Tinderbox (15 page)

Paris, Agios Nikolaos, Casablanca.

Slut
.

Returning to Harvard, she ate so much food, she feared damaging her intestines. She
prayed to be able to make herself vomit, but could not force her stomach to eject
its contents. That semester, she’d read the Richmond Lattimore translation of
The Odyssey of Homer
, been pierced by the image of Penelope weaving a shroud by day for her father-in-law,
Laertes, and then unraveling it by night. And so it seemed with herself when, by the
end of the year, twenty pounds heavier, she settled on the seesaw of binging by night
and starving by day.

Caro stares at her bloated face in the bathroom mirror. For Penelope, the unraveling
at night served a noble purpose: the stalling of the suitors who would have had her
abandon her husband, Odysseus.

Would there be suitors if she stopped?

She stretches out on her bed. She has her mother, whereas her mother had no one. How,
then, is it that her mother can do so many things that she cannot? Her mother knows
how to make herself lovely, something she does in the same way, for the same reasons,
she arranges a vase of flowers—that it is ennobling to create beauty. With effort,
Caro can make herself look passable, someone people won’t notice one way or the other.
Her mother knows how to take care of a child. Caro, child expert, lecturer at national
conventions on the emotional and pedagogic needs of the three-year-old, has never
tucked a child into bed, given a bath, taken a temperature.

Her mother knows how to make a meal: roast a chicken, whisk a salad dressing, roll
out a pie crust. Her mother knows how to create a home, a garden, an office. Her mother
knows how to heal a person.

Her mother has never slept with four men in a five-month span, one of whom tried to
kill himself afterward, and then not been touched by anyone in the fifteen years since.

18

Adam watches his wife clip her toenails. Still in the hospital scrubs she wore through
the dinner with Layla, she is seated in the middle of what, despite the four months
they have occupied this room, he still thinks of as his mother’s bedroom. Omar is
asleep a floor below them. His mother has finished her piano practice. He can hear
Eva climbing the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.

Rachida carries her weight in her back and arms. With her head bent over her small
foot, she looks even more top-heavy than usual.

“Damn. I think I’m getting an ingrown.”

Adam ignores his wife’s comment. Rachida is a workhorse—she returned to work when
Omar was three weeks old—but she maintains a habitual litany about minor ailments,
a litany that seems like a nervous tic, an unconscious imitation of her mother’s more
insistent complaints. He’s met Rachida’s mother only once, on the trip she made with
Rachida’s father to New York for his and Rachida’s wedding, but even then, she complained
morning to night: her aching feet, her upset stomach, the terrible injustice that
Rachida—hating shopping, soap operas, and anything to do with homemaking—has refused
to act like a daughter and then, to add insult to injury, moved across an ocean.

“What do you think Eva does in her room at night?” Adam asks.

“She’s studying Hebrew. She’s taking a class at some synagogue.”

“She told you?”

Rachida looks up from her feet. “What do you mean?”

“She hardly talks to me. Does she talk to you?”

“When I’m around. Your mother told me about the classes. I can’t think of anything
more stupid than learning Hebrew, a language spoken in one country with six million
people. Why doesn’t she learn Chinese?”

“Because they don’t speak Chinese in Israel. And that’s where she wants to eventually
move.”

Rachida makes a snorting sound. “So she can live in a settlement on the West Bank
with an Uzi rifle under her bed? You should see the pictures of the places my mother’s
brothers and cousins live. The Israelis talk a good game about being the homeland
for all Jews, but what they really mean is for all Ashkenazi Jews.”

Adam regrets having come upstairs after putting Omar to bed. He’d had a vague idea
of talking with Rachida about his remake of
The Searchers—
how he has changed Ethan to Moishe, a peripatetic rubber trader whose brother settled
in Iquitos and fathered two daughters with an Indian woman, Ethan’s issues about miscegenation
recast as Moishe’s rejection of his brother’s daughters as Jews, but now, with Rachida’s
scowl, he already knows her response. She’d find the logical hole in the idea, the
reason that Ethan cannot become Moishe, that Texas cannot be Iquitos.

Rachida stands. “I’m going to take a shower.”

Through the half-open bathroom door, Adam watches his wife pull off the blue scrubs.
It has been nearly a year since he and Rachida have had sex. What would happen if
he put his hand on the white cotton underwear she is still wearing as she turns on
the shower? Most likely, he thinks, she would laugh.

The first time he saw Rachida naked, he’d been surprised to discover a scattering
of black hairs around her nipples and a faint dark fuzz that ran from her belly button
down to her pubic line. He softly touched the fuzz. He’d never touched a woman in
an intimate way, never imagined there would be an opportunity.

“My mother used to come after me with depilatory creams. She once threatened to have
me restrained in an electrolysis chair if I didn’t do something about the hair on
my stomach.”

“I like it,” Adam said, and in a way he had. It alleviated his worries about his own
scrawny arms, his lack of sexual experience, which he quickly learned didn’t bother
Rachida at all. To the contrary, she preferred his inexperience, since it made it
easier for her to direct his fingers and tongue to precisely the places she wanted.
For the first year, she had wanted sex every night, and she had come every time. As
the months passed, he’d grown bolder—a liberation in knowing there was no other man
he was competing with for her—and she had let him lead on occasion, moving her body
the way he wanted.

At the end of their first year together, he’d started looking at magazines. The first
few times, he had told himself that it was simply an overflow of his sexual feelings—that
after Rachida would leave for the hospital, he was sometimes still aroused. He filled
a brown envelope with photographs cut from the magazines: some of them
Playboy
girls whose photos he had never looked at in adolescence, pink nipples and firm buttocks
pointed sky-high; then, as he ventured into edgier magazines, vaginas spread open,
men with elephantine penises, handcuffs, anuses. Men kissing men. Men sucking men.

Terrified of tainting the screen, of blighting that refuge, he never looked at videos,
at images on the computer. When Rachida had stopped wanting sex during her pregnancy
with Omar, he’d been relieved, his orgasms, by then, more intense with the brown envelope
than with her.

Rachida closes the bathroom door. Adam can hear the shower curtain being drawn shut.
He goes downstairs to the piano room his mother has let him use as his study. “Do
you remember?” she asked the afternoon they arrived when she showed him the table
she had moved under the window for his desk and the closet she had cleared for his
things. “I’d planned for this to be your room, down the hall from Caro. You insisted,
though, on taking the room upstairs, across from mine. I tried to convince you that
this room was nicer, larger, but you would have none of it.”

The first thing he checked after his mother left was that the door had a lock. There
were rice shades that covered the windows. Now he bolts the door, closes the shades,
opens the closet, and retrieves the brown envelope from the back of the farthest file
box.

19

“I love Eva,” Omar says. It is a Saturday night and Rachida is home, sitting what
Omar calls criss-cross-applesauce on the bath mat while he plays in the tub with his
rubber sea animals and plastic submarine. For a moment, what looks to Rachida like
a wave of worry passes over Omar’s face. Is he afraid that he should not have told
her that he loves Eva? That she will be mad? But he’d been so open about his love
for Zahra, his Moroccan babysitter in Detroit. And Rachida had so clearly endorsed
it, taking him each year to buy something special for Zahra’s birthday, holding him
in her lap when he cried after they had to say goodbye because they were moving here.
Hadn’t she told him that love is a bottomless lake? That loving one person does not
take away from loving another?

Eva, though, is different. She is nothing like Zahra. She runs up and down the stairs
with Omar. At night, after Rachida or Adam has tucked Omar in and gone up to their
room, Eva, Omar has confided in Rachida, sometimes sneaks downstairs and climbs into
bed with him because she is scared. Rachida had not been pleased to hear this, but
the truth is, Omar seems happier than she has ever seen him. With Eva, to come back
to that word Omar’s preschool teacher used, Omar seems actually childish.

“It’s very dangerous where Eva comes from,” Omar says. “Her father once killed a poisonous
spider in their kitchen. Her sister got leeches on her legs when they were playing
by the river.”

Rachida soaps Omar’s back. When, as a baby, he was slow to pull himself up and late
to walk, she assumed he had inherited Adam’s lack of coordination and strength. It
had taken her a while to realize that Omar is simply still—without the compulsive
climbing-touching-spinning-top frenzy of so many young boys.

“Eva said she’s going to take me to see the jungle. When she comes back from Israel
to visit Iquitos, she’ll stop and get me and bring me with her. The poor people come
there on rafts they make into their houses. They bring banana leaves to make into
roofs and their bathrooms are floating outhouses! And she’s going to take me to the
jungle lodge where she used to work. They have dolphins in the river and red howler
monkeys like the one she gave me.”

“That’s nice.” She is drifting into half-listening, something she finds herself doing
too often in response to Omar’s strings of enthusiasms—dinosaurs, jellyfish, asteroids,
the moon, enthusiasms that center on science, her passion too, but are too melded
with fantastical narrations to hold her attention.

She’s had to delegate long hours of Omar’s care to Adam and various babysitters, but
this has never dented her feeling that Omar’s well-being is entirely her responsibility.
She alone has organized each step in his life: the cessation of the bottle and then
the pacifier, the beginning of foods, toilet training, the adjustment to school. With
a look, she can tell if he is well or sick, tired or rested. It has come as a disappointment,
though, to discover her lack of patience, not only for Omar’s enthusiasms, but for
play itself. The discomfort she has felt when observing Omar belly-flopped beside
Adam or Zahra or, these past few months, Eva, the two of them moving around Komodo
dragons or killer whales or triceratops, Omar’s hand resting on his companion’s wrist
or arm or shoulder. The fear that she resides outside the circle of his deepest feelings,
the administrator of his life rather than a character in it.

20

Mid-October, Myra decides it is time to start Omar’s piano lessons. With her own children,
she had been too insecure to do many simple things for them. Looking back, she feels
remorse that she’d taken them to a salon to have their hair cut, assumed that bakery
cakes would be superior to those she could make herself, hired a tutor for Adam when
he panicked at learning long division rather than working with him herself. With rare
exceptions, the other parents around her had been equally intimidated, as though parenting
was some new, complicated development that required expert handling. Now, with Omar,
the foolishness of this assumption is apparent to her, accompanied by a sadness that
she missed the pleasures of teaching her own children to read, to swim, to do, for
God’s sake, long division.

Afraid that Rachida might object to homespun piano lessons, Myra cautiously asks her
permission.

Rachida pauses. Is she concerned that Myra’s inexpert instruction might scar Omar’s
musical development, a realm that perhaps seems mysterious to her given that she cannot
carry a tune, can hardly recall a melody? Having experienced the Moroccan music, the
Gnaouan and Chaabi music that filled the squares Ramadan nights and the cafés on warm
evenings, as primitive and bellicose, Rachida had as a child refused to learn either
the indigenous instruments—ouds, kanuns, tan-tans, karkabats—or the European ones.

She grins. It is so rare to see Rachida’s face relaxed, it actually looks strange,
her mouth larger than Myra had realized, with bottom teeth that are quite cockeyed.

“You’re a good woman, Myra. I’m lucky to have you.”

Myra’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

“I should have said that to you years ago. You’re always thinking about what you can
do for us.”

“Thank you, dear. I’m lucky to have you too. Without you, Caro and I would still be
shepherding Adam. But it’s not an effort—lending a hand where I can. You’re my loved
ones. There’s nothing more satisfying than helping your loved ones.”

“You say that as though it’s a given. But my mother is nothing like that.”

When Myra met Rachida’s family, on their trip here for Rachida and Adam’s wedding,
she’d been struck by the stealthiness of Rachida’s mother’s complaints, slipped in
rather than directly lobbed—
That dish was a bit salty, wasn’t it? The odor, it kept me up all night, maybe it
was coming from the hotel room rug?—
her audience too uncertain if a complaint has actually been delivered to serve back
a rebuttal.

“I’m not intending anything too ambitious for Omar. Some scales, some easy pieces
from the Thompson series.”

Myra gives Omar the choice between Wednesday afternoons or Sunday mornings for their
lessons. With the concrete logic of childhood, Omar chooses Wednesday, which for him
feels earlier in the week and will therefore mean more frequently.