Читать книгу Him, Me, Muhammad Ali - Randa Jarrar - Страница 10

LOST IN FREAKIN’ YONKERS

New York, during the summer of ’96, sees some of its highest temperatures on record, and it is toward the end of this summer that I sit, my enormous pregnant belly to accompany me, on an 80 percent acrylic, 20 percent wool covered futon. I look over the tag again, and under the materials it says, Made in ASU. So I’m sitting on the futon, sweating—we have neither an air conditioner nor a fan, and our window is held up by an embarrassingly huge copy of Dirtiest Jokes Volume III—and wondering: should I marry my boyfriend? And: was the tag-maker dyslexic? I quit worrying and start to masturbate, reminding myself that the pregnancy book says in the last trimester the mother is at her sexual peak, and that each strong orgasm brings her closer to real contractions. How totally unfair this is, considering I can hardly reach my own crotch.

The phone rings, and it’s my mother calling from a pay phone, wondering if she should make the Ninety-Sixth Street imam wait much longer.

“Don’t bother,” I say. “Tell him to forget it; tell him to go home.”

“Why, habibi? Come on, do the conversion, and get married. We’re all waiting for you.” She sounds unconvinced and hurried. Who is “we”? I imagine that Mama had picked up a few Hell’s Angels and a couple of squeegee boys for witnesses on her way into the city.

“He’s not even here,” I say. “He’s not converting. I don’t want him to convert. He’ll be a shitty Muslim and a shitty husband too.”

“Oh, it’s not about shitty Muslim or no shitty Muslim—come, yalla, let’s get this finished. Conversion, marriage, boom, boom, two stones with one pigeon, do they say?”

“Sorry, Mama, he’s at a bar getting shit-faced. Just go home before Baba gets suspicious.”

“Final, that?”

“Yes. Sorry. Bye.”

The sun goes down (incidentally, something my boyfriend rarely does) and Saturday is wrapping up and I haven’t seen James’s face since Thursday night. I decide to get up and call the bars. After I call the fifth bar and the bartender tells me what all the others told me (“He ain’t here, Aida,”), I decide I have to switch strategies.

I beg James’s mother, who sits on her stoop three blocks away and chain-smokes mint cigarettes all night, to let me borrow her Cadillac. She shows me her nails; she’d just had them done at the salon by the laundromat.

“What’s that a decal of?”

“It’s a Christmas tree. What’re you, blind? I had sharp eyes when I was your age.”

I get into the Cadillac and adjust the seat. I could steer with my navel at this point. I stick my head out of the window and say, “Isn’t it too early for Christmas?”

“It’s never too early to celebrate the Lord’s birthday,” she says. “We’re getting the lights and garlands this weekend.”

“I bet you are, you fucking psycho,” I say when the window is up, the air-conditioning on high and aimed directly at my face. Mama says she knows a handful of people whose faces were paralyzed this way.

I get to Phil’s Tavern just before closing. This is where I met James, who is ten years my senior. I go inside and stand by the door, scanning faces. I find him less than a minute later, chatting up a blond girl with makeup so thick she’d have to claim it at an airport.

When I met James, I’d just gotten off my shift, was drinking my first beer, while he was on his eighth. A cigarette butt had accidentally sparked a small fire in my hair; he’d put it out by slapping my head over and over again. This seemed to foreshadow the nature of our entire relationship, and I should have known right then that this was not a person to have a child with.

“Hey, asshole,” I say now. “Wanna introduce me to your friend?”

“Shit . . . honey . . . are we havin’ the baby?”

“No,” I say, “two months to go.”

“All right, fuck me, then what are you doing here?”

I slap his face. He calls me a stupid Ay-rab and tries to slap me back. I kick his groin and go back to the car.

Let me explain a little. So I was eighteen, had just finished a year of college, and found out I was pregnant. Naturally, I told my mother; unfortunately, I told her in the middle of Interstate 95. She slammed on the brakes and parked the car right there, on the highway.

“What? Na‘am yakhti? What’s that, sister? You’re pregnant? I knew it. I knew it,” she said.

“Mama, pull into the emergency lane, please,” I said.

“Ass. You big, stupid ass. I knew I should’ve had your pussy sewn up the last time we were in Egypt,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Hey, get the fuck out of the road,” said a man in a jeep.

“You were gonna sew up my pussy?”

“Who is the father? Where did you find the bastard? Aren’t you at an all-girls college?”

“Wait, I’m still stuck on the sewing-my-pussy-up-in-Egypt-last-summer part.”

“Your father’s going to shoot you. No baby for you, no baby for me. You’ll both be killed, finished, peace be upon you,” she said.

“You’re in the middle of the road, you Puerto Rican moron,” a pasty woman in a van said.

“I am Egyptian,” Mama yelled, and gave her the arm.

“You seriously thought of sewing up my pussy?” I said.

“You will have an abortion, yalla, right now.” She checked her mirrors, restarted the car, and was speeding ahead.

“I will not,” I said.

“Yes, you will, women have them every day, and I’m not ready to be a grandmother.”

“I’m not ready to be a mother, but that’s not stopping me,” I said.

She parked again, this time in the emergency lane.

“I’m going to finish school. Everything will be fine, just the way it was, but with a baby.”

“You’re so naïve, you schew-bid, schew-bid girl.” Mama was crying, and I felt like shit.

Poor Mama. She’d covered for me ever since we moved to the States, essentially for the past four years. She covered for me when I got the clap and took me to a GYN. She covered for me after discovering a bag of weed though I told my baba it was just za‘tar. She covered for me when I went to prom not with the Arab American ninth-grader and friend of the family Baba had chosen, but with a young black man I’d picked up at a club on an earlier night when Mama had covered for me. It was time for me to face the music, and the music coming from Baba was sure to be deafening.

I couldn’t tell my baba face to face. Mona, my only Arab girlfriend, came to my dorm room the day I left him a note, penned in my best Arabic, explaining everything. I’d taken the train to his Midtown office and left the note on his desk. If I’d left it at home someone would have gotten hurt. Mona said it was the perfect thing to do. That it was what she had done when she came out to her father and told him she was trans and had decided to take estrogen.

“Did he ever get over it?” I asked her, drinking milk out of a carton.

“Oh, no, honey,” said Mona, whose birth-name was Munir. “He left my mom and married another woman, said maybe she’ll give him straight sons.”

“Oh,” I said, and wanted to throw up all over Mona’s amazing knockoff designer skirt.

My father took it better than Mona’s. Having quoted poetry on every single special occasion, he was not going to stop doing it now. The note he sent back said,

Each river has its source, its course, its life.

My friend, our land is not barren.

Each land has its time for being born,

Each dawn a date with a rebel . . .

If you have the child, we will no longer be your family.

You will be dead to us forever.

“Holy shit,” I said out loud after reading it. I couldn’t believe it. Darwish? Infuriated, I took the train north, to our house. I sat by a window and watched the streets fly by: Flagship Road, Mary Lane, Raymond Street. What did it mean? Was I supposed to be the land, or the rebel, or both? I didn’t know; I couldn’t care. When the train stopped, I got off and walked the thirteen blocks from the station. When I arrived, I stared at the doorknob. How many times had I turned it to leave? How many times had I returned home after running away? It was spring then, and fireflies were floating all around, as if taking pictures of me on this momentous day. Four years in America, no traceable accent, no one would guess me Arab, and people constantly mispronounce my name. Our house is white and small, the family inside threatening to turn away for good. And inside me, new life. I turned the knob, took my shoes off in the hall, and saw Mama reading the Al-Ahram she gets from the Indian guy’s stationery shop. I hugged her and she shook her head, went into the den with me. Wood paneling, bookshelves, fireplace, Americana par excellence. Baba switched the TV off.

“You sent me a poem?” I said. “I’m pregnant and you quote me Darwish?” I was trembling.

“You’re goddamn pregnant. Who has the right to be enraged? Not you, my dear.”

It was final. Baby = no family = no money for college = I am dead. No baby = family back. I never liked this family anyway, so I chose baby.

It was a hard trimester. There were no easy mornings. My mornings were filled with races to the toilet.

“Jeez, Ai,” James would say, peering into the bathroom. “Jeez, hon, you gonna puke the whole kid out if you keep doin’ that.”

“Why am I here?”

“What’s that, cutie? Why you here? ’Cause you’re sick. I’ll make you a waffle, come on.”

I didn’t need a waffle. I didn’t need to be sitting there, hugging that toilet and not needing a waffle, at eighteen, while my friends were home in their dorms recovering from a newly purchased PCP-laced ounce of weed.

I needed to be not dead. I needed Baba and Mama to want to know that I was hugging a toilet, not wanting a waffle and not wanting to be dead.

When you’re disowned, your mother becomes your secret lover, calling from pay phones, visiting at odd hours and for short bits of time. And your lover becomes your mother, has to take care of you now that she’s gone. It’s been hard getting used to, and besides, my so-called lover is a drunk and not very motherly.

The night I have to bail him out of jail for public intoxication and battery, my friends Shoshanna and Mona are crying, “Fuck this, Aida, let’s just go. You have to leave this asshole.” I want to explain to them that I need this, need to go to school and have a father for the kid, need to be able to tell the God, on the day of judgment when I crawl out of my grave and I’m all alone and shards of sky are crashing down on me, that—look, dude—I tried.

Once a week, I go to the laundromat down the street and chat with Jackie, the attendant who has an entire row of gold front teeth, while I load the washing machines. Waiting for James’s filthy industrial uniforms to wash halfway clean, I sit in the nail parlor and let the old ladies play with my curls, paint my toenails, and give me five dollars if I make them Turkish coffee and read their fortunes. They have a hot plate, though I bring my old-school copper coffeepot, and pretty soon I invest in demitasses from Yaranoush, the Armenian store on Central Avenue, and have my own fortune-telling business going.

“Oh, Ai, tell Joan what you told me about the man in Flo-o-orida,” Mrs. Leibowitz says, punctuating words with her very fake nails.

“Aida, you goin’ to services, honey?” someone asks on a Friday, and Mrs. Leibowitz or Mamie the Widow says, “Oh, shut your mouth, the girl’s a mozalem, she don’t go there.”

Eventually, Jackie sticks her head in and says my filthy laundry is done.

I walk home with the bag on my back, a baby in my tummy, and a ton of shit going on inside my head. He is drunk in his sleep, he is drunk in the afternoon. He is drunk at work, drunk while we “make love,” drunk when he throws a dictionary at my belly and causes me internal bleeding. He is drunk when I am in the hospital waiting for a diagnosis from a doctor who scans my DOB and shakes her head. Drunk when I tell him the baby will be all right. That night, I have to drive home, and I look over at him when we’re stopped at a red light, see his Adam’s apple dance up and down, eyes shut, dark forehead covered in sweat. This is it? I ask myself, hating the government and financial aid rules, my reproductive system, his big dick, my father, and mostly, my God. Not just God, but the God, the one who wrote the book resting in the car-door pocket on my left, the book that my boyfriend erroneously skims from left to right, the book that provides Guilt big enough to make me want to marry this ape with several mental illnesses he does not plan on addressing any time soon. The light turns green, a sign from God, I decide, that yeah, this is it.

James has no idea how broke we are, five days after the hospital bill comes. I pick up the phone and call the college library, ask them if I could come in and work. When he finds out that I got the job, twenty-five hours a week at $6.50 an hour, he puts his hand on my shoulder and winks. I say to him sweetly, “Habibi, ibn il-sharmoota. Yarab tmoot.” (My love, you son of a whore, I hope you die.) “What’s that mean, baby?” He wants to know, and I lie, “It means I’ll love you forever and ever.”

So I take the job at the library, and he’s driving out to Jersey every day, which means I have to walk to the job at the library. It’s a lovely stroll, I must admit. Here are my favorite moments:

1. Stepping in broken glass while wearing my ugly, pregnant-girl sandals.

2. Getting mugged at knifepoint two blocks up from our apartment and having to give the kid my backpack, which contains three interlibrary loan books by Sahar Khalifeh, all in Arabic. He must have felt like one lucky motherfucker.

3. Stepping in dog (or human) shit while wearing my ugly, pregnant-girl sandals.

I tell James the walk isn’t worth it, and he says I should watch my step more. I say, “Yeah, that’s easy for you to say, you don’t have a three-by-two-foot addition to the front of your fucking body.”

“You’re right, hon,” he says, one hand on my thigh and the other holding a Bud. “But I can’t afford not to work in Jers. I did get a weekend job at the scrap-metal yard.” He leans over and kisses me. His lips are soft and wet, and the more I look at him, the more fine the asshole seems. His eyes are a golden hue that always shocks me because it seems too light for his complexion. His hair, always five weeks too late for a cut, curls up in gorgeous black bunches. We make love, and the whole time, I’m yelling, “Habibi, ibn il-sharmoota. Yarab tmoot,” and the guy is moaning, “Yeah, you hot Arabic princess, baby, I love you too.”

While I’m in the shower, the door has to stay open because I’m growing at an alarming rate. He shaves at the sink, which is the size of a small notebook, and I attempt to wash my nether regions. “I’m not Arabic,” I decide to inform him.

“What, you lied about that, too?” he says in mid-shave, his razor, edged with white foam, pointing at me.

“No, you moron,” I say. “I am not a language; if you must, you can call me Arab. But never Arabian or Arabic.”

“Yeah,” he says, shaving his dimpled chin. “All right, so you ain’t a horse or a language. Got it.”

I tell him I love him, and I really mean it, but that I need a showerhead thing because I can’t reach my pussy any more.

He starts to come home from the scrap-metal job with a lot of cash. I don’t know how he’s getting it, but now we have more than just a jar of peanut butter in the fridge. He says he finds metal everywhere and the boss gives him money for it.

“Where do you find this metal?” I ask him.

“Everywhere, shit, there’s metal all over the place. If people only knew.”

“What kind of metal?”

“Like, tire rims, old roofs, window frames, aluminum siding, metal metal, anything. Then I take it to the scrap yard and Mikey gives me cash for however much it weighs.”

“He goes by weight? Like gold?” I say.

“Yes, like gold,” he says in a mocking voice and a sour face. “Now will you get me a beer?”

There are long weeks when we have no money again. “It’s because there’s no metal anywhere; they must’ve caught on, those fuckin’ bums,” he says, staring off into the distance . . . well, not so much into the distance since our living room is pretty tiny. I think the beer in his callused palm is a Pabst.