An Unnecessary Woman (16 page)

She wrote of what it felt like when a neighbor or teacher asked her a question or spoke to her, how fast her heart beat, how the skin of her hands flushed, how her lungs shrank, how her throat constricted, and how her jaw ached.

When she was seven, she moved back into her parents’ bed. Their house had only two bedrooms, four boys, one girl. It seems that when one of the boys reached a certain age, her father decided Hannah shouldn’t be in the same room with her brothers. Until her father built another two rooms when she was fourteen, she slept with her parents: father on the left, mother the middle mote, Hannah on the right. She wrote fondly of those days. She had no trouble sleeping at that age, a talent inherited from her mother. She would climb into bed behind her mother and disappear into the movie world of dreams. Her father lacked that aptitude, and since she also inherited her mother’s snoring, his nightly insomnia became a long-running joke in the household.

“We breathed his air,” she wrote.

She was socially inept, an affliction I am quite intimate with. In some ways, that’s probably what brought us together, but I’m getting ahead of myself as usual. There was something else that classified us as quite different, at least in my book, and in her journal. Throughout her teenage years, she wrote her fantasies. They were detailed and intricate descriptions of romance, of marriage, never of sex, always of rescue. It was as if she was anticipating the sanitized romance novels that would hit the Beirut market a few years later. When she was older, she was addicted to Italian photo-romans (translated into French), mawkish love stories told in photographs and see-through talk balloons. However, those didn’t appear in Beirut until the early fifties, so they couldn’t possibly have inspired her elaborate adolescent fantasies. She was ahead of her time.

The fantasies were well drafted and delightfully drawn up. One impressive journal entry when she was fourteen described in minutest detail the future drawing room where she and her husband would entertain. The descriptions of her future beau tended to be more fugitive, changing from entry to entry: tall, medium height, hairy, smooth, mustached, clean-shaven. How they would meet—strolling on the corniche where eyes glance in passing, looking up from a schoolbook to encounter blue eyes filled with amorous and admiring desire—had more variations than the
Goldberg
.

One of the surprising things—it astounded me really—was that who she was varied as well. In over a hundred journal entries of romantic fantasies, not a single one included her. She wrote of a different Hannah. In some she was a blonde, in others a brunette. She was an Egyptian actress, an abandoned European princess, an exiled Russian countess. She kept her name but not herself. She was rich, she was penniless, she had long eyelashes, a small nose. She walked with the grace of a gazelle, of a poplar, of a girl without a limp. She wrote herself out of her fantasies.

What about my fantasies? I wouldn’t consider them that—more like mild dreams or tame aspirations. I rarely dreamed of romance or adventure, never of love and husbands. I would be married, I knew that, but I treated that fact as a fact, an impeding fait accompli, not as something to look forward to. I didn’t spend time considering whom I would marry or how. I wanted to be allowed to work. I hoped for a career as a secretary. In those days, I couldn’t envision any other job. The only workingwomen I came across at the time were in the service business: maids, cooks, store clerks, secretaries, schoolteachers. By temperament, I couldn’t be around a lot of people. Secretary seemed like an idyllic job—an assistant to an intelligent, honest, and decent man, of course. I spent more time dreaming of my ideal boss than of a husband.

How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

I do understand that it isn’t just Arab girls who have that gene, but it is dominant in our part of the world. A force of nature and nurture, an epigenetic hurricane, herds us into marrying and breeding. Social cues, community rites, religious rituals, family events—all are meant to impress upon children the importance and inevitability of what Bruno Schulz calls the “excursion into matrimony.” No girl of my generation could imagine rebelling, nor would she want to. A kernel of imagination begins to sprout in the minds of women younger than I. Fadia rebelled, yet her idea of rebellion was the same as that of every other girl of succeeding generations. She wanted the right to choose whom to marry. In time, the shackles of arranged marriage were dumped in the Mediterranean; families grew inured to exogamous marriages, be they interfaith, interclass, or interclan. Dating, premarital cohabitation, adultery, and promiscuity became ordinary painted scenes of the current Beiruti landscape.

Feminism in Lebanon hasn’t reached espadrilles or running shoes yet; sensible heels are where it’s at. The choice not to marry hasn’t entered the picture. It may be entering now, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t associate much with the young.

As I write this I wonder if what I said about not dreaming of a husband is accurate. I’m not suggesting that I’m consciously dissembling. But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this:

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Memory, memoir, autobiography—lies, lies, all lies.

Is it true that I didn’t think of a husband, wish for one, or has the image I have of myself, the way I like to think of myself, superimposed itself on what was happening then? Does that question make sense?

Let me put it another way. It is quite possible that I, like every Beiruti girl, dreamed of getting married, had fantasies of what my future husband would look like, but that after growing up, after having had a sad and incomplete matrimonial experience, I reinvented myself, convincing myself that I hadn’t dreamed of such trivial matters. It is possible. I sincerely believe that I didn’t, but I also don’t see myself having had that much courage as a young girl.

I keep the possibility open.

There are images that remain with me. I remember reading an essay—I believe it was by Nuruddin Farah, but I can’t be sure—where the writer says that all we remember from novels are scenes or, more precisely, images. I don’t know if that’s the case, but a number of authors seem to write their novels in one image after another—Michael Ondaatje is probably the best practitioner of the form, as his novels seem to me to be not so much plot as a series of discrete divine images. I still can’t remember who wrote that essay. Maybe it was Ondaatje, but I doubt it.

I’m not a proponent of the above idea, because if all we retain from a novel is an image, then the obvious conclusion is that photography, painting, or film would be a better medium of communication and a higher art form. Not a satisfying conclusion. Also, I loved
The English Patient
as a novel, but the movie, with the exception of the lovely Juliette Binoche, is much too syrupy.

I bring this up, however, to mention an image that is seared into my memory—an image by the exquisitely disconsolate W. G. Sebald. He describes a great-uncle Alphonso in the act of painting: “When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.”

Beautiful.

Sometimes I think I look back on my life wearing glasses with gray silk tissue in the frames.

If I am to think of what image you’ll retain from reading these paltry pages, I assume it will be my mother’s screaming, the frail body, the position of her hands, the skirl of terror.

Am I right?

Most people say they feel nostalgia for their childhood, or for a first love, or maybe for Beirut as it once was, or for parents who have passed away. I don’t, not in the sense everyone means. I feel nostalgia for scenes. I don’t recall the years of my youth with affection; I don’t my family either: my dead uncle-father, or my mother still alive. However, I do recall with a certain fondness the manner in which we children slept on summer nights with their pitiless heat, windows open and the smell of jasmine floating in, the colors and patterns of the sheets in the dark. What was most irritating then—having to get out of bed when my little half sister wet the mattress—I now remember with a tinge of devotion, not for her or her predicament, but for how we always stood in the same spot around my mother as she examined the wet abstractions on the sheets, how we carried the mattress outside to air and sun-clean it. I feel a certain tenderness for the way the furniture was arranged in the main room, the way the large brass tray sitting atop the round burlap ottoman was set for dinner.

But then I feel nostalgia for the walks by Swann’s Way, as well as by Guermantes Way, for how Charles Kinbote surprises John Shade while he’s taking a bath, for how Anna Karenina sits in a train.

I met a secretary once, a classmate’s mother. She walked her daughter to school one morning and delivered her to the gate, at which point the grizzled Armenian guard stepped briefly out of his kiosk to greet them, which he always did when a parent appeared.

Was Hercules the gatekeeper of Heaven? I wouldn’t describe the aged Armenian as Hercules in any case. His job was to make sure that none of the students left before school was out and that none but students and teachers entered, which meant that even though he approached the mother obsequiously, he was in essence taking her child away and forbidding her entry. So no, not Hercules. As much as I loved it and felt at home within its cages, school is more Hades than Heaven—a ritual killing of childhood is performed in school, children are put to death. The guard was the ferryman.

As she handed him her daughter, the mother bathed him in a patrician smile. She wore a tailor-made dress that looked as if it belonged to someone else, as if she intended to grow into it though she carried it off. It was a gray dress of a shade quite different from the pewter gray of the menacing sky that day. Around her shoulders she had wrapped a bright blue shawl. Unlike the arriving teachers, all afflicted with a plague of inattentiveness, she seemed to be relating to the world around her, awake and participating. As I write this, I recall how wonderful I felt while watching her, how young she seemed as a mother, still retaining something organically girlish about her.

I watched the handoff from behind the school fence, looking out through the bars—yes, actual metal bars that my head could fit through only the year before. The bars were covered with lumpy layers of cheap yellow paint, caged-canary hue; it was peeling and chipping, the rust that peeked through complementing the yellow nicely. I was staring. My hands held on to the bars, my face squeezed in between, both cheekbones pressed to painted metal.

The daughter, my classmate, strolled to my side. She watched her mother exchanging unnecessary pleasantries with the ferryman. We, on the other hand, didn’t exchange a word. He mother noticed us and walked over. She politely inquired who I was, whether I was a friend to her daughter—a brief, kind question that only required me to nod yes or no.

“I wish you a most pleasant day, girls,” she said.

She extended her arm through the bars. I can still see the shawl slip from her right shoulder as she ran her fingers through my hair—the one time, as far as I remember, that anyone ever did that—after which, she left.

“She can write shorthand,” my classmate said.

I’ve strayed too far once more. Sorry. Let me get back to Hannah.

What brought Hannah and me together wasn’t so much our social ineptitude, as I’ve mentioned, but her meeting my brother-in-law that fateful day, though that fateful day occurred long before I was married, when I was still a child.

She was twenty-two when she met him, embarrassingly single by the standards of the time, but not yet a certified spinster. Her journal entries then were mostly meditations on what her future life would look like, which girl in the neighborhood had been proposed to, how her status in the family was changing. By the time she harpooned the lieutenant, all her brothers had already married. Thirteen weeks before that fateful day, one of her sisters-in-law had a baby boy, the first grandson in the family, the fourth grandchild.

She described a telling incident. The newest sister-in-law, Maryam, recently married and relocated to Hannah’s home (only two of the brothers were still in the small house then), was deep in conversation with Hannah’s father. The discussion might have been beyond her depth, Hannah wrote, but the girl, a few years younger than she, was happy, peppy, and loud. Hannah wrote that her new sister-in-law “couldn’t understand stillness”—quite a wonderful phrase, if you ask me.

The family was having afternoon coffee in the living room. Hannah’s father slurped his coffee as the girl went on and on. When Hannah finished her cup, she picked up her mother’s empty one and carried both toward the kitchen. As she approached, Maryam, still jabbering and hooting, eyes only on her father-in-law, held her own cup out, left arm extended straight in Hannah’s way.

Hannah stopped, her toes curled, her shoes digging into the carpet. Of course, she was more embarrassed than furious at that point. She didn’t know what to do. The girl hadn’t even looked at her. Hannah tried to carry the extra cup but she wasn’t as dexterous as her mother. Ticktock, the room’s clock mocked her, but none paid attention.