“You have your head in the clouds!”
Meanwhile, Salma had just become engaged to Tareq Darwish, a fellow dentistry student whose parents had emigrated from Syria in the 1970s. She and Tareq were planning to open a joint dental practice, a fact that my mother held up that day, and every day thereafter, as the kind of behavior to be expected of a child for whom parents had given up everything. I called my sister and asked her to talk some sense into our mother, but she only laughed. “Wait,” she said. “Music? Seriously? Oh, Nora.”
My father alone offered something besides derision. He listened to my music, and over my mother’s objections, sent me small checks from time to time. Now he had set aside some money for me, and that had caused my sister’s envy to flare up like a bad rash. She could barely look at me as we stood in the middle of the chattering crowd. I should go back to Oakland, I thought, I’ve been here long enough. I have a composition to finish, friends to see, my own life waiting for me in the Bay Area. Then the twins came running across the schoolyard toward us. “Did you like it, Aunt Nora?” Aida asked me.
“It was great,” I said. “I’ve never seen a better royal guard. High five.”
“What about me?” Zaid asked.
“No one can fake sleep as well as you. High five again.”
The children stood between their mother and grandmother, their faces lit with a joy I hadn’t seen since I’d returned home. I offered to take pictures. Through the viewfinder, I noticed that Aida’s hair had darkened, its shade now closer to mine. I was about to remark on this when Salma took the children’s hands and told them it was time to go. “Good night,” she said stiffly, and led them away to her car.
In the Prius on the way back, I listened to my mother say, for what seemed like the tenth time that day, that she hadn’t known about the life insurance. “I don’t know when he bought it,” she said. “He must have paid for it from the business account.”
“Do you blame me for this, too, Mom?”
“I don’t blame you. I worry about you. About your future.”
My mother said this with resignation, as though it were her charge in life to be saddled with me. This happened every time I returned home. We’d spend a few peaceful hours in each other’s company and then the détente would end and the comments would start, all of them variations on the theme of her disappointment in me. Why don’t you find a better job? Why don’t you apply to law school? Why don’t you move back here if you’re not going to law school and you can’t find a better job? Did I tell you that Mrs. Hammadi’s daughter is getting married? Are you wearing that to dinner? White isn’t a good color for you, you know, it makes you look darker. Did you watch the video that Tareq put up on YouTube? His keynote address to the American Periodontal Association was watched by 313 people. Can you believe it? And the big one, the one that came up with increasing frequency as the years passed: When are you getting married?
Nothing but unconditional surrender would have satisfied my mother. Because of this, I had learned to deploy my own set of loaded questions. Why did you quit college after you got married? Why did you move us to the middle of the desert? Why, oh why, did you vote for George W. Bush? Why do you call a three-week-old embryo a baby? Surely you know the difference—you wanted to be a doctor. Yes, you told me about Mrs. Hammadi’s daughter three times. Did she get married three times? Did you watch my piano performance at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens? It’s also on YouTube. And how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to get married.
These battles never ended in a clear victory. The best I could hope for was a return to the status quo, which usually happened right before I had to leave again. Now my father’s will had opened a new front in the conflict with my mother, and this time Salma was involved in the hostilities as well. But I felt too weak to fight. I couldn’t bear to spend another day in the house. Before going to bed that night, I filled up my car with gas, packed my bag, and zipped my laptop into its case. I would leave for Oakland first thing in the morning, I decided.
And yet when it was time to go, I couldn’t face the thought of returning to my apartment, either. Going back to that life meant I had put my father’s death behind me, that I had moved past it somehow, and I hadn’t. So I asked my mother for the key to the cabin in Joshua Tree. Maybe “cabin” was too fancy a term for it. Though it sat on an acre of land, it was a simple one-room shack, with large windows and a slanted roof, built by a homesteader in the 1940s. One day, driving back from the national park, my father had seen a FOR SALE sign on the side of the road and called to make an offer—without consulting my mother. He said it was a steal at $25,000 and a fantastic investment; she called it a dump and a waste of money. He said he’d renovate it and rent it out; she retorted that no tourists would ever want to stay there. Every time the two of them talked they quarreled, and the cabin gave them a fresh subject of contention. My mother handed me the key reluctantly, all the while trying to talk me out of it. The cabin was too small. The swamp cooler didn’t work well. It might be too hot there during the day. And it could get cold at night. Sometimes there were coyotes.
I didn’t care. It was just for a few days, I told her. All the way to the cabin, I thought about my father. He had driven on this stretch of the 62 every day. Here was the gas station where he stopped for refills, the used books store where he picked out his paperbacks, the liquor store where he bought his beer. Already, life went on without him.
When I got to the cabin, I found that the front door wouldn’t open. The key got stuck. With some effort, I pulled it out and went back to the car. Remembering a trick my father had taught me, I rummaged through the glove compartment for a pencil, with which I colored the teeth of the key until they were dark with graphite. Then I tried the lock again. This time, the door creaked open. The smell of dust and musk immediately made me sneeze.
The place was barely furnished. Under the window sat a gray sofa, its cushions stained and pilling. There was a small kitchen, with two stools at the counter, and a Formica-topped table with an unsteady leg. A stone fireplace separated the living area from the queen-size bed. The bathroom was the only private space. I opened the kitchen door and stepped into the backyard. There were several yuccas, a Joshua tree, and two garden chairs, caked with dust and weighted with stones to prevent their tumbling over in the desert wind. Here and there were tools my father had bought with the intent of landscaping, but by the looks of the yard he had never used.
I walked back through the house to the front porch, where the swamp cooler hung. A turtledove had built its nest on top of it and now the bird turned its head toward me, as if daring me to disturb its peace. We stared at each other for a moment. “All right, little mama,” I told her, palms raised in defense. “We can share.” Slowly, I slid my hand behind the metal box and turned on the water valve. All the while the turtledove kept watching me. I stepped back, drenched in sweat, and went inside.