The Ruins of Us (22 page)

She’d seen them go to extremes to humiliate each other in the past—elaborate practical jokes, physical pranks played out for the amusement of the other Baylani brothers. But now Abdullah seemed serious.

“Abdullah,” Dan said.

“I don’t want them,” she said.

A small group of shoppers had stopped to gawk.

“Here, how about I give you a loan until you can afford it.”

Abdullah put down his credit card with enough force to rattle the display case. The merchant ran it and presented the receipt to Abdullah with a shaking hand. She wanted to toss the earrings on the floor, make Abdullah stoop to search for them. She no longer cared about his bad back. It wasn’t her place to care anymore. But she needed the earrings. Releasing a heavy breath through her nose, she slipped them under her abaya and into her pants pocket.

“Why don’t you go ahead and get Isra a pair, while you’re at it,” Dan said.

“You son of a whore.”

“Just a gentle reminder of your obligations. That’s what you keep me around for, right? Trying to be the best Jeeves I can be for Sheikh Abdullah.”

“You have an odd way of showing gratitude, Coleman.”

“Remind me, what exactly am I grateful for?”

“That I don’t fire you right now.”

“Or maybe the fact that I’m not the asshole who destroyed a perfectly good family by fooling around,” Dan said. “I guess I’m grateful for that.”

“You were content to destroy your own family by less obvious means. And after all this, my wife still
respects
me. Carolyn sees you for exactly what you are.”

“And what the fuck is that?”

“A beggar.”

Rosalie had heard enough; Abdullah’s cruelty astounded her. She turned and hurried back toward the souq entrance, the breeze from the air-conditioning billowing her abaya out behind her like a cape. Shoppers stopped midstep to watch her pass. Abdullah called out, but she did not slow down or look back. She wanted to keep going. Out the white gate, west over the great brown boot of the Arabian peninsula, west over Eritrea, straight to the churning spread of the Atlantic, where she would use her abaya as a sail to drift out and away. There would be no permission forms or backward glances, only forward momentum.

MEMORY GATHERING: SOME
Saturday night at the Lazy Lion. B.A.—Before Abdullah. Talking to a wire-haired guy who’s been reading at the bar. Some tattered paperback with the cover torn away. It’s OK. She doesn’t need to know the title. She doesn’t need anything from this guy. She doesn’t find him to be attractive, and from the way he talks to her, the feeling seems mutual. That always makes her more relaxed behind the bar. It makes her banter more interesting because she actually thinks about what she is saying, rather than whether or not she will fuck the guy at the bar whose face pleases her. She does not find herself wondering about the wire-haired man’s chest and what it might look like in the shadows of her small apartment. Does he even have a chest? She cannot tell. It has gotten lost in the tent of his shirt.

By now, she has seen nearly a thousand Saturday nights at the Lazy Lion. She works every weekend, and during the week she goes to class at the University of Texas. She knows exactly how many work hours equal an hour of class. She never goes home to Sugar Land. Maxine has gotten fat and diabetic, and now she is bedridden and the whole house smells like cauliflower. Wayne says it’s her rotting limbs. Her older brother Randy drives out from Houston to check on them and leaves messages for Rosalie to let her know how they are doing. Though she is close to graduating, Rosalie feels like a drifter. She is young, anything is possible, and that is precisely what scares her.

As he is getting up to leave, the wire-haired man checks his pockets dramatically. Never trust a Marxist, he says. Why’s that? She asks. I don’t have enough for the tip, he says. She waves it off like it’s no big deal, but it is kind of a big deal because that money would pay for at least one or two minutes of class, and she’s not even going to get laid. Here, he says. He pulls something out of his back pocket. Have this. It means more to me than a dollar, anyway. After he’s gone, Rosalie lights a cigarette and wanders over to see what he’s left on the bar. It’s a world map. Careful to wipe away the wet spots first, she unfolds it on the bar. Even in the dim light of the Lazy Lion, she can make out its brilliant blues and greens. She moves her fingers over a tan, boot-shaped peninsula. Saudi Arabia. She lived there once. In her chest, an ache. Her throat closes. It is like seeing a photograph of an old love.

THAT EVENING, AFTER
returning from Gold City, Rosalie welcomed the clean simplicity of her daughter—her floral smells, the nakedness of her teenaged wants. At nine thirty p.m., Mariam materialized at Rosalie’s door, having halted her furious typing to allow Rosalie to mother her. It was wonderful to be called to purpose like that. It happened so rarely now that the children were nearly grown, so when Mariam arrived with her need to be stroked and soothed, Rosalie approached her duties with a religious earnestness.

“Tisbah al-khayr, Umma.” Mariam stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a red cotton shalwar kameez. Against it, her hair fell in a deep chestnut curtain.

Rosalie patted the space in front of her on the bed, and when Mariam sat down, she stretched a leg on either side of her daughter’s body. While Rosalie combed through Mariam’s hair, she considered her situation. Her adrenaline flared whenever she remembered the scrape of Dan’s stubble against her cheek, the pressure of her breasts mashed against his chest. It had been so good to feel another body against her own. Afterward, her limbs were supple, her skin prickled with the slightest breeze. She was a boxer, a champion racehorse, her strength present in the muscles coiled hotly beneath her skin. Her underwear was damp. It might just be physical, but physical was a hell of a lot more than what she had currently with Abdullah. And in her gut, she was surprised to feel a longing for it to be something more than just sexual. Leaving someone was always easier when you had another person’s arms to fall into.

“Dear one. Tell me more about your internship at
Saudi Times
.”

“My teacher wants to give me school credit for it, if she can convince Headmistress Shideed,” Mariam said, her feet swinging back and forth at the end of the bed. “It’s just once a week, but since A’m Nabil paired me with Faizah al-Zahrani and I’m doing so much writing, it should work out.”

“That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I’m thrilled for you. You have to be sure to send A’m Nabil a nice gift. Maybe we can bake something for him. He has that sweet tooth, and A’ma Nadia complains it’s killing her; she’s eating so many pastries, she’s getting fat. Maybe you can give them to him at the office so A’ma isn’t tempted.”

Mariam laughed. Nadia was Abdullah’s middle sister, the smartest of all of them according to Abdullah, who occasionally entertained the idea of making her a partner at B-Corp. Once, he’d even pitched it to her, but she’d responded with a cascade of her famous giggles. “And who will take care of my six little ones, then? Nabil? I can barely get him to come home at night, he’s so in love with that newspaper.”

Nadia had definitely tested Rosalie’s patience with her little mind games at the beginning, but once she was convinced that Rosalie wasn’t just some gold digger after the family coin, they’d become close.

Rosalie spun Mariam’s hair into a coil, twisting it tight and looping it upward. The hair was shining as crude oil, a sober frame for her daughter’s face. Mariam’s hazel eyes had a green fire through the irises that burned in a quiet way. As a baby, she would sit upright in the night and deliver prophesies in babbles. Even then, Rosalie listened. There was wisdom in the child. Now she was off, seeking her path, pursuing her heroes that she might learn from them.

Rosalie lacked her daughter’s seriousness. Perhaps she should have approached her life with more sensibility. Instead, she felt that she had grown merely decorative. Letting her daughter’s looped hair fall loose, she combed her fingers through. She didn’t have to look to know that Mariam’s eyes were closed. She could hear it in her breath, which came steady with the even thrum of a sleeping baby. It was their pre-bed ritual, this head massage and hair comb, and Mariam tilted her head back, her narrow brown throat moving up and down as she swallowed. With each press of fingertip to scalp, Rosalie felt the electricity that exists between a mother and the child she has carried, the little buzz and shock of once-joined flesh touching again. If only she could put her hands through Faisal’s hair, touch his cheek. Perhaps he would feel that primitive tug, his muscles remembering when they fed off her blood. Perhaps he would be less angry with her. Despite Mariam’s protests, she found that she could not help gathering the child in her arms and drawing her close, her daughter’s upper body fitted to her mother’s, a shell folded into the sea bed.

Rosalie thought of making a life in the States. She would be a secretary in a dental office, go home at five to an empty condominium, phone the children twice a week, perhaps create a profile on one of those Internet dating sites. The thought of wading through the pools of potbellied, sunburned men with their fixed swagger and their middle-aged intransigence, made her wince. They would have powerboats, play poker and weekend golf, take vacations to Corpus and Cancun. They would speak loudly, full of bluster and the determination that life’s disappointments ingrain. They would be well past the pleasing pliancy of young manhood. It would all be so ordinary, so unbearably mundane, while her children would bloom like exotic plants somewhere far across the world—unknown and unknowable to Rosalie in her Sugar Land condo.

She got a panicky feeling in her chest, her heart racing at the thought of unmooring herself so entirely. And of course she had to consider the fact that, if she left, Abdullah would belong entirely to Isra.

“Mariam, my heart,” she said.

“Yes, Umma?”

“How would you feel about going to school in America?”

“But I am going to go to school in America, for college. I told you that already. I’m not going to a King Whatshisname School for Girls. They don’t even teach all the proper subjects. Lina’s sister goes to one and every time I talk to her, she gets stupider and stupider.”

“No, honey. I mean now. For high school. Would you like that?”

“Boarding school?” Mariam said. “I thought you said I was too young to be away from my family.”

“I would go with you. We could live in a house near your school. I could get a job and keep you company. And Faisal might be nearby, for college.”

She said it flinchingly, as though she realized that the idea was ludicrous.

“I don’t know,” Mariam said hesitantly. “That’d be cool, I guess. Would Baba come?”

“No, hummingbird. Baba would have to stay here and work. This is his home. But he could come and visit us. You could be on the school newspaper and play sports. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

This child bribery was probably ill advised, but Rosalie couldn’t help it. She had a powerful need for her daughter, especially when she considered leaving everything. And Mariam would have a freer life at an American high school. There would be dances in gyms, the sound of sneakers on waxed wooden floors, the banging of lockers in the hallways, Homecoming floats and football games, the smell of popcorn and wood smoke on late November evenings at the stadium. There would be so much for Mariam’s senses. If she stayed in Saudi Arabia, they’d keep an abaya over her, just the first of the many things to come between her and the broader world.

“Let me think about it, OK?” Mariam said.

“Yes, of course, habibti.”

“Umma?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I might have suspected. For the last year.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ever since Doha. Ever since I met Isra in Doha. Even though she was wearing a navy blue suit and had her hair pulled back tight. I think I knew. I should have told you.” Mariam’s voice cracked quietly.

“Oh, my darling. No. Don’t be upset. Your silence protected both of us for as long as possible.”

She wrapped her arms around Mariam and rested her head against her back. From there, she could hear the thumping of her strong heart. Unlike Faisal, Mariam had been born with a robust body, nearly twice as big as her premature brother’s. Rosalie counted several more beats, then shifted to the side so she could see her daughter’s face.

“It’s just that . . . Baba is never wrong,” Mariam said. “He never makes mistakes. My teachers talk about him like he’s a prophet. And I know he loves us, so I trusted him. I kept silent.”

“Mariam, you were right to do that.” Rosalie cupped her daughter’s cheek in her hand. “To believe. Don’t ever feel foolish when your trust has been betrayed. Hurt and angry for a time? Fine. But a trusting heart is a gift.”

Rosalie always felt wiser as a mother than as a woman, so that she often listened to her own counsel as if she had something to gain by it. Unsurprisingly, she did. Why is it, she thought, that what we expect of our children is greater than what we expect of ourselves?

She shifted back behind her daughter, weaving Mariam’s hair into a loose braid, unwinding it, weaving it again. She massaged her daughter’s scalp where her hairline met the skin at the base of her neck. These nights of touch with Mariam were not enough to sustain her. She remembered Dan’s warmth on the beach. She had never had to survive very long in her adult life without sex, not until Abdullah stopped staying at the house as much a few months earlier. From the moment she had let her virginity go on the hard sand behind a tin hutch in Port Aransas, her body’s own climate mirroring the salt and wet of the beach, she had thought, yes, this is what it feels like to be alive.

The children’s birth affirmed her feeling that sex was not only spirit leavening, but life-giving in that most base, literal way. The moment she held her babies, felt the glory and the mess resultant from sex, a bolt fired through her, life splitting her wide. She had been thirty-one and then thirty-three years old, and she felt a communion with the universe so strong that she became grasping, wondering how she could maintain that feeling always. Five years into their marriage, she’d yielded to Abdullah’s pleas to start trying for children—she’d been so lonely in the Kingdom, so tired of trying to preserve the timeline she’d created for her life before she’d met Abdullah, which had
not
involved getting married at twenty, and certainly hadn’t involved children before twenty-five. But then it was like life was playing a cruel joke on her—they couldn’t conceive right away, and when they eventually did, she’d miscarried. They’d had to see doctors in Germany, all the while the Baylani family thinking they’d been right, that this Amreekiyah was a dud. Then finally, thankfully, Faisal had implanted and kept growing until he’d emerged wrinkled and shrieking. She hadn’t been afraid, as she thought she would be with a newborn baby. Rather, she’d felt with certainty that she’d never be lonely again.