The Nakeds (34 page)

Hannah knew she should be relieved that the operation had been what the doctor called a success. Her leg was free, unbound, but it felt tiny and defenseless. Now, in bed, her thin pajamas weren’t enough, the sheets weren’t enough, and she was acutely aware of her leg’s vulnerability. She hadn’t told anyone, but she missed the casts, the protection and cover they had offered her. She pushed the blanket and sheets back and got out of bed, glancing at her crutches and deciding to leave them where they stood against her closet.

She walked down the hall to Mustafa’s room. The steps were tentative and painful. She limped, tipped to one side, and held onto the wall.

It was after midnight and he was sleeping. With her ear to the door, she heard his heavy snoring. She knocked but didn’t wake him. She knocked harder and opened the door a couple of inches. “Hey,” she whispered. “Hey, Mustafa. I’m sorry to wake you,” she said.

He bolted up in bed, looking around. “What’s going on?” he said, startled.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

He composed himself, pulled the sheet and blanket up, and invited her in. “It’s OK,” he said.

“I wanted to ask you something before you go,” she said, stepping into the room.

“Where are your aluminum friends?” Mustafa smiled at her.

“Left them in my bedroom,” she said. “I held onto the wall. And it hurt like hell.”

He nodded and yawned at the same time.

“I shouldn’t have woken you up.”

“Sit down.”

“I know you’re leaving in the morning. I didn’t want to bother you, but I—” she began and then stopped herself.

“I’m not bothered,” he said.

She stood there without saying a word, thinking that she could still go back to her room and leave him alone. He needed his sleep. His plane was leaving early in the morning.

“What, Hannah? Take a load off.” He pulled his legs up, making room for her, and patted the space at the foot of the bed. “Sit down,” he said again.

Mustafa’s accent was still thick, but there was no mistaking his words. He liked colloquialisms and seemed pleased with himself when he’d used one correctly—or incorrectly. Hannah always understood what he said or meant to say even when he said something else.

“I wanted you to tell me again about your broken arm,” she said.

“I told you. I had a seizure at school and fell down in the concrete.”

“On
the concrete,” she corrected.

“On, in.” He waved his hands around. “I fell,” he said. “And broke my arm. Hurt like fuck.”

She smiled.

“Just thinking about the pain makes me want to smoke a joint. You have one?”

She shook her head.

“I think I have one somewhere.” He jumped out of the sheets, bent down, and picked his jeans up from the floor. He searched the pockets. He opened his wallet and searched his jacket. “Ah,” he said, finding what looked like half a joint, holding it up for proof. “It’s a fatty,” he said, smiling.

“We can’t just smoke it in the house,” she said.

“Why not?”

“They’re home. We’ll get caught.”

He grumbled something and opened the window. He sat on the couch. “Come over here,” he said.

“You’re leaving town, but I have to live with them. Or at least her,” she said.

“Azeem and your mom are so moody these days—it would be good for them to get stoned. We should blow the smoke under their door and cheer them up.”

Hannah laughed.

“Your mom would realize that my brother loves her even if he fucked that woman’s big ass.”

“He didn’t fuck her ass,” she said, smiling.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Anyway, it would be good for them to smoke some pot and loosen up. Hey,” he said. “Are they married? I think they’re married.”

“They’re married,” she said.

“I knew it,” he said. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Because your family has a girl picked out for him.”

“He’s a different man than he was when he left. He’s not right for Raina.”

“Will you tell your mom?”

“Eventually.”

“Good.”

“Come over here,” he said again, patting the seat next to him.

Mustafa was wearing surfer shorts that she didn’t know he had, and though he looked sort of silly, she was happy he wasn’t naked. She almost said,
I thought you slept naked,
and then realized how that would sound, so she kept quiet. Since the last seizure, he’d stopped going to the nudist camp and stopped masturbating obsessively too. “It’s better when it’s with a girl,” he’d said soon after the seizure. “I don’t need to do it morning, noon, and night,” he’d told them all.

“Probably not,” Azeem admitted.

“So much for your theory, brother,” he said.

“The
author’s
theory,” Azeem said.

“You’re the champion of it,” Mustafa insisted.

“You’ve learned a lot of English since you’ve been here,” Hannah said, impressed with the word
champion.
What would have been even better was if he’d used it as a verb. If he’d said,
Yes, brother, but you championed it.
She’d have to remember to teach him that before he left.

“I won’t be pleasuring myself so much,” he’d told them.

“Great,” Hannah had said.

“Wonderful,” her mom had said.

Now, Hannah and Mustafa passed the joint back and forth between them and when she coughed he handed her the pillow from his bed to cover her mouth. She smelled his scent on the pillow and knew that she’d miss him. She looked out the open window, felt the cool air on her face, and stared into the backyard at the trees and empty chairs. Far off, a dog howled, but mostly it was quiet.

“Tell me about your arm,” she said again.

“That’s all there is to tell,” he said.

“Tell me how it was skinny.”

“It
was
skinny.”

“And tell me how it plumped up.”

“It plumped up.”

“How long did it take?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You must remember.”

“Let me see your leg, Hannah.”

She shook her head.

“That’s why you’re here.”

“It’s skinny now, but it’s going to plump up,” she said. “It’ll take time, I’m sure.”

“Let me see,” he urged.

“No.”

“We’ll just sit here until you show me.”

They finished off the joint and sat stoned without saying anything for a long time.

“Let me see,” he said again.

She pulled up her pajama leg and there it was.

She thought she heard him gasp and then recover.

“Not
that
skinny,” he said, looking at it. “My arm
never
looked like that,” he said.

She quickly dropped the fabric and covered up her leg. She stood up to go.

“No,” he said, sternly. “Sit down.”

“I’m going,” she said, feeling like she was about to cry and not wanting to do so in front of him. Still, instead of leaving she stood there, looking down at him.

“Come here,” he said. “Come closer.”

“No,” she said. “Shut up, please, Mustafa. Don’t say anything else.” Her voice cracked into the room.

“The leg is just one piece of you. There are a lot more pieces,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Listen,” he said. And he lowered his voice so that she had to lean down and forward to hear him. “You’ve still got the good body,” he told her.

“Rebecca’s going to miss you,” she said.

“My pot, maybe,” he said.

And their lips brushed and they almost kissed and then they
did
kiss and then they
were
kissing and he had his arms around her, holding her, hugging her, and then she was crying for the first time in a long, long time, she was crying hard, and he was whispering something in Arabic, something sweet she could not understand but understood perfectly.

WHILE HANNAH
was kissing Mustafa, Pablo was kissing Rebecca. Hannah found out because Rebecca told her on the phone. Pablo didn’t want to face her, Becca said. He feels terrible, she told her. He wanted me to call you. He’d been drawn to her for months. “It was always me,” Rebecca said.

“It’s OK,” Hannah said, and was surprised that it
was
OK. She had more important things to worry about now than whether or not Pablo liked her enough and whether Rebecca was loyal enough. She had Azeem, whom she missed, and Mustafa, whom she missed, and she had her mother, who missed and loved them both, and she had her father and Christy, who was supposedly cured, a new woman who was really just her former, too-cheerful self.

They were all coming over, her father and Christy from Irvine, Azeem from Los Angeles, and the five of them were going out to dinner in Manhattan Beach. A place called Kettle’s that the Harrisons had recommended to Nina. They were going to celebrate what her mother called Hannah’s nearly perfect gait, which was nowhere near perfect, which was barely passable.

Rebecca and Pablo didn’t seem that important. It hurt, sure, and she wasn’t happy about having to see them together at school, but if all went well, she’d be avoiding them and walking away from them, sans crutches, on two working feet.

She’d kissed Mustafa back and then kissed him again and felt more during those kisses than she had when Pablo touched her everywhere, and there was no explaining it, it just was.

In the morning, before he and Azeem left for LAX, Mustafa came into the kitchen to say good-bye. “Last night was something I should have understood from my first day here. I should have ignored your mean face and saw the real face,” he told her.

“I told Pablo about your seizure,” she said, putting down her glass of orange juice.

“So?”

“It wasn’t right, the way I told the story . . .”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

“We’re two peapods in a pod.”

“It’s two peas in a pod.” Hannah was crying and laughing at once.

“I should have—” he began, but she interrupted him.

“I want to tell you about the word
champion,
” she said.

“Tell me.”

“It’s also a verb,” she told him. “Azeem
championed
that author’s theory about sexual deprivation.”

“I champion you,” he said.

“I champion you too.”

Azeem stepped into the kitchen. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and rubbed it on his pant leg before biting into it. He looked at Hannah and then around the room. “Hey, no crutches,” he said, excited, juice running down the sides of his mouth. He reached for a napkin and wiped his lips.

“Don’t get too happy,” she said. “It hurt like hell just to make it down the hall.”

Azeem walked over to her, mussed her hair, and kissed the top of her head.

•  •  •

Now, waiting for her father and Christy and Azeem to come over, she thought about Mustafa seizing on the concrete and breaking his arm. She thought of the car hitting her and changing the way she lived and moved in the world. For the first time in years she thought about the person who hit her, how he left her body where it fell, how he didn’t attend to her body at all. She thought about her leg—just a piece of her, Mustafa had said, and then he kissed her.

It wasn’t just a piece of her. He was wrong about that. It was one of her four limbs and it was fucked up and ugly and deformed. She hated that word and had always reserved it for other people, for babies born with twisted hands or feet. But it was a word that belonged to her now and he had told her the truth. The sight of it had made him gasp. He had to catch his breath and recover. It was wrecked and damaged, looking down at it made her cringe, and her mother’s dream might well have been prophetic.

But the leg almost worked, she couldn’t deny that it almost worked, that it was going to eventually work, do its job, it would eventually, one day, maybe even soon, take her away, it would take her to jobs and parties and restaurants, it would take her to a restaurant later that evening, in fact, to Kettle’s for her celebration, where when she had to go to the bathroom she’d walk away from the table without crutches, leaving her four parents smiling and talking to each other, where she wouldn’t need the wall, where she’d walk past two waitresses whispering in the backroom, where she’d walk past a busboy and a smiling chef, a chef whose smile would disappear when he saw her, whose skin would go pale, who would recognize her as his history, and who’d stand outside the bathroom waiting for her to open the door.

Her leg would take her past Rebecca and Pablo in the quad, to tenth grade, eleventh grade, and twelfth.

It would take her to college, to birthdays, and funerals.

It would take her wherever she wanted to go.

MANY THANKS
and much love to my family, especially my father, Aaron Glatt, my favorite storyteller, who says all of this is in the genes. For my brother Andrew Glatt, who’s a lawyer and who said early on, “If you write anything remotely autobiographical, leave me out of it completely.” Which I did.

To the Dinner Party Crew: Meghan Daum and Alan Zarembo, Heather Havrilesky and Bill Sandoval. Extra love and gratitude to Meghan, who read my work at a pivotal moment and offered much-needed encouragement.

To the gifted, lovely Emily Rapp, who spoke of it first.

To Leelila Strogov and Ernie Liang, who are the family we’ve picked out, and to Gwen Dashiell and Jessica Ware, who are more like my sisters than my friends.

I am indebted to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for the gift of time and space; to California State University, Long Beach for a sabbatical I put to work; to my students, past and present; and to Suzanne Greenberg, who read an early draft and offered astute advice.

Much appreciation to Ron Hogan for his sharp eye and editorial wisdom, and to the loyal Andrew Blauner, my agent for the long haul.

And finally, to my husband, David Hernandez, whose own commitment to words has made our house conducive to writing, who turns off the phones and insists we get to work, and without whom the bad things wouldn’t be as bearable and the good things wouldn’t be as good.