The Night Counter (21 page)

“Didn’t you read my e-mail, D?”

“Your e-mail?”

“Listen, I got to go,” Jake said. “You should read my e-mail.”

Dina logged on to her Gmail account right after hanging up.

First she opened Jake’s e-mail: “
D., you have changed my life, and that
is why I have fallen in love with someone else. Her name is Maria, and she is the migrant worker Bud and I have been working so closely with. You told me over and over again before you left that you needed to be with someone who cared about people. I was so afraid of losing you that I begged Bud to take me on the pro bono case so I could impress you. Then I fell in love, like I didn’t know it was possible to fall in love. If it hadn’t been for your unselfishness, I would have never met her. And one day I’m sure you’ll think this part is funny: She told me that at first she didn’t want to go out with me because she thought all I wanted to do was sleep with her, but I told her while I did, I would wait. She’d figured I was going to think she was a freak, but I said how you’d taught me all good women are worth waiting for. I will always love you for that and for leading me to such a generous man as Bud. And to a lottery ticket. That ticket got us $500 and Maria and I are planning on using it as the first donation to a school we plan to build one day in her mother’s name. You are lucky, D., to be filled with so many good things. Call me if you want to discuss further. I love you, Jake.
”

Dina read the e-mail ten times, numb. Then she hit “delete” and opened Jamal’s: “
Dearest Dina, by now, you will know that I left without you. It is for the best. My call will always be my work, and I will never live for long in peaceful places. You will tire of that soon. I am not husband material, as an old girlfriend once told me—which is what I assume you are seeking. It is not easy to let go of someone so wonderful. I am sorry I have taken away the innocence that comes from being oblivious, but also hope that you will be another voice for the voiceless. Love always, Jamal.
”

Patronizing butthead. Dina had underestimated how much control she had over Jake and overestimated how much Jamal cared about her. She wanted to hate them both, but how could you hate people who were nearly saints? Sure, one had fallen in love with his client and the other was in love with the camera, but they were doing good in the world, bestowing humanity, saving people and chickens. Oh, screw all that. She did hate them.

Dina slammed her laptop shut. She went to the bathroom, where a
girl was putting on her third coat of mascara. “Where do you get your nails done?” Dina asked her.

“Well, I have a lady who comes to my house,” the girl said. “But all the tourists love the spa at the Mövenpick.”

Dina wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a tourist, that she was Lebanese. But instead she went downstairs and caught a cab.

DINA ONCE MORE
tried to pry her legs off the Mercedes’s leather. The cab driver lit another cigarette. “We’ll probably be at the Mövenpick in ten minutes.”

Perfect. She couldn’t wait to massage out Jamal and Jake and unclog her pores from Shatila. She dialed Houston.

“Jake’s a two-timing sleaze bucket,” Dina said. “Scumbag asshole.”

“Your father told me,” Randy said. She didn’t mention to Dina that she was the one who had busted Jake after seeing him kiss the Mexican girl on TV during a rally for immigration reform. “I told Bud to fire him, but he says Jake is the only person at the office who shares his passion. It’s your fault that all they talk about is chicken workers. You started it.”

“Mom, I’m coming home,” Dina announced.

“Oh, thank God.” Randy sighed. “You had me all scared with your talk of Gaza. I just saw on CNN that there is another Orange Alert.”

“The Orange Alert means the trouble is your way, not mine,” Dina reminded her.

“I’m so tired of watching the news just because you’re over there,” Randy said. “You’ll be back in time for the Neiman Marcus sale. You know how much fun we have there.”

“Yep,” Dina said.

“Do you want to talk about Jake some more?”

“No.”

“Dina?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Are the strawberries and figs there really small?” Randy asked. “Tayta Fatima always told me the strawberries and figs were so tiny and sweet that you didn’t have to put sugar on them.”

All Dina could picture was the fruit in Shatila sweltering on carts with the flies.

The taxi driver drove down a long driveway to the oceanfront, and two valets ran to open the door for her.

“Mom, I got to go,” Dina said. She exited the cab, stickier than if she had jogged there. Who had a Mercedes without air-conditioning? But it was the facade that mattered, and in that way Beirut reminded her of Houston. In Beirut, however, you couldn’t completely escape the masses the way you could in the spacious malls her mother practically had raised her in. Two lottery ticket boys tried to come down the driveway, but the valets chased them away. Dina watched the boys run back up to the Corniche. So many lottery tickets but no luck of their own. She opened her backpack to tip the driver. Her wallet had less money in it than she remembered. She dug deeper and pulled out two lottery tickets from the camp—they’d have to do for a tip. The taxi driver looked at her, unhappy, and so she dug into her backpack one more time—and saw Sarah’s deed poking out at her.

Her fingers flew across her phone pad. “Allison, I’m sorry about this morning,” she said. “Please tell Sarah I’ll be there with her deed ASAP.”

Dina hung up, hurriedly gave the driver his money, ignored his displeasure at the lottery ticket tip, and walked into the Mövenpick for her massage and pedicure. She’d be quick. She checked her backpack for the deed one more time and went inside.

IN HOUSTON, RANDY
wondered why Dina hadn’t mentioned the boy with the green eyes. She was sure he had something to do with her tears.

She wanted to tell Fatima that Dina hadn’t gone to Gaza. But if she told her that Dina was going to stay in Lebanon, Fatima would continue
to ask her if Dina had gone to see that damn house in the mountains yet. But Randy was a little worried about how well Amir was taking care of her mother after seeing his joke about her cutting off her hair.

She walked up and down her house before she found Bud. He was in the kitchen showing Manuela how to make kibbe.

“The key is to get the shell very thin,” he explained. “My fingers are a little fat for this, but you get the idea.”

“
Sí
,” Manuela said. “Kind of like a tamale, no?”

“Yeah, kind of like a tamale,” Bud agreed.

“That’s not thin enough,” Randy said. She took the shell from Bud and worked it herself. Randy made a perfect kibbe, surprising both herself and Bud.

“I had no idea you knew how to make kibbe,” Bud said. “I just asked the lady over at Drooby’s Market what ingredients to buy and thought I’d try my luck.”

She handed her kibbe to Bud when she went to answer the phone.

“Mom, I’m not coming home,” Dina said on the other end. “When I signed my contract, I committed to staying here the whole summer. I signed a piece of paper, and pieces of paper mean something.”

“That’s lawyer talk,” Randy said.

“I’ll bring you back some strawberries,” Dina promised.

Randy wiped away her tears after she hung up. She went to make kibbe with her husband and maid. On the way, she picked up the lottery ticket that had fallen out of Manuela’s apron and put it on the counter for her.

BEFORE LEAVING
Lebanon, Scheherazade returned to the camp, where Sarah had just completed the last stitch on the dress she had been working on before the air raid. Its vertical mosaics were sewn with the richest blues, reds, and blacks, hues that once had indicated family wealth. Scheherazade pulled the dress over her head. Magnificent. She had taken money from Dina’s wallet earlier and laid the cash down where the dress had been left for the night.

Back in Los Angeles, Scheherazade paused at the petrol caravan’s back window to marvel at her reflection in the cool linen of the embroidered dress.

The very sight of this exquisite gown would get Fatima out of what was sure to be a disastrous mood after the dinner with the photographer named Tiffany from the Iranian Jew’s store.

Scheherazade climbed up the eucalyptus tree, past the fig tree. Before she could peer into the living room window, whispering just below distracted her. She hung upside down from a tree branch and peeked into the petrol caravan. That mortal Sherri Hazad was looking even more severe in her dull blue costume as she reprimanded the man and woman in black. “Look, I appreciate the tip, but you need to stop taking these pictures,” she warned them. “It is not warranted.”

“It’s not?” said the man in black, turning his attention back to the house.

Amir posed menacingly in his jihadist outfit in the living room. A very tall woman with broad shoulders, wearing a
kefia
, the black-and-white Arab head scarf, flashed away with her own camera.

“We know they often take pictures of themselves before a bombing,” the woman in black ventured.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Sherri Hazad cautioned.

Amir then posed with his arms crossed, head covered in the
kefia
.

“He might be looking for just the right outfit for the seventeen virgins in heaven,” the man in black said.

“Maybe, but I don’t want to see your SUV here anymore,” Sherri Hazad said. “I’m going to get a wiretap in place on all the phones billed to that address, and we’ll do a little monitoring of his e-mail. That’s legal. You being here is not.”

Ya Allah
, if only these three could feel me slap them, Scheherazade thought. What
afreet
filled them with feverish ideas that young men were willing to die just to deflower virgins? Especially Amir.

She found Fatima oddly jubilant in the kitchen as she ate kibbe, humming to a Frank Sinatra song with a full mouth. Scheherazade touched her on the shoulder. Fatima quit singing and gasped when she saw Scheherazade’s new dress.

“Oh, what a dress,” Fatima said. She put on her nearby glasses the better to examine the embroidery stretched out across Scheherazade’s bosom. “How did you know today would be a special occasion?”

She motioned for Scheherazade to look out at the couple. “This is it,
inshallah
” she said, seeming to glow. “I went to fry more kibbe—she eats a lot, but
ma’alesh
, it’s okay—and I come back to this joy.
Allahu akbar
, look how she is caressing his hand.”

A person not living on as much hope and delusion would have seen that Tiffany was rubbing bronzing cream on Amir’s hand. Fatima bit into another kibbe. This was the first time Scheherazade had seen Fatima eat the cooking she always bragged about.

“You were too pale before to be threatening,” Tiffany said to Amir, dabbing on a final smear of bronzing cream. “Let’s go, big boy. The money shot.”

Amir pumped his biceps and sneered, and Tiffany started clicking away.

“I’m so glad your grandma got us together,” Tiffany said. “This has been really cool. I needed to expand my portfolio.”

The two high-fived. “Right on,” Amir said. “Do you think we ought to take some pictures of me in, say, a doctor’s outfit?”

Tiffany laughed so hard that her cackle turned into snorts. Fatima grabbed Scheherazade’s hand. “The girl laughs like the donkeys in Deir Zeitoon, but no one is perfect,” she decided. She stepped out of the kitchen and let out a fifteen-second wedding trill from deep in her throat. Her ululating caused Tiffany to lose her balance during a perfectly good shot. Amir turned his terrorist audition glare on Fatima.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” Tiffany asked.

“Would you like some desert, Miss Tiffany?” Fatima said, and gave her a full-denture smile.

Tiffany looked to Amir. “Is that an Arab tradition?” she asked. “Giving a little bit of your desert to guests?”

“
Dessert
,” Amir said. “You want
dessert?
”

“Maybe later,” Tiffany said, and started refocusing her camera.

“
Sí
, you don’t seem like the kind that would say no.” Fatima winked. “My Laila is a bit like that, too. Normal. It’s okay with me.”

Fatima turned up the volume on “Strangers in the Night” and swayed to it.

“Ignore her,” Amir told Tiffany. He gave the camera his “stupid Middle Eastern hot dog cart owner” look, the one he used for sitcom auditions.

Scheherazade paced around Fatima, unable to dance to the dull music.

“If they would only get married in the next three days, I would wear a dress as fine as yours,” Fatima announced. Scheherazade would have basked in Fatima’s awe and adoration if Amir’s
thowb
had not flown past them as fast as her carpet had brought her back from Lebanon.

Amir was left only in his briefs as he put on Baluchi pants and a plastic saber while Tiffany looked on, camera at the ready.

“He adds rain to the mud with his lewd behavior,” Scheherazade
said. She reached inside her new dress and got her lace handkerchief for Fatima’s tears.

“They’re just being friendly,” Fatima said. She ignored the handkerchief and forced out optimism. “Let’s leave them to get to know each other a little better.”

“What’s left to know?” Scheherazade asked. “You can’t give someone like that a house in Lebanon. In the time of my youth this would be okay but today the people back home prefer to appear demure and blame the public decadence on America.”

Fatima held up her hand and let her cane guide her up the stairs, not even bothering to wish Amir and Tiffany a good night. She sat down at her dresser and dared to look at her purple stubs in the mirror. Scheherazade handed her the hairbrush, but she pushed it away. “I’ve decided Amir and this girl will behave and be happy,” she announced.

Scheherazade tried to brush out Fatima’s purple stubs for her and then paused. “Fighting the truth is so much more work than facing it,” she hinted. “What we are born is who we are. We can change the outside appearance, we can change where we live, but inside it’s the same. I know. I’ve been shifting between time and space for—”

“For 1,128 years,” Fatima finished. “But change is possible. That’s why I wanted you to go see Randa.”

Scheherazade saw the hope in Fatima’s eyes. “I did not have a chance to visit her,” she apologized. “But I’m sure she and her family are okay.” She did not tell her that she had visited Dina, for she did not want Fatima asking her about the house in Deir Zeitoon she had forgotten to visit.

“Randa is the one child who knows how to take care of herself,” Fatima agreed. “
Ya Allah
, she is always telling everyone to come see her house. I tell her my house in Lebanon is much nicer than hers and Dina should go visit, but she doesn’t listen. Randa’s house is so big that all of Deir Zeitoon could live in it, but it doesn’t have any marble and no bidet. She told me it was colonial-style, like the British and French colonization hadn’t destroyed the Arabs, like colonization was a good thing.”

The pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, no matter how proud she was of Laila’s Thanksgivings, didn’t figure into Fatima’s definition of colonial.

“Randa married very well,” she added, ignoring the ringing phone. “She did not marry from a
fellahi
family They were city people, not peasant.”

She looked at the phone. “Amir tells me to never answer it if he is home,” Fatima said. “But I think he is too in love to hear it.”

She picked it up. “Hello,” she said, and waited for a response on the other end.

“Fatima?” Ibrahim said through static and line glitches.

“Ibrahim?” Fatima said, remarkably wordless.

“Do you get my …” but Fatima could not make out the words through the interference on the line.

“Get your what?”

“Get my … read it …” was all Fatima could make out.

“Amir and I read the Koran together every night,” she told him. “And you are well?”

“I try again …” Ibrahim said through several clicks on the line. “When your phone line better.”

He hung up, and Fatima looked at the phone. After a long while waiting for him to call back, she turned to Scheherazade. “How Ibrahim and Randa battled,” she recalled, trying to not look back at the phone. “He always calls back.”

“This daughter defied her father?” Scheherazade said, her voice laced with disapproval but preferring conversation about Randa to gazing at a phone all night.

“Randa demanded that he be more of an American father,” Fatima explained. “By doing ‘what he had to make his children typical.’”

“Is that what an American father does?” Scheherazade inquired.

Fatima shrugged. “I didn’t have a father, so I didn’t know how Ibrahim was supposed to be, just as I hadn’t known what Marwan and Ibrahim were supposed to be as husbands, as I never saw my mother with a husband.”

Scheherazade sighed. “My father adored my sister Dunyazad and me. He bounced us on his knees, rode with us on horses groomed silky, snuck orange blossom sweets from the king’s table into his turban for us. And the stories he would tell us at night to put us to sleep. The morals in his tales were spun into mine, and my king—”

“Hey, who’s telling the stories here?” Fatima interrupted, wishing so much that Scheherazade’s tale of her father’s adoration was a story any one of her daughters could be telling of their father, but Ibrahim’s love couldn’t be seen so easily in stories.

“I shall remain quiet,
ya seiti
,” Scheherazade acquiesced.

“Randa was the child from whom Ibrahim and I went from being called Mama and Baba to Mom and Dad. Randa made all the kids follow her, except Laila, who was already too used to Mama and Baba,” Fatima said. “She would buy us cigarettes so we could smoke them with our friends, not the
argileh
. But neither Ibrahim nor I could stand the smell. She was furious with Ibrahim for not building a bomb shelter like all our neighbors. Ibrahim said the Russians weren’t coming. He didn’t get her a hula hoop because he said it was bad enough how cheap Arab girls looked in the movies. Millie told Ibrahim the Arab women weren’t cheap but exotic and sexy. No man wants his daughter to be exotic or sexy. Ibrahim would never even say such words in front of his daughters.”

“Sexy is not an ugly thing,” Scheherazade lamented. “Vulgar, though, is another matter. Why do they have to always make me look so vulgar?”

“Randa was worst in the summer,” Fatima said, unwilling to indulge Scheherazade’s vanity, especially when talking of one as self-absorbed as Randa. “Every one of her friends at school—and Millie and her kids, too—went to cabins up north on the lakes. But we stayed at home with the fans running on high, eating Popsicles. We were alone on the street and with no homework. If there had been school, the kids would have been doing homework together. Every school night, we made them sit together and do homework for four or five hours even though we couldn’t help them much ourselves. But in the summer, there was no homework and the TV did not have things on it all the time like now.
Randa would sit in the living room chewing pink gum and making big bubbles.”

“Not so bad,” Scheherazade said. “Surely, it’s not as if Ibrahim beat the girls with a broom like I once saw an aunt do to one of my dear cousins.”

“
Ya Allah
, no,” Fatima said. “Ibrahim only once raised a hand to one of his daughters. Randa, of course. It was the time she demanded that she attend camp like all the other children. When he refused, she set up a tent in her bedroom. One day while I was on the porch playing cards with a few women from the Arab Ladies Society, I smelled fire, and it was not the charcoal from the
argileh
. I went upstairs and found Ibrahim standing over Randa with his belt next to the campfire she had built, asking her if she had any idea how many young girls had died in house fires in this country—the houses are made of wood here, you know. I was even angrier with her. But I took the belt from Ibrahim and told him that if he ever so much as pulled a strand of her hair, I was going to kill him, just like I’d heard Millie’s husband say to her.”

“Never mind the killing,” Scheherazade said. “Were you able to repair the house damage?”

Fatima nodded. “But we ended up with one less bedroom, which vexed Randa even more. The Arab Ladies Society never wanted to play cards at my house again, and at least that made Randa a little happy, as she considered our friends almost as embarrassing as ourselves. When everyone came back from camp, Randa focused on getting what she called cheerleading clothes.”

Fatima pointed to a picture of a teenage girl in a high ponytail dressed in a cheerleader uniform. “When I told Randa—Ibrahim couldn’t do it calmly—that this cheerleading was
aabe
, she said it made her popular.”