The Newlyweds (9 page)

“How come you didn’t tell me about Ashok?”

“Is it important?”

“It’s interesting,” Amina said. “That is why I’m surprised you didn’t tell me.”

“I’ve known Kim since she was a kid. All that drama doesn’t seem so interesting to me anymore.”

“Oh but it is,” Amina said. “Did he become her boyfriend, do you know?”

“I think they were married,” George said.

“Married!”

“Briefly. But in some kind of ceremony over there, so I don’t know if it was really legal once they got back here.”

Amina was startled. “They came here together?”

“They came back so that he could do a business degree—at NYU—that’s New York University, in Manhattan.”

“I know that.”

“They were living together there—Kim had a bunch of temp jobs. Please don’t ever mention this in front of Cathy, though.”

“Her mother didn’t know?”

“Oh, she knew. But she was furious, and so they weren’t talking. And then after he went back to India, Kim didn’t want to admit it to her mom. She stayed in Manhattan for a little while—she was a mess—and then she finally decided to move back here. But even after she got to Rochester, she didn’t get in touch with her mother. It took her four months to call Cathy.”

“But she talked to you.”

George nodded and adjusted the vents now that the car had warmed up: he didn’t like the heat as much as she did. “It was awkward—I was caught in the middle.” He sounded aggrieved and slightly resentful, as if it were Amina who had put him in that situation.

“But why didn’t she go back with him? I mean, if they were married?”

“Who knows? Why do women do anything they do? Except for you,” George amended, as he always did. “You’re logical.”

“Thank you. I had to be practical because of our circumstances in Desh,” Amina said. “That is how I learned it.” She waited another moment, but when George didn’t say anything, she ventured another question.

“Is it very common, not talking with your parents?”

“Common enough.”

“I can’t imagine not talking to my parents.”

“Mm,” said George, who was probably calculating the expense of a lifetime of phone cards.

“Sometimes I’m afraid about raising children in America.” She looked at George, whose face was defined by the dashboard lights. She thought he looked suddenly and surprisingly handsome, as well as more uncertain than she’d ever seen him.

“You’re right to worry. The schools are terrible, and the values they’re getting at home are probably even worse.” George’s voice became more confident. “All the TV and video games, hardly a book in the house. Did you know that forty-four percent of American children watch television right before bed?”

“I was thinking of myself more. Maybe that our child would wish he had two American parents. Perhaps he would be angry at me, the way Kim is angry at Aunt Cathy.”

But George didn’t seem to be listening. “There should be a test for people before they become parents.”

“Do you think we would pass the test?”

George looked at her quickly, and then away. “Of course. You want children, right?”

Amina felt her face getting hot in the dark, as if she and George hadn’t already spent seven months sleeping in the same bed. “Yes.”

“We should wait until you’re settled. Until we know about your classes, what the requirements are.”

She thought of her mother, without whom she’d couldn’t imagine having a baby. It would be three years before Amina could get her citizenship, in 2008; only then could her parents apply for the immigrant visas they would need to become permanent residents in the United States.

“I would like to work for some time first, to save money,” she said.

“Don’t worry about the money,” George said. But he didn’t push her. “We have a few years, anyway. I want you to feel ready.”

A moment later he reached over and patted her knee, before returning his hand to the wheel.

13
The green card came the last Monday of September. In the evenings George drove Amina around to different stores and restaurants, and in each place she filled out an application. Then she began to wait. The housework took perhaps an hour and a half of her time, if she stretched it out, and then there were eight more hours until George got home from work. She watched more television than she liked to admit, especially movies, which George thought were good for “cultural acclimatization.” Amina liked romantic comedies, and after she had seen one or two a day for three weeks—her favorites were
Sleepless in Seattle
,
Mystic Pizza
, and
Pretty Woman
—she began to consider what it was she found so appealing about them. It wasn’t the expensive trappings of these onscreen courtships, she decided, but the foreign idea of a decisive moment—some gesture meaningful only to the couple involved—so that even if they were in a crowd of people the proposal was personal and unique.

Of course it was always different in real life. Only a few days into his visit to Bangladesh, she and George had begun to talk about things that it would be necessary to do “if” Amina were to come to America; after several of those conversations, the “if” had become “when,” and then two days before he was supposed to leave, George had produced a gray felt pouch from the money belt he wore around his chest. The ring was a family heirloom, and that was why he didn’t want her to wear it until they got home to Rochester.

George had unsnapped the pouch and shook its contents into his palm. The ring was a large, round diamond, flanked by two bright, triangular baguettes. The band was platinum, which was part of what made it look so foreign: she’d never pictured a wedding ring as anything but gold.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful.” She could tell that the diamond was large and expensive, and so she was surprised by the plainness of the design. She knew her mother and her aunts would be impressed by its value rather than its beauty, although her cousin Ghaniyah might find it attractively “international.” Amina touched the stone with one finger,
discovering that she was both eager to wear it and relieved that she wouldn’t have to wear it here at home.

Her parents had gone to visit an elderly relation of her mother’s in Lalmatia, leaving Amina and George alone together for the first time.

“Try it on,” he encouraged her, and so she’d put the ring on her finger. It was certainly striking, but it was much too big for her, and its effect was to make her finger look small and dry, like a child who’d been playing in the dust.

“We’ll have to have it adjusted.” George hesitated a moment. “You don’t want me to get down on one knee or anything?”

“We don’t really do that here,” Amina said.

George nodded, relieved. Then he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, so quickly that she hardly had time to register that it had happened. Her new fiancé’s face flushed in a surprisingly dramatic way.

“I won’t say ‘I love you’ now.”

Amina nodded. She’d never heard anyone say “I love you” to a romantic partner, except on television. Certainly her parents never did. Occasionally a girl at Maple Leaf had said “I love him” of a pop singer or movie actor while her friends rolled their eyes and shook their heads.

“I think people say it too much these days, until it doesn’t mean anything. I think it should just come out naturally, when you really feel it.”

“That makes sense,” Amina said, because some response seemed to be required.

George smiled. “I’m glad we agree about this stuff,” he said, and then he leaned forward to kiss her more deeply, putting one hand on her waist and the other on the back of her neck. The kiss lasted a long time, and George’s tongue was very much involved in it, and because the thought of her parents coming home and seeing this happening was so unimaginable, she felt as if a small part of her were already somewhere else.

When she got to Rochester, he had shown her the safe he’d installed on the floor of the closet, where he kept the title to their house as well as the appraisal papers for the ring. She was shocked when she saw that the ring was worth nearly ten thousand dollars and suggested to George that they keep it in the safe along with the papers.

George had laughed. “That’s actually a good idea,” he said, “except my mother and everyone will want to see you wearing it.” He smiled. “Me, too.”

She checked her e-mail constantly, but for the first two weeks she heard nothing from the stores where she had applied. She knew she would have to take anything that was conveniently located, since George would have to drop her off on the way to work. But when she thought about telling her parents about a job, Amina said a silent, extra prayer:
Please
, she asked God in the empty hours of the morning as she dusted the picture frames and pulled every blade of grass from the flower beds around the house,
please let this job be something respectable and clean—selling housewares, for example, or gardening supplies—rather than anything to do with animals or serving food
.

Here was something she had noticed about God. He often granted one prayer when you were making another or gave you something you’d asked for in the past, long after you had stopped wanting it. When she opened her e-mail on Friday morning, she found four new messages: three that were probably junk, and one from [email protected]. She clicked on the message almost without thinking and was startled to see her nickname. These days, it was only in phone calls with her parents that anyone used it.

Dear Munni
,

Assalamu alaikum! I bet you are surprised to hear from me. Well, after our last meeting I was afraid you are angry. So I have waited some time to mail you. But yesterday I went to visit your parents and they welcomed me very nicely. We sat for two hours talking about you and your success in America. I am glad to hear of it! And I pray for your green card and work permit to arrive soon
.

Here the days are cloudy, but no rain. I am working now, at Golden Horn Internet, Inc. Our boss is a Turkish man, very good. There is also a small mosque in the basement of our building. Three of our office mates pray there with me, but five others are not regular. Your parents tell me it is difficult for you to observe the correct prayer timings, so am sending you this link (
www.qibla.org
) where you can find the timings for Rochester. Please look at it straightaway!

Do you read the Daily Star? Myself, I still follow BBC Online. (You know I do not love England, but I have some love for BBC.) You will laugh to hear that I even enjoy the music from their television broadcasts! That was my favorite time of day over there—me and my flatmates eating together in front of the television, watching BBC for news and the cricket. Every time I hear the music, I am thinking, “Well, I have survived another day.” Munni, I wonder if you ever have these thoughts?

Just this week on BBC I am reading that the U.S. Senate voted for rights of prisoners in Guantanamo and Iraq. But U.S. president Bush still opposes that! They say the U.S. people are starting to know of the crimes their government is committing, and the president is growing unpopular. I wonder, how could they not know of them when they have seen reports and pictures? I am curious to hear what you think
.

Your mother and father have told me that you were married in a mosque. Tell me, was it the same ICR I wrote for you on a paper, the last night I visited in Mohammadpur? Walking down the lane to your parents’ home, I was thinking of past-Munni and present-Munni, trying to make a bridge between the two. It is difficult!

Please write soon. Allah Hafez
,

Nasir

She read the message three times, and then she went into the kitchen to clean the dishes. She didn’t like the dirty dishes to sit in the dishwasher, especially since it took the two of them so long to fill it up, and ordinarily she just washed them by hand. Today she found herself wedging the plates between the plastic prongs, sometimes knocking one carelessly against its neighbor. Had Nasir omitted the final part of his mail, she could have simply dismissed him. What country on earth didn’t have terrible secrets? Certainly their own was no exception. It was the people you had to judge when you were talking about a country, and someone like Nasir—who had gone to England, but only lived in an apartment with other Deshis, working at a Deshi business and eating curry at home with his Deshi flatmates—would never understand the place where he had lived. It was no wonder he’d run back home at the first opportunity.

She would tell him she didn’t read any paper (except sometimes the headlines on MSN) and that she couldn’t stand depressing news.

If he mentioned any of that business again, she would put his e-mail address on her blocked list, and that would be the end of their correspondence. But she wondered if she would have the strength to discard any message from home, when the time between George’s departure for work and his return was so long. It was not a question of “surviving,” because she was perfectly happy—or at least she would be once she found a job. As it was, she couldn’t escape the fact that she needed something to fill up all of those hours.

Her teenage feelings for Nasir were deep in the past; still, she was shocked to read such a perfect expression of the way she thought about herself. She struggled to find some connection between the girl she so often imagined at home in her parents’ apartment and this American wife, using the dishwasher and the washing machine, checking her e-mail on the living room computer. The task was made more difficult by the fact that there was no one in Rochester who’d known that past-Munni, and no one back at home who knew the present one. Sometimes she wondered whether the two girls would simply grow farther and farther apart, until one day they didn’t even recognize each other.

14
For a week there were “no new messages from your contacts,” and then they all came at once: some information from MCC, responding to her e-mail about their teaching certification program; a message from her cousin Ghaniyah, who announced that she was engaged to be married; and, most important, an e-mail from the Human Resources Department of MediaWorks, giving her a number to call at their Henrietta location. Amina called right away and spoke to a man named Carl, who confirmed the amazing news. She, Amina Mazid Stillman, had an American job: she was a sales associate at MediaWorks in the South Town Plaza.