The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (25 page)

"What kind of a thing is that to say?" Khadra said, her voice on the edge of tears. As if it didn't scare her to death. Twenty-one years old and already a failure at one of the biggest things in life. Puffs of frosty air accompanied each of her words.

"Maybe you're being selfish," he said. His eyes had dark circles under them from the stresses of med school. "Divorce is supposed to be a last recourse. Not what you do because you want to ride a bike to class."

He knew about the bike thing. Khadra resented him using it like that. She chipped hard at the solid chunk of ice on the windshield for a while. "I don't think I can stay with Juma without changing who I am. Who I essentially deep-down am."

"Is that so bad? Doesn't everyone change along the way?"

She really didn't know. She prayed an istikhara on it, a Consultation Prayer. But she still didn't understand whether Eyad was right or not.

Juma reached the end of his degree. He couldn't extend his visa.

"What about me?" Khadra said. "I've got one year to go." They were driving to Indianapolis.

"You can finish at the University of Kuwait," he said. "It's nice. Really."

"You could apply for U.S. citizenship. You're married to a citizen. They'll let you stay."

"I don't need American citizenship. I'm Kuwaiti, not Palestinian. I don't have a problem getting around with my passport."

"Or-what if-we could live apart for a year. It'd just be one year. You could go on to Kuwait, and I could stay on my own."

Juma laughed. "You're joking, right? Leave my wife in America?" He swerved to avoid roadkill-a skunk. Its smell invaded the car. Khadra's stomach lurched. She felt queasy all that evening, and the next day too.

Khadra imagined life in Kuwait. Glitzy glass buildings and lots of shopping, and a fairly luxurious standard of living, but there were hidden costs. Was this what marriage amounted to, compromise after compromise, until you'd frittered away all the jewels in your red box? She woke up one morning and felt as if the future were closing in, the horizon shrinking smaller around her. She threw up.

The throwing up didn't go away. It bothered her all week. Then her period was late, and a panicky knot formed in her stomach.

"I can't have a baby now," she whispered to the nurse at the student clinic, sitting on the examination table in shock after the doctor had just told her. Her face was sallow, her eyes puffy. She had never known anything more clearly or more urgently. "I can't."

"You're going to have children sooner or later," Ebtehaj launched at her. "In two or three years, or now, what's the difference?"

"Your life is not in danger," her father said, beginning this line of argument for the fourth time that evening.

Khadra put a sofa pillow on her face to block out the attacks.

"My life is in danger," she said to the golden-eyed lacewings in the entomology lab. She stared at one on a twig, about half an inch long, with four pale green wings, antenna the length again of its body, and bulging shiny eyes. It remained motionless, except for the careful survey of its antennae. Khadra dropped right there and prayed another Consultation Prayer on the gritty floor of the specimen room.

She'd really thought her parents would support her, after she told them how much Consultation she'd prayed on the decision. That's why she told them, expecting them to support her against Juma, help him see why this was okay for her to do. Why it was not haram. What about all those teachings where abortion was allowed in shariah? One hundred and twenty days, and all that. It turned out that nothing she'd read described the real Muslim gut reaction to the question of abortion. Imam Ghazali could have an abortion, maybe, but she, Khadra, could not.

Tayiba came over, with her baby girl Nia on her hip. She was, in Ebtehaj and Wajdy's eyes, a voice of reason from Khadra's generation. She was a part-time student, wife, mother, and mosque volunteer.

"It's not so bad? That's what you're here to tell me?" Khadra said. "Be the Muslim Superwoman?" Like Zuhura, she could have added, but didn't.

"Don't put words in my mouth," Tayiba said sharply. "I never said be Superwoman. I never said it was easy." Zuhura's shadow loomed over both of them. Zuhura the martyr.

Khadra's father said, "My mother died having me. They told her it was risky, but she went ahead and had me." He paused. He seemed to lose his train of thought. "She died having me. A woman who dies in childbirth is considered a martyr-goes straight to heaven."

"Well, I don't want to die in childbirth," Khadra said sarcastically.

"I'm not suggesting you do so," he said quietly. "I'm saying, my mother sacrificed everything for a child. Sacrificed her own self."

"Well, I am not your mother," Khadra shot back. "I don't want to be your mother."

"I didn't raise you to speak to me in that tone," he snapped, as he rarely ever did.

Yeah, you did, Khadra thought sullenly. You raised me to go out and learn, but deep down you still want me to be just like your mother. So where did you think all these contradictions would lead me if not to this frustration, this tone of voice? But I am not going to kill myself to fit into the life you have all mapped out for me.

The medicine for heart's pain is the death of your tarnished soul

-only this: the homeopathic cure: a bit of poison

-Attar

Khadra puked a trail to the toilet. It was taking her over, gnawing out her insides, the clot. The bloodclot that glommed to the wall of her womb. The zygote. It was not a fetus yet. Not even an embryo. It certainly was not a baby. It was a growth, invading her body, reaching out its tentacles, even up her throat. It was a possibility, one she could not entertain. It would lock her into a life, a very specific kind of life with Juma, that she was no longer certain she wanted. She knelt on the tiles with a wet rag mopping up the vomit. Seven times, once with Ajax powder.

No. She had been here too many times, kneeling, her face low to the floor, taking dust mites up her raw nose. Hands coarse with scouring powder, scrubbing the filth of two worlds. Scrubbing away some taint she could never escape.

No, enough, no. Her back was up against the wall, the bathroom small, mewing her in. She beat the floor with the Ajax canister over and over with the force of her will, no no no, no no no no, scattering the powder seven times. Where was it, this will of hers, this misshapen self? She needed to know it. Hello, self. Can we meet at last? It was not vainglorious to have a self. It was not the same as selfish individualism, no. You have to have a self to even start on a journey to God. To cultivate your nafi whom God invites to enter the Garden at the end of Surat al-Fajr. She had not taken even a baby step in that direction. Her self was a meager thing, scuttling behind a toilet, what she hadn't given over of it to Mama, to Juma. Too much, she has given away too much. She will not give the last inches of her body, will not let them fill her up with a life she does not want. Feral, it was not a word but a spasm, the snarl of a fanged thing gnawing at a trap: no. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Juma's face looked like it was going to break, just get cracks all over it and crumble. She told him she had prayed Consultation on it three times and was set and determined. And that if it meant divorce, so be it. He went away. Got in the car and screeched away. Went deep into the cave where wounded men go when they walk around not talking to anyone about what's happening to them on the inside. Otherwise known as Terre Haute.

Khadra steeled herself not to worry about Juma. Or the hurt she saw in his face before the shutter went down over his feelings. "He'll go home to Kuwait and his mommy and daddy will find him someone else to marry in a snap. He'll have a zillion kids and live in that family compound and be happy ever after."

Her regular doctor wouldn't perform the abortion. He'd been the one who prescribed the antibiotic when Khadra had strep, but forgot to tell her that antibiotics mess with the effectiveness of the birth control pill. No, he wouldn't do it. Neither would anyone else at the campus clinic, so Khadra had to find one in Indianapolis.

"Why did you come with me?" she asked Joy. Her parents had refused. Eyad, too. "I'm not going to be a party to something I think is munkar, "he said.

It was a cold Indiana day in late autumn, when the vibrant foliage was gone, and everything so bare and hopeless that it was hard to believe the world might ever bloom again. Joy had waited out in the hallway reading an Amanda Cross mystery and, when summoned, sat next to Khadra's upholstered recliner in the recovery lounge. Now she was driving her home through the wintry sleet. Home to the broken nest. "You're horrified by abortion, Joy. Even if you're pro-choice. You're the most horrified by abortion prochoice person I know. So why'd you come?"

"I'm your friend. Friends don't drop you when you do something they disapprove."

Corny Hoosier Joy. Is that what friends did? I wouldn't know, Khadra thought. I've never been a real friend, or had one. I've demanded that my friends conform to what I approve and disapprove. She leaned back in the bucket seat and closed her eyes. "You're a beautiful friend, Joy. You're a teacher of friendship."

"Aw, that's your meds talking," Joy said. She had this exaggerated idea about abortions, like Khadra must be on morphine or something, when all they'd given her was was a little pain reliever.

"Do you know what entomologists call the body of the bug in its different stages of life?" Khadra said. "An instar. Like, they'll go, `here is the nymph instar of the nine-spotted ladybug' or `the pupal instar of a blackfly has spiral gills."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Joy said, keeping her eyes on the road.

"Know what they call the adult instar-the mature bug?"

"What?"

"An `imagine.' Yeah. Like, you and I are the `imagines' of the human species."

Joy concentrated on getting her home. She was leaving for an ecology internship in New Zealand as soon as the semester was over.

"Joy? Do you think God will punish me by not letting me have babies later, when I want them?" That's what Eyad had said, in his last angry conversation with her before the procedure. Now why did he have to say a thing like that? She needed someone to have her back. I'm holding out for a hero.

"God is not such an asshole," Joy said. After a while she added, alhamdulilah. "

Khadra had some cramping and bleeding like a heavy period. Not really any more than she usually got. Some lower-back pain the day after she lugged around a chem textbook, her Trapper Keeper, and The Arab-Israeli Dilemma in her backpack. Skipped a day of classes but only that one. She had to get through the semester. Just get through.

Her parents would not speak to her. Their throats knotted, and the silence on their end of the phone grew, and they did not come to Khadra. She awoke in the apartment the third night and thought she felt her mother's hand smooth back her hair, stroke her damp forehead. It felt like the old days in Square One. Khadra almost cried. No one was there. She steeled herself. Just get through.

Everyone was talking about her. She felt their whispers feather around her. (Was this how Hanifa had felt?) Was there anyone in the community her parents hadn't told? She felt sure Eyad or Tayiba had told all her old friends and that the awkward glances she was getting on campus from the girls in hijab and the beardy boys were not coincidental. Dawah Center poster girl had fallen.

She offered Juma a khulu', or wife-initiated divorce. That way he wouldn't have to pay her the deferred part of the mahr, the rest of the eight thousand dollars. These were due to her if he initiated divorce. She was well versed on khulu', thanks to Dawah Center seminars. Popular Islam mostly buried khulu', and Muslim women the world over did not know they had this right. Modern Islamists such as the Dawah folk, however, revived many concepts from classical Islam and this was one of them.

Juma's pride was deeply offended by khulu'. She, repudiate him? He'd never even heard of it. Was Khadra making it up? No matter how many courses with sheikhs she may have taken, she was just a girl in Juma's eyes, a girl who'd grown up in America, to boot, and so couldn't possibly be trusted when it came to shariah matters.

Khadra didn't insist on khulu'. She was relieved, actually. She would have had to sell Teta's Ottoman coins and whatever else she owned to pay him back the front-mahr. And she didn't know what she would have done suddenly to support herself. Eyad was the one who'd worked since high school; other than the entomology lab, she'd never had a job. She wasn't going to ask her parents for money, even if she thought they had it to spare, which she knew they didn't.

It didn't seem fair to take all the after-mahr, since she'd been the one who wanted out. She took only enough to pay the rent and bills. She gave Juma back the wedding gold in its red velvet box.

Just as Khadra's marriage was going through its final twitches, Eyad announced his own intention to find a wife. "I know, I know, I have a few more years of school and residency left. But I'd like to complete half my religion," he said to his parents. "Temptation is everywhere," he complained separately to his father. But he didn't have to, since Wajdy remembered from his college days in Square One what the unmarried brothers went through, being around Americans who had no self-restraint.

Eyad's mother got on the case-a joyful project, but one that required care and circumspection and good planning. She excelled at these. She had contacts in Muslim communities all over the U.S. and Canada and, once a list was compiled, Eyad winnowed it down. They then paid each of the shortlisted girls a visit. This involved road trips to Detroit, Windsor, and Cincinnati over the next few months. In the end, the girl who was the one was right there in Indianapolis, or in the northern suburb of Carmel, anyway.

Omayma Hayyan was the daughter of an Iraqi colon specialist. She was slender, pretty, and expensive. She had wide green eyes, fair skin, a petite nose, and strawberry blonde hair under her exquisite scarves. She shopped at L. S. Ayres and the big malls, not Kmart and Sears, and somehow found ingredients from the racks of highend lines such as Liz Claiborne and Laura Ashley to put together hijab outfits that set new heights in Islamic fashion. Had a prep school education and went to Butler, drove to classes in a shiny white TransAm, an Eid gift from her doting father and mother. Bought new, of course. Her vanity plates said "WWPMD," which stood for What Would Prophet Muhammad Do?