Chapter 6 Asma #2
Asma sat in her car, Mamoo’s late-model Mercedes that he had given her before she started college, and idly fiddled with the radio dial.
Usually, slipping behind the wheel and inhaling Mamoo’s lingering woodsy smell made her feel much the way her Trusty Steed had when she’d first gotten it.
Invincible. But not today. She lifted her arm to adjust the rearview mirror and dropped it heavily.
What if they knew what had happened that night and wanted to talk about it? What was she supposed to say?
It had only been a few days since the play, and every minute of that time had been a kind of suffering.
She wanted the memory of the whole night to disappear unacknowledged into the vagueness of the past. She had wildly miscalculated.
Frustrated at her own lack of foresight, she simply had not understood the scale of her parents’ reaction.
What else was her father capable of? Instead of clearing the way for Salma, her parents would scrutinize her every decision more carefully and withhold permissions and privileges.
The shame and embarrassment she’d felt when she had woken up the morning after the play had festered and given way to a lethargic malaise.
She was trying so hard to evade the muddiness of her feelings for Ruby and the events in the parking lot that it left room for little else.
Avoidance took a type of energy. Her attention jostled between the unsettled terrains of Ruby, her family, and school.
There was too much time for thinking and not enough to look forward to.
She wanted to see no one. She missed classes by sleeping through her alarm.
Classes she had been coasting through all semester had gotten hard.
She was behind in all her subjects, found gaps in her understanding about key concepts, and yet could find no motivation to catch up.
She picked up the phone handset from time to time to make sure it worked and then remembered that Ruby didn’t know her unlisted phone number.
The only time the phone rang was with Salma’s callback code, but she didn’t call back. What was there to say?
She was unable to get Ruby out of her head, and at the same time, the idea of seeing her now, after the discombobulated memories from the party, was too much to bear.
Her emotional state felt like the mottled shadow that was slowly starting to appear under the surface of her skin.
After she glimpsed the damage to her body, she started taking a shower late at night when no one else would be in the communal bathroom.
Instead of the pain fading, it continued to grow and deepen.
She felt like she was going to be permanently marked with this loss.
When she finally arrived at Mamoo’s, Aunty was in the kitchen on the phone, pulling things out of the fridge.
Her phone had an extra-long cord and a receiver with a special attachment so she could walk around hands-free without straining her neck.
As she stepped out from behind the fridge, Asma couldn’t help but notice how round Aunty was getting.
She could hear her father’s snarky comments about how they didn’t take care of themselves.
He prided himself on his self-control. Where had that legendary self-control been in the parking lot?
Aunty hugged her as she walked past. Who cared what he thought?
She stood at the big windows in the family room.
Moody, heavy clouds scudded briskly along.
Winter was descending. Asma was an unwilling participant, already resentful of the coming darkness and cold.
Maybe after she finished her studies and was a doctor, she would end up working at the same hospital as Ruby.
Asma imagined stepping into an elevator to perform a rare and highly risky surgery.
Ruby would be standing in the elevator and smile, her dimple deepening, and say, “It’s you.
” Asma shook herself to rid herself of her silly fantasies.
Aunty hung up the phone and came to stand by Asma; their reflections emerged in the glass like shadow selves. There and not there.
“Were you talking to your mom?” Asma asked.
Aunty nodded self-consciously; she was always on the phone with her mother.
“What do you talk about?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Aunty laughed.
Asma understood that feeling. That’s the way she and Salma had always been. Until recently. What would it feel like to have that kind of relationship with her mother? One where you were driven to tell her everything and nothing.
They walked to the kitchen, and Aunty handed Asma a head of lettuce to clean while she minced garlic into perfect, tiny cubes.
“What did you want to talk about?” Asma asked.
“Let’s wait for your uncle. He’s running late from work.”
Asma ripped the lettuce leaves roughly.
“You must have a lot of time back now that the play’s over,” Aunty said.
“Yeah.” There was a part of Asma that was desperate to talk to someone about the crush of her feelings. Someone who wouldn’t judge or ask big questions that she couldn’t answer. Aunty fit the bill, but even as she thought it, Asma knew she never would.
Aunty poured olive oil into a shallow pan and scraped the garlic into it.
Asma loved to stir anything and took the wooden spoon from her hand and sautéed the sticky garlic until it released its sweet funk.
She thought of her family’s stove in Rosebud that had broken many years ago and that now functioned as a countertop.
Her father had even covered it with a spare plank of wood on top of which they had placed a plug-in griddle with two small burners set in stone age steel, salvaged from the bug market.
Her mother was too short to comfortably handle the elevated height, and so she either stood on her tiptoes to stir whatever was in the bottom of the pot, or she asked Asma for help.
“Do you talk to your brothers as much as your mom?” Asma asked.
“Goodness, no. Actually, one of my brothers is here for a conference in a few weeks.”
Over the years, Asma and Salma had met Aunty’s family in passing.
Mamoo had been recognized a few years before at an awards ceremony, and Aunty’s “real family,” as Asma and Salma referred to them, had come from Wisconsin to attend.
Asma, Salma, and their parents sat with Aunty’s parents at one table with Mamoo and Aunty, and Aunty’s brothers, with their wives and children, sat at the adjacent table.
Asma had been unable to peel her eyes away from them.
Aunty’s brothers talked loudly and laughed heartily.
Their green-eyed, shiny-haired children acted disinterested in everything.
One brother had his arm draped over the back of his wife’s chair while he leaned over, whispering conspiratorially to the other brother, eyes shining with glee.
The other brother was balding like Uncle and held his head up with one hand, a wide grin on his face, deliriously writing on the program for the event.
Aunty turned around to shush them more than once.
The wives elbowed their husbands to quiet down.
The brother passed a note to Aunty at their table, almost tipping over his chair to reach her.
And while speaker after speaker droned on, Aunty shook with silent laughter as she read the note.
Asma had wanted desperately to see what was written on that piece of paper and felt an irrational and acute sense of having lost something.
Maybe it was the idea of brothers or maybe that she would never be a part of a family in which playfulness and teasing were part of the family language.
They served themselves pasta and salad.
“Tell me about your brothers.”
“You know. I was the child of an immigrant also,” Aunty said.
Asma took a bite and chewed as many times as she could without it seeming weird. “But not really, right? I mean, your mom is American.”
Aunty nodded. “You’re right, of course. Moms have an outsize influence on the feel of a family, and so, in that sense, we were raised in a more typical American way.
But even though we did all the same things as our cousins, we were definitely not the same.
We were vegetarian for one thing. We went to India every few years, which, thirty years ago, was about as strange as going to the moon.
My older brother refused to go to India in high school because he didn’t want to miss baseball. ”
“Did you feel Indian?” Asma asked. “Or American?”
Aunty paused for a long moment. “American. Probably because our mom ran interference with him, we kids never had to manage our dad’s sense of being let down.
Or at least, I rarely ever felt like I disappointed him.
My brothers on the other hand . . .” She laughed.
“They were wild. I think any frustration my parents felt at their behavior was probably just the normal frustration parents have with their teenagers’ choices. ”
They ate quietly. Asma picked at her salad and asked softly, “How was it when you and Mamoo met? Did he feel conflicted because of the religious differences? Between the two of you, I mean.”
There was always a pause before Aunty responded, like she was really considering what she heard. “From my perspective, no. But you have to remember, I met him after he’d been living by himself for ten years. So I think he’d already worked through some of those things.”
She said this like it was a common understanding. All Asma knew was that Mamoo had gone from Pakistan to England to study and then come to America. There were no details.
“If I really think about how young he was when he moved to England . . . oh, it shocks me,” Aunty said.
“How old was he?”
“Sixteen! Can you imagine figuring out a new country, a new language, by yourself and at that age?”