The Newlyweds (26 page)

She didn’t tell her parents about the disaster that had befallen them; they were consumed by their own worries, and she hoped that in the three months before their arrival, George would find another job. Her father told her that her mother had been acting strangely ever since they’d returned from Nasir’s to the village. She talked more and more about her sister Moni and how she secretly envied their emigration plans, and she often turned down food, saying she was
afraid to eat. Once, her father had woken up because he was being bitten by mosquitoes and discovered that her mother wasn’t in their bed: she’d neglected to close the mosquito net, and her father’s arms and legs were swollen with bites. He’d gotten up and gone out into Nanu’s courtyard, where, after a few moments, he heard splashing from the pond. He said that he knew it was her mother even before he saw her, her head going under again and again, as if she were looking for something on the bottom. When he tried to bring her out, she’d resisted, and only the threat of all of her relatives waking and finding her bathing in the middle of the night was enough to make her climb the stone steps, wrap herself in a shawl, and allow her husband to lead her back to bed. Amina’s mother wouldn’t speak at all that night, but in the morning she had told her father that she’d heard Kwaz, the water saint, calling her from the bottom of the pond.

“I want you to come now,” her mother pleaded on the phone, and Amina had to explain again that her citizenship interview was in two weeks. Every night after dinner, while George was watching television, she studied the hundred questions, memorizing the branches of government and the names of U.S. territories. Some questions were easy (“Why does the American flag have thirteen stripes?”

“Who was the first president of the United States?”), but some tripped her up every time (“What stops one branch of the government from becoming too powerful?”

“Name one American Indian tribe.”) She invented mnemonics, especially for the questions involving numbers: twenty-seven was the number of constitutional amendments and also the age she was last year. Her nanu was one of nine children, enough to fill every seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The last three digits of her father’s phone number were 435, which was also the number of voting members in the House of Representatives.

Words were more difficult. She had the same trouble with the strange-sounding Native American tribes that she often did with the Italianesque names of the drinks at Starbucks: her head was so full of English that there was no room for another language. Once she had even failed to remember a word in Bangla. She had been at school, walking past the dry fountain where students gathered to study and eat their lunch, and for a few seconds, no matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t bring those two syllables—
jharna
—to mind.

“That makes sense,” George said. “One language pushes the other out.” He didn’t offer any solution in the moment, but a few days later their Netflix came in the mail, and she saw that he’d ordered
The Last of the Mohicans
.

“I didn’t think you could forget if you watched a whole movie about them,” he told her, and so she’d taken a night off from studying to sit on the couch and watch it with him. She had just finished her shower and had plaited her hair; she was wearing sweatpants and a tank top, but she hadn’t put on a bra. She allowed herself to think of what could happen, but she didn’t change into anything more modest. She didn’t know if she wanted to have sex with her husband, but she knew she wanted the comfort of sitting on the couch with him without the pressure of speaking or even really of thinking, of allowing herself two hours to change her own situation for the fantasy on the screen.

About three-quarters of the way through the movie, for an experiment, she allowed herself to lean against George the way she once had: he adjusted his position to accommodate her head on his shoulder. The British woman was trapped behind the waterfall with the adopted white son of the Indian chief, kissing in the dark.

“Like Niagara.”

“Except about one-twentieth the size.”

“I’d like to go someday.”

“It’s not expensive,” George said. “When I’m working again. We could take your parents.”

This generous suggestion moved Amina, as did the scene in front of them. Now Hawkeye vowed to leap into the river to conceal himself so that the French soldiers would have mercy on Cora and her party. Even in the face of peril, however, Cora didn’t want him to go. It was in such situations that the strength of love revealed itself; although their own situation was less picturesque, Amina doubted it was any less dramatic. Their backgrounds were as different as Hawkeye’s and Cora’s—perhaps more so, since the onscreen hero and heroine had at least their native race in common. She had escaped a broken country, and George a broken heart; they had chosen each other in spite of warnings from both sides, and she thought those naysayers had made them both more determined that their union would succeed. He’d
written to her for all the wrong reasons—deceptively at first, and then in desperation over another woman. But hadn’t she been desperate, too? Even if neither of their motives had been pure, wasn’t it possible that something pure had come of them now?

It gave her pleasure to imagine George’s surprise and his eagerness, when he found out he wouldn’t have to wait any longer. Between the movie and her own emotions, she felt ready, almost eager for something that had once been a duty. The scene onscreen had devolved into fighting, and she had trouble following the plot.

“Do they get married?” she asked George.

“Does who?”

“Hawkeye and Cora.”

“I’m not going to spoil it for you.”

“I haven’t been paying enough attention.”

“Do you want to go upstairs? You won’t forget the Mohicans, will you?”

“I’ll remember the Hurons now, too.”

George got up and switched off the television, and they climbed the stairs together for the first time in several months. He turned for a moment on the landing, as if he were going to say something, and then hurried into the bathroom and closed the door. Instead of going to her own room, she went into the one they used to share and sat down on the bed. Was it possible she was more nervous than she had been the first time? She could feel her pulse in her ears, and when George turned the handle on the bathroom door, something made her jump to her feet.

“What are you looking for?” he asked, not looking at her. “Your phone is downstairs on the table.”

“I was thinking we could …”

He looked up. “Really?”

She nodded.

“Oh, Amina.” He sat down on the bed, but carefully, as if she were something that might break.

“I want the light to be out.”

He switched off the lamp with its pleated shade, and their skin was suddenly the same dark blue in the dim room. Then he smoothed
her hair in a way she liked and kissed her, hesitantly at first, on the mouth. But when he touched her breasts he groaned. “I missed this so much.”

She had always found it disconcerting when he talked during sex, as if the language was a bridge between this act and the rest of their lives. She thought it ought to be separate, undiscussed. They undressed themselves, as they always had, and she lay down beside him.

“I want you to come this time.” He was on top of her, trying to be inside her, but he could feel she wasn’t wet enough. “Let me try this,” he said, and suddenly he was moving down her body, kissing her there. She knew what he was doing: she’d heard about it from the girls at Maple Leaf and knew that some people believed it was haram, while others said that because it wasn’t expressly prohibited, it was all right between husband and wife.

But we are not husband and wife, she thought—not really. What George was doing felt so strange that she couldn’t imagine taking pleasure in it, and she was relieved when he returned to his normal position on top of her. And yet once he was inside her, she found that it was altogether different, as if he’d unloosed something with his mouth. She wondered if this was what Ashok had done to Kim, and then she thought that the worst thing to do right now would be to think about Kim. She concentrated on pushing back against her husband, and she was surprised by how fast and hard he came.

George rolled off of her and lay down on his back. “You didn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“You would know.” He was disappointed, and she thought she ought to have lied. She wondered why it mattered so much to him.

“Can I ask you something?”

She nodded, and then remembered he couldn’t see her in the dark.

“Was this because you feel sorry for me?”

“No.”

“You wanted to?”

“I missed it, too.” Her guilt about lying compounded the guilt she felt about violating her own conditions; she had thought that this hiatus in their sexual life might make it possible to begin the marriage again on firmer ground. Now she saw that the interval had actually made things more difficult.

George rolled over and looked at her. “I feel like I never know what you’re thinking anymore. Or whether you’re still angry at me.”

“I’m not angry right now.”

“I’m going to get another job.”

Did he think she was upset only about his job? Or did he simply not want to talk about the other, harder problems?

“I know.”

“You don’t believe me, but you’ll see,” George said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“I’m not sure we should do that again.”

George was quiet for a moment. “Really?”

She had been feeling since they’d finished as if she might cry, and now she allowed it to happen, her shoulders shaking in the dark. George sighed and patted her back.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay,” and in that way she was absolved from answering him. After several minutes he removed his hand from her back and turned over, but it was a long time before she was sure he was asleep.

She hadn’t thought of Micki in months, but now she remembered when her cousin first told her about what happened between men and women. They had been sitting in that abandoned hut, and Micki had been insisting Amina acknowledge what she was telling her: that all married people did it and that Amina would have to do it one day, too. She remembered it had seemed enviable at the time that Micki’s parents were divorced. That meant that her mother, Parveen, slept in the familiar way: in some combination with Nanu and the two of them, while Amina had to imagine her own parents alone in an apartment in Dhaka, engaged in that unsettling act. She had known that men forced themselves on women, but Micki said that there were women who allowed it even before marriage. Neither one of them could understand why any woman would do something like that before she absolutely had to, especially when it was likely to ruin her life.

She thought it might be awkward to wake up next to George, and so she got up quietly and went into the other room. She wondered if Micki also remembered that conversation in the playhouse—if she’d thought of it since her own marriage. Tonight had made her understand
how it might be pleasurable for a woman, even if she couldn’t imagine risking her life for it. She allowed herself to believe that something had changed between them and that whatever obstacle had been keeping them from conceiving a child might have been removed by this unexpected tenderness. It wasn’t impossible, given where she was in her cycle; if it had happened tonight, she might fly home in three months, pregnant with her first child. She might enter the village triumphantly, with a baby in her belly and her American husband at her side. The timing would have worked out so perfectly that the credit could go only to God.

5
They had been talking about buying a new bed for the master bedroom and putting the old one in the room where Amina was sleeping now, which would eventually belong to her parents. One weekend at the end of June, George suggested that they go to the mall to look for one. They hadn’t spent an afternoon at the mall since he’d lost his job, and Amina packed a lunch as soon as they got up on Saturday morning.

“What are you doing?” George asked. “We can’t take that into the mall.”

“We can eat in the car, then,” Amina said. “We’ll save at least fifteen dollars.”

George shook his head at her neat Tupperware containers. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves. Okay?”

The Marketplace Mall was decorated for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday. A summertime display had replaced the electric trains they’d had at Christmas. It was set up on a low platform to accommodate children and enclosed by a Plexiglas barrier. Where there had been Ivory Snow on tiny evergreens and a papier-mâché mountain—with plastic skiers going up the lift and down the slope in two continuous loops—there was now a parade route lined with tiny spectators, holding tiny gold paper sparklers. A float actually moved along the route: Uncle Sam raised an American flag while a white-gowned beauty queen waved amid confetti sequins. Beyond the parade, a team of children played baseball while others swung on mechanical swings over patches of cloth flowers, painstakingly
applied with glue. A modest cardboard sign stated that the expense and labor for the project had been shouldered by the Ladies’ Improvement Society of Downtown Rochester.

“My mother would love that,” Amina said as they made their way toward Sears at one end of the mall.

“The one at Christmas is better,” George said. “She’ll be here in time to see it.”

As soon as they found the appropriate department, a young salesman approached them and introduced himself.

“Let me guess,” Craig said. “You folks have been sleeping on the same mattress for seven-plus years, and all of a sudden someone’s having back pain.” He turned to George. “There’s nothing worse than tossing and turning in the middle of the night—is there? Waking up your wife because you can’t find a comfortable position.”

“We need a new bed because my parents are coming to live with us,” Amina said. “Our old one is fine.”

She’d only said it to change the subject, to keep the salesman from talking so casually about the two of them in bed together, but she could see from George’s face that he wished she hadn’t mentioned her parents.