The Newlyweds (5 page)

Most of all, she had always loved fair skin. Her father was brown, and before she was born he had worried that his child would be dark as well. But her mother was
ujjal shamla
, and luckily Amina had come out golden, too. Once, when she was about eight or nine, she had said how much she loved fair skin in front of her father’s friend Rasul, who was as black as the fisherman who worked on the boats near her grandmother’s house. Rasul Uncle had only laughed, but his wife had told Amina seriously that she had once felt the same way, and look whom she had ended up marrying. If you wanted one thing too much, she had said, God sometimes found a way to show you your mistake.

Amina had never forgotten that advice. It was a species of Deshi wisdom that she knew from the village, where her Parveen Aunty—the eldest and most traditional of her mother’s sisters—often told her just this sort of truth about human fate. Parveen’s husband had left her soon after Micki was born, running off with a distant cousin who was little more than a servant in their house. Two years before, Parveen had taken in the girl, whose potential was evident in her intelligent, tawny eyes and beautiful figure. She had fed her, imparted various lessons in household management, and even taught her to read, so that the girl might one day make a better marriage than she had any right to expect. The day after she had eloped with Parveen’s husband, her impoverished mother had come to beg forgiveness, asking to be beaten herself for her daughter’s error. Amina hadn’t been there to witness this scene, but everyone had repeated what her aunt had said:

The more laughter, the more weeping
.

And then:

Someone who is closer than a mother is called a witch
.

Parveen’s type of village wisdom was powerful, as long as you stayed in the village. But the farther away you got, Amina believed, the less it held. It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back. That was why, when she heard the announcer’s joke on the VOA, the first thing Amina had thought of was the Internet.

7
The thing that had impressed her about AsianEuro.com was the volume of both men and women looking for mates. When Amina joined, there were six hundred and forty-two men with profiles posted on the site, and even without including a photograph, Amina’s profile got several responses right away. As it turned out, the problem was not with making contact but with staying in touch. Sometimes (as with Mike G. and Victor S.) a man would correspond for months before he suddenly stopped writing with no explanation. Other times she would be the one to stop, because of something in the e-mail—in the case of Mike R., a request for a photo of Amina in a bathing suit, or “John H.,” the admission, in a message sent at 3:43 a.m., that he was actually a Bengali Muslim living in Calcutta.

Her father had used these examples as ballast for his argument—the people who used those sites could not be trusted—but her mother had weathered each disappointment along with Amina, and her resolve on her daughter’s behalf had seemed to grow stronger as the years passed and her husband’s situation failed to change. They had never been like an ordinary mother and daughter, partly because Amina was an only child, and partly because they’d spent so much time together after she had to leave school. When she and George had begun writing to each other, she had translated his e-mails for her mother, and they had analyzed them with the same care they had once devoted to those textbooks. She hadn’t hidden anything from her mother (even the Heinekens), and eventually they had both become convinced of George’s goodness. They had been a team, discussing every new development, and so it was strange, once things were finally settled, to realize that her mother would not be coming with her.

She had been e-mailing with George for eleven months when he
came to Desh to meet her and her family. Their courtship had more in common with her grandparents’—which had been arranged through a professional matchmaker in their village—than it did with her parents’, who’d had a love marriage and run away to Khulna when her mother was twenty-two years old. Her grandparents hadn’t seen each other until their wedding day, but they had examined each other’s photos. She had thought of her grandmother the day that she had finally received George’s photo as an e-mail attachment. She knew the photo hadn’t been what she was expecting, but as soon as she saw it, she couldn’t remember the face she
had
imagined. That face had been erased by the real George, who was not bad looking, with a strong brow, nose, and chin. He had admitted in an e-mail that he was trying to lose some weight, but that extra bulk wasn’t evident in his face, which was flawed rather by a certain compression of features, leaving large, uncolonized expanses of cheek and chin. His hair was a faded straw color, and his skin was so light that even Amina had to admit that it was possible to be too fair.

She had put her hand over half the photo, so that only the eyes and forehead were visible. Could I love just those eyes, she asked herself, apart from anything else, and after a certain number of minutes spent getting used to the milky-blue color, she decided that she could. She covered the eyes and asked the same question of the nose (more challenging because of the particular way it protruded, different from any Bengali nose). She hadn’t written back right away, but the following day at the British Council (an agony, to wait until the computer was free) she’d been pleased to discover that the photograph was better than she remembered. By the end of the day, she thought she could love even the nose.

Her father went to meet George at the airport, and her mother had come to her room to tell her he had arrived—although of course she had been watching from the balcony. The taxi could come only as far as the beginning of the lane, since their lane had never been paved. Her mother had worried about George walking down the dirt road to their apartment complex (what if it rained?), and they had even discussed hiring a rickshaw. But it would’ve had to be two rickshaws, with George’s bags, and hiring two rickshaws to take two grown men fewer than two hundred meters would’ve made more of a spectacle
than it was worth. Even from her hiding place on the balcony, behind her mother’s hanging laundry, she could hear the landlady’s sons Hamid and Hassan on the roof, practically falling over the edge to get a glimpse of Amina’s suitor.

“What is he like?” she had asked, and her mother had reassured her:

“He’s just like his picture. Nothing is wrong.”

George had stayed for ten days, and on the ninth day they had become engaged. Then he had returned to his work in Rochester, and Amina had begun the tedious quest for the fiancée visa. That had been November, and although they’d e-mailed almost every day, she hadn’t seen George again until he had picked her up at Dulles International Airport in March of the following year.

8
Her visa had required her to get married within ninety days of her arrival in the United States. George had wanted to allow her to get settled, and his mother had needed time to organize the wedding party, and so they had waited more than two months. Her mother understood that it wasn’t practical for George to pay for another place for Amina to live during that time, and she certainly didn’t want Amina living alone in a foreign city. She’d agreed that Amina might stay in George’s house until they were married, but she’d made Amina promise that she and George would wait to do
that
until after they’d had the ceremony at whichever Rochester mosque seemed most suitable. She had talked about the one thing Amina could lose that she would never be able to get back.

In Dhaka, Amina had meant to keep her promise, although she hadn’t entirely agreed with her mother. Especially after she got to America and had time to think about it, it seemed to her that there were a lot of other things that could be lost in an equally permanent way. Her parents had lost their land in the village, selling it piece by piece as her father invested in a series of unproductive business ventures. (Now the same land was worth more than three hundred times what her father had sold it for.) After that they had lost their furniture and then their apartments in Mirpur, Mohammedpur, and Tejgaon, and only Ghaniyah’s father’s intervention—securing another apartment in Mohammadpur at a special price, through a business
associate—had kept them from becoming homeless altogether. This way of living had taken its toll on her mother, who was skinny and prone to ulcers; Amina thought her mother was still beautiful, with her wide-apart eyes, and her thin, straight nose, but her mother claimed that she had lost her looks for good. Worst of all, her grandmother had lost Emdad and Khokon, and nothing she could do would ever bring them back.

Compared with those losses, whatever it was that Amina had lost on the third night she spent in George’s house was nothing. George had agreed to her mother’s conditions and had even purchased a single bed, which had been waiting for her in one of the bedrooms across the hall; on the first night, they’d brushed their teeth together like a married couple, and then George had kissed her forehead before disappearing into his own room. There were no curtains on the window of the room where Amina slept, and the tree outside made an unfamiliar, angled shadow on the floor. Everything was perfectly quiet. At home there had always been noise from the street—horns, crying babies, and the barking of dogs—not to mention the considerable sound of her father snoring. Even when they’d had more than one room at home, she’d always shared a bed: first with her grandmother and her aunt, and then with her parents. When she turned twelve, her father had suggested that she move to a cot, but Amina and her mother found that neither one of them could sleep without the other, and so her father had finally moved onto the cot himself.

On the first night George had sheepishly presented her with an enormous stuffed panda, almost as big as she was—a gift from his mother, who’d thought she might be homesick and in need of comfort. It would have looked absurd and childish to sleep with a thing like that, and so Amina had thanked George and set the panda on a wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room. She fell asleep right away and then started awake in the dark. She looked toward the window, trying to ascertain what time it was, and saw that someone was watching her.

Her scream was loud enough to wake George.

“Amina?”

Of course it was only the stuffed bear. She got up and opened the door to the hall. “I’m sorry,” she said, but it took her a moment to
locate the word: “A nightmare.” She saw the strip of light under his door and hoped they might soon get up and begin the day.

“Okay,” he’d said, from behind the door. “Good night.” He’d turned off the light, and then she’d tiptoed down to hall to check the time. It was only eleven o’clock: seven more hours until she could plausibly dress and go downstairs.

At home she had worn a long T-shirt and pajama bottoms to bed, but on the third night she’d experimented by going into the bathroom in only a kameez. You look cute, George had said, and that had emboldened her; when he bent down to kiss her forehead, as usual, she looked up, so that they wound up kissing for real on the mouth. (This was something that had happened downstairs on the couch during the day, but never before at night.) When she pressed her body against her fiancé’s, a strange sound escaped from George. It was as if there were a tiny person inside him who’d never spoken until now. That small, new voice—and the fact that she had been the cause of it—was what made her take George’s hand and follow him into his own bedroom, which had belonged to the two of them ever since.

She was disappointed to learn how unpleasant it was, how unlike that kiss in the bathroom, which had given her the same feeling between her legs that she sometimes got watching actors kiss on television. It didn’t hurt as much as her cousin Micki had said it would, but it was hot with George on top of her, and she didn’t like the way he looked when he closed his eyes—as if he were in pain somewhere very far away. On the other hand, it was sweet the way he worried afterward, confirming anxiously that it was what she wanted. He asked her whether she minded breaking her promise to her mother, and the next morning, waking up for the first time next to someone who was not a member of her family, she had been surprised to find that she had no regrets at all.

9
Amina had been eager, as soon as they got settled, to invite Ed and Min to dinner. The four of them had so much in common, and you could even say that Ed was responsible for their marriage, since George had heard about AsianEuro from him. She’d suggested
it after the bridal shower, where she’d regretted not being able to talk to Min for more than a moment, but George had said that Ed and Min were very religious and socialized almost exclusively through their church. Amina decided that this was a kind way of saying that Ed and Min didn’t want to be friendly with a Muslim; she suspected that if George’s bride had been from some Christian country, she and George would’ve been invited immediately. Of course she might have simply dismissed them; she’d never been interested in becoming friends with extremists, of her own or any other faith. It was only that here she had so few opportunities for making friends.

It was about six weeks after she’d arrived, one warm May Saturday, when she ran into Min on a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond. She and George had split up to shop, and she’d spotted Min in the kitchen section, examining a set of bright-colored cookware. Amina hesitated for only a moment before approaching her.

“Hello—Min? I am Amina, George Stillman’s fiancée?”

“Oh, hello,” said Min. Her voice was reassuringly warm and enviably free of an accent. “I love this store, don’t you?”

Amina agreed, although she found the size of Bed Bath & Beyond overwhelming and was having trouble finding the things on her list.

“They really do have everything. What are you here for?”

“A mat for the shower.”

“I know where that is,” Min said. “Let me show you.”

This friendliness emboldened Amina, and as she followed the other woman through the store, she was determined to extend an invitation. One thing she had found about George was that he wasn’t a social creature. It was possible that the idea of a dinner party simply didn’t appeal to him, no matter how well he liked the potential guests.