My Accidental Jihad (3 page)

I
stood in the bathroom of Ismail’s apartment, staring in disbelief as a thin pink line appeared on my pregnancy test like a fault line beneath my feet. We had only been dating for a few months. I vaguely recalled having missed a pill or two sometime before, but I had assumed I was protected nonetheless. How could I have been so cavalier about the risk of pregnancy, after having witnessed the consequences of such behavior over and over again? I sat down hard on the cold tile floor.

Ismail was at work. To occupy myself until he got home, I did several loads of laundry at the Laundromat, which was empty except for a slow-moving woman in stained sweatpants and her two children. Her toddler careened around the room, screeching and banging the dryer doors as hard as he could. The baby sat on his mother’s lap and stared at me, drool running in rivulets down his chin and into the fat creases along his neck. A green line of snot snaked from his nostrils to his mouth while his mother stared at the linoleum floor.

That evening I told Ismail I was pregnant. He sat down on his couch and cried, whether from elation or dismay I couldn’t tell. I sat next to him and awkwardly rubbed his arm. I did not know what to do with a crying man. Later we sat out on his back steps, watching the darkness overtake the woods. He seemed both excited and wary, and he studied my face for clues about where I stood. Mostly he communicated through physical gestures: stroking my back, squeezing my fingers just enough for me to feel his strength but not hard enough to make me feel constrained. He brewed me some tea, and together we watched the steam rise from the cup and disappear into the blue-black sky.

I’d always imagined I would have a child one day—after I’d been married for years and my young, successful husband and I had grown tired of traveling, and hosting dinner parties for our smart and stylish friends. I’d have an established career and a home office where I’d compose thoughtful essays while my parents and in-laws, who each lived nearby, took turns babysittng our child.

In my journal, I wrote down a quote from W. H. Auden: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

In the days that followed, I weighed the possibilities over and over. I’d just been awarded a fellowship to work abroad the following year as a broadcast journalist. Terminating the pregnancy would mean I could maintain my independence, travel the world, and pursue my career. Having a baby would mean trading this prestigious opportunity for women’s most ancient work: childbearing. I’d be pregnant and unemployed, far from family, possibly a single mother. If Ismail and I stayed together, I’d be raising a child with a man who was fifteen years older than I was, whose small apartment was pungent with strange spices, who spoke so passionately that I often felt he was yelling.

My formerly carefree relationship with Ismail felt suddenly heavy, weighed down by the decision before us. We continued to run along the dirt trails together in the mornings. One day we wove in and out of a dense thicket of scrub pines, falling into single file where the path narrowed, then jogging shoulder to shoulder where it widened again. Without warning, Ismail broke his gait and turned to face me.

“What exactly are you looking for in this life?” he asked, struggling to catch his breath, his eyes searching mine. “Love? Freedom? Family? Adventure?” He raised his voice and swept his arms toward me, palms upward, as if balancing my fragile future in his outstretched hands. “Don’t you see? It’s all here in front of you. Right here. Right now.”

I stared at him. Beads of sweat trickled from his hairline, past the deep wrinkles that framed his intense, nearly black eyes. His threadbare cotton T-shirt, stained dark with moisture, drooped from his shoulders. All around us scrub pines stretched toward the light, their brown trunks as scrawny as children’s arms. The thick, damp air clung to me. In the distance I heard the sound of traffic.
Th
is is not how my life is supposed to be
, I thought.

Over the next few weeks Ismail and I stepped carefully across the fault line of the positive pregnancy test, which now divided our past from our future. I dozed off on the couch in the middle of the day and had frantic dreams about finding crying babies everywhere—in my backpack, at the bottom of a laundry hamper, on the floor of my car. A startling heat deep in my middle woke me during the night, and I could fall back to sleep only with my belly pressed hard against Ismail’s back, the tops of my feet against his soles. Strange new sensations coursed through my body. My stomach turned at the stench of cooked fish, which hung in the air like a curse for days after we’d eaten it. I recoiled from the trace odor of mildew woven into Ismail’s sweaters, the thin smell of decay on his breath. I cried and wondered how I could possibly bring a baby into this rotting world—and then I wondered how I could possibly do anything but that.

ISMAIL
TOLD ME
that in the North African village where he had been raised, marriage would have been our only option and that men and women had been killed for the offense of conceiving a child outside of wedlock. His casual conversation was always peppered with references to Allah: God willing, the weather would improve. Thanks to God, he had gotten over a cold. But now he held me squarely by the shoulders, looked into my eyes, and told me he would accept whatever choice I made—and I believed him, even though we had been dating for less time than it would take to carry this pregnancy to term.

I knew well what a woman’s options were in California, but I hadn’t yet familiarized myself with the medical resources in North Carolina. I went to a local clinic, where I sat in a small office with a young woman who popped her gum as she took my medical history. When she left the room to administer my pregnancy test, I could hear her giggling and chatting with her co-workers about her weekend. She returned to the tiny room, her face sober. She outlined my choices and asked me what I wanted to do.

It seemed like such a simple question. On the one hand, I wanted to pursue the life I had imagined for myself. But I couldn’t figure out how to measure the value of my goals against the value of this pregnancy. Was an unplanned pregnancy any less precious, mysterious, or promising than a carefully planned one? For the first time I was beginning to wonder whether the pursuit of my own desires was the best strategy in life.

I’d spent so much time thinking about my future, but now I saw that all I had was this imperfect moment: This queasiness. These full, tender breasts. This young woman across from me, with her bright expression. This gentle man in my life, with his musical accent, his warm hands, his tiny apartment. I’d imagined myself as autonomous, but even that was an illusion: Ismail was lodged in my heart as surely as this new life was lodged in my womb, and I would be able to extract myself from these relationships only by what felt like an act of destruction.

The young woman circled phone numbers on color-coded information sheets, tapped them into a stack, and handed them to me. I was grateful for all the alternatives available and for the fact that this choice was mine alone to make. But I did not feel “empowered.” Instead I felt brought to my knees by this burden. I knew that whatever path I chose would lead me first to grief—for the loss of the life I’d planned or for the loss of the life I carried—and that I would have to live with this decision for the rest of my life. Through feminism I’d discovered strength and ambition, but I knew little about the subtler rewards of acceptance and surrender. What gifts might come if I relinquished my expectations of how my life should be, if I submitted to my circumstances instead of trying to control them?

Alone in that anonymous office, I felt a belated rush of understanding of the women I had met in the clinic back in California: the mother who had chosen to end her pregnancy, the young girl who had chosen to continue hers. I understood that sometimes love has the power to drag us under and that there are also times when we have to dive headlong into our fears in order to find our joy. I understood that whatever choice these women made—whatever choice I made—a life was saved and a life was lost.

Soon after that, a strange thing happened. It was late in the afternoon, and I was sitting in Ismail’s apartment crying. His eyes glistened as he leaned in toward me from across the table. My exhausted, racing mind paused its endless deliberations, and in his unwavering gaze I saw a love as vast as an ocean. I could see that it was big enough to contain my fears and regrets, big enough to embrace whatever choice I made. In the silence that stretched out between us, I felt my fears begin to recede, and in their absence I recognized different emotions: gratitude for this man and awe for this mysterious new life entwined with mine. Though it would seem crazy to abandon the future I had planned in such a small moment, it would somehow be enough to lead me into a future I’d never intended—or even knew how much I wanted.

MY BELLY, FORMERLY
a flat expanse between my hipbones, grew round as a globe, as if I were carrying within me a whole new world. At night I lay on my back in my underwear, watching new life surface and roll against the soft walls of my abdomen, then dive back into the depths of my body, like the arc of a dolphin rolling between sea and sky. Like a figment of my imagination, I glimpsed the curved ridge of a tiny spine, the round back of a heel, a small, bony bottom. At night I dreamed of the taut skin of my belly tearing like tissue paper against the weight of this somersaulting body, of frantically tucking tiny limbs back inside as hot blood spilled through slippery fingers.

For years I had managed to freeze my body in time, to keep it as angular and lean as it had been on the cusp of maturity. Exercise was for me like prayer for the devout: a daily ritual that shaped my days, gave me a sense of purpose, purified me. I had trained my body to conform like a drill sargent controls his platoon: demanding total obedience, pushing its limits, trusting without question the purifying power of self-denial and muscle burn, as if pain itself were a form of salvation. Without my strict oversight, I believed my body would never be capable of self-governance; it would collapse into self-indulgence. I had no tolerance for its softness, its languor, its hungers, and as a result it had become strong and disciplined, my weight hovering closely around a single point like a compass toward true north.

But now my body had been infiltrated in the dark, colonized by a new life that toppled my tyrannical regime. My formerly small breasts swelled and lay warm and heavy against my skin, the areolas darkening with newfound purpose. I grew sluggish and dreamy, forgot what I was supposed to be doing or why it was so important to keep moving all the time. I contemplated a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed like it was a riddle I couldn’t solve, tried in vain to come up with a strategy for sorting and folding it, then abandoned the project altogether and curled up instead like a sleepy-eyed cat. I ate pints of ice cream straight from the carton, moaned with pleasure when that sweet cream melted across my tongue and slid down my throat. At night Ismail’s skin was my security blanket; I pressed my face into his back, greedily inhaling his scent of sweat and soap.

In the past my appetites were like stray cats outside a window, staring at me with recriminating yellow eyes. It was easy for me to ignore them and stay focused on my agenda. But now they scaled the walls of my self-discipline and clawed at me, demanding carrot cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting and thick slices of turkey on pillowy white bread, smeared with mayonnaise and slabs of avocado. Eating was no longer something I could do while driving a car or walking or reading or talking on the phone—like lovemaking, it commanded my full attention, its sensual pleasures obliterating all thought. I was becoming someone I no longer recognized: consumed with desires for food and touch and beauty and comfort, burrowing like an animal deep into its nest.

W
e should get married,” Ismail said one night. He lay on his back in the dark, speaking to the ceiling. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if marriage were a durable piece of furniture we should purchase to fill an empty space. Guest lists and honeymoons were not on his mind; instead he was thinking about health insurance and property rights and my protection in case anything happened to him.

Weddings did not hold the same sway over him as they did for me. He had never slipped a wedding dress onto a Barbie doll, then marched her tippy-toed across the carpet beside Ken to a makeshift altar. Nor had he spent countless hours on the playground playing fortune-telling games that pivoted on two questions: whom would I marry and how many kids would I have? He had not sat cross-legged on a carpet in front of a television set, glued to the screen as Princess Diana swiveled her delicate wrist at an adoring crowd on her wedding day.

I was nine years old the summer of her spectacular ceremony. Watching the wedding on TV, I was transfixed by the sight of a horse-drawn carriage pulling up to a cathedral. A princess emerged from a gilded door in a billowing white dress like buttercream frosting, big dollops of white decorating her slender white shoulders. This was no Disney movie; this was
real life.
With her shy smile, Princess Diana tilted her head demurely to show her gently feathered hair. Her straight-backed prince with his broad, ornamented chest held out his arm for her. She put her arm in his, and they turned their back on us, floating away into happily ever after.

As far as I could tell, Ismail was not burdened with fantasies of happily ever after. He had never stood in a tight cluster of women wearing matching, unflattering pastel-colored dresses, laughing awkwardly about the ritual toss of the bride’s bouquet, then elbowing and scrambling after it when it was launched into the air. Instead he had tussled over UN rations tossed from the truck that came through his village once a week; he’d watched neighbors walk away with pockets bulging with canned food, while he went home with none. He had gone hungry when a drought destroyed a season’s crop, seen young siblings die, and nearly lost his own leg to an infection because he lacked health care. Instead of unspooling fantasies about the future, his imagination produced vivid scenarios of hard times. He knew how quickly life could take a turn for the worse, so he wanted me to be prepared: to have health insurance, own half his home, be protected in case of emergency. For him, getting legally married was as practical as having a first-aid kit in the bathroom.

Every time he suggested marriage I snarled at him like a cornered animal, as if he had just flatly stated I should walk several paces behind him or ask his permission before I leave the house. I had already lost so much control. I had gone from being a single woman with a promising future to being pregnant, unmarried, and unemployed—to spending my weekdays lounging on the frayed couch of his tiny apartment in sweatpants, listlessly watching my body change as if it were a nature show on television. Terrified by the prospect of motherhood, I was still coming to terms with being married to the child I carried. I often woke in a cold sweat from frantic dreams of trying to claw my way back into the past. I balked at losing any more autonomy. His practical approach to domestic partnership seemed tragic. Marriage, I imagined, was about being swept into one’s future on a gushing current of love and desire. Instead I was growing heavier by the day, gravity pinning me to this new reality.

BUT HE WAS
RIGHT;
I
did
need health insurance. At home in the middle of the day while he was at work, I looked around me and realized I wanted this home to belong to both of us; I wanted to claim its oak floors and painted-shut windows, the clover spreading through the overgrown grass, the creaking rocker, and the lazy, swirling fan on the porch. So I agreed to go to the courthouse with him—in secret, just the two of us. I insisted that the papers we signed would not mean anything to me—that only a real wedding, with a dress and a cake and music and a party with loved ones, would bind us.

On a weekday morning we drove to the county seat in Hillsborough, a small town with a sleepy main street and an old-fashioned courthouse. A woman shaped like a wedding cake sat behind a narrow desk: her fair, round face stacked onto her white neck, above a broad, spongy bosom that gave way to a buttercream middle. She slipped forms across the counter for us to complete—boxes to check, numbers to provide, blank spaces to fill in, and signatures to authorize in order for our love to be processed and packaged into legal responsibilities and financial benefits.

After we had completed the forms, she gestured for us to sit down in a nearby waiting area, which was empty except for two young people who looked like they were playing hookie from high school. A blonde girl who had not yet lost her baby fat snapped her gum so fiercely that it sounded like a cap gun. Beside her sat a young man in a baseball cap, the brim tucked low over his face, concealing his eyes. He stretched his long legs in front of him, the knees of his blue jeans the rust color of North Carolina clay, his unlaced work boots crossed over each other. He looked like he was planning a deer hunt for their honeymoon, and they would be leaving directly from the courthouse.

We four sat in silence, contemplating the carpet, glancing now and then at one another with mutual suspicion, like people stuck together in a holding tank at the county jail—stunned at the unexpected turn their lives have taken, waiting to be released from this shame, convinced that everyone else inside is more messed up and dangerous than they are. None of us could have dreamed that our wedding day would look like this or that we would be the witnesses to one another’s marriages. I sat brooding under those fluorescent lights, silently interrogating my doubts. This sterile waiting room, with its coarse matching chairs and health pamphlets on the side table, made me feel like a patient seeking a diagnosis and a cure for this love that was wreaking havoc in my life. The stack of paperwork on the clipboard, all those checkboxes I had marked and blanks I had filled in, made my affection for Ismail seem like a loan I would be repaying later with interest.

On a side table, a woman with a black eye and a recriminating gaze stared up at me from a pamphlet, beneath the words
LOVE SHOULDN’T HURT
in bold, black type
.
I reached for the pamphlet and stared uncomprehending at those words as if they were written in a foreign language. Love like an anvil had cracked my locked heart open and unleashed an excruciating flow of tenderness. To rise to the occasion of this love was to endure the sting of daily misunderstandings and the terror of this unexpected pregnancy. There was the fear of the unknown as well as the pain of severing from my past and letting go of fantasies about my future. From where I stood, trying to imagine love without hurt was like trying to imagine the ocean without waves: without it, we would be talking about a whole different body of water, smaller and shallower and safer.

I stared blankly at the pamphlet as the final moments of my single life slipped past. Ismail held my hand in his, stroking the back of my palm with jittery fingers.

“Mr. Soo-yah?” Four heads in the waiting area jerked toward the sound of the clerk’s voice, which cut through the thick silence like a knife. She peered over her bifocals at us.

“Can you please come up to the desk, sir? I believe you made a mistake on your paperwork.”

Ismail looked confused.

“You needed to provide your mother’s
maiden
name here, sir—and instead you’ve provided her married name. Can you come and correct this?” She held the sheet out to him like a teacher returning an assignment to be corrected.

“It’s not a mistake,” Ismail called out across the room, without rising from his chair.

The clerk shook her head vigorously. “Are you sure, sir? How could her
maiden
name be the same as her married one?” The young couple and I swiveled our heads back and forth between them like we were watching a tennis match.

“Because they were cousins,” Ismail replied in a too-loud voice, shrugging his shoulders as if it were the most logical explanation in the world. The young woman beside us pursed her lips and sucked in air as if through a straw. She raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend, who jerked to attention and tipped the brim of his hat back on his head to get a better look at us.

A tense silence filled the room. All eyes were on us. We were like guests on a daytime talk show whose terrible family secret had just been revealed, and now the audience was awaiting the delicious climax of our despair.

I whipped my head around at him.

“Your mom and your dad were
relate
d
?” I sputtered. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

He winced at my accusatory tone. “I’m sorry,” he turned to me, defensive and apologetic, raising his palms in supplication. “It never came up before.”

That was true. So many nights we had stayed up late, plumbing the depths of one another’s histories as if mining for gold, greedy for the riches we found there, each tiny, glimmering nugget of connection convincing us we were striking it rich. I had wanted to know everything about him—his dreams, heartaches, his secret longings and nearly forgotten memories—and I had asked him every question I could think of, but not once had I thought to inquire about inbreeding. In the harsh light of this courthouse, with my pregnant belly squeezing against my bladder, poking against my ribs, and compressing my lungs—this suddenly seemed like a colossal oversight.

“It was normal there . . .
Everyone
in our town was related . . . They were part of the same tribe—the Suayah tribe,” he fumbled, trying to sound reassuring, reaching out to run his hand down my back. The couple beside us were now leaning slightly forward in their seats. My borrowed maternity shirt rode up, revealing the blue-white translucent globe of my belly, which looked as if it would burst under any more pressure. The minutes stretched out, taut as that skin.

When the clerk called our name again, we went to the window and signed our names on our marriage certificates. “Congratulations,” she said with a tight, glazed smile, slipping the completed paperwork across the counter like a barista might slip us a vanilla latte to go. Then she handed me a small plastic bag, which I took without questioning, and we fled out the door.

Ismail and I did not speak on the ride home. I stared out the window at the walls of scrub pines that hemmed in this narrow road. Ismail always listened to public radio in his car, and while I usually objected to its litany of bad news, its droning analysis of the same intractable problems, this time I was grateful for the chatter. This marriage was not headline news; there were far bigger catastrophes in the world than my morning at the courthouse.

Now I was a wife. I had never liked that word—its harsh, whining sound, its implied servitude. Similarly, I had a visceral reaction to the word
nurse,
though I had loved everything about being a candystriper in high school: wearing the pin-striped uniform with the ruffles like vestigial wings at the shoulders; smoothing those crisp sheets tight across mattresses so that the next patient could slip between them like a letter into an envelope; pouring glasses of ice water for patients whose lips were cracked and dry. I liked to linger in the rooms of invalids who seemed to be suffering from a terminal case of loneliness, who brightened in my presence as if my company were the only medicine they required. I loved the sense of being that helpful, that needed—but the word
nurse
made me think of a saintly woman in white making her endless rounds allowing those in need to suckle the life from her. Her nipples might be cracked and sore, her breasts might hang flaccid at her sides—and still the comfort she offered would never be enough; eventually all that hunger would consume her. No, I would never be a nurse or a wife, I once thought—I would never be ravaged by another’s demands.

I reached into the plastic bag on my lap.
Congratulations on your marriage!
the leaflet read. On the back side was a business reply card, which I could drop in the mail to receive a free trial issue of a women’s home and garden magazine. The bag also contained trial-sized samples of a wife’s tools of the trade: a vacuum-packed sample of instant coffee, a single serving of laundry detergent, shiny envelopes of aspirin and antacid tablets.

I saw myself hunched over the kitchen table in a nubby robe in an empty house, after everyone else who lived there had fled the home in pursuit of meaning and fulfillment. I saw myself drinking instant coffee as the laundry machine shuddered in the background, digging through bathroom drawers for an aspirin to assuage the dull ache of missed opportunities. But then I caught Ismail’s eye, and he squeezed my hand and smiled. His gaze moved from my crestfallen face to the items in my lap and he began to chuckle, and I could not help but laugh ruefully as well. Back at our house, I tossed my wedding gift bag into the garbage.