The Night Counter (32 page)

“Your baby should have a name,” Fatima advised her. “A family name.”

“It’s going to have Paolo’s last name, Mrs. Abdullah.” Decimal smiled. “Nassar. Remember how I told you Paolo was born in Brazil but his grandparents came from Syria? They were two of six million Arabs who did, you know. Paolo’s mother told me that. She was full of interesting facts and figures before I got pregnant and she started hating me and stuff. And I got some other facts that will make you even happier. Did you know if Paolo’s Syrian and I’m one-quarter Lebanese, my baby’s going to be three-eighths more Arab than me and just three-eighths less Arab than you?”

Fatima had no problems following Decimal’s math. It just didn’t make her happy to see how it characterized her family. Avon mascara flaked off of Fatima’s eyelashes and onto her cheeks as she held her tongue because she wanted the girl to keep working.

The girl opened a box before Fatima could tell her to ask first. She dug in and pulled out book after book with covers with Arabic calligraphy. She sneezed from the dust.

“You can’t sneeze on those,” Fatima shouted. “
Allah yustur.
”

Decimal opened a dark blue book. “Have you read all of these?” she asked. “I’m a big reader, too.”

“Too bad you can’t read Arabic,” Fatima said, as though she herself could. “Then I could give them to you.”

“Are they mostly fiction or nonfiction?” Decimal said.

“They’re all Korans,” Fatima said. “You shouldn’t touch them if you haven’t washed your hands.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.” Decimal bowed her head.

“It’s not me you are offending,” Fatima said. The Korans were gifts from friends in Detroit who had come back from the
Hajj to
Mecca. Fatima had never opened any of them, as her mother’s Koran was all she had needed in her life, but had given them their own storage box. She wished her children, their children, the Mexican ladies on the bus, the homeless guy with the dimple on his cheek, Amir’s handsome neighbor boy—any of those people—could read Arabic so that she could disperse the Korans among them.

“The green ones are my favorite,” Fatima said.

“I didn’t know the Koran came in colors,” Decimal replied.

“Green was my mother’s favorite color because she said a green field meant a good harvest,” Fatima said.

“I like green, too,” Decimal said. “I knew we’d have a lot in common. Besides just getting pregnant as teenagers and not having husbands.”

“I had a husband,” Fatima said. “And I married another one before my baby was born. And I was nineteen, not seventeen.”

“Nineteen years old is less than 20 percent more of my entire life span so far,” Decimal pointed out.

“How long were you with the father before … you know?” Fatima said, biting into the Coral Satin Sheen on her lip.

“That time, it was twelve minutes,” Decimal said. “Paolo likes me, so he doesn’t go super fast and stuff, like he says he could. But the baby part only takes a nanosecond. It’s not that I miscalculated, if I think about it. It just that for a few seconds it felt so good, I couldn’t stop. But it kind of hurt, too, like three times as much as a hay fever shot. Brenda says giving birth is seven hundred more times painful than that. But I guess with
having ten children and stuff, you must know a lot about the feel-good parts and the feel-bad parts and all.”

Fatima rubbed her eyes, as if that would make the girl and the forty-year-old makeup go away But they were both still there irritating her.

“How do you say ‘key’ in Arabic?” Decimal asked.

“
Muftah
,” Fatima said.

“Mufta,” Decimal said.

“No,
muftah
,” Fatima said.

“Muftahy,” Decimal repeated.

“No, that means ‘my key’” Fatima said.

“I’m no good.” Decimal sighed. “Here I was thinking you could teach me Arabic and then I could teach my kid and stuff.”

It had taken Fatima’s family three generations in America to birth someone who wanted to learn Arabic from her instead of despite her. And now she had so little time to teach the girl anything. Nor could she teach her Arabic if she put her on the street. “The first words you should learn are from the Koran,” Fatima told her.

“Well, we have plenty of those to choose from,” Decimal said. She headed toward the box marked “Lebanon.”

“As soon as we find the key, we will start,” Fatima agreed. The girl began looking in even greater earnest, an earnestness none of her children had had when Fatima had tried to teach them anything.

“I was born in the very house whose key we’re looking for,” Fatima said. She didn’t care if the girl listened, but she did not want to dwell on the key itself as the girl looked for it. “My grandmother, who was Deir Zeitoon’s midwife and matchmaker, brought me into this world, and then the whole village knew it in fifteen minutes. My grandfather had prepared
kunafi for
all the neighbors to celebrate.”

“See all that we have in common,” Decimal said. “Your grandmother birthed you, and my grandmother is going to birth my baby.”

“My mother rested in bed for forty days and was given the best food and strong chicken broth so that I would drink the healthiest milk when
I sucked from her breast,” Fatima countered. “When Ibrahim wrote to my mother to tell her that I had had my first baby, I made sure he let her think the people in Detroit did the same thing.”

“They don’t do that in Minnesota,” Decimal said.

“Nor Detroit,
ya bint
,” Fatima replied. “I did not rest at all. In America, even if I had had a son, no one would have cared. Even when a son gets his first tooth, they do not have a party here. I was alone with my first baby all day. Except when Millie started coming over with her baby. We did not know each other. We used to watch one another in our yards between the hanging laundry, walking with our babies in our arms to get them to stop crying. One day, she just came over. Even though I didn’t speak enough English to have a conversation back then, we would sit and exchange crying babies. She’d walk with mine, and I’d walk with hers. So we felt someone was helping us out with our babies. I told Millie she and I should have had our babies in Deir Zeitoon.”

“What exactly is Deir Zeitoon?” Decimal ventured.

Fatima reached to twirl her hair at Decimal’s pronunciation of her beloved village. “It’s where I grew up,” she explained. “My great-grandfather built our house himself with the help of his brother. They used limestone brick and cedar and olive wood trim.”

Fatima paused and waited for Decimal to yawn or interrupt her, as she had come to expect from her family at the mention of this house. But Decimal didn’t.

“I’m not giving it to you when I die,” Fatima told her. “So stop asking about it and just look for its key.”

“I’m sorry,” Decimal said. “I didn’t mean that I want it.”

“Oh, so now you think you’re better than my house,” Fatima scoffed. “
Aabe
. Shame. You should be so lucky to have been born there.”

“I’ll stay quiet,” Decimal promised. “But if you want to tell me more, I’ll listen.”

The girl was careful as she continued to look through the boxes, and soon she pulled out a key hanging on a Detroit Tigers lanyard.

“I got it,” Decimal exclaimed.

Fatima took the key from her and warmed it in her hand. A simple box key. An American key. Not a skeleton key in a pair of blue cordelias.

“This is the key to the house in Detroit,” Fatima said. “That house went to my husband in the divorce.”

“Who’s he going to leave his house to?” Decimal asked.

Fatima had never once thought about that, and she was sure Ibrahim had not, either. Although they had stopped having long discussions years before the divorce, Fatima still knew most of Ibrahim’s thoughts, as well as most of the things he did not think about.

“I bet the kids will all fight for that one, the way Gran talks about how great Detroit was,” Decimal said.

“My children couldn’t leave Detroit fast enough,” Fatima corrected her.

She wove the Detroit key under a mosaic of embroidery on her dress to keep it in place. Fatima would mark the key for Ibrahim in case he lost his spare. She wanted to leave him something besides the children and their problems.

“Gran said they couldn’t stay in Detroit on account of Dr. Wang getting such a good offer in Minnesota,” Decimal told her. “But she sure goes on about how she and her sisters used to build tents indoors in the summer to pretend they were camping and went on field trips to the River Rouge plant, which half the kids’ dads worked at. And Mr. Abdullah and you took them all to Florida for your first family vacation, and they had peanuts and Coke in Georgia. She’s pretty nostalgic in her old age.”

Fatima had never heard one of her children referred to as being in “her old age,” nor had she ever thought about her children having a lifetime of memories, stories they told over and over. She knew that her children had left not only because of the factories closing. They had left in part to escape their parents’ darkness. “Just look for the right key,” she said, spitting out a crust of lipstick that had fallen into her mouth.

Decimal opened another box, this one filled with yellowed, musty textbooks on American history, algebra, and English grammar.

“Wow, these calc books are ancient,” Decimal said, and sneezed. “Printed in 1971. Cool. Could I borrow these?”

“No,” Fatima snapped.

“Sorry.” The girl was at least polite. Why had Hala not taught her daughter and her daughter’s daughter right from wrong? Perhaps God had not debilitated her yet so that she herself could teach the girl right from wrong. Instilling morality had been postponed too long with this girl.

“Go downstairs and get Randa and my mother’s Koran from my underwear drawer,” Fatima said. “That is the one we’ll use. Make sure you wash your hands before you touch it.”

“You’re going to teach me to read Arabic and stuff?” Decimal smiled.

“Wait,” Fatima commanded. She took the Detroit key out of the embroidery. “Put this in the underwear drawer. But don’t look at anything else in there.”

Even though Fatima didn’t like this girl, unlike Amir, she obeyed her well, and so she would not look. Perhaps if I had been giving her the orders from the beginning, Fatima thought, there would be less shame today.

Decimal took the key, excited as she bounced down the stairs.

Her bounce, although from such a small person, knocked a blue pouch out of one of the boxes. Fatima reached for it, but before she could open it, Scheherazade appeared at her side. Fatima placed the pouch on her lap, covering it with her hand.

“Is she not charming?” Scheherazade commented. She blew the dust from the boxes out of Fatima’s purple stubs and wiped the flaking mascara off her cheeks.

“She’s a most terrible shame.
Aabe al- shoom
,” Fatima said. “That is why I must teach her as much Koran as possible while there is time.”

“Perhaps you should find her a husband, too,” Scheherazade said.

“She is not my responsibility,” Fatima declared.

“She’s your granddaughter,” Scheherazade said, watching Amir rehearse in the garden from the window.

“She is not my granddaughter,” Fatima told her. “She is my great-granddaughter.”

“Yes, she is your great-granddaughter,” Scheherazade said, and applauded Fatima’s admission.

“Stop clapping,” Fatima shouted. “Your joy is giving me a headache.”

“At least offer her Zade’s services,” Scheherazade suggested.

Fatima shook her head and rubbed the pouch in her hands.

“I rarely asked Zade for help,” Fatima said. “Nadia’s boy and girl are the hardest grandchildren for me to talk to.”

Fatima drifted off to a place Scheherazade couldn’t picture.

“Twins succeed doubly in half the time,” Fatima finally said quietly.

Scheherazade bent down to catch a hovering tear in Fatima’s eye, but it stayed put. “
Inshallah
, we will find this key quickly. Do not waste our remaining time on more tears. I will move fast.”

As Scheherazade opened the boxes, all that she uncovered were alien objects to her: two baseball bats, two baseball gloves, a basketball, a game called Battleship, Rolling Stones records, and a calculator bigger than China’s finest abacus.

Fatima turned away from the boxes and rolled the blue pouch in her hands.

“Amazingly, eighty-five years of life and all you dragged with you was a wedding dress and some nonsense,” Scheherazade remarked, looking over what she was sure were Amir’s toys. “So many girls, and you never kept any of their things.”

“The girls outgrew them or took them with them when they left,” Fatima said. “Millie and I had a big garage sale the year the last big civil war in Lebanon ended and got rid of most of the old stuff. That way Amir was able to have his own room with just his things, and Millie was able to die with everything in order for her kids. She was gone a few months later with the lung cancer.”

“To whom did Millie leave her house?” Scheherazade asked.

“She didn’t. I learned from her mistake,” Fatima said. “All her kids had moved to Florida, and they didn’t know what to do with a house split four ways—she only had four kids—and so they had to sell it. Now they don’t have a home in Detroit, and it’s like Millie was never there. I don’t want to put my kids through that.”

“Did I ever tell you the story about the cucumber peddler in Kabul
who thought everyone wanted his bags of cucumbers when they were all content with their bags of apples?” Scheherazade said.

Fatima gripped the blue pouch tighter. “You don’t tell the stories,” she answered. “I do.”

Scheherazade shrugged and dug into one of the boxes. She held up two identical baseball gloves. “These are both for the same hand,” Scheherazade said. “How is that going to keep you warm in the winter?”

“They’re not for the cold,” Fatima explained. “They’re for baseball. It’s an American game where you catch the ball with the hand with the glove and you throw with the hand with no glove. All the kids play it in Detroit in the summer.”

Scheherazade stuck her fist into the glove. “It must be a small ball.”

Fatima hesitated before opening the blue pouch on her lap and pulling out an autographed baseball. “This one was signed by the great Detroit Tiger Al Kaline,” she explained.