A Woman Is No Man(87)

“That’s not an excuse. Why are you defending her?”

Isra didn’t know how to explain it. She had her own resentments toward Fareeda. The woman was tough. But Isra also knew the world had made her that way. That it was a hard world, and it was hardest on its women, and there was no escaping that.

“I’m not defending her,” she said. “I just want you to be safe, that’s all.”

“Safe from what?”

“I don’t know. . . . You’ve been scaring away your suitors. Now you’re sneaking out of school, going to the movies. I just worry your family will find out, and . . . I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Sarah laughed. “What do you suppose will happen to me if I accept one of the proposals my mother wants? Do you think I’ll ever be loved? Respected? Accomplished? Tell me, do you?”

“No.”

“How is that not hurting me? That’s why I refuse to listen to my family anymore.”

Isra stared at her in horror. “What are you saying?”

Sarah looked briefly at the door before whispering, “I’m running away.”

There was a moment of silence as Isra registered the words. She opened her mouth to speak, stopped, felt herself choke. Then she swallowed. “What, are you crazy?”

“I don’t have a choice, Isra. I have to leave.”

“Why?”

“I . . . I have to. I can’t live like this anymore.”

“What are you saying? You can’t just leave!” She reached for Sarah’s arm, clutched it. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t do this!”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, shaking her arm free. “But nothing you say will change my mind. I’m leaving.” Isra opened her mouth to speak, but Sarah cut her off. “And you should come with me.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Says the girl who ran out the basement window in the middle of the night.”

“That was different! I was upset. I didn’t plan to run away . . . and I came back! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I have daughters to think of.”

“Exactly. If I had a daughter, I would do anything to save her from this.”

Deep down, Isra knew her daughters would live out this same life. That one day she would become like Fareeda and push them into marriages, no matter how much they hated her for it. But that wasn’t a reason to run away. She was a foreigner here, with no money or skills, nothing to live on, nowhere to go. She turned to Sarah. “What will you do? How will you live?”

“I’ll go to college, get a job.”

“It’s not that easy,” Isra said. “You’ve never even spent a night away from home, let alone lived on your own. You need someone to take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Sarah said. Then, in a softer voice, she added, “You can take care of yourself, too. We can take care of each other.” Their eyes met. “If you’re not strong enough to do it for yourself, then do it for your daughters.”

Isra looked away. “I can’t . . . I can’t raise them on my own.”

“Why not? You already do, practically. America is full of single mothers.”

“No! I don’t want to put my daughters through that. I don’t want to uproot them—snatch them from home and force them to grow up alone, without a family, in shame.”

Sarah sneered at her. “You have to have a home first to be uprooted from it. You have to know what love is to feel alone.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Of course I am.” Sarah studied an invisible spot on the floor. “But whatever happens . . . It can’t be worse than what’s happening now.”

Isra knew Sarah was right, but awareness and action, she also knew, were very different things. “I don’t know where you’ve found this courage,” she whispered. “And I envy you for it. But I can’t go with you. I’m sorry.”

Sarah looked at her with sad eyes. “You’ll regret this, you know. Your daughters will grow up, and they’ll hate you for your weakness.” She walked away, pausing at the doorway. “And don’t think they’ll understand, because they won’t. They’ll never see you as a victim. You’re supposed to be the one who protects them.”





Deya


Winter 2009

A new year began, and nothing changed. In class, Deya found it hard to pay attention. She felt adrift and nauseous. When school let out and she got home, she retreated quietly to her room, where she ate alone, emerging only to wash the dishes after dinner. A thousand thoughts flicked through her mind like cars on a subway train: she should visit Sarah again, she should leave, she should stay and marry Nasser if he would still have her. But nothing felt right. Every time she tried to talk to her sisters, she’d clench up, racked with nerves and anger. To them, nothing had really changed. Nora had even said as much one night while trying to comfort Deya. Their parents might as well have died in a car accident, she’d said; they needed to move on. Deya hadn’t been that kind of person before; she definitely wasn’t now.

Most of all she thought about Isra, trying to understand the woman she thought she’d known all these years, yet had so grossly misjudged. When Sarah had first started telling her stories of Isra, they had felt like precisely that: fiction. But now Deya clutched at the stories desperately, each one a clue to the woman her mother really was. She tried to stitch together the scattered pieces of Isra’s life, to weave them into a full narrative, a complete story, a truth. But she couldn’t—something was missing. There was more to Isra. After everything she had learned over the past weeks, she knew there had to be.