"Right away? None," she said, an edge creeping into her voice.
"Okay, okay." He dangled his arm out to the water. A lot of girls talked that way when they first got married; his own sister, for one. Later, they tended to come around. "Fine. Later on. How many?"
"I dunno. I haven't thought that far ahead. How many do you want?" She held her breath, suddenly worried.
"Oh, I don't know exactly. I was hoping somewhere between two ... and nine."
She sat up. "Nine! Nuh-uh!"
He is laughing at her. "What is this, `nuh-uh'?"
"Nothing. Just dumb Hoosier talk. Means no. Not nine!"
"Okay."
"No. Say it. Not nine." She was smiling.
He laughed. "Not nine. How about eight then?"
"Okay. I see how it is with you." She dipped her fingers into the lake and splashed him. "Let's just go back to shore right now, mister."
"No, no, please. Look, I brought bread for the ducks." Reaching into the little brown paper bag for the bits of stale bread was a nice prospect because it meant their hands got to meet several more times by accident. Every time hers touched his, she now thought, cashmere, cashmere. When they went under a cascade of green willow branches, he leaned over to her side and grazed the corner of her mouth with his wide shapely lips.
There was a thrill. The boat got tipsy.
In Islam, it is said "Marriage is half of the faith. " In close relationship, the sharpened edges of our nafi (ego-soul) can be little by little smoothed.
-Camille Adams Helminski, Women of Sufism, Hidden Tresure
Khadra's wedding was to be held at the Dawah Center-the women's party, that is. The men's party would be at the Community Room at the Fallen Timbers. Nothing was a more natural culmination of Khadra's girlhood than for her to come down the staircase of the blue Victorian house in her wedding white.
Her choice was Butterick #1287, in scads of lace and tulle, sewn by Wajdy at his Singer, beadwork painstakingly added to the bodice and arms by Ebtehaj, who pored over the dress, bead by bead and stitch by stitch. Even Eyad and Jihad helped sew on the last ones, when Ebtehaj was behind in wedding work and panicking.
Regarding herself in the mirror, the bride thought she looked almost pretty, despite the annoying baby-roundness of her face that just would not leave her. She was shortwaisted and plump. Her mother called it "well proportioned." Teta, of course, said she was absolutely gorgeous, but that was just Teta for you.
Joy was exasperated at the separate wedding parties for men and women. "I mean, come on!" she said. "Then how is it a wedding?" She was dating an Assyrian guy nowadays. "Dating" meant doubledating with her brother; her parents had strict boundaries, and Joy was really pretty straitlaced. Not that any of the Shelbys' careful standards mattered to Khadra's circle. The fact that Joy dated at all was enough to put her, in their view, on the slippery slope to promiscuity.
"So he's a Syrian guy?" Khadra'd said when Joy told her about him.
"No, not Syrian. Assyrian. It's an ethnic group in the Middle East-they've been around longer than Arabs, longer than anybody." Khadra didn't seem to think it possible that Joy could know something about the Middle East that Khadra didn't already know.
"I've never heard of them. Do they speak Arabic?"
"Yeah but they have their own language, Aramaic. It's, like, the mother tongue of Arabic and Hebrew."
"Well, if they speak Arabic, then they're Arabs."
"No," Joy had said, getting annoyed. "They are not. They don't want to be Arabs."
"Are they Muslim?"
"No. Christian."
Khadra had been taken aback.
Joy went on, "They were massacred by Muslims back around 1914. The Assyrians."
"Oh." Khadra's defenses had gone up. Without even knowing the story, she resisted it.
She was sitting in an ornamented chair on the bridal dais now, surrounded by bouquets, and Joy had come up through the throng of wedding guests to greet her.
"Smile," a little kid said, and Khadra and Joy looked up as a camera flashed. Someone had handed one of Aunt Fatma's kids a point-and-shoot and told them to take pictures. That's why all of Khadra's wedding photos showed people in the middle of a bite, their mouths misshapen, or Ebtehaj pointing with her arm stretched out toward something off camera as she directed the flow of wedding cake.
After the banqueting was done, and several rounds of cake and tea had been served to the women, the Dawah Center front door opened to reveal the crowd of male wedding guests waiting outside, having "brought the groom to his doom," as they said, teasing him. They carried Juma on their shoulders, singing and clapping. Khadra caught a glimpse of him, his head tucked down, sneaking anxious looks into the hall. Behind him were Eyad and Hakim and elevenyear-old Jihad with his tie loose.
There were cries of "shut the door, we're not covered yet!" from the women. The newly "hijabed" little preteen girls, like Aunt Fatma's wild-haired daughter Sabriya, squealed the loudest about their hijab being violated. Eventually, the groom entered, to cheers on both sides of the door. The crowd of male guests outside began to thin as some of the women emerged and families, reunited, headed home.
Juma maneuvered his way up the dais crowded with flower arrangements to sit next to Khadra, marking the family part of the evening. He presented the wedding jewelry sent for her by his parents in a red velvet box. There were "oohs!" and "ahs!" at the appropriate moments. When Testa began belting out a Syrian folk song, "Girl of my homeland, where are you going, so tender and true," Ebtehaj hurried away to the buffet table, no doubt to take care of some important logistical detail.
"Omigosh," Khadra whispered to Tayiba. "I've forgotten something important. Help." And she sent Tayiba to Hook's Drugs before they closed to pick up a refill of her birth control pills, which she'd been taking since her last period.
"Okay, but this is going to look weird." Tayiba smiled, patting her second trimester bulge. She and Danny Nabolsy, who'd married the year before, were expecting their first baby.
More pictures were posed for. And then they made their break. The couple, after a pit stop at Khadra's parents' place in the Fallen Timbers to change their clothes and collect their things, was dispatched in Juma's new black Mercury Capri to their honeymoon weekend. Tayiba pulled into the parking lot beside the Capri just in time and handed Khadra a little white paper sack from the drugstore.
"You're really adamant about that, aren't you?" Juma remarked, looking sideways at her in the car as she broke a pill off the little disk.
In the honeymoon suite, Juma took out a small stone mortar and a little goldfoil package, then unwrapped a nugget from the foil and lit it in the mortar. He tossed a little bit of something like bark on top of it.
"What is that, one of your funky Gulfie things?" Khadra said curiously.
Aiwa, "Juma said. Smoke wafted up from it: Sandalwood.
"Mmm," she said. They lay on top of the polyester bedspread, breathing deeply. He pulled her in to him and she nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder. Exhausted, they fell asleep that way.
And across the sands, from among its lavish gifts, the Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
-Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, "The Rain"
High up on a mezzanine in the Kuwait airport, behind a clear fiberglass partition, a great throng of men, women, and children stood waving energetically at Khadra and her husband. Juma waved back. His parents had flown the new couple to Kuwait for a second wedding reception.
"Who's all that?" Khadra said.
Juma shrugged. "Just a few of my relatives."
Khadra grinned. You knew you were an Arab if your ride from the airport was two dozen people.
She and her husband walked out of the air-conditioned airport and it was like stepping into a sauna. The very air was dripping sweat. The crowd of relatives descended upon them, exchanging hugs and welcomes. Besides his parents, there was Johar, the older sister who was a pediatrician, his younger sisters Fowz and Farida, cousins Muhammad, Big Ali, Osman, Omar, Bakr, and Little All and-well, assorted others, more than she could keep track of. The entire caliphate of Islam was there, she joked.
The Tashkenti family compound had a main house for the parents, a second house for a married son to live in with his familythat would be Juma and Khadra and their future children ("but we don't have to, we can go out and get a place of our own," Juma assured Khadra)-a guest cabin, servants' quarters, and an extra house in case any unmarried daughters needed to live there in the future. A poor relation of Juma's father had been living there for years; her name was Moza, and she was divorced, with four children.
The courtyard walls spilled over with bright pink bougainvillea. Bird-of-paradise plants were carefully tended and palm trees swayed, yes, Khadra thought, even if swaying palms is a clich€, by golly sway they did with the weight of their high bundles of ripe fruit. Khadra had never tasted fresh-picked balah, or early dates, and found them delicious. She'd never imagined dates could be as juicy as plums. "I did not mean to finish the whole bowl of balah in the refrigerator, forgive me, but they were so cold and so sweet."
Khadra's favorite in-law was Juma's grandfather. He was a leathery old man, small and spry, who spent most of his days at the docks. Family members spoke of him in a protective way that indicated he was a bit senile.
"He used to be a pearl diver," Juma's father said with a sigh, "before oil was discovered. He hates oil." In the fifties, the grandfather had fought-uselessly-the changes the petrol industry wrought in his country. They'd rendered a man with his skills defunct.
The old man refused to sleep in his luxury suite. His preferred space was a tent at the back of the compound with a payload of sand in front of it. The camp was equipped with a campfire and tin cooking gear. Khadra sat out there with him one evening and ate his coal-blackened fish.
"Bless your heart," Juma's mother said when she came in. Her own daughters dodged grandpa-sitting duties as often as they could.
"We hate roughing it," Fowz said. "Mosquitos!"
"We prefer shopping!" her sister added.
Kuwait City was mall after high-rise mall of shopping with Fowz and Farida. Because of Free Trade zone agreements that made the place a capitalist's heaven-and a hell for workers' rights, Khadra knew Joy would've pointed out-the shopping centers overspilled with stuff you never saw in America, the latest appliance brands from Europe and Japan and China, a dizzying smorgasbord. Khadra was uncomfortable with her sisters-in-law's level of spending and felt terrible about the modest amount of it she herself did. That seemed to be what you did in Kuwait: you shopped and shopped.
"What you can't carry, we'll stock in your house," her mother-inlaw said.
Khadra realized with a start that she was referring to the house in the family compound that would be Juma's when he returned. "Ours, when we return," she mentally corrected herself. But she couldn't see herself there.
Any insect that undergoes a complete metamorphosis has several different life stories, ones that describe how it lives in its immature, larval forms, what goes on in its pupal transformation-if it has one-and how it behaves as a mature sexual adult.
-Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the Other Orders
Back in the Tulip Tree apartment tower in Bloomingon, it was too much fun to have a little place of your own with your own little set of pots and pans in a teeny-tiny kitchen. Your own little dinette where you could entertain. With its own dimmer switch on the cute mini-chandelier so you could create "mood." And your own mirrored dresser where you could set up your own jewelry boxes and curvy-curly perfume bottles, and, and, and, your little things. To be a married woman of your very own, on equal terms with married women and other real people-in the community, only married people had prime status.
Married life was bliss. To have a friend always, a built-in friend. To pray fajr beside him in the dark misty dawn and then sleep beside him in your full-sized bed-your very own man. To watch him shape his beard and do unfamiliar manly things that bespoke a whole man-world different from the one inhabited by your father and brother. To be beautiful in the mirror of his eyes, a doorway into a whole woman-world for him. To lie in the curve of his body watching TV or falling asleep, his arm slung along your hips, making you feel very feminine and tender. At long last, finding the one place where you could soften like that, and not have to be hard and guarded and defensive and worried. And then to do even more interesting and absorbing things in the curve of his body, the bronze and the olive-colored limbs entwined, belly on belly.
It took her twice the work to get where he got with half the effort. It got easier as they got more experienced together.
"I had no idea it was that much work," Juma said, his hand cupped over her crotch afterward, as she lay breathing hard, her whole heart pounding under his hand. "Mine's like a-what do you call it, the no-brainer camera? A point-and-shoot."
Khadra laughed at that.
She fit the profile of the wife Juma always knew he'd have. An observant Muslim, of course, but also a modern, educated woman, not old-fashioned and boring. Khadra would fit right in with his family when he moved back-she would maybe have to adjust to some Kuwaiti customs, but his mother and sisters could help her learn. Her Arabic was not bad. And being married to a Syrian woman would give him cachet in Kuwaiti society. Plus, he was a breast man and he could tell from the first time he saw her that she was not flat, even under those boxy jilbabs of hers. He was not disappointed.
"Juma" meant "Friday" in Arabic so Khadra called him "my man Friday," but he didn't get the Robinson Crusoe reference. His bookshelf had only engineering manuals and a Quran. And one slim volume of Nabatean poetry because, as he put it, "You can't be an Arab without poetry."
She made him read the Defoe novel. "So what do you think?" she asked, lying on her back on the grass at Brown County State Park.