A Woman Is No Man(89)

In her bedroom, Fareeda couldn’t sleep. Her mind raced the moment her head hit the pillow, thinking about her past, her children. About Sarah. Had she failed as a mother? Some nights, she managed to convince herself she hadn’t. After all, hadn’t she raised her children the same way her parents had raised her? Hadn’t she taught them what it meant to be tough, resilient? Hadn’t she taught them what it meant to be Arab, to always put family first? Not to run away, for goodness sake. She couldn’t be blamed for their weaknesses. For this country and its low morals.

Fareeda knew it did no good to worry about things she couldn’t change. Her mind turned to Umm Ahmed, who had become a shell of her old self, blaming herself for Hannah’s death, thinking she could’ve stopped it somehow and saved her daughter. Privately Fareeda disagreed. If Sarah had come to Fareeda as a married woman and said, “Mama, my husband beats me and I’m unhappy,” would Fareeda have told her to leave him, to get a divorce? Fareeda knew she wouldn’t have. What had Umm Ahmed been thinking?

Fareeda knew that no matter what any woman said, culture could not be escaped. Even if it meant tragedy. Even if it meant death. At least she was able to recognize her role in their culture, own up to it, instead of sitting around saying “If only I had done things differently.” It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them. She had comforted herself with these thoughts so many times before, but tonight they only filled her with shame.





Isra


Summer 1997

Isra sat by the window, nose pressed up against the glass, feeling a turbulence rise within her. It will be okay, she told herself. But she was not okay. At first when Sarah had left she had wept so violently that it seemed as though the tears were rising from a deep spring inside her and would never stop. But now she sat in a heavy silence. She was furious. How could Sarah run away? Leave her alone like this? Give up on everything they knew, on the life they’d shared together? Growing up, Isra had never once considered running away, not even when her parents sent her to America. What was Sarah thinking?

But worse than her anger was the other thought that kept returning to her: What if Sarah had been right? Isra thought about Khaled and Fareeda, how they had carried their children out of the refugee camp, leaving their country behind and coming to America. Did they see what Isra saw now? They had run away to survive, and now their daughter had done the same. Maybe that’s the only way, she thought. The only way to survive.

A day passed, then another, then another. Every morning Isra would wake up to the sound of her daughters calling her name, jumping into bed, and a sickness would fill her. She wondered if it was the jinn. Just leave me alone! she wanted to scream. Just let me breathe! Eventually she would force herself to get up, gather her daughters, dress them, comb their hair—all that hair, how they moaned as she untangled it!—sucking on her teeth as she yanked a brush through their curls. Then she’d walk Deya and Nora to the corner, waiting for the yellow school bus to take them away, and she’d think, filled with shame and disgust at her weakness, If only the bus would take the rest of her daughters, too.

In the kitchen now, Isra could hear Fareeda’s voice in the sala. Lately Fareeda spent her days weaving a story of Sarah’s marriage to tell the world, only to cry silently into her hands when she was done. Sometimes, like now, Isra felt a duty to comfort her. She brewed a kettle of chai, adding an extra twig of maramiya, hoping the smell would soothe her. But Fareeda would never drink it. All she did was pound her palms against her face, like Isra’s mama had often done after Yacob hit her. The sight made Isra sick with guilt. She had known that Sarah was leaving and had done nothing to stop her. She should’ve told Fareeda, should’ve told Khaled. Only she hadn’t, and now Sarah was gone, and it felt as though she had slipped into a pocket of sadness and would never emerge from it.

When she’d finished preparing dinner that night, Isra crept downstairs. Deya, Nora, and Layla were watching cartoons; Amal slept in her crib. Isra tiptoed across the basement quietly so as not to wake her. From the back of their closet, she pulled out A Thousand and One Nights, her heart quickening at the touch of the brown spine. Then she turned to the last page, where she kept a stash of paper. She grabbed a blank sheet and began to write another letter she would never send.

“Dear Mama,” Isra wrote,

I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I don’t know why I feel this way. Do you know, Mama? What have I done to deserve this? I must have done something. Haven’t you always said that God gives everyone what they deserve in life? That we must endure our naseeb because it’s written in the stars just for us? But I don’t understand, Mama. Is this punishment for the days I rebelled as a young girl? The days I read those books behind your back? The days I questioned your judgment? Is that why God is taunting me now, giving me a life that is the opposite of everything I wanted? A life without love, a life of loneliness. I’ve stopped praying, Mama. I know it’s kofr, sacrilege, to say this, but I’m so angry. And the worst part is, I don’t know who I am angry with—God, or Adam, or the woman I’ve become.

No. Not God. Not Adam. I am to blame. I am the one who can’t pull myself together, who can’t smile at my children, who can’t be happy. It’s me. There’s something wrong with me, Mama. Something dark lurking in me. I feel it from the moment I wake up until the moment I sleep, something sluggish dragging me under, suffocating me. Why do I feel this way? Do you think I am possessed? A jinn inside me. It must be.