Chapter 4 Asma #4
Since arriving at college, she had gotten a crash course in the many varieties of sexual couplings.
There were her friends Val and Paul, who lived on the fourth floor of the men’s dorm.
Paul had never been with a woman. He had known since he was a little boy that he only ever wanted to kiss other boys.
His mother, too, had always known and put no obstacles in his path to living the way he wanted.
Yet he was still a virgin. Val had had a serious girlfriend through most of high school and was now trying to find the safety and acceptance he’d had with her but this time with the physical and emotional connection of a man.
And then there was Val’s roommate, a strapping boy whose only religion was The Clash.
His girlfriend was strictly Catholic and wanted to save herself for marriage, and so they compromised and had only oral and anal sex.
It didn’t make much sense to Asma, but if it made them happy, what did she care?
In fact, the longer she lived closely among people who were open about their feelings and learned who she was, no matter how intense and brash, the more she found she didn’t need to be as oppositional to make a point.
She didn’t need to gird herself to be ready to be challenged.
And in the absence of that opposite, negative force, she found herself engaging with the world around her, feeling new things in an entirely different way. Like whatever this thing was with Ruby.
Asma was passed a bottle of beer to open. She propped it against her leg to put more torque with the bottle opener, and the neck broke off. Someone screamed, and everyone in her vicinity jumped back from the shattered glass and splashed liquid.
“Sorry!” Asma bent down to hide her embarrassment as much as to help the crowd that had gathered to clean up.
She felt a warm hand on her right wrist and looked up.
“Let’s look at that hand,” Ruby said.
Asma glanced at her hand; it was covered in blood. “It’s okay. It’s nothing. I don’t even feel it.” She was already mortified for having caused an accident, but seeing her blood on the floor, and knowing people’s sensitivity these days, made her want to disappear.
Ruby tugged at her.
“Let me clean this up first.” Her mother’s silent and not-so-silent training made it hard for Asma to walk away from a mess, especially one that she had created.
“I’ll take care of it,” Salma said, appearing next to her.
Ruby put a towel around Asma’s hand and led her down a dark, narrow hallway to her bedroom and then a bathroom.
Asma was only vaguely aware of the stinging in her hand; the proximity to Ruby in the passage dampened all other feeling.
Asma looked around greedily for evidence of a husband or boyfriend: a low platform bed made up neatly with a white duvet; an entire wall of bookshelves; two small tables with matching lamps, their dark lampshades concentrating their light downward; a few framed black-and-white pictures.
There was nothing that said that someone shared this room with her.
There was also nothing that said someone didn’t.
Ruby pushed Asma down on the toilet seat and put her hand in the sink and started rinsing it.
“I’m sorry. I made a huge mess.”
Ruby examined Asma’s hand intently, turning it this way and that slowly. Distractedly, she said, “Don’t think you need any.”
“Don’t think I need any what? What are you doing?” Asma asked, her eyes glued to her hand being held so gently, so tenderly.
“Stitches,” Ruby said. Ruby held Asma’s hand tight while she opened the medicine cabinet and took out peroxide, gauze, and tape, setting them up in a line on the countertop. She turned Asma’s hand under the faucet, the water running pink. “You know I’m a nurse, right?”
“What? No. I . . . I didn’t know that.” Asma realized she knew nothing about this woman that made her feel shaky. She felt inarticulate and clumsy next to her.
“It’s a bleeder.” Ruby rewrapped the hand in the towel while she talked and pressed down firmly but gently. “You don’t mind if I hold your hand for a bit, do you?” Ruby asked, her eyes sparkling mischievously.
Asma shook her head mutely. She wanted to lick that dimple. Yeah, this is what the songs were about. Not that clinical, dry thing she’d experienced with boys. This come-from-behind feeling that made her legs feel like she’d ridden her bike too long and too fast. “So wait. How are you the director?”
“In undergrad, I directed the spring musical my senior year. The school asked me to step in and help out with Pippin because the theater director is on leave for health issues.” Ruby leaned her hip against the sink countertop and looked down at Asma, still sitting.
They sat in a fraught silence, smiling shyly at each other.
Ruby periodically opened the towel to see if the bleeding had slowed.
Asma felt dazed, seeing all her blood in the sink, and turned her head to the side. A petite shelf loaded with lipsticks hung on the wall. “Are those all yours?”
“Uh, yeah. I have a problem.” Ruby laughed sheepishly.
“How many are there?”
“One of my brothers says if I end up with one for every day of the year, I need to get help.” She laughed good-naturedly.
“How many do you have? Brothers.”
Ruby leaned forward and said, “Four!” as though she still couldn’t believe it.
Now that Asma knew a little, she wanted to know more. “Are you from here?”
“No. Chicago. How about you?”
“I’m from a small town about an hour away called Rosebud.”
“Rosebud, huh? I like that.” Ruby removed the pressure and checked Asma’s hand again.
Asma’s curiosity spiraled. “Are you married?” she asked softly.
Ruby let go of Asma’s hand so abruptly that it fell in the sink. The silence fell awkwardly. Asma felt like she had committed a grave offense, her hand suddenly cold from the withdrawal of Ruby’s warmth.
Later, when she would think back on this moment, she would feel embarrassed anew.
She knew this from her upbringing. People simply did not ask personal questions about the status of couplings or how people met.
In their culture, people were children, married, or on the way to getting married and having children.
Perhaps, even in America, there were circumstances when it wasn’t okay to voice these types of questions.
Ruby finished taping the cut with a matter-of-fact precision, and they walked back to the party.
In their absence, more people had arrived.
The lights were dim, music thumped, and voices yelled over music.
The table and ground were all cleaned up as though nothing had happened.
Life was going on normally. Asma scanned the room and found Salma sitting on the couch surrounded by the crew.
How fitting that she had found herself with the people who preferred to work in the background.
Asma sat next to Salma, who looked at her worriedly and wanted to see her hand.
“You doing okay?” Asma asked.
Salma’s eyes were shiny. “Yes! Everyone has been so great!”
Asma smiled, taken aback at Salma’s enthusiasm.
Ronny walked over and said, “You took my seat.”
Asma now understood why Salma was so animated.
She stood up, and Ronny poured himself into the small spot she had previously taken on the couch.
Her insides were jangly. She didn’t want to share space with someone who was too chatty or intrusive.
She wanted to be alone with her thoughts of Ruby holding her hand.
She would have liked to have a drink, but Salma was there.
Asma rarely drank to excess, somehow her stomach always giving out before she got to the point of abandonment, but Salma would be able to smell her breath, and Asma didn’t feel like explaining her when-in-Rome rule tonight.
She made her way from group to group, making small talk, her inner compass always oriented to Ruby.
She went outside and had a few puffs of a joint.
It took the edge off the pain, but it made her want to be next to Ruby even more.
Later in the night, people started leaving, and those that remained started moving furniture to create a dance floor. Someone plugged in a strobe light, which lazily threw light around the room. Pizza arrived, and the smell of doughy bread and sauce filled the room.
“New Song” came on the stereo with its staccato, happy rhythm.
Asma loved this song. She glanced around the room and saw Ruby leaning against a wall, one arm crossed against her middle and the top of a bottle of beer resting against her full lips.
It felt like Howard Jones’s words about having waited so long were meant for her.
The bird inside her was no longer fluttering; it was thrashing itself against her rib cage.
They stared fixedly at each other. They were each taller than most people in the room, their view unimpeded. Asma’s chest hurt.
Ruby made the slightest motion of her head to the front door and raised one eyebrow. My God, that look. Asma felt like a character in a Spike Lee movie, gliding through the room through no volition of her own, slightly wobbly, with no obstacles in her path.
The temperature outside had dropped as steadily as it had risen inside.
Ruby sat in the corner of the porch swing, one leg pulled up and the other pushing against the rail.
Asma sat down gingerly in the opposite corner.
The cold was bracing and a welcome relief.
She trembled and stroked the short, soft hair on the back of her neck.
Ruby went inside and returned with a brightly colored quilt. “If we get cold.”
She sat back down, this time closer to Asma. Asma ventured a glance at Ruby, who was still in a short-sleeve shirt. How was she not cold? Had she known how long, how graceful, Ruby’s neck was? And had she just put in those silver hoop earrings, or had she been wearing them the whole night?