A Woman Is No Man(62)

Fareeda took a sip of her chai, looking away from Khaled. “The boy wants to work, so let him work,” she said. “Maybe I’ll ask Adam to give him a job in his store.”

Ali jumped in. “What about Omar’s store?”

“What about it?”

“Maybe I can work there instead?”

“No, no, no,” Fareeda said, reaching for another loaf of pita. “Omar is still getting on his feet. He can’t afford to hire anyone right now. Adam has a steady business going. He’ll hire you.”

Khaled stood up. “So that’s your solution? Instead of encouraging him to stay in school, to do something on his own, you turn to Adam, again, as though he is the only man among them? When will you stop spoiling them? When will you start treating them like men?” He turned to his younger sons, his index finger shaking. “You two don’t know a thing about this world. Not one damn thing.”

Oh, for goodness sake, Fareeda thought, though she said nothing. Instead, she pulled the skillet of shakshuka closer, taking two, three bites in a row, chugging her chai to keep the food moving. Food, it was the only thing left that gave her comfort. She was considerably thicker now than she’d once been. But that didn’t bother her. In fact, she would spend all day eating if it didn’t cost so much. Of course she knew that burying her feelings in food was unhealthy—that it could kill her. But there were other things that could kill her, too, things like failure and loneliness. Like growing old one day and looking around to find a husband who resented you, kids who no longer needed you, who despised you despite all you’d done for them. At least eating felt good.





Isra


Spring 1994

The books kept Isra company. All it took to soothe her worries was to slip inside their pages. In an instant, her world would cease to exist, and another would rush to life. She felt herself come alive, felt something inside her crack open. What was it? Isra didn’t know. But the longing to connect to something filled her. She went to bed bewildered that she had felt herself so vividly in another place, that she could almost swear she’d come to life by night and the fictional world was the place she actually existed.

But there were also days when the books didn’t seem quite as soothing. Days when reading would turn her mind and force her to question the patterns of her life, which only made her more upset. On these days, Isra dreaded getting up in the morning. She was aware in a fresh way of how powerless she was, and this realization flipped her upside down. Listening to the characters in her books, it was clear to Isra how weak she was, and the enormous effort it would take to transform herself into one of the worthy heroines of these tales, each managing to find her voice by her story’s end.

Isra didn’t know what to do with her conflicting thoughts, didn’t know how to fix her life. If she were a character in one of her books, what would she be expected to do? Stand up to Adam? How, when she had a handful of children depending on her in a foreign place, with nowhere to go? Isra resented her books in these moments when she thought about the limits of her life and how easy courage seemed when you boiled it down to a few words on paper.

You can’t compare your life to fiction, a voice inside her head whispered. In the real world, a woman belongs at home. Mama was right all along.

But Isra wasn’t entirely convinced. As much as she tried to console herself with these thoughts, inside her a flicker of hope had been reignited. The hope that perhaps, she, Isra, deserved a better life than the one she had, as far-fetched as that hope seemed.

Some days she believed she could actually achieve this life if she tried. Hadn’t the characters in her books struggled, too? Hadn’t they stood up for themselves? Hadn’t they been weak and powerless, too? Wasn’t it true that she had as much control over her life as they had? Perhaps she too had a chance to be happy. But just as quickly as these thoughts came, they went, leaving Isra overwhelmed with hopelessness. She couldn’t possibly take control of her life. And it wasn’t Adam’s fault but her own. It was her fault for asking Sarah to bring her books, for reading them obsessively in this way. She was to blame for raising her expectations of the world, for not focusing on Adam and her daughters instead, for dreaming and wanting too much. Or maybe it was her books’ fault for turning her mind the way they had. For tempting her to disobey Mama as a young girl, to believe in love and happiness, and now, for taunting her over her greatest weakness: that she had no control over her own life.

But despite the war inside her mind, Isra couldn’t part with her books. Each night she read by the window. She decided she would rather go on living conflicted with books by her side than be tormented all alone.

“I have some books for you,” Sarah whispered to Isra one evening as they cooked dinner together. As the sun set, the windows darkened, and Fareeda retreated to the sala to watch her favorite Turkish soap opera, Isra and Sarah roasted vegetables, simmered stews, and prepared assortments of hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabbouleh. Sometimes Nadine would enter the kitchen to find them whispering together, and to their relief, she would join Fareeda in the sala. In these private moments, as they lingered near the stove, wrapped in a blanket of steam, the savory smell of allspice thickening the air, Isra would feel her heart swell.

Lately, Sarah had been sneaking into the basement a few times a week after dinner with a handful of books she had brought home for Isra. In the past, on nights like this one, Isra would have put her daughters to sleep and spent the evening gazing out the basement window until Adam came home. But now she waited up for Sarah, eager to see which books she’d brought. Some nights they would even read together. Last week they’d rushed through Pride and Prejudice in four nights so Sarah could write an essay on it for her English class. They’d sat together on Isra’s bed, knees grazing, the book like a warm fire between them.