The Night Counter (15 page)

ONCE SHE WAS
back in her bedroom, Fatima took off her scarf, hung up her black skirt, and put on her pink robe. Scheherazade wrapped herself under the bedcovers, Detroit’s violent wind still coursing through her timeless blood.

Fatima sat at the vanity mirror and brushed out her purple hair. She paused, dusted her hands off on her robe, and carefully opened the mother-of-pearl Koran at her bedside.

“This is Mama’s Koran. She could read it herself,” she said. “My grandfather made a pretty good living with his carpentry, and she was able to go to school until she was fifteen.”

“
Mashallah
,” Scheherazade replied. “God be praised.”

Fatima took out a tattered sepia photo from inside the Koran. “She died of something the doctor found in her bosom, my uncle told me,” she said, and handed Scheherazade the photo, which showed a woman tilling a tobacco field, the sun having given her skin a beating. She wore a long black
thowb
. What little embroidery it had was also in black. The woman looked as if she never had experienced youth.

“I only knew Mama in mourning clothes because someone in her family was always going away and dying,” Fatima continued. She twirled a strand of her hair. “The only thing that ever stayed the same was the house.”

Scheherazade sat up. “Give the house to Laila. A place to relax and pray with her husband when he retires. Perhaps it will be better than their Florida dream.”

“What if the doctors tell her …?” Fatima said. “What if they say it
is back for good? Then she will have to give the house away herself. I don’t want to trouble her with that decision, especially when all four of her heirs are unmarried. Worry is bad for sickness.”

From the vanity, Fatima picked up a black-and-white photo of a girl with two braids running to her knees, standing on tiptoe and struggling to hang up a huge bedsheet on the clothesline.

“So helpful, always,” Fatima said to Laila’s picture. “Does her hair still curl up at the ends?”

Scheherazade was too slow to respond. “It will come back.”

“We never had any time left to even comb the other girls’ hair when I braided Laila’s for school. So thick. So strong. Like mine. But not so black like mine. Almost red,” Fatima said, and then stopped twirling her hair.

Fatima opened the vanity drawer and handed Scheherazade a pair of scissors. “Cut my hair. Short, short.”

Scheherazade leaped out of bed, put the scissors back on the vanity, and stepped away from them. “A woman’s hair is her proof of wealth and happiness,” she said. “It is her crown.”

“Laila is my firstborn.” Fatima forced the scissors back into Scheherazade’s hands. “The first to suck on my breast, the first to graduate from high school, the first to marry, the first to have children. She did everything the right way in the right order. Normal. I have loved watching her go normally through life’s stages. I am blessed I will not live to see her die a normal death. If it comes again,
Allah yustur
, then I want her to not worry about losing her beautiful hair again. She will have mine. Cut it or I’ll do it myself.”

Fatima’s hands were shaking, and so Scheherazade took the scissors, as she did not wish to see any blood. Scheherazade combed out the long hair and then hesitated. But Fatima did not move, and so she lifted the scissors, hesitated once more, and then cut five perfect thick strands of purple. Instinctively, she began braiding them while Fatima watched in silence. She laid them on the vanity just as the door opened.

Amir dropped the pill tray at the sight of Fatima’s braids. Scheherazade got out of the human fray and perched herself on the windowsill.

“Jesus Christ, what have you done, Tayta?” he screamed. He touched the spikes of purple on her head. Fatima pushed his hand away and put the braids in the top drawer of her dresser, caressing them as she laid them down.

“When I go one of these days, don’t look in this drawer,” Fatima ordered. “It has all my underwear.
Aabe
, shame, if people look in my underwear drawer upon my death.”

She was still angry with him, but she had no time for anger. She had spent most of the night thinking of Laila, but Scheherazade had assured her of Laila’s health. She could focus again on what needed to be done for him before her own death.

“You should see someone professional,” Amir said, tentatively coming closer to the purple stubs. “I’m going to call Auntie Hala tomorrow.”

“She is a doctor and a daughter,” Fatima said. “From both directions she will want to find something wrong with me when nothing is wrong with me. It’s the nature of children and doctors.”

She put her scarf on over her stubs. “See, no one will know,” she explained.

“People will think you’re Muslim.”

“I am Muslim.”

“Yeah, but since when are you one of the scarf-wearing ones?” Amir asked.

“My head gets cold on the bus,” Fatima said. “The air-conditioning is twenty-one degrees cooler than outside. It will be even colder without my hair.”

“Look, it’s not so great that you’re walking down the street talking to yourself. Luckily, this is LA., so that’s not going to stop traffic, but the scarf,” Amir said. “Even in this community we’ve got punks. You’re old and vulnerable, and it’s better to pass as Mexican in that condition. Without the scarf, you can pass.”

The color drained from Fatima’s face. “Now you’re insulting our religion,” she fumed. “Every day, are you going to tell me things you’re going to have to apologize for?”

A car braked in front of the house before he could come up with an answer more sophisticated than “no.”

“That’ll be the messenger from Warner Bros. with my audition pages,” Amir said. “This could be the big one; I had to go behind my agent’s back to get it. Omar Sharif, baby.”

He looked at her one more time and picked up the scissors. He left with them, humming the score from
Lawrence of Arabia
.

“Lawrence was not a hero but a betrayer,” Fatima shouted after him. “We should have stayed with the Turks.”

“I was just trying to bring a little music into our lives,” he shouted back.

Fatima reached up to twirl her hair, but it was not there. “
Ya Allah
,” she said, and ran her hands through her stubs with fierce energy.

Scheherazade leaped down from the windowsill. “Here, let me try,” she offered. She fluffed out Fatima’s purple spikes with her more agile fingers. “Better.”

But Fatima decided not to risk looking in the mirror. “Do you think I confused him too much about the underwear drawer?”

“Nothing is more transparent than false modesty,” Scheherazade replied. “It is the first place he will look.”

“He’ll open the underwear drawer, and there will be my gifts to my children.” Fatima nodded. “This is where I will also put the key to the house and Mama’s letters.”

Fatima began taking her underwear out of the drawer and tucking it neatly in the TV credenza. There would be no
aabe
, shame, when Amir opened the drawer, just inheritances. She also would leave Laila her bra. It was still in great shape. It would give her hope that it would hold her breasts whatever they looked like for as long as it had held hers for only $2.99. Laila could always fill it with tissues the way Millie used to do.

Scheherazade was her most gentle as she laid Fatima’s purple locks in the drawer, but Fatima pushed her aside and smoothed out the locks with her hands.

“Close the door, please, and tell me a story,” Scheherazade said.

“No, you tell me of my death,” Fatima demanded just as a car backfired outside, startling her enough to drop one of her braids.

Someone opened and then slammed the car door shut. “Hello, hello, hello,” said a laughing voice from downstairs.

“
Ya Allah
, Soraya is here,” Fatima told Scheherazade, and swiftly picked up the fallen braid.

“Who?”

“Amir’s mother.” Fatima grimaced and forced the underwear drawer shut. “Back from spreading good fortune.”

“Generosity is the hallmark of noble people,” Scheherazade said.

“Generosity should first be revealed at home,” Fatima barked. “She’s always giving big fancy-word excuses for herself: attention deficit disorder, acute adult-onset paranoia, obsessive-compulsive something or other. Just say you are selfish.”

“
Inshallah
, her son is more excited to see her,” Scheherazade said.

“
Minshan Allah
, I hope she didn’t bring one of her boyfriends with her—fifty-four years old and still using the word
boyfriend
,” Fatima lamented as Soraya let out another loud laugh.

“Excuse me, but I have to sleep so she doesn’t talk to me,” Fatima explained. “I want to see my children before I go, but God forgive me, I do not have the energy for this one tonight. And she will not wake me if she sees me sleeping.”

Fatima took off her nearby glasses and got into bed. Scheherazade pulled the covers up for her.

“You tell me a story for a change so I can sleep,” Fatima whispered.

Scheherazade began to tell her of the king who met his death when he obtained by deceitful means a book that contained the secrets of the world. A less greedy but wiser man had dressed each page with poison, and when the king licked his fingers to turn the pages, he learned the secrets, but it was too late for him to make use of them. Soon Fatima dozed, for she had listened to this story as a child nearly as many times as Scheherazade had endured her stories of Deir Zeitoon.

Fatima heard Scheherazade sneak out to see the woman with the
laugh so determined to envelop everything. It was a laugh Fatima could still hear in her sleep, a laugh that now prevented her from asking Scheherazade about her own death. This child had always timed her entrances and exits badly.

SORAYA LAUGHED BRAVELY
as Amir stood in the doorway glaring. She was dressed in a long Paisley dress she had purchased at the Indian store just for the occasion of seeing her son and perhaps her mother. She had accessorized with hoop earrings from the African store and an electric red scarf that revealed the length of her pitch-black hair underneath, hair as long as Fatima’s had been just a couple hours earlier. Since her mother had moved into this house, Soraya felt less kumbaya here.

“Hey, baby cakes,” she said with an unconscious question mark. Everything she said came with a question mark, even when she was feeling almost confident, which was never the case in front of her family, particularly Amir. Years of reading
A Course in Miracles
, daylong meditations in which she chanted “I am the beloved,” and attendance at several uplifting sermons at the Agape Spiritual Center had helped her a little, but not much. “I checked the mail for you. Look who sent you ten dollars.”

She laughed more loudly still and handed him the only piece of mail. From Ibrahim, of course, but twice as thick as usual. Maybe cash this time instead of a check. Whatever. He tossed it on the desk as Soraya followed him in. When he turned around, she went in for a hug. Amir pulled away after counting off five seconds and patting her back, which she had told
him years before was the minimum level of politeness to maternal figures. At the time, she had been talking about how she treated Fatima.

“Tayta cut off her hair,” Amir said when he let go.

“Don’t be silly, sweetie,” she replied, feeling that she sounded too much like the mother of a small child.

“Go up and see the disaster for yourself.”

“Okay, sure, after I buy nuclear weapons stock,” she retorted. “Stop saying things just for attention. You have your acting for that.”

There. Now she at least sounded like an adult talking to her teenager, if not her adult child. Right?

“Nuclear weapons are not publicly traded,” Amir mumbled. “How long are you staying this time?”

“There’s a cute guy in the car,” she offered.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Not for me, but for you, sweetheart,” Soraya said. “He’s only twenty-seven years old. My cutoff is thirty.”

She waited for Amir to join her in laughter, but today he was putting up a tough fight against her humor, the only thing on which they usually agreed.

“Everyone in this family is a freaking matchmaker,” he said.

“Then why am I still single?” She laughed. “Anyway, he and I are going to Tijuana to work at the new spa hotel where everyone’s going for cheaper cosmetic and dental surgery and other what have you health issues. He’s an aromatherapist, so his skills are going to be needed down there as much as my psychic powers.”

“My mother wants me to have a relationship with someone who profits off of desperate people as much as she does?” Amir asked.

Soraya ignored the slur on her profession. “You have a fear of commitment, so the distance would allow you to nurture the partnership slowly while you tame the fear demon in you, and maybe taking in Tayta was an excuse to stay out of life,” she suggested, trying to sum up the years of their dysfunction in one modified zinger sentence from Dr. Howard,
who had been her favorite therapist. Longer explanations forced her to question herself rather than him.

“Are you coming or going, Mom? I’m busy,” Amir said. “I’m preparing for an audition. The producer said it’s a role to die for, but he wouldn’t tell me the details. Word on the street is they’re looking for the next Omar Sharif to play Omar Sharif in the Omar Sharif biopic.”

“I like Danny Thomas better,” Soraya tossed out, unable to think of any other nonthreatening Arab who ever had been on TV.

“Danny Thomas is just about you idolizing fatherhood,” Amir said.

“Is not,” Soraya said. “I’m perfectly fine with how emotionally absent my father was. So there.”

“Whatever. A mother’s job is not to pick fights with her kids.” Amir shrugged. “It’s supposed to be the other way around.”

“You’re so conventional,” she said. “Could I use the bathroom?”

Amir shrugged. “You came all this way to go to the bathroom?”

“No, I forgot my crystal ball here,” she replied. “When I was on my way up to the Vajrapani Institute Tibetan Buddhist Retreat Center. Remember? It does help to accessorize one’s own fortune-telling skills. I also need to pee.”

Amir started up the stairs and then paused. “So did you call the sperm bank again like I asked you to? Maybe they’d release the information to you, since they won’t to me.”

Oh, Goddess, not this again. Wasn’t it enough that no mother had gone to greater lengths to have him, especially at that time? She had been a pioneer in this type of motherhood because she had wanted him so desperately. But she knew even better than he did that she had done nothing in his life to convince him of that. “I’ll try again, Son,” she promised.

“I’d appreciate that,” he said. Then he put his finger to her lips. “Be quiet so we don’t wake her up. I don’t feel like listening to her tell you how it’s your fault I think I’m gay.”

“Me, either,” she agreed. “Hopefully, she’s fallen asleep dreaming of Lebanon: ‘Oh, the figs in Deir Zeitoon at this time of year.’”

Amir didn’t join her in mimicking Fatima’s grandiose talk of Lebanon, which had been a bonding ritual for them over the years.

“Did you tell Tayta about Auntie Laila?” he asked. “She was talking to herself about her tonight.”

“What kind of uncentered creature do you think I am that I would subject her to information like that? I only spread good things.”

Soraya prided herself on being the keeper of all secrets. Her siblings— and anyone who came to her for a reading—vaguely hoped she really did have psychic powers; that was how they justified telling her things they didn’t tell anyone else. But the main reason everyone told her everything was that she never stayed in one place long enough to be bored enough to start gossiping. She was sure she loved her family, and from a distance she felt no pressure from that. When Amir was a child, she would call from whatever state fair or international festival she was working and tell him what the kids there were like. She was great with other people’s kids because they weren’t expecting maternal instinct—or anything else—from her.

Amir interrupted her thoughts. “Wait until you see what I did with the bathroom,” he said.

“I can’t imagine any other place I’d rather pee.” She sensed her son’s expectations, as if her motherhood still held value despite his better sense. She followed him up the stairs, expecting more chrome. Instead, she found herself standing in front of a bathtub surrounded by mosaic tiles, lantern lamps, and dark marble countertops. “It’s beautiful, Son,” she marveled.

Amir grinned, and she felt slightly vindicated, especially as she was being honest about the bathroom. On the way downstairs, he paused in front of Fatima’s room. The door was open, and Fatima was sleeping in her pink robe.

“Let’s get going,” Soraya whispered. “We’ll wake her up.”

As she turned back toward the stairs, he shoved her inside.

She tried to go back out, but his arms blocked the doorway. Then he gave her another shove toward Fatima. She looked back, hoping her son would show her some mercy, but he pointed to her to go on. She tiptoed to Fatima’s bed to kiss her. Her lips nearly had touched her mother’s
cheek when she recoiled at the purple stubs. She rushed out of the room, and this time Amir allowed it.

“She’s never cut her hair as long as I’ve been alive,” said Soraya. She clung to her son as they went back downstairs. “Maybe I should go talk to her.”

Luckily, Amir didn’t expect that much from her.

“See you next time, Mom,” he said.

“And my crystal ball?” Soraya asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Amir said. “I put it in the guest room because it kept reflecting off the chrome.”

“What guest room?” Soraya said. “Isn’t Tayta staying in the guest room?”

“Tayta in a guest room? No, she would never impose like that,” Amir scoffed. “Once she arrived, it became Fatima’s room and she started calling my office the guest room.”

This time he waited for her to join him in laughing, but she couldn’t. Laughter was impossible with the image of her mother’s stubs now the prime visual in her cluttered mind.

Amir went back upstairs, and Soraya told herself to “inhale, exhale, inhale,” taking in breaths so big that they blew Ibrahim’s envelope off Amir’s desk. She picked it up and, as if it might hurt her, put it down quickly, leaning it against the old photo of Fatima in her wedding dress, Fatima with her beautiful hair. That photo sat next to Amir’s laptop. His Yahoo! account was on the screen.

She was his mother; she could peek at his e-mail, right? As she read the open e-mail, she pulled out a stack of cash from her purse and counted out forty-three hundred-dollar bills. Amir mocked her work, but she got more gigs than he did.

Soraya had put the e-mail list together for Amir. She reread his e-mail. Her eyes then focused on the picture of Fatima in her wedding dress.

“PS,” she added, “she cut off all her hair.”

The young man in the car honked, and Soraya put the $4,300 in an envelope in front of the envelope from Ibrahim just as Amir came down with the crystal ball.

“So you don’t want to come out and meet the guy?” Soraya asked.

Amir shook his head and took off his Polo sweater and handed it to her with the crystal ball. “In case you get cold,” he explained.

“Yes, Scheherazade the Magnificent always likes to be warm,” Soraya said, using her fortune-telling name.

“Wait a second,” Amir said. He opened the overflowing freezer, and several Tupperware containers came crashing down. “She keeps making me food, thinking I’m going to starve when she’s gone if I’m not married.”

Soraya almost could laugh again, and this time he almost joined her. “Anyway, the stuffed eggplants are veggie, so take them,” Amir said, and handed her a Tupperware container. “I’m supposed to serve them at her condolences. It’s all in her funeral instructions. But what if she lives for another ten years? Freezer burn.”

She held the freezer door open so that he could shove the containers back in. Together they slammed the door shut and laughed.

“Wait a minute. She gave you her funeral instructions?” Soraya asked. She felt sweat form on her upper lip.

“In an envelope bigger than one of your wads of cash,” Amir said. “The menu alone could feed most of West Hollywood. The dry cleaner
wrote it all out for her. He’s Korean, so there are a lot of spelling mistakes, but it’s pretty elaborate. A lot of the crap I’ve been putting up with lately is morbid.”

“She’s a Pisces,” Soraya said, finding that her mother’s obsession with death, even at the age of eighty-five, needed a rational explanation. “You just have to tell her things that will make her think she’s happy. And happiness is about thinking tomorrow will be good and next week even better.”

Soraya first had developed her psychic powers trying to make Fatima happy. Then she had realized it wasn’t just her mother but the whole world that wanted to see a perfect vision of the future. Now the daily grind of keeping her mother happy was her son’s.

She touched Amir’s cheek. “I love you, my gorgeous baby boy.” This was the only thing she ever said to him without sounding unsure. She had been sure about having him but ever since his birth had been unsure of everything else. Whenever she quit this Mexico job, she decided, she would come back to the States and really try to find out more about the sperm donor. He deserved that much. And who knew—maybe the sperm donor might want to know what a great guy he’d helped put in this world.

She walked to the car, blowing kisses all the way. The driver opened the door for her. He was cute, and she hoped Amir saw him. She looked up at her mother’s bedroom window. An envelope of funeral instructions and purple stubs were not good signs. They bothered her so much that she hadn’t even asked Amir if Fatima had listed her in the instructions as one of the people who were to wash her body for burial. She wiped the sweat off her lip. She was glad Amir was going to tell her brother and sisters about her mother’s hair. Its beauty was one of the family’s few givens.

She waved again as they drove away, leaving behind the boy whose future she always left in someone else’s hands—someone who, for all Soraya had mocked her, made a much better mother, at least for Amir. That vision had come to her the moment she and her mother first had laid eyes
on her beautiful baby together. It was in Fatima’s arms, shrouded under her veil of purple hair, that her son finally had calmed down enough from his long trip out of her womb to fall asleep.