The Milk of Birds (16 page)

What scares me is what comes afterward. My grandmother always said,
It is not difficult to give birth to a baby, but it is difficult to raise him.
Teaching the young is like sculpting soft stone. In Umm Jamila we had many to show a child the right path. When a wife gave birth to a girl, her aunts and all the women trilled like frogs. If it was a boy, the men cried, God is the greatest. My mother said when Muhammad was born my
father slaughtered four sheep, and family and neighbors ate until they could not move for the weight of their bellies.

But what becomes of babies who have no one to greet them? What becomes of their mothers? All my life I heard women tell their sons to marry untouched girls. Old shoes with holes are better than a woman who has a son. Avoid a mother of a child even if it is dead.

Men do not like to marry a widow. We do not even have a word for girls like me.

Now Adeeba is fussing. What do you mean men do not like to marry? There are men in this camp who would marry a stump if it could cook. Then she says, That might be the problem in your case.

Is your friend Emily so rude?

And no one to greet the baby? Adeeba says. Am I a no one? And your mother and Hassan and Zeinab? And Saida Julie?

Adeeba is trilling, not a frog but a sick hyena maybe. All around us are laughing at the sound.

But I tell you, K. C., my confidante, it is now I miss my brother Muhammad. I would not fear for my child with such a
khal
to watch his back.

Do not regret what is gone, Adeeba says. She is like an echo with these sayings.

It is true God never made a mouth and left it.

Your sister, Nawra

A
UGUST
2008

Parker's looking at the book and making up test questions about the Paleolithic era, which seems more pointless than
American Idol
. I don't even bother asking Chloe to tape it for me anymore.

“My brain's got nonstick coating,” I tell him.

Parker closes the book over his finger and looks at me with his big brown Labrador eyes. “How do you study?” he asks.

“Usually I don't.” I smile the idiot smile.

“Come on,” he says. “You read the textbook and then . . .”

“I don't read much of it,” I say. Like, almost none. “I look at the pictures.” I should tell Nawra here's why people lie: The truth sounds so feeble.

“Then how do you learn?” Parker asks. Not in a mean way, though. He just sounds curious.

“Usually I don't,” I say. Only I can't smile because at this moment I feel really sad. Emily's coming back tomorrow, and I wonder if she's outgrown me after spending the summer with eighth-grade geniuses. What if I'm not her type anymore?

She sent me one lousy postcard. While she's been negotiating trade agreements and defending human rights, I've been raising Mr. Hathaway's blood pressure. “Miss Cannelli, it appears you have strewn your commas like rose petals.” Emily's going to
have better stuff to do next year than pick up after my commas and hold my hand through the Dust Bowl.

But Parker's on Mom's payroll, so he has to humor me.

Parker was as obsessed as Wally with Thomas the Tank Engine. “Ask me anything about talking steam engines,” I say.

He gives me a quiz.

“Why did Sir Topham Hatt come to Sodor?”

“To build the railway.”

“Ten points. What else?” Parker asks.

“He built a bridge from the island to the mainland.”

“Twenty. And now for our bonus question: What was Topham Hatt's nickname?”

“The Fat Controller?”

“Ding, ding, ding. Winner!” Parker says.

Silly as it sounds, “winner” makes me feel good.

Then Parker returns to the characteristics of Paleolithic culture. He starts drilling, but there's no oil in this shale. Parker launches into the speech about why the Stone Age is important to my future.

“You know lots of stuff,” he says. “That means you're learning.”

“Let's go outside,” I say.

“K. C., I know the code. ‘Let's go outside' means ‘Let's goof off.' ”

“You asked me how I learn,” I say. “I learn by going outside. You want to teach me about the sun, let it shine on my face. Let's go be hunter-gatherers.”

Parker is highly dubious. In the backyard I cast him as the hunter and me as the gatherer, but I let him tell me what I'm gathering and how these wild grains (Mom's weeds) are so abundant here in the Fertile Crescent. Then Parker, who's having a
hard time spearing wild beasts—no dinner tonight—says, “Hey, honey, how 'bout we plant some of those seeds you collected?” It turns out they sprout right up, fertilize themselves, and then feed us and a sheep, so it doesn't matter anymore that Parker's a lousy hunter. He starts to stick around to guard all the wheat and barley and lentils we harvest, and I start having more kids (we skip over this part), especially since I don't have to carry each one miles on my back all day. So we settle down with other families and have so much food that some of the kids don't have to farm anymore. They can grow up to invent the alphabet and be priests and traders and kings.

Although I started this, Parker really gets into it. He pretends to carve a plow out of a stick, and then he turns into an awful tyrant of a king, wringing taxes out of us poor farmers so he can build a snazzy capital city. As usual it's a stinking hot Richmond day, so humid you could grow mushrooms in Todd's sneakers, and when Mom comes home, she finds us out back all sweaty and laughing beside piles of weeds and stones. She looks at us like,
Huh?

“Those are our taxes,” I explain.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Cannelli, we were just reenacting the development of agriculture,” Parker declares.

“How . . . creative,” Mom says. She catches my eye and wags her finger at me.

“Can you stay for dinner, Parker?” she asks.

I hold my breath. He says yes.

A
UGUST
2008

“Are you awake?” I whisper.

“How could I not be, with rain dripping on my head?” Adeeba says.

“My mother sleeps,” I whisper.

I do not like to sleep because of my dreams. Last night I held a baby as big as a calf. I was scared to look at its face. When I did, I saw its father.

In the dark I often listen to my mother. She drags her breath through her nose as she drags her leg on the ground during the day. Many cry out in their sleep, but my mother keeps her silence. Perhaps in her dreams she returns to Umm Jamila. Perhaps she is running her hand over a mat that Saha has woven or searching in the pot for the piece of meat worthy of Muhammad. As I listen to her snore, I thank God for his mercy.

“She sleeps even when her eyes are open,” Adeeba says. “My students sleep with their eyes open too. Maybe there is a sleeping sickness in this camp.”

“Do you miss your mother?” I ask.

“My father,” Adeeba says. “I miss him every day.”

The dark shifts as she sits up.

“When I feel pain, I think of Richmond USA,” I say.

“You have pains?”

“They come and go.”

“Are they coming now?”

“Not now,” I say. I roll to my side and push up with my arm so we are sitting together in the dark.

“K. C.'s ice cream with lima beans on top. That is what I would like right now,” Adeeba says.

“Tell me about ice cream,” I say.

“It is cold,” Adeeba says. “Like the mountains on K. C.'s paper. And smooth.”

“Like a rock.”

“Softer,” she says. “Like a baby's thigh. And sweet, so sweet.”

“Tell me about lima beans,” I say.

“I think they are like fava, only green, not brown,” Adeeba says.

I sniff.

“Are you crying?” Adeeba asks.

“I am smelling the
medamas
,” I say. “Onions, tomato, cumin.”

I stir in the dark.

“What are you doing?” Adeeba says.

“The pot is so big I need two hands to stir.”

“You are crazy,” she says.

“Here, you take a turn,” I say. In the dark I reach for her hand. “Stir,” I tell her. “If the lima beans stick to the bottom, they will burn.”

“There is water falling in the pot,” Adeeba says.

“It is good for the sauce,” I say. “Here is my bowl.”

I hold out my palm. She swats until our hands collide in the dark.

“More,” I say.

“Leave some for me,” Adeeba says.

A pain strikes my belly like a switch. So many days I have these pains, but still the child does not come. He does not wish to see this world.

“What is the matter?” Adeeba asks.

Sometimes I dream of a son who is wise and strong, one who removes the dust, as my brother did. Then I remember that the son of a rat is a digger. I am the thirsty person who sees a mirage as water.

“Mmm,” I say. I chew as a horse does, loud and content.

“Now that we speak of cooking, I will gather the wood tomorrow,” Adeeba says.

“You must teach.”

“I will tell Si-Ahmad I cannot take the morning class,” she says. “You must not leave the camp.”

“You must tell Si-Ahmad that you wish to teach letters, not health.”

“He is a good man, but he is a man. He does not take directions from a girl,” she says.

“Then you must bring Hassan and Zeinab with you and have them write their sentences.”

“And you,” Adeeba says. “You are my star pupil.”

Sometimes I look at the words on the ground and think,
Is it my stick that made these?
My script is not as beautiful as Abdullah's, but I have now written more words than my father ever did.

Adeeba would teach us only sentences with feet if I did not insist on some sentences with wings.
God is with those who persevere,
I wrote tonight, although the rain muddied “God” before I finished “persevere.”

“So that is why you taught me,” I say. “To boss me around. He who taught me one letter, I became his slave.”

“You would not make a good slave,” she says.

•   •   •

I remember that terrible place of tents and fires and piles of stolen carpets and pots. None is born a slave, but any can be made one.

•   •   •

“I am asking you as my friend and not my slave,” Adeeba says. “Let me collect the wood this time. Now is the time for giving birth. The head cannot carry two pots.”

“The wood I put on my head,” I say. “The baby is in my belly.”

“I tell you that it is an ox, not a cow, but you say milk it,” Adeeba says.

“I see you have taken my advice about the sayings, Professor.”

“How else am I going to get a camel like you to the water pool?” Adeeba says.

“Listen to the one whose advice makes you cry, not to the one whose advice makes you laugh,” I say.

“But we are laughing!” she says.

For just a moment, life is ice cream.

A
UGUST
2008

“You're not concentrating,” Parker says.

I start telling him about the time we almost got a puppy.

“What's wrong with Purrfect?” Mom had asked.

“He's a cat,” Dad said. “I want a pet that jumps up and down when I walk in the door.”

Mom said a sheepdog was impractical.

Dad said he'd wanted one all his life.

“Since your mother died,” Mom said.

That's another story for Parker, how my grandmother was driving too fast on a wet night and crashed. Dad never talked about it, but Mom told us, and it was there in the way she said, “Buckle up!” Dad's always moving, always talking, but every once in a while, when he slows down, this sadness rises, like oil in a salad dressing when you stop shaking the bottle.

Parker's not just a good tutor; he's a really good listener. He nods and looks at me so patiently, like his eyes are his ears, following the story closely. I know he's thinking we should be going over the review questions—he circled number seven in pencil when I detoured the study session—but since then he hasn't looked down at the book once.

Dad swore he'd take care of the puppy—walk it, feed it, drive it to the vet.

“Why don't you start with your own children?” Mom said. She was mad because Dad vaporized a lot, especially at our bedtime, so she was always the one waving toothbrushes, reading stories, and looking for where Todd had hidden his Nintendo to play after she turned out the light.

Dad started a chant—“PUP-PY, PUP-PY”—and Todd and I joined in.

“That's what I'll be cleaning up—pup pee,” Mom said. So Dad had us whisper “meanie” every time we passed Mom. Every time. On the stairs, in the kitchen, at dinner. “Here's the ketchup, meanie.” Even though I sort of knew the four fingers were pointing back in our direction, Todd and Dad and I really got into it. Mom shrugged it off for about a week, and then on Saturday she said, “Stop. Please. Enough of this ‘meanie.' ”