The Newlyweds (4 page)

“You don’t know where she’s going to be on any given day,” Aunt Cathy had said, during one of the dinners at Eileen’s beautifully appointed table. Since there were only four of them, they ate in the breakfast nook, which was wallpapered in a pattern of red and blue sprigs that also matched Eileen’s china cups and dishes. George’s mother was a good cook and always remembered to make something separate for Amina, if there was pork in any of the dishes.

“Are you allergic?” Aunt Cathy had asked the first time this had happened, and George had explained that Muslims, like Jews, didn’t eat pork.

“Oh, I can see how it would be dirty over there. You wouldn’t want to eat any meat, would you? But our pork is very clean. As clean as chicken—next time, you’ll tell Eileen she doesn’t have to bother.”

George’s mother said then that it was no trouble to take a piece of chicken out of the freezer for Amina, but Amina’s dietary restrictions had already gotten Cathy started on the subject of her own daughter.

“You can hardly cook a meal for her anymore,” Cathy complained.
“No meat at all, no fish. She doesn’t even eat eggs. And the last time I saw her, no onions. Can you believe that?
Onions?
”

“Why doesn’t Kim eat onions?” Amina asked.

“Something to do with yoga,” George said.

“When I think about what she was like as a little girl—that white-blond hair, big green eyes, the longest lashes you’ve ever seen. And so well behaved! People used to stop us on the street, ask if I wanted her to be in commercials. I’ll tell you—that’s hardly what you’d get if you tried to adopt today. Little Chinese girls everywhere, and now people are even taking them from Africa.”

“When did you see Kim last?” Eileen asked.

“I can hardly remember! These places she goes—you don’t even know what country she’s in, one day to the next.” Cathy turned to Amina. “That’s the definition of torture for a mother. I hope you never experience it.”

“Kim’s at a yoga-training course in Costa Rica,” George told Amina. “She’s getting some kind of advanced certification.” She had noticed a particular way George had of translating for her when they were with his mother and his aunt. Even if the thing that had been said had been said clearly in English she could understand—and she had quickly gotten to the point that she thought she could understand nearly everything—George might reprise it for her and then add some extra information he thought might interest her. After a certain number of Sunday dinners at his mother’s house, Amina realized that having her there precluded George from joining in the conversation the way he might have had to in the past. He was always too busy making sure she understood.

“Kim’ll make more money,” he told her now. “And the certification will allow her to teach all over the world—not only in Rochester.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Aunt Cathy had said. “Torture.”

5
Amina had thought she would finally meet Kim at her bridal shower, which George’s cousin Jessica had thrown for her at Great Northern Pizza Kitchen. But it turned out that Kim wasn’t able to attend any of the wedding events, since she and her mother weren’t speaking to each other.

Amina had been sorry not to have a woman her age to advise her, but Eileen and Jessica had both been very kind. Jessica was George’s only cousin on his father’s side, just as Kim was his only maternal cousin; she was two years older than George, with a similar build but darker coloring. She and Eileen had taken Amina to the beauty parlor on the morning of the shower, to have a “trial run” before the wedding, and they had stayed with her the whole time in case she had trouble telling the stylist what she wanted. When Amina had pointed out her bitten nails, George’s mother had promised the manicure would fix it; when she’d asked about eye makeup, his cousin had said her lashes were so long that she didn’t need it. Through all of this, the girl working on Amina’s hair had simply smiled and nodded, as if she didn’t care about getting extra work but simply wanted Amina to be happy with how she looked.

Amina tried to explain how this manner of working differed from what she would have encountered at home—where extra goods and services would have been pressed on the family of the bride from the moment they walked in the door of the shop—but Eileen and Jessica hadn’t really heard what she was saying, because they’d been so surprised to hear that there were beauty shops in Bangladesh at all.

“Oh yes,” Amina said. “They are very popular.”

“But not near your village,” said Jessica, with so much certainty that Amina hesitated a moment before correcting her. She explained that there were three beauty shops in the bazaar in Satkhira alone and hundreds more in the capital.

“But what about the women who cover their hair?” Eileen had asked, and Amina said she guessed that even those women enjoyed looking nice underneath the chador.

She had told George that she didn’t need a wedding dress, that she was happy to get married in the clothes she already owned. She had ordered three new dresses before she came to Rochester, because tailoring was so much less expensive back at home.

“That’s why I love you!” George slapped his hand on the kitchen table, as if he’d won some kind of wager. “You’re so much more
sensible
than other women.” Amina thought it was settled, but later that night George talked to Ed from his office, who reminded him that
they would eventually have to show their wedding photographs to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Ed says a white dress is better for the green card,” George said. “My cousin Jess’ll take you. Go get something you like.”

The wedding dress Jessica chose for her was sleeveless white organdy, with white satin flowers appliquéd on the neck and the bust. George’s cousin was protective of Amina, telling the saleswoman firmly that they were not interested in a strapless dress and that they were looking for something economical. Jessica agreed that she might eliminate the veil—Amina had never covered her hair and didn’t intend to start on her wedding day in America. But even without it the dress had cost more than five hundred dollars, not including alterations. Amina stood on a wooden box with a clamp like a giant paper clip at her waist and tried not to cry.

“Smile!” the saleswoman said. “A lot of girls would kill for a figure like yours.”

“No kidding,” Jessica said. “I wasn’t that skinny when I was fourteen years old.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“She’s dumbstruck. Wait until George sees you in
that
.”

Jessica chatted happily with the saleswoman as they paid for the dress with George’s card, but once they were in the car she asked Amina whether everything was okay.

“Everything is fine,” Amina said. “Only it was so expensive.”

“George doesn’t mind,” Jessica said. “Trust me, I could tell. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”

Ordinarily when she felt homesickness coming on, she was able to distract herself with some kind of housework. Vacuuming, in particular, was helpful. Now, sitting in the car next to George’s cousin, she was unprepared for the sudden stiffness in her chest, and the screen that dropped over everything, making Rochester’s clean air, tidy green lawns, and even the inside of Jessica’s very large, brand-new car look dull and shabby. George’s cousin was so friendly, and there was still no way she could explain to her what was really wrong. When they stopped at a red light, Jessica turned to Amina and put a hand on her arm.

“Because if something were wrong between you and George, I want you to know that you could tell me. I’m a good listener.”

“Oh no,” Amina said, “George is no problem,” and Jessica had laughed, although Amina wasn’t trying to be funny. She could tell that Jessica wasn’t going to allow her to be silent, and so she searched for a question.

“What is the meaning of ‘dumbstruck’?” she asked, feeling slightly dishonest. She had encountered that word for the first time in a conversational primer from the British Council, in a dialogue between a Miss Mulligan and Mr. Fredericks.
“Your manners leave me dumbstruck, Mr. Fredericks,” Miss Mulligan exclaimed
, and for some reason that sentence had lodged itself in Amina’s head. Often, when someone had spit on the street in front of her, when a woman had elbowed her out of the way at the market, or when she’d run into one of her old classmates at Rifles Square, and the girl had inquired sweetly as to whether her father had finally found a job, she would think of Miss Mulligan and how dumbstruck she might have been had she ever found herself in Bangladesh.

“Oh, um—surprised. It just means surprised. I bet you wondered what I was talking about!”

But it didn’t only mean surprised. It meant so surprised that you could not speak.

“I was just saying anything to keep that saleswoman quiet. She was skinny, but old-lady skinny, if you know what I mean. Saggy. I don’t want to look like that, but I would like to lose fifteen pounds.” As Jessica continued to talk about the foods she ate, didn’t eat, and intended to eat, Amina concentrated on nodding and making noises to show that she understood. It was possible to be struck dumb by all sorts of emotions, not only surprise, and as they drove back toward Pittsford, Amina thought that there ought to be a whole set of words to encompass all those different varieties of silence.

6
Her mother wanted her to get married in a sari, although Amina argued that that kind of wedding, with the gold jewelry, the red-tinseled orna, and the hennaed hands, was really more Hindu
than Deshi, and as long as she was going to wear foreign clothes, they might as well be American ones.

“No need for a red sari,” her mother conceded. “How about blue? Or green?”

“It has to be white,” Amina said. “It has to be a real American wedding.”

“Even a white sari,” her mother said. “Some of the girls are doing it. I saw it in the ‘Trenz’ column.” Since she left, her mother had been spending hours every day at the Easynet Cyber Café in Mohammadpur. It was amazing to Amina that her mother could navigate even English sites like the
Daily Star
, where she knew how to get to the Life Style page, with its features on “hot new restaurants” and “splashy summer sandals,” its recipes for French toast and beef bourguignonne, and its decorating tips (“How about painting one wall of your living room a vibrant spring color?”).

“A dress,” Amina said firmly. “That’s what ICE wants.”

Of course her mother didn’t really care about the dress, just as she would never consider visiting a restaurant (where who knew how dirty the kitchen might be) or painting one wall of her “living room” (the room where she brushed her teeth, chopped vegetables, and ironed her clothing) a vibrant spring color. The white dress was a way for her mother to talk about a worry she had had ever since the beginning—a worry that had been amplified by her cousin Nasir’s visit—that Amina and George were not going to be properly married.

It was strange that her mother should be the one to have reservations now. Both of her parents had hoped that she might someday go abroad, but it was her mother who had worked tirelessly with Amina at every step of the long journey that had finally led her to Rochester. Her mother had always hoped to make her a famous singer, and when they had discovered that Amina hadn’t inherited her mother’s beautiful voice, they had tried ballet, the Bengali wooden flute, and even “Ventriloquism: History and Techniques,” illustrated in a manual they checked out from the British Council.

Their first really serious idea was that Amina might study for the O levels on her own. They had gone to the British Council once a week, following her cousin’s syllabi from Maple Leaf. In the mornings, when she would have been in school, Amina and her mother
would sit at the table with
Functional English
or
New English First
and always the
Cambridge English Dictionary
. When there was a word in a book Amina didn’t know, her mother would underline it very faintly in pencil so that it would be easier to review later, and if there were unfamiliar words in the definition, her mother would mark those as well. After she’d passed her O levels (much to the surprise of her Devil Aunt, who’d said there was no way Amina could succeed without formal preparation), she’d checked out one of those books again, and she and her mother had laughed at the number of words they’d underlined.

When she’d passed, they had been determined to apply to American universities. Amina had written letters of inquiry to ten colleges, six of which had responded. The University of Pittsburgh had encouraged her to apply for financial assistance, but even if the tuition had been entirely free, there would have been the cost of living in America to consider. Her parents had read the letter from Pittsburgh over and over again, as if some new information were likely to appear (Amina could bear to read it only once), and shown it to all of the Dhaka relatives, speculating about a potential “American scholarship.” The whole family had then of course begun to gossip about the grandiose dreams Amina’s parents entertained for her—their only child, and a girl.

A few weeks after the letter had come, Amina had been listening to the Voice of America. She and her mother had been following the broadcasts in Special English for years, and even after those became too simple for Amina, they had continued to turn on “This Is America” every day at 10:00 a.m. One morning after the broadcast, there was a program about different types of student and work visas, and the SAT, GMAT, and TOEFL tests foreign students might use to qualify for them. Amina had been half listening (these were strategies she had already considered, and all of them cost money) when the announcer said something that made her look up from her book. Her mother was ironing her father’s best shirt and trousers, arranged on the ceramic tile as if there were already a man inside them.

“Of course, the easiest way to come to America is to find an American and get married!”

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it; ever since she was a little girl,
she had loved everything foreign. When other girls had traded their dresses for shalwar kameez, Amina was still wearing hers: she had to put on the uniform white-and-gray shalwar kameez in order to go to Maple Leaf, but when she got home from school she would change back into a dress or a skirt. She didn’t mind covering up: when she and her mother went out to the market, she would wear trousers under the dress and a sweater instead of a shawl and even tie a scarf over her hair. Her mother said she looked crazy, especially in hot weather, but her father had laughed and called her his little memsahib. Whenever he had money, he would buy her a Fanta and a Cadbury chocolate bar.