“Yusef Ali,” I replied.
“Oh, cool. Yusef, I’m Marcos.” We shook hands.
“Oh I’m sorry,” said Lynn. “I should have taken care of that.”
“It’s all good,” said Marcos.
“What’s your
good
name?” I asked him.
“Marcos,” he replied.
“Oh. I mean, you didn’t change it?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“That’s cool though.”
“Yeah. Well, nice meeting you. Lynn, take care.”
“Later Marcos,” she said.
“Nice meeting you,” I said. And then he was gone.
“Good
name?” asked Lynn, leaning in on the table. “What the shit is that?”
“Why does Rabeya wear the full burqa?” I asked Fasiq while sitting on the roof. Blunt hanging from his lips, he closed up the Qur’an and placed it on his right. Took a hit before replying.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she doesn’t wear it for the notion that it’s sunna, we know that much... and she doesn’t wear it because her family is really strict... and I don’t think she wears it for some Islamo-Feminist gesture... so I don’t know why—” Fasiq interrupted me only with a suddenly active, alert silence that felt as though he would say something. He looked at me and said it.
“Ever have a day when you didn’t want people looking at you?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I guess so. Is that why she wears it?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a puff and then dramatic exhale. “But that’s why
I’d
wear it.”
“What the shit is this?” boomed Umar, running down the stairs. I was sitting with Rabeya in the living room.
“What?”
“This!” he held it up for us.
“Looks like a Qur’an,” Rabeya replied.
“Yeah, yeah it is. It’s a Qur‘an. And you know where I found this Qur’an?”
“The Qur’an Store?”
“Funny, sister. But no, I found this in the bathroom, sitting right on the sink.”
“And...”
“And what’s it doing in there? This is the Word of Allah Subhana Wa Ta’Ala!”
“Fasiq probably left it there by mistake,” Rabeya replied. “You know he uses the bathroom window to get up on the roof, that’s where he reads Qur’an—”
“No, that’s where he smokes his ganja!”
“Yeah but it’s also where he reads. I’m sure it was an accident. He probably climbed in through the window, set the Qur’an on the sink and then forgot about it.”
“The bathroom is filthy.”
“This whole house is filthy.”
“Yeah, yeah you’re right. Back when Mustafa lived here it never could have looked like this.”
“Back when Mustafa lived here,” Rabeya shot back, “I could never sit in the living room.”
Of course, that night all of Jehangir’s kafr cronies filed in and trashed the place as he stood in a corner watching it all go down with a sly satisfaction that only hours ago our house had been a masjid and now it was a riot, as though real salvation hinged on having a little taste of everything. Then Jehangir reached the point of drunkenness at which he could talk about nothing but Allah, his tragic failures as a mumin and the promise that within the next twenty American years or so Islam would blossom into something that you could not witness anywhere else in the world.
Some guy put Billy Bragg on the stereo: “Joe DiMaggio’s Done it Again.” Jehangir threw his spiked-leather-jacket-arm around me and hung off my body for support. He wore red plaid pants. Seemed like he always had them on.
“Listen Yusef Ali,” he said. “My grandmother used to talk about DiMaggio all the fuckin’ time. She hated the Yankees, did you know that? She only fuckin’ hated the Yankees because her dad liked ’em, so it was like they would give each other a hard time about it. You know what I mean? If the Yankees won or lost, one would tease the other. Father-daughter bonding.”
“I see.”
“So then her boys in turn
liked
the Yankees, and gave her a hard time when they won.”
“And then you, the next generation—you hated the Yankees, right?”
“My dad died before he could really get that ingrained in me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Eh, so it goes. I grew up in a house full of women.”
“I remember you telling me that.”
“It worked out, I think. It all works out.” He turned his head at a girl walking by. “Gave me something, I think,” he whispered to me with such disgusting alcohol-breath I could smell it through my ear.
“Did you ever get with Fatima?” I asked.
“Funny you should mention that. Fuck, I need to sit down.” We went over to an empty spot on the couch that Fasiq used as a bed. Surrounded by noise and dozens of autonomous conversations and blaring Billy Bragg, he told me the story. “Listen, Yusef. I had her up in my room, right? And we’re making out and whatever, and I go for her tits. And that’s cool, she’s cool. So I’m messing around with her tits but over the shirt. So then I think, ‘well, might as well go under the shirt.’ So I’m under the shirt, over the bra. Then I figure I can free the tits up completely so I yank one out of the bra and then the other and she’s totally good to go. I pull up the shirt, I’m suckin’ on her tits and whatever, and after that what can I do? Might as well go down for the crown. I put my hands between her legs—over the jeans, of course—and I can fuckin’ feel the warm moisture, bro! Even through the fuckin’ jeans. She’s liking it so I go to unbutton her jeans and she puts her hand over mine and I’m thinking fuck, that’s it. And she just looks at me and you know what she says?”
“What?”
“She says, ‘sorry if this is a dumb question, but if you were to,
to...’ and she couldn’t even get the words out so I’m like ‘finger you?’ and she goes ‘yeah... would that break the hymen?’”
“Wow,” I replied, not knowing how else to react.
“Yeah, bro. I couldn’t believe it. So I told her that most girls lose their hymens years before that’s even an issue. And she had no idea! I was like, shit, you can lose your hymen when you’re eight years old riding a bike. She looked at me like I just blew her mind.”
“Don’t they teach you all that in health class?”
“Yeah, absolutely. That’s where I heard all that, like in seventh grade. But her mom kept her out of that shit, wrote a note to the teacher saying to send Fatima to another room once they hit Sex Ed. So the girl had no clue, here I was a scumbag guy trying to get in her pants and I had to tell her shit about her own body that she didn’t even know.”
“So what happened after that?” I asked.
“What can you do, after that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuckin’... what can you do, after that? This girl was scared I would break her hymen. Jesus, man. If we did shit I would have felt like a child molester or something.”
I looked around the room. Rabeya was arguing with some guy about war in Iraq. Rude Dawud had his arm around a girl I had never seen before. Amazing Ayyub regaled a small circle with his tale of spitting in the football players’ car. Then there were self-supporting crowds of strangers. Jehangir looked up at the ceiling and said “women, y’akhi.”
“Women,” I repeated.
“They’re better than us, bro.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s one for you right now,” he said with a slow nod. I looked where his eyes directed me and saw Lynn talking to Fatima, both of them with red plastic cups in hand. Lynn had discarded her
jumaa gear for a tight little top and loose-fitting khakis. The bra straps were blue. “Go let her save you.” He patted me on the back and I stood up. She saw me before I had to think of an opening.
“Hey, you!” she yelled. Gave me a hug, surprising in that it had only been a matter of hours since we last saw each other. “Glad you could make it.”
“I live here,” I replied smiling.
“Oh, right. Well, glad you live here then.” Fatima seemed to have spontaneously disappeared.
“So what’s going on?”
“Nothing, really, just chillin’. Actually I was thinking about how I haven’t really seen the whole house yet.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I’ve only been downstairs. Care to tour me?”
“Sure.” I squeezed through the people towards the stairs. Lynn had her hand on my shoulder, ostensibly to keep us from being separated. “This is Dawud’s room,” I said upon reaching the top of the stairs with a gesture towards the closed door at our left. “That one over there is Umar’s and the other one’s Jehangir’s.”
“Where’s yours?” she asked.
“Just down the hall this way.” We walked in its direction, Lynn pausing to examine various Sharpie graffiti on the walls: tags, political slogans, vulgar comedy, band names and some Arabic. “And right here’s our upstairs bathroom—don’t leave a Qur’an in there or Umar will snap, we kind of had an issue earlier today.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she replied.
“And there’s Fasiq,” I said, pointing to the open window. Fasiq sat on the roof with a closed Qur’an at his side. He was watching traffic or squirrels or something. We stepped away without him noticing. “This is my room,” I said nervously, opening the door.
“Very nice,” she said. “Is everyone else’s this clean?”
“Umar’s pretty neat.”
“Oh cool,” she said, walking to my bed and taking my little white and green flag from its display stand. “That’s Pakistan, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever been there?” She was standing close to me. Turned slightly to put the flag back, then returned to full attention.
“I spent a summer there when I was ten.”
“Really? How was it?”
“A different planet.”
“I can imagine.”
“Sometimes I don’t know where I feel more out of place.” I looked at the floor, slowly making my way up to her eyes. I did not know what to do with our eye contact. She crinkled her eyebrows. I clumsily leaned toward her and it happened. I could not tell you
really
how it happened—I can’t remember making any conscious decision to go for it, and I have no memory of her taking the initiative. The kiss came of its own volition without asking for help from either of us.
Likewise, it continued and demanded more of us, like tongues and hands. Then her shirt was off and we cascaded onto my mattress. I opened my eyes briefly and looked at her shoulder, deciding the bra should come off and soon realizing I was out of my element tugging on the hooks. She reached behind herself and it was off.
My eyes unintentionally zeroed in on the red break-out traversing her left breast.
“It’s eczema,” she said plainly.
“Oh.” Only thought in my head, strangely, was of Rabeya and how every inch of her body, saving the hands, could have been covered with that and I never would have known. I place no value judgment on the fact; it’s merely an observation.
“Silly boy,” she said, pushing me over. As I lay back she straddled
me and drove our loins together, grinding in such a way that I almost found painful with the obstruction of garments.
Dry-humping,
I believe it’s called. She leaned forward and buried my face in her breasts, the fleshy area between them still smooth and free of rash. As she rode I took hold of her bare shoulders and made an ineffectual attempt at having some form of control in the situation.
She swung her right leg so suddenly we were side by side. I approached her breasts almost violently, squeezing as hard as I could while my soft imbibes of her nipples gave way to hard tugs with the teeth. All this time I was fully, valorously erect, throbbing like I could rip through my pants and bore a hole through her stomach. She moved her hand down and glided over it, her fingertips noting the ridge of my head. My entire body stiffened, my legs straightening out so hard I felt the strain in my knees. Then she took my hand and smoothly brought it to her, brought it down into the recesses of jeans already somehow unbuttoned, plunged me toward what had been a dark unknown; but upon first contact of my fingertips with the threshold of curly hair I yanked back up and out.
“Are you one of those guys who hates girls?” she asked, sitting up.
“What? Why would I hate—no, not at all,” I stammered, hardly prepared for her question. “Why would you think I hate girls? Does
this
seem like I hate girls?” I gestured with my hands almost pointing at her, as though my mauling of her breasts had proven the point.
“Yeah, actually,” she replied, head tilted playfully toward her left shoulder, which seemed to be rising to meet it. “You could be one of those guys who wants it so much he hates the girl who makes him want it. It is my fault, right?”
“Is what your fault?”
“That we’re up here?”
“What? No, no, totally not, it’s all—”
“Because I led you astray, wearing a tight little shirt so you could see my shape, right?”
“No!”
“And I’d lean over so you could see right down...” As she said it she did just that, but almost in caricature of what the intention would have been.
“It’s all me, I’m the—”
“Yeah,” she sighed with the resignation of an immortal, eternal woman who had seen this time and time again over the centuries: man after man, the same old thing in a thousand different guises as scriptures and nations came and went. It sounded quite like that as she explained—
I’ve seen it before.
I cast my gaze down.
I’ve dated Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the whole nine.
My eyes rose to meet her briefly in a scientific curiosity about the sexual maladjustments of those faiths, how they might have compared and contrasted to mine.
And Catholics? Don’t even get me started...
“Catholics?”
“Even if you don’t hate girls exactly, you at least fear them enough for your brain to process it the same way.”
I just then realized the strangeness of being on a bed with a girl who had her shirt off, her breasts big and drooping with enormous nipples and eczema on the left. At least it was strange to me. Did-n’ t seem too strange to Lynn. “Where’s the romance in Islam?”