The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (43 page)

Linda, who was the kind to volunteer matchmaking services without having to be asked, was thrilled at this new customer. She was already thinking of women she knew, already bringing Rais up to mothers with unmarried daughters. To help her search, she had asked Rais to define, however precisely he could, his criteria for a wife. He was still working them out, but in their incipient form they spoke to how he had, and had not, been changed by his American remaking.

Now thirty-nine, he wanted someone thirty or under—not least because, like Robert Stroman, he dreamed of starting a family. It didn’t matter to him whether the woman worked or didn’t; Islam, he said, accepted either. What was important was that she be unlike all those people Rais knew whose conversation amounted to “nothing but car, their clothing, the jewelry, the ornaments, the vacation.” He was open to any background, but she had to be free of materialism and worldly concern: “The person—I don’t care who she is, Latino, Hispanic, white, Bengali, whatever—but a person who has the kind of mentality that life should not be defined based on what you have, what you had, what you’re going to have.”

Despite his own restraint, Rais had no expectations of marrying someone, particularly if she grew up in America, for whom he would be the first: “I cannot expect that I’m going to go and marry a virgin. I don’t expect that. I have to be practical. Finding the right person is more important than what she did in the past.”

Rais’s wife also didn’t have to be Muslim. Of course, if she was
willing to convert, “that would be very good thing,” he said. This idea, like many of his ideas, had derived from a close study of how the Prophet had lived.

Rais understood from the Koran that Muslims were permitted to marry any person of the book—Jews and Christians as well as those of their own tradition. “Even our Prophet, he married a Christian. A couple of his wives were Christian,” Rais said. Then he told his version of a story about one of the Prophet’s gestures that had given him an idea for his own life.

“There was a war about to be started,” Rais said. “For a peace treaty, He did not go and tell that tribe or that people, ‘I want to marry so-and-so.’ He said, ‘I’m willing to make this peace treaty, and I’m offering myself—that let’s build a relationship. I’m willing to marry anyone from your tribe.’ ” In other words, the Prophet “did not marry for his pleasure,” Rais said, but for bridge-building.

Rais wondered if he could achieve some bridge-building of his own, between the Muslim world and his adopted country, through marriage.

“That is one of the thoughts,” Rais said. “I don’t compare myself with the Prophet. But what I believe is that there’s another way of bridging among people, among cultures. And also it’s one of my thoughts that if I go back to Bangladesh and marry someone, then I have to bring that person here, and I have to babysit that person for several years to adjust herself with this culture, with this language, with the environment. Whereas if I married someone here, then I don’t have to go through that.”

Having reached these realizations was one thing; getting from realizations to wife, quite another. The truth was, Rais had no idea how to proceed. On one hand, he knew that God would look out for him and that his fate was predetermined; on the other, he knew that was no excuse, not in America at least. “If I find someone and when that person will come, it’s already decided,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I should be sitting tight.”

But he wasn’t going on dates, either: “Are you crazy, that I have the time to go on dates?” Even at work, he tried to avoid situations in which he and a female co-worker ended up alone at lunch time. “In this country, one-on-one means a date,” he said. “At least more than two person, then it’s safety. You’re off of the pressure.”

Because of the campaigning he was now doing, he had negotiated with his company to let him work from home three days a week. That was great for his campaign but further deprived him of encounters with women. Another complication was his history with Abida, which he mentioned in all his talks. After his lecture at DePaul, a bunch of young women, taken with his story, had come up to him and asked about Abida and whether they now had children.

“Since I tell that I had a fiancée, they think that I am still with my fiancée,” he said, unsure of how to correct the record. He wondered if he should start using “ex-fiancée” instead: “I always thought about that—that I had to clarify. Because it also closed a lot of doors.”

The one thing Rais refused to adopt from America was this insatiable consumption of partners on the supposed path to true love. He knew that women weren’t cars, and that it didn’t work to treat them as if they were: “You switch your partner like a new car came to the market, and you have to test it, drive it.” Wasn’t it this behavior, Rais added, that had so punished the Stromans?

But why not at least go on a few dates? Nothing too intimate—just dinner and soft drinks?

“Here’s the problem,” he said, finally just putting it out there. “In this culture, once you go for a date, the way girls—women—behave in this Western culture, then they expect that you will go and sleep with them. Maybe not the first date; maybe second or third or the fourth date. They expect, right?

“But I can’t do that. I cannot cross my boundary before I find that person that’s my wife. So if I go for a date, and then next date it doesn’t happen, then they will think, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’ And the dates are like that: you have to expose yourself that you’re
a guy, you’re manly. You have to expose yourself in that way—sexy way—and then increase the expectation of your female partner that you will take her and there will be something. And I cannot do that.”

Rais was a man of technology, though. Surely the Internet, with its florescence of dating and matrimonial sites, had overcome this problem. Were there not sites for Muslims who hadn’t slept around and didn’t want to date in the American way? There had to be women out there with the same dilemma.

“Where do I find them?” Rais said with a nervous, hopeful giggle.

T
o get to Stephenville from Dallas, you drive west across the city until, for the briefest time, civilization vanishes. It quickly reappears, though somewhat diminished, in the form of Fort Worth, whose gripe with Dallas is that it is inadequately western. Then you fall out of Fort Worth into country made for horse chases: endless flat land, hilly at times, most of it ranches. You can count the number of animals you see in a few hours’ drive—a lot of land for not so much meat. On the highway, mirage after mirage spreads and dries up in the 100-degree July heat. From time to time, you cross some town redolent of afterness: just a lane or two, maybe a store, maybe a crossroads.

Erica Stroman emerged from the horseshoe of apartments where she was living. She wore white bug-eyed sunglasses with fake diamonds on the edges and was joined by her cousin Desireé. They were headed to Brownwood, sixty miles to the southwest, to see Tena and
Amber. In two days, it would be the one-year anniversary of Mark Stroman’s passing.

It had been a good year for Erica, considering. “It’s doing better,” she said. “I mean, I’m looking up. Little by little. Just as far as being able to work, pay things. You know, I got a vehicle—a truck. I’m not dependent, really, on anybody else. It’s kind of being on my own a bit, really.”

Not long after her father’s death, she had taken the graveyard shift at McDonald’s for a month. Then she got 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., which was good because it gave her the rest of the day free. There was a lot to learn very quickly: how overtime works; how the registers were checked and the employees docked for shortfalls; the three-warning system for misbehaving; how to wash your hands at the start of your shift and only then clock in, because they’re not paying you to become clean. Yet what began as a drudgery in Erica’s mind had quickly turned into something else.

McDonald’s was not known as an engine of mobility, but in a place like Stephenville it could seem like the closest thing. All her life, Erica had dreamed of an altered end state, but she had never been able to figure out the intervening how. Now, at McDonald’s, the future felt real and malleable. She had already been promoted to junior manager, and if she kept rising, she could get a transfer to Fort Worth or maybe even Dallas. The way you got promoted was by studying. Erica wasn’t a big book person, but McDonald’s made it straightforward and step-by-step. You could take online McDonald’s classes and even earn college credits doing it. You could, if you were lucky, get picked to go to Hamburger University, a training center for managers and owners. Erica’s boss had recently gone, and she was now clearing $40,000 a year, just working at McDonald’s.

When Erica explained to outsiders what she was studying—subjects like food cost, waste, hygiene, and the like—she zipped
through it so quickly and energetically that it was hard to follow: “OK, it’s like we sell a McDouble for $1.08. Well, it costs us 60 cents. But if you make a McDouble the wrong way, then you gotta make it again. Then you throw it away—that’s waste. The nuggets are 6 cents. You know, 24 cents for the four-piece nugget that we sell for $1.83. But when it’s busy, we’ll make a lot, and all that’s waste, waste, waste. So that’s 6 times 60. Plus everybody goes by, because on the grill they like to press the timer, so you go by and open it, check it or just pick up one and ‘O.K., that’s old.’ So that whole tray—that’s waste.”

Life had often left Erica callous and surly, but the customer-service training had helped her keep it together for the sake of business. “Even on a bad day,” Erica said, “nobody’s gonna wanna come in here with me being pissed off.”

She knew, more clearly than in earlier phases of her life, what the next steps were and what she had to do to take them. She was assigned the cash registers these days, counting down the drawers. If she finished the class she was currently taking, then she’d get a twenty-five or fifty-cent raise. If she continued, she would soon set her own shifts. After the next set of classes, another boost of twenty-five or fifty cents. It wasn’t out of the question to grow into a general-manager role within a few years. Erica’s boss did it within four, and now she owned her own house, had bought a used Camaro for two grand, and paid for school on the side while also managing the restaurant.

“It’s like a climbing ladder, really,” Erica said. The job had filled her with hope: “I’m not at the bottom anymore.”

Desireé was Erica’s cousin on her mom’s side; they were rooming together these days. Desireé was eighteen but could easily have passed for ten. She was short and scrawny, to the point of appearing malnourished, and wore little rectangular metallic glasses. The only hint of her age was the sizable diamond she wore on the fourth finger of her left hand. Her fiancé, Chance, had proposed recently, on
Valentine’s Day, in the middle of their junior year. They planned to wait a whole year after high school before marrying, to stress-test their love.

Desireé had a spark and vibrancy and thirst for the world that distinguished her from her family. On paper, her options were just about as lousy, but she had an aspirational quality. She had a lot of questions about the world. She was keen to share the story of her Indian friends in school, who, she helpfully explained, were from Pakistan. She made sure to tell people that Chance came from a family with money. He bought her a $5,000 ring, supposedly, which she claimed to have thrown into a field after a fight. They never found it, she said, and so he bought her another. In a place full of half-men, she’d found herself a diamond mine.

Amber had, of course, gotten out of the desert of good men by going over to women. When she and Maria got together, four years ago, it had shocked everyone, including her sister. Amber, as far as anyone knew, had never been with a woman before. Some in the family had been resistant at first, but Maria had proven herself, Erica said, by not cutting and running all the times when that would have been the smartest thing to do.

As for herself, Erica was dubious about settling down, which often seemed to involve a lot of settling. Girls like Desireé were the lucky exceptions, happy and in love and well tended. The reality was, the women Erica knew worked harder than the men. Far from here, governors and senators and presidents spoke of a crisis of the family, of a breakdown in marriage. But Erica sensed what they didn’t: that for people like her, taking on another person wasn’t always the stabilizer it was cracked up to be. “It’s just, you can do bad on your own, and then when you get with somebody that’s just doing the same as you are, or worse than you are, you can’t—my grandma used to say that you can’t hang around with trash or it gets in your eyes.” The country’s marriage enthusiasts often had the fortune, unavailable
to Erica’s class, of being whole to begin with. They multiplied with other whole people to form still greater products. What Erica intuited was that a fractional being like her multiplied by another fractional being equaled—in matrimony as in mathematics—a smaller fraction than either person was before.

A
MBER’S NEW HOME
in Brownwood was in a so-called clean house, with subsidized rent, strict rules of sobriety, and required attendance at recovery meetings. The building was various hues of brown and beige, decorated with seashells and cross-sections of trees. Amber had a well-ordered upstairs apartment. The one-bedroom place had a small kitchen, in which dishes recently washed stood neatly in a rack, drying, and a poster over the stove advised “serenity.” The kitchen spilled into the living room, which was dominated by a sofa whose stretchy cover kept coming off. A television with its own built-in DVD player sat unplugged; Amber and Maria carried it into the bedroom when they wanted to watch in there. The air-conditioning was set at 64 degrees and on all day, since electric was included in the rent. The smell of cigarettes, perhaps in violation of the compound norms, hung in the air, mingling with the scent of simmering hamburger meat, which was cooking on a plug-in griddle on the kitchen table.