Chapter 18 Salma #3
It was the time of year that the Midwest is an unrelenting gray, no distinction between sky and earth.
Only leafless tree trunks and branches cut the horizon line.
Neighbors’ houses glowed from the inside with warmth, intermittent bursts of light from a roaring fire or lamplight.
I imagined myself on the inside of such a house, claiming that ordinary life where the simple act of growing up was not seen as an act of rebellion.
Where your life, or some close approximation, was reflected back to you on television.
Multicolored, twinkling, Christmas trees beckoned, promising treats to come and an escape from lonesomeness.
One minute I felt a tired relief that school was almost done and the next a fearful anxiety about Asma coming home for the holidays.
The week before Asma was supposed to come home, Ami told me to call Asma. The phone picked up on the first ring, and Asma sounded breathy, as though she had just run into the room to pick up the phone. “Oh, it’s you,” she said flatly.
The phone handle felt like it weighed five pounds. “We haven’t heard from you.” God, I sounded like Ami. I wanted an opening; I had so much to tell her. But she gave none.
Ami took the phone from me and started discussing when Abu would pick Asma up to come home, because her car needed to be dropped off for an inspection at the mechanics’ shop in the city, where Abu paid for work on trade.
She nodded along to something Asma was saying and then stopped abruptly.
“Come home first, and we can talk about that.” She passed the phone to Abu, but Asma had already hung up.
Ami said to Abu, “She says she wants to go to Chicago or somewhere to visit friends.” I don’t remember my father’s reaction.
The day Asma was coming home for break, I got off the bus and could smell onions and cumin down the driveway; all of Rosebud knew Ami was cooking.
Inside, a cold and bare overhead light cast its meager glow in the living room.
Coming in from the outside, I could feel the warmth of the house.
I liked little reminders that everything in life was relative.
I turned off the overhead light and switched on the one lamp in the living room and watched for Abu and Asma’s arrival from the front window.
It reminded me of how we felt when Mamoo and Aunty used to visit when we were little. Oh, what sweet excitement.
Even though I feared an extended stay, and the baggage that had sprung up between Asma and me, my natural disposition relative to her was excitement.
I was still the little sister always seeking a way to be with my big sister.
I had always thought that in her presence I was a person fully embodied, and without her, I was something less.
She helped define me, her love giving me some kind of assurance.
But after my time at Mamoo and Aunty’s, I became increasingly uncertain.
There was so much I wanted to tell her. Should I tell her about the conversation I’d overheard?
But what would that do other than make her anxious at school and in the one place she was happy?
Should I tell her about the letters and what I’d seen?
After Thanksgiving, I felt like I needed to but was scared by how she’d react.
Ami was in the kitchen preparing dinner.
She wasn’t just making normal, everyday dishes but special-occasion, labor-intensive shami kababs and samosas.
Head down, she rolled the dough, cut it into circular pieces, folded them to become pretty little cones, spooned the dryish potato-and-pea mixture into each, pinched the packet closed, and placed each samosa on a tray, uniform and precisely equidistant from its neighbors. I remember each step.
There were times that I was so angry at her I never wanted to see her again.
Her carelessness at Thanksgiving and general cluelessness grated on me.
And yet it was impossible to not recognize her attempts at creating an image of a happy family gathering for the holidays.
There was a strange purity in her intentions, no matter how destructive or unrealistic, and I hated myself for feeling protective.
They emerged from the car as if they didn’t know each other, not exchanging a glance or a word.
Asma, hair flat on one side of her head and looking like she’d slept the entire drive.
Abu paused to stabilize himself before turning.
Abu inserted the key into the trunk and lifted her suitcase out.
Without even looking up the half flight of stairs where Ami and I were waiting, she said, “God, the house stinks of fried food. I’ve told you this so many times.
You need to put the fan on when you cook.
” She shrugged off her coat and hung it haphazardly on the hook and started down the stairs. “I’m going to sleep.”
All the cooking, waiting, and hopeful anticipation had been for nothing. I sensed rather than heard a shaky exhale and, for a second, couldn’t tell if it was Ami’s or mine. I expected Asma to show contempt for Ami and Abu, but not me. Never me.
I ate dinner with my parents like every other night, two bites of kabab and picked at a samosa, crumbly and tasteless in my mouth.
After dinner, I crept into Asma’s room with a samosa wrapped in a napkin as a peace offering, for a peace I could neither name nor negotiate.
I had hoped she was awake and skipped dinner just to avoid my parents, but she was curled up on her side, snoring lightly and steadily.
Her eyelids, translucent as butterfly wings and shot through with veins, remained a tiny bit ajar, as though her eyes were too big to be covered by such a delicate fabric of skin.
She was speed-reading in her sleep. I left the samosa on her bedside table in case she woke up hungry in the middle of the night.
Late that night, long after Ami and Abu had gone to bed, I lay on the couch in the TV room downstairs.
Half asleep, I watched an old-fashioned black-and-white movie on low volume.
I felt, more than saw, Asma emerge from her room and freeze when she saw the television on.
In the low light and harsh shadows cast by the movie, I didn’t move, feigning sleep.
After a long moment, she quietly took the phone off the hook and pulled the long cord into her room, softly closing the door.
There was always a collective exhale in the minutes after Abu left for work.
Like music only some could hear, the door clicking shut followed by the crunch of tires on gravel let something free in us.
The house resumed breathing. When we were younger, we all fell into the roles we were accustomed to, in which Ami felt more like one of the kids than an adult.
Asma would take out her stash of old Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines bequeathed from Heather, and Ami pretended like she didn’t see them.
In summer, Ami would go to her room, draw the shades against the summer sun, and take an afternoon nap, one of those vestiges from Pakistan that did not translate to our air-conditioned life.
It was the only time Ami ever took off her bra; even at night, she wore a bra.
But when Abu was gone, she gave herself that little luxury.
I would put the radio on. Asma would strip down to a T-shirt and underwear, her long colt-like legs bony and awkward.
Asma and I would dance around, and even Ami would shake her behind, in a self-conscious way.
We never discussed it. The loosening and permissiveness were entirely organic.
It was late morning on Christmas Eve. I was on the couch in the living room with a book, still smarting from how Asma was treating me.
Ami seemed to have forgotten I was there.
She sat at the kitchen table, hunched over something, her left hand moving in a writing motion, talking softly to herself.
I strained to catch a word or a tone. I was fascinated.
The most I ever saw her write was a grocery list, and even that was in a shorthand that no one but her could understand.
Head bent, she wrote furiously until we heard Abu’s car return, the sound muffled by falling snow.
He walked in, eyebrows thick with snowflakes, and proclaimed that the roads were so bad that there weren’t even any snowplows out.
The weather forecasters in the city had predicted twelve to eighteen inches, meaning we would get even more. It was going to be a white Christmas.
He sat down on the small bench in the entryway, and Ami pulled off his galoshes without his asking. How had I never noticed that she pulled his boots off? He glanced at me and barked, “Go, wake up your sister!”
I stomped down the stairs. Why was he yelling at me?
I had spent two days waiting for Asma to see me, to acknowledge me beyond the bare recognition of a nod.
I had read. I had cleaned my room. I had worked on a partially completed latch-hook rug I found under my bed in its original box.
I had stared out windows. I had eaten breakfast alone.
I had helped fold the laundry and clean out the linen closet.
All while waiting for Asma to move in my direction, to miss me and come back to me of her own accord.
But she hadn’t. And now, instead of a day watching Christmas specials with no demands and wallowing in self-pity, I was going to be boxed in with all of them and their overreactions in a too-small house.