A Girl Like That(19)

The woman I saw in Abdullah’s magazine, however, had nipples the way I did, though hers were considerably larger and pierced through with silver rings. A thin strip of black hair ran down her crotch; the hair on her head was dyed blond. The shock I felt at seeing her nude wasn’t as great as the shock of finding her in my brother’s room.

I remembered the look he’d given me once when I bent over to pick up a pencil in the living room, the way his gaze had lingered on my legs and butt even after I’d straightened. It was only when his gaze reached my face that he started and stepped back. We both went red—I, for reasons I did not know back then—and then Abdullah had simply frowned at me, which made me feel as if I’d done something wrong.

I flipped through more pages, ignoring the text and focusing on the pictures—all of them women, all of them naked. I spent so long in Abdullah’s room that I didn’t hear him come back from school or enter until he was towering right over me, his shadow censoring my view of the page.

He seized me by the arm and threw me out the door. “If you tell Mother about this I will screw you so bad, you will not know what hit you.”

“Like you screw those girls, you mean!” I shouted, even though I didn’t know what I meant in throwing his threat back at him.

Then Abdullah leaned forward and grabbed hold of my arms. His thumbs dug into the sides of my breasts; I could feel his nails through my clothes. His teeth were gritted, his mouth so close to my face that I could smell the potato chips on his breath.

“Stop it! You’re hurting me!”

“Children?” A voice floated toward us from the other end of the hallway. “Children, what is it? Why are you fighting?”

I do not know what Abdullah would have done had Mother not suddenly emerged from her room. He released me as suddenly as he’d caught me. “I do not want you inside my room again. If you do that, I will show you what I can do.”

Out of fear, then, rose an emotion that I would carry always in reaction to Abdullah’s threat: an anger that made me shove him with both hands against the closed door. There was surprise on his face—he had, I realized, not expected me to hit back—then wariness, a look he would always give me when we were alone together after that, before he stalked off into his room.

In the weeks and months that followed, I began to look up terms in the dictionary—intercourse, sex, masturbate. From the girls at school, I learned the slang words—the forbidden four-letter ones they scribbled on the doors of toilet stalls—and looked those up as well, putting new meaning to the words my brother used on the phone with his friends.

By the time I was fourteen, I had a rough idea of what happened between a man and woman when they had sex. We learned about reproduction in biology, saw crude drawings of the male and female organs in our textbook. At school a girl brought in The Diary of a Young Girl and showed us a chapter where Anne Frank described her own body in detail. I had learned enough to giggle at these descriptions, to hide my own prudishness in front of the other girls.

It was the year Father instructed the family driver to give Abdullah driving lessons in his car—a brand-new GMC that Abdullah was expected to chauffeur me and Mother around in once he got his driving permit. Father’s visits to our home also decreased that year as he spent more and more time managing his new electronics store in Bahrain. Now, in Father’s absence, Abdullah was officially the man of our house and our legal guardian—the one who would be allowed to sign papers permitting me or even Mother to travel anywhere outside the Kingdom, even though he was fifteen and Mother forty.

Forbidding me to see his friends was the first of Abdullah’s many dictums, though that never really bothered me that much. I had heard plenty about these boys at school, and had no inclination to see them or to let them see me. What bothered me was Abdullah’s refusal to allow me to accompany him and Father on our family’s first ever pilgrimage, our first ever Hajj, to the holy city of Makkah the following month, even though Jawahir and her sons were allowed to go.

“You cannot!” Abdullah had insisted when I complained. “You’re fourteen years old, Mishal. You have your whole life ahead of you. Besides, if we both go, who will take care of Mother?”

“We could take Mother with us! I promise I’ll take care of her!”

“Mother is not capable of going at this time and you know it.” Abdullah’s eyes softened slightly when he saw the anger on my face. “Look, I’ll tell Father to take you with him next year, okay?”

Rationally, I knew my brother was right. While the pilgrimage was one of the five pillars of Islam and obligatory for Muslims, it needed to be undertaken only once during a lifetime, health and finances permitting. Abdullah also had a point about Mother’s depression, which often got worse after spending time with either Father or Jawahir, even with her medication. There was no way she would be able to manage the five days of the Hajj with both of them and their kids.

A part of me couldn’t help wondering if these were the only reasons or if there was more behind Abdullah’s refusal to take me along. By now, my brother and I had reached a truce of sorts, which we maintained by staying out of each other’s way. He did not want me around him, which should have been more relief than it was offense, I had told myself.

The evening Abdullah’s friends came over, I was still thinking about the Hajj. About the luxury Makkah Clock Royal Tower hotel, where my father had booked a suite with a view of the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba. I thought about how once they got there, Jawahir would fawn over Abdullah as if he was her son. How they would pretend to be one big happy family—like my mother and I didn’t exist.