“We’re going to be late for Mimi,” her mother says. “They headed out an hour ago. Everyone ready? Souad, help me wrap these up.” On the kitchen counter there is a stack of sandwiches her mother has prepared. Souad begins wrapping them in paper towels. She wears a cotton dress, and when she turns, Riham can see the outline of her hipbones. Riham is dreading the car ride, the long day at the beach.
“If you’re going to pick any more shells,” her mother is telling Souad, “you need to wash them before you get in the car. Teta’s car is full of sand.”
“The shells are for Karam—”
“I’ll wash them with her,” her grandmother interrupts smoothly. “Right, Sous? We’ll get a nice bagful for your brother.”
Riham feels a sudden longing for her brother, doe-eyed—though in the past few months his features have begun to elongate and harden, several scraggly hairs prickling his chin—her ally during these summers.
Her mother kisses Riham on the forehead. “Enough with the melancholy.” She winks at her. “The beach will be fun.”
Amman transforms her mother. Back in Kuwait she complains of being tired and snaps at them when the television is too loud. She wears slacks and T-shirts, kohl around her eyes. But here, she keeps her face bare, wears short dresses that cling to her thighs. Her skin browns the way Souad’s does, while Riham’s turns red and peels in itchy flakes.
In the evenings, they sit on Khalto Mimi’s balcony and visit with the neighborhood women, women that Alia went to school with years ago. They eat figs and pour tea and cut thick wedges of orange-peel cake. No husbands ever come, no fathers or brothers. Only children, laughing and playing as dusk falls, the light turning first red, then orange, then purple. Her mother looks radiant in the evenings. The other women call her Aloush and tease her about her school days. Riham perches on the balcony railing, watching them. They seem like strange, mythical creatures to her, with their laughter and talk. They speak of soldiers and husbands and love.
“Come here, habibti,” Alia will say sometimes, her arms extended, and Riham goes to her mother gratefully.
“Aroos,” the women call her. “Little bride.”
“We’re going to marry you off,” they tease.
“Good God, so long as he’s not Kuwaiti.” Alia wrinkles her nose, and everyone laughs.
“Are they so bad?”
“They’re awful. With their terrible country. Not a single decent restaurant!” Her mother likes to imitate the locals, their harsh Arabic and mannerisms. Riham feels her ears burn when she does this, angry at her mother for speaking this way of their life in Kuwait, for the disloyalty to her father.
Her father, with his ink-stained fingertips, his slow chuckle. The way he pops peppermint candies in his mouth that clank against his teeth as he drinks tea. His habit of retiring to his study after dinner sometimes, the door only slightly ajar, so that Riham has to flatten herself against the wall to see the familiar silhouette of him, bent over his desk, writing. She loves the sound of the pen scratching against the paper, the way he always looks so solemn in those moments, unaware of her watching.
She misses him terribly, even more than she does Karam, misses talking with him about books, the way he quizzes her on characters and plot lines.
“And Anna Karenina?” he would say while cracking a pumpkin seed—her favorite, though she only sucks the shells until the salt is gone. “Do you think she made the right choice?”
If he were here, her father would understand why Riham wished to stay home, why she preferred to be alone rather than trailing Mira and Lara—as though she is some leper, some babysitting charge—and why she hates her polka-dot bathing suit, the one her mother bought when they first arrived. It is the exact same one as Lara’s and the contrast is depressing, how it clings perfectly to Lara’s thin frame, bulges and strains on Riham. She always wears a shirt over it.
So far, she hasn’t entered the water once. Even on the hottest days she remains in the shade with her book. When anyone asks, she says she has a stomachache.
In her fantasy, Bassam notices her suddenly. There is a lull in the chatter at the pastry shop and their eyes lock, like the click of a clock’s hand snapping into place. He sees her and nods.
“Want to walk to the sea?” he asks, taking her hand. Everyone in the shop watches them go, surprised at the mousy girl from Kuwait. As she heads out with Bassam, Riham turns and smiles at Mira and Lara.
They walk together until the sun goes down, night settling around them. He tells her she is pretty as the moon—Riham edits herself liberally in her fantasies; she has a trim waistline, curls the shade of mink—and she tells him about Scarlett O’Hara, how she made men fall in love with her in minutes.
“I never thought I’d meet you,” he says, and this is when he turns to her. In the distance, lights from the fishing boats glitter. Riham dips her head and looks up at him through her eyelashes—a trick she learned from watching her mother—and smiles without speaking. Bassam places a finger on her chin and tilts her head upward. They kiss.
Here the fantasy always stalls. All that Riham knows of what bodies do together is gleaned from passages in novels and ambiguous biology lessons. She understands there is nudity involved, and some complicated incursion—an upward motion, the woman below, usually clutching the man’s neck—something enormous and final.
There are times she feels a tremble, tiny quakes within her body, feels the firecrackers beneath her hipbones and shakes. She knows it is sin.
“I think Lara and Mira are going to a party tomorrow,” Alia says to Riham in the car. She glances at her in the rearview mirror.
“Hmm.” Riham makes a noncommittal sound. Next to her, Souad is humming to herself and rolling up a tissue.
“I think it’s a birthday party. Mimi said you should go with them.”
Several hours at some girl’s house, sweating and discreetly lifting her arms to smell her armpits, struggling to think of things to say while the other girls giggle and chat.
“They’ve assigned us books for the summer that I have to read.” It is partly true; the books exist, but Riham has already read each one twice.
“Good for you, habibti.” Her grandmother twists back to smile at Riham. “Keeping up with your schoolwork.”
“She can read them after,” her mother says. From the back seat, Riham sees her bright red fingernails drumming on the steering wheel. In Kuwait her mother never drives, never paints her nails.
“I need to start tomorrow,” Riham says desperately.