Someone saw him, and the girls and women squawked and covered their heads and faces.
“God forgive you, go back to the salon,” Aunt Faizah said.
Before they whisked her off, Saeedah smirked at him, like she was having the last wordless word. She mouthed something: Cigarette? He didn’t smoke, but he slipped outside into the courtyard and waited. The dark sky was swirled with clouds, like foam on Turkish coffee. Servants had set out lengths of plastic cloth, little bowls of cucumbers and tomatoes, chopped cilantro with lime. Soon they would bring out the trays of lamb and rice, spiced with cardamom and cloves. He could already smell the food.
“What are you daydreaming about?” she said.
“God, you’re like a jinni, appearing out of nowhere.”
She wore a black dress with the neckline cut straight across from shoulder to shoulder and the hem at her knee, and a black leather headband. He had never noticed the mole exactly in the middle of her cheekbone before.
“You got cigarettes?”
He covered his mouth with his fingers and nodded toward the gateman and the cook, an Egyptian husband and wife, who were descending the steps burdened by an enormous tray of rice and lamb. It wouldn’t be proper for them to catch him and Saeedah flirting. She curtsied like a queen in a movie and disappeared into the house, leaving him to wish they’d had more time. The rest of the night was other men talking at him.
Muneer and Saeedah’s worlds were separated, but her face lived in his mind. He thought of her often in the weeks to come.
At first, he didn’t think of marrying her. His plans were nearly set: he had applied for a government scholarship to go to the States to study. His brother Bandar had gone to Germany and Belgium and Canada, staying long enough in each place to decide he wanted to study somewhere else. He’d come back from Toronto a few months before with a big, bushy head of hair that their father threatened to cut whenever he saw it. Midsentence while serving a customer he’d say, “Can you believe that’s my son? I’m going to cut his hair in the middle of the night.” Bandar scowled. Muneer marveled at his brother’s disrespect.
From Canada, Bandar had smuggled a dozen little bottles of alcohol, hiding them in a pair of tube socks stuffed in his shoes. Muneer half admired his brother’s gumption and half considered him an enormous fool. If the customs agents had caught Bandar, they would have thrown him in jail. To drink the gulp-size quantities of rum and schnapps, Bandar, Muneer, Jameel, and two of Bandar’s buddies had driven to the desert outside the city after the last prayer of the day. They veered off-road and drove for five minutes into the desert, keeping the glare of the streetlights in their rearview so they wouldn’t lose their way. The sky was so stacked with stars Muneer felt sure he could count the seven heavens. They spread a blanket on the ground in the beam of the headlights, kicked their shoes off, and swigged two bottles each. It was enough to coat his tongue and warm his cheeks, not enough to get drunk on. Bandar claimed the last two bottles, and at the end of the evening seemed the tipsiest. He’d brought a shisha to mask the smell of alcohol. They smoked for nearly an hour and took turns breathing in one another’s faces to test how well the ruse was working. The smoke tickled their faces. By the end of the night laughter gurgled in their bellies like the water bubbling in the shisha.
It was the only time Muneer ever drank alcohol, the only time he was ever tempted.
A few nights later, Muneer and Bandar were hanging out with Jameel at their father’s dress shop downtown in the Balad. Bandar talked about America as though he’d been there before, as though he were an expert on New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.
“Come with me,” he said.
Muneer looked up from the newsmagazine he was reading. Bandar swiped it and hid it behind his back when Muneer reached for it.
“We’ll study together,” Bandar said. His eyebrows lifted on the word study, as if to say, “We will do nothing of the sort.”
Muneer grabbed the newspaper his father had left on a stool by the door. He shared his father’s obsession with other countries’ politics and war, but in the two years since he’d graduated high school, working in his father’s shop, he’d started to yearn for more than talking about the news. He didn’t want to read the newspapers or listen to BBC Arabic anymore. He wanted to hold a microphone to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s face. He wanted to be banging on a typewriter.
“America,” said Jameel. He ate watermelon seeds out of a small metal bowl. In front of the shop, their dads sat on overturned buckets passing the nozzle of a shisha back and forth.
“You can both come,” Bandar said.
They applied. Muneer waited for news of his university applications and went to the shop daily. He thought about Saeedah, writing her name over and over in his mind. Envisioning the smudged kohl under her eyes. He started to regret applying to American universities. What if God meant something else for him? It so happened that Saeedah’s father had run a newspaper called al-Sharqiyah for more than a decade. Muneer could work for him, couldn’t he?
The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to go. One evening while he was drinking tea with his parents, Saeedah’s name fell out of his mouth.
“My sister’s daughter?” his mother said.
Muneer’s father looked up from behind the pink screen of his newspaper.
“It’s not a good idea to marry a relative so close.”
The sentiment was something of a newfangled idea, and Muneer watched for his mother’s reaction. She measured out seven spoons of sugar for Muneer’s father and poured Lipton tea into the small jars they used as their everyday tea glasses. The fat crystals danced in Baba’s glass as she stirred.
She handed the tea to Muneer’s father. “Why shouldn’t he marry my sister’s daughter?” she said. She was a woman who would never raise her voice at her husband, but would not always agree with him.
“Go to America,” Muneer’s father said. “When you come back, think about marriage. Why drag a wife along?”
“You trust young men over there by themselves?” Muneer’s mother asked, and when it became clear from her husband’s face that trust had nothing to do with anything, she turned to her son and said, “It will be lonely there. You don’t believe me, but it will be.”
Soon the letters came from America, battered and stained from crossing the ocean. Muneer and Jameel had gotten into programs in Cleveland. Bandar’s envelopes contained single pages telling him he had not been accepted.
“I won’t go without my brother,” Muneer said.
“By God you’ll go,” his father said. “If you don’t, people will think neither of you was smart enough to go to America.”
In the end, Bandar went to Dhahran to study petroleum engineering. Muneer and Jameel found an apartment in Cleveland through the uncle of a friend of a friend. They arrived in August. The muggy weather, though ten degrees Celsius cooler than at home, nonetheless felt familiar and welcoming. But soon chill crept into the air, the green of the grass and trees vanished like a mirage, and the sky was the dull gray of his mother’s old pots and pans. Everything felt strange. Not necessarily bad, but strange. The cold that burrowed into him, the houses with their aluminum siding and sloped roofs, the lawns, the deciduous trees reaching up to the sky with bare-naked limbs.