The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (19 page)

Bizarre rumors circulated among the Campus Muslim Council kids about the local Sufis. "They swim naked together in Lake Monroe" was one of them. "Because they think they're so spiritual they're above gender. You know, like Gandhi sleeping with the naked girls!"

"And one of them is gay. The Sufis."

"But he's married."

"But he's gay."

"And he goes to class in his bathrobe."

"It's a kimono."

"It looks like a bathrobe."

The supposedly gay married man in the kimono was actually a Finnish professor and his wife was a Japanese woman who was an adjunct lecturer in thermodynamics and also part of the whole mysterious (to the regular Muslims) Sufi cabal. They were rumored (by the regular Muslims and the general populace) to hold esoteric Sufi rituals in Nashville, Indiana, a nearby artsy-fartsy smudge on the map where yet more Sufis existed among the glassblowers, longhaired sculptors, and budding Georgia O'Keeffes and Jackson Pollocks who congregated there.

"They don't look Muslim to me," Khadra said to a classmate.

"You don't have a `look' that determines whether you're Muslim," Joy Shelby retorted.

But Khadra knew that you did, no matter what her new friend said.

"So it's Shalaby, originally," Eyad said when Khadra mentioned Joy's last name. "Why did she change it to sound more American?"

"She's from Mishawaka."

"Oh," Eyad said. That explained it. The Muslims who lived in that northern Indiana town were the assimilated kind, second- and thirdgeneration Americans descended from turn-of-the-century Arab immigrants. They had failed to preserve their identity-they'd caved.

"Hey-it was a different era when my grandfather came over," Joy said when Khadra mentioned Eyad's comment about her family name. "He was just a farm boy. Immigrants were more afraid back then, okay? Less educated. They did whatever the Ellis Island officer said, okay? If he told you Anglicize your name, you did. Sorry it doesn't meet your standards of ethnic purity."

Joy's family album was part of the American landscape in a way that Khadra did not think it possible for her family ever to be. Her brother and her father, like his father before him, worked in a steel factory, helping to make one of America's basic building blocks.

Khadra and Joy biked to a Kierkegaard study group, Joy in shorts, Khadra in baggy trousers and a long-sleeved tunic top that reached her knees. Dogwoods were in bloom along the avenue. The sun shone on puddles left by the previous night's rain in ruts and chuckholes that splashed as they biked through them, dispersing clusters of midges and gnats. Their destination was a Japanese restaurant where the group was meeting.

Khadra stopped cold outside the restaurant and said, "I can't go in there."

"Why not?" Joy said, her Pat Benatar mullet a little windwhipped.

"It's a bar."

Joy looked up. The sign read "Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar." "It's just a sushi bar, Khadra." She was already threading the lock ring through her front wheel.

"Well I don't know what sushi is, but a bar is a bar. I can't go inside a bar."

"It's not a bar-bar! Like, not a pub or a tavern or a beer house. Sushi is seafood, okay? Christ, I thought I was the hick, coming from Mishawaka," Joy said. She snapped her bike padlock shut. As part of the first generation in her family to go to college, she had enough to deal with, without some little Arab girl from a privileged college-educated family trying to tell her what was acceptable and what was not in the "Islamic lifestyle." As if Islam was a lifestyle. Instead of a faith.

It was moments like this, and things like Joy's casual blasphemous use of "Christ" that made Khadra doubt the whole "it's okay for Islam to adapt to new locales" argument Joy put forth. It seemed to Khadra that her friend was just an assimilated Muslim, plain and simple.

"Do they serve alcohol?" Khadra pressed.

"God, I don't know. Look, we're gonna be late for the study group. I can't believe I'm out here debating this with you. I'm going in." Joy abandoned Khadra to her doubts.

Khadra hoisted her bookbag off her shoulders and squinted up at the sign again. She had a Fear and Trembling exam coming up in Intro to Existential Thought. The material mystified her and she really needed the study group. Whispering a prayer for guidance, she entered the sushi bar.

Khadra resented the way Joy always seemed to assume, as if it were a given, that succumbing to white, middle-class, middle America's norms on all things-proms, birthday parties, eating out, clothing, and a thousand other things-was not only the unavoidable destiny of pathetic newcomers like Khadra and her family, but was somehow morally superior.

"McDonald's Muslim," she once accused Joy hotly.

"What?" Joy said.

"McMuslim" Khadra repeated, sniffing. "It means you believe by default in the typical American lifestyle of self-indulgence, waste, and global oppression." She loved listening to her leftist college professors. They gave her a language to critique America that fit with her parents' stance, or with the social justice part, anyway. This was a revelation, that some of the things she'd learned at home not only stood up to outside scrutiny, but actually coincided with the views of some of her professors. Not the religion part, though.

Say, "He is Lord of the East and of the West and of all that is between the two, " if you have intelligence.

-Quran: The Poets, 27

"Why don't you come up and visit?" Joy said one day.

Going up by herself on that far a drive with just some other girl from college was not going to happen. But Khadra persuaded Eyad to come along (he'd get to visit some of his old CMC buddies in the area), making it okay with her parents that she'd be spending the night away from home.

As they drove down joy's tree-lined street of small white houses with postage-stamp front yards and big porches, someone yelled out her name.

"Your mom said to tell you-she at Im Litfy's."

"Okay, Donnie!" Joy called. "That's our next-door neighbor," she explained to Khadra and her brother.

Khadra was overwhelmed with a sense of home as she entered Im Litfy's kitchen. Maybe it was the garlic and cilantro smell, or maybe it was the scene of kibbeh-making that greeted them. Khalto Im Litfy presided over a Moulinex meat grinder just like the one the Shamys used at home-in fact, Moulinex simply translated as kibbeh machine in Arabic. Here too was the giant bowl of peeled onions, here was the pile of ground lamb meat. Behold, the mountain of bulgur. Into the maw of the Moulinex were poured these three, whose fates would be forever ground together, though they knew not each other before that hour.

A pear-shaped woman came out from around the table with a heavy, comfortable gait. Her short, coarse black hair was partially covered by a snatch of bandanna to keep it out of the meatwork. To Khadra and Eyad she said, "I'm Rose, Joy's mom. I'd shake hands, hon, but as you can see . . . " She was up to her elbows in raw meat and onions. "But I'm glad you're here! You're right on time!"

Im Litfy, gray-haired and jolly, explained, "She means right on time to help out." She had a thick accent in English but a pure native inflection in Arabic.

"Wash your hands! I need stuffers!" Joy's mother said. "Stuff those holla kibbehs for me. Pull up that chair, kiddo," she nodded to Khadra. "You too, slugger," she said to Eyad, who clearly expected to be escorted to the living room to sit with men. And "Slugger?" No Arab woman had ever referred to him with a baseball epithet.

No Arab men turned up to rescue him, either. He and Joy and Khadra were conscripted into hard labor by the Queens of Kibbeh. For kibbeh was a great and complex task, requiring a whole clan in the kitchen, way beyond the grasp of the lonely nuclear family in America, severed from the web of extended family. Down into the hot oil went the small, football-shaped ovals of stuffed kibbeh, bursting with ground meat and pine nuts. Out they came again fried, shiny and grainy and brown. Into the oven went tray after tray. The pan kibbeh was cut into diamonds, cut into stars.

"For the Arab Pride festival tomorrow," Rose said. "In the morning, we take the food over to Im Litfy's church, St. George's. That's where the parade'll end with a banquet."

You could see Khadra and Eyad do a mental double-take. Church? Im Litfy? Who felt as familiar as their own grandmother, whose kitchen felt like home?

Khadra glanced at their hostess' face, her features so familiarly Syrian, her cadence and voice equally so. What other homes of similar sweetness and joy had they passed by all these years, insisting as they did on their separateness and specialness, then? What a waste. Something started to unravel in Khadra there in the kitchen, bringing her almost to the point of secret tears. Confused, she kept them in.

"We saved some for ya, Baker," Rose said. A guy in a denim jacket suddenly filled the doorway, beefy and big and sloping, with wide hips and slow, heavy movement. He had a shock of coarse black hair and strong black eyebrows from ear to ear. Fresh cold air came in with him, and a smell of woodburning that made Khadra think of crackling logs on a fire and rustling piles of autumn leaves. Two more children appeared when he entered, girls about ten and twelve in soccer uniforms.

"Baker, meet Joy's friends from college," Rose said. "And here's my youngest, Amalie, and this is Im Litfy's granddaughter Lisa."

Baker shook hands with Eyad and then stuck out his hand to Khadra. It was such a big gentle hand; Khadra's little pudgy one instinctively homed into its big clasp and he covered it with his other hand. Eyad flashed her a glance-shaking a man's hand?-but she ignored it. "Hey, welcome to Mishawaka," Baker said. "How's my kid sister?" He ruffled joy's hair as she ducked her head uselessly.

Later, after tea and baklava, the whole family smoked, except Joy. "Joy's our little crusader for anti-smoking," Rose said proudly, puffing a cigarette out on the Shelby front porch, a generous space cluttered with plants and odd things, like what appeared to be a stuffed king cobra. Khadra started when she found it at her elbow.

"That's Pete Seeger," Joy said, indicating the snake with a nod. "Baker beaned 'im, Dad stuffed 'im, and I named 'im."

The Shalaby father had welcomed them with Arab-style effusions of `ahlan, ahlan wa sahlan, "and knew enough old-school ways not to offer his hand to Khadra but to place it on his heart to greet her. He now lit up a pipe. He had a square head, big bushy eyebrows, and thick coarse hair gone to iron gray. "Did you know," he said, puffing out his first cloud of smoke, "that Indiana was once covered so thickly with forest that a squirrel could go the entire state without ever touching the ground?"

"Really?" Eyad said politely. "Just jumping from tree to tree?" He looked such an overly neat college boy in this setting. In any setting, really, but more so here.

Joy nudged Khadra and whispered, grinning,"The long grasses line is next,"

"Incredible, how fertile this land is, Amreeka," Joy's dad went on. "Once upon a time, a long time ago, the Middle East was that rich in greenness. But the kings of the old days-now, I'm talking preIslam, pre-Christianity, pre-Roman even, going way back-well, the kings, they cut down the cedar forests to finance war after war, see. And now we have what we have," he finished.

Khadra looked at Joy. She was wrong. Her dad wasn't following the script.

"And the long grass that covered Indiana," Bou-Baker went on, and Joy smiled at Khadra, vindicated. "Why, they were so tall that you couldn't see a rider on a horse come through them at full gallop. Ey, na'am. Yes, indeed." Puff, puff-puff. Irongray bushy eyebrows going up and down.

Rose picked up a guitar from the corner of the porch and strummed it as the fireflies of evening came out. Khadra recognized an old Fayruz tune from her father's tapes, a song, she found out in college, which came from a Gibran poem. Something like,

The familiarity of it struck a chord in her. She and Eyad had never seen Arab folk like this: women called Rose who mangled Arabic with an American accent and played Arabic music on American guitars, and men who looked like Hoosier farmers in denim overalls but a shade or two darker. All sitting around eating kibbeh nayyeh of an Indiana evening as the midges and moths played in the porch light.

Joy's bedroom was cluttered with Holly Hobbie ornaments, Cesar Chavez posters, stacks of The Radical Ecologist, and ratty Green Lantern comic books. The whole house smelled as if it had flooded in 1920 and never recovered from the mildew. As Khadra made her way over the creaky floorboards after using the bathroom to make ablution, she spied, through a door slightly ajar, joy's father on his prayer rug, his back to her, finishing off a slow-moving rakat. He had made no fuss of "clap-clap-clap, it's prayer time, everyone hop to it." But wasn't it a father's duty to call everyone to prayer?

"Men should be men and women should be women," Rose was saying on the porch. "I don't truck with all this women's lib business. What do we need libbing from? You're with me, right, hon?" she said, looking at Khadra and Eyad. "It goes against religion, am I wrong or am I right?"

Eyad nodded, happy to find common ground. Khadra said, with mild protest, "I think religion allows a little more flexibility than that, Auntie. I mean, the Prophet used to help his wife with the housework, and Sitna Aisha led a battle once."