A Woman Is No Man(20)

“But you barely know him,” Deya said now, the words slipping from her.

Naeema looked at her, startled. “Of course I know him!” she said. “We’ve been talking on the phone for almost four months now. I swear, I use up at least a hundred dollars a week in phone cards.”

“That doesn’t mean you know him,” Deya said. “It’s hard enough knowing someone you see every day, let alone a man who lives in another country.” Her classmates stared, but Deya kept her eyes fixed on Naeema. “Aren’t you afraid?”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of making the wrong decision. How can you just move to another country with a stranger and think it will all be okay? How can you—” She stopped, feeling her heart begin to race.

“That’s how everyone gets married,” Naeema said. “And couples move to different places all the time. As long as they love each other, everything is fine.”

Deya shook her head. “You can’t love someone you don’t know.”

“How would you know? Have you ever been in love?”

“No.”

“So don’t talk about something you don’t know anything about.”

Deya said nothing. It was true. She had never been in love. In fact, besides the nurturing love she had for her sisters, she had never felt love. But she had learned about love through books, knew enough of it to recognize its absence in her life. Everywhere she looked, she was blinded by other forms of love, as if God were taunting her. From her bedroom window, she’d watch mothers pushing strollers, or children hanging from their father’s shoulders, or lovers holding hands. At doctors’ offices, she’d flip through magazines to find families smiling wildly, couples embracing, even women photographed alone, their bright faces shining with self-love. When she’d watch soap operas with her grandmother, love was the anchor, the glue that seemingly held the whole world together. And when she flipped through American channels when her grandparents weren’t looking, again love was the center of every show, while she, Deya, was left dangling on her own, longing for something other than her sisters to hold on to. As much as she loved them, it never felt like enough.

But what did love even mean? Love was Isra staring dully out the window, refusing to look at her; love was Adam barely home; love was Fareeda’s endless attempts to marry her off, to rid herself of a burden; love was a family who never visited, not even on holidays. And maybe that was her problem. Maybe that’s why she always felt disconnected from her classmates, why she couldn’t see the world the way they did, couldn’t believe in their version of love. It was because they had mothers and fathers who wanted them, because they were coddled in a blanket of familial love, because they had never celebrated a birthday alone. It was because they had cried in someone’s arms after a bad day, had known the comforts of the words “I love you” growing up. It was because they’d been loved in their lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures, even in places it clearly wasn’t.

“I changed my mind,” Deya told her grandparents that night as they sat together in the sala. It was snowing outside, and Khaled had forgone his nightly ritual of playing cards at the hookah bar because the cold worsened his arthritis. On nights like this, Khaled played cards with them instead, shuffling the deck with a rare smile, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

Deya looked forward to these nights, when Khaled would tell them stories of Palestine, even if many of them were sad. It helped her feel connected to their history, which felt so far away most of the time. Long ago, Khaled’s family had owned a beautiful home in Ramla, with red-tile rooftops and bright orange trees. Then one day when he was twelve years old, Israeli soldiers had invaded their land and relocated them to a refugee camp at gunpoint. Khaled told them how his father had been forced to his knees with a rifle dug into his back, how more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had been expelled from their homes and forced to flee. It was the Nakba, he told them with somber eyes. The day of catastrophe.

They were playing Hand, a Palestinian card game, and Khaled shuffled together two decks of cards before dealing. Deya picked up her hand, scanning all fourteen cards, before saying again, louder, “I changed my mind.”

She could feel her sisters exchanging looks. On the sofa beside them, Fareeda turned on the television to Al Jazeera. “Changed your mind about what?”

Deya opened her mouth, but nothing came. Even though she’d been speaking in Arabic her entire life, even though it was her first tongue, sometimes she struggled to find the right words in it. Arabic should’ve come as naturally to her as English, and it often did, but other times she felt its heaviness on her tongue, needed a split second of thought to check her words before speaking. Her grandparents were the only people she spoke Arabic with after her parents died. She spoke English with her sisters, at school, and all of her books were in English.

She put down her cards, cleared her throat. “I don’t want to sit with Nasser again.”

“Excuse me?” Fareeda looked up. “And why not?”

She could see Khaled staring at her, and she met his eyes pleadingly. “Please, Seedo. I don’t want to marry someone I don’t know.”

“You’ll get to know him soon enough,” Khaled said, returning to his cards.

“Maybe if I could just go to college for a few semesters—”