Reckless Endangerment (10 page)

Then there was the fount and source herself. Karp watched his wife work at the stove, as she bent to take a casserole out of the oven, specifically at the way her buttocks moved under the thin, worn blue jeans, still as solid and round as a nectarine. The outline of the pancake holster under her jersey, and the faint whiff of exploded gunpowder mixed with her Arpège brought forth another sigh. The gun itself sat in its gun safe, but there was the evidence that this was not your regular mom and wifey.

Marlene turned, casserole in hand, and caught his eye.

“What’re
you
looking at?” she asked.

“You. Your ass, if you must know.”

“Watch that mouth, buster,” she said, thumping the dish down on the table.

“Hey, I can admire your ass. We’re married.”

“Not for long if you don’t learn to behave. Posie: bath time. Get these horrible monsters out of my sight. Lucy: toss the salad and set the table, please.”

“What should I do?” said Karp.

“Nothing. Just sit there like a pasha and thank your lucky stars for a house that runs like a clock. And clean up after, of course.”

Later, in the relative peace of the kitchen, the dishwasher chuckling, they exchanged their news.

“Not that great,” said Karp when asked how Williamsburg had gone. “He thinks I’m anti-Semitic.” He said it derisively, meaning to solicit a supportive response from his wife, perhaps an incredulous gasp, but what she said was, “Maybe you are.”

“What! How can you say that? Jesus, Marlene, the guy’s a nut, a fanatic.”

Marlene poured herself another shot of Medaglia d’Oro from the big steel hourglass espresso pot and said, “Probably is, but on the other hand, can you imagine anyone accusing me of being anti-Italian? Or anti-Catholic?”

“Why? Because you cook macaroni and go to church? I don’t see you out there throwing rocks at abortion clinics.”

“Don’t raise your voice. Abortion clinics have nothing to do with it. It’s not my fault you’ve cut yourself off from your own people—”

“My
people
! Since when did we get so biblical around here?”

“… your
people,
if I could just finish, and it’s not really your fault either. I have this big, warm, intact family, and in spite of my speckled past, I’m connected to my childhood, which includes the Church, and you’re not, mainly because of your family, who you don’t get along with, and who are also barely Jewish anymore.”

“What do you mean,
barely
? My brother Richard is so Orthodox he gets re-circumcised once a year just to make sure.”

“That’s his reaction to the situation—burrowing in. Maybe your reaction is just as extreme in the other direction. Look at the situation, Butch. Your mother dies when you’re just a kid, your father marries a …”

“Bimbo?”

“I was going to say uncongenial and not very motherly younger woman,” said Marlene, driving on like a psychic bulldozer. “So all three of you go away from home. Your brother Dan becomes a clone of your dad, Richard marries a rabbi’s daughter, you marry a nice Jewish girl, just like Mom, whom you ignore, and she runs off, and then you marry someone as little like your mother as you can find, who nonetheless has a great big family that you can slide into without having to think much about it, and in which no one expects much of you because you’re like a permanent guest. Perfect, except I get these sly digs about my religion from time to time. …”

“I don’t—”

“Shhh! Occasional sly digs, which I ignore, but which, if you notice, Lucy takes more seriously, and now this rabbi gives you a hard time and you come to me for sympathy. Which I would be glad to give, if I understood anything at all about your spiritual life, which I don’t because that’s all a kind of joke to you and you never talk about it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud! What’s to talk? I don’t believe in that stuff, Marlene, I never have. And I don’t believe in clans either, these little groups—this one’s inside, the other one’s outside. It pisses me off.”

“Too bad for you, then,” said Marlene. “They exist. It’s like not believing in gravity. Oh, I’ll just jump off this building, doesn’t affect me, no, sir…”

“What’re you getting at, Marlene?” Karp snapped, more violently than he had intended. “You want me to convert? You want me to lay
ts’fillin
in the morning? What? I don’t understand.”

Marlene finished her coffee, rose, and placed her cup and pot on the drain board.

“My point,” she said, as if explaining something to a dull child, “was that although you yourself are miraculously free of the ethnic problems that affect the rest of us, it is a fact that you got yourself canned last year, from the only job you ever really liked, largely because you got yourself involved in a racial situation that was over your head, and now you’re in another mess with this rabbi, who they sent you to see presumably because they figured you had some special understanding there. Everybody’s on a team, Butch. People start getting anxious when they can’t read the letters on your chest.”

A long, uncomfortable silence. Marlene tilted her head to fix him with her real eye. Karp glowered at her, but as always, that tilt of her head, birdlike, interested, the symbol of her damaged body and its resident courageous spirit, charmed him and drained any resentment from his heart. “Well,” he said dryly, “you may have a point. I will strive to do better in that department. And how was
your
day?”

“Oh, a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives, as Walter Cronkite used to say. Girls and guns. Oh, and lest you think you’re the only member of this family who doesn’t live up to expectations, I got a tongue-lashing from Mattie about what a shitty feminist I am. Yes, you may well be amazed. She’s got this goddamn woman who can’t be made to understand that her husband is going to hurt her, that he’s always going to hurt her, and every time we help her out she ends up getting back with him. I think she calls him, in fact, or lets it out where she is so he finds her. So I say there’s so many woman desperately
trying
to break away, we don’t have time to fuck with an idiot like this, cut her loose”—she made a helpless gesture—“but you know Mattie.”

“Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”

“Oh, she’s all right, really. I guess you have to admire her. She never gives up.”

“Neither did Hitler,” said Karp. “Marlene, she’s a vigilante.”

It was an old argument that Marlene did not at this moment wish to pursue. She shrugged off the comment and said, “You have to work with all kinds of people, and you have to take them for what they are, not for what you’d prefer them to be. That was Marlene’s daily spiritual advice nugget, and I expect you to take it to heart.”

“I will. You could put out a calendar.”

“I could. The feminist failure date book.” She stood and stretched. “What I need, and what I intend to have, is a long, perfumed, luxurious tub. Care to join me?”

“That’s definitely the best offer I’ve had all day.”

“Well, I should certainly
hope
so,” said Marlene.

Hassan Daoud had been in the United States for ten years, since shortly after the Six Day War, in fact, when the famous lightning victory of the Israelis had convinced him that the Arab armies were never going to push the Jews into the sea and get him back into his grandfather’s land in the Jezreel. He had a cousin in America. Transportation was arranged, he worked double shifts in a warehouse for seven years, saved every penny, and was able to send for his wife, Rima, his son, Walid, and his daughter, Fatyma. He started baking the flat bread of the Middle East, as his father had before him, in a borrowed oven, in a space rented in a friend’s garage. He would bake the night through and then deliver the loaves before dawn to a string of Arab grocery stores in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, using an old Pontiac station wagon, also borrowed. Again, every penny saved, until he had the down payment on the storefront off Atlantic Avenue he now occupied, and saw the lettering in real gold, in Arabic and English inscribed on the window,
Ahsen Foruhn,
BEST BAKERY
(for it was nothing less), and his own name beneath it. A proud day, second only to the day his first son had been born.

The bakery prospered. Hassan worked like the devil, and Rima worked silently beside him, as a woman should, like a donkey. They had three more children, of whom only one, thank God, was a girl. The bread was in demand, not only among the Arabs, whose population in Brooklyn had exploded in the last decade, but also the specialty-food stores in Manhattan were buying, even some of the local supermarkets. He bought a large white GM step-in delivery truck. Each package of a dozen he sold for the equivalent of a day’s wage in Palestine. He was rich, which was only to be expected. In America everyone was rich; why else live in so godless a nation?

What weighed him down, and made him curse, and stamp, and pull on his mustache, and beat his wife (although only with a very small stick) was the two older children. Walid, his firstborn, was involved in some stupid political thing, running with a group of worthless hoodlums who fancied themselves
fedayin.
This had attracted the attention of the police, and Hassan was waiting for the inevitable visit demanding a bribe. The boy had been beaten, of course, and given extra work to keep him out of trouble, but a father’s eyes could not be everywhere. Still, politics, however stupid, was not disgraceful. Hassan could sit with the men and sip coffee and lament his worthless son. Many of the other men, of course, had worthless sons too, and it was pleasant to compete as to who had the hardest lot as a father, whose son was more ungrateful for the many benefits showered upon him. But of the other thing, the daughter, he could not speak. He could barely let it flow through his mind.

The fact was that Fatyma, at fourteen, was already a whore, or the next thing to a whore. Her head was filled with thoughts of fornication. She listened to the music of fornication on her radio (before he had smashed it) and went to American films (that were all fornication and blasphemy) and would have gone out of the house dressed as a whore, with a painted face (and had he not found actual whore’s face paint where she had hidden it under her mattress?). He had stopped that for the time being by chaining her ankle to a radiator at night, on a long chain that enabled her to visit the toilet. This, however, was not a permanent solution. In the old country he would have paid a woman to slice out her sinful parts with a razor, as was done with uncontrollable girls, but the rules were different here. Hassan did not want to go to jail. Already he had a stack of letters from the truant officer, wanting to know why Fatyma was not in school. He did not think the truant officer would comprehend the problem. Americans had no idea of honor or of the responsibilities of a father. No, the solution was to marry her off while she was still marriageable, before she got with some boy and lost her honor, in which case he would have to kill her, jail or no jail.

So he had written letters and had found the right man, a prosperous importer in Baalbek called Zaid al-Habashi, who was fifty and looking for a younger wife to add to his household. The match was made by post, contracts were signed, passport and ticket purchased. In two days she would leave, escorted by a family going back to Beirut on a visit.

Naturally, when Hassan had announced this news, Fatyma had wailed, and cursed, and even an exceptionally severe beating had not stopped her noises. She was wailing still. He could hear her upstairs from the back room of the bakery where he worked, even over the rumble of the kneading machine. Eventually, he knew, she would stop crying and accept her fate, as all women did. But he was glad that it was only two more days.

In the night, in the short time between the preparation of the dough and the time the baking must begin, while the family slept, Fatyma worked. The chain that bound her to the iron radiator leg was long enough to reach the bathroom in the hallway, but was also long enough to reach into the next bedroom, where her brothers slept. She knew where Walid kept his knife, a long, curved dagger, old but sharp. It had been in the family for years, always in the possession of the oldest son. Walid was snoring like a pig and did not stir as she removed it from his bureau drawer.

Back in her room, she frantically scraped the soft, old wood upon which the radiator leg rested. It took her nearly two hours to chisel away a depression deep enough so that she could slip the loop of chain beneath it. Free now, she went to her closet and used the knife to pry up a floorboard. Beneath it, tightly rolled, were two pairs of jeans and four T-shirts, forbidden garments that she had shoplifted from stores in downtown Brooklyn. She dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, pulled on socks and her cheap sneakers, and her ugly, knee-length gray tweed coat. The two suitcases her father had provided for the journey were packed with the clothes needed for her new life in Lebanon as the second wife of a fat old man. Choosing the smaller of the two, she spilled out the embroidered gown, the slippers, the headdress, the veil, and put in her scant American wardrobe.

“What are you doing, Fatyma?”

Her breath stopped in her throat. Leila, her little sister, was sitting up in bed and watching her. The child’s eyes were wide and confused in the faint gleam from the street. Fatyma sat on her sister’s bed and stroked her hair.

“It’s late. You have to go back to sleep.”

“But what are you
doing
?” the child insisted.

“Well, you know I am getting married, right? Well, my new husband is waiting outside for me. I have to climb out the window and meet him, and I have to be very, very quiet, because if anyone hears me, then I can’t get married. That’s why you have to be quiet and go back to sleep.”

“But
why
do you?” asked the child.

“It’s a tradition,” Fatyma said, an answer the child had heard before.

“Will you come back?”

“Oh, sure,” Fatyma lied. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll wear my wedding dress for you, okay?”

When the child was settled under the covers again, Fatyma put her brother’s knife in the pocket of her coat. She placed in the suitcase a plastic bag containing the lipstick and blusher (also boosted) that her father had not found, some underwear and toilet articles, and two paperback books, both heavily thumbed. One was called
Fountain of Desire.
These words were printed on the cover in swirling pink letters, over an illustration of a darkly handsome man embracing a woman in an old-fashioned dress. The other book was
Norma Jean,
a biography of Marilyn Monroe. Fatyma had stolen them from the public library. She believed they contained nearly all of what she needed to know to survive in her new life. Slowly, carefully, she forced up her window and slipped onto the fire escape, clanking faintly. She descended and walked quickly toward the Atlantic Avenue subway station. She stood on the IND platform for what seemed like a long time, with her hand on the knife in her pocket. A D train for Manhattan arrived, and Fatyma boarded it. When the train doors swished shut, she sighed and relaxed somewhat. At last she was bound for America.