The Night Counter (14 page)

Ibrahim looked at Laila, confused. In that instant, Amani understood that Laila couldn’t tell her own father she was ill.

“Laila is on a special diet,” Amani said. “It takes a lot of work. I came all the way from Egypt—twenty hours on the airplane—to help with her diet. I cut vegetables all day, but I do not eat them myself.”

Amani patted her belly as proof and took Laila’s hand. Amani was protecting her secret as if she mattered. What next? This was a day to give anyone a breakdown.

“Bullshit,” said Ibrahim, having always understood the word perfectly. “Since when have any of Laila’s diets been so important? I want to go home.”

The guests shuffled and mumbled about how they had to get going to the mosque. Their religion’s schedule was proving to be an especially convenient excuse today, even for her; she could not clean up the pork mess in front of Ibrahim.

“I’ll give you a ride,
Amo
,” Ghazi said. “Let’s get you home before this storm comes in.”

“Let me pack some grape leaves for you,” Laila said.

Ibrahim shook his head. “But perhaps I will stop by on my way to the airport tomorrow; that is when one of the KLM flights comes in.”

Laila didn’t know anything about the airport schedules, but she was relieved he wanted to visit again.

“This diet is making you too crazy to be left alone with this woman,” Ibrahim warned, pointing to Amani.

“
Amo
, take the paper with you,” Ghazi offered, and held out
Al-Ahram
to Ibrahim. “Maybe it will keep you company on the way to the airport tomorrow.”

“No,
ibni
, my son, I don’t want to scare no people on the bus reading Arabic,” Ibrahim said. “It’s plenty scary that I am old.”

Laila took the paper from Ghazi, and he held the door open for Ibrahim. The others followed them out. Ibrahim turned around and patted her cheek one more time.

Laila was left alone with Amani and the pork

“You did not tell your father you might die?” Amani said.

“The doctor said it is gone,
Khalto
,” Laila replied, glad that Amani’s
usual melodrama could not tip her over the edge tonight as she already had tipped over.

“
Inshallah
,” Amani replied.

“Thank you for not telling him.”

“I got to help you. I’m the only mother you got in Detroit.” Amani shrugged. “But your father should know. I would want to know if something,
Allah yustur
, happened to Ghazi.”

“Fine, then I promise to tell you,” Laila said. “But not my father.”

“Why not, in the name of God, the most merciful?” Amani said, gesticulating in all directions. “May He protect us from all evils.”

“
Khalto
, do you mind not making our life one of your Egyptian soap operas?” Laila asked.

“Egyptian soap opera?” Amani fumed. “At least in an Egyptian soap opera my grandsons would be married by now. I said take them to Egypt, we’ll find them brides from good families, but did anyone listen to me? No. Bullshit. I must go to sleep now or faint. Save some veal for me to eat later.” Cleopatra had never made such a dramatic exit to her chambers as Amani did in storming off to her tiny room.

Laila took the platter of pork and dumped it in the garbage, careful not to touch it. She scrubbed her hands and looked at the disposal. She got out the bleach and put on a pair of kitchen gloves. Two hours later, she had destroyed three pairs of rubber gloves and her gardening mittens and scraped her hands twice getting the meat out of the disposal. Then she took the garbage out and put the meat at the bottom of the trash bin. Good thing the garbagemen were coming tomorrow.

She was watching news coverage of the storm when Ghazi came home, swept through the door by a rush of wind. She did not lower the volume on the TV He kissed her on the cheek.

“Thank you for inviting my friends over,” he said. “The veal was delicious. I just told your father it was terrible so he wouldn’t feel bad about not eating it.”

“So Mo joined you tonight at the mosque?” Laila said.

“Maybe Mohammed will pray next to a man who has a single sister,”
Ghazi suggested. He assumed that his sons would marry Arabs, whereas Laila had assumed years ago only that they would marry She wanted to tell him about having the boys become part of her nephew Zade’s marriage service, but he would consider such public airing degrading.

“I’m sorry I made a scene in front of your Muslim friends,” Laila said. “They are always very nice.”

“Your father can live with us any time you want,” said Ghazi.

“I know.”

“I was glad to see your father,” Ghazi said. “He looked well.”

“He looked about as well as I do,” Laila said.

“You look fine.”

Ghazi had adopted the worst clichéd American husband responses to everything.

“I’m not getting fake boobs,” Laila said.

“Then don’t,” Ghazi said. “I mean, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. …”

“I would only get them to not offend you,” Laila said.

“You do not offend me,” Ghazi said, and took her hand.

“Really?” Laila said. She started to unbutton her blouse. He turned away. She buttoned it back up.

“I’m glad you don’t miss them,” she said, and turned back to the TV.

“I do care so much for you,” Ghazi whispered. That was not easy for a man from Egypt, an engineer no less, to say. Maybe it wasn’t easy for any man. Laila had no experience with any other man. One day, Ghazi might even try “I love you,” although she knew he would never be American enough to throw it around like “hello” and “goodbye” the way her regular American friends’ husbands did. He had said the three words to her when he had asked her to marry him, and that had been enough for both of them through the years.

He took her face in his hands. With her shirt buttoned, Ghazi was able to put his arms around Laila and hold her, something she understood as proof of his love. They stayed that way for some time.

“
Has Laila wooed you with longing? Departing amidst her tribe
,” Ghazi
recited from an old Arabian poem he had courted her with, a poem she had not heard since several years before she lost her breasts. “
Yes indeed the tears come flooding in streams over my breast.
”

Ghazi’s lips bent down to kiss hers. Laila pushed him away.

“You should brush your teeth first,” she said. “There might be veal stuck in them.” She hadn’t meant to push him away. It just happened. The way he had loved her these last few months had left her more alone than she had ever felt since meeting him. Yet she could not tell him that. It would make her cry, which would result in him forming tears he would try to hide, which would take her nervous breakdown to the point of no return.

Ghazi ran his tongue along his teeth. “You are right,” he said. He went up to the bathroom and flossed and brushed and waited for Laila to come up after her television show was over.

Many hours later, after Ghazi was sound asleep, Laila got up. She took off her wig, washed her hands and feet in the bathtub, and pulled Ghazi’s prayer rug out of the linen closet. She faced the direction in which Ghazi said Mecca lay. Then she did the only the thing she knew to be true and right.

“
Authu bilah min el-Shetan
,” she began. She clasped her hands together and went through the
rikkahs
, rhythmically bending and repeating phrases asking for mercy and wisdom by rote, as she had heard her husband do so many times over the last year and three months, as she had heard Fatima do since she was a child. Finally, she knelt. “Dear God,” she prayed quietly, eyes closed, ignoring the wind beating outside. “I am sorry for the pork tonight. I was angry for the way things couldn’t be anymore. God, as my sons turn to you, protect them from the dangers their love for you could bring them. Also God, I don’t want anyone or anything—not the Red Crescent, not the CIA, not you—no one but a marriageable woman to take my sons away from me. I hope you understand.

“Do you know what I wished in the supermarket right before I bought the pork? I wished that just once I had worn one of those fancy silky bras with all the lace and padding that make a lady’s breasts spill
over. Just once. I should go to sleep now before Ghazi sees me. I don’t want him to know how much I talk to you, although I am lucky to have a good man, which is hard to find in any religion. I want to also thank you for bringing my father to me. Grant me more patience for Amani and her bullshit. And God, I promise to go to California and bring Baba with me. And then Mama and he can be normal again. I will look for cheap airfares tomorrow. And I will get a better wig for the visit. Amen.”

Laila stood and rolled up the carpet. For the first night since this time of war and cancer, she felt at peace.

WHEN SCHEHERAZADE LEFT
Laila’s home, she was assaulted by a ferocious blast of swirling air reminiscent of the
shamal
winds during winters spent along the Persian Gulf Unlike those desert winds, the Detroit winds did not threaten to blind one with sweeping golden sand but rather promised to strike one down. When she saw a cloud in the shape of a funnel, she sought refuge for the night in the women’s section of Ghazi’s mosque. Scheherazade had known earthquakes, floods, sandstorms, mud slides, and other formidable forms of divine intervention. But her homeland, for all its woes, had been spared the tornado. The next morning she was glad when the funnel cloud decided to leave Detroit alone.

The remaining winds were still strong enough that they propelled Scheherazade to Los Angeles far more quickly than she had expected. From her flying carpet, she saw Fatima getting off the bus, holding her cane in one hand and carrying two plastic bags from the Iranian Jew’s store in the other, clean black skirt on and brown scarf tied around her head to prevent the wind from irritating her hearing aid.

Scheherazade checked her makeup in her gilded silver compact and then tapped Fatima on the shoulder.

“Where were you last night?” Fatima demanded.

“I encountered a tornado and had to wait for it to pass.”

“Tornado.” Fatima shuddered. The old lady had very strong reactions to weather reports sometimes.

“How were Suheir Lababidi’s condolences today?” Scheherazade asked.

“They had even better
ma’amoul
than at Selma Haddad’s,” Fatima reported. She showed Scheherazade a business card for Victory Bakery. “I’m going to ask Amir to add them to my funeral menu—wait, where did you encounter a tornado?”

“I met your Laila yesterday,” Scheherazade admitted. But she did not enjoy revealing news of illnesses and so momentarily distracted herself with the half-naked handsome men coming out of Santa Monica Boulevard’s exercise palaces, men who politely ignored Fatima talking to herself but could not resist looking at her head scarf with its wisps of protruding purple.

“My Laila is always going on a diet and going to gyms,” Fatima said. “Sometimes in Detroit she would pick me up and I would go with her and watch everyone exercise. So how normal was Laila?”

Scheherazade searched for words that didn’t involve cancer.

“So how normal was Laila?” Fatima repeated, eyes drilling into hers.

And then Scheherazade knew that Fatima already knew.

“How did you find out?” Scheherazade whispered, as even immortal Arabs spoke of cancer as if it were a contagious scandal they didn’t want to spread.

“One day she stopped talking about her diets and stuck to just the weather,” Fatima said. “So I asked her why she wasn’t on a diet, and she said she had lost plenty of weight and she would send me a picture—as thin as her wedding day, she said. She never sent the picture, and when I ask my other children about her, they start talking about the weather again. Then I knew. Has she stopped losing weight? Like all the other chubby-type people, she never used to lose weight for long. Normal, see.”

“The cancer is gone now,” Scheherazade confirmed. “She will get fat again,
inshallah.
”

“
Inshallah
. I am so far from Laila because she will not talk of it. It’s funny; I never felt how far away Mama was until the day Laila was born,” Fatima said. “I kept calling out for Mama in the delivery room, but the nurses didn’t understand me. My English still wasn’t so good. So the nurse told Ibrahim he could come in, but he said it was shameful because
he wasn’t the child’s father. By the time Miriam—my second—was born, I spoke English pretty well, so Ibrahim never had a chance to see any of his children born as they all came before people thought it was okay for fathers to be in the room.”

“God forbid, who would want the man there?” Scheherazade asked.

“Times change,
ya oukhti.
” Fatima sighed. “When I first came to this country, I couldn’t understand how the women—Millie and those big picture show stars—let men boss them around. And when we got the TV, you should have seen how the women let their husbands talk to them. They’d scheme behind the men’s backs and then smile and obey them. Who had time for such nonsense? ‘Oh, Ricky’ ‘Oh, Ward,’ ‘Oh, Rob,’ they would say. I thought the men were silly, but Millie loved them because they didn’t yell and say ‘I’m going to kill you’ like her old man— that’s what she called her husband—‘I’m going to kill you,’ he used to shout. In the beginning, I was alone at the house at night because Marwan was in Flint, and I would raise the volume on the baseball game so I couldn’t hear him. It was the first sentence I learned in English. When I could say more things in English, I once told her to tell him right back she’d kill him first, but she never did.”

“Or at least divorce him,” Scheherazade said.

“She said her religion didn’t allow that,” Fatima said. “Then, about the time we got our second television, in Technicolor, you know, women went marching and yelling in the streets. They called it women’s lib, and Millie’s husband forbade her from going to the marches and said that you couldn’t tell a man from a woman anymore.”

“You said it, sister,” the homeless man with the dimple piped in from the sidewalk.

“Don’t call me ‘sister,’ boy,” Fatima warned him. “I’m old enough to be your mother. Did you look for a job today?”

Scheherazade let Fatima find the homeless man’s woes a distraction from Laila’s until they reached Amir’s home.