A Woman Is No Man - Etaf Rum Page 0,93

was unconvinced. Isra felt a sense of failure rising in her. She had tried her best to shelter her daughters from her sadness, the way she wished Mama had sheltered her. She had made sure they were asleep when Adam came home, made sure they never saw him hit her. Sadness was like a cancer, she thought, a presence that staked its claim so quietly you might not even notice it until it was too late. She hoped her other daughters didn’t see. Maybe Deya could even forget. She was still young, after all. She wouldn’t remember these days. Isra could still learn to be a good mother. Maybe she could still save them. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“I’m not sad,” Isra said again, with a smile this time. “I have you.” She pulled her daughter in for a hug. “I love you, habibti.”

“I love you, too, Mama.”

Fareeda

Winter 2008

The sun faded beyond the bare trees, a sliver of it visible from the kitchen window as Fareeda washed the last of the day’s dishes. One of the girls should be washing these, she thought, carefully arranging the wet plates in the dish rack. But they had hurried to the basement after dinner, feigning sickness, leaving Fareeda no choice but to do the dishes herself. “I’m the one who’s sick,” she mumbled to herself. An old woman washing dishes—it was disgraceful! With four teenage girls in the house, she should have been giving orders like a queen. But she still had to cook and clean, still had to pick up after them. She shook her head. Fareeda couldn’t understand how her granddaughters had turned out so unlike her, so unlike their mother. Surely it was America. One quick wipe of the kitchen table, and these girls thought they were done. As if things could be washed so easily. They didn’t understand you needed to scrub hard, crouched on hands and knees, until the house was spotless. These spoiled American children knew nothing about real work.

When she was done, Fareeda retired to her bedroom. Brushing her hair, she wondered when she had last fallen asleep beside Khaled. It had been so many years she couldn’t remember. She didn’t even know where he was tonight—likely at the hookah bar, playing cards. Not that it mattered. He rarely looked at her most nights, staring absently ahead as he ate his dinner in silence, not even thanking her for the food she had labored over all day. The younger Khaled would’ve had some remark to fault her cooking, saying the rice was overcooked, or the vegetables oversalted, or that there was not enough green pepper in the ful. But now he hardly spoke at all. She wanted to shake him. What had happened to the man who used to break belts across her skin? Who never went a day without insulting her? But that man had faded over the years. When had it begun? When had he first started to lose the spark in his eyes, the iron grip he had around his life? She thought it was the day they came to America. She hadn’t noticed it then, the transformation had been too gradual. But she saw it now, looking back. She remembered the day they’d left Palestine. How Khaled had shook as he locked the door of their shelter, weeping while he waved goodbye to his family and friends as their cab drove away. How, at the Tel Aviv airport, he had stopped several times to catch himself, his knees buckling beneath him. How he had worked day and night in a foreign country where he didn’t even speak the language, just to ensure they were fed. The loss of his home had broken his spirit. She hadn’t seen it then, hadn’t recognized that his world was slowly unraveling. But maybe that’s the way of life, Fareeda thought. To understand things only after they had passed, only once it was too late.

She slipped out of her evening gown and into something warmer. The heating unit in her bedroom didn’t work as well as it once had. Either that, or her bones were getting frail, but she didn’t like to think that way. She sighed. She couldn’t believe how quickly time had passed, that she had gotten old. Old—she shook the thought away. It was not the thought of being old that bothered her rather the realization of what her life had amounted to. What a shame, she thought now as she waited for sleep

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