A Sister to Honor (5 page)

G
us's converted garage reminded Afia of the quarters occupied by Tayyab, the cook, back in Nasirabad. It was tucked the same way, behind a hedge at the end of a driveway, with a tiny, nailed-up porch and a side door. Only Tayyab had a whole family in his quarters—separated by curtains for various privacies—while Gus's was one big room with a portable radiator cranking electric heat.

“They are like swimming jewels,” she said of the fish in the big tank set up at the far end of the garage. She had never known a person to keep tropical fish before. The snake and lizard—their cages by the adjacent wall, complete with heat lamps—reminded her of what anyone might see in the hotter area of her province, down by Peshawar. And the two cats reminded her of her village, where cats roamed free. Only these bright swimmers, some of them translucent, their eyes unblinking, mesmerized her.

“They have different behaviors,” Gus said, standing close behind her, his hand on her shoulder. “See how the betta come up to gulp air? And this little suckermouth hides—see her behind the castle?”

“You always say ‘her.'”

“Yeah, they all seem like girls to me. I don't know why.”

In a week, she would leave for Nasirabad. Gus kept saying it was not a big deal. That he would miss her for the three weeks, sure, but he would be busy with vet school applications and his own family in Pittsfield, and he would write her every day. She didn't know about getting e-mail in her village, she'd reminded him. There was Ali Bhai's, the Internet café, but otherwise not much of a signal. “Anyway,” she'd said, “I cannot be writing while I am home. It is”—she wanted to say
dangerous
, but then he would ask how it could be dangerous, which was not possible to explain here—“it is weird,” she said.

He'd seized on this information about an Internet signal to calm her down. Not only, he'd pointed out, had the PR people at Smith cut him out of that picture, but there was also no way for anyone in her village to kick up a fuss about a web page they couldn't access. Oh, he made her brave, Gus did. He offered to talk to Shahid for her, which was not possible—
Do you hear me?
she insisted to him.
Not possible
—but with Gus in her heart, she felt able to make light of Shahid's acting like Baba, talking about her
namus
and the family's
ghairat
when it was just a photo, after all, and she was doing nothing wrong in it.
I don't even remember the guy
, she'd lied in her last text to Shahid.
Everyone was holding hands.

She turned away from the fish tank to Gus's little stove—two burners below a microwave—where she was making him a special tikka, the first time she had cooked for him. She didn't like the yoghurt she'd found for the marinade—they were too thick, the yoghurts in America, and they lacked the tang you needed for a good lassi. But she'd managed to find a heavy iron skillet at the Salvation Army, and they'd opened the high windows behind the stove to let the smoke escape.

She knew from American TV how cooking was part of courtship in America. The men and women advanced their intimacy to where they were playing house, making the roles that would become tedious into moments of romance—candles; a tiny white apron untied to reveal a clingy top; the masculine uncorking of wine. She and Shahid sometimes watched these shows broadcast from Peshawar, and Baba would come in and laugh at the man who thought his life would forever be this way: his perfumed lady staring longingly at him over roast chicken.
It is an illness they suffer from,
he would say,
and when they recover they find themselves married
.

She was ill, she supposed. Odd feelings came over her at unexpected moments. Sometimes, it seemed her skin was not strong enough to contain the energy of her body. Other times her breath would not come right, and then it was as if she didn't even need to breathe, as if her feelings for Gus drew oxygen from the air and charged her blood.

He'd put on a song track they both liked, Rufus Wainwright, and fed the cats, and now he came to stand behind her. “Smells nice,” he said, nuzzling her ear.

“The tikka, or my hair?” she asked. Because she no longer covered, now, when she was alone with him, and her thick hair curled down her shoulders. He didn't answer but wrapped his arms around her waist, and he moved with her as she chopped the onions and tasted the sauce. “Don't want to hold you and feel so helpless,” he sang along with the song. “Don't want to smell you and lose my senses.”

The girls Afia lived with at Smith fell in and out of love with boys and with each other every day. They talked about birth control the way they talked about food—natural versus organic, controlling what they put in their bodies. When they could have been unlocking the secrets of proteins, they were weeping in the shower or giggling on the phone. It was as Baba had said, a disease. But for her first nine months in America, Afia had been immune. Even when she went to watch Shahid play, even when he introduced her to the guys on his team, she paid no attention to any of them, certainly not to the freckly redhead at the bottom of the lineup.

Then in September she'd gone to the med school fair at the state university with Taylor, who sometimes talked, idly, of becoming a pediatrician. Forty-five American med schools were there with their pamphlets and computer videos set up on plastic-covered folding tables, and five veterinary schools in a corner by the auditorium stage. When Taylor spotted Gus by himself at the table for Tufts, she gave a little squeal. “He's that cutie from your brother's team,” she'd said. “Poor lonely boy. Come on.”

He reminded her, that day, of the village boys, the way they could prattle about goats or the weather but fell back to mumbling if asked about their sisters or their homes. Gus said he didn't have any sisters or brothers. He grimaced when Taylor called him a jock. You can play squash by yourself, he said; that's how he'd started, when he was a puny kid and didn't get picked for any high school teams. “You're not puny now,” Taylor had said, and Afia had felt herself blushing, because her eyes had fallen on his shoulders, the way they pulled at his T-shirt. He was interested in endangered species, he'd said. He thought he might be a vet at a zoo, or go somewhere exotic like Africa. Only it was hard to get into vet school. Maybe he shouldn't play so much squash, Afia had suggested. He should be studying. That was not, he'd said, the advice her brother gave him when they roomed together. “When was that?” she'd asked, surprised, and he'd said that was all Shahid talked about, that first year—getting his brilliant sister over here for school. “He missed you bad,” he said, and Afia felt her face grow warm.

It had been Taylor's idea to haul him out for pizza. When Taylor got bored with his short answers about the Greek scene at Enright or Dartmouth's chances against them in the March tournament, Afia managed to lift her voice and ask him what exotic species interested him most. “Reptiles,” he said. He went on to describe what had been happening to habitats in the Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa. He told her about Pearl, his corn snake, and Voltaire, the iguana. He described the fish he'd acquired, saying that before medicine began obsessing him, he'd thought of becoming a marine biologist. Eventually, the pizza cold and her beer finished, Taylor told Afia she was going to roll, off to meet Chase at an Amherst party. Gus offered to give Afia a lift home.

No, she'd said when he'd asked if he could see her again. She did not date, she said. He promised not to touch her, he understood things were different for her. He liked her, that was all. He liked talking to her. What time was it, by then? Three
A.M.
, they remembered later. They had spent most of it in his car, their breath steaming the windows, the air still warm back then, late summer crickets singing. She had told him things she'd never told anyone, not even Moray. About her rebellious friend, Lema, back in Pakistan, and how worried she was for her. About Khalid, how he frightened her. About her fears of the drone strikes in the mountains and what would happen to Sobia and Muska; would Baba ever let the family leave or did honor mean staying on your land even when the soldiers came? The Americans, the Taliban?

They could talk again, she said. Which they did three nights later, under a full moon by the river. The next week on a hike in Huntington. At Local Burger, the first night he'd brushed his lips to hers. On Columbus Day they'd gone apple-picking with Afia's roommates, who kept calling them a cute couple. Afterward they'd come back to this garage, where he'd introduced her to his pets. By Halloween she'd let Pearl wrap around her arm. The next week she had bumped into Gus in the squash center hallway, and there in that public place he had planted his lips on her own. Late that night, after Shahid had dropped her back at Smith, Gus had rung on the dorm phone.
I have feelings for you, I can't help it, I do,
he'd said, and she'd said without thinking,
I do too, for you I mean.

Now, cooking in the garage, she shooed him away and flamed the tikka. The cats—Facebook and Ebay, he'd named them—meowed and rubbed at her legs even as smoke billowed up and drifted out the high windows. On her instructions, he ran the blender to make a version of lassi that wasn't the same as home but would have to do. They sat at his rickety folding table and ate. On the iPod, Rufus Wainwright crooned.
Every kind of love, or at least my kind of love, must be an imaginary love to start with.

“Your mom taught you how to do all this, I bet,” he said after he'd pronounced the food delicious and proved it by digging in. She was proud of her rice, fluffy and perfumed with clove and cardamom.

“Some from her, yes. Mostly Tayyab. Our cook. Don't look so!” she said when he rolled his eyes. “It is not like here. Servants . . . people have servants. Not just rich people. Normal people.”

“I know, M'Afia. I'm just giving you a hard time.” He called her that,
M'Afia
, which he said was short for
my Afia
. “What would be normal,” he said, “is sharing this great meal with your brother. I bet he misses this food.”

“Don't,” she warned him. She held up her fork and pointed it at him.

“I'm just saying. He's my friend, too.”

“He is my brother. I know him best.”

He nodded. She saw his eyes go to her white knuckles, clenching her fork. “I'd like you to meet my family, anyhow,” he said. “Even if I can't meet yours.”

She wrinkled her brow. “You have family?”

“Sure. My mom. Sometimes my dad, I mean, they don't live together, but still.”

“But—” That a mother did not make a family was not something she could tell Gus; it would hurt his feelings if he understood how many voices filled the compound in Nasirabad. “But she will not like me,” she said instead. “She will think . . .” She set down the fork, drank her lassi. She was glad Gus didn't drink beer. In so many ways, he surprised her. Always wanted to know what she thought about things. When she explained about the wedding, he saw nothing wrong in Maryam's being plighted to a man she had not met. He cried at sad movies. But still: his mother. “She will think I am a bad girl.”

“She'll be crazy about you.”

“No, she—” She couldn't finish. A tear welled in one eye. She tucked a finger under her glasses to wipe it away. A mother would want to inspect a girl first, for her son—this, she knew, was universal, no matter what they showed on American TV. A mother would want to see how modest the girl was, how graceful. She would want to know something of the family. Such was a mother's absolute right. “I am not ready,” she managed to say.

“M'Afia. I've upset you. Come here. Come on. I'm sorry.”

It was infecting her, this illness, and all she could do was open her arms wide and invite it in.

He pushed his chair back and beckoned to her. When they were alone and close like this, she almost felt at home with Gus, but in a new sense of home, home as a place where their own rules made them safe. Three weeks ago, in November, they had touched for the first time beneath their clothes. The next week, again. Each time, he had asked permission. Would she like this? Was this all right? When he touched her, it was with both wonder and inquiry. She had seen him probing his animals, just gently enough so they did not flinch away but with enough authority to detect a bowel obstruction or a tumor. One night, studying in her dorm room, he'd swung her around in her desk chair and gently, so gently, pulled off her glasses, so the world and his face lost their outlines.
Your eyes
, he'd said,
are the most amazing eyes in the universe.
So blue. It's like you went to Saturn or somewhere and came back with those eyes.
Just as gently he slid the arms of her glasses back over her ears, and his face had snapped into focus, and his lips had moved to hers.