In the spring, you move with your parents to a small town in the Mojave, where they buy a donut shop. The sun and the wind are impossible to escape. Within days, your skin burns, your lips chap, your hair grows two shades lighter. You ask about school again. “Maybe next year,” your father says, casually. “Right now, you’re too young.” Betrayal is still new to you, and hard to swallow. Leafing through the realtor magazines from the dispenser outside the shop, you pretend to read. Eventually you learn to recognize the letters that go with the pictures: h-o-m-e. You ask for more magazines. Your mother gets a library card, checks out five books at a time, and sticks you in a corner with them. She has a shop to run, trays to wash, floors to clean, and no time to play. But at night, when everything is quiet, she sings you lullabies in Arabic and lets you fall asleep with your head in her lap. You press your face against her belly, amazed at how warm it must have been inside. If only you could go back in there. One weekend, your uncle and his family come for a visit. When your cousins try to pinch you, you bite them.
The day finally arrives: you start school at Yucca Mesa Elementary. You already know your alphabet and raise your hand and answer correctly every time Mrs. Hamilton calls on you. You are not an ape anymore. Now you are a circus seal. In your repertoire, there are many tricks: you sing “I’m a Little Teacup”; you spell girl and home and want; you get an A on your first test. Your mother starts taking you everywhere with her. You say words like semolina and delicatessen without stumbling, ask where the zucchini is without giggling. You take after the Amazigh side of the family and every spring your hair grows lighter. Grocery-store clerks ask if you’d like a sticker, young lady. Bank clerks ask if you’re excited about the Easter egg hunt. It will be years before you encounter the word passing.
Then all of a sudden, there is a crib in your parents’ room, a stroller in the hallway, a yellow activity mat you’re not allowed to touch. Your father coos over the new baby like she’s something special, even though she can’t add two and two, or tell the time, or win Scariest Pumpkin at the first-grade Halloween festival. She has dark skin and chubby legs and big eyes that seem to track you everywhere you go. When no one is looking, you pinch her. She cries inconsolably. Your mother wonders aloud what is wrong with that child.
You still speak Arabic, but you no longer dream in it.
You grow to be tall, almost six feet by the time you’re in the ninth grade. You play volleyball, compete in the science fair, collect box tops for the school’s fundraiser, correctly guess the number of jelly beans in the jar. You’re never late, never sick, never rude. All your friends’ parents love you. “Such a sensible girl,” they say. One afternoon, while your family is at the neighbors’ pool party, you run off with the other girls to try on makeup, and leave your sister behind. She falls into the deep end of the pool and nearly drowns. In that moment, you realize you’re not a sensible girl, and immediately hide this fact from everyone.
The summer you turn twenty, while you’re home from college, the king dies. His funeral is broadcast live on CNN and your parents watch in disbelief, as if they need proof that it really is happening. Two million people line up on the streets of the capital, hoping to catch a glimpse of the velvet-draped coffin as it makes its way from the royal palace to the mausoleum. Your father yells at the television: “Did you forget what he did?” Your mother shushes him and raises the volume on the set. Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac are in attendance. So are Hosni Mubarak and Rifaat al-Assad. One by one, they praise the deceased monarch, call him a man of peace, a champion of tolerance. “Well,” your father says, in a small voice, “I guess I can go visit my mother now.”
A year later, when you finally travel to Casablanca with your family, you do not recognize your grandmother, nor does she recognize you. How is it possible to miss someone you don’t remember? And yet you do. For the duration of your visit, you sit side by side with her, in companionable silence. When you do venture out, tourist guides ask you in English if you’d like a tour of the medina and, if you ignore them, they try again, this time in German. Bazaar clerks call you Miss, offer you mint tea, and charge you four times the price for every trinket. Boys standing at street corners whistle when you pass, then openly touch their groins.
After college, you go to dentistry school at Loma Linda. There, you meet a clear-eyed man who is never late, never sick, never rude. When he speaks Arabic, it is as if music is streaming from his mouth. Words like zaytun and sukkar and habibet el-omr sound like they’re accompanied by a thirteen-string lute. You marry him, open a practice together, make your parents proud. “Why can’t you be more like Salma?” your mother tells your sister, and each time she says this, you feel a special thrill.
Day after day, you stare at open mouths, smell rancid breath, scrape rot from cavities. Increasingly you have to spend your afternoons arguing with insurance companies about billing and payments. The whole thing gives you a headache. You take a Vicodin. You are no longer a trained seal. Now you are a bird. You float away, free. When your husband complains that the painkiller samples are disappearing fast, you say it’s not your fault you had three root canals in one week. You haven’t begun to order extra boxes of diazepam and he isn’t suspicious yet.
But someday he will be, and you will have to meet his eyes across the dinner table, answer his questions, and agree to let him take over your surgeries. He will ask that you see a substance abuse specialist, but you will say you’re fine. At least talk to someone, he will beg. Talk to your mother. The thought of your mother finding out about your habit is excruciating. Her approval is a prison you do not wish to escape. I’ll see a specialist, you say, and never make the appointment. After he goes to bed, you sit on a lounge chair on the deck, and watch the view that the realtor said was unparalleled anywhere in the valley. You take another pill.
This is where the plane took you.
Nora
I can see now that there was an element of stubbornness in what I did next. But at the time, I felt I had no choice but to help manage the restaurant, because my mother abruptly stopped showing up to work. This might have been her way of forcing my hand on the sale, though it had the reverse effect: I stepped in for her. And it surprised me, too, how quickly all the little habits I had learned years ago came back. I wore closed-toe shoes, even in the heat, a comfortable pair of washable pants, and a polo shirt with the diner’s name embroidered across the breast pocket. I folded silverware into napkins, refilled salt-and-pepper shakers, took over Veronica’s tables whenever she went on her cigarette break, made sure the wait station had plates and cups and bowls, talked to customers, and tried to be cheerful about it. How are you this fine morning? Would you like some ketchup or mustard? Careful, that plate is very hot. What a beautiful baby.
After a few days working at the restaurant, I found that I could take care of all my duties and still have time to run to the store for supplies or to the bank for quarters and nickels. Still, I had forgotten how physically taxing food service was, how much my feet could swell or my arms ache from a single day’s labor. How did Veronica do it? Or Rafi? By the end of my shift, when my only thought was of how long it would take me to get to the cabin and collapse on one of the porch chairs with a beer, they still looked as fresh as they had when they started their day.
But the best at this line of work was Marty. I could never keep up with him. He had his own set of habits, too, like carrying extra straws in his apron pocket so he wouldn’t have to walk back to the wait station every time a customer asked for one. Without needing to be told, he changed the channel on the stereo when the music got too loud for an elderly couple, or lowered the shade when the afternoon sun streaming through the windows made a toddler squint. He knew several of our customers by name and talked to them like old friends. He would close the restaurant every night, and when I opened it in the morning, I would find that he had given me a head start by restocking the jam caddies or refilling the sugar dispensers.
Late one morning, while I was at the wait station with the paper napkins I had just bought on my run to Costco, Marty left the cash register and came to talk to me. “Miss Guerraoui,” he said, taking off his glasses and letting them dangle from their retainer, “are you taking over from your mother?”
“I’m just trying to help out.”
“I see.”
“If I missed something, let me know.”
“As a matter of fact, there is something.”