In my first year of college a guy my roommate had gone on four dates with punched her so that her eye turned black and her nose bled. At a party the night before, a friend of his had seen her kissing someone else, and the next evening he waited for her in the hallway of our apartment building to ask if it was true. As she unlocked our door, she admitted that it was. She began to apologize when she felt his knuckles bash into her face, continued to feel them across her body. ‘I fucking liked you,’ he said several times as he hit her.
I came home from class to find her on our living-room floor, folded over, her face covered in blood. I had never imagined her tall body could look so small. She had bruises on her arms and neck, spit in her hair. At the hospital she was admitted and treated and then interviewed by two social workers, a therapist, and three cops. With one eye bandaged she looked at each of them directly, with her mouth swollen nearly shut she repeated her answers. When they left my eyes wandered to her naked feet, the chipped red polish she had the night before complained she didn’t have time to fix.
The guy was arrested and bailed out in under an hour. His hearing was set for three weeks later, and in the courthouse I sat and listened to my roommate give the same answers and repeat them while staring at the person that had drawn blood from her body. I listened as the judge sentenced that person to a year of counseling and six months of community service after a tepid exchange with the prosecutor and the defense attorney about what to call his crime. Had he inflicted serious bodily injury? What were the benchmarks of injury? Was it a matter of simple or aggravated battery? Domestic battery demanded an intimate relationship. What constituted intimacy?
**
It will feel heavier today, the rising. Our bodies’ weight will suffocate us, press upon our shoulders and lungs and make it difficult to breathe. We will want to stay in bed, to lift the covers above our heads and let our lungs heave in silence. To imagine a slate that wipes black to gray and gray to white will help us move. In the bathroom mirror, we will see your face, not ours. Your eyes like veiled opals, your brows like question marks. Where do you roost? From where do you watch?
When the coffee boils, we will pour it and drink at once so it scalds our tongues. Our knuckles will ache and we will rub them in apology. We will remember how our fingers clutched at playground bars and how we were strong enough to catapult our bodies through the air, to land on tanbark whose splinters were incidental to the miracle of flight. We are older now, we will say. There are wrinkles, delicate but discernible. Skin thinner and less even. The makeup does not hide it and instead we will cover our marks with clothing. Cotton and wool and silk that know how to do what we still don’t. We will wrap a scarf around our necks and tighten it until we feel veins throbbing and pulse slowing, and release. When we open the window cold air will hit our faces and we will lean against the windowsill and inhale. We will try to forget that the air we breathe is not ours.
Outside we will walk the length of the street while staring at the sidewalk. A dime-sized egg speckled violet just fallen from its nest and cracked, its yolk spilling onto the asphalt, will have us looking for signs of life. A black eye; an unformed beak. We will feel exhausted, reach for mental lists of who does what where and resist the urge to lie beside the broken shell in mourning. Instead with newspaper we will pick it up and place it at the foot of the fenced-in tree. Dust to dust, life to mud. The warbling in the branches will be low-pitched and hoarse, and it will quaver in our ears for hours.
The day will pass and the light will become dark. From the window we will watch the crescent moon cradle the sun before both disappear. That is when we will call to you with our loudest voice. You are black stone and white granite but are you not also our mothers? By the salt, by the fire, why have you forsaken us? Again we will hear only silence.
**
When I shaved my head my grandmother refused to speak to me. ‘Tell her she looks like a boy,’ she said to my father when I came home to visit. All weekend she walked around the house with her beads in hand, muttering spells and prayers and shaking her head. ‘Tell her she will never find a husband with her hair like a boy,’ she said.
I was about to graduate college and two months pregnant. My friend Alex drove me to the clinic twice in one week. The first time, the nurse spread a cool gel on my stomach and moved the ultrasound wand in circles. She directed my face to the screen, but I was already looking at the gray mass moving there. She began to explain the image, its fuzzy sections and barely visible parts, and if she saw my eyelids close she pretended she hadn’t. On the second visit, the doctor was an ugly woman who put me to sleep and performed the procedure. When I woke up, she said kind words and held my hand.
‘Maybe now was not a good time to look so hostile, no?’ my college counselor suggested when he saw my shaved head. I was going on as many job interviews as I could, determined to not move back home after graduation. It wasn’t until my sixth interview that a receptionist called me back to her desk after I had met with the office manager. ‘This might not be my place but maybe you should think about wearing a wig, just until you’re done with treatment or until it grows back. I’m just trying to be helpful. It makes people pretty uncomfortable to see others that way.’
At the graduation ceremony my parents’ smiles beamed from the audience when I was introduced as the class speaker, and I could hear their claps above all others when I finished my speech. At the reception a professor told them how proud they should be and lauded them for raising a strong daughter. My father assured him that he was more than proud, that I had proven myself as worthy as any person. ‘Man or woman,’ he added. My mother smiled and nodded, and turned to me as the professor walked away. ‘So many good things ahead,’ she said. ‘Thank God your hair is growing back.’
**
Eventually Zaynab’s face returned to normal. She had spent the worst of those days crying, my mother said. Moans slow and long like some ancient call. But it was not long before she became placid, speaking only when necessary, unable to draw together enough energy even for her infant daughter. It was only when she regained control of her facial muscles, when she could smile and grimace at will, that she seemed to re-ignite. If she was biting before, she was now caustic. If her jokes had been improper, they were now vulgar.
She was not allowed to divorce her husband, not that she had wanted to. Instead she smeared the name of his second wife to any and all willing listeners, of which there were many. At him she hurled every insult, from sunup to sundown, until he ceased to come home. When relatives visiting from other towns would ask where he was, a content smirk would stretch across her face as she answered. ‘Oh, he works a lot. Works late into the night, really. May God bless his loins.’ Or, ‘Who? Oh! Is that the impish man on the nightly shows?’ People were aghast, my grandmother said, or pretended to be anyway. They knew the stories and they all claimed to know the truth. They demanded that Zaynab be the one to answer.
So when Zaynab began to spend her free time in the corner shop chatting with its owner, a man known for his throaty laugh and dirty jokes, no one voiced an objection. Not because they approved, but because they did not dare. Only my grandmother tried to reason with her. ‘What will people say?’ she begged. ‘You have a daughter to consider. Who will want to marry someone with a loose mother?’
One day Zaynab packed a suitcase and my then three-year-old cousin and without telling friend or family, neighbor or stranger, eloped with the man from the corner shop. ‘Maybe now people will stop talking,’ my grandmother said, her face wet from wailing. ‘Don’t be silly,’ my grandfather said. ‘They’ll talk even from their graves.’ After six months in the U.S., my aunt Zaynab gave birth to a second daughter, my cousin Farah. And then every other year for the ten years she was married, she gave birth to one more.
**
I have been moving
