The Others (15 page)

The girl eating corn flakes is Janan. The one in the white blouse, Ghada. That one, who just got up to go into the kitchen, is Basma. And the girl who is tying her hair back right now, that’s Miral. The one over there who has no chest is Duha, and over here is—

I know her. Yes, I know her—it’s Dareen.

Not a name easily forgotten! And then there was the touch of her hand as she greeted me warmly. Since I arrived, we’d exchanged a few furtive glances together with smiles quickly suppressed, their minute transgressions swiftly concealed. Only rarely did I ever encounter someone whose form would mold itself into an urgent and alluring question mark before my eyes. Someone who could get to me so easily. That moment of greeting with Dareen had not been a friendly handshake; it had been a brush against the membranes around my heart, a pressure upon the sensitive nerves of my soul. The best way I can put it is that the flesh of her hand had gone deep inside of me and flung everything there into disarray.

I had expected—or feared—that I would not prove able to feel quickly at ease among strange girls with whom I had never shared Basta market day hours, or middle school classrooms, or Um Hussain, who had been our teacher in the
kuttab
, our religious kindergarten where we first learned how to read and recite the Qur’an. Yet, even with all of my apprehensions, I forgot myself completely, balling up my
abaya
and piling it off in a corner, and entering right into the commotion they were creating in the kitchen with the help of lettuce and tomatoes and the salad slicer.

Are you from Qatif? one of them asked me immediately.

That’s Amal, Dai whispered in my ear.

Yes, I am.

Your mother is, too?

Yes.

Where do you study?

Here in Dammam.

So, why do you talk the way you do?

I looked at her, puzzled.

Like, you speak the way Egyptians do.
Mish ‘awza. Taale ala baali. Aysh. Barduh. Libayh
. Like an Egyptian and sometimes a Lebanese.

Dai rescued me, rushing into the conversation. You know the girls at the college. They come in from the villages and think they can shrug off their old ways of talking. They get swollen heads.

Amal’s wary questions were not new to me. So often, my speech had stood out from that of others, even my siblings. It was not deliberate. It was not an adopted dialect. It was just that words slid onto my tongue so easily, and then slipped off just as easily, words from the television, from my girlfriends, from my Internet buddies and my reading. I would stack them unconsciously in my store of daily vocabulary and they would emerge in my conversations. Even in chat rooms, I used a language that you might call neutral, unattached—or perhaps to put it more accurately, a language that was not identifiable as belonging to any one place. A mixture of dialects, where I could not pinpoint the origins or sources of the words I uttered.

The low, round table was brought out and a variety of dishes rapidly covered its surface. I heard invitations from every side, entreating me to try this dish or that one; more came my way than anyone else’s, since I was the one outsider in a group of obvious familiars. Dai finished eating before I did and got up to wash her hands, leaving me on my own for five entire minutes. Her slowness to return was suspicious and embarrassing all at once. When I finished my meal, Husna showed me around. Here were the bathroom, kitchen and a room to the side. Here was the passage that led to the swimming pool, and over there was the other corridor, on the farm side, where I had entered; here were the birdcages and animal pen. She showed me all of this through the screen door, which led from the kitchen directly outdoors. She pointed out the rows of trees and gave me their names. She began recounting happy memories of visiting a woman named Um Jawaad, who sold native roses to make a living.
We were always running out of money
, she said,
all we got for pocket money was two riyals
. The rays of the sun were so blinding that I could see nothing; she promised me that we would go out just before the sunset. We would pick sweet basil leaves and make necklaces for our mothers. Then she excused herself and left me in the chaos of the kitchen and my loneliness.

Stacked with dishes, the kitchen sink did not look inviting, so I turned toward the bathroom, opened the door, and saw Dai standing there with her friend who wore gray glasses and whose name I had not been able to remember and then had not thought to ask. The two of them were standing exactly in the same pose that she and I had assumed in front of the basin that morning. She was staring at their reflections in the mirror. Her arms encircled her friend’s waist and stretched toward the sink: she was rubbing her palms together beneath the flow of the water. She rested her chin—or more precisely her lips—on her friend’s shoulder. There was nothing in this picture that I did not know. I swung the door shut. The whole thing took no more than half a second but it dug itself deeply into my head, etching caustic furrows and filthy oaths at Dai’s expense, yielding imagined scenes whose beginnings I knew but whose endings I did not fathom.

Once everyone had finished eating, we headed like one large wave to the water as if we were fly-by-night waifs who hardly ever got the chance to relax and have fun in nice surroundings. The air was electric: laughter and splashing, little tricks and transient touches. And I was fully charged, the tension flooding through me, too strong to dam up. Even the water could not drink it out of me. I had never before attended a gathering like this and so I had no idea what might happen. My expectations were flung as wide open as could be, although so far, I had seen nothing more than a surreptitious kiss, and even that I had witnessed accidentally.

By prior agreement, Dai was to show absolutely no signs of physical attraction to me. I could not be sure of Dai, though. I had no confidence that she would stick to her word, especially since this was her chance to parade her skills—and she loved to be the one on the dais, immobilized by applause from all sides. More important right now, though, was the doubled sense of revenge she bore toward me. It wasn’t only that I had cut my hair without her permission. I had forgotten her ring. I had taken it off to do my ablutions before prayer, I insisted. And then I had left it on the basin in my bathroom. She saw through my lie, I was sure of it.

Now I felt sick with disgust at Dai, and if she got near me, it would just work up the demons in my blood. I grabbed my first opportunity to get away. In the pool, on my back, every time I closed my eyes I could sense the pool roofing about to collapse onto me: it would only take a second to squash me flat as the floor. And then, the moment my eyes opened in fright to stare at the ceiling, I would feel overwhelmed by how very far away it was, imposingly high above me, and how I was so very alone far below, deafened and silenced by the clamor around me, just all alone, so completely isolated. It was only my sense of hearing that let me know where I was and where I was heading, and all I could hang onto was intuition in figuring out whether I had reached the edge of the pool and should push off in the opposite direction.

I closed my eyes, struggling hard to get the better of my sense of falling, of collapse, of my body bruised and crushed. I imagined myself as a mote that the current was pulling into the depths. And then I was swelling up like a kernel of popcorn and blocking the opening of the pool’s drain, and this way, the water could not swallow me.

Dai took me by surprise, laying her hand on me and whispering, The honey—where’d it go? Her morning kiss and her sweetness now were gestures that made my heart tickle, so rarely did Dai act like this with me. She pushed her fingernail into my palm and scratched, lightly, and then, pointing to the visible red line that her nail had left behind, said, Look, your skin has drunk its fill of water and now it’s really soft and fine.

She drew me with her—we sat on the edge of the pool. She didn’t leave any space between us, and her hand went around my middle. We were whispering because anything anyone said, next to the pool, produced an echo. She asked me whether this excursion we had planned was to my liking. And did the girls please me, and the lunch, and the swimming pool? I was answering, yes, yes, and then, it was sudden, she moved away from me, far enough so that she could look into my eyes, and so my fingers went caressing the dimples in her cheeks, which is what I always do when I’m longing for her. She backed off and said, And me?

You what?

Do I please you?

Oh yes, always!

Always
always?

Sometimes not.

Then she was right there again, very close beside me, exactly like in those moments when she is about to take my ear between her lips, and she delivered me the shock which I did not take in.

I love you.

After five months, the total sum of my acquaintance with her, our relationship had begun to take on its own character, with the kind of struggle only intense closeness creates, the summits of longing, the particular stupidities unique to us, the ferocity of it, and the way it could shake my life to the core and completely alter the person I was. Throughout the whole of this time, we had never once said to each other, I love you. I can almost, almost believe that it was never there in any of the plans or expectations that either of us had; it was so
not there
that I would not have dared to put it on the list of possibilities that I was hoping or waiting for. It was, simply put, the thing that could not be said, and likely, it was the dreaded phrase desired by no one. From the start, talking about our feelings was not in the picture. And only now do I realize that we actually said very little to one another. Considering how long I had known Dai, there was a lot that I did not know about her. About the human being in her, about her dreams and hopes and fears, the projects she would have in mind, her desires and her past. Right from the start, it had been the body that had steered our relationship, and the body remained alone under the spotlight, unaccompanied by any supporting actors.

So I smiled.

That grin was utterly the stupidest reaction I could have come up with when faced with an
I love you
that arrived like a belated award of merit. I needed to rework my response very fast, and so I hauled her away from the swimming pool. I did not wait for us to be alone somewhere empty and enclosed, though. I pushed her back against the wall, exactly as she does each time I visit her. At the door to her room, she blocked me so that I couldn’t move. Then I caught her lips, breaking up a half sentence she was about to finish, my head going round and round as we fell dizzily into a prolonged kiss. A very long kiss.

I told myself that suddenly jumping for once over my red line—after I had just squandered an entire morning sketching out that line with her and convincing her that it was necessary—would not mean permanently violating it. One kiss would not kill me. Anyway, what I was getting in return from her was greater than any loss I could possibly have. I wasn’t intending anything more than a kiss that would barely nibble her lips. But my gratitude and the way she melted like sugar in my mouth hadn’t together pushed me far beyond. Swallowed up in her, I was brought back into the world only by the exclamation
My eyes
! uttered in a clammy voice carried along on footsteps that had just gone by on the way to the pool. I heard a low murmuring and then an explosion of laughter.

My face must have gone completely crimson. Opposite me, Dai was totally flustered, I could tell. My reckonings had not been at all misplaced. Dai felt proud of me but she was not interested in showing her pride at my expense. That was an enormous distinction. Of course, I could not overlook the satisfaction she took in herself. She was the one who taught me how to draw on my own store of cunning, after all, not to mention how to pass my clever observations to others without having to snap my fingers to get their attention, and ruining the effect.

I hate performing roles for free, though. That is what I had not given any thought to, when it came to kissing Dai, which was what put me directly under the hot spotlight of curiosity. It wasn’t the kiss; it was me as a new arrival, an unanticipated and unknown element. It was my being fresh and untried; it was also that I was off limits. And the kiss which could have easily been taken for insolent behavior or a cheap attempt to get some attention was taken instead as a first step toward getting inside the mystery of me and undoing my own reticence. Then I thought, It may well be that everything Dai has told me about this world of hers is a pure lie, and if so, I have fallen into the trap made up of her lies, I have crashed through unwritten boundaries, and concocted unacceptable roles, but all without any understanding of what I was doing.

Dareen winked at me from behind her friend’s shoulder. She stood up from the poolside and asked who wanted to help her out in the kitchen. No one responded, and then I caught on to the little conspiracy in which she was including me and I volunteered. I weighed up the two sides of the balance in a matter of seconds. Yes, there was no doubt that I would stir up Dai’s anger and jealousy; but I would get to know Dareen and her way of thinking, at least a little. It was well worth the attempt and it also meant I would buy some time away from any attention I might be getting, especially if it was clouded by greediness or envy or mannered behavior toward me. I would remove myself too, I hoped, from any disgust anyone might be feeling at my bad behavior.

When I got up from where Dai and I sat and turned my back to her, she pinched my bottom. I all but turned and slapped her. With a single stupid and mean move, she had just blasted apart all that had happened the moment before. She had crushed my desire to love her, torpedoed the pure memory of that
I love you
instant, done away with the flash of absolute contentment granted me by that moment between us. What I felt was something that went far beyond anger and disgust and nausea and feelings of inadequacy or lowness. What I felt eclipsed anything bad I had ever felt toward Dai in the past. What I felt exceeded my powers of explanation and my ability to respond. And so I did not turn in the direction of that pinch; I did not slap her, I did not spit at her or kick her or push her into the water and force her head beneath the surface until she drowned. These images went through my head, but that is as far as it went.