Chapter 3 Salma #6
We both started laughing. Abruptly and in unison, our voices rose and fell as though choreographed.
As different as Asma and I were physically and temperamentally, we shared the same sense of humor and a laugh that people couldn’t tell apart.
Deep and rumbling, it started at the same note and escalated with the same rhythm and cadence, acting as a call and response.
Among all the things I miss about Asma, perhaps this is what I miss most of all.
I am supposed to be part of a pair. I am a saltshaker pining for my pepper.
I am Robin with no Batman. I am a discarded sock.
The air felt looser between us.
“You keep pushing because you want them to accept this theater thing. They’re never going to. You know that.”
“Why not?” Asma asked. “I’m majoring in their stupid premed biology.”
“Maybe because this isn’t a negotiation?” I imitated Abu’s accent. “‘Oh, let’s let Asma do theater so long as she becomes a doctor.’ This is about something way bigger.”
We listened to each other breathe. We could do that and find comfort.
The phone handle felt like it weighed five pounds.
We shared a mode and type of communication—spoken and unspoken——that we didn’t share with anyone else.
It acted as a protective barrier and armor to keep others out.
How many times had our mother walked into a room and thrown her hands up in the air on seeing us across the room talking, or silently reading with our feet touching on the couch?
As though our intimacy was an affront to her, a silent challenge.
“Isn’t it our job to figure out what our passion is and then go for it?”
“You’re really taking the Free to Be . .
. You and Me thing seriously,” I said. When we were little, Aunty and Mamoo had given us a kids’ record player and the Free to Be .
. . You and Me album. We used to listen to it quietly in our rooms. Over and over Marlo delivered her subversive message through benign melody about how every girl in this country grows up to become her own woman.
“I don’t think that was written for us.”
We had a complicated relationship with the idea of self, as in doing things for oneself and thinking of, or for, oneself.
It’s not that it wasn’t allowed. It was just that it was supposed to take a back seat to family—those we knew and those we didn’t.
Our choices supposedly cast a shadow over all of them.
As we’d become teenagers, Abu lectured us on the underbelly of American society, the false god of self.
But everywhere we looked, in books, on television, on the radio, and among friends, we saw all success underpinned by the single, solitary truth: that to get anywhere in this world, we were supposed to think first of ourselves.
No one was going to do that for us. America taught us that it was our job to figure out our gifts and unleash them on the world.
I say all of this as if it had been clear to us at the time. It was not. We were each grappling with becoming American, whatever that meant, and how to honor the siren song of the culture of want and me-first while still honoring our parents and the culture we came from.
Asma’s voice hardened. “So what are you suggesting, Sal? I’m so tired of hiding from them.”
“I don’t know.” I twirled the lime-green cord of the phone around my finger and released it, setting it to bounce like a yo-yo. “Maybe tell them you decided to not do it after all.”
“I’m not not doing the play just to make them happy.”
“I didn’t say to not do it. I said to tell them you’re not going to do it. And then do it anyway,” I said.
“Oh, you mean like prom? That worked out great for me.”
“I’m the one that told you that was a stupid idea, remember?” I paused. “There’s a big difference. You don’t live at home anymore, and they’ll never find out.”
Even then, I wasn’t able to name myself in the list of people who were affected by Asma’s actions. The habit of protecting her ran deep.
“I’m not backing out of this play, Sal. I got a big part. And besides, I’m not letting him think he won.”
There it was. The real reason. Asma locked in her eternal battle with the one person who could deny her what she was striving to become. What could I say?
After that trip to the city, Abu started leaning into complimenting my hair, which was weird because he was not a man given to compliments, and my hair was not the type to be complimented.
I perpetually wore it in a low ponytail because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
Neither straight nor curly, it was just a mass of thick, wavy hair that I later learned, through an unfortunate haircut, would get even more bushy and shapeless if cut into layers.
Whenever I saw him, he said things like, “I like your hair,” or “Your hair looks so nice,” the words as awkward and strange in his mouth as they were in my ears.