I, the Divine (13 page)

Had I known the opening of my New York exhibit would turn out to be a complete fiasco, I would have stayed home. My friend Dina and I reached the gallery at ten minutes to six, breathless. The gallery was empty. One of the assistants was still sweeping the concrete floors. The reception was from six till eight.

I was lucky to have Dina with me. I was a nervous wreck, floating in a rough sea of anxiety. For nineteen years, she had been my anchor. She had taken a week off from her job in Boston to be by my side, flying out to San Francisco to accompany me across a continent to New York.

“Do you need me there?” she had asked over the phone.

“No, I’m fine. It’ll be nice to see you in New York, but you don’t have to come here. I think I can manage. Look, it’s no big deal. We just had another fight. That’s all. He didn’t want to come to the opening. He was surprised I asked. That’s all the fight was about. No biggie. It’s not like he usually shows up at any events.”

“Lovers are supposed to support each other.”

“Well, maybe he’s not my lover.”

“I know that, but do you know that? I’ll be there. I’ll fly to San Francisco and we can come to New York together. I’ll feel better that way.”

And that was that. She arrived in San Francisco to escort me.

I thought the exhibit looked wonderful. My paintings had never looked better, they had breathing space. Even though my best painting was not hung since UPS had damaged it during shipping, the rest of the work was good enough. I was elated.

The gallery had three rooms with three different exhibits. Mine was in the main room. In the smaller gallery there was a group exhibit of New York artists, both paintings and sculptures. In the smallest room was a conceptual exhibit by a Russian émigré.

It was January 19, 1995, and I felt my life might be going somewhere. It did, just not where I expected.

I had not been painting for a long time, but I had reached a style all my own. Having been influenced by what some people called hard-edged abstraction, from Mondrian to McLaughlin, I began painting symmetrical rectangular bars on a plain colored background. The canvases were always large.

I drove my black Honda Accord on the freeway for the simple reason that I needed to get out of the house. It was Sunday morning and I wanted time to think. I crossed the bridge, unconcerned where I might end up. In time, I would turn around, returning along the same route, without even thinking about it. I wondered what to do, as the rolling hills of the East Bay flew past me. My ex-lover, David, had not called in over six months, but I still wished fervently he would. I was stuck in a relationship that had been over for years.

For someone who had believed the main point of life was relationships, I had done a poor job of living. If relationships were the crucible of transformation, I had shattered those fragile containers. I had failed every romantic relationship I had plunged into. The reasons for these failures continued to elude me, but the resulting feelings did not. I sometimes felt like I had been dropped into a sea of overwhelming sadness. I was unsure whether the feelings were the direct result of my incompetence at relationships or the effect of a biochemical imbalance. For sometimes, like this moment, as I drove on the freeway, I cried for no reason.

The enveloping sadness began in my belly, moved up to my heart, and inundated me. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I drove. I was in the midst of a feeling explosion. I zipped past a highway patrol car on my left. I panicked. The patrol car was behind me, the disco lights went on, and I slowed down. I breathed deeply, slowly, trying to control myself as I parked along the side. I could not let a policeman, a stranger, see me in that state. I tried to stop crying, but was unable to. What the hell, I thought, go for it. I allowed myself to sob and heave loudly. The policeman came to my window, Mars, the god of war, personified, all pomp and circumstance capped off by reflective sunglasses. “Can I have your registration and driver’s license, ma’am?”

“Yes, of course, officer,” I replied between sobs. I began looking through my purse.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked, beginning to visibly deflate.

“Yes, yes, I’ll be okay. I’m just having emotional problems.” It was a miracle I could even be understood. I was practically in hysterics as I handed him my driver’s license. “It’s an old picture. I looked better then.” The last sentence was followed by a loud heave and a renewed bout of crying.

“Are you sure you’re all right, ma’am?” he muttered, no longer sure of himself. His hand trembled.

“Yes, I’ll be okay in a few minutes. I’ll just stay here for a bit until this passes.”

“Where are you going, ma’am?”

Go for it, I thought to myself. It was Sunday. “To church.”

“Will you be able to drive?” he asked me, his voice hesitant.

“Yes, just let me catch my breath. I’ll be able to drive as soon as this passes. It always does.” Another loud sob.

“Well, ma’am,” he said, giving me back my license without having looked at it, “please take your time before getting back on the highway.”

“I will, officer,” I said compliantly. “I’ll just wait here for a while.” No ticket, not even a warning, nothing.

He backed away from me, turned around, and practically ran back to his car. He drove out so fast he almost hit another car as he changed lanes. I sobbed and laughed at the same time. Animus meets Anima and runs away in terror. My life story

Unlike me, my sister Lamia was not the sort of person who would attract attention, preferring to blend into the background. She was such an anonymous presence in our family we sometimes forgot she was even there. Though she was the sister closest to me in age, we were not close in any other way. She was a reticent child. She spoke so little many assumed she was a deaf-mute or incapable of understanding our language. Adults spoke to her slowly, loudly, as they would to a foreigner, and she rarely replied unless it was absolutely essential. When she did reply it was aggressively, snapping back at whoever had the audacity to engage her. Every now and then, she surprised us by interrupting, using a polemical tone, disagreeing with what was being said. Her utterances were not usually a statement requiring an argu
ment or further elaboration, simply an assertion of her disagreement like, “You’re wrong,” or “That’s absolutely untrue.”
She uttered such remarks whenever my grandmother or my father made a disparaging comment about our missing mother.

My eldest sister, Amal, says Lamia was not always a troubled child. I would not know since she was older than me. I only remember her after her troubles began. Amal remembers her as playful, if not too rowdy, before our parents’ divorce and our father’s remarriage. Our mother’s sudden disappearance was the final in a series of blows that forced her inward. Around herself she wove an impenetrable cocoon from which she never emerged. My father remarried when Lamia was five. By that time, her personality was struck.

Our mother simply vanished. One day, she was not there. Without any explanation or elaboration. “Your mother went back to America,” our father said. That was all. We were supposed to live with that.

I always thought that being the youngest, I suffered the most from my parents’ divorce, but I was wrong. By the time Lamia had succeeded in pulling herself out of our world and was institutionalized, I had come to the realization that I knew little if anything about her. Apparently no one else did either.

Our mother rarely wrote to us. At first we assumed our father had intercepted most of her correspondence. Later on, when I got to know my mother, she explained away her lack of letters as distaste for epistolary communications (her exact words). She did, however, send us cards on our birthdays. Whenever Lamia received hers, she burned the card after reading it. She placed the card in a crystal ashtray, poured rubbing alcohol over it, and lit it with a match, never a lighter. Her eyes bore into the beautiful blue flame. She did not remove her gaze until the flame died out, until the card evaporated.

I had stupidly assumed Lamia hated our mother and blamed her for leaving without an explanation. Lamia had never attempted to contact her or try to visit as I did. Lamia never mentioned her to either Amal or me. After she was institutionalized, Lamia’s husband asked my sister Amal if she would help pack some of Lamia’s things. While doing so, Amal discovered a well-hidden cache of letters. They were folded sheets of papers, no envelopes, no addresses, undated, frayed, having obviously been read many times. All of them were addressed to our mother. All of them in English so our mother would understand them better since her written Arabic was not advanced enough. None of them sent.

The letters spanned thirty-five years beginning the day our mother disappeared and lasting long past the day our mother committed suicide. The first one, written in crayon on a sheet of paper torn from her school notebook, simply stated in a childish handwriting, “Come back, Mommy.” The last, written with her Dupont fountain pen on light blue stationary, was a six-page letter detailing in jumbled, nonlinear prose all that had transpired since the previous letter, all the pain, all the loneliness, all the insanity. In between those two, there were over four hundred and fifty letters, written about once a month, in which Lamia chronicled her life and feelings in a mundane, running conversation.

My sister Lamia was a murderess, a serial killer. She hated her job as a nurse. She thought the patients too demanding so she systematically killed those who most annoyed her while under her care. Her methods were not ingenious, mostly overdosing them. By the time the dust settled, it turned out she had killed seven patients and was suspected of one more death, though the authorities could not prove the last. The first time she was asked about the deaths during the investigation, she confessed to everything. The patients irritated her; she killed them. She gave the authorities as many details as she could remember. Luckily there was no trial. She was declared insane and institutionalized to avoid any further scandal. In actuality, she had killed seven patients and failed in killing two more. She stated so in the letters. She had told our mother about each killing, the reasons, the methods, everything.

Most of the letters are simply ramblings. It would have been clear to anyone who read them that they were the product of a disturbed mind. Unfortunately, no one read them until it was too late, and then we did not dare show them to anyone else. Only my sister Amal, my stepmother, and I read them. Their presence was kept a secret among the three of us. We never told my father.

My sister was what we Druze call a “talker.” It is a difficult word to translate. A talker is one able to say things as a child that related to her past life. Those who follow the Druze faith believe in reincarnation. “Talkers” were not rare among us. She began getting into trouble at the age of three. When she was given a sandwich for dinner, she refused it, saying she would only eat if the dinner table was set, she was too good to be given sandwiches. She told everybody that when she lived in Jabal al-Druze, in Syria, she always had lavish feasts for dinner. She stomped her feet when she was asked to bathe. She wanted her old bathtub, the one with intricate turquoise-colored designs on the side. She asked to be taken back to her husband and children. Usually such behavior is taken with a degree of acceptance among Druze families, allowing the child some leeway until she adjusts to her new life. It is considered normal. Unfortunately, Lamia was insulting the family so she was made to shut up. She was forced to eat sandwiches, use cutlery not made of silver, and bathe in a regular porcelain bathtub. It was at that time that she began to withdraw.

When my grandfather began investigating her previous life—one goes to the area where the “talker” was supposed to have come from and asks around to see who died at the time of the “talker’s” birth—he discovered that what Lamia was saying was true. She had come from a rich, landowning family and had three kids of her own. Apparently she had lived a normal life, married to an ostentatious man who constantly berated her for not being perfect. On the day she died, she took a saber to her husband’s throat, slashed it, and killed herself, leaving her children orphaned. Those in the village from which she came warned my grandfather that if her soul was back, our family should be wary. We were not. My grandfather told my father who told my stepmother who told me. It became a tale, an interesting family story. No one mentioned anything to Lamia. In her letters, though, it was obvious that she knew the exact details of her life in Jabal al-Druze.

I had always thought I was the one who took after my mother. After all, I inherited her exotic looks, her artistic tendencies, her mood swings, her Americanness. I was the one who was perpetually lost, always trying to find myself in the rubble. But in the end, I realized it was my sister Lamia who took after my mother. She inherited her insanity.

It is quite possible that I am not the best person to describe my sister or to speak for her. I am biased and cannot write objectively about her. I will let her speak for herself:

Dear Mother,

My husband is very strange again because about five weeks ago, he bringed a mannequin home for what reason he will not say but I don’t know how to say mannequin in english but you know what I mean like the big doll. The children have liked it in the beginning and they called it Madonna but not too long and they don’t like it anymore, why I don’t know, and I wanted to throw her out but my husband he said we might use her some day but I did not like her naked all the time so I dressed her and put a wig on her hair and The children liked her now so I put her in the salon room in one of the couches. Well I liked the way she is looking now and I start to dressing her in different every two or three or four days and I put makeup on her face and I gave her some new looks wonderful and it was fun and so the children talk to her as if she was someone human being. But my motherinlaw thinks its realy crazy but I said to her maybe she better talk her son because he says he want her in the house at the beginning so she said I should not be dressed her but I told her Madonna only wear things I dont’d wear because I don’t have a body like her and she is very thin, don’t you think and I can’t get far away with what she puts on. Why is she blaming me all the time?

I argued another time with my father because he still has the same temper. He got upset with me because I gave Ashraf some Cypro and hee said only doctors are suppose to proscribe strong antibiotics and he was so holyer than thee but He agreed with me that all the symptoms of Ashraf’s were a bacterial infection, but he thinks I should have talked to a doctor but I think he just hates me. Amal selfproscribes valuums and Majida takes Prozac whenever she has depressions like candy and bonbon but if I give my son antibiotic, I did the wrong thing, don’t you know? You know of course that Ashraf was better and it was the right thing to do of course but my father didn’t said to me that I gave him the wrong medicine but only that I need to talk to a doctor. He went on and on and on like running water all the time about the danger of all medicines are over the counter in this country and as if that had anything to do with me so I said to him what can I do about that but he didn’t tell me so he treats me like a little girl who doesn’t know right from wrong. And my husband doesn’t do anything because the fat thing only sit there and let my father shout at me and I keep thinking that one day, he shall’ll stand up for me and tell my father stop but he doesn’t know whats going on so I told him a couple of time that if my dad shouts at me it means he’s insulting him since he was the man of the house and not my father who isnt the man of the house at all, don’t you think? He doesn’t understand it and I dont depend on him for anything because its all up to me and I am the rock of Gibraltar and My husband is a weakthing and he can’t even answer up to his own mother, so how can he answer up any one personne like my father. People will always run all over him and ride him and wipe there feet on him like a outdoor carpet and he lets them because he’s been passed over for better job at work over many hundred times. I swear on you, if he didn’t married me, he would’n’t have gotten anywhere in this life but being with his mother at home all day crying over spoiled milk. Do you watch ER? I watch every show even though the children try to harass me during the show but I like it because it shows how much better American hospitals are than Lebanese hospitals and much better hospitals and all the nurses and doctors are pretty and they have all the best machines and none of the patients are as demanding as the patients are demanding in Beirut. My father still doesn’t give me enough appreciate me and I have to say to him all the time that I am a nurse and I am a good nurse too But he doesn’t see that, does he, but I’am just happy that we don’t work on the same department because I swear on you, he treat the philipino nurses better he treat me. Because at one time when we were over at his home to have dinner, he start talking about a procedure he did on that day and then he looked at me with a bad smile and asked me what
uterus
was in Arabic because he was just making a joke of me because I study nursing in Cairo and start to learn anatomy in Arabic as if that make my nursing degree bad, Can you believe that? If I had graduated from the American University of Beirut, then I was a real nurse and as if it was my fault that we had a war and I go to Cairo to make sure my family is safety and you know, at the least I have a degree, don’t you think? I’am the first woman in the family to come out a degree. Sarah says she graduates from Barnard, but I know she is lying, she is, and she does’nt have a single picture in a hat and graduation dress and she says she didn’t go to the graduation celebration because she thinks graduation celebrations are for children and the only reason she thinks its for children is because she couldn’t go and I’am sure she did’nt have a graduate. I told her one every time to show me her degree and she asked me in a realy angry way, Why? You want to hire me? Because If she realy come out a degree, wouldn’t she show a degree papers to me, don’t you think? but my father loves her and always Sarah this and Sarah that thing and she is graduate from Barnard and shes the smart one and she is the joy of his heart and she is the apple of his eye and she is the flower of every four seasons. They can all go to hell on a quick basket.