The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (26 page)

What was not to like? Eyad was smitten. His brow knotted at the possibility of his sister and her bad choices ruining his outlook with Omayma and the Hayyans. "You just keep a lid on it, Khadra, that's all I'm saying," he said to Khadra at the door of her apartment one afternoon. He was dropping off Jihad to spend a weekend in Bloomington with her. Her little brother came with his Atari box and Pac-Man cartridge, oblivious.

"I'm not advertising it, if that's what you mean, you jerk, "Khadra said, quickly converting hurt to anger. "And my recovery is going well, thank you very much for asking. I hate you."

If you go one night to the mosque, be sure you walk with bright torches so everyone will note your piety

-Sanai

Eyad and Omayma's wedding was held in the Indianapolis Marriott, not some apartment complex lounge. Homey little weddings were not for Omayma's social set. Her father trained the hotel staff to understand the separation of the sexes, with the men in one banquet room and the women in another. Waiters matched the gender of the room they were serving. They didn't mind; Dr. Hayyan tipped them well.

When they returned from their honeymoon, Eyad and Omayma set up house in a new garden-apartment complex near Butler, where she was still working on her degree. Eyad commuted.

Khadra's new sister-in-law may have had sequins trimming the edges of her expensive scarves, but she was no less committed to Islam than the Dawah community. "Have you ever heard Dr. Allam speak?" Omayma asked Khadra. "I went to one of his lectures in Paris."

"No. Who's he?" Khadra said, eating another leftover wedding cannoli from a crystal dish on the coffee table. They were in Eyad and Omayma's apartment, in which every stick of furniture was newly purchased. At retail. It wasn't just her sister-in-law, it was Eyad-he seemed to have developed the immigrant child's craving for gleaming new things, after a lifetime on threadbare secondhand couches.

"He's amazing," Omayma went on. Her eyes widened. "He's, like, this religious scholar from Egypt. Oh my God, when he lectured-it was so intense. He turned off all the lights in the auditorium and then he goes, if I were the Angel of Death-if I were Azrael, come to take your lives, right now, how would you meet your Lord? Like, have you lived Islamically, and have you done good, or like, have you wasted your time on earth? And he, like, thundered. I got chills. I am so serious." She wiggled her toes for emphasis.

"Really," Khadra said. Even Omayma's toes were elegant. Not stubby, with flaking cuticles, like Khadra's. Even her toes felt numb, as numb as her heart that short dark season.

"Oh my God, yes," Omayma said. "That's when I totally knew that I had to get good with God and rededicate my life to Islam. And ever since I have," she said, "I've been so blessed-and now your brother has come into my life, so blessed-"

Noticing she was getting a little teary, Khadra handed her a tornup tissue she dug out of her pocket and, after looking at it, Omayma dabbed a teeny-tiny corner just under her eye. "Always dab, don't wipe, it's better for your skin, dear," she said to Khadra through delicate sniffles.

What's wrong with my skin? thought Khadra. Maybe it was Omayma coming into her life during the raw period after the abortion, or maybe her heart was simply too clenched up just then. She should have liked her. Were they not two very similar Muslim girls of Indianapolis?

" ... and there's this Muslim restaurant owner, and he, like, serves alcohol. Bottles lined up from here to the ceiling," Omayma said at the meeting to which she persuaded Khadra to come.

"Boycott him?" her friend Maha, the Sudanese doctor's daughter, asked.

"That's it, that's totally what we need to do." Omayma looked around the group with bright earnestness. She and Maha and some friends had recently formed a new sisters' circle called the Nusayba Society. Tres chic and trPs holy, they were the face of Islamic women's work for a new era. Khadra attended a few meetings to please her sister-in-law, but oh, how she would have despised these Muslim Junior Leaguers in her black-scarf days.

How like Mama she is, Khadra thought to herself while marking up one of the signs for the boycott. How can Eyad stand it? Omayma didn't see herself as being like Ebtehaj at all. She saw her mother-inlaw as an old-fashioned innocent, out of style and out of step.

"What an-interesting-jilbab," Omayma said, looking at Ebtehaj's tan double knit with its large, outdated collar.

"Wajdy sewed it for me, thank you," Ebtehaj smiled. "Would you like him to make you one? Then we could have matching mother-in-law/daughter-in-law outfits!"

"Oh-ah-no, it's all right. I really wouldn't want to put Uncle Wajdy out," Omayma said, as Khadra saw her flash a look of "save me" to Eyad. It almost made Khadra want to defend her mother's polyester jilbabs. Almost.

"Have you ever thought about changing the look of the place?" Omayma asked, glancing around at the shabby sofa and the bare white walls, a little smudged around the light switches, and punctuated by "classic Islamic art" such as the black-velvet Kaba and the green prayer rug with the Prophet's mosque. They'd had those ever since Square One. Tacky as they were, Khadra couldn't imagine home without them.

Khadra followed her gaze. And suddenly, although she had vowed never to let country plaid anything cross the threshold of her own house, she wanted to smack Omayma's pretty little face. The Shamys (whose South Bend move had been twice postponed) were the last of the old Timbers crowd that still rented there. Everyone else had moved on. But because of the ugly garage-sale furniture, and the rest of the gimcrack decor and the refusals to indulge in things one craved over the years-things of the sort Omayma took for granted-she, Khadra, was able to go to IU. Because of Wajdy and Ebtehaj's extreme mindfulness and annoying diligence in all things.

And they were so vulnerable and fragile, her parents. They could be knocked flat by anyone. But this was a home they'd created, a home. Out of nothing. Out of arriving in America with so little. Intangibles their only treasure-their brains and their values. How dare Omayma? What could she know, just seeing surfaces? The godawful plaid couch, the ratty black velvet Kaba. They didn't tell the whole picture. They didn't tell anything.

Khadra gave Ebtehaj a hug when it was time to leave for campus the next morning. Her mother was in her robe de chambre, as she still called it, with a vocabulary left over from French colonialism in Syria. Sitting at the kitchen table in the worn old bathrobe and padded slippers, she was getting ready to debone chicken under the cold white glow of the energy-saving neon lights. To pick the slivers of meat even from between the neckbones, so as to use it in some dish that stretched out small quantities. She was taken by surprise.

"What's all this?" she said. Her cheek smelling softly of Nivea cream. She and her daughter had not been speaking much since the ... what Khadra had done.

"Nothing." Khadra said. But she clung a moment longer.

"Well. Here's nothing back, then," Ebtehaj said, and hugged her too.

The picket at the restaurant that Omayma organized happened on a cold sludgy day, the kind of day when the Indiana cold has drizzled so deep into your bones that you almost no longer remember what it feels like to be warm in summer. Had it snowed, it would at least have looked picturesque. Instead, the rain beat ugly pocks in dirty piles of shoveled snow. Khadra arrived late. She circled around looking for street parking while Ferdinand Marcos gave up power to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines and the remains of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger bobbed somewhere in the ocean. It was an area of downtown Indianapolis she'd only been to once or twiceshe seemed to recall Aunt Hajar Jefferson's salon being around here, near the Projects. And Uncle Taher's restaurant, the one he'd opened with his non-Muslim brother.

Wait a minute. Uncle Taher's restaurant. TJ's. Was it-? Yes, it was. It was indeed the one they were demonstrating against. Khadra's stomach sank. A few passers-by were watching curiously and, inside the restaurant, at the windowside tables, patrons looked out at the line of protesters with their signs. Omayma was keyed up with the thrill of the moment, the collective action, the eyes upon them.

Khadra had to work hard to get her attention, finally practically yanking her out of the line. "Did anyone talk to him before we organized this picket?" she asked her.

"Talk, like, to whom?" Omayma said.

"Uncle Taher."

"Uncle Taher Tijan, that's his name, the owner of the restaurant. Did you try to talk to him first, find out why he has the bar? Maybe a non-Muslim investor is making him do it?"

"What do you mean? A bar is, like, a bar. A BAR IS A STAIN ON OUR COMMUNITY!" she fell in shouting with the others.

"This isn't your community. You don't live in this neighborhood," Khadra muttered to herself.

A big bulky man with a long, sorrowful face came out of the restaurant toward them. "What's all this about?" he said. He read the first sign, then another. "ALCOHOL IS A SIN IN ISLAM."

"GOOD MUSLIMS DON'T SELL BEER." He shook his head. He spotted Khadra.

`Assalamu alaikum," he said. "Khadra? Is that you? You've changed. What's goin' on here?"

Khadra wished she could drop into a hole and hide. "Wa alaikum assalam, Uncle Taher. I'm-I didn't know-I'm sorry-"

"Aah," he said, waving his hand in dismissal. He turned and lumbered back into the restaurant.

"Who was that?" one of the picketers said.

"I think it was the owner," Omayma answered, with satisfaction.

"He was a teacher of mine," Khadra said, kicking a stone on the sidewalk.

When the silverfish is about to molt, he grows quiet, arches his body, and expands and contracts his abdomen until a split appears along his back. Gradually undulating his new body, he pulls himself through the crack headfirst ... a certain number simply die, unable to escape through the slit in their former backs.

-Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the Other Orders

She drove home and got into bed. It was full of clutter. She pushed to the floor the pile of clothes and books and the empty bowl with bits of milk-softened cereal dried at its bottom. She tipped her heart over like a little boy's toy dump truck. She dumped out Juma and his loving. Sobbing in bed for days. Out, out. Out of my system.

But what was happening to her? It wasn't just about Juma, the fact that her marriage was over finally hitting her. It was more, even, than the days of embryo bleeding out of her in agonizing bits and pieces.

It took her by surprise, the sudden revulsion she felt for everything. For her whole life up till now. She wanted to abort the Dawah Center and its entire community. Its trim-bearded uncles in middle-management suits, its aunties fussing over her headscarf and her ovaries, its snotty Muslim children competing for brownie points with God.

Twenty-one years of useless head-clutter. It all had to go. All those hard polished surfaces posing as spiritual guidance. All that smug knowledge. Islam is this, Islam is that. Maybe she believed some of it, maybe she didn't-but it needed to be cleared out so she could find out for herself this time. Not as a given. Not ladled on her plate and she had to eat it just because it was there.

These were weeks during which she left the apartment hardly ever. She slept fitfully, ate badly, and puttered around aimlessly. By the light of the flickering TV, which she kept on late into the night for company-for she had never been so alone-the news of the world was too horrible, young Palestinian boys and girls of ten and twelve throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, and the soldiers dragging them and beating them, just pounding those kids with their rifles and boots. It was the first time American television had ever shown Israeli-on-Palestinian violence.

Stupid Connie Chung and stupid American commentators and that all-news channel, CNN, were like, "But Brian, tell us how is this possible, we see Israel doing bad things to the whatcha- callems, how can that be?" and one asshole Zionist "expert" suggested that the violence done to Palestinians was their own fault, because they were not following Gandhian and Martin Luther Kingian nonviolence principles-"a rock is a very violent object!" he actually said. Khadra threw a plastic flip-flop at him and said "Fuck Gandhi and Martin, and fuck nonviolence, and fuck Israel, and fuck you, CNN!"

It was all so horrible, there was no point watching it, ever. Khadra didn't want to hear another word of news again in her whole life. She switched on Whitney Houston, turned up the music loudloud, and buried her face in a pillow.

She missed fajr after fajr sleeping through her alarm. It made her feel ill to miss a prayer. It was so drummed into her: the first thing a believer will be asked on the Day of Judgment is prayers. His foot will not move until he has accounted for the five dailies. She made up the late fajrs contritely at first. Then she began to be angry. The rest of the five, duhr, asr, maghreb, isha, she banged out with fierce uncaring roteness, pecking the floor with her forehead. Peck peck peck, one rakat after the other.

There, she said, flinging it at God. Here's what you demanded. Two rakats? Four? Four-three-four? Take it, take them all! Was this what prayer was for, to stave off an exacting bean counter? Ticks on some kind of scorecard He was keeping on her? Fuck it.