Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction

My Elizabeth

MY ELIZABETH
DIANA ABU-JABER I tipped my forehead to the window and watched as we passed another Indian, black-bronze in the sun, thumb in the air. I was twelve and Uncle Orson was six years older. We’d started our trip in New York City, and I hadn’t paid much attention until about two days in, when we began passing long wings of pivot irrigation and the sky started to look like it had been scoured with salt water. We passed power lines that stood like square-shouldered figures at attention, past grain and silo storage bins, glowing aluminum with pointed tops. At the time I didn’t know the names of any of those things; I’d never known that America unraveled as you moved west, until it ran straight as a pulled strand and the trees shrank back into acres of sorghum, beans, corn, and wheat. I stared through the truck window at things mysterious as letters in a foreign language. My uncle’s name had been Omar Bin Nader, but when he first pulled up to my father’s apartment on Central Park, he introduced himself to me as Orson. For the rest of the ride out to Wyoming, he cursed his luck, having to transport this newly orphaned niece and all of her father’s worldly goods. Then he would stop himself and apologize , saying, nothing personal, and hold my head against his chest. I slept curled on the wide front seat of the cab. The sound of the engine went on and on. It reminded me of my toy train, an electric engine that had run a two-tiered figure eight around the hall outside our bathroom. It chugged and was painted red with “X & Y Railroad” in white on both sides. I used to watch it with Baba when I’d come home from school and he’d be waiting for me in his bathrobe and 135 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 135 slippers and smelling of wrinkle-your-nose. He said to me, “Someday we will climb on to this train and I’ll drive us home.” We passed square hay bales, plumes of irrigation water, torn tires, more trucks: Peterbilt, Kenworth, Mack, Fruehauf, Great Dane. Orson pointed out shacks with tires on the roof, sunflowers pointed toward dusk, the road ringing like an anvil. Near dawn a train horn woke me, mournful and steady. My father had gone away to work on the train; he told me so just before he left. That was why Orson had to come to get me. Baba would be spending his days on the tracks, cross-stitching the same country that Orson and I covered. New York was not a place to raise children, Umptie Nabila said. Umptie Nabila had become “Great Aunt Winifred” since five Easters ago when we’d last met. What’s more, she’d thought it over, and it seemed my name was now Estelle. “Estelle,” I said, turning the name before me. In the following days I often could not remember to answer to it. I put the name on in the morning like a wig. Before long, though, I became accustomed to it. My former name grew faint, then fell from memory. The land around us was spiced with yellow wildflowers. There were men crawling the construction troughs along the highway, veils of dust and diesel smoke, and grasslands bearing distant ships of mountains. A sign said, “Welcome to Maybell, pop. 437.” My aunt and cousin lived beside a freight yard; all evening long it rang metal on metal. There were yellow-sided Union Pacific cars, railroad ties, pallets, and stacks of lumber. Past the yard was a field of horses where the colts slept on the ground under their mothers’ gazes. By day, I could look out my window and see the train on the horizon, vanishing into the earth and spilling out the other side. Sometimes the mountains were gray, red lightning scratched the sky. I walked past sandstone hills dusted with sage, rows of snow fences, bikers, vans with MIA/POW bumper stickers. The grass gave way to quills of prairie brush, desert green, and downy cows. It was the 136
DIANA ABU-JABER 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 136 top of the world, mountains curling at...