The Night Counter (10 page)

AMIR STEPPED INTO
Fatima’s room and recoiled from the funk and haze of smoke over his grandmother. He went to the window and leaned out.

“Screw you, asshole,” Amir yelled at his soap opera star neighbor’s house. “Smoke whatever the hell you want in your bedroom but close the windows so you don’t kill my grandma.” He didn’t completely recognize the smell. The jerk must have upgraded from low-rent weed with his fat new SAG checks.

“Sorry about the stink, Tayta,” Amir said. Her pale green eyes were oddly bright this night, and she didn’t seem quite as pissed at him as before.

“That’s all the sorry I get?” Fatima pouted and started twirling her hair on her finger.

“Jesus Christ, give me a second,” Amir said. “I came up to say I was sorry about tonight’s engagement dinner.”

“You should have been wearing your orange shirt,” Fatima replied.
“Tighter shirts to show that you have a body that can work a good day and provide for a family Your name means ‘prince,’ and you should dress like one. No more queen stuff.”

Queen stuff? Fatima often surprised him with her unexpected knowledge of certain words.

“And what is this for?” Amir asked. He handed her the envelope with her funeral instructions.

“Marrying that girl tonight was the last thing I was ever going to ask you to do,” she said. “Now this is.”

“Take it back. I won’t need it for a long time.”

“Not if you keep doing what you did to me tonight,” Fatima answered.

“Never again,” Amir promised. “Take back the envelope.”

Fatima held up her hand. “We’ll just have to start all over on Wednesday with Tiffany.”

Jesus Christ, no, Amir thought.

“She’s an American, but we don’t have time to be picky. She’s a wedding photographer I met at the Iranian Jew’s store—he’s the only one that sells
jeranic
, green plums, and good pistachios.”

Fatima always justified the store owner to Amir, as if Amir might accuse her of supporting Israel’s occupation because of her shopping practices. She had discovered the store on her way back from a memorial service in Westwood, at the same cemetery where Marilyn Monroe was buried. Now she managed to make a side trip there after any funeral, regardless of location, to buy Amir “real food.”

“I was very subtle with this Tiffany,” Fatima continued. “I did not mention marriage. I have convinced her to take your picture for your acting hobby. She agreed in exchange for dinner. Either the two of you will fall in love tomorrow or we will send the photos to Zade’s computer love-making business.”

“Matchmaking, Tayta. Matchmaking, not lovemaking.” Seventy years in this country and it was amazing what words she didn’t know. “I’ll be nice to Tiffany, and you keep this.” He tossed the envelope onto the bed,
and it rested atop the bundle of Fatima’s mother’s letters. The letters were more faded than the last time he had seen them, but he remembered all the times Fatima used to flip through them in Detroit when she was sad, as if she could read them.

“They’re for Nadia when I’m gone,” Fatima explained.

“You’ll outlive us all.”

“Don’t say such wicked things,” she admonished.

“I’m sorry again, Tayta.”

He kissed her hand and held it for a few minutes. Then he went downstairs without taking back the envelope. In the kitchen, he rinsed the hummus out of his beard and hung it up to dry. He would make a point of not wearing the beard for Tiffany. He had always hoped that he would not fall in love until Fatima was gone, as she would not like his taste in a partner. However, he wasn’t in a hurry to be in love or for her to die.

In fact, in the last couple of days he had learned a lot from Fatima’s conversations with herself. He could picture Nadia in her diplomatic speech pleading for Elias’s release. But he couldn’t see Lena in any wedding dress. It would be hard for a guy to get close to someone who never told anyone what she was really thinking. Amir, unlike his cousins and most of his aunts and uncles, had lived with Lena for many years, as they both had been raised in Fatima’s house at the same time, the favorite grandson and the youngest child. Lena had been Amir’s baby-sitter, had taken him to
Star Wars
movies the very day they came out, and had bought him anything he wanted with the money she made at McDonald’s during high school.

Fatima needed her kids, and he could use the break. Lena was his best bet because she never said no. Even on the days when Fatima would say that she herself would drive Amir to school, Lena never said no. Fatima would drive the whole way, telling him that if the cops stopped them and asked for her license, he had to pretend that his appendix was bursting and they needed to get to the hospital. Fatima couldn’t admit to anyone, not even the Department of Motor Vehicles, that she couldn’t read, and
so she had never taken a driver’s exam. Still, Fatima’s driving beat going to school with Ibrahim, who never said a word.

Amir sat down in front of the computer.

Why would Lena do him a favor? The last time he had even bothered to befriend her had been when he was looking for an agent.

He picked up a mustache and stuck it onto his face. He looked at his reflection on the computer screen and then at the picture of Fatima on his desk.

“By the name of Allah, woman, I will cut off your balls and feed them to the goats,” he declared. “My camels will curse you from hell.”

He reached down for a script and checked the line. Yeah, he was ready for his audition tomorrow. Saddam Hussein as a young man. Jesus Christ, he needed a better agent. Or a better heritage. Or the Omar Sharif audition.

IF AMIR HAD
been looking out his window instead of at himself, he would have seen Fatima under the fruitless fig tree, her pink robe now tucked into sweatpants, bobby pin readjusted to hold up her purple hair. Scheherazade’s special cigarette had left her awake—and hungry.

“Psst,” Scheherazade whispered from atop the neighboring eucalyptus tree. “Where are you going in this desert wind? My midriff is shivering, and I’m not even making love.”

“I just received a call that Suheir Lababidi has passed,” Fatima whispered, holding up her black skirt. “And the dry cleaner has free doughnuts.”

Scheherazade hummed a Samarqand folk tune as she climbed down from the eucalyptus tree. “I’m hungry, too,” she decided. “I was looking for a fig on the fig tree.”

“Be careful,
dyiri balik
, don’t break any of its branches,” Fatima pleaded. “I brought that tree all the way from Lebanon.”

“Lebanon?”

“Well, Detroit,” Fatima clarified. “Ibrahim planted it in our backyard in Detroit with seeds from Mama. I had my oldest girl ship it from Detroit and replanted it here. Amir had to take down a persimmon tree for it.”

“Why aren’t there any figs on it for me to eat?” Scheherazade complained.

“I could never make it fruit.” Fatima sighed. “But Detroit’s soil was very hospitable to
the fe’oos
and
baeli
that I grew.”

“Why leave Detroit, then?” Scheherazade asked. “Nations have been destroyed for valuable soil.”

“After the divorce, I didn’t want to buy another house in Detroit, when I had a perfectly good one in Lebanon,” Fatima explained. “I thought I’d just spend a couple of weeks with Amir and then move back home to Lebanon. Then September 11 happened, and I didn’t want Amir to be alone in such terrible times.”

“But of course,” Scheherazade said, nodding as if she believed her. She sniffed the air. “Do I smell cucumbers?”

“They’re in Amir’s back garden,” Fatima said. “Let me use your arm, and I’ll take you back there. I don’t want my grandfather’s cane to get muddy.”

“You know you can make it without your cane or my arm,” Scheherazade said.

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d carried ten children on your hip for so long that it wore your bones out.”

“Fine, use my arm,” Scheherazade said. “
Yallah
, I’m very hungry.”

Fatima held on tightly as they approached the patch of vegetation in which she took so much pride. She had spent too much time in that room with Scheherazade, as if it were the only place stories could be told. There was no reason not to come to the garden at night, when Los Angeles’s cool breezes let its fragrances waft.

“
Kusa
, eggplant, mint for salad, tomatoes,” Scheherazade marveled, delicately walking through the garden. “Everything to make the summer dishes.”

Scheherazade plucked a young cucumber and bit into it.

“
Zaatar
for the
labneh
,” Fatima added, holding up a sprig of thyme to Scheherazade’s nose. “When I came here, Amir already had the garden. He said he had designed it with seeds from our garden in Detroit. A good boy. A boy who should have a wife.”

Fatima had created her garden in Detroit with the seeds of her mother’s garden in Lebanon, seeds that her mother had tucked into the cedar chest for her on the day of her first wedding. Somehow Fatima had
made the garden flourish, but she had had a harder time re-creating Lebanon in Detroit than Amir had had re-creating her Detroit garden in Los Angeles. Both he and the vegetables were in their natural environment in West Hollywood, but Fatima didn’t permit that thought to take hold in her mind.

“Amir even added a lemon tree, which we did not have in Detroit,” Fatima boasted. “The house in Lebanon has three lemon trees in the back. Come on, the bus will be here in five minutes.”

They walked arm in arm with the only sound between them the growling of Fatima’s stomach. At the MTA #4 bus stop, the homeless man with the dimple looked up from his smoke. “Out late tonight,” he noted.

Fatima frowned at him before boarding the bus. She let go of Scheherazade’s arm to show the driver her senior citizen card. The short ladies holding bulky tote bags on their laps rattled a variety of Spanish niceties to Fatima. “
Sí
,” Fatima responded. They were as young as her daughters but too old to be cleaning houses, which was what Amir told her they did when she asked why so many of them got picked up at houses so much bigger than his.

She sat far away from two teenage boys with nose rings conversing in a language that required only two words—
dude
and
cool
—and the gesticulating of their hands and heads in a pattern that resembled wild animals more than people.

She didn’t want to appear even crazier than they, yet there was so little time to waste. She could sit and fret about Amir and the house. Or she could tell Scheherazade more about her two husbands so that Scheherazade could reveal her method of death and therefore let her know how much time she actually had left to fret. Everyone on the bus would think she was talking to herself, but what was wrong with her being just one more crazy person on the bus? It was not like she’d be riding it many more days, anyway. And there were no Arab ladies onboard to gossip about her tomorrow at Suheir Lababidi’s funeral. She turned to Scheherazade to begin the story of the man who brought her to America. “This Los Angeles does
not even have a football team, so Marwan would not have liked it,” she started. “They try to be beautiful with their beach, but this is no Detroit.”

“As my father the
wazir
, the minister of state, used to say, the people of Mecca know their streets best.” Scheherazade nodded.

“Detroit’s streets are not mine, but still it is the best city in America,” Fatima continued. “When I arrived in New York with Marwan, it wasn’t paved with gold, like Mama had heard it would be. But I had never seen buildings so tall, so tall that I thought they might have touched God when their tops disappeared into the clouds. I was sure humans could not live so high up in the sky. I thought something so far up could not stand by itself for so long, and I kept covering my head, anticipating one to fall. When I finally opened my eyes and looked ahead instead of up, people stood in long lines for bread that was hard and thick, and shop clerks chased kids in rags for stealing apples. Big, big signs with lights advertised things I’d never heard of, and the streets were filled with hundreds of motorcars, not just one like Deir Zeitoon, and women wore funny hats, and so did the men, even Marwan, who said it was what gentlemen did.”

Fatima did not know that in telling this story of America she had reverted to English. The black and white people on the bus listened to Fatima as she told a story they should have gotten from their own grandparents. Whether the Mexican lady—who, to the passengers, seemed like the direct recipient of Fatima’s words—understood her or just pitied her solitude, she took Fatima’s hand and patted it comfortingly in her lap.

“It takes time to love a place, just as it takes time to love a man,” Scheherazade said. “Did you learn to love Marwan by the time you got to New York?”

Fatima shook her head, and the Mexican lady patted her hand again. “We stayed only one day in New York—with a cousin of Marwan’s and his six kids,” she continued. “The cousin didn’t have a job. He had lost his job at a Syrian silk factory that made Japanese robes for Japan. All the factories were closed because Marwan said the country was depressed. The entire way on the train to Detroit it was depressed. But then in Detroit
there was life, smoke pouring out of buildings so big and long that I thought they could reach Deir Zeitoon. And everyone had jobs.”

“Just like Marwan.” Scheherazade smiled.

“Almost.” Fatima sighed. “On the boat, Marwan told me that because of the depressing times, Mr. Ford had let him go when he went to Lebanon because so many other people needed his job. But when we arrived at the train station in Detroit, the first thing Ibrahim told Marwan was that General Motors was hiring again to build machines for the war in Europe, and
inshallah
, his friend there could get Marwan a job.”

The MTA #4 bus came to a stop, and Fatima motioned to Scheherazade to help her up. Several passengers took it as a signal for them, and the two boys with nose rings quit bobbing their heads to silent music and assisted her down the steps. Others clapped as she left, as if thanking her for the story.

“
Sí
,” Fatima said, and waved goodbye. She took Scheherazade’s arm, and a smile folded up her face until it took up half of it.

“What’s so funny?” Scheherazade wondered.

“I was just remembering how Ibrahim met us at the station holding two blocks of melting ice,” Fatima said. “It was the hottest summer Detroit had ever had, and I was wearing a big wool coat, as Mama had heard that in America sometimes people actually froze solid. The ice felt so nice even though it was melting all over my coat. Ibrahim asked after everyone in Deir Zeitoon in Arabic much better than Marwan’s. It felt good to be able to really talk. Betsy, Ibrahim’s wife before me, was there, too. Marwan said that Betsy and I would be great friends. She hugged me when she saw me, but I couldn’t speak English. The longer we stayed with them, the less friendly she got. Marwan said it was my imagination, as did Ibrahim later. I think that she was probably in love with someone else and worried that, being a woman, it wouldn’t take me long to figure it out. I think she thought I would tell Ibrahim if I knew. I don’t know to this day if she ever did tell him before she left him. I never asked him about her.”

By the time Fatima finished telling Scheherazade about the first time she had laid eyes on Ibrahim, they had reached the dry cleaners. Fatima
handed the balding owner her skirt. “Mr. Kim, I have condolences tomorrow, so I’ll wait.”

“No problem, Mrs. Abdullah,” Mr. Kim said. “Anything you would like me to add to your funeral instructions?”

“No, thank you,” Fatima said. “I’ve got other things to get to now.”

He nodded and pushed a box of doughnuts over to Fatima. She took two powdered sugars.

She led Scheherazade to a secluded veranda table at the café next door. Fatima plunged into her doughnut, letting the powdered sugar coat her mouth and nose. She offered Scheherazade a bite, but Scheherazade was drawn to the café’s young male patrons’ physiques. Fatima snapped her fingers.

“Aren’t you the one that wanted a story about
my
men?” Fatima reminded her.

“Right. So while his wife daydreamed of someone else, Ibrahim helped Marwan get a job to give his new bride—you—a good life,” Scheherazade said, and attempted to wipe Fatima’s face clean of powdered sugar.

“It was Marwan who got Ibrahim his job with Mr. Ford and took care of him when he first came to America,” Fatima explained through another mouthful of doughnut. “So Ibrahim got Marwan the job at GM soon after we arrived, but then later Ibrahim felt even more obligated to Marwan.”

“You mean Marwan then got Ibrahim a better job at the GM plant?” Scheherazade asked.

“No, no, that job was terrible enough for Marwan,” Fatima remembered. “Poor man. He had already bought the house in Dearborn because Mr. Ford had told his men before the depressing times that they would work at River Rouge forever. But Marwan drove all the way to GM in Flint every Sunday night—seventy-five miles away, and cars weren’t what they are now and no radio in it for distraction—and for only twenty dollars a week instead of thirty dollars like before. He would come back late Friday nights and just stare at the walls, maybe listen to the baseball
game. Which is what I did all the nights he stayed at his cousin’s house in Flint—ten men from Deir Zeitoon lived in that house during the week. He told me that at the factory he would do the same thing over and over for hours and hours, always bent over as his back ached him if he stood straight. Sometimes he came home with really big cuts all over. I thought he was clumsy at first. But once when Ibrahim stopped by to read a letter from Mama, he told me that Marwan worked with very dangerous machines.”

“So then Ibrahim felt guilty about getting Marwan a bad job,” Scheherazade interrupted.

“No, no,
hamara
, Ibrahim showed me then that he had cuts like that, too. More than half the men had lost their jobs in the last seven years, so they were all happy to have income again,” Fatima said, and bit into her second doughnut. “But Marwan knew it was wrong to treat workers that way. So he joined the union. It was a new organization to protect the workers and make sure they got fair money. After I had been in America just five months, the men said they refused to work until things got better. Marwan was never home even on weekends after that, always out organizing.”

“You must have missed Deir Zeitoon the most then,” Scheherazade said.

Fatima nodded. “Millie would invite me for coffee with the other wives, but I didn’t feel comfortable with no English—except around Millie alone,” she said. “None of them knew how to make real coffee anyway except for the Greek lady two houses down. The only time I laughed in those days was when Ibrahim would come by to read a letter from Mama and tell me some new joke he had heard at the Syrian grocery. One day, Ibrahim came to my house and didn’t smile as usual. He told me that Marwan was in the hospital. The police had shot at the strikers with something called buckshot because the workers were throwing iron nuts, bolts, and milk bottles at them and squirting them with water. And Marwan’s arm was cut so deep, it was a miracle they were able to sew it together again.”