Chapter 10 Miz
10
MIZ
I step into Mom’s cozy two-bedroom bungalow, carrying my Tupperware of failed doro wat. The greenhouse, a.k.a. living room, is an empty no man’s land between the women’s voices coming from the kitchen around the corner, and the men’s YouTube Ethiopian news blaring up the basement stairs.
Depositing my fusion berbere baked chicken on the dining table, I join Mom and her friends in the sauna-hot kitchen, entering just as Almaz, the combative one, currently mincing cubes of red meat into a fine mush for the kitfo, squawks, “What is she?”
Apparently, a heated discussion is in progress. A political one, judging by Almaz’s question, likely about ethnicity. I pass myself around for greetings, breathing in the artery-clogging, heartburn-igniting aroma of foods I can’t wait to eat.
“Who knows what she is!” Yeshi answers, in her signature sour tone, so potent I fear it’ll contaminate the collard greens of the gomen besiga she’s stirring.
“But he is Gurage,” Elsi, the bringer of tea, confirms, reaching into the open oven to stir the bubbling tray of string-cut tenderloin zilzil tibs in its beefy juices.
Almaz nods sagely. “Those people are serious about their money.”
Mom looks at me and gestures to a bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen table. I pull up a chair to begin peeling the shells and scoring the whites, readying them to be eased into the bubbling vat of real, multiple-chicken doro wat (why did I even bother trying?) to absorb the flavours of the stew.
“ Indee! ” Zainab, ever the peacemaker, exclaims, sawing through a fresh-baked wheel of difo dabo with a bread knife as long as her forearm. “His people are threatening to set fire to her family’s home in Bole!”
“Can you blame them?” Mom counters, layering napkins between dishes. I look at her funny. Did my mother just defend criminality?
“How does a person spend fifty thousand dollars in three months?” Almaz challenges, drizzling the minced red meat of the kitfo with herby clarified butter.
If they’re planning a wedding… I think sarcastically. As the hot takes fly fast and furious all around me, I make a mental note to send a photo of the spread to Kal once everything’s laid out, so he can put in his takeout order.
“It was a trick. She tricked him!”
“The moment he paid her, it was her money to do with as she wished.”
“But fifty thousand?”
“Let it be fifty million!”
“Was there a condition that she touch it only if the case succeeds?”
“What case?” I whisper to Zainab. Of Mom’s friends, she gives me what most resembles answers to my questions. Resembles being the operative word. At age five, when I’d wanted to know where my father was, she told me he was a walia goat. It would take me a few years to understand that she meant he was, and would always be, in Ethiopia. Like that endangered species.
“Some marriage-for-paper arrangement in America,” she says to me now. “INS threw out the case, so the man’s side wants their money back from the American woman. Except…”
“It’s all gone,” I guess.
“They say she informed the INS that it was a fake case.”
“That’s bitchy,” I say, earning a reproachful frown from Mom. I can’t wait to tell Omar about another marriage of convenience gone sideways.
Out come more distasteful paper-marriage stories—a buck-toothed, weak-chinned man back home who couldn’t get women to look twice at him, but the moment he won a US Diversity Visa lottery, they lined up to marry him; the guy somewhere in the US who married and brought over every single one of his sisters, divorcing one after the other, but then got his case thrown out when he wanted to bring over his actual new wife; a couple getting taken into separate rooms for their immigration interview and asked about the colour of the bedsheets, the pattern of the curtains, when they only lived together on paper. Enough to make a girl lose her appetite. Not this girl, of course. I’ve already snuck one egg into my mouth whole, feeling my stomach unfurl with gratitude.
“These children, if it is not papers they are after,” Yeshi says bitterly, “it is ‘happiness.’?”
A round of derisive hmphs…but no follow-up opinions pro or con. Everyone’s suddenly acting as if they don’t smell a fart. Ooh , the silence that equals premium tea. Almost too hot to pour. I dart my eyes to Zainab. Who’s daring to want to be happy ? To this pioneer batch of very reluctant exiles from the ’70s and ’80s, happiness is low on the priority list, compared to what they’ve endured: trying not to get shot to death by the military junta, surviving imprisonment and desert crossings, creating community from scratch in Sudanese and Kenyan displaced persons’ camps, making injera with North American self-rising flour and water, getting their children educated, keeping the girls away from the boys, temporarily deporting the rebels. The struggle was real. Happiness was an afterthought.
But Zainab avoids my searchlight gaze by carrying the platter of cut bread into the living room. Whoa, that major, huh? The lull drags. I flinch when I hear her peeling back the tinfoil that covers my container of fusion chicken.
Finally, Yeshi speaks up, probably figuring she might as well finish what she started. “These days, there’s no mechachal . Just meleyayet at the first sign of problem.”
Shite, there they go with them ten-dollar words. What does that mean?
Another lull, save for tut-tuts of agreement.
Zainab returns from the living room. “I see you made your contribution, Mizu.”
I force a tight-lipped grin, and everyone jumps on this as if it’s a lifebuoy. I have to explain, to great amusement all around, that I used yellow onions instead of shallots by mistake, and that I wimped out on dicing six pounds of them by hand and used a food processor. I tried to explain that ain’t nobody got time, and that my eyeballs and gel nails had barely survived just peeling them, despite my goggles and latex gloves, but it was no use.
My berbere baked chicken turns out to be a surprise hit though, gone by the end of the night. When it’s just Mom and me left and I am packing Kal’s (and my) takeout, I seize my chance.
“So, Mommy,” I say, filling Kal’s half to the brim with doro wat from the pot. “What’s meh…mechal… ”
“It means to endure someone, over the long term,” she says, putting incense on the stove on a piece of tinfoil.
Coming from her, the words land heavy, as if she knows more than most about true endurance. Long-distance endurance— ha, like mother, like daughter— since she is technically still married to Dad; a fun fact I discovered upon my deportation, when I saw the wedding ring on Dad’s finger.
“Which one?”
“ Mechachal. ”
“And…the other one?” I know I’ll bungle it up if I try to say it.
“ Meleyayet is…to be apart.”
“Like divorced or separated?”
“Either.”
“Uh-huh. So, who were they talking about?”
“Yeshi’s kid.”
I splutter. Sosina’s wedding was my first bridesmaid gig, almost ten years ago now. I may be marriage-allergic, but a party is a party, and weddings are always a blast. And Sosina’s was lit . I’ve seen her maybe five times since, and we text only occasionally. Has she been unhappy all this time?
I feel bad for her, but I can’t help also feeling vindicated a bit. “Ale Gena” rings out in my head. There’s misery yet —how’s that for a lyric update? “But…the wedding took so long!” As if all those parties, spread out over three cities and two years, all that effort, which was not out of the norm, should somehow guarantee that a couple stays together.
“Take more for your friends,” Mom says, opening the cupboard where she keeps containers and closing the topic. I’ll have to fill out my intel elsewhere, I guess. On the streetcar home, the stack of containers warming my quads, I take out my phone to text Sosina. What to say? After a bit of brain-racking, the perfect excuse comes to me.
Me: Was doing cleanup and guess what’s still in my storage?!
In all the wedding commotion, her bridal gown had somehow ended up at my place. All these years, no one had bothered to come pick it up. Red flag much?
Sosina:
Me: Your monster white dress! Shd I take to the dry cleaner? Never too late haha.
An hour later, by the time I’m home tucking the leftovers into my fridge, when there’s still nothing, my heart sinks. Wow, even now I can’t breach that wall that goes up as soon as that “Ale Gena” song ends, huh? But maybe she doesn’t want to say too much because she’s going through only the separation version of meleyayet . Fair enough. I can wait. I have three decades and counting of experience waiting for a couple (called Mom and Dad) to tell me what went wrong. One more marriage mystery is nothing.