A Girl Like That(29)



Curious and a little disgusted, I stepped forward. Once, twice. Again. A voice roared in my ears, “ZARIN!” and my feet halted in their tracks.

The DVD slipped from the boy’s smudged fingers and clattered onto the floor.

I felt Masa’s fingers grip my arm. “Come! We’re leaving.”

As we were leaving the store, however, I turned around once and caught the boy’s eye. He gave me a slight, wobbly smile. It was strange how quickly I went from being disgusted to feeling sorry for him. I smiled back, the barest upward flick of the mouth, a quick nod.

Days later, I saw the boy again outside our apartment building, tossing pebbles at my bedroom window. It was probably the worst thing he could have done because Masi was in my room at the time, placing a load of newly folded laundry on my bed.

A moment later, Masa and I watched, a little shell-shocked, as Masi marched out of the building, her long nightgown whipping outward from her bone-thin body, her hair still covered with the white cotton scarf she wore for prayers, and threw a slipper at the boy, hitting him right in the back as he ran.

When she returned, Masi gripped me by the shoulders and shook me hard, her words buzzing in my ears like bees: “Who was that boy? What was he doing throwing stones at your window? Did you know him? Did you call him here?”

“Stop it!” Masa pulled her off me. “Khorshed, stop! Of course she doesn’t know him. He was that boy from the DVD store last week.”

“What boy? You didn’t tell me anything about a boy!”

“He was…” The flush on Masa’s face nearly reached the top of his bald head. “He was watching her. I didn’t think much of it. Boys and girls at this age. You know what it’s like, Khorshed.”

“How could you be so foolish?” Masi’s head swiveled from window to window, a manic bobble-head doll. “I know you’re a man, but don’t you even think?”

“I’m sorry! But how could I have known he would follow us?” Masa turned to face me. “Zarin, did you tell him we lived here? Did you ask him to come? You know how wrong that is, don’t you?”

“I never even talked to him,” I said. “He was the one who was watching me. He followed us. I didn’t do anything wrong!”

I gritted my teeth. Sure, I wasn’t exactly innocent here. I had smiled at the boy at the end. But how could Masa assume I would give our address to anyone anywhere?

“You didn’t, did you?” Masi’s lips were turning white. “Oh no, you knew nothing!”

“Khorshed, please, it was most likely a mistake.” Masa’s voice, so sharp and accusing when he’d talked to me, softened, sweetened. “She’s only eleven … she was probably curious.”

*

It took a few more years for my curiosity to be satisfied. And I had to admit that Abdullah, who started calling me his girlfriend at the end of our third date, did it quite well with his kisses.

In stores, I continued to aggravate Masi, looking boys and men in the eye, forcing them to take second looks with a twist of my hips, a slightly swaying walk.

By the time I was sixteen, I considered myself an expert on boys and the sorts of looks they gave me. It was also during this time that I began questioning my expertise when I discovered another kind of boy, another kind of stare.

*

A few blocks from our apartment building in Aziziyah stood a Lahm b’Ajin deli shop, one of many meat and cheese franchises owned by the Lahm b’Ajin group of companies headquartered in the capital city of Riyadh. The words lahm b’ajin referred to the minced-meat pizzas they initially sold out of a small shop in Riyadh many years before. These days, the same pizzas were sold in the cooked-goods section at each of their deli shops and as frozen goods in big supermarkets like Tamimi and Danube.

Masa worked as plant manager at Lahm b’Ajin’s meatpacking factory in Jeddah’s fourth industrial city. From what he told us at dinnertime and from the various newspaper articles he pointed out, I understood that the company was expanding rapidly across the Kingdom and the UAE, opening new branches and shutting down old, unprofitable ones.

The deli we visited was one of the few older shops that still turned a profit. Run ever since we came to Jeddah by an old Palestinian named Hamza, it was as familiar to me as the back of my hand, with its gleaming white walls and speckled tiles. Meat hung from hooks at the far end of the store, where the butchery was set up—skinned goat and lamb parts, whole goats in the days leading up to Eid al-Adha. The deli section, at the center, nearly always ran out of the peppercorn-beef salami, but there was usually plenty of smoked turkey on hand. The cases displaying the cheeses at the other end of the butchery always had red plastic roses in them. Masa and Masi knew every man who worked at the deli counter by name, some of whom still called me “Baby,” which, though embarrassing, was something I tolerated.

Being treated like I was still seven years old was a small price to pay for a few minutes, sometimes even half an hour, of real freedom if the line at the counter was long—the kind of freedom that Masi had sanctioned, the kind I didn’t have to steal. The deli shop was one of the few places Masi sometimes sent me to alone, on errands to pick up a tray of smoked turkey. This had begun happening more and more often over the previous year or so, after Masa got promoted to senior plant manager and began working longer hours and Masi grew more sluggish—probably because of the medication she was taking then.

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