When I was twenty-four years old, I came close. Toward the end of that summer, I met a cabdriver while leaving work one night down at the phone-hoe factory. He drove me home, and then he didn’t charge me but instead asked for my phone number. A free ride? Swoon. I suppose I gave it to him. He wasn’t remarkably handsome, he had an accent I couldn’t place, and if I’m remembering correctly, his name was Malik. He shared that name with both my father and one of my brothers, so I knew he was Muslim. He was a Yellow Cab driver just like Dad. Was he my type? I don’t fucking know! But he texted to ask me out and I was bored, so I said yes. He said he’d pick me up. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him when he drove me home so I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out in a lineup of two people, and what’s worse, he was in a cab. All the cars on my street were cabs! After much confusion, I figured out which driver of which cab was my date, and we went to some diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I found to be grown-up and fancy. I was young and unfancy then. We talked over dinner and got to know each other. He was from Egypt. He was absolutely Muslim. He tried his best to be a good man. He wanted to get married. Just like the psychic said. I rolled my eyes through the part about getting married. While this guy was nice, he wasn’t particularly interesting, and if I’d gone to the bathroom and come back to a completely different man sitting at our table, I wouldn’t have noticed. I assumed that even though he’d brought up marriage he didn’t mean me. How could he? We’d just met. Surely he was speaking generally, not specifically.
At the end of the night, he drove me home, and while we were still in his cab, he turned to me, and said, “I want to marry you.” Swoon? I wasn’t surprised or even caught off guard. I was annoyed. “You need a green card?” I asked. He seemed surprised. Idiot. Do you even know how smart I am and how big a cliché you are? “Yes,” he admitted, as if no one else would have cracked the code of an immigrant asking a woman to marry him on the first date. “How did you know?” he asked, as if I were a psychic. “That’s how my parents got married,” I answered. “No, thank you. I gotta go.” Then I got out of the cab and went to bed. The next day he texted me saying that he hadn’t meant to offend me and that he really did like me. While I wasn’t offended, I told him to cut the bullshit and said I wasn’t interested in marriage fraud. But then he kept texting me. All day long. Then he asked if I wanted a ride home . . . the things I’ve done for a ride home. So we’re in his cab again, and he starts to plead his case. He at first was coming at me in a romantic way as if I would believe that we were in love and that we should get married as soon as possible. When he saw that I wasn’t falling for it, he decided to approach me as if we were going into business together. He explained that we wouldn’t have to be married for that long. Two or four years. That I could move in with him in Queens and that he could pay me. Pay me? Swoon! That’s when I really started to consider it. I took a few days to weigh my options. I even made a pros and cons list. I still lived with Mom and Ahmed in a two-bedroom apartment. Even with my job as a phone sex monitor, I wasn’t making enough money to live on my own yet. I didn’t know how or if I could ever move out. It felt like I was doomed to live at home forever and that poor Mom was also doomed to sleep in the living room forever because of it. I just had to leave. Maybe immigration fraud and a green-card marriage was my ticket. I thought maybe I’d move to Queens and have the cabdriver pay my way through school. By the time I was finished with school and placed firmly in whatever career I’d end up with, I’d be done with marriage. The idea of marriage was scary, but a sham marriage was just a sham! It wasn’t forever. The only hiccup would be if I fell for the guy while we were married. Then I’d end up pregnant. But then I’d have a baby and that wouldn’t be so bad because that’s what was expected of me. I was a woman after all. Maybe this was just what my life would be. Unhappily married to an African cabdriver named Malik so that he could stay in this country. It was exactly what Mom had done. But Mom had gotten something out of it. She had a life. And she had proved her mother wrong! I was no better than Mom. Who was I to think that starting my life this way wouldn’t be enough?
But . . . I couldn’t let that bitch be right. Not this time. Mom is always right. She’s right about many things, so it has been my lifelong crusade to make her wrong about me. I was forever swimming upstream. Throughout my life, she had been right about more things than I cared to remember, but she would lose this round. I refused to settle. Not just because she told me that I would have to and I wanted to prove her wrong, but also because this marriage would be EXACTLY what she’d done with Dad. Exactly. I was about to marry Dad! Something I had vowed to never do.
Problem is, I still wanted the things on the pro list. Not all of it. Not the things other people wanted for me like marriage and children, but the things I wanted, like an education and to move out of Mom’s apartment so she could move into my bedroom. Independence. That’s what I wanted. I wasn’t sure how I would get it without marrying Malik. I didn’t know how other people got it so I googled “How to go back to college.” That’s how I found Mercy College. I kept opening up page after page until I figured out how to apply for financial aid on my own now that I was old enough to do so. I enrolled myself for the upcoming semester. I was on my way back to school on my own three years after losing my aid at City College. I wouldn’t need Malik to pay my way. I wouldn’t need anyone. I called him and let him know that I was going to begin classes soon and that, along with my work schedule, I wouldn’t have time to see him anymore. Also that I wouldn’t be marrying him but that I wished him luck anyway. He was annoyed. He accused me of wasting his time, but his whole situation had nothing to do with me. Two weeks later I was back at school and two weeks after that I was a movie star, so none of it mattered anyway. I had turned down a marriage proposal about a month before I got my first film role. Change was in the air like a cloud and it was finally raining on me.
The idea of marriage remains very scary to me. A real marriage. One where you love each other. Where you have dreams of a future together with a home and children. Couple friends and game nights. Family vacations and studio portraits on the wall. One man for the rest of my life. That shit is scary. It’s scary because I don’t know what that looks like from the inside. My parents were only able to show me some of those things, but because they weren’t in love with each other, was what they did show me even real? I want to love a man who loves me, but I don’t really want to get any more involved than just that. I don’t want to meet his family or have him meet mine. I just can’t imagine melding my entire life with someone else’s for eternity. Can’t I just fall for a friendless orphan? Getting married is so fucking normal, and in the right case, a healthy way to grow. Normal? All of my instincts tell me to run the opposite direction.