A Real Marriage

She met amir in May at the Friendly Market convenience store, where he worked and where she was buying Miller Lite with her roommates, and by July she asked him to marry her. His travel visa had expired two years before, and now INS wanted to send him back to Morocco. Supposedly this had nothing to do with the fact that he was young, male, and Muslim, but Abigail was suspicious, and she liked the idea that marrying her boyfriend could help combat discrimination. Besides, Amir was the only person who had been remotely interested in taking her virginity, and she was twenty-one years old. Letting him leave the country could only be a mistake.

“It doesn’t have to be a real marriage,” she said. “We don’t have to tell anyone outside of the judge or whoever it is that does it, but if we got married, you could stay.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“It doesn’t have to sound right,” she said. “It has to sound practical.”

They were sitting on the duct-taped leather couch in his apartment, watching Judge Judy and enjoying their last hour alone before Amir’s Palestinian roommate, Rayed, would come home. Rayed was nice enough, but he made Abigail uncomfortable. When he wasn’t cooking a greasy lamb dish and crooning along to Arabic music, he was staring at her boobs and asking her why more American girls weren’t good like she was.

“We need to take care with this decision,” Amir said.

She shrugged. Her heart was racing. From the beginning, she had suspected that she liked Amir more than he liked her, but she was hoping he wouldn’t notice. “I’m offering to marry you. If you don’t want to marry me, just say so.”

Abigail would graduate in August. She had finished the course work for her communications degree but hadn’t yet passed the swim test required by UNC for graduation. She had already failed it twice. This time, she was taking a swimming class. Her mother, who worked at the post office in Hickory, had told her to use the last semester wisely before she wound up working a crap job with an idiot boss, but Abigail couldn’t figure out what type of job she wanted, let alone how she might qualify herself to get it. She had majored in communications because she thought taking classes with cheerful people who wore Easter egg-colored sweaters might make her friendlier, but it hadn’t worked. Surrounding herself with the optimistic just made her more anxious and depressed.

The only time she felt something close to happiness was with her new roommates, whose spare room she was subletting for the summer—three willowy philosophy majors who spent most of their time smoking pot and watching TV ironically. Unlike her mother and her college friends, who had all graduated and moved away, the philosophy majors seemed to think she was doing just fine. She had lost her virginity—they’d taped her underwear to the fridge with a Post-it on the crotch that said, “De-virginized!”—and she was learning to swim. “One thing at a time,” they said. “You don’t want a corporate job anyway.”

Before the week was up, Amir called and told her they could get married but only if she took it seriously.

“This is what my mother thinks,” he said. “I agree also. Marriage should not be convenient.”

“Marriage should not just be convenient,” Abigail said. “Besides, your mother married a stranger when she was fifteen.”

“Yes,” Amir said. “My mother who has been married for thirty-four years.” Whenever Amir talked about his family, it made Abigail feel proud of him and also jealous. His biggest dream was to return to Marrakech with years of savings and make everyone’s life easier. Abigail had a six-year-old half-brother she barely knew, had never met her father, and couldn’t spend more than four hours with her mother unless they were both drunk.

“Thursday’s fine,” she said...