Tinderbox (6 page)

She glances at the Spanish boy, who has produced an erection which he is fondly stroking.

“Sweetheart, I have to go. I will call you later. I promise. But perhaps you might
give it just a teensy bit more time?”

Ursula feels a heaviness in her breasts and an urgency between her legs. “Kiss, kiss.
Bye.”

The Spaniard grins when he sees the red lace.

“Be rough,” she orders.

18

By the time Myra has finished her midday walk around the reservoir, showered, eaten
her lunch, and returned to her desk by the open French doors, the solution is clear.
She will have to reorganize the sleeping arrangements. On the fourth floor, where
she had planned for Omar to take the front room while she kept her bedroom overlooking
the garden, she will let Eva stay put. She will give Rachida and Adam her bedroom.
Omar can have the back bedroom on the third floor, and Adam can still have the music
room for his office. She will move downstairs into the small room she’d planned for
Eva.

She gets up to look at the room. It is narrow, with a twin bed under the window. A
small wooden dresser and a card table are the room’s only other furnishings. A pegboard
with hooks serves as a makeshift closet. If she empties the closet in her office,
there will be enough space for her clothes. In a way, it will be better. She won’t
have to worry about Eva moving around while her patients are in the office.

Fifty cents a hat. Two dollars a sweater.

It is a more logical arrangement, she tells herself.

19

After the chubby engineer threw her out, Caro had camped in the fifth-floor walk-up
apartment of Anne-Marie, a girl from Brussels she’d met at the Parc Monceau. Pooling
the money from the envelope the engineer had given her and the allowance Anne-Marie
received from her banker father, they left in June for Greece, after which they took
the train west to Spain, the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, and then another train
south to Casablanca. Terrified of the overtures of a Coca-Cola distributorship heir
which had taken a nasty turn, but more, really, of herself and who she’d become during
the months since her employer had pulled back her sheets, she fled Casablanca, taking
the first departing bus.

The bus had gone to Essaouira, a town she knew nothing about. She spent three days
in bed with what she thought was a case of tourista before she ventured out, wandering
through a maze of narrow streets just wide enough for a wheelbarrow or donkey cart,
the white light and briny smell from the adjacent sea lending a holiday atmosphere.

At the jewelers’ souk, she found a silver bracelet for her mother, a braided cuff
over which she bargained with the bearded shop owner to reach a price of 550 dirham.
“A very rare piece,” the owner said. “I am losing money selling it to you.”

Two stores down, the identical cuff was displayed in the window. “How much?” she inquired
of the young man behind the counter.

“I will give you a very good deal. Three hundred dirham.”

Indignant, Caro returned to the first shop to protest.

“That,” the man sneered, “that bracelet you saw, to mention it in the same breath
as mine is an insult. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You are ignorant about
the differences in the quality of silver.”

The man had a long face with a bulbous nose. His cheeks were flecked with broken capillaries.
It was clear that, from his point of view, inflating prices for a tourist was acceptable
practice, the exchange between them entirely within the realm of principle.

Her eyes wandered to a shelf where there was a candelabrum that looked like a menorah.
“Can I see that?”

Very carefully, the shop owner reached for the object, which he placed on the glass
countertop. There was a star of David on the base of the piece. He peered at her.
“You are a Jew?”

She did not answer.

“You want this instead?”

She nodded.

“For you, I will rob myself. Rob my own family. But no more discussion of the quality
of my silver. You will come to my home tomorrow for the Sabbath dinner.”

And so Caro met Uri and his vain, hypochondriacal wife, Raquel, and then their brainy
angry daughter, Rachida, and her sweet older sister, Esther, the mother’s handmaiden
and an image of how Rachida might have looked had she not felt her life depended on
being as unlike her sister and mother as possible.

Esther and Raquel fingered Caro’s clothes, the hem of the loose blouse and the folds
of the long skirt she’d worn to walk the streets alone.

“These are shoes for a girl?” Esther asked, giggling as she slipped her tiny soft
feet inside Caro’s beat-up Birkenstocks.

Uri batted Esther’s leg. “Excuse this rude child of mine.”

Before dinner, Raquel lit candles. The family held hands, Rachida grimacing as she
placed hers inside Caro’s, and Uri said the blessing over the wine, the same
baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh haolam, borei p’ri hagafen
Caro dimly recalled her mother’s uncle saying on their annual visits to her mother’s
parents’ home.

“Your parents, they keep the Sabbath?” Uri asked as Raquel served the couscous.

“Not really. They both had uncles who were rabbis, but neither of them is religious.”

“Your father should have insisted. That is the job of the father.”

She did not want to say that her parents were divorced, her father remarried to a
woman who wasn’t Jewish, but before she could decide what to say, Rachida blurted
out, the first words Caro can remember her having said, her face locked until that
moment in a bored scowl, “In America, they are not still in the Dark Ages. There are
Jews who actually use their minds.”

A vein throbbed in Uri’s temple. When he spoke, it was as though he were releasing
his words one by one. “My daughter, she thinks that she is more intelligent than her
father. She thinks her science is wiser than the Talmud. But she will learn. Our ancestors
have been here since the time of the Romans. My father was a Berber. My grandfather
was a Berber. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a Berber. We are the Jews
who came here directly from the Holy Land. Not the Jews who fled Spain. Not the Jews
who pretended to be Christians. Before there were Muslims here, before there were
kings—when there were only tribes of people. Our people have brought our trades to
every corner of the world: to China, to India, to South America, to Canada. And always,
always we have kept Sabbath, obeyed the kosher laws, observed the High Holidays. But
no, my brilliant daughter, she is smarter than thousands of years of our people.”

At “brilliant,” Uri slammed his fist on the table, toppling his glass of wine. Raquel
reached over to right the glass and blot up the wine. Esther froze, a forkful of couscous
midair, and Rachida pushed back her chair, mumbling something that Caro was sure must
be
fuck you
in Arabic.

After the meal, Rachida reappeared. She grilled Caro about New York City, where—she
lowered her voice to tell Caro, her parents didn’t know yet—she was applying to medical
school.

A year later, Rachida began medical school in the Bronx. She had been living across
from the school for a month when she first called Caro, home for the summer with a
job at a Head Start program. They spent several evenings together, the first of which
was marked by what Caro knew was Rachida’s surprise to see the changes in her, her
curves hidden beneath the twenty pounds she’d regained on her return to Harvard, when,
unable to sleep, she’d begun the secretive night eating in her dorm room as she tried
not to think about what had happened with the chubby engineer in Paris and then afterward.

The evenings with Rachida passed with awkward pauses, continued on Caro’s end out
of a sense of guilt at the thought of abandoning a foreigner, but also due to a begrudging
admiration of Rachida’s frank bitterness—about her father’s misogyny, that he never
got over not having a son; about the foolishness of her mother and sister, who couldn’t
understand Rachida’s lack of interest in clothing and domestic adornment; about the
other medical students, who awkwardly avoided political conversations in her presence,
assuming her to be a Muslim foe of Israel.

A few days before Caro returned to Boston, in a last-ditch effort to be hospitable,
she introduced Rachida to Adam, about to start his first year at N.Y.U. Perhaps he
would take Rachida on as a movie partner—his ironic love of lowbrow movies companionable,
she thought, with Rachida’s enjoyment of them for exactly what they are. Romance between
the two of them never crossed her mind, not only because of their age difference,
Rachida’s twenty-two to Adam’s eighteen, but also because it was hard to imagine physical
contact between them, Rachida too brusque to seem amorous, Adam looking like a kid
whose hand needed to be held.

By the time Caro came home for Thanksgiving, Adam and Rachida were a couple, even
then, though, more like an old married couple than young lovers. When Rachida left
for her dermatology residency in Detroit, still believing she would ultimately return
to Morocco, Adam followed—neither of them prepared for the other female residents
with complexions out of cosmetic advertisements and tight skirts worn under their
lab coats, all headed for lucrative nine-to-five practices that would require no evening
beepers and permit ample time for family ski trips and home-beautification projects.
They married three months before Omar’s birth, after which Rachida gave up the idea
of going back to Morocco. In the fifth year of her shopping mall practice, she devised
the plan of a respecialization fellowship in primary care that would allow her afterward
to work at a clinic serving the Arabic community in Detroit.

Now, in two days, Rachida, Adam, and Omar would be here.
You should be happy
, Caro tells herself. She pinches her arm.
You really should
.

20

“It’s the summer solstice,” Omar announces as he tumbles out of the backseat of the
stuffed Honda wagon. His bangs, navy-black like his mother’s, hang over his forehead.
“Rachida explained it to me. The way that the axis of the earth to the sun changes
with the seasons.”

Rachida had given Omar her mini-astronomy lecture somewhere around Ohio, part of her
scientific education program, prophylactic, she believes, to a vulnerability to religion.
She dislodges herself from behind the driver’s seat and glances at her son. Like her,
he rarely smiles, his seriousness so familiar to her, she had never thought about
it until Omar’s preschool teacher mentioned it—not with alarm, she was careful to
say, Omar is passionate about so many things and plays so nicely with the other children,
but rather because it is so unusual to see a child so lacking in, well, she blushed
as she said it, childishness.

Standing on the steps of the brownstone are Myra, Caro, and a girl with stringy dark
hair who, Rachida realizes, must be Eva. In one hand, she is holding a blue helium
balloon that says
WELCOME
, in the other a stuffed animal.

“It’s the longest day of the year! Rachida said I could stay up as late as I want.”
Omar disappears into the arms of his grandmother and aunt. Adam groans as he unfolds
himself from the passenger seat, pulling on his beard and his wrinkled khaki shorts.
Caro hugs him, a hug that ends in a little poke to the belly that in the last year
has begun to overhang his belt.

Rachida cocks her head in Omar’s direction. She can feel the circle of perspiration
that has formed on her back. “He slept all afternoon.”

The rounds of hugging with introductions of Eva continue until Rachida pops the trunk
and begins lifting out the bags. Omar goes inside with Eva to look at the box of his
father’s old toys that Eva has unpacked in the third-floor room that will be his.
By the time Rachida arrives with a duffel filled with Omar’s clothes, Omar and Eva
are flopped on the rug, their noses inches apart as they sort through the pieces of
an Erector set.

Myra announces that dinner will be on the kitchen deck. Rachida washes her hands and
face in the kitchen sink, aware that it would be more appropriate to go upstairs to
wash up and change her shirt with its slightly unpleasant odor—that she is under the
sway of the oppositionalism her mother-in-law’s graciousness sets off in her, Myra’s
good manners eliciting her own rudest inclinations. When she’d once mentioned this
to Caro, Caro had laughingly chided, “Trust me, I understand. But you’d better get
over it. There’s so much my mother does well. If you become a contrarian with her,
the only things left for you to do will be to suck your teeth and play poker.”

With her face still wet, she steps onto the deck. Votive candles are perched on the
railing. From the garden below, she can hear the fountain, a hypnotic gurgling that
brings her back to an afternoon in Fez with her father and sister, a square with a
blue-and-white-tiled fountain where students from the nearby madrasa would come to
wash.

Eva has come downstairs and is now helping Myra carry the food to the outdoor table:
shrimp done on skewers on the grill, baby potatoes roasted with olive oil and dill
from one of the terra-cotta pots, a corn-bread and green salad that Myra says are
both Eva’s doing. Eva beams. With each platter she places on the table, she looks
up at Myra to check her reaction. Rachida counts the plates. Six. She knows there
is no acceptable alternative to having Eva eat with them, but it will be a chore to
carry on a conversation with her, grating to see the glances Eva gives Myra, Myra’s
small nods of encouragement.

Myra sends Eva to get the others. When everyone is on the deck, she motions for Rachida
to take the seat at the end of the table across from her, Omar and Eva along one side,
Adam and Caro on the other.

“I can’t believe you’re from Iquitos,” Adam says, looking at Eva. “
Fitzcarraldo
is one of my absolute favorite movies. I’ve seen it and
Burden of Dreams
, the documentary about Herzog’s making of the film, dozens of times. You probably
know some of the people that were in it. There were over a thousand extras. My God,
Herzog, the megalomaniac, actually dragged that ship over the mountain. Everyone thought
he was insane. He makes his character Fitzcarraldo seem like a measured man.”