Guapa Page 16

  “Use mine,” I whispered, placing my hand on the receiver so that Teta would not hear.

  “Nice one,” Ray said, nodding.

  “Who was that?” Teta demanded.

  “No one, Teta.” How would I even begin to explain to her that I was now sharing my studio apartment with a homeless man?

  “That voice … who was that man?” she asked.

  “I’ve got the mayor’s son staying with me, Teta. His house is being renovated so I’m doing him a favor.”

  “Good boy. You’re treating him well, yes? Give him your bed and sleep on the floor. It’s good to have the mayor’s son on your side …”

  One morning I woke up and realized it had been months since I had spoken Arabic to anyone but Teta. Speaking only English made me a different person, I realized, someone less easygoing. But I was nervous to try and start speaking Arabic again, fearful that the rust of the language on my tongue might throw me in a pit of despair. There were some things I could only say in Arabic, and without the language I felt I had been stripped of a set of core emotions. Speaking Arabic I felt like a kinder person somehow, more passionate and human.

  The feeling was very different from how I felt growing up, where one of my major concerns had been to find new ways to avoid attending Arabic class. In English class we read the Famous Five, Judy Blume, Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, all that stuff. I saw myself in the characters and could feel what they were feeling. Arabic, on the other hand, was like a dead world. We only had one large textbook, which had short vignettes of Quranic verses and old nationalist poems that were boring as hell, and the grammar was too damn difficult. It wasn’t even the Arabic I spoke, which was free-flowing and malleable. The Arabic that was shoved down our throats was rigid and alien. So Maj and I would feign illness or else spend the hour hiding in the bathroom cubicle, which smelled of piss but at least we could joke and speak however we wanted.

  It was around that time that we became friends with Basma. That was good for the both of us, because Basma was popular. She had chocolate skin, dangerous eyes, and a mess of curly hair. She had a keen eye for playing the system and was not afraid to do so, and that made her powerful.

  Basma hated Arabic class, too, so the three of us ditched it together. We hung out in Smoker’s Paradise, which was on the top floor of an abandoned staircase. The high-school kids spent hours there smoking cigarettes and kissing. No teachers ever went up to Smoker’s Paradise, especially in the winter. The staircase was exposed and smack in the middle of a wind tunnel, so it was damn cold.

  For the most part the high-school kids left us alone. We were harmless. We just sat there in Smoker’s Paradise giggling at Maj, who was obsessed with Madonna and would stage-whisper performances to us while we huddled together for warmth.

  On Valentine’s Day, the day before I turned eleven, we spent three whole hours in Smoker’s Paradise. When we finally stepped back into the school hall our faces were flushed and our hands were like frozen fish fingers.

  Valentine’s Day was nothing special to anyone except Maj. He was also hooked on American television and so knew exactly how to celebrate. Every year he would send himself a secret card or a bouquet of flowers. That year he had gone all out. He bought himself a dozen red roses and some red balloons. Of course he was beaten up during lunch for that. There was Maj, clutching his balloons as the boys kicked him, squealing, “I’m a lover not a fighter!”

  Anyway it was just our luck the principal caught us. Miss Nadwa was a foul old lady with straw-like hair and a bad eye. She looked like a cross between a scarecrow and a pirate. She was always walking around the halls, peering at us with her one good eye, barking orders.

  “Tuck your shirt in, boy. Ya ayni aleyk … where do you think we are — the jungle?”

  “Take your hand off his shoulder, ya binti. This is not a disco.”

  As soon as we stepped out of Smoker’s Paradise, Miss Nadwa popped her head into the corridor.

  “Run!” Basma screamed.

  We turned on our heels and bolted. We ran to the other end of the hall and took a right. Basma was in the lead, and Maj and I were trailing. At the time Mama was really unhappy, chopping bowls of onions every night. She stayed up all night but in the morning she had produced no new paintings or sculptures. She just sat there chopping onions and whispering to Doris. When Mama was unhappy, it meant that I was bloated and gassy. Running down the hall, my stomach like one of Maj’s red balloons, I struggled to keep up.

  “Yalla,” Basma urged us on. “Faster!”

  I waddled along behind her, clenching my butt with all the strength I could muster. My stomach gurgled. I felt sick from holding all the farts in. Sweat began to form on my forehead from the strain. I felt that if I let it all out now I might gas the entire school to death. A fart holocaust.

  “Where are we going?” Maj yelled.

  “Basement! Basement!” Basma shrieked as she bolted down the stairs. I stopped and crossed my legs. If I ran another second I was sure I would pass out.

  “What are you doing?” Basma yelled as she ran down, three steps at a time.

  “I need a minute.” I groaned. I looked back, hoping Miss Nadwa had given up. But there she was, panting behind us. And only a few meters ahead of her was Maj, tripping over his Valentine gifts. A trail of red petals followed him down the hall.

  “Drop the flowers,” I yelled.

  “No!” He clutched his bouquet tighter. The red balloons bounced in the air behind him as he ran.

  I caught my breath and hobbled down the stairs. Basma was two floors ahead of me. Her quick footsteps echoed through the stairwell. When I was one floor down, I looked up. Maj had just reached the staircase but Miss Nadwa was right behind. Just before he went down she made a lunge for him. She grabbed him by his shirt collar and pulled him back into the hall.

  “Save yourselves!” Maj shrieked, squirming under Miss Nadwa’s iron grip. “For the sake of the Prophet, just keep going!”

  “Enough!” Miss Nadwa screeched. “Basma and Rasa, I know it’s you.”

  We stopped running and turned ourselves in.

  Miss Nadwa grabbed Maj and I by our ears and dragged us to the office, while Basma danced around her. “I’m calling your parents. Then suspension.”

  “But I’m a girl!” Basma shrieked, flailing her arms. “You want to destroy my honor, miss? You want to bring shame on my family? Let me warn you, miss, if you do this, it will be on your head! You hear me?”

  As usual this worked, and Basma blew us a kiss as she walked out of the office. As for Maj and I, well, they called our parents, honor be damned. Maj tried to reason with her.

  “Look, miss, it was my fault. I urged them to come with me. And I would do it all over again, you see. If I could I would propose the entire school accompany me to Smoker’s Paradise to ditch that silly Arabic class. You see, miss, the teaching is all wrong. How can we fall in love with this language when it’s being taught from that stupid book by that silly donkey? Hear me out, miss, I will give anyone my attention. But only if they earn it. No one is simply entitled to it just like that.” He snapped his fingers and put his hands on his hips. “You get my attention if you entertain me, ya miss.”

  In a single move Miss Nadwa reached behind her desk, unplugged the black cord connected to her radio, and whipped it across Maj’s side.

  “Owww!” Maj howled. “Well that won’t make me want to go back to that class.”

  My mother stumbled into Miss Nadwa’s office. She caught my eye and pointed her finger at me.

  “You are in deep SHIT,” she slurred.

  “What’s this language?” Miss Nadwa shrieked. “We are not in a marketplace, habibti!”

  Maj burst into a fit of laughter. He bit the insides of his cheeks to stop but it only made him snort. He shook in his chair, snorting like a pig, and that set me off. I laughed and laughed. I clutched my stomach and squirmed to keep all the farts inside. But it was useless. They ripped through me like a tr
umpet. Maj was rolling on the floor now. Tears were streaming down his face. Miss Nadwa shrieked and shrieked. I turned to look at my mother, who could not hold it in any longer and let out a squeal of giggles.

  One night, a month after Ray had moved in, while he was out drinking with money he borrowed from me, Cecile and I ordered Chinese food and watched a film in my studio. We divided the cost equally. Cecile handed me the plastic fork and gave herself the spoon, and with the knife she scraped a line down the thick red sauce in the circular dish of the Kung Pao chicken.

  “Eat up until this line,” she instructed. I stared at the crescent-shaped ration in front of me. In minutes I had wolfed down my portion. I was about to go in for another bite when Cecile smacked my fork away with her spoon.

  “Already you ate your portion,” she said with an annoyed look on her face. “Shit, already you ate over the line. The rest is mine. See?” She pointed to the now half-eaten line that snaked down the middle of the dish like a sneer. “Always so greedy, Rasa.”

  Ten minutes later, long after she had turned her attention back to the movie, I realized I was still staring at the Kung Pao chicken, feeling increasingly angry and ashamed. I was a greedy Arab, scolded for eating more than my share. But the meal cost six dollars, and it was obvious that Cecile did not intend to eat all of her portion that night. Who cares if I ate a bit more than my share? The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. Her street-rat lover had spent most of the fall semester sleeping in my bed without so much as lifting a finger, and she throws a tantrum because I ate an extra spoonful of rice? What a typical capitalist move. Even food, the most sacred of gifts, is sliced up and privatized. Cecile really is a petty bourgeois European, I thought, lighting a cigarette. But what could I say, really? There was nothing. Besides, forget about capitalism. More than anything, negotiating over six-dollar Chinese takeout was eib. It was the eib to end all eibs.

  “I’m going to break up with Ray, by the way,” Cecile said, spooning a piece of chicken into her mouth. “He scrounges off me too much.”

  What an utter little bitch you are, I thought, still fuming. Instead I told her that I thought it was about time she get rid of him. And after the movie Cecile wrapped up the remainder of her portion of the Kung Pao chicken and took it home with her, saying she would eat it for lunch the next day.

  So this was how it was going to be, I thought. Cecile’s actions — from sorting her friends the way a little girl arranges dolls, to intricately breaking down restaurant bills and dividing and rationing food like we were in a famine — were nothing more than a microcosm of America itself. Everyone had their space, fiercely protected, their plot of land, their books and their meals and their money and their laws and their rules and their rights. They divided everything into manageable parts that only they owned, and everything seemed orderly and operated under a law that was immune to any appeals to eib or haram, as such actions would have done back home. There was no eib here. There was only the law and human rights.

  When Ray returned home drunk later that night, I put the chain on the door and didn’t allow him in.

  “You’ve got to go, Ray,” I said.

  “You can’t just kick me out without notice,” he slurred, banging on the door.

  “I’ve been asking you for weeks. Now I’m telling you.”

  Ray kicked the door a few times and fell over.

  “This is really triggering me, you know? It’s bringing back memories of my father kicking me out of the house.”

  “Always so greedy, Ray,” I said, enjoying how much I sounded like Cecile. “Get off my property or I’m calling the police. I have rights, you know!”

  I never saw Ray again, and after the incident with the Kung Pao chicken I kept my distance from Cecile, spending a greater deal of time on my own. With the exception of being alone in the bathroom, there was little time for myself in Teta’s house, so having this time in America allowed me to continue reading and exploring imaginary worlds I didn’t know existed. More important, it allowed me to think of my mother.

  As much as possible, I needed to bring her back to life, to delve into our history and discover what had happened to her. Although she had made a decision to stop painting, Mama was not able to put the paintbrush down for long. She floated between secretarial jobs during the day, and stayed up many nights, bottle in hand, working on pieces she never finished. She often worked all night, barely sleeping. Our kitchen came to be littered with half-finished paintings and melting clay sculptures that — like a teenager hiding cigarette butts — she desperately tried to conceal from Teta. But her ideas came to her on a whim and fled just as quickly, leaving behind a carnage of crumpled papers, multicolored stains, and jars of paintbrushes with crusted stems soaking in dirty water.

  I recalled these memories while lying on my bed in America, staring up at the white walls of my studio apartment, blasting George Michael’s album on repeat, the album that got me through the worst of my teenage loneliness. It finally dawned on me one evening, as I stared at my bare walls, that if I could not find her in the directories, I might be able to locate the details of her parents.

  I had never met my mother’s parents. When she lived with us she barely spoke to them, so I knew they were not close. They spoke once every eight or nine months, and afterward my mother would be nervous and distracted, pacing under a cloud of smoke and talking to herself. One time she had announced that they were finally coming to visit that summer, but the summer came and went and nobody ever arrived. Still, I knew their names, and it didn’t take long to find my grandfather’s number. He was a retired doctor and professor at one of the colleges on the other side of the country. Tentatively, I wrote down his number on a piece of paper and picked up the phone.

  He answered on the third ring. As soon as he said “Hello,” sounding both more American and more dignified than I expected, a combination I had not thought possible, I realized I had made a terrible mistake.

  “Hello?” my grandfather repeated.

  I remained silent, my sweaty palm clutching the phone. I willed the words to come out, but they remained lodged in the back of my throat.

  “Hello?” he said for the third time. I did not want to see my mother. I was terrified at the thought of it, of being consumed by her again, of being probed and eaten alive. Would she be able to see what I was hiding in my secret cage? And how would she react? More terrifying was the thought that she might accept me for who I was, and expose my own guilt and shame in the process. With Teta it was easy. Yes, she could sometimes be sadistic and fickle, but we had an understanding of the red lines that neither of us breached, and together we allowed our shame to grow. In Teta I had an ally who would help me hide my shame. But meeting my mother again, the woman who had worked hard to ensure there was not a single stone of our family’s shame left unturned, no shadow left unexplored — what would she uncover from my cage of secrets? She would expose all my secrets with a single glance.

  I hung up, my hands shaking. I slid back against the wall, defeated yet relieved that my shame remained undisturbed. Coming this close to reaching out to my mother, I knew, was an ultimate defiance of Teta’s rules. This one phone call was the equivalent of ten million viewings of POLSKASAT, and when Teta called me that evening for our nightly chat, I feigned sickness and hung up after a few minutes.

  As I was falling asleep, I recalled a morning not long after my mother had come running back from al-Sharqiyeh in tears, vowing never to paint again. On the days when Teta was around, Mama would wake up late and spend the morning drinking Nescafé and smoking cigarettes by the kitchen window, silently looking out past the single palm tree in our front yard. But that morning Teta had gone to visit some friends, so it was just the two of us, my mother and I, free to dream up crazy ideas without the fear of Teta’s disapproving judgments. If I had known that such moments would soon end I would have taken advantage of them, appreciated them more perhaps. That day Mama woke up early and went straight to the bottle. Afterw
ard she danced around in her nightgown listening to Remi Bandali songs. She grabbed me in her arms and I sang along with her, and after breakfast we sat on the kitchen table and Mama, cigarette in hand, began to plan my birthday party.

  “We can’t have too many people,” she said. “Twenty?”

  I nodded solemnly. “Sounds about right.”

  “And for food, mini-pizzas of course …”

  “Lazy cake?”

  “Yes, yes, absolutely.” My mother nodded, paused to take a puff of her cigarette, and looked out the window at the garbage collectors picking up our trash. “Don’t you think people look funny when they walk? The way their arms move around as they move, almost like aliens. Why are we so scared of aliens when we are such aliens ourselves?”

  “Mama, focus please! We need to organize my birthday,” I pleaded.

  “Sorry, yes, your birthday. Where were we? Do you want a clown?”

  “I’m ten, Mama. I’m too old for a clown.”

  “Well how about an elephant? We can dress him up like in Dumbo. You know, when they went to the circus?”

  “Where would we get an elephant? They don’t have any here. Besides, we’d never be able to fit an elephant in the house.”

  My mother stubbed out her cigarette. “Yes,” she clapped her hands, her smile so wide it was almost a grimace. “An elephant. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

  My second winter in America was the coldest in recent history, and as the snow piled up around the brick houses and the streets iced over, my questions became bitterly frosty. Why had my mother not been in touch with me in the first place? In fact, why did she have to leave at all? Was it because of the state of the Arab world, where we treated mental health and addiction with the same reckless disdain we had for everything else? Perhaps Cecile was right. And those pundits on television, they were right, too. Why was everything done with little planning, just a bunch of haphazard inshallah’s thrown around? Was I angry about the state of the Arab world? Yes, I was angry. I was furious at the lost potential, at the millions of young people who have no opportunities because of structural impediments that ought to be challenged. I was angry about the lack of law and order. I was angry for myself, about my lost childhood spent navigating this confusing maze of chaos and loss. I was angry about my education, with its ancient and rigid teaching methods peppered with false truths and blatant lies, where the only goal was to make us forget how to criticize and ask challenging questions. And most of all I was angry about my mother, that she had to go so far and leave me behind like I was just another one of her abandoned paintings. And that was the fault of our society. We needed more damn lines in our Kung Pao chicken.