The earlier argument was about sugar. Souad eats it sprinkled between slices of bread, and she leaves trails on the kitchen counters, attracting ants. Priya is constantly killing them, using a sponge spotted with their bodies.
Over and over, Alia and Atef have told Souad to use a plate. Atef is good-humored about it, making jokes about unwanted guests, but Alia has been sharper, bringing up Priya’s arthritis.
“We’re going to have an infestation,” she told her.
The girl never listened. Still she ate the sugar sandwiches, still the trails appeared, followed eagerly by the ants. For weeks, Alia stewed—the thoughtlessness! The selfishness, the entitlement. Unwilling to inconvenience herself even in the smallest ways.
So when Alia happened upon Souad that afternoon, taking a bite out of a half-eaten sandwich, the sugar crumbs falling right in front of her eyes, she’d snapped, screaming something about the girl being a brat and poking the embers of their ancient, age-old fighting until it roared a brilliant, unrelenting red.
“You’re insane,” Souad had hurled later as she tugged her shoes on in the doorway. Crumbs of the now-forgotten sandwich clung to her lips. “Absolutely insane.” Then there was the slam of the front door, and she was gone.
The clock above the television blinks nearly midnight. On the TV, the dancers behind the singer move their hips suggestively. They no longer wear the short skirts and feathered hair of previous decades, the style Alia had grown up with—tight sweaters, eyeliner, frosty lipstick—and still favors.
Instead the women dress as Souad does, in too-tight jeans and leather. Alia finds it unattractive, pushy. Perhaps fashion reflects each generation’s women, Alia thinks, and she is pleased by the thought. She wants to tell Atef, but there is still a distance between them, his kindly silence an affront. His face is illuminated, the dancing women causing ripples of blue and green across his face.
The singer finishes and bows, applause surrounding her. The dancers exit the stage and the lights dim. Another singer walks on in a long dress, a hijab wound around her head. Alia recognizes her—the Moroccan singer who’d abruptly announced her faith a few months ago, swapping her trademark short dresses for a veil.
“I wonder what her mother thought,” Alia comments. She keeps her voice light, glances sidelong at Atef. It is a peace offering. The volatility of their marriage, when the children were younger, has cooled over the years, yielded to camaraderie.
He clears his throat, considering. “Maybe she had another daughter to make up for it.” They both laugh and Alia scoots closer to him on the couch.
In some ways, it is truly comical. The Miniskirt and the Veil, she likes to quip to her friends. Quick nicknames for her daughters, well intentioned but occasionally ringing caustic to another’s ears.
The truth is that Alia can scarcely make sense of it—the two daughters, years apart, one godless and unruly, the other veiled and earnest and married. Though both are intense, Alia thinks at times, prone to immoderation. In some ways, not so dissimilar, a restlessness drumming through them that has them rifling through selves like dresses on a rack.
It is not that Alia dislikes Riham’s faith; rather, she is vaguely uncomfortable by its visibility. Riham was always a quiet girl, and in her adolescence signs began to emerge, the girl asking about veils, saying she wished to fast for Ramadan. And Alia and Atef, proud but perplexed, exchanged worried glances.
“I’m happy about it, I really am,” Atef said once, “but it’s just so—”
“I know,” Alia said.
Watching their daughter avert her eyes from food during Ramadan, overhearing the splashing water in the bathroom as she prepared for prayer, listening to her footsteps before dawn as she rose with the muezzin—it was like having a mirror held up to their household, and in the reflection, they saw themselves as lacking.
Alia had grown up with her mother’s praise of Allah, her gentle faith coloring religion a soft hue for Alia so that she loved the muezzin, the Eid festivals, the verses of Qur’an. For Alia, after the war, after Mustafa’s death, these things had not been lost so much as quietly, intentionally misplaced.
And then, years later, Riham wrapped faith around herself as effortlessly as a shawl, never once mumbling a complaint about rising early for prayer, never sneaking bites of bread—as Alia always did—during Ramadan. What could she and Atef do but encourage Riham even though over the years faith seemed to engulf her? To do anything else seemed inconceivable.
In that way, Riham has worn them down as much as Souad, both daughters pushing until Alia and Atef surrendered, in small ways at first, and then bigger ones.
“We need to support her,” Atef would say, his voice uncertain. It was his refrain when Riham veiled, when she took Islamic studies courses at the university, when she began to volunteer at the hospital.
So last year, in the early days of May, when Riham sat her and Atef down and told them in her slow, wistful way that she was to wed one of the Jordanian doctors at the hospital, an older religious widower with a young boy, there was nothing left for the two of them—stunned, they who had made a vow of their silence—to say.
The doctor—this is how Alia still thinks of him, though the wedding was in January, though she should think Latif or Riham’s husband—is a dull man with kind eyes. When he first came to their house for dinner, Alia was struck by how soft-spoken he was, how calm and refined, even his shoes polished.
“I have only the finest intentions toward your daughter,” he’d told them in a voice cultivated by years of reassuring the ill and dying, and the two of them exchanged looks.
“He’s old enough to be your father,” Alia hissed at her daughter afterward and Riham shrugged, unblinking.
“He’s good, Mama. You know that. You can see it.” An enigmatic smile traveled across her face.
“Also,” she’d said, her voice final, “Teta would’ve loved him.” Salma, dead in the ground for nearly a year. Alia felt the fight leave her.
Surprisingly, it was Souad who spoke up the most.
“A child!” Souad stood in her sister’s room, fists on hips as Riham packed her clothes in large suitcases. The doctor was returning to his native Amman after the wedding and would be taking Riham with him. “He has a child, Riham. You’re going to be that kid’s mother. Do you understand that? You still sleep with your stuffed animals.”