The Newlyweds (7 page)

“Is there some problem?” she asked George, but George’s cell phone was ringing. He frowned and went back into the office to take the call.

“Is something wrong?”

“Sit down,” said Eileen, but Aunt Cathy grabbed her arm and wrenched her upright.

“Careful!”

“What is it?” Amina said, trying to keep the panic from her voice. For weeks she’d been convinced that something would get in the way of the ceremony; this morning she had prayed—not that nothing would go wrong, but that she would be prepared enough to see it coming and resourceful enough to find a way around it.

“If you sit, your dress will be ruined,” Aunt Cathy said.

Amina was about to ask where George was when her husband-to-be came back into the room.

“What?” Amina said again, but Ed was telling everyone that George couldn’t even forget TCE for as long as it took to get married.

“It wasn’t TCE,” George said.

“Was that my daughter?” Cathy said. “You shouldn’t have even answered it. Thinking she can make up for it with one phone call. Her own cousin’s wedding.”

George turned to Amina, lowering his voice. “Kim wanted to apologize for not being here. She thinks she made a mistake—and she’s dying to meet you.”

But Aunt Cathy was listening. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive—if she were ‘dying,’ she probably could’ve made it. It’s not like she has any other responsibilities.”

“She wants to have us over next week,” George said.

“Come on,” said Eileen, putting her hand on Amina’s back. “It’s your turn,” and Amina was relieved to see that a door had opened on the opposite side of the room, and a short, bald man in a suit, a man who looked as if nothing on earth had ever disturbed his composure, was gesturing for them to enter. She understood that the wedding was continuing as planned, and she looked carefully around the room because she knew her mother would need to hear exactly what it looked like. There were two potted trees with braided trunks and three rows of white plastic folding chairs, half filled by George’s family and friends. The deputy city clerk stood behind a wooden lectern underneath two certificates framed in gold. With the light from the window on his glasses, Amina couldn’t see his eyes.

She hadn’t expected to be nervous, and at first she wasn’t. George had told her what her cue would be, and Amina allowed her mind to wander while she waited for it. When she’d left Desh, there was still the possibility that her parents would be able to come to Rochester for the wedding. Ninety days had seemed like enough time to plan, but when George went online to reserve airline tickets, they were almost fifteen hundred dollars each, even if her parents made stops in Dubai and Hamburg, Germany. George was willing to help pay for the tickets, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about it, and so Amina had called her parents on a phone card and given them her opinion: it was a waste of money. She and George were getting married at the county clerk’s office, and afterward there would be a dinner at Giorgio’s Trattoria in Brighton. The whole thing would take maybe four hours (including driving time), and Amina and her father agreed that
to fly twenty hours in order to do something that took four hours didn’t make a lot of sense.

“What about the Muslim wedding?” her father had said. “When will that take place?”

“It will take place at the Islamic Center of Rochester,” Amina said. “It will also be very short.”

“Nasir’s place?” She could hear the scorn in her father’s voice, but the main thing was to please her mother. Neither ceremony was important to her father, who cared much more that Amina be legally married. Only once she was married could she get the green card, and only once she had the green card could she apply for her citizenship. As a citizen, her father knew, she could sponsor her parents, and in his mind the sponsorship was the only thing keeping him and her mother from making the journey to America.

“The ICR is a good place,” she reassured him, and then, searching for additional details to impart, added: “Even the other mosques in Rochester encourage you to go there.”

In the end, as she’d expected, the problem was not her father but her mother. Her mother had agreed at first, and they’d even made another plan: as soon as Amina and George could come back to Dhaka, they would go to a studio and take wedding photographs. They would buy wedding clothes, and Amina would go to the beauty salon; they would have more money to spend on the clothes and the photographs, since her father wouldn’t be paying for a wedding. Once they had the photographs, her mother could look at them all the time; it would be no different than if they’d all celebrated a wedding together for real.

She had thought her mother was satisfied, and then a few nights later, Amina got a call after they had gone to bed. There weren’t many minutes left on her father’s phone (it was morning in Dhaka, and the Flexiload place in Kaderabad Bazar wasn’t open yet), and so Amina had to use another card to call them back. Her mother was crying, and it was hard to understand her. Her father told her not to worry, but when she asked why her mother was crying, he said:

“She’s crying because she’s going to miss your wedding. She’s going to miss it because I can’t afford the ticket.”

“No!” Amina said. “We decided—it didn’t make sense. Twenty
hours for four hours. Three thousand dollars for one party!” She could hear hammering in the background: a new building was going up across the street. Her parents complained that the new apartments would be much better than theirs, but Amina was disposed to look on the bright side. The neighborhood was improving.

“Tell her it will be only a small party,” she told her father.

“Your wedding party. What kind of terrible parents don’t come to their own daughter’s wedding?”

She started to argue, but her father wasn’t listening. Her mother was saying something in the background.

“What does she say?”

Her father paused so long that she would have thought the call had been dropped, except that she could still hear the sound of hammering on the other end. It was morning in Mohammadpur: the sun behind the haze, the kids walking to school in twos and threes, the crows on the telephone wires, and the call of the vendors—Chilis! Eggs! Excellent Quality Feather Brooms!—or her favorite, the man who took your plastic jugs and gave sweet potatoes in exchange. Once again she had the disorienting feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present. Only on the telephone did the streams ever cross. At the other end of the line, another Amina was hiding her head under the covers, stealing just a few more minutes before the cacophony outside forced her to put two feet on the cold, tiled floor.

“Tell me, Abba.”

Her father’s voice when it came was stoppered, strange, as if he’d swallowed something whole. “She says it would’ve been better if you’d never been born.”

George shifted sleepily in the bed. “Tell them you’ll call them back tomorrow.”

Amina gripped the head of the bedpost. From their room she could see the house behind them, windows blazing in the dark.

“Tell her the food is going to be terrible,” she whispered to her father. “Tell her there is a popular dish called ‘pigs in blankets.’ ”

But George was awake. “Are you talking about food
now
?”

“It doesn’t matter about the food,” her father said. “The point is that you are her only child.”

“Do you, Amina Mazid, take this man, George Stillman, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

The corresponding question was asked of George, and then the city clerk declared: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

George leaned toward her, and Amina leaped back. From the chairs behind them, Cathy made a hiccupping sound. George’s face tightened in a familiar way, like the mouth of a drawstring bag, and when Amina glanced behind her, she saw an identical contraction on the face of her new mother-in-law. She hurriedly stepped toward George, smiling to let him know that it was only that she was surprised, not that she didn’t want to kiss him in front of his family and friends.

Many hours later, after cocktails at Aunt Cathy’s, the reception dinner at Giorgio’s, and then cake, coffee, and the opening of gifts at George’s mother’s house (Eileen had insisted that Amina call her Mom from now on), when they were home in bed together so much later than usual, George had asked why she hadn’t wanted to kiss him.

“You didn’t tell me,” she explained.

“You didn’t know there was kissing at a wedding?”

Amina had to think about that for a minute, because of course she had known. She had known since she was nine years old and her Devil Aunt had bought a television. She had seen it on
Dallas
, and
L.A. Law
, and
The Fall Guy
, and so there was no way to explain her ignorance to George.

“I did know. I guess I just didn’t believe it would happen to me.”

“You’ve kissed me a hundred times,” George said, in a voice that suggested to Amina they might be about to have their first fight. She wanted to avoid that, especially tonight, because if there was anything she believed about marriage, it was that arguing the way her parents did was a waste of time.

“Not only kissing. The marriage in total.”

“You didn’t believe we were getting married? What did you think we were doing?”

It had started to rain, and that comforting sound lent the contents of the room a sudden, momentary familiarity, almost as if she’d seen them once long ago.

“In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed. But in America you make your plans and then they happen.”

To her relief, George finally smiled. “So you planned to kiss me, but you were surprised when it actually happened.”

“Yes,” Amina said. “I was dumbstruck.”

12
Kim had invited them in June, but soon after the wedding she suddenly went abroad again, this time to teach at a yoga retreat in France. It wasn’t until September that they finally made a date to meet her for a cup of tea, in her apartment on Edgerton Street downtown. George had said that the houses in this area were cheaply built, and that the style of Kim’s building—pale stucco ornamented with dark wooden beams—was a reference to a type of architecture popular in England hundreds of years ago. He said it looked pretentious on these modern Rochester apartments. But Amina liked the street where they’d parked their car. They walked past a women’s clothing boutique where everything in the window was black and white, a bookshop, and a café with tables outside, where college students read and talked in intimate groups. The air smelled of burning leaves, a scent somehow sharper and more distilled than it was in their yard in Pittsford.

Kim lived on the fourth floor, and they were both breathing heavily by the time they got to the door. George had said that his cousin was twenty-seven, two years older than Amina, and so he could remember when his aunt Cathy and her husband, Todd, had adopted her. He had been seven when they brought her home—a nine-month-old baby girl—a year before Todd had gone off to Florida with another woman, abandoning his wife and child. George had said that Kim looked nothing like her mother, that she was tall and thin and dressed in an eccentric way, but when Amina pressed him for more details, he had become impatient and said that she was going to meet his cousin and could form an opinion herself.

George rang the bell, but Kim must’ve heard them coming up the stairs, because she opened the door almost immediately. She was certainly tall, almost as tall as George, but unlike most of the women Amina had met so far in Rochester, she was very thin, with a flat chest
and narrow hips. George and his adopted cousin had similarly sandy blond hair, and light-colored eyes (though hers were more green than blue)—but no one would have mistaken them for biological relatives. Kim was unmistakably pretty, with regular features, a smooth, high forehead, and a perfect, bow-shaped mouth. Her hair was wavy and hung nearly to her waist, and her skin was fair, with undertones of pink and gold. Most extraordinary, she was wearing a long Indian shirt, a kind of kurta with a red and purple pattern, over a pair of black leggings. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were painted a brilliant royal blue.

“I can’t believe you’re finally here,” she said. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Amina—not the kind of hug George’s mother often gave her, which involved the arms and a glancing touch of the cheeks, but a true embrace, laying her head for a moment on Amina’s shoulder, as if for comfort, before she stepped away.

“I have all different kinds of tea—jasmine, green, tulsi. I know you prefer coffee,” she said to George, “but I don’t have any.”

Amina thought she’d misheard. “You have tea made from tulsi leaves?” Her mother was a particular believer in the beneficial properties of the tulsi leaf for ailments ranging from eye strain to stomach cramps and rashes and took it regularly, in both tea and tincture form.

“That’s what I’m having—let me make you some.” Kim disappeared into a galley kitchen, almost as small as the one in Mohammadpur, and George led Amina through an archway into the apartment’s single room. The room was dominated by a futon bed made up to look like a couch and a fireplace, which Kim had filled with houseplants. Amina recognized spider plants, aspidistra, and aloe, but there was one very beautiful species that she didn’t know, with a single, red waxy bloom. The apartment seemed bigger than it was because of three large windows, which Kim had outlined with strings of tiny white Christmas lights; beneath the windows was a long, low wooden table, with potted plants and a collection of jewelry and figurines, artfully arranged as if in a case at a museum. Among the miniatures Amina recognized the Buddha and several Hindu deities, their fierce expressions and odd many-armed postures crafted from silver, bronze, and jade. On the wall above the bed Kim had thumbtacked a Tibetan painting on
silk, with an inscription below in that forbidding alphabet, the letters like tiny knives. Because there were no proper chairs (and George would have been uncomfortable on one of the colored cushions scattered over the rug), the two of them sat on the bed.