The Night Counter (11 page)

“So sad,” Scheherazade said.

“But it was because of men like Marwan that GM and Mr. Ford had to give the workers fair money and good treatment,” Fatima said, and licked the last of the powdered sugar from her fingers. “Marwan’s courage proved that we didn’t just care about sending money back home, which is what most people thought about Arabs. I know because that’s what Millie told me her husband told her. He told her we’d just take off back to ‘garlic eater land’ as soon as we made enough money. Marwan went back to working for Mr. Ford when I got pregnant with my oldest so he could be nearer to me. Even though his left arm was always weak after that strike, he was starting to get Ibrahim and the others to talk about unionizing Ford. One day, Ibrahim came to tell me that Marwan was in the hospital again. This time he died, Allah
yerhamu
. He was barely thirty-nine years old and had a heart attack. He was putting a door on one of Mr. Ford’s new model Tudors. I have never ridden in a Tudor in my life. I can’t.”

“So you did love him,” Scheherazade said.

“If he had lived longer, I probably would have loved him more,” Fatima admitted. “I think God was willing me to love him a little. But it took a while. That’s why it took a while to make a baby. And he was always tired or gone.”

Mr. Kim came out with the black skirt, which had been pressed perfectly. He cleared his throat, pretending not to have heard the tail end of her story. “Will you be able to carry it by yourself?” he asked.

“Of course,” Fatima said. “I’m not dead yet.”

She took the carefully hung skirt and waited for Scheherazade to take her arm, but she was too busy looking at a man whose muscles rippled under his tight T-shirt. “Men’s body parts sure have grown since I was mortal,” she gushed, ignoring Fatima’s proffered arm.

Fatima walked off in a huff but did not get far. After eleven steps, her cane caught on the edge of the plastic bag covering the skirt. As she made her way to the unquestionably harsh concrete of the sidewalk, she began to form the thought that she probably would die in six days of complications from a broken hip. But before the thought had enough seconds to crystallize, Fatima found herself caught by firm yet comforting arms.

“I got you, ma’am,” a voice said, and she looked up into the turquoise eyes of the handsome neighbor boy.

Fatima attempted to recompose her dignity as Scheherazade ogled his beauty She glared at Scheherazade. “Act like a lady,” she scolded.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the handsome boy said, standing her upright. “My grandmother used to always tell me the opposite. How about I give you a lift home? I’m your neighbor.”

“Yes, with the nice big cars.” Fatima blushed, completely embarrassed by her helplessness. “I was just smoking something special today. First time. I didn’t know it could make me so dizzy.”

“Right on. It mostly makes me hungry.” He shrugged. “Got to watch the body, you know, so I don’t do it anymore. And I’m not saying anything about the white powder around your nose.”

“The dry cleaner has free doughnuts,” she whispered.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in the same irritating tone Amir used when she told him she was inviting a potential wife to dinner.

He helped Fatima into his SUV Scheherazade climbed in the backseat, taking her first ride in one of the petrol caravans.

“Smoother than a camel indeed,” Scheherazade said to Fatima.

“Chevy.” Fatima nodded. “You’re a good boy. Patriotic. I like that. Look at these cars on this street—Mercedes, BMW, Lexus. You wouldn’t see such behavior in Detroit. These boys here with their Japanese and German cars have no loyalty and respect for their grandfathers’ toil. During the war, my husbands and the others were all making war vehicles to defeat the Germans and Japanese, and now their factories make more cars for their grandkids than Ford.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the handsome boy said again. He stopped in back of the other SUV parked in front of his house and helped Fatima out.

“You should meet my grandson,” Fatima said. “You could teach him a thing or two about loyalty. Look at his Honda.”

“I’d love to show him my next new car if it would make you happy.” He smiled. Then he got out and helped Fatima, who was still a little shaky from her near fall, down. “Everything good?”

“
Sí
,” she said. “Thank you.” Scheherazade stood next to her as she watched the handsome boy park in his driveway. Nice boy. If she had more time, she’d find him a wife, too.

“
Al-hamdulilah
, we’re home,” Fatima said. “I was so worried if I fell, I would be bedridden for the rest of my days, and I don’t have that kind of time with the house and Amir still left to settle.
Ya oukhti
, my sister, I’m tired.”

“But you accomplished much in the last two days,” Scheherazade pointed out. “You left your mama’s letters to Nadia, let your grandson know that the funeral papers are ready, and bequeathed to your unmarried daughter the dress you married her father in.”

“I did not marry both husbands in that dress,” Fatima corrected. “Ibrahim and I do not have wedding pictures. I was in mourning and pregnant. There was no celebration. My only wedding pictures are alone or with Marwan. I told Laila, who is Marwan’s only child, that she could wear the dress for her wedding, but she said it would be an insult to Ibrahim, who had been her father since she was born.”

“It was very normal for her to believe that,” Scheherazade concurred.

“Laila is like that,” Fatima boasted. “Normal. She married an Arab boy, of course. Egyptian. Everyone came to the wedding, all the children. His mother came from Egypt for it, and even though she was from a good family, I was grateful that she would live far away from Laila. Do you know what Laila makes at Thanksgiving?”

“Thanksgiving?”

“It’s an American holiday where they sacrifice a turkey,” Fatima explained. “So do you know what she makes at Thanksgiving?”

Scheherazade licked her lips. “Does it have pistachios and cinnamon?”

“She makes turkey,” Fatima boasted. “
Subhan Allah
. Normal, see. Do you know how I know this? Because she would invite Ibrahim and me every year, like a normal daughter does. … You could go see for yourself.”

“You should rest for Suheir’s funeral tomorrow,” Scheherazade advised.

But Fatima did not leave, did not even slouch, despite the ache in her hip. The two women regarded each other under the streetlight until Fatima
nodded good night. “I should rest. It’s going to be a very big funeral,” she said, and hobbled into the house.

When Fatima was out of sight, Scheherazade clapped her hands for her carpet. It was not her duty to visit this daughter, but the way Fatima had talked about Detroit’s glory, it made her wonder. Scheherazade had seen many of the world’s most beautiful sites: Mount Ararat at sunset, the Oracle of Delphi at dawn, the Nile channeled by the Aswan Dam in the spring. Why not pay this daughter in Detroit a visit?

She departed just as the handsome neighbor boy stepped back out and tapped on a window of the petrol caravan under the eucalyptus tree. She heard him say to the man and woman in black, “I got a scoop for you,” as the wind swept her toward Detroit.

The next afternoon, following storm clouds that were moving in that direction, Scheherazade found Fatima’s normal daughter in a place with more food than an army marching through the Sahara needed. She recognized Fatima’s nose on Laila’s face.

LAILA STARED AT
a slab of pork at the supermarket and calculated the cost of a nervous breakdown: $150 an hour for the shrink, $200 a month for pills not covered by insurance, another $200 for a homeopathic doctor and nutritionist, at least $500 for a lawyer to write up her will in case she became suicidal, and $850 for a self-actualization yoga retreat in California. Throw in another $600 for a couple of colonics and a massage. Expensive.

The one thing Laila had inherited from Fatima, besides the nose, was the ability to do math and shop at the same time. A nervous breakdown, along with all her other medical expenses, was not in the family budget. She would have to settle for prayer, her husband’s response to everything these days. Or she just might get as much satisfaction from purchasing pork.

It was so cold in the meat aisle that Laila found herself readjusting her wig as if it were a ski cap. She shivered and reached for the pinkish-gray pork. Her hand jerked back. How did people touch this stuff? She watched a frazzled woman with three kids grab a large armful of packages—it was a pretty good pork sale. One of the kid’s suckers popped out of his mouth and landed where Laila used to have 36D breasts.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the woman apologized, reaching to pull off the Jolly Rancher.

Laila brushed the woman’s hand away. “It’s okay. My boys were always doing things like that,” she said, and then plucked the sucker off her sweater and handed it to the mother, who handed it back to the kid. This
woman isn’t the germophobe I was with my boys, Laila thought. The woman’s two other kids were tossing one of the pork packages to each other as if it were a football.

“What do you do with this stuff?” Laila asked, pointing at the flying meat.

“The pork chops?”

“Yes, the pork.”

“Well, you can broil them and then cover them in barbecue sauce,” the woman recommended. “That’s what they do in the South.”

She pointed to a row of barbecue sauce bottles lined up above the pork section. Laila thanked her as she and her kids rolled away with their cart, which was overflowing with cereal boxes redeemable via the coupons the youngest child was waving around. Laila grabbed a bottle of barbecue sauce and saw the price: $4.99 a bottle. It was a good thing she’d never eaten pork. She could get two bottles of ketchup for that price, and that would take care of at least fifty hamburgers. She bought a couple of cans of tomato sauce instead. It was not as if Ghazi had ever eaten pork. He wouldn’t know how it was supposed to be served.

As she put her groceries in the car, Laila almost slipped on a greasy rain puddle made the previous night during the first thunderstorm of summer. She could smell more rain on the way. She and Ghazi used to talk about moving to Florida when the kids grew up. In truth, she had flown on an airplane only once in her life, she’d never lived anywhere but Detroit, all her doctors were here, and her relationship with Ghazi wasn’t such that either relaxed at the thought of living in a place where the only people they would know would be each other. And Ghazi’s mosque was here. She slammed the trunk hard.

When Laila had discovered her cancer, Ghazi had discovered Islam. Until then they had been the kind of Muslims who fulfilled their duties by giving to the poor and not eating pork. They knew when the Muslim holidays were only when Ghazi’s mother called from Cairo to say
Eid Mubarak
. Now Ghazi was the kind of Muslim who went to the mosque five times a day, didn’t drink, and gave all the money he used to spend on his fancy
gym membership to the new mosque, as if trading in fat for prayer would make his family healthy again.

Laila drove by the new mosque as she headed to Dearborn for what her mother called real food. She couldn’t serve just tomato-sauced pork for dinner, any more than she could miss the mosque’s minarets from the freeway. Michigan’s Muslims bragged that the mosque was the largest one in North America.

At Greenland Supermarket, she bought
halloumi
cheese, a bag of pumpkin seeds, and a five-liter bottle of olive oil from Lebanon, which she noted didn’t cost half as much as the pork, despite the sale. She usually got the ingredients to make
foul
for Ghazi, but today, for the first time in her marriage, she wasn’t in the mood. Amani, Ghazi’s mother, could make it for him later in the week. After all, she had come here from Cairo to help, as Ghazi described the purpose of her chaotic arrival.

The store was packed, as usual, and Laila waited in a very long line with women in head scarves, black
abayas
, or tight rayon tops with glitter designs. It all fit in here, but Laila remembered that when she was a girl, it was very rare to see a head scarf, let alone an
abaya
, in Dearborn. The Arabs of her childhood had been blenders; they just mixed into the rest of the country. She didn’t know where those Arabs were now, all those popular girls from high school.

The shoppers at Greenland, mostly women, checked one another out as usual, either in judgment or out of curiosity. Laila used to think that gave the
hijabis
the advantage because she couldn’t see the secrets under their scarves. However, with the wig, she felt that they were on even ground, and she stared right back. It turned out that after all these years, she was a better starer than anyone else. A few minutes later, no one would look at her.

She turned her attention to the collage of posters at the exit behind the cashiers. Most featured big-eyed children in rags, lone figures among rubble—with one sign asking its readers in both English and Arabic to sponsor a child in the refugee camps, which Laila did; another asking them to give money to the schools in southern Lebanon, which Laila did;
and another asking for contributions to restore Egypt’s classic black-and-white films, which Laila also did.

There were posters asking for money to rebuild Iraq. This Laila did not give to. Many of her neighbors had kids in the military, and Laila felt sad for them every day, but she did not agree with the destruction of Iraq, and so she could not bring herself to give to its reconstruction. This was also how she had responded to the loss of her breasts. Ghazi had said that reconstructive surgery would make her feel like a woman again, but she still felt like a woman, even if he couldn’t see that anymore. Laila had found her cancer 430 days ago, the same day the United States invaded Iraq.

The bagger, Ahmad, asked her how she was doing. Everyone in Dearborn knew her “situation,” as they called the cancer in whispers, because of Ghazi’s generous contributions to the mosque. Ahmad was a sweet kid, twenty-four, about the same age as Zaid, her youngest. Ahmad had been in the United States only fourteen months, and he always said how lucky her boys were to have her so close. He missed his mom. Laila definitely would have had a nervous breakdown if her sons had talked about missing her. But on the days when the boys took her to radiation instead of Ghazi, she smelled their fear through their clothes, which she still ironed for them. If her boys were married, they would not miss her so much if the cancer came back. When she had told them that if she died, they would want someone to lean on, they had told her that the cancer would not come back. They did not mention any girlfriends.

“
Allahu akbar
,” Ahmad grunted as he heaved the five liters of olive oil into the trunk. The pork bag tipped over.

“That’s funny-looking chicken, Auntie,” he said.

Laila stepped between him and the pork. “It was on sale,” she explained. “Fifty cents a pound. What can you expect for that, you know?”

Ahmad was impressed. Dearborn’s stores, like ethnic markets everywhere, sold meat and produce at rock-bottom prices, but fifty cents a pound?

“You shop well, Auntie,” he said. There were ten people on this planet who could call her “Auntie” by blood, but she had hardly ever seen them.
Most of them, unlike her sons, had gotten married long ago. Maybe she and Ghazi should have left Detroit, as her siblings had.

Laila drove home along Warren Avenue, where she had grown up but had not lived since her marriage. Then it had been Arabs mixed in with Slavs and Irish. She passed the messy Arabic calligraphy on mom-and-pop groceries and boutiques, the syncopating Iraqi pop music seeping out of Lincolns and Buicks, and the McDonald’s bragging in red letters,
WE PROUDLY SERVE HALAL
M
C
N
UGGETS
.

Maybe there were fewer women willing to marry a guy with an Arab name nowadays. Even so, her sons should have been married long before 9/11. Laila feared that the boys now jinxed each other. The younger boys’ girlfriends would be turned off, she was sure, by the fact that their much older brothers hadn’t married yet. She would have thought it weird if all of Ghazi’s older brothers had been single when she married him.

Laila was so anxious to think of reasons for her sons’ singleness that she almost hit an old man coming out of Masri Sweets. She skidded to a stop just in time. It was the old man’s cane she noticed first: the cedar carvings of her great-grandfather.

She had called her father last week, but when was the last time she had seen him?

She got out of the car, the humid summer breeze causing her head to hurt as it whipped through her wig.

“Hi, Baba,” she said. Like all her siblings, Laila answered Ibrahim in English even when he used Arabic, but she was the only one who called him Baba instead of Dad.

Ibrahim looked up. “Fatima?”

“No, it’s me,” she said. “Laila.”

Laila read the thought on his face: How could this old woman be my daughter?

“I’ve been a little sick,” she explained. “That’s why I look like this.”

Laila expected him to turn away before admonishing her for never exercising or for eating bad food, as he always used to, but he stared her right in the face. Actually looked. And kept looking. She couldn’t remember
him ever looking at any of his daughters without turning away the minute they caught him. He reached for her cheek, and she remembered the last time he had touched her. He had held her hand on her wedding day.

“Why aren’t you fat no more?” Ibrahim whispered.

The trembling in his fingers quietly drummed her face. She did not know if it was from age or from seeing her. Whatever the reason, that was when Laila gave in to her nervous breakdown, whatever the cost, right in front of Masri Sweets, amid the scent of fried dough and rosewater. Her father’s kindness was the last surprise she could handle. She kept on crying, right in the middle of the sidewalk, as women covered in black stepped around her in the summer heat, their emotions displayed in their heavy walk rather than in their impenetrable faces.

Laila was sixty-five years old now, too old to lean on her father, and he was too small now to hold her. Ibrahim still didn’t look away. Neither did the people in Masri Sweets, who were watching her from the safety of air-conditioning.

The
Ithan
went off, calling all believers to the nearby mosque. The a cappella chant of the
Ithan
had always moved Laila in the way “Ave Maria” did when she attended Catholic weddings and “Amazing Grace” did at Presbyterian funerals. They all made her feel God, even though He really annoyed her of late. God had tested her much more than she was capable of handling. His recent tests were made for stronger people.

Ibrahim took out a handkerchief embroidered by Fatima. He shook it out and handed it to Laila.

“Would you like to come to dinner tonight?” Laila asked, and looked up at him. “I’m making grape leaves.”

His eyes floated in as many tears as hers. “It’s just dinner,” she said, and lowered her eyes again.

He nodded. Then Laila remembered the pork. It stopped her tears.

“Or better yet, I’ll tell Ghazi to pick you up on his way home from work tomorrow,” Laila suggested. “That way you could rest today. You probably want to rest today.”

“No, I’ll come with you now,” Ibrahim said. “I taught your mother
how to roll grape leaves, you know. She couldn’t cook nothing before we got married.”

Laila assumed that was a joke. He so rarely tried to make her laugh; she could not take back the invitation now.

She motioned him to the car. “Maybe we’re going to stop at the pharmacy for my pressure blood medication?” he asked.

“Sure, I’ll get my pills, too,” she replied. It had taken old age and disease to give them something they could do together.

They drove to the pharmacy and home in silence, which was how they were most comfortable with each other.

In her house, Laila quickly shoved the pork in the refrigerator while her father was in the bathroom. Then she washed her hands very, very well and prepared tea with sugar, or “sugar with a little tea,” as Laila referred to the way her parents liked it. Ibrahim came back to the kitchen with
Al-Ahram
, one of Ghazi’s Egyptian newspapers, which he had acquired along with God at the mosque.

Laila let Ibrahim read and sip his tea as she rinsed and cut stems off the grape leaves. Amani had picked them from the garden that morning before going to English class. Laila did not tell Ibrahim that her mother-in-law lived with her. She would not mention her at all. Amani undoubtedly would play cards after class with her Arab mother-in-law classmates and not come home until Ibrahim was gone.