The Girl Who Fell to Earth (6 page)

6

BETA CEPHEI  •  THE FLOCK  •   

Before my sister Dima was born, our father Matar had made numerous forays into the profession of long-haul trucking. He liked the big rigs. Even though they were cab-over-engine Macks, not Mercedes, they still reminded him of home. He added flourishes to his English by listening to the crass lilt of CB lingo and UFO conspiracy-theory sermons. He managed to get freelance work from a few contacts he'd made at the Port of Tacoma. Without his own cab it was hard to get jobs. Still, no one could deny that if they needed a long, straight trek at a steady pace, the
Ayrab
could do it.

For Matar it was also an excuse to see more of America, to drive far from all the cities, where he could see the starlight. It was also the only way to quell that old urge to keep moving.

While Matar was tearing up and down the I-5, Gale had worked straight through both pregnancies as a meter reader in Tacoma. But when she took up wearing
hijab
, her employers at the city found that the sight of her in a veil poking around electrical meters in people's backyards was giving customers the creeps. They gave her the choice to remove it or lose the job.

It was then that Baba decided it was time for him to return to the Gulf. With Abu Dhabi, Doha, and the entire region transforming rapidly in the sway of a great black gold rush, he decided to light out for his old territories. He figured he'd have a pretty good shot at a well-paying job, especially now that he could speak English with the big men in charge of the oil companies. He promised he'd send for us once everything was settled, but there was no way of knowing when that might be.

It had been three years since Matar had come to America. He'd explored the country, married a native, and fathered two kids, and yet somehow he managed to leave with no baggage. We dropped him off at the airport with the same nearly empty leather briefcase he'd arrived with. Nothing inside it but his
sirwal
and a
thobe
to change into when he landed. Ma tucked a photo into his wallet of the four of us at the Space Needle in Seattle, Ma and Baba bowed together over Dima and me. Our father left almost everything he'd accumulated over the years behind with us. Our closet remained packed with his shirts and the Quran tapes he'd recorded for us. Too young to really remember him, we knew his smell without knowing who it belonged to, and knew his voice before we'd ever spoken to him.

I must have been nearly five years old when we finally received word from our father. He sent us a package that included a videotape, a studio portrait of himself, and some corporate gift pens. “That's your babi.” Ma introduced us and let Dima smudge the framed photo with her fingers. Of course it wasn't a proper studio portrait; it had been taken for work. Or so it would seem, judging by the Japanese company logo and the photo of a flaming offshore rig erupting over his left shoulder. He sat stiffly, as if he'd been holding the pose for a long time. It reminded me of the photo on the mantel of our Grandfather Kaarle standing with a “Klondike or Bust!” banner as his backdrop.

A letter was taped to the back of the photo frame.

 

Dear my dotters,

This fideo from your Baba in dawha.

Your family they wants see you.

You have 11 auntie and uncles in dawha and your

Gramma and Grampa they are in Saudia

Also you have too many cousins.

We wait you and miss you too much.

Next year come. And if you can like it stay.

My wife,

I miss you and America also. Donot forgit your prey.

Promis. I love you honne. Baba Matar

 

Next we settled down to watch Baba's tape. Ma pulled Dima up onto her lap, and I sat too close to the TV, squinting through my plastic-frame glasses. When the static drew back on the screen, we heard men speaking in Baba's language. The view was of the color beige, a speeding shot from a car in the desert.

Ma recognized one of the voices as Matar. “There's your baba's voice. I'll bet he's forgotten all of his English.”

The microphone crackled from the wind as the camera spun around to face our father.

“Welcome my girls!” he said.

Ma put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile.

“This is our country road. You can see your new home. Lots to see!” He turned the camera around to capture the car's approach to the Doha Sheraton, an iconic structure jutting from an outcrop at the edge of the city. “This is new. When I met you, Gale, it was not here,” Baba shouted into the wind. They pulled up slowly alongside a line of Ferraris and other fancy cars parked in front of the lobby. “This is my new car,” he said, pointing the camera at a gleaming DeLorean parked under a palm tree. Ma laughed. My eyes widened. “Sorry. Joking. Your Baba's not rich . . .
yet
.”

He took us inside. The lobby was a seductive Islamic fantasy-future of hexagonal mirrors and disco-lit elevators. My eyes widened. It was beautiful. At the center of the lobby was the largest standing chandelier in the world: a crystal palm tree. We exited to the garden, where the camera panned briefly over Indian men gardening on a path beside a giant chessboard. He pointed the camera out to the water. “You cannot believe it, Gale. Now I am working on a rig, way far out there in the sea. I'm not afraid anymore of the water.” He demonstrated by patting his bare foot in the seawater for Ma's benefit, and she responded by hugging Dima. Back in the car he pointed the camera at himself again. “Everything is changing here now, Gale.”

The video carried on for a few minutes out the window of the old car—which drove at warp speed past lonely vistas of desert—as though he'd forgotten to turn it off. Then suddenly he said, “Tell the girls I love them very much.”

“They know,” Ma replied to the TV, a choke in her throat as the black slug at the end of the tape doused the image.

That videotape was a revelation to me, and as the white noise resumed I saw it as a portal into another dimension—one I felt immediate ownership over, if only because I had been told it was mine. Having a second world to belong to immediately made me cast doubt on my place in the first. It seemed like such a very different world from the rivers and the raspberry farm. I can't say it was exotic, or mysterious, or any of the other alluring adjectives associated with the Gulf. But seeing the video permanently cracked the world into two halves for me. I watched and re-watched the tape so many times the belt wore out. It made me feel funny, a new yearning, like my mind was salivating for something new. I wanted to go there as soon as I could. Maybe it was as simple as missing my father; either way, Ma was forced by the video to acknowledge that we would never be fully hers. Eventually her daughters would have to learn to live in both worlds.

A few evenings later, while Dima and I were parked in front of
Cosmos
watching the man in the red turtleneck and camel jacket explain tesseracts, Ma called us to the telephone. “Girls! Come talk to your baba!” She sat in the kitchen in jeans and one of his old shirts. She had her
hijab
down on her shoulders, and her wrists were tangled up from nervously twisting the phone cord. Ma scooped Dima up to her lap, where she held the phone to my little sister's ear. “Say
salam alaikum, Baba
.” Dima's fat cheek pillowed against the receiver. She breathed heavily into the phone but didn't say anything. I clawed my way up onto Ma's lap, wedging myself into range for my turn. “
Asalam alaikum?
” I showed off, holding the receiver to my face.

“Safya! Will you like to come and live with your baba?”

“Can we fly there?”

“Yes.”

“In a airplane?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have to go through outer space to get there?”

Ma cuffed me. “Don't be silly. This is a long-distance phone call.”

“No, but you do fly over the North Pole,” he answered.

“Go help your Gramma in the garden,” Ma scolded.

I ran out to tell Gramma, who was hosing down the rhododendrons in her muumuu and boots. “We're going to see Babi in Doha!” I yelled across the yard at her.

“You kids might as well be flying to the moon for all I know,” she grumbled, and kinked the hose off.

 

We set out for Qatar a month later. The problematic nature of our situation in the Gulf was not made clear to Ma until the London-to-Dhahran leg of our trip, where she made easy transit-friends with Aramco oil wives in the smoking section at the rear of the plane. Ma stuck out among all the white linen, tan faces, and bleach-blond hair, her
hijab
and morning-glory dress making her look severe and unfriendly to the other American ladies. “I guess you don't drink anymore then, huh?” one asked, directing a dismissive gesture at the
hijab
on Ma's head. Ma took it in stride and shared her pack of Marlboros around. The most boisterous among them was a woman named Mary Lou. She was from Kansas, and one thing was certain—she didn't want to go back to Saudi, because “there really
is
no place like home.”

It was on that flight that Ma learned being an expat American woman and being married to an Arab meant that although she and these women came from the same backgrounds, they were bound into two very different worlds. The gap between Ma and Mary Lou could not have been wider. Ma was the wife of a Bedouin man, the kind Mary Lou's husband thought of as a coolie. Mary Lou was wife to the kind of man who had the power to drill any of Al-Dafira's land and yet thought twice about hiring Bedouin. Mary Lou explained all of this and more to Ma while drinking her gin and tonics somewhere over Jordan.

“I tell ya, Gale, it's a different
planet
over there. You don't know what you're getting yourself into.” Before Ma could get a word in edgewise, Mary Lou grabbed her by the knee and leaned forward in a conspiratorial (drunk) whisper: “My husband works with a guy who makes his wives sleep three to a bed!”

“I don't think you're in any position to judge,” Ma said, hoping it would be the last word. Mary Lou raised a penciled eyebrow. “Don't kid yourself, sweetie.” And swilling the ice in her cup, she knocked it all back. “They're all the same.
Ayrabs
.”

Ma watched Mary Lou stagger back to her seat. A steward came over and crouched down to speak with Ma. “I just want you to know, we see this all the time on this flight,” he assured her. “I hope she didn't offend you. They usually have to get drunk to go willingly.”

When the plane stopped in Dhahran, an officer came aboard to check the passports of everyone going to Doha. He looked through Ma's passport, bored, and then opened mine and Dima's. He did a double take at the last name Al-Dafira before calling for another officer to come and gawk at the white woman with the Bedouin children. The plane filled up around us with Indian men transiting through Doha to Mumbai or Kerala.

It was the middle of the night by the time we landed on the tarmac in Doha. Ma stood out like an alien at the top of the steps. Two men stood at the foot of the stairs, long hair protruding from under their checkered
gutras
. There was something familiar about their manner. “They were like your father,” she'd tell me years later when I asked about our first passage to the Gulf. “I don't know how, but they let me know.” One of them gently relieved Ma of Dima while the other took me by the hand, leaving Ma to carry her bag. For a moment she panicked; these were strangers. But as if he had read her thoughts, the man holding my hand traded me for her bag.

They whisked us through a special line at passport control, and on the other side Baba stood at the baggage carousel. The two men each kissed him on the nose (a practice Ma complained about as being “kind of fruity”), and we waited our turn in the pecking order of “hello.” Baba knelt down to kiss Dima and me, and then rose to tell Ma hello, but she intercepted him with a long, bold kiss, shocking the few stragglers in the terminal. Baba tried to hide his grin as he reprimanded Ma for the benefit of his cousins and led us out to his car, which was not, to my dismay, the DeLorean. It took a long time to get from the airport to our new home. Dima and I watched from the backseat as we passed through the pockmarked moonscape of construction pits and cranes that was our new home.

“Close your eyes!” Baba flung the door open on Apartment 1303. We closed our eyes in the hallway and waited for him to give us the cue. “Come here. No, here. Okay. Open!” We stood in a wide marble hallway with five closed doors.

“Which one is ours?” Ma asked, scanning the doorframes for numbers.

“Ha!” Baba was pleased with her country-mouse mistake. He opened each of the heavy doors and proclaimed, “All of them!” The rooms were dark and empty, and cold air gusted out of them like a chill wafting up from some subterranean river.