Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (32 page)

The cigarette was still lit when Mikhi came in from playing outside. Uncle Eddie drew one last double-drag and tapped it out in a saucer. Then he removed his belt and called Mikhi into the kitchen. Nadia hadn’t meant to tattle. She tried to show Mikhi this by the look on her face, but Mikhi saw only the belt as he backed slowly away from the kitchen door.

The narrow snakeskin belt was one of the first things that
Eddie had bought after the service. He was in San Diego and not yet out of uniform when he passed a shop window, and the gleam of its scales caught his eye.

“Achhh….”

The moans were growing louder, and from the front room Nadia heard a sound like something thrown against the wall, something soft. She pushed the last drawer shut and went out to see.

The front door stood wide open, the screen door ajar. And Mikhi was gone. The cushion he’d thrown, the red one, lay across the room, wedged between the baseboard and an end table.

Nervous like Papa, he never could bear it the way she could. “She’s old, Mikhi,” she used to tell him. “Old people get sick, then they die. That’s all.”) And so to find the amulet, she would have to go down alone into the cellar. He had left that to her.

She lingered a moment, listening while the groans became soft again, as regular as the tiny pendulum swings of the mantel clock. Nadia was afraid to go down there alone, and Mikhi knew it, and here he’d gone off anyway and left it to her.

She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, an absent gesture; then, suddenly aware of the gesture, she dropped her hand to her side. Another moment of that and the tears would have started for sure.

Her father had a way of combing his fingers through his hair when he was worried, the nervous habit of a nervous man. His gray hair stood out in whorls because of it. And on that day almost three years ago (even into adulthood she and her brother would remark the very date their father brought them to Sitti’s house and left them there: Sunday, July the
eighth, 1951) it seemed that every few seconds his hand would go up to his hair as they waited on the front stoop for Sitti to answer her door. They waited a long time, and when she did answer, how grim she was, how stone-faced, as she let them in. The bags they carried were heavy, even though Nadia herself had repacked them. (Papa had packed them first, confused from the start, unsure of what to take and what to throw out or leave behind.) He never came in after them but remained on the stoop as if still confused. There was a frightened sadness in the way he stood there, and his kiss was a good-bye.

Afterward, nobody spoke much of him except to repeat what was already known: that Mikhail Yakoub—married late in life (and to an American), a failure at any business he tried, finally a widower with children—was never a lucky man.

But then Mikhail Yakoub never respected luck as the others did, not even grudgingly. He preferred to be free of it. “Bad luck or good luck,” Nadia remembered him saying, “to hell with them both.” One time, he took her and Mikhi with him on an errand down Congress Street. While there, he stopped in at one of the
ahwa
shops to talk to a man. The coffeeshops did not admit females, not even little girls; she had to wait at the door while her father and brother went inside. The windows, like the doorway, were wide open, and flies buzzed everywhere among the tables. Old men sat drinking from tiny cups, all of them smoking cigars or water pipes. A group at a near table were playing cards. Suddenly, one of these men looked up as a shadow flitted past the lampshade dangling above him. Then they were all scrambling to their feet, crying out and cursing. A chair was overturned, and Nadia had to step aside to keep from getting trampled as the men jostled and elbowed one another out the door and onto the street. She heard her father before she saw him, his loud
laugh booming above the confusion. Only after the three of them had woven their way through the small crowd did Mikhi, himself red-faced with laughter, pause long enough to explain it to her.

“What happened is, is a bird flew in the window.”

“So?” she said.

“It’s an omen,” her father said.

“A bad one?”

“The worst. It means a death in the house. Holy Toledo,” her father began laughing again, “I never saw a room clear out so fast.”

Nadia chuckled a little, even though she didn’t see anything funny, not at first. Holy Toledo was a city near Detroit, and Papa called out its name sometimes when things were funny. But after a moment, remembering how quickly the old men had moved, their baggy trousers flapping as they shuffled and pushed, she began to laugh in earnest.

“I almost hurt myself,” Papa was saying, and the children hurried after him to hear, “when old Stamos the Greek tried to climb out a window. I had to grab him by the suspenders and hold him back.”

And so her father never respected luck, himself luckless. After he went away, those people who mentioned Mikhail Yakoub at all spoke of him as if he were gone forever. But he wasn’t dead—she and Mikhi had been able to wheedle that much out of them. He had simply disappeared from the neighborhood. And when the children pressed to know where he’d gone, some said “Boston,” others “Chicago,” but none of them was certain. Sitti answered them only by saying “America!” and fluttering fingers to temple in the Arabic gesture
tarit
, which meant
it has flown out
. Yet how could that which was sealed within the hard bone of the skull simply fly away? Nadia couldn’t understand it, and so she clung to what was certain: he was gone, swallowed up somehow by
the vast America beyond these streets, alive, forever luckless, and free. And in her imagination forever homesick, too, forever standing at a closed door somewhere, lost, running his fingers through his hair.

Still blinking against the tears—not much of a tomboy after all—she was startled to find the cellar stairs already lit. “Mikhi?” she called.

The stairwell before her was cool despite the day’s heat, its walls seeping spiderwebs of black moisture.

“Mikhi?”

“Down here, Nadia. Come on down here.” Her brother’s voice was clapped instantly from behind by a thin, sharp echo.

“Did you find it?” she asked, leaning into the doorway. It was quiet for a moment, then she heard his voice again, thinned so by the echo that she thought of the sound of her own voice, as if from far away.

“Okay, Nadia?”

“Okay what?”

“Are you coming down?”

“Is it there? Did you look in the boxes?”

“Aww, Nadia!” The way he called her name, thin and sad from within that darkness, it was a plea. She hesitated, then descended quickly after it, the way medicine is swallowed quickly so as not to taste it.

“Where are you?” she called. The cellar gradually deepened into its maze of half-walls that baffled, then blocked altogether the faint stairwell light.

“In here.”

She stepped cautiously along the uneven floor, following her brother’s voice into a corner room. The only light was a smudged glow from the single high window. Mikhi sat
beneath the window, legs dangling atop Sitti’s old steamer trunk.

“Did you find it?”

“I didn’t look.” Mikhi’s voice caught. “Aww, Nadia. It doesn’t matter.”

“But why didn’t you just—” she stopped herself, realizing that Mikhi probably had come down here for her sake, because she was afraid and she’d asked him to come with her. And the strange thing was that she wasn’t so scared anymore. At least not now. There she was in the deepest corner of the cellar; she almost laughed.

When she turned to Mikhi, his head was down, eyes on the trunk beneath him. Brass and black leather, one side of the trunk was crayoned with writing from forty years ago. Their father had once pointed out to them the different languages—Turkish, Arabic, French, and finally, in English, the yellow and blue admittance stamp of Ellis Island, New York.

“What is it, Mikhi? What’s wrong?”

“She’s not going to die,” he said with sureness. Then, the sureness faltering: “Do you think she’s going to die?”

“Yes.”

“Honest?”

“She’s old, Mikhi. Old people—”

“I don’t care,” he said quickly. “I’m going anyway.”

“Where?”

For a moment there was silence—only the muffled sounds of Sitti’s footsteps above them—before Mikhi sighed, “I don’t know … out there. Away from here.” Then he touched his hair with his fingertips.

“Don’t do that,” Nadia said, and he lowered his hand. “When are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

She nodded once, slowly, as if in solemn agreement, but it was relief that she felt. If he didn’t know where and he didn’t
know when, then maybe he wouldn’t really go. And then she wouldn’t have to go either, because what would they do? Who would take care of them out there in America, a girl and her little brother?

“I mean it, Nadia.”

But he didn’t mean it, not really. Alone, Mikhi wouldn’t know what to do. Not even what to take and what to leave behind. Especially that. He wouldn’t know that any more than Papa had known it.

“Nadia, will you come with me?”

“Sure,” she answered quickly, easily. After all, a boy can’t just walk off the way a man does.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mikhi said, the disappointment in his voice showing her that she’d answered too quickly. “But at least you won’t tell on me, will you?”

“I don’t tattle. Not anymore.”

Above them, Sitti was moving something heavy, dragging it across the floor. Her moans carried even to the cellar.

“You promise?”

He still didn’t believe her. She began to promise, but just then the moans from upstairs were cut short by a brief cry of surprise as something, glass or china, shattered on the dining room floor. The two of them remained still for a moment of teetering imbalance that ended abruptly with a heavy, resounding thump. Mikhi leaped from the trunk and ran ahead of her up the stairs.

“Help to stand,” Sitti said, hearing the sound of their feet. She had fallen to her knees, the side of her face leaning against an open drawer of the buffet. She must have been trying to shove the buffet away from the wall so she could search behind it.

“Sitti,” Mikhi spoke quickly, “should I go find Uncle Eddie?”

“No,” Sitti said, whispering, as if she had strength only for that. “Jus’ help to stand.” She held out one arm, and Mikhi took it.

“Ach!” she cried out at the force of his grip. Immediately, Mikhi released the hand.

“My heart,” Sitti hugged herself, “my heart. Achhh….”

“Is it a heart attack?” Mikhi’s voice rose on the word
attack
, threatening to rise to a screech if she answered yes, but Sitti didn’t answer. Instead, she braced her forearms against the buffet and slowly, but with less effort than Nadia had imagined it would take, raised herself to her feet.

“Did you find it, Sitti?” Nadia asked. She looked down at the shattered remains of what had been the china teapot. “Was it in the tea—”

Sitti closed her eyes as if to silence her. She stood that way for a few seconds, consulting some inner pain. Then the three braids that stuck out over the collar of her nightgown quivered a little, and she belched, a low weak sound.

“G’wan,” she told them—they were staring at her—”G’wan, don’t lookit me.” She leaned against the buffet. “Achhh….”

“What
is
it, Sitti?” Again Mikhi’s voice rose, like a girl’s.

“Nothing. G’wan.”

“Can I get you something? What do you want us to
do?
”

“Nothing,” she answered, but simply, even lightly, as if somehow pleased.

Mikhi looked to Nadia. His eyes were wide, near panic. Then he lowered his head and spoke. “You’re not sick,” he said.

There was utter silence, and Nadia was frightened by the sudden realization that she was about to laugh.

“You’re not sick at all,” Mikhi said once more, looking up now. He was actually smiling, although his eyes kept blinking as if somebody were shaking a fist in front of them. “You’re all right. It’s just gas. I know it is.”

“You be shaddap!” Sitti growled. Then she cursed him in Arabic, “
Ibn menyouk!
”

Mikhi flinched, but stood firm. “You’re not sick,” he said again.

Sitti turned furiously to Nadia, as to a witness. Mikhi, too was looking at her now. Then, slowly, he shifted his gaze to Sitti, and her face collapsed in fear at the sight of him. She raised both hands to her eyes and began to cry out weakly, muttering like a child on the verge of tears.

“And that was when he give to me the Evil Eye,
ya djinu, ya ibn menyouk!
The girl here, she see it all!”

Uncle Eddie listened patiently while Sitti went on and on, slipping in and out of Arabic and rushing the words so rapidly together that the children—made to sit quietly at the kitchen table—could barely follow it. She paced back and forth behind Mikhi’s chair, and Nadia watched her uncle smoke his cigarette with those nervous double-drags. Now and then, distractedly, he reached to his neck and touched the golden thread. The charm against the Evil Eye was suspended from it, a single porcelain gleam at the hair of his throat. Nadia had noticed it as soon as he walked in the house. She was sure Mikhi must have seen it. And Sitti too, as she hurried to the door, grasping Eddie’s sleeve with both hands before he was hardly inside. Uncle Eddie didn’t even try to hide it. All he did was shrug—a son cowed by the suddenness of his mother’s fury—and call her and Mikhi into the kitchen. Then Sitti started all over again from the beginning: Mikhi had been tormenting her all day. Worse yet, she was sick to dying, and the boy gave her the Evil Eye—wasn’t that so, Nadia?

She squirmed in her chair, answering neither yes nor no. She was innocent, but for the first time uneasy in the
tattletale pleasure of such innocence; after all, Mikhi was right. Here their grandmother stood, alive, hands working as she spoke, and her voice strong. She wasn’t sick at all. Mikhi knew that. She wasn’t going to die.

“Isn’t that so, Nadia? Speak up, girl,” Sitti paused only a second before again launching into an angry jabber of Arabic.

And the charm, all the good luck of it hanging there at Eddie’s throat the whole time they were searching, seemed forgotten; its luck granted or not—both Sitti and Uncle Eddie were acting now as if it never mattered in the first place. And Mikhi had known that too.