As the bus turned the corner and she watched her sisters climb down its steps, Deya realized that Sarah was right: her life was her own, and only she controlled it.
Isra
Fall 1996
Isra could no longer remember her life before America. There had been a time when she knew precisely when the mulberries back home would ripen, which trees would grow the sweetest figs, how many walnuts would fall to the ground by autumn. She had known which olives made the best oil, the sound a ripe watermelon made when you thumped it, the smell of the cemetery after it rained. But none of this came to her anymore. Many days, Isra felt as though she had never had a life before marriage, before motherhood. What had her own childhood been like? She couldn’t remember being a child.
And yet motherhood still did not come naturally to her. Sometimes she had to remind herself that she was a mother, that she had four daughters who were hers to raise. In the mornings, after she woke and made the bed and sent Adam off to work with a cup of kahwa and a labne sandwich, she’d wake her daughters and make them breakfast—scrambled eggs, za’atar and olive oil rolls, cereal—running around the kitchen to make sure all four of them were fed. Then she’d take them downstairs and run a bath. She’d soap their hair, digging her fingers into their scalps, rubbing their bodies until they reddened, rinsing them off only to start over again. She’d dry their shivering bodies and comb their wild hair, untangling it strand by strand, willing herself to be gentle though her fingers moved frantically, aggressively. Sometimes one of them would scream or let out a whimper. On days when she was feeling patient, Isra would tell herself to take a breath and slow down. But most days she’d snap at them to keep their mouths shut. Then she’d drop Deya and Nora off at the bus stop and set Layla and Amal in front of the television, eager to complete the day’s chores and return to her books.
Now Isra leaned against the window, reading. Outside the trees were bare, their stark branches covered with frost. Isra thought they looked like tiny arms, thin and bleak, reaching for her, like her daughters. Lately it seemed as though she saw mothers everywhere, smiling wildly as they pushed strollers, a glow emanating from their faces. She wondered how they found it so easy to smile. The happiness she had felt at being a mother when Deya was born was so far away she couldn’t even grasp it. A dismal feeling loomed over Isra now, a feeling that had only intensified since Amal was born. She had thought that the meaning of her daughter’s name, hope, might grow a seed of hope in her heart, but it had not. She woke up every morning feeling very young, yet at the same time terribly old. Some days she felt as though she were still a child, other days as though she had felt far too much of the world for one life. That she had been burdened with duty ever since she was a child. That she had never really lived. She felt empty; she felt full. She needed people; she needed to be alone. She couldn’t get the equation right. Who was to blame? She thought it was herself. She thought it was her mother, and her mother’s mother, and the mothers of all their mothers, all the way back in time.
When Isra first arrived in America, when she first became a wife, she hadn’t understood why she felt so empty. She had thought it was temporary, that she would adjust in time. She knew there were many girls who left their families to come to America, having children when they were still children themselves. Yet they had managed. But lately Isra had finally understood why she couldn’t manage, why she constantly felt as though she were drifting far out to sea. She understood that life was nothing but a dark melody, playing over and over again. A track stuck on repeat. That was all she would ever amount to. Worse was that her daughters would repeat it, and she was to blame.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Deya said in Arabic, her high six-year-old voice drawing Isra out of her book.
“Not now.”
“But I want to,” Deya said. She walked over to Isra and pulled on her bleach-spotted nightgown. “Please.”