The Girl Who Fell to Earth (10 page)

10

EPSILON ORIONIS  •  THE STRING OF PEARLS  •   

The portrait of Baba still looked straight at me from the mantelpiece. No matter where I moved, from the davenport to the TV to the hearth, he was watching me. The news at the time was preoccupied with another omnipresent face with a mustache—Saddam. Every weeknight we sat together in the living room with Gramma and watched the five o'clock news, mostly illustrated with stock footage of fighter jets and green night-vision desert. Whenever a map of the Gulf came on-screen, it had topographical features rather than political borders. Despite being a distinctive part of the Arabian Peninsula's geography, Qatar was often left off the map altogether, so Dima and I would race to mark it on the television with a little extension of Silly Putty, which would stick to the screen throughout the broadcast like a saggy pink blemish on the anchor's face. The absence of borders on the maps made everything seem extra close together, and the fact that our family was there somewhere between the cartoon barrel of the tank gun and the cyan blue of the “Persian” sea was hard to comprehend.

Feeling it was her civic duty to correct the local news, Ma called in to the station to ensure they knew it should be referred to as the Arabian Gulf. And yet the news anchor persisted in calling that little nubbin of water on his map the Persian Gulf. However, he wasn't the only one who kept stubbornly to his mistakes. “Is old Hoodam Sudain at it again?” Gramma would say apropos of nothing when we turned on the TV. It didn't matter to her whether it was “Hoodam” instead of Saddam, “AbiDabbi” instead of Abu Dhabi, or “old man Jibber Jabber” instead of our grandfather Jabir.

We all watched together as the news anchor forecasted the Iraqi army's movements like a weatherman, moving little tank icons around the cartoonish map like thunderclouds. Despite the fact that we lived only a few miles from the U.S. Air Force base and were used to seeing huge hawk-like Stealth bombers and strange lights filling the sky on summer nights, the scenes of air raids alarmed Ma. She kept in close contact with Baba on the phone during that time, calling him to overreact every time they showed laser-light footage of air raids more than a thousand kilometers away. He always knew the appropriate reaction, to shrug them off as blithely as if they were scattered showers.

Before school started, Ma got a new job at a software company called Helden Systems. Dima and I spent those first days on our own sneaking all the things we'd never been allowed to watch: the loving, wise fathers on shows like
The Cosby Show
and
Full House
made our own home feel empty, whereas Carl Sagan in his polystyrene cockpit had always filled us with wonder. Ma didn't want us to watch those shows for a reason; they gave us ideas about what we might be missing. We did our best not to voice our dissatisfaction. Whenever she came home proudly bearing reams of dot-matrix printer paper and dry-erase markers salvaged from a Dumpster at work for us to play with, we pretended to be thrilled, wishing all along Baba would come to visit and take us to Toys “R” Us to buy My Little Ponies. Ma did her best to entertain us with cheaper pursuits like making cornstarch “moon mud,” and took time away from programming for some flow-chart fun, teaching us how to make process diagrams.

“You start with a problem and you end with a solution. So you link the question and the answer through steps you represent with these little boxes.”

She waggled the transparent stencil at me. “Go ahead. Just think of a problem,” she coaxed. “And answer it.”

Then she swiveled back to her black DOS screen.

I looked down at the disordered chaos I had been scribbling, the beginnings of a house with trapezoid windows. The only problem I could think of to fix was our family. So I began plotting out my lineage, taping two pieces of computer paper to the kitchen wall beside each other. Starting with two end points—triangles representing Dima and me—I worked up. The problem burst backward from the fix. Men were represented by parallelograms, women by ovals, and kids by diamonds. I traced red lines between men and women who were married and stenciled blue lightning bolts off these to link kids to their parents. The paternal side of the chart quickly filled up and refused to fit onto the page neatly like my mother's family. On my fifth try I became so frustrated by the lack of symmetry caused by multiple wives that I wadded both sides up and stuffed them and the flow-chart stencil into the garbage, and returned to my aimless doodling.

After she received her certification, Ma's continuing obsession with ensuring we had American teeth led her to take a temp job at an orthodontist's office over a higher-paying entry-level position at Boeing. She was relieved to finally be able to afford to get us into braces and headgear. “This is for your own good. You want the other kids to make fun of your buckteeth?” But Ma's plan to spare me the scorn of my peers had one central flaw—headgear. Despite the orthodontist's instructions stipulating that I should only wear the full-skull scaffolding at night, Ma affixed them to my face during the school day as well, in order to ensure we got our money's worth.

I was entering third grade now, and our mornings started with squabbles over what to wear. I'd emerge from our jumbled closet in Baba's old OPEC sweater, and Ma would reprimand me, “You want everyone to think we're poor? That I can't dress you in new clothes?”

Ma ripped the sweater off over my head, snagging the headgear on the way off, then stuffed me into a Blue Angels F-18 sweatshirt and gray sweatpants ensemble. She failed to notice the jets on the shirt, which meant it was for a boy, but no matter, it had been on sale and was enough sizes too big that I could grow into it. If that wasn't bad enough, she hiked the bottom half of the outfit to my bellybutton and tucked the sweatshirt in to give me what she referred to as a “tidy” appearance. To complete the indignity, she matched a pair of fresh white socks and penny loafers, then stepped back to observe her styling. She nodded approvingly, apparently pleased with herself.

I turned reluctantly to the vanity mirror and burst into tears. When someone says they were a homely child, they never saw me. I had beady eyes behind bottle-cap glasses, a monorail of headgear, and a nerdy boy's sweatpants outfit on.

“At least take the headgear off!” I groveled.

Unmoved, Ma sent me down to the bus stop at the end of the road anyway. I waddled the whole way, trying to calm my overexcited waistline. If I'd been the bus driver that day, I would not have stopped for the misshapen, angry little person waiting under the “No Trespassing” sign.

Dread filled me on the approach to school. I wore my hood up through the hallway and entered my new classroom, ready for a hail of laughing sounds. But the principal came on the intercom and asked us all to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance before anyone noticed me. I shuffled up from my seat and moved my mouth, pretending I knew the words to what everyone was saying. Crystal, my desk buddy, pinched me and showed me how to hold my hand over my heart. After the pledge, Mrs. Newton pulled down a world map in front of the chalkboard and affixed its hook to a nail. She then pointed out the fat boot next to Africa. “This is the Persian Gulf,” she said, circling the Gulf with her finger, “and
this
is Kuwait.” She pointed at a shape on the map, meaningless to her and everyone else in the room but me. I squirmed in my desk, trying to stop my hand from shooting up to correct her. Mrs. Newton glanced at me and then smiled around the room, not wanting to draw more attention than necessary to the scaffolding on my face.

“Now I know you all heard about the war on the news, and maybe your parents talked to you about it . . . has anyone seen the big army airplanes in the sky lately?”

Most of the class murmured yes to this question. By now I was now kneeling on top of my desk, waving my hand in the air.

“Yes Sophia. What is it?”

“It's not the Persian Gulf. It's the Arabian Gulf!” I corrected breathlessly.

“Can you explain to me why on this map it is the Persian Gulf and on the news they call it the
Persian
Gulf? Pretty official.”

“I don't know! It just is.” I was glowing from the warmth of my conviction. Impertinent and cranky, I jumped up and ran to the map, took a moment to find Qatar, and pointed at the little thumb jutting out into the
Arabian
Gulf. “This is where I used to live. My baba, I mean my
dad
, is from here,” I exclaimed, taking care to use the American term for father.

Mrs. Newton was about to respond but was interrupted by Bri Barker in the back, “Hey, railroad mouth! Is Saddam your
dad
?”

I leveled a death stare from over the construction on my face.

“Is that how come Sophia don't know the Pledge of Allegiance? Cause Saddam's her dad?” Crystal asked, half-ratting, half-curious.

“Enough!” was all Mrs. Newton had to offer in my defense, and she changed the subject. “Everyone, take your earth science books out. This week we're going to start reading about Pangaea!”

11

EPSILON BOÖTIS  •  THE LOINCLOTH  •   

With Ma's various temp jobs stacking up, she was home less and less of the time. By now I was beginning fifth grade and I know breasts were a major concern of the time, because I began keeping a journal and wrote about them
a lot
. I kept monologues on cup sizes and other profound thoughts in a notebook with a holographic cover. My entries were vague, but the project of mapping out my own private hinterland was explicit. I poured into it my secret pubescent thoughts and opinions about
all
of the strange new world that was opening up to me. Cable TV, adult magazines in the corner store, and the conversations of my ten- and eleven-year-old classmates filled the notebook. Class chat was all rumors trickled down from older siblings and misheard lyrics from songs on the radio. Although I was never included in these discussions, I recorded my observations as meticulously as a Victorian explorer drawing diagrams and explanatory footnotes. I desperately wanted to have a window into the exotic world of sex and learn its language, customs, and costumes for myself.

I wrote these concerns down into the book in incriminating block letters of plain English, even though I
knew
somewhere in the back of my mind that these were
1984
-style thoughtcrimes. The notebook was full of damning evidence manifest in the form of questions I shouldn't have been asking. I wrote about what I imagined lurking inside the little store's Saran-wrapped copies of
Hustler
or beneath the glowing scramble of Spice TV. The diary became increasingly incriminating as I drew bizarre illustrations of body parts and disguised them in code—ice creams topped with cherries were my visual slang for “boobs,” lightning bolts burst from jeans to represent “penis.” One ballerina had labia that hung down so low from under her tutu I bound them up in pink slippers to make them look like an extra pair of legs. I approached my explorations in a spirit of scientific inquiry. Somehow I hoped this would pardon me should anyone find the journal. Then one day, a partial answer to my questions about adult anatomy came. Nestled in with a bunch of windowed bill envelopes, bank ads for personalized dolphin-art checkbooks, and Columbia House ads was a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue, my Rosetta stone to a cartoonishly commodified world of sex! I dropped the boring mail onto the buffet and went straight to the bedroom, where I spent the rest of the afternoon Sharpie-ing
hijabs
onto the heads of the
almost
all-nude girls. Fantasy trumped all in this colorful compendium of glossy, posed female sexuality. The models reminded me of My Little Ponies, each with a special outfit of lacey dressage, manes over withers, round rumps, and plasticky, powder-soft skin. But while the boxes of My Little Ponies came clearly labeled “KEEP AWAY FROM SMALL CHILDREN,” the Frederick's catalogue had no warning of any choking hazard. I decided it was mine to keep.

Obsessed by my new discovery, I catalogued and mapped the hieroglyphics, learning to identify different kinds of lingerie (teddy, romper, waspie) and copying down their attendant constellation of adjectives (strappy, dentelle, crotchless). Within a few weeks I'd absorbed all the charge out of my secret catalogue. I began slicing the models up into little pieces and repurposed the mutilated bodies into collages of half-nude mermaids and centauresses, à la
Fantasia
. Using the bits of body to create fleshy chimeras in the diary, the girl in pasties became a half-zebra, and the blonde in red lace ended up an orange mermaid. But once I started collaging with the risqué photos, the evidence scattered in the garbage and on the floor was a giveaway to Ma. And the fact is, diaries inevitably get read. Usually by the last person in the world you would want to read them. Coming home from school one day, I knew something was wrong. It felt as though the pressure had dropped in the house, and I found her, red-faced, in the closet where I'd hidden my diary. It was a lesson learned, she said, for both of us. Then, in true thought-police form, she ordered me to rip every page with anything
haram
, or forbidden, on it out of the diary. By this time, Islam had become a convenient tool for Ma to keep us in line.

In most parenting matters Ma was self-sufficient. Now she spoke to other parents and even consulted Baba about the right line of action to take with me. “I don't understand where it is coming from!” she fretted over the phone to him. “It is disturbing to me, Matar! Maybe it's all this stuff she sees on the TV, just the environment she's in here. Kids these days are just different.” Baba prescribed a variety of remedies, including an increased intake of Quran and the possibility of another relocation to Doha, where I could live with Umi Safya. I was barely eleven, Ma pointed out, and she could never let me go on my own. My twinkling of sexual curiosity had obviously spooked her deeply. By the end of fifth grade our relationship had disintegrated into a permanent standoff. “It's only a phase,” Gramma reassured Ma. But my “phase” wouldn't go away.

Ma's vigilance only drove me further underground and sharpened my moody conviction that I was being unfairly persecuted. Even after the school year had passed, I wanted nothing more than to get away from the scene of my thoughtcrime and wished Baba would scrape the funds together to buy me a ticket to Doha. I began writing everything in the diary out phonetically in Arabic script, my own private language even Dima couldn't read, my own evasive Navajo code.

During this time I passed into middle school and entered the sixth grade. This was the official end of childhood, American public school's exile from the nursery. Whatever molten hormones run in the veins of preteens were running hot in mine when school started that year. At that age there is a nonvolition, an unknowing of oneself that causes actions to come out inexplicable and divine. I moved, spoke, and acted without meaning and without meaning to; my fights with Ma, Dima, and even Gramma became frequent and caused everyone to walk rhythmlessly around me for fear of an attack. While cage-fighting with Dima usually ended in bloody wounds, and spitting at Ma only got me a slap across the face, I didn't mean any of it.

I started to fill my time after school loitering at the public library. I noticed that most people came to the librarians with missions. They needed a particular episode of
Red Dwarf
or wanted to search this new thing called the Internet. I didn't know what I was looking for until I found it.

I must have paused ten times or more on
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
before I decided to check it out. I took it home and promptly forgot about it in the bottom of my backpack full of library swag. It wasn't until one lonesome lunch period while pretending to be busy cleaning my bag out that I found it again. I locked myself in the bathroom (the most private place on campus), and pressed play. By the second song, it was “Soul Love,” and by the time I'd committed “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” to memory, I was long gone (and so turned on). My devotion to Bowie was immediate and earnest and fervent, in the way only twelve-year-old virgins can truly
love
a pop idol. Of course I was decades too late to freak out in his moon-age daydream, be one of his young Americans, or put on a pair of red shoes and dance the blues, but I still
believed
this album was made for me. The spangled guitars, the piano romps, and the emotional sway of that voice going from a low crackle to a shrill howl gave me the kind of all-powerful shivers in the groin (even off that crappy cassette tape) that made other girls at my school scream and faint over Garth Brooks or Boys II Men. Vising the metal band of my headphones onto my ears and disguising them around the house under a beanie, I wrapped myself into a clinging embrace with the album and didn't let go until it was overdue.

The way Bowie emancipated a word like “sparkle” from being a boring marketing term aimed at girls in my age bracket, turning it into a sexy secret, inspired me to start writing in my journal again. The possibility of subverting my mother's all-seeing eye and making up new and obscure innuendos was my new goal in the writing. At the back of the book I carefully took dictation from the tape, copying down the cut-up sublogic of the lyrics into my expurgated diary. I alternated my set of Japanese glitter gel pens for a rainbow effect and drew a pink star for words I either couldn't decipher or didn't want Ma to read.

I suppose it was the idea of a concept album that was most mind-boggling to me, as were the possibilities of creating an alter ego or curating one's own personal mythology. For all homely, zit-faced, graceless people, the notion that a different, unrecognizable,
other
version of yourself might be possible is both the most liberating and the most seductive of beliefs. David Bowie went from the gross codpiece-wearing goblin prince in
Labyrinth
to my spiritual icon in the course of a few weeks. I couldn't let the album just go back into public circulation! I had to keep it with me—
always
. I took one of Baba's Quran cassettes and taped the songs of darkness and dismay right over the top of Surat Al-Baqara, and the more I listened, the more fervent my devotion became.

I set about building my own alter ego from the sale racks of Value Village and the suitcases of old clothes from Doha. Where I had previously paid acute attention to the cliques I might fit into—preps, hillbillies, skaters, D&D gamers, and so on—by spring I had built a remarkably unflattering wardrobe of secondhand crap and had split all of Dima's old
jalabiyas
at the seams by trying to wear them as shirts. The closet was a mixture of ninety-nine-cent tropical sunset shirts, wrinkled old
hijabs
, pin-on epaulettes, broken sunglasses, and polyester leisure suits. My most precious acquisition had been a pair of American flag Converse—striped on the sides in red and white, blue tongue speckled with white stars—which I wore with a pair of slouch-crotch
sirwal
with thick silver cuffs embroidered up to my knees. The first time I wore them outdoors we had already walked halfway to school before Dima observed, “Those pants make you look like you pooped yourself.”

Still disturbed by my diary, Ma now found a new source of disgust in my clothing. The glitter-grunge-via-Gulf look gave her cause to tell me on repeat that she hadn't worked long and hard to clothe me in perfectly good
new
clothing from K-Mart just to have me turn around and wear dirty hand-me-downs on purpose. She took it as a slap in the face to her efforts and took special offense to hair experimentation involving peroxide, egg white, and the ultimate contraband: Manic Panic.

“You look ridiculous,” Ma growled, snapping the elastic bands off my head. “You need to keep a lower profile,” she warned. “There are predators
on the lookout
for girls like you!” Ma believed that all the pedophiles in the county were waiting for us just beyond the property line and that they were somehow organized and monitoring the routes to and from our school with walkie-talkies. “Are you
trying
to draw attention to yourself?” Of course I was, though I wouldn't admit it. She tugged at my glow-in-the-dark alien guitar-pick necklace and broke the mint dental floss I'd used to tie it around my neck. “You
want
to look like a freak?”
Duh,
I thought to myself, and answered, “I'd rather look like a freak than look like you.”

She froze with a look as though I'd just stabbed her in the heart. I shrank back as Ma cast around for something of value to me. Her eyes locked on my box of tapes. I lunged to protect them, but she was too quick. She fingered through my carefully curated collection of mixtapes from the radio and pirated copies from the library. She picked out
Ziggy
and held it up as an example to me, then hooked her finger under the magnetic strip. I screamed, falling instantly into hysterics as she pulled out a long strand of tape as she unwound the album, brown tape glimmering as she spooled it round her fist and ripped it out at the reel.

“You want attention from dangerous men? Okay! You want to end up cut into pieces and dead in a ditch? Be my guest!” Ma had grown up in an era (and an area) where dressing like a hippie tramp was less liberating than it was dangerous.

She moved on now to my other cassettes: Nirvana's
Unplugged in New York
,
One in a Million
by Aaliyah, a copy of Orson Welles's
War of the Worlds
broadcast from the local PBS station. All the while she was clenching her teeth and swearing under her breath. Something about “no daughter of mine is going to turn out a freak.” She finished off, leaving only the tapes she had bought me for my birthday,
Wolf Songs
and Wagner's
Die Walküre
—perfect for the howling fugue I had worked myself up into.