The Hidden Light of Objects (20 page)

The only person in those early years who responded differently to Amerika's name was her religion teacher.
Abla
Nada was tightly wound, a pinprick of a woman, with a face as thick as coffee. Her head was securely bandaged in black, a
hijab
covering her hair, her forehead down to her eyebrows, half her cheeks, and most of her chin. As she spoke, her saliva sprayed onto open books, shiny desks, the tops of students' heads, the blackboard. “An infelicitous name for an infelicitous little girl. You are doomed, my dear. With a name like that, there will be no redemption for you. Nor for any of us who dare to step across Allah's line. In your graves, you all will hear the footsteps of your mourners walking away, leaving you alone. Your punishment will begin as your grave starts to shrink around you and you feel the hot breath of hell encircle your body, you smell its rot, its pus, its blood and urine.” Saucer-eyed children listened in terror, unable to close their ears or their hearts to her words. Only Amerika seemed immune. She listened to
Abla
Nada's tales of torture and punishment like she would ghost stories around a campfire. She scooped up her teacher's chatter as she did her grandmother's about what it was like to grow up in the desert, about how the skies used to be a shattering blue that reminded you to be grateful for beauty and birds.
Abla
Nada's accounts were stories and Amerika loved stories. Her friends left class trembling, crying, promising to pray. Amerika left with a kick of the heels, a Rockette, a rocket, the letter
k
in search of adventure.

Amerika pronounced her name “Amreeka,” with a stress on the
r
not the
m
, because that's how America is pronounced in Arabic. She had no idea that it was pronounced differently in other places, at least not till she was about seven and started watching satellite TV. Then she learned it could also be pronounced “Ammurrika” or “Amereek.” She discovered her name was a place, a big place with tall buildings and wide open spaces and violent storms with lots of rain and snow. She learned about icicles that clung to the branches of trees like crystal fingers. About trees with leaves that changed color, bursting into orange and red, yellow ocher and chestnut brown. She found out about Halloween and dressing up in scary costumes. She thought
Abla
Nada might enjoy the idea of Halloween, obsessed as she was with the shape and smell of death, but
Abla
Nada told Amerika in no uncertain terms that she would be sent straight to hell simply for knowing about such things. Amerika retorted that if hell was anything like Halloween, full of trick-or-treating and jack-o'-lanterns, she would gladly go.

Amerika learned about baseball, hitting a white ball with a stick and running and spitting on the ground. About Babe Ruth, left-handed hero. About cowboys and horses, mother-of-pearl buttons on flower-embroidered, close-fitting shirts. About skies like fields that turned yellow and green before a storm, clouds that colored the mountains black and blue, and funnels that came down and destroyed hundreds of homes, decimated lives and left sad old photographs floating in the aftermath, carried by a remnant wind.

Amerika discovered New York City, a cathedral of a place, gray and glittery, with a park in the middle of it, a lake in the middle of the park, and a woman standing tall in the ocean. Everything exciting happened in New York. It was a maze of crime and food sold on street corners. It had numbered avenues with square intersections and yellow taxicabs. Intersections in Kuwait were round, taxis orange. Manhattan was an island, like the Kuwaiti island of Failaka, though, unlike Failaka, Alexander the Great had never been there. Alexander had named Failaka “Icarus,” after a son who flew too close to the sun.

The grandest thing Amerika learned was the language. Not just English . . .
American
. She rolled her tongue around its
r
s like a parrot, owned its nasal crescendos and punchy confidence. American pried opened a world of wonder for Amerika.

*  *  *

Watching American television via satellite over the years, Amerika came to believe people laughed more in that vast place that stretched further than it seemed possible to stretch – from sea to shining sea. To contain this vastness, this remarkable joy, to make it hers, Amerika decided when she was ten to keep a box, to fill it with as much of America as she pos­sibly could. Amerika knew she had the propensity to collect like a magpie, so she decided to limit the size of her box. A wooden box, about ten inches squared, with a hinged lid. Inside, the box was divided into twenty-five compartments, each two inches by two inches. She had insisted on going to see the carpenter herself, to the amusement of both the carpenter and her father. She didn't want the box to be too heavy, but it had to be sturdy. The lid was to have a lock in the middle and the key had to be made of brass.

Designing the box was the easy part. Figuring out what twenty-five objects to put into the box was much harder, and they would vary over the years. At ten, Amerika filled her compartments with: the wrapper of a Baby Ruth bar (her uncle had brought her back a bag of candy from Florida); green jellybeans; grape Bubble Yum; five different colored cat's-eye marbles (she had seen television kids in a schoolyard flicking them during recess); a small American flag on a toothpick; a clam shell (for clambakes); a wooden Santa; peanuts (for peanut butter, which, she learned, should be eaten on soft white Wonder Bread with the crusts cut off and strawberry or grape jelly not jam); a folded page ripped out of an
Archie
comic; a teensy teepee she got out of a Kinder Egg (not sold in America but usually containing stuff to do with America); a John Wetteland baseball card (1996 World Series MVP); an Elvis pin; an orange maple leaf cut out of felt; a short string of popcorn; Fruit Loops (she loved the curve and stretch of the word “loop”); an Abraham Lincoln penny; a yellow HB2 wood pencil (sharpened down to almost nothing, pink eraser intact); a small silver figurine of the Empire State Building; a Coke bottle cap; a McDonald's cheeseburger wrapper (after liberation, the biggest McDonald's in the world rose like a neon castle on the Gulf Road); a foot of dental floss; a falcon's feather as a stand-in for a bald eagle's (brought back from the brink of extinction, symbol of national pride); a Fisher Price Little People pilot with a round brown head on a blue plastic body (finding out about slavery would rupture somewhat Amerika's faith in American joy); and a Winnie-the-Pooh sticker. Amerika filled the final compartment on the lower right hand corner with American idioms written neatly on strips and scraps of paper. She wrote with tiny handwriting so that she could fit as many as possible in the two-by-two space:

 

Acapulco gold

ass in a sling

at first blush

between the devil and the deep blue sea

by the seat of one's pants

cock-and-bull story

fat of the land

flat as a pancake

for Pete's sake

get down to brass tacks

hard as nails

Indian summer

in the twinkling of an eye

into thin air

laughed my head off

lickety-split

lit up like a Christmas tree

lump in my throat

many moons ago

out of the blue

paint the town red

pooped out

scream bloody murder

sell snow to the Eskimos

square peg in a round hole

stars in your eyes

under my skin

the world is your oyster

zip it

 

This compartment was Amerika's favorite, and it was always stuffed to capacity. She had decided at the very beginning that whatever came out of the box had to be thrown away before a new object was added, but she couldn't bring herself to throw away the idioms. If she wanted to add a new idiom to an already full compartment, she would carefully choose one to remove. The only condition she set herself was that the first letter of the removed idiom had to match the first letter of the idiom to be newly inserted. So, for example, if she wanted to add “mad as a hornet” to a full compartment, “many moons ago” had to be removed. Once retired, old idioms, organized alphabetically, were placed in a great black stamp album that looked like a witch's spell book. Amerika liked the crinkling sound of the white protective tissues between the heavy pages. She adored the way her scraps looked, odd sizes and textures, splayed against the black. She would come to love that book almost more than the box.

Amerika never took her box with her to school, though she spent most of her time there thinking about it. School had become a nightmare for Amerika. The gulf between her life at home, comfortably padded with satellite TV and, soon enough, the Internet, and her life at school, where teachers like
Abla
Nada were multiplying like spiders, was becoming intolerable. Because she was the youngest, the most cherished, the long-awaited, her parents left her to her own devices. They were impressed with her sponging up of English – “Not just any English,” she would boast to them, “
American
English!” – with her ability to entertain herself for hours, and with her commitment to her special projects, baffling as these sometimes were to them.

Amerika loved to read. Nobody in her family ever picked up a book if they didn't have to, and they never had to. The idea of reading a novel or poetry or anything other than the newspaper wouldn't have occurred to them. Amerika didn't learn the habit at school either. Students were discouraged from reading anything other than the Qur'an. But Amerika felt instinctively that reading was a chance to imagine new worlds in words. It was a way to create chinks in walls where they weren't supposed to be. She had figured out on her own that the only way she was really going to learn English was by reading books in the language. She loved Beverly Cleary, Louise Fitzhugh, Judy Blume. She saw herself in Harriet the Spy, Sheila the Great, and Nancy Drew. She begged her older brothers to drive her again and again to the Family Bookshop in Salmiya. They always did.

Amerika's seven older brothers didn't want to impose their will upon their little sister. She was delightful in her smallness, a jack-in-the-box in the middle of their nothing-special lives. They teased her about her America obsession, about her book fixation, about being a girl and being the youngest, but they did not tell her what to do or what to think. She knew, from stories friends told her about their own brothers, that hers were exceptional. At first her mother had wanted to mold her daughter, the way she had been molded by her mother, into a baby-making shape that could balloon and grow but not fly into the sky like a bird or a kite. But Fatma quickly decided she would rather Amerika take shape on her own and make her own shapes in turn. Maybe it was because she was her only daughter, her final child in a line of children, the one she hadn't prayed for but who had answered her prayers. Fatma was taking a risk, making a quiet decision to allow something she could not predict to happen. Amerika was as grateful as honey for her mother's arms around her, for her brothers, for her Mr. Rogers in a
dishdasha
father, for the way things were at home. It made her life at school tolerable, but only just.

By the time Amerika turned fourteen, every single girl in her class at the all-girls government school was a
mutahajiba
. Their heads were covered up, swaddled, one by one. A child would pop her newly wrapped head into the classroom and all the other girls would rush over to kiss and congratulate her, to ask what had made her come to her senses. “I dreamed of a serpent coiled around my thighs and felt its teeth sinking into my skin. I woke up crying, and my mother said it was Allah's way of reminding me that my uncovered hair was a sin. She's right. It's my turn.” Many of the girls didn't have a choice. At ten or eleven their parents forced them to wear the veil, their little heads covered in darkness, their mermaid hair out of the light forever. Some girls covered up because everyone else was doing it. They gave in to the pressure like tele­vision teenagers gave in to smoking in bathrooms or unprotected sex. Others did it because they believed it would pave the way for marriage. They imagined dark eyes appreciatively surveying the iconic bit of cloth. These girls glided through the air, their pert bodies draped in multicolored chiffons sparkling with sequins. Still others, with the sharp cheddar fervor of true believers, covered their entire faces in black, a new, creepier breed of
niqab
. And the
niqab
– permitting only sullen eyes to peep through curtains of black – was suddenly everywhere.

Amerika's mother told her that before the invasion
munaqqaba
s were rare. They could be found mainly around the outskirts of the city or in the desert where the Bedouins lived. “But after liberation,
ya habibti
, Kuwaitis seem to have caught the virus.” Amerika's mother wore a black
abaya
like a magician's cape around her shoulders when she went to the
souk
or to visit friends. She was not veiled because she said it was not the old Kuwaiti way, at least not the way it was when she was growing up. “Kuwaiti women were modest but they were not mice, Amerika. We were never mice.” Amerika would jump up and down on her mother's bed and yell, “We are not mice! We are not mice! I am not a mouse! I REFUSE TO BE A MOUSE!” Amerika's hair was as lovely as her mother's, rich mahogany waves lapping her shoulders. There was no way she was ever going to cover it up. Her hair was her. It was her mother's loop of love flowing, and she refused to hide it away.