Talking through the Door: An Anthology of Contemporary Middle Eastern American Writing

E l m a z A b i n a d e r

21 E l m A z A b i n A d E r Mothers and Daughters 1918 Mayme tucks her dress beneath her thin legs and sits down. The other passengers on the ship around her scrape tin spoons across metal plates. She slowly rubs the left side of her face and closes her eyes. Now she can think. People have stopped moving around; she has stopped moving around. Although she needs food, she does not want to eat. She prefers to sit, to let her back curve in a posture she would correct on her daughters—to drop her head slightly, to not look at anything very hard; to place her hands together, not in prayer. The deck rocks beneath her long flat feet. Her daughters, Zina and Camille, sit quietly on the bed above hers. Soon the lower deck will be dark. Boats stir a sickness inside Mayme, and the view from the rail petrifies her with its infinity. The passengers cannot watch her down here; the girls will not see. Lie down girls, sleep. Sleep for days. Hold your shiny rosaries of olive seeds and close your eyes. Mayme cherishes solitude and quiet. She did not have it in Abdelli, not even in the old days before the war. When they moved into the big house, she imagined she would sit on the veranda sipping tea and watching the water, but she did not. If she could have escaped through an open window for a little while, just a little while, and disappeared while Shebl’s friends drank black coffee and smoked Turkish pipes; if she could have shrunk and crept along the roads like a mole, she would have loved her home. In the early years of their T a l k i n g T h r o u g h T h e D o o r 22 marriage, she liked company, and set food for everyone at a moment’s notice. After all, she was the sheik’s wife, and from her hands came plates of stuffed grape leaves, stacks of homemade bread. She placed a diamond of baklava on each plate. They called her Sheika and thanked her. She bowed, smiled, and backed into the kitchen, never speaking or mingling with them as they sat on their chairs watching her come and go. Now without light or examination, she pauses, stops, stares as she could not in the busy “palaces” in Abdelli, in the basements and ruins she was sent to live in, or in the shanty in Batroun, where she could not look beyond the flicker of the fire. Now Mayme is taking her daughters away, and that’s all that matters. No one will notice if she rests for just a little while, or if she remembers, allows herself to think back and remember the faces, hands, and voices of the dead. And when the deck has gone quiet, Mayme will think of her nieces, the children of Shebl’s brother Yousef. His wife—she forgot her name, although they spoke often—had run away, leaving the two daughters on their own. They were not only the same ages as Mayme’s own daughters, they had the same names, except in that family, Camille was the elder and Zina the younger. No one could have known the girls would die. Not the women who had named them the same, nor the fathers who lived in America; not the mother who had left them, nor the mother who stayed, and maybe not even their uncle, Rachid, the new sheik. Could anything have been done? When they try to explain, people will say: The girls were born into a hard time—it was World War I, the Turks occupied Lebanon, and those who weren’t dying of starvation were ill from the Spanish flu. Everyone counted these events in his history. Mayme knew to keep her daughters close to her, to veil them in her skirts, to create chores for them so they would not stray and find a body or touch food that was contaminated. Mayme made them sing. Love singing, girls. Listen to my scratchy voice as I beat the bread. Repeat and sing. After the wife’s disappearance, the nieces had no mother to whisper to them, to take them away from the sickness, or to take E l m A z A b i n...