Chapter 7 Salma
Salma
I cause quite a stir. When I come to, Sophie’s mom is hovering over me, my left wrist in her hand. A circle of gravely serious faces peers down at me.
Sophie’s mom looks me intently in the eyes and says something I can’t quite understand. I am mortified and scramble to sit up. If I could just stand, I could finish whatever it was that I was doing. I hear a familiar voice speaking far away. I think I will cancel dinner with Emil. He’ll understand.
Sophie’s mom touches my shoulder and says, “Let’s hold off for a minute.”
“I’m fine.” My mouth feels like I have rocks in it. I recall the last image I saw and just want a little space, a moment of quiet, in which to reexamine the memory. But there are all these people crowding me.
Another mother comes over with what looks like a spitwad.
She carefully opens the sodden brown paper towel—the kind in the bathroom and above the sink in my room—so as not to tear it and approaches me to, what?
Wipe my forehead? Oh God. Make this stop.
I push her hands away. This is my classroom, and I must reassert control.
I sit up in the middle of this circle of near strangers and feel like a spectacle.
My knee-length skirt is bunched up, and I am horrified at the thought of what I may have revealed.
People are speaking loudly about me as though I’m not here.
Perhaps this is how kids experience the world.
Words are coming back. The familiar voice is now loud and in the hallway.
The principal, Betsy Scott, who annoys the daylights out of me and every other staff member in the building, rushes in like she’s going to take charge.
“Not her! Not that one!” Wait. That’s my voice.
I clasp my hands over my mouth and close my eyes.
As if wires are being reconnected, my head informs me that I am in great pain.
“You hit your head pretty hard, Miss Chaudhry. Go slow.” Dr. Greta, Sophie’s mom, says.
She asks the parents to please give me space, and the classroom slowly empties out.
“My knees were locked,” I lie. I touch the back of my head and feel a bump the size of a golf ball. When I look at my fingers, they are covered in blood. I’m afraid I might fall back again. I have always hated the sight of blood.
The raised voices are angry and then, suddenly, stop.
Paramedics come in. Betsy announces over the PA system that curriculum night is ending early.
I may not be taking in everything that is being said, but I am taking in enough to know that forever after, this will be the year that curriculum night ended early. Because of me.
The building quiets while all the people that give it life empty out.
The paramedics take my vitals and clean my head.
They tell me I’ll have a nasty headache.
I don’t need to go to the hospital, but I should make sure to go see a doctor.
They look at Sophie’s mom, embarrassed, and she holds her hands up in mock surrender.
Sophie’s parents help me stand, and I see that Emil is sitting on a child’s chair, the face of a character drawn to look worried. “I’m going to drive you home.”
I start to say that I’m fine to drive, but Sophie’s mom, so benign and gentle to this point, takes an authoritarian tone. “You may not drive, Miss Chaudhry. I’m quite certain that you are concussed. Stay away from computer and TV screens for a few days.”
“My kids . . .”
“Will be fine. You will not be unless you take a few days and rest.”
I scan the room to see my ghost, but there is no one there. I am wildly dizzy.
Emil puts his arm around me, and we walk slowly down the main artery of the school. He whispers in my ear, “You’ll do anything to get out of curriculum night.” I giggle and stop immediately as my head explodes in pain.
Betsy Scott follows ten feet behind us like a worried and well-meaning wraith.
“Whatever you do, Salma, do not look back. Do not meet her eyes.” Emil is on a roll.
“Stop. It hurts to laugh.”
He sits me on the bench at the front door while he goes to get his car.
I try and make sense of what the last thirty minutes have brought at the same time as trying to work out how I’m going to get to school in the morning if my car remains here.
Seemingly out of thin air, Marlene appears next to me.
Her face is red and mottled, mascara streaks down her face.
She wrings her hands overwrought. Everyone is an overdrawn character tonight.
“I’m so sorry, MissCh . . . Salma. I am just so sorry.”
My hand grips the top of my head. “Marlene. Please.” I want to tell her to be quiet. I want to tell her that I don’t have it in me to reassure her right now.
But she is not listening, just crying and holding my free hand in both of hers, kneading it like a cat palpates a cushion. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“Why are you sorry?” I groan.
“That she was coming or that’s how she’d show up . . . how am I ever going to be able to show my face again?”
“Marlene. What are you saying?”
She looks at me like I’m thick. “That was Roberta.”
And then finally, finally, I understand. Roberta is Ruby.
I remember Ruby. I met her once at a cast party.
Twice, if I count the time I saw her the night of Asma’s rehearsal.
She stood on stage, hand over her eyes as though watching for something coming over the horizon.
Even from half an auditorium away, her presence was palpable.
I had accompanied Asma to rehearsal to watch the cast run lines in the musty auditorium.
At first, I thought Ruby was a man, hair shorn close.
Asma had approached her shyly. They spoke, and when Ruby turned, the stage lights caught her at such an angle that her cheekbones, high and sharp, seemed cut from marble and her hoop earrings twinkled.
All these years later, I can still see her standing on stage, legs placed wide, the settler of my sister’s heart.
That woman who was so sophisticated and feminine, who so clearly stood in her own power, was nothing like the flailing-crab person on my desk, pushing papers and books onto the floor while trying to right herself.
When she had looked up at me, her color was all wrong, as though she was sick, her hair nappy and uneven.
But it was her round eyes, so sad and dead-looking, that told me who she was.
I can still see Asma’s expression when she returned to the party trailing Ruby, her face glazed like she’d seen God.
I have a concussion and am home for at least one week.
There will be no more headstands for a while.
I used to think I had a high tolerance for pain given how I lived, with the shut-in, dark suffering that is my constant companion.
But I was wrong. This headache is nothing like I have felt before.
It is physical and concrete and unavoidable.
I remember my mother’s long days closed in her bedroom with the blinds drawn tight against her migraines and experience an unwelcome pang of empathy.
I make myself stay in the living room and common areas of the house until it is time for bed at night. I am nothing like her.
Mamoo is staying at my house, even though I don’t think it’s necessary.
He pampers me with peppermint tea and salt-and-vinegar potato chips.
It is all I’m able to manage through the nausea.
He reads to me. We tell stories about my kids, past and present.
We nod off for minutes and hours, he in the recliner and I on the sectional sofa.
I try to think about Marlene and Poppy and their connection to Ruby, but it is smoke, incapable of being isolated and examined.
There is something niggling me, a crucial understanding just out of my mental reach, but I can’t seem to grasp it.
When I try to figure out exactly what it is that I know and what I still need to learn, the details elude me, and I float away into sleep.
Emil comes over after school and, with great flair, cooks elaborate meals, which turn my stomach.
He and Mamoo giggle like two second-grade girls.
For a little while, it feels like I have my old Mamoo back.
Emil tells Mamoo that he is hurt that Mamoo volunteers throughout school, but not in PE.
Mamoo says, “What kind of a role model is a chubby man who can’t touch his toes?
” It breaks my heart that they are both starved for home, a place where someone is always waiting for you.
Emil brings me cards from my kids. He knows that I am worried about their progress.
Everything I teach is in preparation for the next piece of learning.
I want to write emails to the substitute teacher about what needs to be accomplished in class, but Emil tells me that Mrs. Morris and Ms. Rhodes have split my class into two and have absorbed them into each of their own classes.
They have retained a substitute class intern, Ginger, so each class has two adults. I am assuaged.
We are scheduled to visit the rainforest in just a few weeks, and there is much to do to prepare in advance. It is a monumental task, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it this year. I try and develop a plan for pushing it by one week, but I find it hard to concentrate.
Emil says that Marlene wants to call on me. My phone number is unlisted, and unlike many, I do not have a mobile phone. I pretend like I don’t hear him. I do not want to be found. I have not told Mamoo about why I fainted. So far, only Marlene and I know. And Ruby. My secrets pile up.
My dreams are nesting dolls. Dreams within dreams. Intense and discomfiting, burrowing into the oldest of places. One dream is not enough to transcend; my consciousness peels away layers trying to find the heart of the thing.