Guapa Page 15

  When Baba died so too did that brief foray into the mosque, and for that I was thankful. I couldn’t face having to deal with the confused feelings I had. And it was tedious, the public spectacle of communal prayer. There was nothing to stop my mind running off to admire the mass of bodies in front of me. And in the end all I took away from it was the memory of the sight and smell of the men’s bodies that surrounded me. I tucked the memories away in my secret cage and continued to beg for God’s mercy.

  By the end of my first year at university, aided by long periods of self-reflection amid the library’s dusty shelves, it dawned on me that maybe Islam was the source of the contradictions I felt inside. Not just Islam but religion as a whole. After hours of doing exercises to rid myself of the limpness in my wrists, after years of late-night prayers furiously demanding, negotiating, and then pleading with God to make me fall in love with women, he failed me. They all failed me. So I turned to Marx.

  I came back after my first year in America to find that a barrier had formed between Teta and me, like film on Turkish coffee. I immediately informed her that I had ceased to believe in God and declared myself a communist.

  “If you don’t believe in God then you can’t eat any more kaak during Eid,” she threatened.

  “If I can’t have any kaak I will spit on the Quran,” I threatened back.

  I didn’t budge. All the anger and betrayal I felt was put into the class struggle. I insisted Doris needed to have one day off to leave the house.

  “One whole day every week,” I insisted during that warring hot summer.

  “What else? Would you also like the girl to sit at the head of the table during lunch?”

  “I’m sick of ‘the girl this’ and ‘the Filipino that.’ For God’s sake, you talk about her as if she were some kind of slave that doesn’t deserve even the most basic labor rights.”

  I also brazenly taped an old photograph of my mother on the wall above my bed. Teta did not allow any pictures of her, and I had secretly held on to that photo for years. Throughout high school I had kept it hidden in a shoe box under my bed. Occasionally I would take the photograph out to examine it. The photo was old, taken in the eighties, and the colors had yellowed over time. Growing up, I had looked at that photo many times, at least once a week but usually every two or three days. I had always been so careful with it, keeping it out of the light and regularly wiping off any dust that might gather on it. But more than that, I was careful not to gaze at the photograph for too long, even if I wanted to, because I didn’t want the photo to lose its power.

  In the photograph I am wearing a straw hat and sitting on my mother’s lap. I am happy, my finger in my mouth, giggling, showing off my few teeth. My mother’s lips are pursed, her fingers positioned like claws around my sides, as if she might be tickling me. Her lips were large and juicy, and her kisses were desperate and wet. When my mother closed in on me and covered me in kisses, tickling me with her mouth, I would howl with laughter. Her lips looked like they might be painted on, accentuated, but as far as I can remember she never wore lipstick. In the photograph she is wearing large dark sunglasses so I’m not able to see her eyes but I remember them very clearly, because they are my own. When I look in the mirror and see my sad face, the big green eyes staring back at me are my mother’s, and I feel sad all over again.

  My mother only wore makeup around her eyes, black kohl that accentuated the greenness. I remember this because when I was eight, Mama returned from one of her trips to al-Sharqiyeh earlier than I had expected. Usually she would be back by midafternoon, and I would spend the hour before waiting by the door like a puppy. If she was ever late I would pace the living room worrying that I had lost her. But then I would hear her keys jingle as she approached the front door, and I would run into my room so she would not know I had been waiting for her.

  That day she came home earlier than usual, heavy on her legs, carrying four or five canvases wrapped in clear plastic. I was lying on the sofa watching television, and as I turned to look at her, she lifted her head. The kohl was all messy around her eyes, like a raccoon, wild and dangerous. She glanced at me and then quickly looked away, dropping her bag and keys on the floor and running into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  When Baba came home a few hours later, I followed him as he opened the bedroom door to find my mother, a large bump curled under the white sheets.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I can’t take it here anymore,” she said from under the sheets. “You can’t walk down the street without bumping into a religious nut or an authoritarian one.”

  Baba was quiet for a moment. He motioned for me to leave, but I ignored him. He leaned in to her and whispered, “I can smell the drink on you. What happened?”

  My mother pulled the sheets away and sat up in bed.

  “I took some of the paintings to be exhibited in the art space. A few men came in and pointed to that one I did of two women picking olives in a field. They said it showed the women uncovered. Uncovered! They said it was haram, that I painted their hair with sexually suggestive brushstrokes and I’m devaluing their women. For God’s sake I’ve been painting al-Sharqiyeh and the villages for years. No one has ever said anything about haram. How can something suddenly be haram when I did that painting ten years ago? But what could I say? I just took my stuff and left.”

  “Good for you,” Teta’s voice boomed from behind us. She had appeared seemingly from nowhere. “When you play with stray dogs, don’t be surprised when they bite.”

  “Mama, please,” my father began.

  “No please, no nothing. Her emotions come too easily, ya ibni,” Teta interrupted. If there was one thing my grandmother despised more than my mother’s sentimentality, it was my father’s attempts to, if not understand her moods, then at the very least console her. “It was fine when you were young and had dreams of saving the world, but you’ve got the boy now. It’s time to stop the painting nonsense.” She turned around and left the room.

  Teta’s casual mention of me, “the boy,” filled me to the core with a heavy guilt. I was partly responsible for my mother’s slow unraveling, one more chink in the crumbling armor protecting her dreams. The deeper truth, that I was merely a weapon in the war between Mama and Teta, was not something I understood at the time, and even now the thought feels intellectually sound but emotionally hollow.

  Later that same evening, I sat across from my mother at the kitchen table as she prepared dinner. She was increasingly agitated, sighing and muttering to herself as she minced bulbs of garlic. Finally she pushed her chair away and stood up. She walked past me and I caught a whiff of sour alcohol and rose perfume as she reached over and grabbed a knife from beside the sink, which was still dripping wet. She turned to her painting of the women in the field and slashed the canvas diagonally, starting from the top right to the bottom left, and then the same thing across the other direction. She dropped the knife back in the sink and returned to the garlic bulbs.

  Ten years later, I gleefully smiled when Teta gave death stares to the photograph of Mama tacked above my bed. And after that hellish summer battle with Teta, I headed back to America for my second year of studies, taking this newfound freedom with me.

  I filled out the landing card while I stood in line at immigration. Jotting my name on the form felt like writing a political manifesto. It was no longer simply a name my mother had fought hard to call me. The name reeked of Islam. I wrote down my place of birth and no longer thought of the city with the ripest peaches and watermelons. Looking at my city scrawled onto that white card became a red flag for interrogation. My fate was marked on me by these unchangeable realities. I was branded like a cow arriving from an infected farm that had been designated a hazardous zone. I was a threat waiting to happen.

  “Where do you live?” the immigration officer asked me as I handed her my landing card.

  “Here,” I replied.

  “Sir, you don’t live here,” she sai
d. “You study here. Where do you live?”

  “Just write down I’m a Muslim. That’s what you want to know, yes? Write down: I’m a Muslim.”

  “Sir, are you being smart with me?” She grabbed my passport. “I’m just going to check this through the system. Don’t run away now.”

  One evening, a few years after the painting incident, just as we sat down for dinner, Teta turned to my mother and asked, “You’re not going to run away like your father did, are you?”

  She asked this many times after that, always finding the perfect moment when my mother least expected it. Mama began to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. The religious nuts had found an ally in Teta, and together they succeeded in forcing my mother to drop her paintbrush. She took up a number of secretarial jobs that she was never able to hold for very long. When she was working, she would be gone all morning and when she arrived home she’d fetch another bottle of her medicine from a drawer in her dressing table and go into the kitchen to cook. She’d pour herself glass after glass until there was not a single drop left in the bottle. The more upset she was, the longer she’d spend in the kitchen, cooking up a storm. She would joke with Doris as they cooked, or else if she were really upset she would chop onions at the kitchen table.

  Chopping onions made Mama cry. But not like they made everyone else cry. No, onions made Mama cry so hard she sobbed. Sometimes Doris and I would watch her and laugh, and eventually she would laugh along with us. She would sob and shake with laughter, the fat teardrops rolling down her face and into the chopped onions. The tears always added a special saltiness to the meals she cooked. Other times she remained in her own world, and even as I told her about my day at school, about the teachers I liked and disliked and the subjects we were studying, she’d nod her head and smile but her eyes would be far away. Sometimes she would interrupt me to mutter something under her breath.

  “What is it, Mama?” I asked her once. “What did you say?”

  My voice brought her back for a moment. “I’m sorry, habibi, what were you saying?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said angrily.

  “I did it all wrong, didn’t I? I’m a horrible mother.”

  “No, Mama. You’re the best mother anyone could ever ask for.” But that would make her cry even harder and so after a while I stopped saying that, too.

  On bad days she spent hours chopping onions. She chopped enough onions for the entire month, which she would then freeze in clear plastic bags. We all knew why she was doing it. Teta knew, Baba knew, Doris knew. And Mama knew we knew. Still she chopped, and nobody said a word, because we also knew the second someone said something the façade would crumble. And if Mama started to cry without the bucket of onions in front of her, everyone would know everything and we’d have no choice but to talk about it. So it was better that Mama just took those onions out of the cupboard and chopped.

  Because Mama was upset a lot there were onions in everything: with our stuffed grape leaves, our bamia, our morning eggs, and our fresh fish on Fridays.

  “You’re going to gas me to death with all this onion,” Teta said one evening as we sat down to eat. “Is that your plan for killing me off?”

  Mama stood up to leave the table.

  “You’re not going to run away like your father did, are you?” Teta said, passing me the rice.

  Baba poured himself a glass of arrack. Mama sat back down and took a sip from her glass.

  I moved out of the dorm and into a studio apartment. In defiance of what it meant to be a good Muslim boy I grew my hair shoulder length and began smoking. The cigarette was my confidant. I grew into my looks and for the first time felt glances of appreciation from women. I transformed myself from a wide-eyed, fresh-off-the-boat Arab into a tall, dark, mysterious foreign student, always deep in thought, who smoked cigarettes outside lecture halls and stared into the middle distance with an air of authority.

  And it was on one of these smoke breaks, as I lit a cigarette and thought of the class struggle, that a girl with thick auburn curls and a deep tan rode across the courtyard on a bright yellow bicycle. She tore through the grassy area and screeched to a halt inches from my face.

  “Please give me a cigarette,” she said in a thick French accent. She had a yellow flower tucked behind her ear and a brashness that, as a newfound communist, I found incredibly sophisticated.

  I gave her a cigarette. She leaned on her bike as I lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and blew a cloud of smoke from the corner of her mouth. I watched the smoke mingle with the lush tangles of her curly hair.

  “I’m Cecile,” she said, giving me a quick hug. I could smell the papaya body lotion on her silky skin.

  “I’m Rasa,” I said.

  “What frat are you with?”

  “I’m not a member of any.”

  Cecile looked shocked. “Really? It’s the only way to have a social life. Like everything here, you’ve got to pay for your friends. Anyway, where are you from, darling?”

  I told her and her blue eyes brightened.

  “I have many Arab friends in France. I mean I am not pied-noir, but I find them endearing somehow.”

  I did not know what to say to that and so we became friends. Cecile was — and I would only later come across the perfect word to describe her — fabulous. She helped me navigate the crazy world of America, providing me with both company and a steady supply of marijuana. The latter, in particular, turned the hours of shelving books from a dreadful chore to a thrilling adventure. I floated through the musty shelves of the library, finding words of incredible depth in even the most mundane of corners. In return I provided her with an ear, upon which she could deposit her daily musings about herself.

  Compared to many of the Americans I met, who’d had little contact with Arabs and looked at me with mistrust and fear, Cecile was from France, a country, she explained, that was “heaving with Arabs.” Thus she treated me with a familiarity bordering on contempt. The familiarity was based on this new Arab identity of mine that I had not come to fully understand. Still it was a welcome change.

  On the whole, our friendship took place on a plain separate from her wider socializing. She had her life in America, with keg parties and sororities and girls’ nights out and dates at pizzerias and art exhibitions, and then she had me.

  This was fine. I quickly discovered that I did not excel in social environments, with their concentration of belligerent students who were always a sentence away from making drunken comments about my Arabness. Instead I met Cecile in wood-decorated coffee shops, dusty secondhand bookstores, or the apartment she shared with four other girls, where we watched Bergman films she discovered in her film studies courses.

  I grew fascinated with the way in which Cecile divided friends into boxes, picking and choosing among them depending on her mood. I envied her ability to compartmentalize her social life, organizing it to suit her needs. When she wanted to see a friend, she would make time for them. If she did not, she would not. Teta, on the other hand, taught me that if someone wanted to see you, then you saw them. What you wanted did not matter, because the certainty of eib trumped the ambiguousness of desire. Because of this, there was something appealing about Cecile, who did and said what she wanted with no concern for what others thought of her.

  One day Cecile introduced me to someone she had been dating.

  “I should probably warn you,” she said over the phone, “Ray is a bit eccentric.”

  When they arrived at my studio apartment, Cecile barging straight in and Ray lumbering behind, it took me a moment to recognize him. The last time I had seen him he was hunched in a corner, a hoodie covering most of his face. Now he was wearing dirty jeans, a large black cowboy hat, and oversized sunglasses. But the long, straggly beard and hair helped me put the puzzle pieces together.

  “I know you …” I began.

  “Awesome, man,” Ray said. He reached out to shake my hand. His fingernails were chewed up and black with dirt. I made a mental note to wa
sh my hands as soon as I could.

  “Yeah, we met last year … I gave you some cash —” I stopped myself. Did Cecile know that he was homeless? I turned to her. “How did you guys meet?”

  “Very funny story. Ray was sitting by the bank downtown, and he asked me for some spare change. We started up a conversation et voilà!”

  “Great,” I said, as casually as I could. What would people say to this? They would mark Cecile for life as a harlot who chases after street boys. I tried to formulate the best way to break this news to her as Ray opened my mini refrigerator.

  “Wow, hummus,” he exclaimed as he started to make himself a sandwich, a musky smell following him around the room.

  “Cecile —” I began.

  “Listen, Rasa,” she interrupted, lighting a cigarette and perching on the tiny table in the center of my room. “I need a huge favor, yes? Ray, he will stay with you for a short time, okay? You know, my housemates are so uptight and …” She waved her arms. “It won’t be for long … he’s going to be a chef you see. Lots of interviews lined up, but you know he needs a base, and it’s getting colder … for only the next few weeks, yes?”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. How could I say no? The gods would rain down a tsunami of eib if I were to deny Ray my house. “I mean my apartment is tiny, you know. It’s just a studio … I don’t know where he would sleep … but I guess he can have my bed and I can take the floor, and —”

  “Merci, my love, I know it is not easy. I promise, maximum two weeks.”

  That evening, as I was speaking to Teta on the phone, Ray tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Hey buddy, you got an extra towel or shall I just use yours?”