Homeland Elegies(61)
Being confounded by one’s own appearance must count as among the most commonplace of human experiences, but the feeling has a special strangeness when coupled to the matter of race. Having grown up in the western suburbs of Milwaukee, endlessly encircled by whiteness, it stood to reason my darker skin would come to define me, but what still mostly eludes me is how exactly this came to pass. There were no traumatic episodes with cohorts in school; no well-intentioned teachers and mentors ennobling my difference; I had no problem fitting in or finding girlfriends; at home, my parents never complained about anything even remotely resembling bigotry. The Wisconsin of my youth was still proud of its homegrown progressivism. It was the birthplace of workers’ comp and Bob La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea, that academic and scientific research should be placed in the service of the public good, a place—so unlike the eastern Pennsylvania of Riaz’s youth—where the only tribalism I ever witnessed growing up concerned the local football team. And yet as my darkish body ripened, my disgust for white bodies was now squared by desire. My wet dreams were only white; I longed for white faces brightened by the sight of my darker one, imagined white breasts and thighs, white fingers on my thickened brown-red penis—all of which, of course, reveals a socialization into the politics of race touching the very core of my being. And yet that morning, as I lay beside Asha, our dark hands side by side against the snowy covers, I felt—for the first time I could remember—no confusion at all, felt that our brown hues looked unerringly correct, a conclusion that felt all the more convincing and forceful for proceeding not by a process of thought but from an afflux of feeling, a trickle of sudden wonder that had her as its miraculous source. Of course, it was love I was feeling, though I’m no longer clear what sort, exactly—whether it was love for what I’d never been able to accept about myself (my color), which I mistook for love of her, or whether (as I believed that morning) I’d fallen more deeply for another person than I’d known was possible.
Asha wasn’t in a cuddling mood. She woke and turned away from me, pleading her bad breath. She grabbed her phone as she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I heard the faucet, then the shower.
I got up and started coffee, then chopped some of our leftover karahi into a bowl of eggs with chilies and coriander. I buttered two chappatis and heated them on a skillet as the omelet cooked. When Asha emerged in a towel, her wet hair slicked back, texting on her phone, she looked delighted to find breakfast ready. My heart leaped as she wrapped her arms around my neck and nuzzled her still-moist cheek against my ear. Her phone buzzed with a text. As she sat and tore a piece of bread for her eggs, her phone buzzed with another. She glanced at the screen, then turned it facedown on the table, annoyed.
“Who is it?” I asked.
She shrugged and shook her head, by which she meant to convey, I think, both that her response would not have surprised me and that it was nothing worth talking about—which could only have meant it was Blake.
“What does he want?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.”
I was feeling hopeful and defenseless—hopeful with my longing to speak even just a hint of what I was feeling for her that morning; defenseless from a growing sense that, in fact, she’d already picked up on something new in me, something needy and pleading, and was now plotting her escape from it.
“So whose cross is that in the bathroom?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“On top of the vanity. I needed a Q-tip. I knocked the jar of coconut oil. There’s that silver necklace with a cross on it…”
“Oh, right. That.”
She misread my embarrassed smile: “What was she like?”
“Oh, no. It’s not that…It’s mine.”
“Really? Why do you have a cross?” she asked.
On any other morning, I would’ve lied. But not on this one. Even if I couldn’t tell her I’d fallen in love with her, she deserved the best of me—even if only for my own sake. “It’s from 9/11,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story, I mean—”
“It’s okay,” she said as she chewed. “We have time.”
I took a breath. I began again: “Back then, I had a TV in my bedroom, and the first thing I would do when I got up was turn it on for the weather. That morning, though, I remember they were showing a live feed of a fire in the upper floors of the first tower. The announcers kept saying a small plane had hit the tower, and I remember thinking—as I went into the bathroom—of JFK junior’s plane going down in the Atlantic Ocean. I was putting toothpaste on my toothbrush when I heard someone cry out on the TV. I went back into the bedroom and saw there’d been a new explosion. Another plane had hit the second tower. I knew right then. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.”
“Knew what?” she asked.
“That it was us. That we did this.”
She was quiet, but her guarded look wasn’t hard for me to read. If I was cannier, dear reader, I would recast that expression on her face, offer an airbrushed look of offense as prelude to a vociferous objection on her part, then follow it all with a concocted back-and-forth that made clear her Muslim horror over the attacks, no different in kind from that of any non-Muslim. If I cared less about it all, I would write it like that to save myself the likely grief ahead. But I won’t write it that way, because that’s not what happened. She didn’t speak because, like me, she was used to the sermons and family dinners replete with complaint about murderous American meddling; worry over Muslim land and lives lost; praise of Hitler and rage against Israel; self-reproach about the pathetic state of our own imperial destiny. Like me, she’d heard many times that a figure would rise among us to overthrow the illegitimate rule of these Europeans and neo-Europeans, that we were destined to take the world back from these spiritual ghosts one day. They’d turned their back on God for money, and we knew that could only end badly. They were a category of human with no measure beyond themselves. They honored nothing. It was no surprise the very planet itself was dying under the watch of their shortsighted empire. The day would come when we would take it all back and restore to it a rightful holiness. She’d heard it all so many times—though we would both hear it less and less after the attacks. She looked away now with the subtlest of discouraged nods, the expression on her face—I thought—charged with chagrin.