“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s too bad he’ll miss the play.”
“That’s how it is when you run a practice,” my sister said coolly.
I turned my attention to the program booklet. Sleeping Beauty, the title said in gold lettering. I skipped past the director’s introduction, the donors’ list, the appeals for fundraising for next year’s performance, and looked for the twins’ names on the cast list. Aida and Zaid were to play night watchmen. “Do they have any lines?” I asked.
“No.”
“How come?”
Salma shrugged.
“Well, I’m looking forward to it anyway,” I said. “I’ve never seen them in a school performance.” From behind the curtain came the shrill sound of a microphone being hooked up to a power source. The air-conditioning unit stopped and, a moment later, started again. Back when I went to school here, there was no AC, just an oversized fan that whirred painfully from above. I had to sit backstage in whatever costume Mrs. Fleming had sewn for the play, sweating under its weight, scratching my skin in places where it met the cheap fabric, waiting for my cue. Even though I ended up with the same parts every year, I liked performing in plays because it was the closest thing I’d found to reading a book. Books were better, of course. In books, I could be more than the mute sidekick; I could be the hero. “It’s already ten past six,” I said, looking at my watch.
“Do you have somewhere else you need to be?” my sister asked sharply.
The testiness in her voice had been there since my father’s will had been delivered to the house by a courier from the lawyer’s office. The will had been drawn up many years ago and we all knew what it said: legalese about splitting my father’s assets between his spouse and children. What none of us had expected was a life insurance policy worth $250,000. Its sole beneficiary was me.
The din in the cafeteria rose. A cell phone rang, then another. In the back, chairs scraped against the floor. “I don’t understand,” Salma said. “I just don’t understand. What did I ever do to him?”
“Nothing,” my mother replied. “This is not your fault.”
“Nor is it mine,” I said, looking at my mother, but she didn’t acknowledge me; her eyes were fixed on my sister.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” Salma asked me.
“About what?”
“What do you think? About all that money he left you.”
“Since when do you care so much about money? Or is this Tareq talking?”
“This isn’t about money.”
“What is it about, then?”
The houselights dimmed, and the audience grew quiet. Salma turned to face me. “I’m the one who stayed here. I’m the one who stuck with dental school. I’m the one who took care of him when he had cataract surgery. I did everything he wanted me to do while you were”—she waved her hands in the air—“gallivanting at music festivals. And then he leaves it all to you. You can’t even hold down a real job!”
The insult was still ringing in my ears when an old woman in the row behind us cleared her throat pointedly. I lowered my voice to ask, “Do you really want to talk about this here?”
“What does it matter where we talk about it?”
“He didn’t leave everything to me. You and Mom still have the business.”
“Yes, it was quite thoughtful of him not to take that away.”
I glanced at my mother, hoping for some kind of support, or at least some sympathy. Instead, she put her hand on Salma’s knee, as if to beg for her forgiveness. “Your father never told me he changed his will. I wouldn’t have let him if I knew.”
“Well, he did it anyway,” Salma said. “Nora was always his favorite.”
So much anger in her voice. So much resentment. But how had our father disfavored her? Had he not read to her from the same books, taken her to the same parks, played the same board games with her? Had he not driven thirty miles to Palm Springs every Sunday morning and waited two hours to drive her back when she took that SAT prep course in high school? Had he not paid for dentistry school? For that wedding in Orange County? Had he not watched her twins whenever she needed to be away on a conference? Had he loved her any less? “Listen,” I said, “I didn’t ask for any of this.” My voice was muffled by the sound of the piano overture.
The woman in the row behind us leaned closer. “Sshhh,” she hissed.
“So what if you didn’t ask for it?” Salma said. “You expect me to feel sorry for you? And why do you always have to bring Tareq into everything?”
“How many times do I have to say it? I didn’t know about the insurance. I just don’t understand why you’re so mad at me when I had nothing to do with it. And yes, Tareq is always putting—”
A cold hand landed on my shoulder, startling me. “Either be quiet or take it outside,” the woman said. With her side braid and dark eyes, she looked like an older version of Mrs. Nielsen, my kindergarten teacher. “Get your hand off me,” I said.
The curtains parted. A king and queen stood on the stage, admiring their infant princess in her cradle. I was so unsettled by the blame in my sister’s voice that I found it difficult to pay much attention to the play. It didn’t help that the costumes were poorly made and that the children wore too much makeup. While bestowing her gifts on Aurora, one of the three fairies sneezed, sending green glitter flying everywhere but on the cradle. At least the action was moving quickly. In forty-five minutes, the princess had been cursed, pricked by a spindle, enchanted, and put in chambers. Aida and Zaid finally appeared as night watchmen, who dozed as the prince made his way past them to the princess’s room. A kiss, a broken curse, and the audience erupted in applause.
As soon as the curtains closed, I turned to my sister again, but Salma ignored me and began to make her way out to the blacktop. I could see that she wanted me to correct what had happened, but even if I could, it would not undo the choice our father had made, nor what it said about us: that he thought she could manage without his help, and that I couldn’t. But she believed it meant something else altogether: that he cared less about her than about me. Outside, the sky was a hazy orange and the air felt heavy with heat. Salma stood by the swings, her eyes filled with an envy that silenced me.
Envy was not something I expected from someone as accomplished as my sister, and yet it was there. It had been there, really, since the day I found out I’d been accepted at Stanford. Salma had gone to the state school in San Bernardino and, after receiving poor scores on her MCAT, went to Loma Linda School of Dentistry, which had seemed like a fine place to her, until my admissions letter arrived. She was quiet for days. My mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop talking about it. She told her brother and his family, her new friends from mosque, the neighbors from up and down the street. Everything I said or did she suddenly deemed brilliant. Having her approval was an entirely new feeling for me, and it was perhaps because of it that I decided to study pre-med in college. But three years later, when I called home to say that I had changed my mind about medical school and that I would be applying to the graduate program in music at Mills College instead, the news was greeted with horror by my mother, and ridicule by my sister. My mother couldn’t believe that all those years of calculus and biology and chemistry had led to chamber quartets and jazz ensembles. “Don’t do this,” she warned me. “You’re going to ruin your life.”
“Mom, calm down. You’re acting like I got pregnant or something.”
“Pregnant! Why do you say this? What have you been doing at school?”
“Nothing. I’m just saying it’s a graduate degree, not a life sentence.”