need to be sitting there, hugging that toilet and not needing a waffle, at eighteen, while my friends were home in their dorms recovering from a newly purchased PCP-laced ounce of weed.
I needed to be not dead. I needed Baba and Mama to want to know that I was hugging a toilet, not wanting a waffle and not wanting to be dead.
When you’re disowned, your mother becomes your secret lover, calling from pay phones, visiting at odd hours and for short bits of time. And your lover becomes your mother, has to take care of you now that she’s gone. It’s been hard getting used to, and besides, my so-called lover is a drunk and not very motherly.
The night I have to bail him out of jail for public intoxication and battery, my friends Shoshanna and Mona are crying, “Fuck this, Aida, let’s just go. You have to leave this asshole.” I want to explain to them that I need this, need to go to school and have a father for the kid, need to be able to tell the God, on the day of judgment when I crawl out of my grave and I’m all alone and shards of sky are crashing down on me, that—look, dude—I tried.
Once a week, I go to the laundromat down the street and chat with Jackie, the attendant who has an entire row of gold front teeth, while I load the washing machines. Waiting for James’s filthy industrial uniforms to wash halfway clean, I sit in the nail parlor and let the old ladies play with my curls, paint my toenails, and give me five dollars if I make them Turkish coffee and read their fortunes. They have a hot plate, though I bring my old-school copper coffeepot, and pretty soon I invest in demitasses from Yaranoush, the Armenian store on Central Avenue, and have my own fortune-telling business going.
“Oh, Ai, tell Joan what you told me about the man in Flo-o-orida,” Mrs. Leibowitz says, punctuating words with her very fake nails.
“Aida, you goin’ to services, honey?” someone asks on a Friday, and