Chapter 9 Asma #3
The door clicked shut, and Asma debated whether to go sleep on the couch.
It would trigger questions, but she didn’t care.
Anything to stop this conversation. It’s not that Asma was unmoved by Salma’s feelings.
It’s just that she didn’t care. Salma was making this about herself.
Like somehow, their father’s act of rage was a tragedy she had to co-opt.
She was dealing with this the best way she knew how.
Besides, she was basically an adult and didn’t have to live like this for much longer.
With enough time, her parents would forgive her or forget about it, like she was trying so hard to do.
“Did you tell Mamoo?” Salma whispered.
“Why would I do that?” Asma said sharply. Briskly, she gathered her pillow and duvet.
“What are you doing?” Salma asked.
“Sleeping on the couch.”
Salma started speaking quickly. “I’m sorry about what he did to you. I wish I could have stopped him. I didn’t see it coming, and then it was all over so fast.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Sal. It happened. To me. Not to you. I don’t want to talk about this shit. You don’t get to force a conversation because you need to talk.”
“I had to drive home with them in the car and be alone in the house. And then, stuck at home with them with the news that Dadaji is dying and then rushing to leave . . .”
Asma opened the door and said, “Besides, I’m doing this for us.” She couldn’t help but get the last word in.
As she closed the door, she heard Salma say, “Please. You’re doing this for yourself.”
Almost immediately, Asma wished she hadn’t stormed out. She knew she wasn’t being fair to Salma. She wasn’t used to holding things back from her, but what was there really to say?
She settled in on the couch, facing out the back window.
Slowly, she felt her body leach its heat into the duvet and the duvet warm her in return.
Her imagination reached out to Ruby, bouncing between what had happened and the sweet, tormented possibility of what might have been.
Mippy jumped up on the couch and watched her with her apex predator gaze.
Asma kissed her, and she settled on her chest. The night had become clear.
A full moon shone over the expanse of lawn.
It reminded her of the first time she had experienced something she wanted but knew she would never, could never, have.
The summer she was thirteen, there had been a full moon at the Thresher’s Fair.
Held annually in late July, it was part county fair, part carnival, and something all its own.
With old-fashioned tractors, threshers, and other farm equipment on display, it was a celebration of rural culture, a time and place that seemed largely unknown or forgotten.
There were nightly dances under the picnic pavilion with live bands, food booths, barbecue, and potluck dinners.
People came from the surrounding fifty-mile area.
It was the biggest event of the year in Rosebud and what her family had quietly observed from across the street shortly after their arrival.
Her mother always signed up to set up dinners, before the heavy drinking began, and contributed some kind of fried Pakistani snack, made not too spicy.
The rule of being home by dusk was suspended, and Asma and Salma were given free rein and five dollars to spend as they wished over the course of the weekend, with warnings to Asma that she was in charge and responsible for her sister.
The highlight of the fair was the hayride.
For a quarter, a tractor, pulling a trailer with hay bales for benches, drove around town and the dark woods for fifteen minutes.
At sunset, parents with younger children dominated the rides.
At twilight, grandparents struggled their way up the three metal rungs and held hands and giggled while suffering the bumpy ride and hard slat-backs.
Once it was fully dark, it was time for the teenagers and young adults.
The first twenty people got a space on the trailer, and when the tractor returned, everyone filed off and got right back in line.
In the late-July darkness, vestiges of velvet indigo hung on the horizon, and stars popped like a garland celebrating youth.
Everyone in the wagon was in a collective state of anticipation.
Fifteen minutes on a dark wagon with no adult supervision felt like a night of freedom.
Girls giggled. Boys preened. And everyone tried to not stare at the brave couples making out.
That year, the tractor had started its rumbling engine, and the strangely appealing smell of gasoline burst in the air.
The wagon lurched, and the hayride pulled out of the shadows of the light cast from the dance floor.
As the tractor drove into the darkness, the sound of banjo music, plaintive and soulful, trailed them.
Asma sat with her friends. A boy she had never seen before moved from one side of the trailer to squeeze in next to her.
His name was Roger; he was from another town, and he was cute.
He had said he thought she was pretty. She had been stunned that an American boy would think she was attractive.
They had held hands discreetly, and in the light of the moon he had leaned over and kissed her quickly, his lips landing on the side of her mouth.
The memory felt so childish now, except for that feeling of her heart racing and the thrill of desire. The intensity of wanting something that was not permitted and the secret furtiveness of longing felt as true and pure now as they did on that hayride.
The next morning, Asma woke up on the couch to the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen and the sound of rustling newspaper. She considered pretending like she’d gotten up early to study on the couch. But she was too tired for all of that; most of her life already felt like she was acting.
“Let’s get outside and breathe some fresh air. I think we could all use it,” Aunty said pointedly, looking at Asma on the couch. “It’s a beautiful, crisp morning.”
Asma had gone on plenty of walks in the woods in Rosebud, and some of her most pleasant memories were smelling the fecundity and green of the woods, lush, sacred, cool, and protected. She was happy in the wild. But not today. She just wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
“It’s cold,” Asma said.
“A hike will be invigorating,” Aunty said.
The parking lot at the trailhead was empty.
Aunty and Salma set off. Mamoo, huddled inside his jacket, followed, and Asma dragged along behind them.
It was cold in the shade of the trees but warmer in the sun.
The leaves crunched with every step. Asma breathed deep the smell of campfires and dying things.
“Everything okay between you two?” Mamoo asked.
“Yeah. Fine.”
They hiked in silence for a few minutes, marching uphill. She stopped. Salma’s nagging rang in her head. She wanted to tell Mamoo about Ruby. She wanted to speak her feelings out loud, to make sure they were real and not just something she was making up in her own head.
Mamoo turned around. “What’s going on, darling?”
She started walking again, and they came around a bend in the trail. Salma and Aunty were standing on a jutting rock at the top of a bluff a hundred feet above the river. The moment had passed. She couldn’t say anything now. Instead she asked, “Do you have any pictures of your mother?”
“Uh. I think a few,” Mamoo muttered.
“Can you imagine being Lewis and Clark and coming upon this?” Aunty asked.
They were close enough to see rippling eddies on the water’s surface and tree branches tumbling in the muddy green-brown water, but high enough to see the grandeur of its scale.
The river extended to the east and the west, wending a ribbon of hammered metal to its vanishing points. It was a majestic and humbling sight.
Asma looked down and was disappointed to see staggered layers of gray-white granite, the immediate drop less than a foot.
She would have liked to hang her legs over a sheer cliff.
They sat on the rocks, cold on the backs of their thighs.
The sun fell between the trees on their sunny spot, and Asma slouched a little, feeling her body relax.
In the middle of the night, on the couch, she had realized that she had been arguing with herself.
She was drawn to Ruby and had been trying to make the feelings she generated fit defined and acceptable parameters.
She could be a friend. She could be a mentor.
But that hadn’t felt right. She had found the phone book and looked up Ruby’s phone number.
The heavy book lay open on her lap, and she had finally named it, admitted it to herself.
She was drawn to Ruby because she was attracted to her, wildly, irrepressibly, uncontrollably attracted to her.