Authors: Nell Freudenberger
“Ashok.”
“Do you want to stop at Cold Stone for ice cream?”
Amina agreed because she knew it was George’s favorite. “That would be nice,” she continued, “if we were all having dinner together at your mom’s one day. You and me and Kim and another husband.”
“Mm,” George said. “Let’s take it one step at a time, okay?”
George took her job-hunting for the second time, at the Pittsford Wegmans, Radio Shack, and the Gap. Amina filled out applications everywhere, but George said it was a bad time to look, since high school and college kids who were already working part-time would increase their hours as soon as summer started. He thought that Amina should wait until everyone went back to school in September.
“Take it easy,” George said. “Do your homework and spend time in the garden. You’ll get a job in the fall, and then you’ll wish for days like these.”
She didn’t feel she could mention her parents again, after their last conversation, and so she simply told George that she liked to be busy. “When there’s nothing to do, I get jumpy.”
“We don’t want that,” George said tolerantly, but she knew there was another reason he wanted her to relax. They’d been talking in bed the other night when George had asked suddenly whether she was ready to start trying to have a baby. She didn’t feel any less frightened of having a child without her mother to help her, but it was at least two years until her parents would be able to apply for citizenship—even if the problem of where they would live could be solved.
“Okay,” she had told him, and George had smiled and made a little production of getting up and going to the medicine cabinet, throwing away the blue package of Trojans that always sat in the upper-right-hand corner.
“Is there anything I’m supposed to do?” she asked him, thinking of how strange it was to be asking this question of her husband. Of course she might have asked her mother on the phone, but she knew that as soon as she mentioned it, her mother wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else. Amina thought longingly of Micki, a year older than she was and already a mother of three. Of all her cousins, she’d always felt closest to Micki. When they were little girls living with Nanu and Parveen, they’d been like sisters, but Micki had stayed in the village after Amina left. When she was sixteen, she’d taken over
the village baby school from Shoma Aunty, who had taught the two of them when they were small. Micki showed such patience with even the most disobedient child, was so pretty, with such skills in the kitchen and the house, that in spite of the scandal with her parents’ marriage, everyone said that Parveen would have many choices once her daughter came of age.
Amina still thought she knew her cousin better than anyone: even as a teenager she could see that Micki was obedient not out of a desire to please but because she’d already concluded that it was the only road to happiness—at least if you were a girl. Micki might have had the opportunity to leave the village as Ghaniyah and Amina had, especially if her father had stayed at home, but she would never have talked the way they did, mocking its backwardness in order to distance herself from her own place and people. Surely God loved someone like that better than he loved a person like Amina, who spent so much energy trying to escape the very spot where he had seen fit to bring her into the world.
Micki would have been able to tell her in the plain village way how to go about getting pregnant, without any of the silliness and affected embarrassment of her Dhaka friends. But Micki didn’t use e-mail, and they hadn’t been in touch since Amina had left the country. She knew her cousin had married a man from their own village called Badal, who worked as an auto mechanic in Satkhira, but even if she were able to get his cell phone number from her grandmother, Amina would be shy about calling out of the blue. She certainly wouldn’t be able to mention family matters under those circumstances. She thought for a moment of Kim, whom she hadn’t seen since that afternoon in the garden. Her confidence that day suggested that she might want to become Amina’s intimate friend, but you could hardly discuss starting a pregnancy with someone who was still grieving over the loss of one.
“I think there are kits and things,” George said, flushing. “To tell you when your best time is.”
“My mother got pregnant very easily,” Amina said quickly. “Too easily. She always says they should’ve waited.”
“Do you want to wait?” George asked. Amina thought of what her mother had said, about how George would see the logic of having
them live in the house once a child was born. She was starting to wonder if that was true, and even whether it was what she wanted—now that she could actually imagine having her parents in the room next door. Looking at her husband, waiting for her answer, she realized that apart from everything else, she wanted to please him.
“No,” she said. “I’ll be twenty-six in July. We should start now.”
George smiled. “Crazy to think it could be next spring,” he said. “I mean if it happened right away.”
“Would you like to have a boy?” Amina asked, to distract herself from the possibility of next spring.
“A boy would be nice,” George said. “But I was thinking one of each.”
4
Amina didn’t stop calling the places she’d left her applications, but the summer sped by without a job materializing. One night at the beginning of August, George suggested that they pick up chicken from the Boston Market restaurant for dinner. While he was choosing from the drive-through menu, Amina noticed a sign—
WE ARE HIRING
—pasted to the inside of the glass. Instead of driving to the pickup window, George parked the car, and they sat and ate their dinner inside so that Amina could fill out an application. There was an elderly couple eating by the window, but the only other person in the restaurant was the middle-aged woman standing behind the cash register, her lips moving slightly as she counted coins from a paper-wrapped roll.
“Will you give it to her?” Amina asked George when she was finished, but George shook his head.
“They have to see that you have initiative,” he said. “Take your time. I’ll swing around and get you.”
Amina approached the woman, who was wearing a great deal of face powder, perhaps because she suffered from spots. (She could not have been trying to lighten her skin, since she was as white as George.) You could look past the registers and see into the kitchen, and what was visible was surprisingly clean. Rather than the bones and peels you would expect—she and George had eaten chicken, potatoes, and
salad—the counter was stacked with paper and foil-wrapped packages, as if it were not a restaurant but a pharmacy.
“Excuse me,” she began, but the woman had obviously already noticed Amina. She smiled and took the application before Amina could say anything else.
“I saw you filling it out,” she said cheerfully. “Do you have experience?”
“I was working at MediaWorks,” she said, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask how long it had been since she’d had that job.
The woman frowned. “No casual dining experience?”
“I’ve never worked in a restaurant.” Amina tried not to sound as if she were proud of that fact, but she couldn’t help remembering Nasir’s e-mail. She had chastised her father, but that was because she had lost her job. If she’d been able to keep it, a part of her would have been thrilled that everyone knew how successful she’d been so far in America. She thought of Ghaniyah and what she would say when she heard that Amina was working in a kitchen, where her clothes would be dirty at the end of the day and her hair would smell like grease.
On the other hand, Amina reminded herself, she wasn’t Ghaniyah. Her parents couldn’t afford a spectacular Deshi wedding with seven hundred guests, or expensive jewelry that would be worn only one time. Considering where she had started, it was incredible that she was where she was right now: standing in a Boston Market restaurant in Rochester, New York, at seven o’clock in the evening while people at home were yawning and drinking their first cups of tea.
“I’m a fast learner,” she told the woman behind the counter. “My boss at MediaWorks said I was the best employee he had ever had.”
The woman nodded. “Normally, we wouldn’t consider someone who’d just done sales—this really is a different kettle of fish. But Tanya left on Friday without a word to anyone—not that I expected much more from her—and we’ve got to have someone on Tuesday. Could you start on Tuesday?”
“I can start at any time.”
“I’m Nancy, by the way. I saw you sitting over there and I thought, She looks responsible. I have that sense—I can always tell about people.”
“Thank you,” Amina said.
“If we hire you, you’ll have to be here before eight in the morning. Are you a late sleeper?”
“We are up at five,” Amina said.
“See?” Nancy beamed. “I can tell. So what are you, anyway?”
“Pardon?” Amina said, although George had told her a thousand times that Americans never used that word.
Nancy repeated her question more slowly, raising her voice so even the old people in the back turned around to look.
“I was an English tutor,” Amina said, and then because she did know what Nancy meant, she added: “That was in my country—in Bangladesh.”
“
Bang
ladesh.” Nancy hesitated. “That isn’t the Mideast, is it? I’m sorry to ask, it’s just that my husband’s a protective—that’s a volunteer for our fire department—and our daughter lives in Jersey. So it hit us pretty hard, everything that happened down there … you know, on 9/11.”
She hadn’t yet encountered anyone who blamed her for the September 11 attacks because she was a Muslim or because she came from a country that had once been part of Pakistan, but this was a misperception she’d anticipated and been prepared to correct. She had known that Americans wouldn’t be familiar with her country’s history, and she’d been ready to explain about the Liberation War, and to tell people that her father still had a scar on his leg from his service as a Freedom Fighter against the Pakistanis. It was the Pakistanis who’d let in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, she had planned to clarify.
The explanation had been unnecessary up until now, and some part of Amina had been disappointed. Because no one asked, she couldn’t be sure that they understood, and although most of George’s friends and relatives were BAs (or even MAs) in something, many of them had politely inquired where Bangladesh was located. (Kim, who had dropped out of college, was in fact the only person who’d known exactly where it was.) In any case, it was a relief to finally be asked, especially since the question had been put so simply that Amina had no difficulty answering in English.
“Bangladesh is not the Middle East,” she said. “It is in South Asia.”
Nancy smiled and nodded. “I thought so. There’s another girl here from Vietnam—a real sweetheart. Well, I’m acting as if you’ve got the job already. I have to check your references, but you can expect to hear from me on Monday. Bright and early!”
“How’d it go?” George asked when she got back in the car.
“Good,” Amina said. “She said she would call me Monday.”
“I bet you’ll get it,” he said. “You make a good first impression.” He grinned at her, but she wasn’t in the right mood. She turned back as they left the parking lot: she couldn’t see Nancy through the windows, but the empty tables looked bleak under the fluorescent lights. She was good at doing math in her head, and she’d immediately calculated that if she worked as many hours as she had at MediaWorks, and kept this job for the two years that remained before she could apply for her citizenship, she would’ve saved only enough for fifteen months of rent by the time her parents arrived.
George was driving in a relaxed way, one hand at the bottom of the wheel.
“What about the job with Kim?” she asked.
He looked over at her, startled, and then back at the road. Rush hour was over, and she noticed they were speeding slightly in the dark.
“That was months ago,” he said after a moment. “And I thought you said your parents would disapprove?”
“I could tell her it’s a place for fitness exercises,” Amina said. “My mother is mad for calisthenics.”
George braked suddenly for the turn onto South Main, forgetting to signal.
“Maybe Kim could ask the boss for an early shift for me … so it would be convenient for you to drop me off.”
“I doubt it’s still available.” He sounded disappointed in her, although she’d never thought he had anything against yoga. “But go ahead and ask—if that’s what you want.”
5
Dear Nasir
,
Did my parents tell you I’m learning to drive? Perhaps they have also shown you the photograph of our house in Rochester. The yellow and red flowers by the front door are called “mums,” and I’m the one who planted them
.
Thank you for your good wishes about my job, but I’m actually not working at MediaWorks anymore. Now I have a better job that pays more. And it’s easy! I work at the desk of an exercise studio, where people come to take fitness classes. My hours are good, so I’m saving well for when my parents arrive
.
As for our holiday, I will celebrate Eid in my own way this year. Maybe it’s different for me, having married a U.S. citizen, but I don’t need to have secrets from the people around me. I never fasted back in Desh, and my parents never bothered me about it. I wonder—if I had married a Deshi Muslim, would you be asking me these questions?
Well, Cousin, I’m sorry to hear about the girl your Sakina Apu contacted. But it’s for the best. I’m sure you will find your Other Half. Look at George and me. We found each other from 8,000 miles, and we are so happy
.
I agree with your boss that you should take down those newspaper articles. George and I have one disagreement on the subject of depressing news and pictures. He likes to get all the facts, even when there is nothing he can do. If I can’t do anything, I don’t like to think of these things. Who knows? Perhaps if you are more cheerful, Allah will send the right girl
.
Please send my best regards to your sisters
.