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 Mrs. Leibowitz or Mamie the Widow says, “Oh, shut your mouth, the girl’s a mozalem, she don’t go there.”
Eventually, Jackie sticks her head in and says my filthy laundry is done.
I walk home with the bag on my back, a baby in my tummy, and a ton of shit going on inside my head. He is drunk in his sleep, he is drunk in the afternoon. He is drunk at work, drunk while we “make love,” drunk when he throws a dictionary at my belly and causes me internal bleeding. He is drunk when I am in the hospital waiting for a diagnosis from a doctor who scans my DOB and shakes her head. Drunk when I tell him the baby will be all right. That night, I have to drive home, and I look over at him when we’re stopped at a red light, see his Adam’s apple dance up and down, eyes shut, dark forehead covered in sweat. This is it? I ask myself, hating the government and financial aid rules, my reproductive system, his big dick, my father, and mostly, my God. Not just God, but the God, the one who wrote the book resting in the car-door pocket on my left, the book that my boyfriend erroneously skims from left to right, the book that provides Guilt big enough to make me want to marry this ape with several mental illnesses he does not plan on addressing any time soon. The light turns green, a sign from God, I decide, that yeah, this is it.
James has no idea how broke we are, five days after the hospital bill comes. I pick up the phone and call the college library, ask them if I could come in and work. When he finds out that I got the job, twenty-five hours a week at $6.50 an hour, he puts his hand on my shoulder and winks. I say to him sweetly, “Habibi, ibn il-sharmoota. Yarab tmoot.” (My love, you son of a whore, I hope you die.) “What’s that mean, baby?” He wants to know, and I lie, “It means I’ll love you forever and ever.”
So I take the job at the library, and he’s driving out to Jersey every day, which means I have to walk to the job at the library. It’s a lovely stroll, I must admit. Here are my favorite moments:
1. Stepping in broken glass while wearing my ugly, pregnant-girl sandals.
2. Getting mugged at knifepoint two blocks up from our apartment and having to give the kid my backpack, which contains three interlibrary loan books by Sahar Khalifeh, all in Arabic. He must have felt like one lucky motherfucker.
3. Stepping in dog (or human) shit while wearing my ugly, pregnant-girl sandals.
I tell James the walk isn’t worth it, and he says I should watch my step more. I say, “Yeah, that’s easy for you to say, you don’t have a three-by-two-foot addition to the front of your fucking body.”
“You’re right, hon,” he says, one hand on my thigh and the other holding a Bud. “But I can’t afford not to work in Jers. I did get a weekend job at the scrap-metal yard.” He leans over and kisses me. His lips are soft and wet, and the more I look at him, the more fine the asshole seems. His eyes are a golden hue that always shocks me because it seems too light for his complexion. His hair, always five weeks too late for a cut, curls up in gorgeous black bunches. We make love, and the whole time, I’m yelling, “Habibi, ibn il-sharmoota. Yarab tmoot,” and the guy is moaning, “Yeah, you hot Arabic princess, baby, I love you too.”
While I’m in the shower, the door has to stay open because I’m growing at an alarming rate. He shaves at the sink, which is the size of a small notebook, and I attempt to wash my nether regions. “I’m not Arabic,” I decide to inform him.
“What, you lied about that, too?” he says in mid-shave, his razor, edged with white foam, pointing at me.
“No, you moron,” I say. “I am not a language; if you must, you can call me Arab. But never Arabian or Arabic.”
“Yeah,” he says, shaving his dimpled chin. “All right, so you ain’t a horse or a language.
