Three Daughters: A Novel (52 page)

“I’m afraid,” said Nijmeh unexpectedly. “I don’t know what’s waiting for me there.”

Her mother agreed and her heart felt as if it was flying apart, but she composed her face and took a deep breath. “It’ll all turn out well, because you’re strong and generous. Things might be hard in the beginning, but they’ll soon work out. Remember that your father and I will be thinking of you every day. You will never leave our hearts.”

35.

YOU ROTTEN BASTARD! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Y
ou rotten bastard! Where have you been? Somebody says you’re married. Is it true?” She was an olive-skinned brunette with coarse features and a voluptuous body. She worked in the pathology department and he had been sleeping with her for months. She was the best technician the hospital had and, as she often reminded him, knew more about medicine than half the doctors, which was probably true. She had grown up in New York and had a certain brashness that excited him physically but made him cringe socially. Although he had told himself many times that she meant nothing to him—she was simply “lay” insurance—it upset him when she was busy and couldn’t see him.

Two months before he left to find his bride, he had asked Rita to stop seeing other men. “It upsets me,” he said honestly. “I know it’s unfair to ask it, but I’m asking anyway.”

“Well, in my book, if you don’t want me to see other men, you have to tell me I’m your one and only. After that usually comes more serious stuff.” She was trying to be offhand, but her eyes were hopeful and he knew that if he told her he was serious she would be pathetically happy. Tough, streetwise Rita would have cried. He had no more serious stuff in mind and now she knew for sure.

“I didn’t plan it this way,” he said.

“Plan it what way, you rotten pig? To use me as a goddamn parking space until you found someone good enough to marry? Of course you planned it this way, but you’re too much of a prick to admit it.” She picked up a folder holding patients’ records and threw it at him. She did the same with a delicate shell ashtray and a cup holding pencils.

“Hey, cut it out! What are you doing?”

“I’ll cut it out when I’m damn good and ready.” She was crying and shouting. “What I really hate is the hypocrisy. If you had said all along, ‘Rita, I love fucking you but you’re not the girl I’ll marry—be warned,’ I would still have done exactly what I did. You wouldn’t have come out such a pig and I wouldn’t feel so filthy.”

He was massaging the back of her neck to quiet her down. “Hey, Rita, sweetheart, don’t cry. I’m sorry. You were a big part of my life.” His hand went around her back and he brought her close to him. He kissed her forehead. She lifted her face and found his mouth. “Oh, God, I’ve missed you,” she said. “We were so good together.” Her hand was on his crotch. “Open it right now.”

He didn’t waste time accepting the invitation and she began to work on him. He stood there with a sheepish grin and then he felt as if the top of his head would open up. He pushed the back of her head but she struggled free and looked up at him. How ridiculous he looked with his green knit Ivy League tie, his button-down shirt, his slicked “good boy” side-parted hair. All that for the establishment and nothing for her. “Are you really hard, lover?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?”

“Good. Now go shove it into your wife.” She got up, cleared the rest of his desk with a sweep of her arm, and marched out.

“Hello, darling.” He found Nijmeh in the kitchen wearing capri pants and a ribbed black turtleneck sweater that made her coloring more astounding. She was meticulously pouring oil in a measuring spoon. Several bowls containing the ingredients for her dish waited in a row to be combined. He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck.

“Paul, wait, I’ll spill the oil.”

“Forget the oil. Let’s go inside.”

“But what about dinner? You’ll be hungry.”

“I’m hungry for you.”

He thought she would follow immediately, but she stopped to close the bottle of oil and to find a dish on which to place the oily spoon. He decided that if he had not been waiting she would have completed her measuring and maybe even washed out the spoon. It annoyed him.

It wasn’t the love story of the century. Paul, beneath the superficial thrill of bagging such a breathtaking girl, expected her to be dispassionate and punished her in advance. He was chronically tardy, often silent, and sloppy at lovemaking. Statistically, he was among the majority of middle-class husbands (according to the Kinsey Report that had recently come out), fifty-five percent of whom had affairs and never brought their wives to orgasm.

He made no provisions for the crushing changes in her life. There was no more country acreage or sports. No stepping out into the welcoming arms of quiet lanes and trees. No extended family. No horses to ride. But worse, for a girl whose life had always had structure and precise goals, there was no central focus to guide her.

They lived on upper Connecticut Avenue in eight hundred square feet painted a muddy beige with too much pink. When Paul left for work, sometimes as early as six, Nijmeh got up, took a shower, vacuumed, and washed the two breakfast cups and saucers. Sunlight streamed into the apartment at midmorning and seeing the dust swirling in the air made her realize how pointless it was to think anything was clean. The Sun-Brite Laundry came once a week to take his shirts and the sheets and towels. The other stuff she washed in the basement of the building with coins from his dresser.

On Sundays they had a late breakfast of bacon and eggs that Paul cooked. While they ate, he read the real estate section, circled several ads, and then let it drop to the floor. “I’m going to make a lot of money,” he would tell her with grave conviction. “My practice is growing and if I manage it right, it can be very lucrative.” Every weekend he would condense their future into the simplest terms. “We’re going to buy a nice house and furnish it to the teeth. This is what men work hard for. To have a really nice house and invite successful people. This may sound too simple, but if you strip aside all the froufrou, that’s the American Dream in a nutshell.”

He persuaded her to stop calling herself Nijmeh because “You’ll save yourself a lot of explanations. No one is going to pronounce it properly and besides, people are suspicious of foreign names. Nijmeh means Star . . . from now on I’ll introduce you as Star.”

“It’s so theatrical. Won’t people laugh?”

“Believe me, no one’s going to laugh.”

She went along with it because it was harmless and there were things that disturbed her more. He was always either exhausted from work or a night delivery or groggy from sleep, which made him unapproachable. She wanted to be companionable, but how could she engage a person who was desperately in need of sleep? Often he was too tired for sex.

Most troubling was his drinking. When he ordered a double Scotch, it sounded reckless, as if he couldn’t get drunk fast enough. Yet he never did anything silly, so she had to assume the liquor didn’t affect him.

“Fix me a drink, honey,” he would ask with the weariness of someone who needed oblivion. Once she’d suggested a cup of tea instead. He had looked up from his slumped position and told her, “My afternoon delivery today gave birth to a blue-eyed little girl, seven pounds, three ounces. She had ten fingers, ten toes, a turned-up nose, and a hole the size of my fist at the base of her spine. Within a week, fluid will build up in her head and it will swell to twice its normal size. We’ll have to drill a hole in her skull to drain it. I had to face the mother, the father, the grandmother, and the parish priest. I don’t want tea. I want a double Scotch.” After his first gulp, he had added philosophically, “All doctors drink.”

He was a doctor and the importance of his work overshadowed her needs and her feelings. She saw very quickly that she’d have to seek out whatever would fill her life on her own. The nurses and patients treated him as if he were precious, and on the days she met him for lunch, he did look glamorous in his baggy sterile uniform, the operating room mask dangling from his neck. It helped her to see him in that setting. He’d take her on the cafeteria line and explain the food with good humor. “Here’s meatloaf . . . it’s like kibbeh
,
but not as tasty. And potatoes. They mash them up here, I don’t know why. Carrots, you already know. String beans, you know. But not this, I bet. Not Jell-O. The texture is repulsive, but a lot of people must buy it. It’s out every day.” As they ate he’d watch her reaction to the food, as if he were anxious to please her. He was one of those people whose energy level shot up in public but not at home.

Walking became her salvation. Out of the apartment and up Connecticut Avenue she passed a dry cleaner, florist, beauty salon, and three restaurants. Farther north there was the zoo, where she would sometimes stop to watch the seals swoop and rocket through the water. When the sun became fierce, she went into the monkey house to visit the gray gibbons that swung recklessly across the cage with increasing speed, as if recent good news had made them crazy with joy.

When the weather cooled, she walked south on Connecticut, past the Shoreham Hotel and the Calvert Street Bridge, eating up the miles with a long stride until she reached Lafayette Park and the White House. If she turned west onto K and walked along the letter streets, F, G, H—lined with narrow-frame houses painted in sweet colors and collared with patches of lawn and flowers—she reached George Washington University. The look of the carefree students made her feel . . . unfinished. She had been trained all her life to take charge of a complicated enterprise, but she didn’t have the training for any of the simple jobs of daily life in America.

A man on television had said that beautiful women live in an unreal world where all their wishes are granted and they can’t face reality. What a thing to say! But might it be true? No one had ever wondered if she would turn out well or have a successful life or even if she would be happy. It was taken for granted. She was not only beautiful but also Samir Saleh’s only child. She had learned how to cope with physical hardship and how to conquer fear, but not how to face reality and get what she wanted out of life. It was sad to be beautiful, though no one would believe it. It was an edge that everyone begrudged her yet were eager to have themselves. It was like having an unbelievable skill and being told it was criminal to use it.

Walking through the outer reaches of Dupont Circle, she came upon more humble territory that turned her mind in a different direction. There were two blocks of identical yellow-brick attached houses that were grimy with years of soot but sat high up to take advantage of breezes and views. They were nicely proportioned, with large front porches and gracefully pitched roofs. Her grandfather Nadeem had seldom passed a structure without mentally purchasing it and making a fix-it list that would bring the building to optimal health.
That roof needs rolling or it will leak by spring
, he would say.
That door isn’t hung properly. Look how it rubs the sill. That whitewash was applied with the wrong tool.
As she passed the blocks with the yellow houses, she, too, began to refurbish them mentally.
The brick would look better painted white. Replace the concrete walks with brick. Put in planters along the narrow stoops. Install more graceful front doors.

It kept her absorbed, but when she returned home her will sagged and she saw herself as dangerously foolish. As if her mind were off the track.

The events of the last four months collapsed in time like a long, vivid dream. Surely she would wake up to see her familiar room and hear their old dog barking and her parents’ soft voices echoing against the tiled walls of the sheik’s cavernous kitchen. Her life had become alien, as if a malevolent eye had searched and—gratuitously—settled on her. But who would listen with sympathy? She was considered a very lucky woman. She was married but she didn’t feel married. She already had a future and it was her own immaturity that kept her searching for a different one.

Dear Mama,

I’ve made a terrible mistake and perhaps Paul, too, would be relieved if this marriage could be dissolved by some magic wand, or better yet, had never taken place. I want to work and do something worthwhile. Not this emptiness.

She never sent such a letter to her mother. She never even wrote down such words, knowing she would tear them up. She never even willingly allowed such a condemning string of sentences to find a place in her thoughts. They were just bizarre random words that popped up out of nowhere. Human nature was unpredictable. Outwardly, life was orderly, but people’s thoughts weren’t orderly. At times they were destructive.

Dear Mama,

Paul sent me to buy things for the house, but truthfully I had no idea what to buy. They had quilted covers to put over the toaster and the bread box. What a waste. I bought dish towels and a soap dish and a metal utensil for mashing potatoes. Paul likes them mashed and I’ve learned to make them with butter and milk.

That sounded much better. That’s what they wanted to hear.

She wrote regularly to her parents and grandmother and occasionally to Aunt Julia, describing what was unique about Washington. Certain sights lingered—the throngs of laughing young girls in summer dresses pouring out of government buildings, stepping daintily onto buses and trolleys. They seemed so innocent and eager. The wives, on the other hand, were cold and efficient. They took command of their houses and their maids and their children.

Department stores—one was named Woodward & Lothrop—contained every item one would need in a lifetime. You could buy a nightgown or a bed or a lawn mower—oh, did her mother know what a lawn mower was? Then there was television. It was against her nature to sit in the house during the day and be entertained. She wrote a three-page letter to her grandmother trying to describe
Beat the Clock
:

It’s so silly. Imagine two adults crossing a room, each twirling a pie plate at the end of a stick while their ankles are tied together. Oh, and they only have thirty seconds to do it. This is a serious country, but this show is on every night. People love it.

She could imagine Miriam trying to make sense of such a complicated letter, but she would be pleased that Nijmeh thought she read that well.

Letters were written back. The rain was plentiful or it was scarce. The crops were lush or skimpy. Horses foaled. Cousins had babies. Diana’s granddaughter married Mr. Saleem’s son and—after the ceremony—Mr. Saleem (remember, he was the plumber) dropped dead. They finally were drawing up plans for a large modern house at the farm. It would be two stories with a mezzanine overlooking the living room.
We’ll break ground next year, after the rains.
They never mentioned the political troubles, but they didn’t need to. She could read about them in the local papers.