The Night Counter (22 page)

“But didn’t Ibrahim want these girls of his to be known?” Scheherazade said. “To get good husbands early.”

“Once when the kids were little, I convinced Ibrahim that we should go on vacation like Millie and her family,” Fatima explained. “Randa doesn’t remember because she was only three, but one summer, when we had only six kids, he agreed, and we went to meet some Deir Zeitoon
cousins who lived in Florida, where they were making an orange grove. The children had a great time with the ocean. On the way back home, we stopped at a little restaurant off the big highway in Georgia. A young man was serving Coca-Cola with peanuts outside the restaurant, which the kids had never seen. So I let them try it. How they giggled. All the Coca-Cola made them have to go to the bathroom. The waitress led me to the ladies’ bathrooms. There were two doors. One said ‘coloreds,’ and one said ‘whites.’ All the people in the restaurant turned around to see which one we would go in. Laila said these must be the laundry rooms. The waitress—I think she felt bad for us—said to Laila, ‘No, honey, that’s how we sort people around here. I wish I could tell just from looking at you all, darling, which one you should use.’ I told the girls to wait and went outside and asked Ibrahim what color we were. Ibrahim grabbed my arm so hard it bruised for a week and dragged me into the restaurant. We found the girls were happy as could be eating chocolate ice cream with some men who all looked like nice grandfathers. One of them patted Randa on the head and said, ‘You’re just about the cutest little mulatto I ever seen.’ Ibrahim’s face turned into a frightening purple and red I had never seen before, and he yanked the man’s hand off Randa. ‘You don’t touch my kids,’ he yelled so loud that the gas attendant looked in. The man stood up and told Ibrahim, ‘Here I am trying to be nice to you people, and you go threatening me. You get your family out of here before I call the sheriff.’ Standing, he was a very big man, much bigger than Ibrahim, so all Ibrahim could do was tell the girls to go to the car. Then he drove straight back to Detroit without a word. I kept pacing that night we got home because I didn’t know what color my children were and why my husband had turned such an awful red and purple in front of such a friendly man. When I asked Ibrahim for the third time, he finally spoke and said it didn’t matter because the girls should never leave the house again. He said he’d rather they were unhappy at home than dead outside. Then he sat down on the bed, and his face turned a white I had never seen before. It frightened me as much as the red and purple had, and I wanted it to go away before the girls saw it, and so I begged him to talk.”

Life’s patterns often came easy to Scheherazade after 1,128 years. “His sisters were killed in Lebanon,” she said, not trying to muffle Fatima’s tears.

“In Deir Zeitoon, three years before Ibrahim came to America,” Fatima whispered. “He was thirteen years old. It was the spring, and Ibrahim’s mother was in the neighboring village of Deir al-Bortugal for the birth of her oldest daughter’s first child, the daughter whose marriage to the sheepherder Ibrahim had arranged. That afternoon several Druze men came into the village looking for the Abdullah family. They were looking for the Maronite Abdullahs, who they said had murdered their father because they mistakenly believed he had shot one of their uncles twenty years earlier. They broke down the door to Ibrahim’s house while he was doing his homework. They dragged with them two of his sisters, covered in bleeding scratches, guns pointed at their heads. They had taken his sisters from a henna party for one of their friends who was to be married the next day. The men demanded that Ibrahim lead them to the person who had killed their father. Ibrahim told them that they had the wrong Abdullahs. He pointed to the Koran in the house, to the prayer rug, but they were so drunk with vengeance, they would not believe that Ibrahim and his sisters were not of the very same Abdullahs who had supposedly killed their father. Ibrahim had no names to give them, and so the leader cocked his gun at one of the older sisters’ temples. Ibrahim begged and pleaded with them to whip him more, but they shot his older sister. Ibrahim screamed out a name in Deir al-Bortugal so they would spare his other sister. One man stayed with Ibrahim and his dead and living sisters, while the rest went to Deir al-Bortugal. When they came back to say there was no such person in Deir al-Bortugal, the leader shot Ibrahim’s other sister. Ibrahim waited to be shot himself. ‘No, you have let your sisters die, and that shall be yours to relive every day and every night,’ the oldest one said to him, as if he were a sage rather than a killer. It was Marwan’s sister who helped Ibrahim take their bodies to be prepared for burial and cleaned the house before Ibrahim’s mother returned. Ibrahim had hoped that if his mother did not see the blood, it would help her to not lose her mind.
But by the next year, she had cried herself to death. From the night Ibrahim told me this story, I did everything to hide any dangerous truths of my children’s lives from Ibrahim, although I wasn’t very good at it because I often wanted his advice on what to do. But when I could hide the bad, I did. He felt like he couldn’t protect his daughters either that day in the peanut and Coke café.”

“Do your children not know this of their father?” Scheherazade asked.

“He begged me not to soil their hearts with such a thing,” Fatima said. “In time, they would come to know their own sorrows.”

“Your husband distrusted all men in the presence of his daughters, just as my husband distrusted all women in the presence of men,” Scheherazade said.

“With each daughter that was born, Ibrahim laughed less and less,” Fatima concurred. “He stopped being the man who used to tell me jokes in Arabic when I first got here so I could laugh sometimes. I couldn’t understand American humor back then, but I loved his old Juha jokes. I can’t imagine him telling a joke today.”

Scheherazade recalled how Ibrahim had tried some humor—a joke about Fatima—with Laila, and that warmed her memories of Detroit.

Fatima pointed to a photo on the vanity of a teenage Randa and Laila trying to wash a frozen turkey far bigger than the sink.

“Ibrahim should have laughed, Randa was so ridiculous,” Fatima said. “She would force Laila to get involved in her schemes to make us typical, although Laila was content to just get through every day without gaining weight. That’s all Laila cared about, which actually made her the typical one. Randa would tell Laila to play Elvis Presley and the Beatles and other nonsense really loudly and wait for Ibrahim to lecture them on the sins of the musicians, as their parents’ friends did. But we didn’t even understand the words, and as long as the girls were in the house safe, he didn’t care what they did. Once Randa asked me if I thought it would be okay with Ibrahim for her and her sisters to go to the school dance. I told her
inshallah
. But in private Ibrahim said, ‘Date? Only when a man walks
on the moon.’ Then I told the girls that, and I meant it just as much as Ibrahim. When President Kennedy started talking about going to the moon, all I could think is
inshallah
not before my girls are married. Mr. Armstrong, God bless him, didn’t do it until most of my girls got to college at least. By then, they all sat straight, crossed their legs, didn’t laugh loudly, and smiled and nodded politely only at good boys.”

“
Al-hamdulilah
,” Scheherazade said.

Fatima’s dark mood then gave way to a smile. “Laila has turkey on Thanksgiving, but do you know what Randa has?” Fatima winked. “She has lamb because it turns out Bud Bashar Bitar doesn’t like turkey. But that’s a small price to pay for love. … Ibrahim used to tell her that if she didn’t stop blowing bubbles with that ridiculous pink bubble gum of hers, no Arab man would marry her, which of course made her do it even more. So love’s joke was on her in the end.”

“What did Bud Bashar Bitar want with her?” Scheherazade said.

The incredulity in Scheherazade’s voice irked Fatima. “Everything Randa did at home was to make us all more ‘outstanding typical people,’ as she called it, not just herself,” Fatima explained. “She always made her sisters believe they deserved better—and Bud Bashar, too. It is why her two oldest married wealthy American boys—whiter than new Detroit snow, I tell you. Now she is worried because she told me Dina left her betrothed.”

“Dina left him?” Scheherazade smirked. “Give the house to Dina. Let Randa’s daughter have Lebanon whether Randa likes it or not.”

“I would never want her to be so far away from Randa forever,” Fatima said. “When Randa moved to Texas, I said that it was an American tradition to come home at Christmas, and she told me that Detroit wasn’t home anymore. I said Detroit is where your mother is, so it is home. She asked me why I had never gone to visit my mother in Lebanon, then. It was the meanest thing any of my children ever told me. But she calls me every day, so
maalesh
, it’s okay.”

“I have heard enough of this daughter,” Scheherazade said. “Just leave her your Avon colors to paint on another face.”

“Then what will the homeless man with the dimple do for money?”
Fatima asked. “I have decided to leave him the Avon to sell, as he can’t seem to find another job. No, I will leave Randa Mama’s Koran, as she needs faith and her past, and Mama’s Koran gives her both. And Randa will want it because it looks expensive.”

Tiffany’s loud laughter carried up the stairs. Fatima reached to twirl her missing hair.

“I brought you something,” Scheherazade said to distract Fatima from the donkey laugh. She spun around in the embroidered dress.

Fatima clapped her hands. “This dress is for me?”

Scheherazade took the gown off and was left standing in a lilac slip of Indian silk. “Let your children see you at least once dressed as we dressed, not as they imagine we dressed,” Scheherazade said.

“And I’ll leave it to Soraya,” Fatima promised. “Then,
inshallah
, you can be proud of her using your name.”

Fatima looked at the calendar. “How will it be in three days?” she said. “I have told you much now.”

“You have lived eighty-five years without really knowing tomorrow, and now you need to know the next three days.” Scheherazade sighed. “Just put the dress on.”

Fatima was not satisfied with Scheherazade’s answer but could not keep her hands away from the dress. As she held it close, both women heard the door slam downstairs.

Scheherazade leaped up to her window perch and then chortled. “Come, Fatima,” she said, waving. “Look.”

“Thanks for everything, Amir,” Tiffany called out as she got into her Volkswagen. The girl had left the house fully clothed.

“
Al-hamdulilah
,” Fatima said. “She is dressed and doesn’t want to spend the night. She will know how to behave in the village.”

“Her laugh is not that of a donkey in Lebanon,” Scheherazade noted. “It is that of Soraya.”

“Every boy is attracted to someone who reminds him of his mother,” Fatima said. “That is why I am sure Ibrahim had a very kind mother because with time he didn’t just feel obligated to me but also attracted.”

“Attracted?” Scheherazade said, still surprised that Fatima couldn’t admit, even to herself, that her husband simply had loved her.

Fatima held the dress close to her.

BEFORE TIFFANY HAD
pulled out of her parking spot, Amir was uploading the photos she had taken of him. Jesus Christ, this had been the best date Fatima had ever set him up on. Much as he hated going out for the Abu Nidal roles, he made a dashing terrorist through Tiffany’s lens. And she had taken the photos for free. All she had asked for in return was that she be allowed to use the photos in her antiwar collage. The evening had been an excellent value: In addition to free photos, he was going to be part of a work of art.

He clicked on a photo that Tiffany had taken of him in his Osama beard. His arm was around Fatima, and she was attempting to hide her purple stubs with her hands. Looking at his grandma’s hair in a photo reminded him all the more how much she was falling apart. No one had responded to his last e-mail, nor had Lena said when she would visit. Jesus Christ, maybe Fatima’s kids weren’t getting the full picture.

He looked at the photo one more time.

The only one he did not send it to was Laila, as he figured from hearing Fatima talking to herself that she had enough on her mind.

He flipped through the mail quickly. For the first time since Fatima had moved in, he saw a letter addressed to her that wasn’t from Ibrahim. It was from Minneapolis, in the sloping handwriting of teenage girls, sealed with a Hello Kitty sticker. Minneapolis? He placed the letter on Fatima’s medication tray.

When Amir walked into Fatima’s room, she stopped talking to herself He set her pill tray down.

“Hi,
habibi
,” she said, ignoring the tray “I think this Tiffany is
noor hayatuk
, the light of your life. Her laugh is very loud, let us say, but the house in Lebanon has very strong walls. The neighbors won’t hear.”

“I’m sure, but I’m still—” Amir stopped himself when Fatima reached for her hair to twirl and there was none. For the first time in his life, Amir heard his mother’s voice as wisdom in his head: You just have to tell her things that will make her think she’s happy.

“Tiffany is a regular blast,” he enthused.

“
Wallah?
Really?”

Amir winked, and Fatima’s dentures opened into a smile so big that it revealed the bluish tops of her gums. “When do you think you and Tiffany might go to Lebanon?” she said. “Get married first, though. No
aabe
, shame. You are the great-grandson of Hashem Riyad Mustapha Abdul Aziz, and you must live up to that.”

“Tayta, I’ve never even been to Paris,” replied Amir, who didn’t think an ancestry of sheepherders, tobacco field workers, and matchmakers was all that great. “First, I’d like to see Europe. Then there’s that yoga retreat in Costa Rica I’ve always dreamed of.”

“What are you talking about?” Fatima asked.

“I’m just saying that there are a lot of other places on my vacation-land map I’d like to see, too, if I ever get a vacation,” he said.

“Lebanon’s no vacation,
ibni
,” she said. “It’s our home.”

“Yes, Tayta,” he said by rote. “It has beautiful roses.”

He handed her the envelope. “This came for you today,” he said. “It says it’s from a Decimal Jackson in Minneapolis.”

“I don’t know anyone in Many Happy Police,” Fatima said.

“What about Auntie Hala?” Amir said.

“Her name is not Jackson,” Fatima said.

“I’m still going to go ahead and call Auntie Hala,” Amir said.

“Hala’s a gymnotologist,” Fatima said. “What can she do to help? Send us birth control pills? I needed a gymnotologist before she and the others were born, not after. You know what a cardiologist is? It’s a heart doctor. Isn’t being a heart doctor a better way to help your mother?”

She patted the bed for him to sit next to her on the mattress. “Your grandfather called tonight to see if we were reading the Koran every night. Do you know in Lebanon he—”

“Oh, Jiddo,” Amir interrupted. “He called yesterday about—” The teakettle went off downstairs, and he decided to not mention Ibrahim’s letter because she would start obsessing about finding someone to read it, and he was too busy to deal with that at the moment.

“I got to go, Tayta,” he pleaded. “I have a big audition I can’t blow. I’m going to put sage in the tea.”

He added the last part because it thrilled Fatima any time he used something from the garden. He put the Minneapolis letter down on the tray. “I’ll read it for you tomorrow,” he said. “And the Koran. Don’t forget
to take your pills. Want me to turn on the TV? Maybe the Lions have an opening pitch tonight.”

“No, they don’t,” Fatima said, waving him and his ignorance of sports away.