In the Country (5 page)

I bought the shawl. Outside the store, I draped it around Minnie's shoulders—which were narrow, like my mother's. “It's yours,” I said.

Of course, she tried to refuse.

“Consider it your Ramadan bonus,” I insisted, tucking the ends of the shawl into Minnie's collar. “From me. And Mrs. Mansour.”

For her first day of school Aroush wore a pink dress embroidered with silver thread, hoop earrings, and a stack of filigreed bangles. Two tight braids along the sides of her head followed her ears' shape and coiled at the ends like sea horses.

“Good morning, Teacher,”
sang Mrs. Mansour, waving Aroush's hand.

They had brought a servant with them this time, a Filipino dressed in black-and-white livery. He carried in Aroush's car seat, a special recliner with support for her neck and head, and a gliding rocker and ottoman for me. I greeted him in Tagalog, but his brief, accented response suggested that we shared neither a hometown nor a dialect. And he seemed loath to socialize in Mrs. Mansour's presence. For my part, I could barely look at the man without an urge to laugh at his ridiculous costume. Minnie had once described her own uniform as “French maid,” which at the time had almost made me laugh as well.

Mrs. Mansour spoke gently into Aroush's ear—in English, seemingly for my benefit. “Aroush, listen to Mrs. Sally Riva and learn from her.
Ummi
will return for you in the afternoon.” She kissed Aroush and gently passed her to me.

Aroush let out an extended version of her low, atonal grunt, and I learned that this was how she cried. The servant held the front door open for Mrs. Mansour, who stopped and looked back. I saw that her arms, in the sleeves of her
jilbab,
longed to reach out. We both stood there awkwardly, the emptiness as new to her arms as Aroush's weight was to mine. I began to rock and hush Aroush, for both our sakes. Mrs. Mansour smiled and was able, finally, to leave.

I stood in the foyer comforting Aroush until her tears and drool formed a damp spot on the shoulder of my blouse. I grew tired. Despite being smaller than a healthy five-year-old, Aroush felt solid and hefty in my arms. I sat down with her on the new gliding rocker in my living room.

At this time of day, I would normally have been waking up, descending the stairs to make my first cup of coffee. That kind of leisure had troubled me when I first became a housewife, at the age of thirty, the year we came to Bahrain. It felt not only dull but somehow criminal: I'd always worked at some job or other since I was twelve years old. And work was not a matter of choice for Minnie, who sent her wages home to a sick mother and school-age relatives in Manila. In college I had marched with tenant farmers on the Congress Building, and built a campus barricade with striking jeepney drivers, throwing firecrackers at the military helicopters overhead. It felt strange for all that activist fervor on behalf of working people to have gone down the gold-fixtured toilet and matching bidet of this house, once Ed and I moved here.

Aroush's crying faded to a grunt, and then to rattled breathing. I sang her a song of greetings and good mornings that included both her name and mine. She cried again when I stood to install her in her recliner. I imagined Mrs. Mansour and her servants tiptoeing around Aroush because she cried so easily. A common, well-intentioned error. In fact children like Aroush needed more stimulation, not less, than regular ones. I stroked her hair, her thumbprinted cheek, and her knee; I turned on the chair's massage function and sang some more.

Back in Manila, I had chosen my field for reasons I would never share with anyone. It seemed in college that if a girl was not rich, or beautiful enough to marry rich, then there were two honorable ways for her to survive: nursing, or teaching. Weak in science, I would not have made it through nursing school. Yet I had a medical kind of appetite for staring at disorders, at things gone gruesomely wrong in the body, which seemed wasted on ordinary teaching. I was drawn to special education, whose textbooks included pictures of collapsed spines and rock-like formations in the brain. I liked the sound the two words made together and the person I became in other people's eyes when I uttered them. I told stories of afternoons spent coaxing antisocial boys out of bathroom stalls and of violent girls who bit me until the skin broke. “You're brave, Sal,” people said. “I wouldn't last a day.”

I guided Aroush's hands over a stuffed terry-cloth bear, a satin blanket, a ball with knobs on its rubber surface. A cold tin rattle set her off again. The growths on her hands were buoyant to the touch, the rust-colored henna patterns drawn to perfection despite their uneven canvas. I wondered if the henna artist had special dispensation, like the Mansours' Filipino servants, to enter Aroush's bedroom, or if Mrs. Mansour knew how to paint the vines and flowers there herself.

She arrived at three o'clock sharp to pick up her daughter. “You must reward every response she shows, to any stimulus at all,” I told Mrs. Mansour. To demonstrate, I set the alarm clock one minute ahead and sat silently in front of Aroush, holding her hands, waiting for a reaction. Mrs. Mansour's presence there seemed to require a performance on my part. The clock rang, and Aroush startled at the sound. “Good girl!” I cried, clapping my hands and exaggerating a smile. I kissed her cheek.

“How wonderful,” said Mrs. Mansour. She bent down and took Aroush into her arms, murmuring to her in Arabic. “Today, clocks; one day, symphonies. Right, Teacher?”

At fifty dinars an hour, I could hear Minnie saying, who was I to argue? I looked away as Mrs. Mansour covered Aroush with her veil and went to the door. “We will see you tomorrow, Teacher,” she said, her eyes misty with hope. “For the meantime, here is our gift to you.”

There was a basket on our front step the size of the cradle of Moses, its cellophane wrapping tied with a gold ribbon. Inside were tropical fruits and comfits I hadn't seen since leaving the Philippines: sugar apples, bristly-skinned rambutans, strips of dried mango, shredded coconut preserve. I looked up to protest, but the gate had already clicked shut behind Mrs. Mansour and my little student.

At night I served Ed his dinner of pork and root vegetables. “How was your day?” he asked. My husband was always the first between us to ask how the day had gone—even in Bahrain, where on some days all I had to report was the price of cabbage, or the latest plot twists on
Falcon Crest.
Today I told him about Mrs. Mansour. “She seems to believe her daughter will be an astronaut or artist one day,” I said. “This limp, drooling, averbal, severely delayed child.”

Ed kept his face close to the bowl as he ate, chewing openmouthed while his spoon secured more. “Sweetheart, if you had tennis courts in your backyard and a separate wing for the servants, you might lose touch with reality too.” Bits of squash and potato landed on his place mat and the surrounding tablecloth. “How much did you say she was paying you?”

“Fifty an hour.”

“Dinars?”

“Dinars.”

“Not bad. Soon I'll be here watching soaps, while you bring home the bacon.” Ed winked at me in the manner of people who cannot wink: both eyelids fluttered awkwardly, as if sand had blown into them.

In the Philippines, before marrying Ed, I had warned him that I did not want children; I worked with them, and I had no desire to bring my work home. Ed didn't mind. “I'd make a lousy father anyway,” he had said. “I can't imagine sharing you with anyone else.” When I gained weight during our first six sedentary months in Bahrain, Ed proclaimed himself a lucky man. “Now there's more of you to love,” he said. He was a decent, doting husband, remarkably blind to my deficiencies. His devotion had once offered me an oasis: from gossipy friends and demanding family members, from challenged students and their challenging parents.

But now that we really did live on a desert island, I was finding myself less and less in need of that oasis. Here in Bahrain, where my daily stresses were so few, where television or groceries provided the most taxing strains on my attention, I'd grown more and more aware of what came with Ed's constant, indestructible love. His incompetent winks. His noisy, desperate way of eating. The texture of his skin, baked rough and leathery by this new climate, and its now perpetual film of grease. The odors of sweat and petroleum on his body and in his clothes after a day's work.

I had no right to find such fault with him, of course. Now that I brought in no part of the household income, was losing what looks I ever had, and could rarely even offer interesting conversation, some basic patience and loyalty were the least I could give Ed in exchange for his kindness. I owed him winks in return. I owed him my permission to sit at the dinner table in those damp clothes when he was too exhausted to shower or change. I owed him hums of sympathy when he complained about his job. And I owed him my dutiful, wifely laughter when he ridiculed those who worked with him.

If his day had been pleasant enough, Ed's face would take on a goofy, simian expression at dinner, and he'd wag his head from side to side in imitation of his Indian subordinates. “The new
Bumbai
are so difficult to train,” he said now. “First of all, I can't understand a word they're saying. They're like chickens clucking in boiling water.
Vee are vorking as qvickly as vee can, sir.
” If he had suffered a bad day at work, I would also know it by Ed's face: his features would contort with bitterness, and his voice would imitate, instead, the hard, thumping English in which his Arab superiors had scolded him.

I cleared our dinner dishes and arranged some of Mrs. Mansour's fruits in a bowl, placing them at the center of the table. Ed reached before he saw what was inside.

“Surprise,” I said.

“What—
atis
?
Santol?
” He peered closer. “Where did you get these, Sal?” He broke open a sugar apple, scooped out one of the inner pods, and began to suck.

“Mrs. Mansour.”

“Not bad! Did she have them flown over by private jet? How is it the ants didn't get to them first?”

“I don't know.” I was grateful for the fruit, whose fragrance sweetened the kitchen and seemed to absorb my husband's odor. According to Ed, though, it was the Indians who stank. “The pipe will spring a leak one of these days,” he liked to say, “and I won't even smell it for all the
Bumbai
around me. The stench of curry armpit will have knocked me out.”

I blurred the focus of my eyes until Ed became a set of disembodied sweat stains in front of me: the spots under his arms, the gleaming oily patches on his cheeks and forehead, the tie that grew darker as it looped around his neck. Only by the sounds of him eating the fruit—the slurping of pulp and spitting out of seeds—could I tell that my husband was still there. With my fingernail I punctured the skin of a rambutan to expose the white jelly inside.

On our second morning together I began to train Aroush's eyes. I placed a doll and a flashlight beneath the heavy, floor-length tablecloth in our dining room and carried Aroush under. She began to cry. As I soothed her in the dark, I noticed how much she smelled like her mother—that pleasing scent of tangerine mixed with something stronger. When the moaning stopped I shone the flashlight upon the doll, a few feet in front of us. “Do you see the pretty little doll, Aroush?” I had fallen into the special-needs teacher's habit of narrating each minute as it happened, of repeating myself, of asking questions Aroush could not answer. “Do you see?” I peered around at Aroush's face. Her eyes were as aimless and agitated as ever.

I had been taught that senses were the doorway to skills. In the kitchen I held against Aroush's tongue a pretzel-shaped teether that had spent the night in the refrigerator. She shivered. “Good girl!” I hugged and kissed her. An older, less impaired child I could have rewarded with raisins or candy; Aroush, who had never eaten solid food, I could only praise and love. I exchanged a cold teether for one that had steeped in a pan of warm water since morning. A furrow appeared between Aroush's brows at the change in temperature, and I practically attacked her with cuddling.

By the time her mother arrived, Aroush was in her chair, and I was holding the flashlight two feet from her eyes. “Where is the light, Aroush?” I said, moving the flashlight slowly from side to side. “Do you see it? Aroush, follow the light with your eyes.” Again it was I who felt in the spotlight, with Mrs. Mansour there.

She applauded. “Now a flashlight; in time, a telescope. Isn't that right, Teacher?”

“We have lots of work to do,” I said carefully, “before we start thinking about telescopes.”

Mrs. Mansour gave no indication that she heard me or understood. Lifting Aroush from her chair, she saw a plush rattle on the coffee table. “Toys, Teacher?” she said, with some concern. “Will my girl learn from baby toys?”

I picked up the rattle and shook it. “Auditory stimulation will develop her receptiveness to sound,” I said, “which is precedent to the acquisition of language.” In my earliest days of teaching I would sometimes hide behind jargon this way, learning quickly that a crowd of syllables could soothe the most anxious parent. It seemed to work on Mrs. Mansour, who smiled again and handed me a velvet pouch.

“Teacher, do you believe in miracles?” she asked.

Inside the pouch I found a choker: pearls as large and heavy as marbles, with a bluish silver tone to them. “In Libya they have built a river where there was no water. A pearl is only sand before it turns to precious stone. Then there is the flood, the burning bush, the tree in our desert that has lived four hundred years on nothing.” She took the choker from my hands and reached over to secure the clasp at the nape of my neck. “They say only children can believe such stories. Me? I believe. Like a child, I believe.” Her fingertips were cool, and some of their coolness seemed to linger in the pearls at my throat after she had gone.