A Sister to Honor (3 page)

Afran lifted his face from the towel. His eyes were bloodshot. “I guess I could try that.”

“What else?”

“Or I could show the kill and then just flick the ball to the back.”

“Now you're talking.” Shahid tapped his racquet against Afran's. “And what about the T?”

“Dominate it,” Afran said. “But, dude, he obstructs me.”

“So ask for a let.”

“Yeah, and let him call me Muhammad.”

“You think that lughead's not calling me Muhammad?”

“Fifteen seconds,” said Yanik. He had the job of referee for Afran's match. It was one of squash's great features, Lissy thought, the way it called on players to shift from competing to judging.

Shahid stood up. “Whose game you playing?” he said to Afran. “His or yours?”

As Shahid turned away, Lissy touched his arm. “Thanks,” she said.

“He'll be okay,” said Shahid. He glanced over at the score on Chander's match, which had drawn even. “Go Rockwells!” he shouted. Then he replaced his goggles and stepped back into the glass cage.

Losing, Lissy knew, was never an option for Shahid Satar. When the coach at the Pakistan Squash Federation first called her, Shahid had played professionally for a year. You'd have thought he'd spent a year at hard labor, the coach said, so crushed was his spirit. Not that he had done badly. He had risen up the way boys did in countries with Olympic-sized aspirations: not through his family's wealth or connections, but through the national sports system. Everything he had, all the medals and rankings, he had earned. There were simply better players on the international scene. When Lissy first spoke with Shahid on the phone, he had apologized for his failures, sure he was wasting her time, so many had believed in him but there he'd gone, again and again, losing in the third round, the fourth round. He'd been forty-eighth in the world in juniors, Lissy had pointed out. A long silence had ensued, in which she realized he was transforming her praise into pity. Finally he said, as though lying prostrate, that he would do his very best for her. He would fight for every point. And yes, yes, he would study. He wanted to learn things. Things besides squash.

His grades from Edwardes College in Peshawar had been good enough to get him an academic scholarship at Enright; the rest, Lissy understood, was being paid by a childless uncle in Peshawar. Already in this, Shahid's senior year, doors had started to open for him in the States—a chance to coach at Harvard, internships in the corporate world that knew of squash through the elite clubs in New York. He impressed people.

A half hour later, his match was over in three games. As the others went into a fourth, the three-sided block of bleachers looking over the U-shaped set of courts filled with spectators. The players glanced back at the growing crowd and played more fiercely.

Amazing, Lissy always thought, the power of a cheering crowd. Her brothers and their friends, ruffians cheering by the swanky squash courts at the Missouri Athletic Club, called themselves Lissy's Love Boat. Inspired by them, she used to hit rail after rail in the community center after school let out. To build her speed, she strapped weights onto her ankles. To train her reflexes, she sometimes hit blindfolded, trying to guess from the sound where the ball would bounce.

She resembled Shahid, she thought now as she joined him to watch Afran play his fourth game, more than she did his sister. Like Shahid, she hated to lose; she accepted no excuses from her weaker self. And like Shahid, she was more fragile than anyone knew.

Down 7–9, Afran hit a trickle boast, a tricky shot that came off the side wall and ricocheted low on the front, stretching his opponent into the front corner. Chase caught the effect of it too late and missed before he sprawled on the floor. “That's my boy,” said Shahid, pumping his fist.

Lissy took her place on the bottom bleacher. If Afran lost this game, he'd be tied at two games all. Chase, she noted, had dropped twenty pounds and put on muscle since last year. He darted around the court more nimbly than Afran.

“I think he's going down,” she said to Shahid.

“No way, Coach,” Shahid said. “Watch him now.”

Sure enough, Afran took the score to 9–9, then 10–9 with a looping lob that Chase wanted to call out and shanked instead. Though Chase nicked a ball for 10 all, Afran served an ace, and followed it on the next point with a series of rails until he pulled the ball off the wall and slammed a volley—a move that Lissy would have called pure Shahid. “You've been coaching him,” she said.

Shahid grinned. “A few tips,” he said. Then, as Afran shook Chase's hand and the spectators began to gather their things, he glanced up to the bleachers and frowned. “You seen my sister, Coach?”

Lissy twisted to look up at the top bleacher. Afia was gone; not a hijab to be seen. “Her friend's there,” she said. Taylor didn't look happy at her boyfriend's loss. “She's probably in the ladies' room.”

“Hey, man,” said Afran as he came off court. “Did it make a difference?”

“Three-two so far, thanks to you,” said Lissy.

“Thanks to him, you mean,” Afran said, fist-jabbing Shahid. “This is your year, man. We're taking it all the way.”

“Inshallah,” said Shahid.

With a portion of the crowd drifting off, Lissy looked around for her second tier. She had four more matches to coach, and then the women. In the corner by the snack machine, Yanik was stretching his hamstrings. “You seen Gus?” she asked him.

Yanik jerked his head in the direction of the unlit hallway toward the lockers. Sure enough, there stood Gus Schneider, in his uniform, his unruly hair tied back, squash bag at his side. But he wasn't stretching. He was embracing a girl. For good luck, Lissy thought. She took two steps, then stopped. She recognized the girl. Her head bent back to receive Gus's kiss, her head scarf had fallen away from her dark hair. Shahid's sister, Afia.

Lissy smiled.
How sweet
, she thought. Discreetly, she turned away. She counted to ten. When she turned back, Gus was coming toward her briskly with his bag. And the girl was gone.

G
ingerly Afia stepped out of the restroom. She looked both ways before she scurried back to the bleachers. Gus was on the far right court now, three other Enright players on the nearer courts. Shahid's woman coach prowled back and forth like a blond lioness watching her cubs. Afia perched on one of the top bleachers, out of Gus's sight, to wait for her brother. She tried to look into the middle distance, as if she were thinking about her biology class, or Maryam's wedding, or anything other than the salty taste of Gus's mouth on hers five minutes before.

It wasn't the first time he'd kissed her. That had been last week, the night he had taken her out for her first hamburger, to Local Burger in Northampton, where he said they got the beef from nearby farms so it was probably close to halal anyway. She'd had a chocolate milkshake with the sandwich. She hadn't thought much of the meat—she liked her mother's kofta better—but the shake was creamy, delicious. When he'd pulled the car over to the curb to drop her off, Gus had put his hand gently on her jaw and turned her to him. Pulling away, she had felt a stirring deep inside, like the froth on the milkshake.

But that had been in Gus's car, in the dark. This kiss had come suddenly as she'd been heading toward the restroom, in the hallway where anyone could be passing by. Suddenly Gus had been in front of her, his squash bag slung over his shoulder, and before she could speak he had cinched her waist with his free hand.
Wish me luck
, he had said, and his lips were on hers, his tongue flicking quickly in and out of her startled mouth. His fingers had feathered against her hips before he kept going. Anyone could have seen them, anyone.

But no one had. No one, she reminded herself as she practiced her absentminded gazing. Just like the first time the plane lifted away from the tarmac in Peshawar and she was sure it was going to fall, it was turning, it was falling, and then it didn't fall but rose safe into the blue sky, a free-floating panic grabbed at her breath and pumped through her veins long after the danger was past. And she thought—as she'd thought then—
never again
, while at the same time the rush of pleasure slipped back and she realized terror wasn't the only feeling in her veins. And this time, as she pushed herself back onto the bleacher, to look as though she had been there a long while, she felt also the damp warmth and tingle between her legs that Gus's kiss had ignited. In the restroom she had soaked a paper towel and held it cold to her face, then a dry towel; she had wiped her glasses and fixed her scarf. All she had to do now was appear mildly distracted.

“Hey, Shahid, man,” she heard. She turned to see her brother's friend Afran rounding the corner from the locker rooms. “Your sister's right where you left her!”

She smiled modestly at Afran. Behind him, Shahid bounded out. “You go invisible, or what?” he asked in Pashto.

“That's my power,” she said. And as she lifted her book bag to follow him out, she knew it would be all right. He hadn't noticed a thing. Though he talked to the coach before they left, she didn't even stop in front of Gus's court. She had become expert at dividing her life into compartments, the way fetal cells differentiated until one group could function only as a heart, another only as bone marrow. When Shahid had told her about Maryam's wedding and the tickets Baba was sending, she had felt only a surge of excitement and homesickness—not the homesickness she'd felt last year, when Massachusetts food made her ill and the winter cold threatened to kill her, but a longing to be back in Nasirabad, with its smells of spice and animal dung, with her sisters' silly games and the clack of knitting needles from her grandmother, her
anâ
. By contrast, when Gus rang on the dorm phone—he knew not to ring her mobile—she felt only her heart rising in her chest, as if his call meant their future was unfurling before them as unblemished as a fresh carpet. Now and then she reminded herself that the heart and the bone marrow have to work together, or a person will not survive. But normally she put off for another day the question of reconciling her two separate lives. Only now did she have the memory of that sudden encounter, his hand on her waist, his lips. Like a jewel that glows in the dark.

•   •   •

W
hen they'd picked up a pair of halal burritos and settled into Shahid's dorm room, he put on the DVD of
Othello
he'd checked out of the library. Outside was windy, with fat gray clouds scudding across the sky, the last yellow leaves of fall dancing across Shahid's window. Already the hours they had spent together last spring, with her hauling him through Principles of Physics, were a distant memory. He wasn't taking any more sciences, just this lit course and then business and economics. Shahid was a better writer than she, Afia kept telling him; Shakespeare should be easier for him. But he had trouble grasping these plays. When the video was over, all he could talk about were the scenes that weren't in the version he'd read for class.

“And they show a lot of sex, you know,” he said in Pashto, not looking at Afia. “Because it's for the Americans, they need that.”

“They show it between married people,” she said quickly. “They wouldn't show it on the stage.”

She had read the play, for his sake. If he could nail this class, he'd bring his GPA above 3.5, which was what the fellow at Harvard said he needed for that job, next year. She had her own paper to write, for Microbio, but she could do that tonight, with lots of tea. She marked a few places in Act Three. “You see how it's morning when Cassio asks Desdemona for a favor? Emilia's with her. She's never alone with Cassio. But by that night, Othello's sure his wife has been unfaithful and he strangles her.”

Shahid shook his head. “I'm lost already,” he said. “And it's all in this old English—”

“But remember in the movie. There's just the one night that Othello spends with his wife.”

“Yeah, when she marries him against her father's wishes. I thought I could write about how it's fated not to work because she's so headstrong. And in the movie, what they do—”

“Shahid, it's an American movie. We see that stuff all the time.”

“We don't write about it.”

“Ignore the sex. If you look at the time frame—”

“Still, he's a Moor. She's Italian. Maybe it's kismet, you know, that they die.”

“Where would you find the evidence, Shahid lala?”

He stood and stretched. His dorm room was smaller and more cluttered than hers. He'd drawn a single this year. “You don't need evidence,” he said, looking down on the leaf-strewn quad. “This isn't science.”

“I took a class in poetry last spring. You needed evidence even for that.” Carefully she pointed out to him that Shakespeare's play let only twelve daylight hours elapse between the time Othello first becomes jealous and the moment he kills Desdemona. “And see here,” she said, pointing to where she had highlighted lines in yellow, “how he says she's committed the act of shame with Cassio a thousand times. But she hasn't had the chance to do it once!”

In the end, Shahid couldn't stop talking about Desdemona's planting the seed of suspicion by the way she dishonored her family. That was, Afia thought later, the way Baba would see it, and Khalid too—especially Khalid. So she helped Shahid write his paper about Desdemona's disobedience and kismet. Even if the evidence wasn't strong, she thought it would get him the B he needed.

Just as they were finishing, three of the squash guys came by to persuade Shahid out for a hamburger. Afia adjusted her hijab and averted her eyes. She knew all Shahid's teammates. But Gus was among the three, and she didn't trust herself. “I have to take my sister back to school,” Shahid said to them.

“Both of you come out with us,” said Yanik. “You're not keeping halal anymore, Shahid. Don't give us that bullshit.”

“My sister is,” said Shahid.

“Valerie's hostessing tonight,” Yanik said. “C'mon, dude.”

“I have to get back,” Afia said. It hurt not to lift her eyes to Gus. He was the only secret she kept from her brother—well, he and her job. Three afternoons a week, she bagged groceries at the Price Chopper in Northampton. The scholarship she had from Smith covered tuition and housing, but she had told her family it covered everything, just like Shahid's scholarship and his allowance from Uncle Omar. The older women at the Price Chopper knew about Gus and didn't mind when he came by. She called them all “Aunty,” the way she would have at home. At the end of the day, they usually gave her a bag of dinged cans and boxes they'd found, and she sorted through for what was halal. It lifted her spirits, to tie on her apron and spend the dark evenings in a bright place where she felt cared for.

But she could not tell Shahid about the shameful job she held, bagging other people's food and mopping up their messes; and she could not let him see how well she knew Gus. She put the Gus-feeling away, like moving a wayward cell with a tweezers back to the organ it was meant to serve. As they stepped out of the brick dormitory onto the parking lot, she saw the clouds that had been threatening all day had opened, and rain was coming down. She slipped off her flats and waited barefoot on the cold sidewalk for Shahid to bring his Honda around.

“What, no Wellingtons?” he said when she slid in.

“I bought some last year. They leaked.”

“Where'd you buy them?”

“I think it's called Payless?”

He chuckled. “Silly sister. Those are cheap, you can't expect them to last.” He glanced at the clock on the dash. “We'll swing by the outlets,” he said. “Get you something for rain and snow too. What'd you wear last winter for the snow?”

Afia shrugged. She didn't want to tell him she had ruined her sturdiest leather shoes, the only ones that could keep her warm enough. She couldn't expect a brother to notice such things. That he thought she could buy anything at all was odd, since he didn't know about the grocery job—but even with her own money, she was a burden. Shahid had had to ensure she was safely transported and cared for on weekends and school breaks. He had to answer to Moray and Baba for any tarnish on the gleam of her promise in America.

“They have good boots here,” said Shahid, pulling up in front of Clarks. “Britisher boots, rains all the time there.”

Afia hung back while he pulled one model after another off the shelves and examined them critically. Her eye was drawn to a pretty pair with a buckle on the side and a stacked heel, but she let Shahid ask the saleswoman questions about waterproofing and warmth. “Here,” he said in English when the woman had fetched her size, “try these.”

He handed her a pair of strangely elegant workmen's boots. They laced up from a padded toe but ended in a flap of shearling. When she stood up in them her feet felt hugged. “These are the kind Patty wears in winter,” she said in Pashto.

“That's the idea. They'll keep you dry and warm too.”

She glanced at the tag dangling off the shelf. “But Shahid,” she said, “these are more than a hundred dollars. You can't spend this on boots!”

He snorted. “You don't know what Uncle Omar sends me for allowance, do you?”

“But that money's supposed to be for you—”

“Do you like them? Do they fit?”

Her eyes strayed to the pretty pair. But they were even more and would not keep the rain off. Her toes began to feel the way they felt when she wiggled them in front of a fire. “They're perfect,” she said.

The rest of the way to Northampton—her boots on in the car, her feet a pair of little ovens—they talked about Maryam's wedding, the tickets Shahid would buy with Baba's credit card, the dates they would each be finished with exams. Afia was excited to fly home in the middle of the year. She had told the other girls in her suite about Maryam's wedding. She had even told her favorite professor, Sue Glasgow, about it. It would be fabulous, Professor Glasgow said, for her to see her family. She didn't ask, the way the girls did, how long Maryam had known her fiancé; she didn't ask if Afia liked this young man. Professor Glasgow taught biology, but she understood a lot more about the way families could be organized than the members of Al-Iman, which Afia had been invited to join when she arrived at Smith last year. The Al-Iman girls were mostly Jordanians, and they wore the hijab in the Turkish style, not at all like Pakistanis. The famous Muslim feminists they talked about were from the Middle East, and they all seemed wealthy, with winter vacations on the Black Sea or in Cancun. She didn't have any more in common with these students, she complained to Shahid, than with the women in the South Asian club, who were all Indians and Sri Lankans.

“It's the same for me,” Shahid said. “The only one who even starts to understand is Afran, and he's from Turkey. That's practically Europe.”