The Girl Who Fell to Earth (16 page)

“I better get going,” I said, and stamped out my half-smoked cigarette under a pile of mulch.

After that I wiped my palms off on my jeans and carried on up the riverbank toward the farm on a cloud of smoke and a hazy inkling that I should run away from this town, and soon. I walked the rest of the way up past the cottonwoods to the edge of our old property. What I saw when I reached the top of the path almost brought me to my knees. The fields were all plowed up. Orange plastic flags marked off different areas for laying concrete. The once neat berry tines were now piles of wooden post and wire. The lilac bush Ma and Baba had been married by, the cherry tree, and hundred-year-old firs were all toppled and mashed into the dirt by bulldozer treads. But the worst sight of all was the house, or, more specifically, the place where it had once been, now an open patch in the fields like a gashed-in crop circle of rubble. None of us had anticipated that the new owner would knock our home down.

I picked my way up to the open basement foundation, a big hole where the house should be. The uneven ground on the bottom was covered with mangled black plastic and held down with rocks. All the remains of the house had already been taken away, so it felt as if the house had just been beamed up, leaving a cement-block outline like chalk around a corpse. I kicked some broken glass into the hole. The place we called home had been erased right out from under us.

After that, the idea of leaving Puyallup grew beyond a hint of a thought into a full-on escape plan. Things seemed more vivid as I prepared to make my announcement. It was as if the forces behind every object and action were suddenly drumming up their energies double-time, shining brighter, like when clouds break and suddenly whatever it is you're looking at becomes more brilliant. That is how seeing that ripped-up land galvanized my resolve to go. I never saw Joey again, and I never heard Gramma call me by my real name after that. But the experience made me realize that the only way to become the person I wanted to be was to remove myself from the people who thought they knew me.

17

LAMBDA URSAE MAJORIS  •  THE SECOND LEAP  •   

Baba was eager to have me return to Doha, live with the family, and learn about Islam. Ma, on the other hand, wigged out when I told her I was leaving. We spent the remainder of our time together in mortal mother-daughter emotional combat.

“You had no trouble tossing me into the pool when I was a baby!” I screamed at her. “Why can't you let me go now?”

In response to this she would bring Dima into it, accusing me of abandonment. I felt bad enough about leaving Dima behind in that crappy little duplex without Ma rubbing it in. Still, the urge to leave had become more powerful than even my worst guilt. I officially withdrew from school in Puyallup and packed my suitcase several pounds overweight with a full stock of Dover Thrift Editions and my CD binder to keep me company. At the airport, Dima came inside to see me off, while Ma, out of protest, stayed in the car. My little sister and I hugged, knowing we would be apart a long time, then exchanged quick “okay, whatever, bye”s, and I was on my way. To what, exactly, I couldn't have guessed.

When I made it to Doha, I took my papers to the American school, hoping my credits would transfer, and enrolled myself. Getting a place in the school was so competitive it was almost impossible for Qataris whose parents didn't work in the oil industry. After a very long afternoon in the principal's office explaining my story, it was decided, with some trepidation, that I should be granted a place in the junior class and that the usual payment of tuition up front would be waived for us to sort out later.

Baba gave me five hundred riyals to clothe myself for school. Falak took me to Souq Al-Jaber, where apparently all the trendy girls got their uniform fabric. She enlightened me as to various tricks, fashions, and rules as we browsed the stalls filled with reams of colorful prints and weaves.

“In high school you wear
long
skirts and white shirts,” Falak said meaningfully as we looked at the tailor's spiral notebook full of ballpoint variations on the long-skirt design.

“So?” I said, flipping through the pleated, seamed, and mermaid patterns.

“You can't wear those.” She gestured at the ragged hem of my jeans poking out from under my
abaya
.

I looked down at the dirty denim sticking out like a rat's tail. I got the hint.

We bought several meters of black and blue and maroon cotton for my skirts, and the tailor bashfully measured me over my
abaya
. Next we went to Sana and Splash (pronounced “Suhblash”) for shirts and
accesswarat
like barrettes and plastic bracelets. As a gift, Falak furnished me with an array of
boofs
—these were just glorified hair clips handy for keeping
shalas
on. They were designed to give the illusion (and allure) of bounteous piles of thick, healthy hair underneath the veil. Basically the large hair clips of flowers and feathers were the female equivalent of a pair of socks masquerading as a bulge in a guy's trousers.

By the end of our shopping spree, my
abaya
was dredged in dust and the
shala
wasn't much better for wear, sliding off my head into a silky noose around my neck. My makeover was almost complete, except for one thing: after the tailor's fee we didn't have enough money for a new
abaya
. Falak promised to let me borrow some of hers until
Eid
, when my father would give me more money.

Falak's room back in Umi Safya's house was well-loved and cozy. During the day it was left open so it was a playroom for my many young cousins, and at night my two pregnant aunts slept on roll-out mats while Falak and I used the bunk. The night before school I was surprised to enter our bedroom to find a small desk in the corner of the room and a little stationery set waiting for me. On it was a note from Falak that simply read “good luck” in Arabic. I sat at the little desk area of my own and fondled my new pens and sniffed the pages of my fresh notebook, and then locked it all away in the one drawer under the desk that secured with a little key. I fell asleep that night to the naive hope that
tomorrow
was going to be the start of something new, with no shame, no guilt, and no mistakes in it.

A lot had happened since I'd been away. Faraj's marriage had lasted all of three weeks before Amna asked for a divorce. He had moved back in with Umi (some male-pattern uselessness is universal) and gotten a job as a night security guard. Because of his graveyard shift, Faraj was usually available to drive me to and from my new school. On the first day the old truck announced our arrival with a horrible black emission and a sputtering cough. The engine gargled as we coasted past the red, white, and blue gates, and then Faraj idled it to a crawl in front of my new classmates. They were a lot of good-looking, Bijan-clad senior boys leaning against their Jaguars and Land Rovers. The girls were all beautiful and looked grown-up, their clothes fresh off the backs of mall mannequins.

I started to wish I had something other than a public school uniform on under my
abaya
. They were all so well-adjusted and pleasingly
diverse
compared to Puyallup. It was like
90210
if it were acted entirely with international exchange students cast by Benetton. They came from India, Norway, Sudan, and Colombia, the offspring of ambassadors and oil barons. But the weirdly utopian assortment of cultures had boiled down into a patty-melt pastiche of an America I knew from experience didn't exist offscreen.

The truck groaned and settled down on its wheels with a cough just as we pulled up in front of a troupe of very classy-looking Qatari girls.

“You've
got
to be kidding me,” I said aloud, echoing every teen sitcom I'd ever seen.

Some of the girls were in
abaya
and some were out. They looked down their noses at the Suburban through their D&G sunglasses. “Who are
they
?” Faraj asked as the girls backed away into the foyer and out of sight. His presence seemed to have spooked them. I slid low in my seat to avoid attracting any more attention, but Faraj was glam-blasted. “They look, they look . . . like angels!” he murmured like a fever-stricken madman.

Umi Safya's house, Madinat Al-Dafira, was just a few miles away from the school, and until this morning Faraj had been completely oblivious to the fact that this unreal enclave of Americana plucked from a different, imaginary TV world existed so close by.

I slid out the car door, shutting it quietly and hoping against hope that I'd remain unnoticed in my ill-fitting borrowed
abaya
and non-
marka
, or luxury brand, bag.

Although the characters were all different, the stage was set the same. The school seemed so excessively unreal I half expected the front to be a painted plank façade. I was surprised to enter and find that the illusion of an all-American high school didn't only continue inside the building, but became more intense. The halls were stacked with steel lockers, the same make as the ones in Puyallup; the floor was the same speckled linoleum; and with the A/Cs it had the same slightly frigid but stale breeze running throughout. I recognized the biology textbooks stacked beside the entrance to one of the classrooms. A bulletin board by the principal's office was lined with enthusiastic sayings and purple paper letters that shouted in all caps, “Shoot for the Stars, Seniors!”

The Qatari girls who'd given Faraj and me the nasty looks approached me in the hall. The shortest one had deeply kohled eyes and a nose ring.

“Hey, I'm Noor. This is Fatima and Sara. We just wanted to tell you, you don't have to wear your
abaya
here.”

“Thanks,” I said, keeping it on to be contrary.

“So who's the
habarbish
?” Noor asked me.

“What?”

“That guy you came with.”

“That's my uncle.” Fatima and Sara tittered.

“No way!” Noor exclaimed. “But he's sooo Bedu!”

It took me a slow minute to get that she was using the word
Bedouin
the way an American might talk about rednecks. I replied thinly, “Is there something
wrong
with that?”

“It's just, he looks like the kind of guy who hangs around the mall staring at us 'cause he's unemployed with nothing better to do.” Here Noor did an impression of a
habarbish
, with teeth bucked and eyes bulged.

“He's got a job,” I retorted.

“I'm
sure
he does,” Noor smirked.

 

My daily routine on school days started with the bathroom.

Despite the fact that the Gulf is the most water-stressed place on earth, for some reason the bathrooms
always
seemed to be sopping wet. In Umi's house there was no toilet paper. Instead we had a length of garden hose without a nozzle to wash with. The toilet was of the scary squat type, which meant I spent a lot of my time constipated with dread. The shower was a metal nozzle jutting out over the toilet and draining into a hole in the floor. Every morning I got up after
Fajer
prayer to take the first shower—if I waited too long into the morning the water tank on the roof turned into a boiling cauldron and left scald marks down my back.

In Falak's bedroom I'd change under my
jalabiya
so she couldn't see what I was wearing. I put on jeans and a T-shirt, and over them my school-uniform long skirt, so it appeared I was wearing my “proper” school clothes. Over that I wore my open
abaya
and
shala
. Lastly, when I left the house I'd toss the
shala
over my face to hide my identity from nosy neighbors. Riding with Faraj every morning and afternoon provided a neutralizing space, like going into the decontamination chamber before entering or exiting a space station. In addition to the neutrality of his presence, I was able to shed layers on the way to school in the following order:

First roundabout out of Madinat Al-Dafira—uncover face.

Inside school's front gate—
shala
off.

Locker—
abaya
.

Bathroom—skirt off.

Class—jeans and T-shirt.

When school let out I'd do the opposite. On the way home Faraj forced me to tell him all about the restricted
other
world I lived in. To Faraj it was
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
; to me, it was just confusing. He seemed endlessly curious about the rich kids and what their day-to-day lives were like. They were some of the very privileged few whom Faraj had only ever seen passing in Lambos along the corniche.

My situation had been thrown glaringly into focus by the proximity of my American and Arab worlds, which existed within a few roundabouts of each other. Despite the nearness, I managed to miss a lot of school at the beginning while Faraj and I got into a regular rhythm. Some mornings when he was late coming back from his night shift, I'd sit with Umi Safya in her room while she gave herself a shot of insulin and listened to the news on her little red Viking radio. She sat flat on the floor in a posture like a baby's: back straight, legs akimbo, coffee and dates and newspaper and Quran and radio and telephone arrayed around her like discarded toys. She kept the cane alongside her at all times so that if the phone rang she could flip it off the hook and drag it toward her with its silver claw. I used the phone to call Faraj to wake him up, but he rarely answered. If the living room clock struck nine, well into first period, I'd just end up changing back into my
jalabiya
and going back to bed. When Faraj
did
get me to school I hopped out and raced into the hall, where I'd strip down to my jeans and Converse and toss my
abaya
in a wad into my locker. The commute between Madinat Al-Dafira and the American school began to give me cultural whiplash. I felt like a deep-sea diver, adjusting constantly to the pressures of the two very different environments. And just like the bends, it was painful.

It took stepping outside the tribal boundaries (something I hadn't ever done before) to see how Al-Dafira was perceived within the larger, national context. I discovered through being cornered in class discussions that apparently
we
were notorious for being backward, brutish barbarians who were culturally impenetrable even to fellow Qataris. According to my new classmates, Al-Dafira boys were “scary dudes”—backdunesmen and bumpkins who packed huge clubs called
ajeras
in their cars just in case of a skirmish. What was even more disconcerting to me was that no one seemed to know anything at all about the women I knew and loved.

Things should have started to get better as I began to figure out my place within the tribe, the school, and the city. I was now able to keep my
shala
on properly and had made friends with the Qatari girls at the school. The kids I was in school with were from power families, and I now started to understand that the relationship between my family and theirs was analogous to that between the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia and the Rockefellers. There might be more of us, but numbers weren't everything.