“Of course I remember,” Umm Ahmed said. “But things are different now.”
“Are they?” Fareeda asked.
“If my daughter-in-law needs to sleep, then why not? Why can’t I help her a little bit?”
“Help her?” Fareeda met Isra’s eyes briefly and then turned away, hoping she didn’t expect the same from her. “Shouldn’t she be helping you?”
“Fareeda is right,” a woman on the opposite sofa added. “What’s the point of marrying off our sons if we are going to help their wives? The point is to lessen our burdens, not add to them.”
Umm Ahmed laughed quietly, tugging on the rim of her blouse. “Now, ladies,” she said. “You all remember how it felt coming to America? We came without a mother or a father. Just a husband and a handful of kids. Do you remember how it felt when our husbands went off to work in the morning, leaving us alone to raise our children, in a place where we didn’t even speak the language? Do you remember how awful those years were?”
Fareeda said nothing. The women sipped their chai, peering at Umm Ahmed behind their cups.
“My daughter-in-law is here alone,” Umm Ahmed said. “The same way I once was. The least I can do is help her.”
Fareeda wished Umm Ahmed hadn’t said that. The last thing she wanted was for Isra to start expecting the same treatment from her. That’s one thing she always hated about women: how quick they were to compare themselves to others when it suited them. God forbid she remind Isra that at least Umm Ahmed’s daughter-in-law had given them a son. Not another girl. As if Fareeda needed another girl. A splotch of memory came to her, but she pushed it away. She hated thinking of it. Hated thinking of them. Trembling, she unwrapped a piece of chocolate, the crisp sound of the foil wrapping like white noise in her ears. She swallowed.
Deya
Winter 2008
One step onto Fourteenth Street, and Deya was shaking. The city was loud—screeching—like all the noise in the world had been let out at once. Yellow cabs slammed on brakes, cars honked, and people swerved by like hundreds of Ping-Pong balls flying jaggedly across a room. It was one thing to look at the city from the back seat of her grandfather’s car, another thing entirely to stand dead in the middle of it, to smell every whiff of its garbage and grease. It felt as if someone had let her loose in a giant maze, only she was stuck between thousands of people who knew exactly where to go, shoving past her to get there.
She read the address once, and then again. She had no idea where to go. She could feel the sweat building along the edge of her hijab. What had made her come to Manhattan on her own? It was a stupid idea, and now she was lost. What if she couldn’t get back to the bus stop in time? What if her grandparents found out what she had done—that she had skipped school and ridden the subway? That she was in the city? The thought of Khaled’s open palm against her face made her knees shake.
A man paused beside her, head bowed, typing into his cell phone. Should she ask him for directions? She looked around for a woman, but they all flew past her. She forced herself to approach him.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, wiping sweat from her hijab.
He didn’t look up.
She cleared her throat, said it louder. “Excuse me . . .”
He met her eyes. She felt a conscious effort on his part not to let his eyes wander around her head. “Yes?”
She handed him the card. “Do you know where I can find this bookstore?”
The man read the card and handed it back to her. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But eight hundred Broadway should be that way.” He pointed to a street in the distance, and she marked the spot where his fingers landed.
“Thank you so much,” she said, feeling a heat rise in her cheeks as he walked past her. She was pathetic. She didn’t know where she was going, couldn’t even look a man in the eye without turning into a bright red crayon. Not only was she not an American, but she could barely even count herself as a person, feeling as small as she did at that moment. But she shoved these thoughts away, saved them for another time when she would sit and think of just how tiny she