The Girl Who Fell to Earth (11 page)

Then, with a calmness that seemed maniacal to me, she concluded, “You're not going to be able to get a job dressed like that.”

“I'm not
trying
to get a job!” I choked through my snot while I wept over the mangled tapes on the floor.

“You're going to need one if you're going to stay under
this
roof!”

“But I'm twelve!”

“You want to keep buying this garbage? Fine. But I'm not paying for any of it!” We eyed each other tensely, each waiting for the other to move. Tears were now trickling down over my crumpled chin. “I'd been earning my keep for years by the time I was your age! Now go clean yourself up.”

In that unfortunate moment, I got up from my nest of dead cassettes and I wiped my snot and tears and the makeup I was expressly forbidden from wearing across my cheeks.

“Is that
mascara?
” Ma roared.

Sniveling, I made a rookie error and lied, “No!”

That was it. Busted.

“
Just
for lying to me, you are going to go into this closet right now and throw out every piece of junk you've collected.” Ma dragged out a mound of my Salvation Army artifacts and began plowing through it.

Her anger and my hysteria escalated as she discovered the extent of my horde. An electric-blue bowling bag, a silky Chinese restaurant delivery jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back, moldy
Camelot 3000
comic books from the '80s, some cheap plastic costume jewelry from Saudi, and all the rest of my fledgling hipster paraphernalia were stuffed into a Hefty bag. Ma carried it out to the trash and forced it in, spraying the hose into the garbage can so I wouldn't go through it trying to rescue anything.

That night, after Ma had gone to work, I stayed awake well past midnight watching MTV to spite her. I didn't hear her engine approach outside, didn't hear the brake crunch or the car door slam, or any of the Pavlovian triggers that usually warned me to turn the radio down and change the channel. For these occasions I kept a
Cosmos
tape in the VCR, so if I were watching anything verboten I could switch back to our approved TV chaperone, Carl Sagan, and Ma would never know. But getting caught was an inevitability under Ma's surveillance, and just as Æon Flux somersaulted across the screen in her bondage harness, legs spread-eagled, tits like two stiff torpedoes, I felt the rocking chair pull back. I knew it was over before I had time to switch to Carl's model of a tesseract. That night Ma was on the phone to Baba arranging a ticket for me to leave.

12

BETA COLUMBAE COLUMBA  •  THE WEIGHT  •   

The flight from SeaTac Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol took half a day, and then it was another seven hours to Abu Dhabi and forty-five minutes to Doha. Hemmed into Schiphol's international nowhere land of travel-size cosmetics and mutant Toblerone chocolate, I felt free. Riding miles up and down the terminal concourse on a walkalator gave me my first taste of autonomy. But my blissful float was tainted by the knowledge that I was en route to a place where privacy amounted to five minutes alone in the bathroom once a day. Yes, the airport of Amsterdam was the one place I was going to have the chance to transgress consequence-free.

I went into the news kiosk with my twenty emergency guilders and hovered timidly near the brink where Art/Lifestyle dropped brow into Men's Interest/Porn. I emerged with an oversized European fashion magazine full of nightlife photography and interviews in a language I couldn't read but whose subjects were fabulous beyond words. The portraits were variously taken in lofts and luxury hotels; floor-length windows revealed views of city skylines I pretended I might be en route to. I parked myself at a gate bound for Paris and leafed through the thickly glossed pages. It was most precious for its dazzling color and surreal imagery, suspending me for hours while I waited in the terminal. There were models posed to play random female icons: Elizabeth I in a brocade pantsuit, the Virgin Mary in a red maillot and blue beach towel, Joan of Arc chrome-clad in Mugler body armor.

I knew this magazine full of scantily clad women would be contraband and, therefore, our time was limited together. Self-censorship had become habitual after the journal incident in fifth grade, so I decided not to try to bring it into the Gulf and set about rigorously memorizing the delicious details of each photograph. Time folded around me, and before I'd made it halfway through the magazine, boarding was announced. Final call came over the intercom while I hunched deeply over the last spread, titled “Grow Up” in English. It was shot on a playground; women in couture slid down slides, rode seesaws, and climbed trees. The last image was of a model captured midair as she launched from a swing. I left her on my seat reluctantly, where she stayed permanently suspended and artfully akimbo in a slit red dress.

 

I was still brooding over having to leave my magazine in Amsterdam when I emerged onto the catwalk of Abu Dhabi International Airport, suitcase jittering across the studded rubber tile behind me. Customs hadn't even bothered scanning my luggage, and I had passed through the stand of security guards as if I were invisible. The men who guarded the sliding doors marked “UAE Border” had way bigger problems than a kid with a magazine full of artistic nude pictures.

I joined the parade of other passengers milling toward the parking lot. As we passed into the arrivals hall I felt the sharpness of a thousand eyes pecking me out like a painted bird. They craned over the railing, Indian and Arab men silently expressing everything from mild curiosity to personal offense at my bare, bony legs. It had been a really long time since I'd seen my father's face, and now I reminded myself of his identifying features. He was a brown man with a mustache . . . but so was everyone else here. Each configuration of facial hair and skin tone along my path was different, but none of them was the one I was looking for. I tried to hold an image of him in my head and clenched my mind around it like a fist. But it was like holding a handful of sand. All the half-recollected details of his face just slipped away.

Then it occurred to me with panicked alarm, “What if
he
doesn't recognize
me
?” The changes in my body had been pretty abstract until now. I felt my new height and my new heft and the hairiness of my legs. For the first time I took stock of my short haircut, my greasy face that needed washing, and these American clothes that suddenly made me feel indecently exposed. Like an animal sinking into a tar pit, my body felt like a burden. I slowed as I came to the end of the hall, each step heavier as I neared the exit. Were the soles of my shoes melting to the floor, or was I just tired?

The sweat of bodies folded over me in a heady arbor—the distinct aroma of the Arabian Gulf. Even now the scent of salty perspiration laced with
oud
has a soporific effect on me. It is the smell of my father's armpits and, thus, an elusive port of safety. If I didn't recognize his face, maybe I'd recognize his smell. I found an empty spot on a marble ledge and fell asleep in the shade of a plastic palm tree like some postmodern pastoral scene—dozing shepherdess replaced by jetlagged young traveler.

When I woke the airport was quieter and Baba was rousting me out of the pebble-filled planter and leading me to the car. “You were early,” he said as he buckled me into the passenger seat. I pretended to be asleep and peered at him through my eyelashes. He looked like the photo we had over the hearth in Gramma's house. Stern and silent.

Hesitant to let on I was awake, I grasped for the appropriate way to address him or a greeting to open the floodgates of the father-daughter conversation I imagined we were supposed to have, the kind that TV dads had with TV kids in their TV homes. But when nothing came to mind I resolved it was best to remain in stasis. Tomorrow I could start over, I thought. I could wake up and say good morning as though only a night had passed since we'd left him. I practiced this in my head, planning to kiss his cheek and give him a hug. But these thoughts were crushed in a bottleneck of nameless emotion fizzing up in my throat. I yawned to pop the pressure in my ear and rolled over to face the window. Tall streetlamps studded the desert road in a nauseating rhythm and tears puddled on my cheeks. Before they fell I felt his hand vise the nape of my neck, just like he used to do when pulling my teeth—it worked like some kind of Vulcan nerve pinch. The reeling stopped and I began to drift, this time peacefully, orange light dashing me into the darkness, mind steadying to a place where nothing was the matter and everything was forgiven.

Next morning I awoke at sunrise in a familiar bed, the old one from our flat in the city with a scalloped headboard painted with fluffy clouds. The room was empty but for a mirror and a baby's crib. The walls were covered in stickers and crayon markings, signs of my
other
siblings. I wondered where they were and then I wondered how many there were. Ma and Baba had a mutually enforced “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy about Flu's pregnancies, but I guessed from the crib that there had been a few new additions. Beside the bed was a new
jalabiya
, a polyester slip, a
fanila
, some barrettes, a copy of
Majid
comics, and a black
shala
to cover my hair with.

I picked up the cotton
fanila
, tiny rosettes stitched along the neck. Leaving me an undershirt was proof Baba hadn't expected me to have grown into a B-cup. The slip fit fine, but static made it stick to the hair on my legs like Velcro. A pretty girl modeled a tastefully striped nightie on the cover of the
jalabiya
packaging. But the garment I pulled from the plastic bore no resemblance to the one she was wearing. I popped my head out the itchy neckhole and looked in the mirror to find a shapeless mass of fabric patterned with strange cartoon creatures of indeterminate phylum. No matter how I tried to flatten it, the stiff white ruff stuck up around my face and made me feel like a dog in a funnel collar. Last I picked up the
shala
, my first veil, nested in with an array of kids' clothing. Despite the fabric being incredibly light, the veil held a heavy musk of ambergris. I wrapped it around my head several times into a loose wimple as I'd seen the women in the airport do, but when I let go it just slipped away into a limp coil around my neck.

Baba was sitting on the floor with a newspaper and breakfast of pocket bread and eggs. “
Marhaba! Benti!
” he cried, and held out his hands for me like he was receiving a present. Bending down for a kiss on the cheek, I gave him an electrical shock instead. “Wow, you get so big!” I could hear the echoes of Gramma in his bad English. I folded myself down beside him. “Ha? Tell me. What you will do this summer?” He dealt me a piece of bread over the swirl of egg.

“I dunno,” I grunted. “Aren't I going to stay here with you?”

“
Wella
, you know, I thought you can stay here with me. But you are so grown up now.” I caved my chest back and hoped he wouldn't notice I needed a bra. “I think you might be happier if you go to Doha and stay with Umi Safya.”

I looked around the flat; it was almost completely empty. The only decoration was a glow-in-the-dark Mecca clock hanging on the wall over his head, the minute and hour hands ticking from the center of the
Kaaba
. “Did you just move here or something?”

He got up to make me a cup of tea. “No. I been here, maybe three years.”

“Then how come there's no furniture? How come no one is here?”

“This is the living,” he answered. “If I want to go, I just go. You know your baba.” He smiled at me.

“You find the
shala
?” I nodded. “Good. It's a gift from Abir. You remember Abir?”

I tensed. Baba loved to test me on my knowledge of the extended tribal tree. I filed through my hazy memory of relatives, Abrar, Alia, Afra, Afia, sure, but I came up blank at the name Abir.

“Abir! You must remember! You met her when you were little in Saudi.”

I slowly ripped my bread, hoping he'd change the subject. He clicked his tongue as though he were ashamed. I was starting to worry this was some kind of a riddle—maybe I
should
know her. “What's her face like?” I tried.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “How should I know? I've never seen her face.” Sufficiently convinced it wasn't a trick question, I went back to my egg while Baba explained. “She is my father's—that's your grandfather Jabir—milk-brother's son's wife's sister by marriage.”

I gulped, trying to digest both the eggs and the flimsy familial tissue linking myself to the nice (faceless) lady who had given me the gift of the
shala
. “What's a milk-brother?”

“If your mother couldn't give you milk when you are a baby and you drank from a different mother, you would be milk-sister to her other children,” he explained patiently.

Suddenly, the stillness of the room was broken with a loud racket from the hallway. It was a pack of children surging up the stairs, knocking every door they passed on the way up. I got up to investigate and peeked into the dim stairwell where a rabble of boys and girls, all in mini-
thobes
and
jalabiyas
in varying states of dirtiness, were playing keep-away with a balloon. It floated up and down the landing, and the kids, the oldest of whom couldn't have been more than seven, tumbled after it. They didn't see me, all eyes on the gently floating orb, little fists brandishing pencils, keening for the first jab.

“Who are they?” I asked, quietly closing the door so as not to draw their attention.

“Your cousins.”

I remembered that
cousin
was a term used loosely here. “Why are they awake?” It was 6 a.m. at the latest. Baba shrugged. The stampede shook the ceiling like an earthquake. “Do they go to school?”

“Mostly the families here don't have
jinsia
, so they can't go to school.”

I understood the word
jinsia
. It meant the very essence of a person's being, your sex, your personality, your nationality, your identity, and, in this situation, citizenship. “Is that why Flu and the kids stay in Doha?”

“Yes.”

A loud detonation of helium came from the stairwell, followed by the siren-like howl of one of the littlest kids. Baba ignored the sound, plopping in several spoonfuls of sugar to sweeten the tea. He poured it from glass to glass for me as though I were still a little kid liable to scald herself.

“Is there anyone my age here?”

“No girls are here now. All of them are in Doha or Saudia for the summer break.”

He handed me the tepid, syrupy tea and rattled off names of cousins I could visit with there. “Also your Auntie Falak. Flu. Your little sisters.”

I got up to skulk by the window. Even though the prospect of spending three months in these empty rooms surrounded by the noise of the feral cousins depressed me, I wanted to stay a while longer.

I surveyed the turf. We were surrounded by undeveloped desert, sliced to the south by the highway to Abu Dhabi and to the north by power lines. The apartment we were in was part of a larger complex of buildings, each one an identical, squat square. They were similar in design to a council-estate scheme—well-intentioned but badly planned, all full of utopian details that only worked in the model. For example, the shopping arcades running underneath each building probably looked great in balsa wood. But where the mock-up would have been bustling with miniature commerce, the real places turned into creepy corridors full of garbage, with sand collecting along the unused shop fronts. This place, I would learn, was mostly full of Bedouin like Baba who for various reasons (political or financial or just by accident) found themselves on the periphery of society. Even in Doha they lived in zones of temporary-turned-permanent government housing and spent their lives waiting for jobs or the call to prayer or their favorite TV show to come on.