Authors: Nell Freudenberger
Both Long Nose and her parents believed Salim had intended to set the building on fire—trapping Amina and her mother inside while the other tenants ran to the street for safety—and they thanked God that something had scared him off. Sometimes now, when Amina suffered a particularly discouraging day—when a customer yelled at her, or she was forced to wait an extra half hour in the unheated bus shelter outside the mall—she would remind herself of that dreadful morning in the apartment in Dhaka and try to imagine her parents’ faces if they could have glimpsed then the privileged circumstances of their daughter’s life right now.
19
Amina had been at MediaWorks for only six weeks when Carl doubled her shifts, just as Lisa had said he would. Now she
worked every day but Wednesday and Sunday and took home two hundred and eighty-six dollars each week after taxes. She waited until George had gotten used to her new schedule before she brought up the question of her parents again, one night after dinner. They were sitting in the den, watching the Cowboys game on television.
“Look at that,” George said. “Right through. I told you they don’t have the defense this year.”
“The bachelor’s degree and then the master’s in education are going to take at least eight freakin’ years.”
George looked up at her, smiling with his mouth but letting his forehead frown. “ ‘Freakin’?’ ”
Amina hurried on before he could laugh at her. “I mean, if I go part-time.”
“You can give up MediaWorks when you start school,” George said absently. “You won’t have time for both once we have a baby.”
“I have to save some money,” Amina said.
“I’m going to pay for those classes. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“In case I lose my job.”
“If you lose your job, I’ll give you the money to send home.”
“I won’t lose it. I’m a hard worker, Carl said. And Lisa says that MediaWorks is being bought by an international consumerate.”
“ ‘Conglomerate,’ ” George corrected. “If it’s being bought by a conglomerate, why do you need to save your money?” He was talking to her, but his eyes were on the screen. Now he put one hand on his forehead. “Oh no—I can’t watch.”
Amina was holding the remote, and so she turned off the set. George took his hand away and looked at her. “What are you doing?”
“You said—”
George looked irritated. “I was just—okay, here.” Once he’d taken the remote and found his channel, however, he put his arm around Amina. “What are you worried about? I said you can do the program. It doesn’t matter about the money. Do you want to wait to have the baby until you’re finished with school?”
Amina shook her head. “That’s too long.”
George looked relieved. “I agree—so what’s the problem?”
Amina could hear her mother’s voice in her head again, and so she
took off her glasses (even though George said he didn’t mind them). She stayed close to him on the couch and twisted her engagement ring on her finger. She was still unable to look at it without thinking of the sum it represented.
“I want to save money for a rental apartment.”
George had been watching the commercials, but now he muted the sound. “An apartment! What would we do with an apartment?”
“You said an apartment in Greece could be eight hundred dollars per month.”
George didn’t move away, but he dropped his arm from her back. “This is about your parents again.”
When he was upset, his shoulders moved closer to his ears. It was 100 percent different from the way her father got when he was angry, yelling at her mother and sometimes even leaving the house. Her mother would yell back, call him Madcap or Monkey’s Son, and then when he’d left she and Amina would laugh. She was able to mock him, but she also obeyed the traditional proscriptions, never using either of her husband’s names. She referred to him as “my husband” or “Amina’s father,” and if she needed to get his attention in public, she would ask Amina to call him. When he returned home after one of their arguments (pretending nothing had happened), she teased him and called him Thunder, because those bursts of temper were both loud and brief.
George, on the other hand, never got angry, something her mother said she ought to be grateful for. She said Amina was lucky to have a husband like that, but her mother didn’t see George when he looked the way he did now, staring willfully at the players on the screen, as if they had the power to take this conversation away. If she hadn’t known him better, she would have thought he was praying.
“So my parents won’t have to live upstairs,” she said. “They could still help with the baby. But they would not be here in this house.”
George picked up a small, decorative pillow embroidered with a blue star and put it in his lap. She knew that this was something his mother had made for his father early in their marriage, but what this gift might signify in an American courtship of the early 1960s, or at what point in a relationship it might be appropriate to present such a token, was beyond her. Other than this pillow, there was nothing
Amina knew about George’s father, except that he had grown up in Texas and then moved to Rochester for a job with the Xerox Corporation. No matter how many questions she asked, there was a great deal of George’s life before he met her that she knew she would never be able to imagine, and of course the same thing was even more true of him with regard to her.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said finally. “They don’t know how to drive—even if they could help with a baby, how would they get to us? You know what bus service is like. How would they do their shopping?”
“I could shop for all of us at once.”
George shook his head. “You won’t have time. And they’d be miserable—trapped in the house all day.”
“Maybe if the apartment building had a little yard. They enjoy gardening,” she said, although she was afraid George was right. The only way her parents would really be happy in America was right here in the house with them.
“Not to mention the winter. I’m worried about you when it gets to be February—but two old people?” George looked at her, and she was afraid he could see that she was starting to cry. “I’m sorry I can’t ask them to live here. Even if it were the right thing for them—and I don’t think it is—I couldn’t do it. We’d never have any privacy again.”
Amina could feel her face flushing: she thought she’d camouflaged her hopes about her parents’ emigration, but now it seemed as if George had known what she wanted all along. He replaced his father’s pillow firmly in its customary position on the couch, and at once she understood that their previous discussions on the subject had been his way to prepare her. She wondered if a part of her had known he would say no, and if that was why she’d waited so long to talk to him directly. All of George’s arguments about her parents’ happiness made sense, and at the same time they were completely beside the point. She was here, and so this was where they had to be. The three of them would never have begun talking about Amina marrying abroad if it were going to be a question of permanent separation. Could she now begin getting used to the idea that she would live apart from her parents forever? The finality of it made her stomach drop, and it was even worse to think of how they would feel.
“You like being alone together, too—don’t you?”
Amina nodded, but it seemed to her that “alone together” was something to strive for if you lived in a bustling house full of children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Here they were now, alone together, and with the TV on mute, the only sound was the indistinguishable electric purr of all their appliances working in conjunction.
George looked at her for a long moment, until she had to look away. “It’s late,” he said finally. “Let’s go to bed now,” and his voice made it sound as if Amina were the one who had swept away years of careful planning with only a few words, instead of the other way around.
She followed her husband up the stairs and into the bathroom, where he was looking at himself in the mirror, holding his toothbrush but not brushing.
“I’m getting old.” George traced the lines at the corners of his eyes. “Look.”
But Amina couldn’t stand to look. It wasn’t that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?
20
Ghaniyah was married just after Eid, and by the end of November her brother Rashid had designed a website and posted 1,678 photographs. Amina had already heard the details about the food, her cousin’s various saris, and the yellow-and-gold bedroom set her aunt and uncle had gifted to the new couple. Nevertheless, she was eager to skim through the thumbnails: Ghaniyah having her hands decorated at the
gaye holud;
Ghaniyah posing in front of the mirror with an artificially apprehensive expression; Ghaniyah laughing as she danced with the youngest girl cousins. In one photograph Amina came upon her own mother unexpectedly, in an unfamiliar royal-blue-and-silver sari, her face barely visible in profile as she fed her niece a perfectly round and golden bundi laddoo by hand.
Amina skipped the pictures of the groom’s family, but she was able to examine Ghaniyah’s new husband, Malik, in the 214 pictures of the couple on the red-and-gold dais in the wedding hall, as well as those taken in the restaurant and in the parking lot in front of the
hotel. Her cousin’s husband was stout and prosperous looking, with a wide, confident face and short, gelled hair. He looked more comfortable in the suit he wore for the ceremony than he did in the orange silk kurta he put on for the reception, but by that point in the festivities both bride and groom had the dazed and patient look of people who’d been greeting, kissing, and bantering with their relations and friends for several days already. She stared hard at the pictures of her cousin, wondering how she could be both so familiar and so unlike herself. It wasn’t only the embroidered crimson sari, the makeup, and the jewels, but the studied poses and generic backdrops: Amina had turned her back for a moment, and Ghaniyah had been transformed into a bride just like the ones the two of them had been admiring in photographs since they were little girls.
This was the beginning of her first December in America, but the snow hadn’t come yet; Amina watched the sky every day. Already on the tract people had begun to string up lights in the trees in their front yards and along the gutters of their houses. Her favorite house was number 59, where a family of wrought-iron deer—a buck, a doe, and two fauns—were illuminated from within by pure white flame-shaped lights.
They were planning a small Christmas dinner with George’s mother and Cathy—Kim was teaching a New Year’s meditation retreat in Belize—and the prospect of that unfamiliar celebration had made her regret that she hadn’t insisted on taking George to the Eid potluck at the ICR. He had offered to leave work early that day, but she could tell it was inconvenient for him. Before she’d started working, she was dying to meet other Muslim women in Rochester, but once she had her job, that eagerness abated a little. It had occurred to her that they would certainly meet the imam at the potluck, and he would ask where they’d been married. Amina would have had to say that they had only done the civil ceremony, and therefore in God’s eyes, they weren’t married at all.
It was also possible that the imam might have asked whether she’d been fasting, and she would have had to say no. She certainly wasn’t going to fast at her new job. She would’ve had to explain it to Lisa, and Carl might have wondered if she seemed to be weak or sick. She would never lie about being a Muslim, but there were no opportunities for
falsehood because Carl and Lisa didn’t ask. They certainly weren’t the kind of Americans who lumped all Muslims in with Osama bin Laden and his followers—in fact, she’d never heard either one of them refer to any piece of news that had occurred outside of Rochester—and she hadn’t seen the need to bring up her religion at all. She had felt a pang at missing Eid altogether, but when she thought of meeting dozens of new people, of telling her story again and again (answering the inevitable questions about their unusual courtship and marriage), she was convinced she’d made the right decision. And so she’d told George that there would be many other years when they could go.
The snow came overnight, and in the morning it was still falling outside the kitchen window. It was surprising to see it coming down, not straight and light the way it did on calendars and in the Switzerland of Indian movies, but in wild switchbacks, swirls, and eddies, more like a river than like snow. You could see it best against the three black spruces that divided their lawn from the street, and Amina was staring at those trees when George came downstairs.
“Look,” she said, and George did not make fun of her or mute her pleasure in any way. He came up behind her and just stood without touching her, watching over her shoulder as if this were the first time he had seen it, too.
“It’s better than I thought,” Amina said. “It’s not like in pictures.”
“Like rickshaws,” George said, which was a joke only the two of them could understand. She had e-mailed about rickshaws to George—who said they sounded dangerous and inhumane—but when he’d arrived he’d said the Deshi rickshaws weren’t like the old-fashioned Chinese ones he’d seen in a book. He’d liked the way each one was individually painted, with mosques and pairs of lovebirds, and was good-humored about the drivers, who’d joked about his size and vied with each other in anticipation of the profits associated with driving a foreigner.
“It isn’t sticking,” her husband said, going to get his own coffee while Amina watched for another minute, the white flakes falling on the yellowish lawn. It was rare for him to take any extra time in the morning, and it made the day feel like a holiday. “That’s because of global warming. Did you know that the last two decades were the hottest in four hundred years? It’s happening so fast, there’s nothing they can do to stop it.”
“Do you think there will be more snow?”
“It’d be nice to have something that stuck.” He glanced out the window, calculating the odds.