Chapter 13 Asma
Asma
It didn’t take long for Asma to feel comfortable enough to swim laps without a kickboard, as long as Ruby was in her same lane.
They went swimming together whenever they could, even though their schedules did not line up neatly.
Asma had decided she would ask Mamoo and Aunty for a swimsuit for Christmas.
She wondered if they would care or if they would have the same hang-ups as her parents.
But even as she thought it, she knew the answer.
Swimming was the first real form of structured and regular exercise Asma had ever engaged in.
She loved the way the water embraced her and accepted her like a mother.
For a time, she was weightless and unencumbered.
Quickly, she reached the point when her mind no longer focused on not drowning, could let go, swimming as freely as her body, buoyed and with no resistance.
Despite her promise, Asma had not gone to see Salma again. Nor had she arranged for her to come to campus. She felt badly; one of the side effects of telling Ruby her life story was that she remembered how much her sister meant to her.
Their relationship was about more than just being siblings.
If life was a Venn diagram consisting of ethnicity, class, and culture, surely there wasn’t a smaller slice than the one the two of them occupied.
The unusual and stressful events of the last few weeks had masked certain truths, but speaking them aloud reminded her that there was no one in the world who would ever, could ever, understand her and where she came from better than Salma.
They were a part of Rosebud but would always be foreign to it.
Each world in which they operated had its own language and rules, none of which translated perfectly.
Life inside their house was built on the expectation of being even-tempered and compliant, parts of a collective submitting to the larger good of the family.
The lessons her mother imparted—how to brown spices, how frequently to change the sheets, how to get stains out of shirts—were part of a long-term training program through which they understood they were being taught how to keep their own home one day where they would fulfill their expected role as a mother and wife.
Whereas life outside their house prized independence, individuality, and self-expression.
Asma returned to her dorm room after a swim and called Salma at Mamoo’s. Aunty clicked over from talking to her mom, no doubt, and Salma got on the line.
“How was school this week?” Salma asked.
“It’s been a great week.” Asma sighed.
Asma waited for Salma to probe about why her voice sounded that way.
But after an awkward pause, Salma simply said, “Mippy’s hitting her head on my hand, demanding more pets.”
“She’s a little tramp.”
They both laughed.
“When do they come back?” Asma asked, anticipating a return to their cumbersome callback phone-call routine. She rubbed her hand through her hair, still damp from the pool.
“Tomorrow.”
Asma didn’t need to ask if she was ready. She knew.
“I started sw . . .” Asma said.
At precisely the same time, Salma said, “Mamoo told me . . .”
“Sorry, you go first,” Asma said.
“I was just going to say that Mamoo told me this crazy story.”
“About what?”
“He was talking about Ami and Abu’s marriage and how it got set up. It was really intense.”
Silence.
“Ami went through so much, when she was younger than us,” Salma went on.
“I don’t understand this thing you’re doing, Sal. This needing to dig up the past and talk and talk about it,” Asma said.
“Talk and talk about it? We don’t talk about anything.”
Asma knew every tone of Salma’s voice and was struck by the irritation and pushback in it. She realized that she wasn’t the only one who had been changing over the past few months.
“We know nothing about our family history. I’m just trying to understand,” Salma said.
“Understand what? They are who they are. That’s all.”
“But don’t you see? Maybe this stuff explains them. Or at least her.”
“Goddamn it, Sal! Don’t you see? I don’t really care why either of them are the way they are.
” Asma had come into this conversation intending to smooth things over with Salma, to reassert the primacy of their relationship.
But in the wide-open space between intentionality and actuality, there was infinite room for misunderstandings.
“I’m not trying to defend them.”
“You don’t seem to get it, do you? If they don’t have to protect me, then I don’t have to protect them. I’m done with them, and I don’t understand how you’re not too.” She paused like she’d remembered something. “Oh, I forgot. You’re the good one. You don’t do anything wrong.”
“Knock it off. The only thing I do different from you is that I don’t purposefully try and piss them off. I keep things to myself.”
There it was again. That voice that signaled she, too, was fed up.
Asma snorted. But before she could respond, Salma said, “You think only about yourself, Asma. There’s always another side to everything.”
A few days later, while Asma was loading her backpack for class in the morning, Mamoo telephoned her.
“Your parents returned.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“The house feels empty without Salma. I really got used to her being here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you called home?”
“Mamoo, what’s going on? I have class . . .”
“Oh right, darling. Sorry. I’m just being daft. Listen. Your Aunty’s brothers are going to be in town for the weekend with their older children. They’re touring colleges, including yours. What do you think about going to dinner one night? You can tell them what you’ve liked and whatnot.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow? I know it’s not much notice, but we just found out.”
If it had been any other night, Asma would have politely declined.
But Ruby was gone for two days and one night for a training.
Ronny was harassing her for not going out anymore.
But she had been staying away purposefully.
He and all their theater friends knew Ruby, and it would be impossible to not spill her feelings, which were hungering for release.
Asma was happy to have something to do to fill the time. “Sure.”
“We’ll meet you at your dorm after they finish the school tour, and maybe you can show them some of your favorite places? And then we can go to do dinner?”
She wondered whether Aunty’s nieces and nephews remembered her.
She didn’t remember what she wore to the recognition event a few years prior or how she looked—had she still been in her awkward phase?
Was that the year she grew four inches and her mother’s habit of buying clothes for multiple seasons caught up with her?
Was she still wearing her hair in one long braid?
She wondered if she should feel a little intimidated at the prospect of seeing these families again, but something about her feelings for Ruby immunized her from feeling too badly about anything.
Asma met Mamoo and Aunty on the quad late in the afternoon.
Aunty’s two brothers were there, a little balder and paunchier than she remembered them, with each of their eldest children.
Ethan was introverted and shy, while Maddie, shivering in her short skirt and cropped top, seemed to be one of those girls that had been ready to go to college a year ago.
They walked around campus. Asma gave an informal tour around the student union and showed them where to get a late-night snack.
She saw Ruby everywhere she went. The bench outside of her dorm. The quad. The rec center.
At dinner, Asma made note of small things, like Aunty’s brothers were vegetarian like Aunty, but the kids ordered pig-lover’s pizza.
Within this family unit, Mamoo was not in the center of Aunty’s relationship with the world around her.
Rather, it was her brothers. They had their own language, replete with half-finished sentences and old stories and the same habit of pushing on the shoulder of their closest sibling while cutting them off or interjecting their thoughts.
Asma wondered whether she and Salma had this kind of connection, literally visible to outsiders.
She wondered if their future children would be as American as Ethan and Maddie. It was hard to imagine.
In Asma’s fantasies about cousins, she assumed that they would be close.
Like the best parts about siblings, but without the bickering and sharing of resources.
Ethan and Maddie were friendly enough, if slightly disinterested with everything around them and each other.
Asma felt let down by them. They didn’t even know what they had in each other.
“That was fun. I’ve never seen Aunty with her brothers before,” Asma said as Mamoo drove her back to the dorm. She wondered whether Mamoo felt left out between Aunty and her brothers.
Mamoo nodded but was otherwise quiet.
She wondered what Ruby was doing and wished she could see the dynamic between Ruby and her brothers.
She hoped Ruby would call her tonight but didn’t know whether their undefined relationship warranted long-distance charges.
She hadn’t asked Ruby what time she would return for fear of overstepping and was now fidgety, counting down to an unknown time the next day.
Lost in her own thoughts, Asma was surprised when Mamoo pulled into the parking lot. She started to open her door, but Mamoo said, “Let’s talk.”
The dread with being put on notice with a statement like that was one she had felt many times before, just never coming from Mamoo. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, darling. I . . . I just wonder if there’s something you want to talk about.”
Asma felt a moment of panic. It was like he was reading her mind. “Like what?”
Mamoo was turned sideways in the car seat and looked at her directly. They stared at each other in the blue light of the dashboard, frozen. “Have you called your parents?”
Asma’s eyes shifted. She waited for a gotcha, something that was going to be revealed. “No, I told you that, remember?” she said slowly.
“Yes, that was a few days ago. I just wondered.”
Why was he persisting with this? The thought of her parents made her feel sour.
Since their return, the phone had rung a few times with Salma’s callback code, and Asma had ignored it.
In all fairness, she felt like she was always waiting for a call from Ruby and, because she didn’t have call-waiting, didn’t want her line to be tied up.
She didn’t feel like she was slighting her sister as much as waiting for her destiny.
“You know I’m always here, right? I’m always just a phone call away,” Mamoo said after Asma remained silent.
“Yeah.” She was wary. Mamoo was clearly fishing for information. There were only a few secrets she had from him, none of which she had any intention of divulging.
Behind them, a car honked its horn. Mamoo glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “Okay. Well. I’m glad we talked.”