The Hidden Light of Objects (19 page)

He taught her in the seventh grade. He was nice to her, favored her, though he was always discreet. He left the door of his classroom open during lunch time and announced to his classes that students were free to come in if it was too hot outside. He knew the boys never would – there were marbles, footballs, computer games outside. Most of the girls didn’t either. Mina and two or three of her friends were regulars though. He would pretend to be busy with his preparations for class. He would sit calmly at the front of the room, papers and books spread before him, patiently counting chunks of time – five minutes, ten, fifteen – then, and not every day, he would allow himself a glimpse. He would not move his head at all. He moved only his eyes, up or to the left or right, to Mina. About midway through the year, Mina began to come to him. She told him things, her voice hesitant but conveying a confidence she shouldn’t have had at that age. He let her talk to him about her crushes, about how her legs hurt at night, about the music she liked. She would shove her Walkman at him, laugh at his inept bobbing to an unfamiliar beat. She would come in close as he listened. He would be able to recognize her smell in a dark room, even now. She smelled like snow or the sun in winter or smoke from fire on a freezing night. She smelled like weather he had known as a boy, which confused him. She was a whirlwind of joy with a serene center.

The following year he didn’t teach Mina science, but she still came to visit him during her breaks. At thirteen, she was beginning to understand what her body could do. She flirted with Charles mercilessly, and he played the fool. His obsession with her pushed him to extremes. From extremes of happiness – a roiling delirium that took him into the desert on weekends to stare gratefully at an indigo sky and a galloping moon – to extremes of sorrow – a tormented lament for the lives he would never lead because he had grown up without a mother, because he would never have children of his own. His lows left Meredith bewildered. He was inconsol­able. His hollow moans escaped from under the locked bathroom door, but to his wife’s concerned queries he was resistant as tarp.

The year after that, his fourth year in Kuwait, Charles arranged with the school to teach ninth grade biology. He didn’t like teaching high schoolers, especially not high school boys, but he wanted Mina in his classroom one last time. He needed to see her every day. He was ashamed of himself, the things he was thinking about her. There was a steady build up of danger, danger all around. He was jumping into a volcano of folly, there was no stopping him. His dreams were taking over his waking life. She was there every night. When he saw her the next morning, biology class came first, she seemed impossibly familiar. None of it made sense to him. Three years was a long time. He convinced himself it could not be a simple fixation. This was love. She was young, but he imagined waiting for her to get older, waiting for her to graduate from college so that he could marry her. He would have children with her – it wasn’t his fault after all. With her, everything, every possible life, could materialize. He was positive, certain he loved her, would love her always.

When she turned fifteen, in the tenth grade, Mina pulled away from him. In any case, that’s what it felt like to him. He hardly ever saw her. He caught slivers of her – waves, cheery smiles, hellos light as air. She was elsewhere. Her life still unfurling. She was flying high. For Charles, it was ending. Exuberance was collapsing, after only three years. He wanted more.

He saw her one December day sitting silent under a tree. It was rare to see Mina by herself, her still center always attracting others as it did, fine young boys he could never hope to compete with, their own lives expanding as robustly as hers. That early afternoon, though, she was alone under the low branches of a tree. He slid up to her without thinking, so close he could smell her once again, that same snow smell he wanted to scoop up. This was it. He stared into her eyes like he had never done before, inhaled her into his very soul, brought his mouth to her ear – this was going to get him fired, he knew it would, but he was in the midst of folly and there were no brakes underfoot – and whispered, “Stay out of my dreams, kiddo.” He had never and would never again use that word. “Kiddo” should have been reserved for his own kids. “Kiddo” would have pushed him to break the knees of any man saying it to his own daughter. That whispered “kiddo” under the tree was the death of his exuberance. Kiddo, for whom every fuck in his forties had been and for whom now, inexplicably, he wants to put together endless files, a labyrinth of dossiers through which he might trace his way back to what she had made him feel all those years ago, to her smell.

It took Charles four years after the encounter under the tree to put Mina on the back burner and to acknowledge exuberance, his for so short a time, was gone forever. Turning forty helped him rediscover his desire for sex. He slept with Mere, he slept with others, and he found an unconventional balance for about a decade.

*  *  *

Their last year abroad was in Beirut. They had been there for two years, were crazy about it, and signed a second two-year contract. Charles felt he might be coming out of his haze and, for several months, started nothing new with anyone. Once again, their friends Veronica and Tom had ended up in the same place as them. They had been friends for almost fifteen years. They too were childless. Veronica’s fault. This brought them all closer together since most of their colleagues, if they weren’t too young, had children and always socialized with their children, which neither Charles nor Tom could take. Charles loved Tom, the only man besides his father he loved with an open heart. Tom knew about Charles’s affairs. He was a man without judgment, and he was gentle with his friend. Midway through their third year in Beirut, Charles turned fifty. Tom and Veronica were there for his birthday.

Charles wasn’t just anticipating a midlife crisis, he was staging it himself. They all got very drunk that night. Charles followed Veronica into a room. He held her by the wrists and pushed her against a ready wall. He kissed her and she responded at first. He pushed harder and she started to resist. He could see himself, his bloated stomach and already sagging thighs. It was farcical and he could hear her saying no. He continued anyway and Tom walked through the door. There were tears and screams and rage. There were ugly accusations and a destroyed friendship. He had violated Veronica. There could be no future for him. Mere did not speak to him until the phone call with the news about his father four months later. Mere did not speak to him but, as always, Mere stayed.

It isn’t forgiveness he is after. It isn’t redemption, either. He has paid his dues, living longer than his mother had, not holding his father in his arms as he lay dying in a lonely bed. He lives in a world where oil could burn hot enough to turn the sky black at noon, the sun a slate circle in the sky. A place where people die by the hundreds in the desert, throats slashed, villages purged. A place where bodies are blown to bits by other bodies blowing up. What could he possibly matter in the middle of all that? Forgiveness? Redemption? His life isn’t history, but it is in ruins. He has fathered no one. There is no going forward. But there is a way back. Onward he will die, backward he will find his way. Through the small things his wife has known about all along (the beads those old men counted, the marbles of his childhood, the mosaics in his head), he hopes to wend his way back.

Meredith holds out her hand to him, and he takes it. He will hold it tight enough to get through. Holding her hand and counting the beads, the marbles, the smallest, unsolicited smiles, the tears in his eyes, he will get through. A passage through the dossiers. For a life of snow. For goodness unfurling, taking him in.

IX

Elsa was a Christian Iraqi. Her parents were firecracker smart. They realized early on that they couldn’t remain in Iraq and that Kuwait, pleasant as it was at the time, wouldn’t last. They left to the US in the early 1970s, stayed for the time required to get a green card, and then returned to Kuwait for another decade to earn enough money to build their dream home in Georgia. I remember Elsa in the third grade, braided hair in hoops around her ears, starched white collar under her sharply ironed navy blue jumper. Elsa spewed a million words a minute, conclusions I always believed, like I would a teacher’s or a mother’s. She was my age, but she felt like my big sister. One year, Elsa told me her aunt was dying of cancer and that she was going to become a doctor when she grew up so she could find a cure. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I had no doubt she would do it. (I wish, Elsa, you had found the cure. You promised, Elsa, and I believed you.)

Over the years, I learned to trust her completely when it came to the things that mattered – a yellow, yes, yellow sweater went best with my favorite gray pleated skirt; I was, for goodness sake, thin enough; my taste in New Wave, highly cultivated, was impeccable; kissing two boys in a week certainly did not make anyone a slut.

Elsa lived in a wonderland apartment complex. It had a huge pool in the middle and you could smell the sea nearby. The families who lived there – from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, assorted European countries, the US – all had kids who went either to the same school we did or to one of the other familiar internationals. Neighbors did not leave their smelly shoes outside their doors. Children did not thump and scream all day and night like irredeemable demons. There was football out front, marble-clad pillars marking goal posts. There were bikinis on lounge chairs, mothers no older than we are now smoking slowly, eyeing their children through oversized sunglasses. A slumber party at Elsa’s was a weekend affair that started after school on Wednesday, involved a night at the ice rink, a lazy Thursday afternoon by the pool – scoping the boys scoping us – a party in the evening, and concluded on Friday afternoon, warm as soup. Those vanished weekends still make perfect sense, like a parallelogram or a Polaroid picture.

Amerika's Box

 

 

 

The decision to change their five-year-old daughter's name was a bold one for Ahmed and Fatma to make. Kuwait was, after all, a country tangled in red tape. But like most of their fellow citizens in the year 1991, Ahmed and Fatma wanted to commemorate their nation's gratitude to America. Fatma was in her late forties. It had been a few years since she was last pregnant. They knew something drastic had to be done, so they ploughed patiently through daunting name change procedures. They submitted pillars of forms to the proper ministries. Small bundles of cash slipped quietly under desks. They publicized their young daughter's new name in two newspapers. Once the paperwork was done, Ahmed and Fatma informed friends and family of the change and invited everyone to their home to celebrate over
istikan
s of saffron tea. Men in one room, women in the other, eating like locusts and singing along to music. They were free once again, safe together in the long afternoon.

Ahmed and Fatma were not wealthy. They lived in government housing near a gas station in the city center. Ahmed pushed paper in a ministry job that masked unemployment. Fatma stayed at home, swamped with the details of domesticity. Their decision to have eight children was largely economic. While both had an uneasy sense that birth control, like a gynecological exam, was against Islam, it was mostly for the per-child social allowance that they had permitted their family to grow. Each newborn added fifty dinars a month to Ahmed's paltry salary. Fifty times eight could not be passed up, so Fatma had spent most of her adult life ballooned by babies.

With every pregnancy, Fatma prayed for a girl. A daughter to follow in her footsteps and to help with chores. A daughter to share the burden of her disappointments, to scold and to love. A daughter to plan a wedding for, to take care of her and her husband in their old age. None of the first seven pregnancies answered her prayers. By the eighth she had stopped asking, accepting that the girls she would choose for her sons to marry would be as close to daughters as she was going to get. Her baby girl's unasked for arrival was, to Fatma, a sign of Allah's subtle endorsement of her years of
du‘aa
. To Ahmed, his daughter was, more simply, a reason to soften, a way to escape the noose of habit.

Young Amerika Ahmed Al-Ahmed took to her new name instantly. The oily gray man in charge of stamping name change forms had mistakenly replaced the
c
in America with a
k
. He had picked up snippets of English here and there, and America sounded to him like it should have a
k
in it. In any case, he was starving and wanted to leave work early for lunch. He had no time to look into trivialities. By the time Ahmed was informed by the oily gray man in charge of receiving name change forms that America was spelled with a
c
not a
k
, it was too late. If Ahmed wanted to change that single letter, he would have to wait until after the weekend and pray for the unlikelihood that both oily gray men showed up for work. Ahmed made the wise decision to accept the
k
; it didn't really matter since his daughter's name would be written mostly in Arabic. As it turned out, Amerika would come to love her accidental
k
especially. A
k
like a kick in the air, like a Radio City Rockette.

In elementary school, Amerika felt special. Nobody else had her name. She didn't know what exactly America was then. All she knew was that whenever she told people her name it made them exuberant. “Yes! We should be grateful. If it weren't for America, we would be part of Iraq,
Allah la yagooleh
. You will never forget to be thankful to America. Neither should we.” Always the exuberance. To begin with.