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 . . . are we havin’ the baby?”
“No,” I say, “two months to go.”
“All right, fuck me, then what are you doing here?”
I 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 . .
