Back home, each of these rice dishes was served on large round aluminum platters to dozens of guests. In Ohio, Muneer and Saeedah ate their Bukhari rice and saleeg straight from the pot. They discussed inviting friends over to share the food they cooked, but there wasn’t room, and truthfully, he didn’t want to share her. Her laughter, like the wind chimes tinkling on their neighbor’s porch. The sound of her voice reciting ingredients to him. The way her lip and eyebrow jutted up to the right as she concentrated on chopping onions and cilantro for hot sauce.
What he and Saeedah need, he decides, moving quickly from the beach idea, is people around them. People to eat their food. Muneer invites his best friend Jameel to come over Saturday evening after their shift at the pizza parlor, where they both earn a little extra to send home to their families while they live on student stipends from the Saudi government. He and Saeedah have Muneer’s small stipend. They have to stretch it further than a single guy like Jameel.
Jameel is studying to be a dentist. He drinks beer, smokes menthol Lucky Strikes, and dates American girls. His teeth are whitened and as startlingly bright as his patent leather loafers, while Muneer’s teeth are stained yellow from too much fluoride in the drinking water growing up in Jidda. The two of them went to the same public high school, and their fathers had neighboring dress shops in the Old City. Jameel’s father had the greater business acumen, opening stores in new parts of the city with the help of his other sons.
On Saturday morning, Muneer drives to Aladdin’s on Carnegie to stock up on ingredients for the feast. Saeedah has already left for a study group or the library—as usual, he doesn’t know where she’s gone.
He returns with rice, lamb, cilantro, pita, plastic packets of cinnamon and cloves, dried orange and fresh oranges, carrots, tomatoes, and two hot peppers the size and shape of his thumbs. Saeedah sits in the wicker rocking chair reading an Arabic translation of Gone with the Wind. He notices signs that prove his point about bundling up: Her hands have cracked and bled along the knuckles. Her lips are so chapped they look perpetually rouged. Her hair flickers with electricity. He wants to offer her petroleum jelly and ChapStick.
Instead he says, “Didn’t I tell you Jameel is coming?”
She turns a page. “Welcome to him.”
“Do you want to help?”
“Welcome to you.”
It bothers him that she won’t say a straightforward “No.” Alone in the kitchen, he preps the lamb and rice. He grates orange peel into the pot, and the scent adheres to his hands. He goes into the living room to ask Saeedah a question, but she’s disappeared. The empty chair rocks.
He calls into the bedroom, “How much hot pepper in the salad?” His words drown in her silence. Is she in the house?
The doorbell rings, and Jameel arrives with Diane, a woman he’s been dating since last year. She’s an elementary school teacher with long, straight, hennaed hair and a silver cross at her neck the length and width of a pinky nail. Once, when Muneer picked Jameel up at her place, her German shepherd, Jack, scared the shit out of him. This is the story Jameel chooses to tell when Saeedah comes out of the bedroom.
She greets them in Arabic, kisses them on both cheeks, and lets Diane touch her belly and ooh and ahh over her. Everything seems so normal. Muneer can’t believe he thought things were strange between him and Saeedah.
“And Jack licked him on the eye and he had to wash his face seven times!” Jameel says.
“I don’t understand why,” Diane says. “They were kisses.”
“Dogs are dirty,” Saeedah says.
Muneer agrees, yet the way she says it, and the way Diane freezes with her mouth open, as though she is about to disagree loudly, make him jump in quickly.
“He’s a nice dog. I was taken off guard.” He wipes his face, as though the dog has licked him again. “Let’s eat, OK?”
Diane asks if she can help set the table.
“Shouldn’t we sit Saudi-style?” Jameel says.
Muneer doesn’t care, but Jameel seems to want to turn this into some sort of cultural display. They spread a plastic cloth on the floor and eat with their knees bent beneath them. Diane sits cross-legged.
Saeedah takes a mouthful of rice. “You shouldn’t cross your legs,” she says. “It’s not etiquette.”
Diane’s eyes, light-colored like marbles, roll up. She tries to cut a piece of lamb with a spoon. “Let’s sit at the table. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable that way?”
“Can I get you a knife?” Muneer says, feeling sorry for her.
“No, I’m fine.”
Jameel rummages in the kitchen and comes back with a butter knife.
“That’s no help,” Diane says.
Jameel hacks at the meat on Diane’s plate, gives up, tears it with his fingers, and offers it to her. Meanwhile, Saeedah puts on her sneakers. With the door open, she stands outside and lets the below-zero air blow in.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” Diane calls to Saeedah. “Don’t you want a coat?”
Muneer’s growing annoyance with everyone in the room is like water on its way to boiling, minuscule bubbles in his chest popping, then larger ones, bursting pockets of anger. On the soap opera he watches most weekdays to improve his English, there is a psychologist whose three children are addicts, and it has dawned on him that he, Muneer, is a journalism student unable to uncover the truth of whatever is wrong with his wife and his life. Last week, he took the small reporter’s notebook out of his knapsack and stood at the bathroom mirror, interviewing himself.
“When did your wife begin behaving this way? How did she react when you didn’t have enough money to go home over the summer? Is there anything you could do to make things better?”
“I don’t know,” he told the mirror. “No comment.”
In his socked feet and sweatshirt, he joins his wife on the front porch, hugging himself for warmth while flakes of snow turn her hair white as an old lady’s. His teeth clack; it’s that cold. He has never felt so out of place.
“What’s going on?” he says.
She turns to him, looking lost. Like she doesn’t know what to tell him.
She steps off the porch. Muneer watches her leave a trail of footprints leading to the car. She revs the engine. He returns to his friends and his nearly finished meal.
“That was strange,” Jameel says.
“The rice is delicious,” Diane says to Muneer. “Is there orange peel in here?”
Jameel scoops spicy duqus onto his rice.
“No problem,” Muneer says. “She’ll be back soon.”
AIRMAIL
There is a gap in Muneer’s memory of Saeedah five or six or seven years wide. She was a dirt-faced, plait-haired little girl in the courtyard one minute, and the next, mashallah, a beautiful woman glimpsed from behind a screen.
At a late-night family gathering at Aunt Faizah’s house, he’d left the men’s salon to go to the bathroom and glimpsed her. The latticework screen between them turned her face into a beautiful jigsaw puzzle, challenging him to piece it together. She had little gold earrings like berries and her palms and fingernails were henna stained, rust red. When she moved her hands, it was like a flash of plumage from behind a bush. He thought of her as a bird, never still except in the pause before it flew from a branch.