The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (18 page)

Khadra was interested in the library-she hadn't brought much reading on the trip and glimpsed rows of leatherbound novels on the shelves, The Remembrance of Things Past, Tess of the D'Urbervilles-but Afaaf pulled her by the hand to the home theater room instead, where an enormous television center took up an entire wall. She picked a tape out of a well-stocked video library and slipped it in, and soon a shimmering Olivia Newton-John was singing on roller skates, with hordes of roller-skating Americans in her train. This was Afaaf's idea of great entertainment, Xanadu?

"This is only a pit-stop," Afaaf said. "Just wait a bit." She picked up a gold-trimmed princess phone and started dialing numbers. Meanwhile, she flipped open a compact and applied mascara, eyeshadow, and blusher, and outlined her lips. "Come on, get your abaya. We're going out!" she said.

Sheikha's driver didn't like being ordered out by Afaaf. The lady of the house had left no such instructions.

"Then we'll take a cab," Afaaf said, pouting.

"No, fine, I'll take you. Better someone keeps an eye on you."

But Afaaf sent him home as soon as he dropped them off at a shiny mall that seemd to be called Prisunic.

"No, not shopping," she hissed, pulling Khadra away from the automatic glass doors. She sauntered around to a side street, pulling her abaya tight against her waist and shapely bottom. A long black limousine with official tags of some sort drew up. To Khadra's consternation, Afaaf got in and pulled Khadra in after her.

The car was full of young Saudis-two cleanshaven guys in white caftans and a girl whose black abaya was crumpled under her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. "Like a Virgin, "a familiar sultry voice pounded out on the stereo system.

"Here she is," Afaaf said to them. "My American cousin."

"Tifham arabi?" one of the guys asked Afaaf. His ghutra was pushed rakishly back on his head.

`Aiwa, bifham, " Khadra retorted. She was shocked to see Afaaf throw off her veil and abaya inside the limo. She shook out her short, dark auburn curls. Her lips were full and glossy.

"Oh," the guy said. "So ... you're not really American? You don't speak Arabic with an accent."

"No. I'm not really American. I'm an Arab, like you."

The girl seemed to think this was funny. Outside the window, the city disappeared. They were speeding down a bare stretch of highway with empty desert on both sides. Khadra felt a pang in her stomach.

"Do you drive?" Afaaf's conversation partner said. He had a wide smile and a funny, kind of broken-looking nose. "I'm Ahmad, by the way," he added, sticking his hand out.

Khadra shook her head. She didn't even shake hands with men in America, just like her mother. She wasn't going to start in the land of the Prophet. During Haj, no less. The strangeness of this whole scene was making her uncomfortable.

"Afaaf's here for her driving lesson," Ahmad said. "Ready?"

"Ready!" Afaaf cried. Ahmad said something to the driver and the car slowed to a stop. Then he pulled off his white headpiece and draped it on Afaaf's head. He and Afaaf climbed into the front seat.

A fat white Mercedes pulled up next to them. "Look, it's Rasheed," said the guy who'd remained silent until now. He had a John Travolta cleft in his chin.

"And he's got Fawaz and Feisal with him," the girl said, clapping her hands. She buzzed down her automatic window. "PARTY!" she shouted. The young men grinned and waved. One of them mouthed something at her.

The limo jerked forward, Afaaf driving. The fat Mercedes matched its motion. Afaaf darted forward again. The other car kept pace. And suddenly both vehicles were off.

"Wheee!" Afaaf shouted, the wind in her face. Then brakes screeched. The limo whirled in a circle, burning rubber. John Travolta was thrown against Khadra.

"Oh-excuse me," he said, but didn't seem very quick to move from where he had landed on her, rather firmly. Khadra scuttled to her side of the car, hugging the black leather.

"Are you okay?" the girl opposite said. "You look green." The car lurched forward again, then skidded to a stop. "Afaaf, stop!" the girl called. "The American girl is gonna hurl on us."

Khadra closed her eyes. She didn't want to be here. This was supposed to be Haj.

"Here," the girl said. She snapped open a little gold lamb handbag with an Italian label and dumped out an assortment of colored pills. "Try the yellow ones," she suggested, giggling.

Khadra shook her head.

"Suit yourself!" she said, flinging the door open. "I'm going to say hello next door-" and then she was in the Mercedes.

"That's my cousin, Ghalya," the guy left with Khadra said. "I'm Ghazi. So ... you're American, huh?"

"No," Khadra said. "I'm Arab. I told you, I'm Arab. Just like you." She got out of the car. Where was Afaaf? The limo chauffeur was back in the driver's seat, having a cigarette. A hulking sports utility GMC pulled up alongside them, and a silver Jaguar with a loud, obnoxious engine was arriving. The "party" appeared to be mushrooming.

"What kind of Arab?" Ghazi said, trailing after her.

"The Muslim kind," Khadra flung behind her back.

"I mean, what Arab country? I can't tell from your accent." It was true-her dialect was a mish-mash of Damascene, Palestinian, and Eygptian, all the Arab accents in the Dawah community.

"Syria."

"Ohhh . . . Syria, huh," he grinned. "Syrian girls have a reputation."

Khadra wasn't listening to him. She knocked on the window of the Mercedes. "Afaaf?"

The window rolled down on a cheerful male face. "Hi!" he said in English. Then he said over his shoulder in Arabic, "But she doesn't look American."

"Afaaf?" Khadra called into the car. "Is Afaaf there?" She peered past him into the back seat. There were a couple of open cans of Diet Coke on a polished wooden tabletop between the seats, and something else-a thin line of white powder. Ghalya leaned over it. ' "Our house is your house," she said to Khadra, gesturing hospitably.

Khadra recoiled. "Afaaf? Afaaf!" she called, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. The abaya, hanging from her shoulders, spun with her in a dramatic arc. There was utter desert darkness, no streetlights, a full array of stars above her with such clarity as she hadn't seen since the station wagon trip across America. And even though she was in a Muslim country at this moment, and not just any Muslim country but the Muslim country, where Islam started, she had never felt so far from home. There was a nip in the air all of a sudden.

"Wait for her in here," Ghazi said, opening the limo door for her. "The desert turns cold on you at night." Khadra shivered and got inside, Ghazi following.

"Surely you don't wear that thing in America," he said, tugging at her veil and pouting boyishly.

What the-? She batted his hand away. A pugnacious look flashed across his face and for a minute he reminded her of-of Brent Lott, of all people. He caught her hand by the wrist. Halfplayfully he wrested it down to her side. In the middle of Mecca, this was the last thing she expected.

"Let go," she said.

"Why? No one can see us," he said. Without warning, he was pulling her veil down the back of her head and pushing his other hand up against her breasts and his mouth was grazing her now exposed neck. She was squeezed up against the car door, and then he was pushing himself on top of her, his jeaned thighs taut.

"Get off-get off of me!" she gasped. And what did he mean by that, "no one can see us"-wasn't the driver of the car right there, and wasn't he looking straight at them in his rearview mirror-only why didn't he do something, why didn't he move? The driver lowered his eyes and tucked his head down and sat very still.

"What is it-what is the big deal-we're not doing anything you have to worry about," Ghazi said thickly. "-we've got our clothes on-and you grew up in America-don't tell me you never do stuff like this in America-"

She fumbled for the door latch and tumbled out when it opened. He fell half out too, and cursed. Khadra pounded her fists on the side of the limo and kicked the back left tire of the Mercedes and shouted at the wan faces that poked out of windows at the commotion. "AFAAF! You get out here! You get out here right now and take me home! Afaafl"

A disheveled Afaaf stumbled out of one of the two farther cars. "What is your problem?" she said, wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand. "What's the matter, is this not as fun as what you do in America?"

That again. "I'm not American!" she yelled in Arabic, kicking dust at Afaaf. Then, because the worst insults she knew in Arabic were what her parents blurted when she or her brothers misbehavedbrat or at worst, churl-she launched into a torrent of English: "I hate you-you're a FILTHY girl, with FILTHY friends-you take me home-you take me home RIGHT NOW. You-you-you goddamn bitch."

Ghazi whistled and said, "Listen to her go off in American!" and Ghalya giggled like it was a fine joke.

But Khadra gasped and covered her mouth with her hand because she'd just cussed. In Mecca. On Haj. Although she didn't think they were still inside the Holy Precincts. Wait: did that mean she had to do ihram again at the miqat before she got back in the city? Had she violated ihram? But what did it all matter-she had done so many wrong things here, was under such wave upon towering wave of darkness, like someone in a crashing night-storm, who can only clap her hands to her ears at every thunderbolt, and see only a handspan before her at every lightning strike-it was hopeless to dream of absolution. So it was all for nothing: she hadn't even finished Haj, and she'd already blown it. She would never emerge pure as a newborn babe.

She went through the rest of the Haj motions feeling hollow, feeling like a hypocrite. On the plane home, she said, "I'm glad we're through with that place."

"Aunt Saweem's?" her mother said.

"Yeah. It creeps me out."

Ebtehaj fixed Khadra with a stare. "She only says things like this to irritate me," she said, turning to her husband.

Khadra was glad to be going home. "Home"-she said, without thinking. She pressed her nose against the airplane window. The lights of Indianapolis spread out on the dark earth beneath the jet. The sweet relief of her own clean bed awaited her there-and only there, of all the earth.

If you were to fill the lamps to overflowing with fat Their glow would point the way to every acquisition of knowledge And if their oil is wanting, their wicks go dry Where is the light of a thread not immersed?

-Aisha Taymuria, nineteenth-century poet of Egypt

Khadra was elated when she got an acceptance letter from Indiana University, Bloomington. She didn't have to go to IUPUI or community college. Which would have been her fate had she not had a mahram, Eyad, driving to IU every day in a little used Gremlin she could share with him.

Her parents were as excited as they'd been when Eyad started college. Almost too much so: they covered the kitchen table with course catalogs and schedule forms and pored over her distribution requisites and major requirements. Ebtehaj, who'd never had such parental help in her college years, was glad to spend several very efficient late-night sessions mapping out a course plan for all four years and Wajdy, who loved a time-and-logistics management problem, worked out how Khadra could fit in the classes she needed and those she wanted in her first semester, given the parameters of what was offered when.

She was assigned work-study in the entomology department. Damselflies pinned in shadowboxes dotted the wall behind her. And in the top drawer of her worktable, there was a little dish of spare beetle legs. How fine is that, she marveled, a dish of spare legs.

She thought it was cool that instead of a job requiring her to say "Would you like fries with that?" she had one where she could say, "Will that be the aeshna cyanea naiads'-those were the nymph stage dragonflies-"or the adult plathemis lydia?" Bug taxonomy was so different in each phase-yet the cells of one stage produced the cells of the next, and somehow it was the same creature.

Khadra and Eyad were not a part of the mainstream campus scene of frat houses and tailgate parties. Most of the "practicing" Muslim students stayed away from all that. The CMC (Campus Muslim Council) was the heart of the Muslim scene in Bloomington. CMC had a little ratty cubicle with a file cabinet with the overblown name of office amid the equally tatty offices of other student groups. They met twice a week, once for juma in a carpeted off campus basement and once in a classroom for organizational stuff. Eyad was vice-president. Of course Khadra joined. The club had a mix of South Asians and Arabs (all engineering and pre-med majors), and increasingly teemed with big-bearded religious male Gulfies, men from the Arab Gulf states. The other Arab men on campus, Palestinians and Egyptians and Iraqis and Algerians, and most of the Arab women foreign students, generally belonged to the more secular Arab Students Club or the African Students Unity Organization, with its pan-African leanings.

If you were a Campus Muslim Council type of student, you wren't the type of Muslim that dated. You could say, as Tayiba had said to Khadra and a gaggle of CMC girls who'd given her the of snake-eyes when they caught her walking around easy as you please with Danny Nabolsy, "we had a study group at the library but everyone else left and then we went for coffee but only because we were both thirsty." But you didn't call it dating.

One of the most delicious things about the campus Muslim scene for the earnest young brothers and sisters was the Muslim modesty dance. Its basic move was the lowering of the gaze. Who can lower their gaze more? Who is the modestest one of all? The more attractive a "brother" found a "sister," he more sternly he kept his gaze lowered before her at the Divest from South Africa protest, staring hard at the ground with furrowed brow. I'm a modest guy, his lowered gaze said, and I find you worth showing how modest I am. His lashes trembled on his cheeks with the effort. For if she was some middle-aged auntie, or a mere unripe kid-sister girlchild, why would he bother? Having a male gaze lowered before you said, You are a Woman to me, with a capital W. What a thrill for a woman newly hatched from her egg of girlhood, what a delicious gut-tightening flutter of confusion and power. Her gaze lowered too, and her eyelashes lay down on her flushed cheeks. Or she may on purpose roughen her voice and find some important Islamic point to make or, stepping into the role of girl-next-door Muslim sister, something in the setup of the event that needed brisk tending to, to help her pretend she didn't feel the shimmer in the air between them. And then, in the next round, she may lower her hemline even more, and tighten her headscarf, and make her hijab stricter-lo, she has found someone worth being the queen of modesty for. And how that thrilled the young brothers, for it meant they were not little boys anymore but Men. Watch out then. Danger, sexy danger, Muslim flirtation-via-modesty-games danger, was in the air. It was worth never missing a CMC meeting to be part of this.