The Other Americans Read online

  Maryam

  I was trying to stay awake, so I switched on the radio and looked for Claudia Corbett’s show on KDGL. Usually, she’s on at lunchtime, and I listen to her while I’m peeling potatoes or chopping parsley, but the show is so popular that they rebroadcast it again at ten p.m. That night, a young woman was calling in to say she had gotten married just six months ago, but she and her husband were already fighting because he wanted to move to Portland to be a nature photographer, and she wanted to stay at her job with an insurance company in Salt Lake City, and neither one of them would change their minds. “Listen,” Claudia told her sharply, the way she does sometimes, when callers start to ramble and refuse to face the obvious, “nobody said that marriage was easy. Marriage is work.”

  When we moved to America thirty-five years ago, many things took me by surprise, like gun shops next to barbershops, freeways that tangled like yarn, people who knocked on your door to talk about Jesus, twenty different kinds of milk at the grocery store, signs that said DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE. I remember pointing them out to Driss: they even have signs that tell you what you can’t think! But above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television. Men talked about their affairs or addictions or gambling problems, women talked about their weight or plastic surgeries or the children they had outside marriage; even teenagers had something to say, mostly about how terrible their parents were—and all of it like it was a normal thing. I couldn’t stop watching. The television sat on top of the supply cabinet in the back of the donut shop, and while I was washing dishes or mopping floors, I would watch Sally or Donahue, which in those days were on in the middle of the afternoon, when the shop was quiet. My brother had told me that watching television would help me improve my English, and I will say I learned a lot of new words, like paternity test and artificial insemination and AIDS epidemic, but my trouble was pronunciation, how easy it was to say “tree” when I meant “three,” or “udder” when I meant “other.” I needed a lot of practice. In Casablanca, I had my two sisters, three uncles, and eight cousins, but here in California, my brother was the only family I had, and he lived a hundred and thirty miles away. I hadn’t realized how far that was until we went from seeing him every day to seeing him only once a month, and sometimes not even that often. For me, that was the hardest thing about living in America, being so far away, it was like being orphaned.

  One day we went to the Stater Brothers on the 62. We had been living in the Mojave for about nine months by then, but this was our first winter here and we weren’t used to the cold, so I bundled up Salma in a green wool coat I’d bought for her at the Goodwill before we went to the store. She sat in the shopping cart, which was another thing that was new to me in America, but I let her, she liked the feeling of rolling around the store in the cart, and I didn’t see the harm in it. Looking through the coupons we’d clipped from the newspaper, I found a discount we could apply to a can of Hunt’s diced tomatoes, but I couldn’t see the brand anywhere on the shelf. “I’m sure they have it,” Driss said. He was like that, he always had faith, even about silly little things, so while he looked for the can, I waited, shivering in my denim jacket. Then a woman pushed her cart past us, and in her wake I caught the scent of rose water. Instantly, I was back in Casablanca with my sisters, putting our hair in rollers and trying on different colors of lipstick, looking at our reflections in the dresser mirror, where a picture of Shadia was tucked into the frame, her hair in an elaborate bouffant we were trying to replicate. The radio was on, we were waiting for the DJ to play the Bee Gees, our friends were coming by later to watch an Egyptian movie starring Roshdy Abadha.

  I don’t know why I did this, but I followed the woman down the aisle and along the refrigerated section, where she got milk and butter and eggs and juice, enough for a big family, and then to the corner display, where she picked out one of the new E.T. lunchboxes, with the alien and the little boy touching fingers and the light glowing between them. The woman had long brown hair, almost the same shade as mine, only she wore hers parted down the middle, and I remember that her coat had those huge shoulder pads that were becoming popular. She went into a new aisle, and I watched as she tried to choose a brand of baking flour from the dozens that sat on the shelf. “Hello,” I said. The woman turned around, her eyebrows lifting, her lips stretching into a tentative smile. My name is Maryam, I wanted to tell her. What is yours? Do you live nearby? What do you do? Do you have children? I have one daughter, she is three years old. Would you like to have tea with me someday? Are you baking a cake? I know a great recipe. You shouldn’t use Star Flour, though, it’s not good for cakes. But when I opened my mouth again, nothing came out, my heart was beating too fast inside my chest.

  “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “This is not good floor.”

  “What?”

  Later, I would learn to sound out words in my head before I spoke them, the way I had been taught to do at school, when we recited the poems of al-Khansa’ or al-Mutanabbi, and our teachers would not tolerate a missing inflection or an incorrect agreement, but that day all I felt was the betrayal of a foreign tongue. “This,” I said, “is not good floor.”

  She looked at the ground. “I don’t understand.”

  “Too thick.”

  “Lady, I have no idea whatchu tryin’ to say.”

  Only now that I was close to her did I see that she had a beauty mark on her upper lip, just like my youngest sister, which I hadn’t expected, and I stared at her even more intently. But I had already mangled what I’d tried to say and I was afraid to make it worse, so I pointed to the flour and rubbed my belly and smiled in a way I hoped made my meaning clear. She shook her head and laughed, displaying crooked teeth yellowed by coffee, then put a box of instant baking mix in her cart and walked off. Standing next to the canisters of frosting, I started crying. That’s where Driss found me later, crying next to the frosting. “What’s wrong?” he asked, taking my hand. I didn’t know how to explain to him that nothing was wrong, and yet everything was wrong. Salma was watching me from the cart, and I quickly dried my face, I didn’t want to upset her, especially after she brandished the can of Hunt’s diced tomatoes like a prize. A consolation prize. “Where’s the coupon?” Driss asked me.

  I didn’t have it, I’d dropped it somewhere along the way, when I’d followed the woman from aisle to aisle, so I retraced my steps, but I couldn’t find the little envelope where we saved all our coupons. It had taken us weeks to clip that many, and now Driss was annoyed because we would have to pay more for our groceries, and he bickered with me about it while we waited in the checkout line. We had to be extremely careful with money back then, because we had just started our business. We worked hard in those early years, we worked very hard, and maybe we should have worked on our marriage, too, like Claudia Corbett said. Listening to her that night in the car, I was thinking that we should try again, stop arguing about everything, learn to forgive ourselves, and especially each other, for our mistakes, but when I walked in, Driss wasn’t home. Usually, he was in his lounge chair doing his crossword puzzles, that was how he improved his English, he was obsessed with finding all the answers, and hardly ever looked up when I walked past him on my way to the kitchen. But as I said, that night the chair was empty, and he didn’t pick up the phone when I called him, so I called Salma instead. It was nine forty. I remember the time because I was looking at the clock on the microwave while I talked to her, and she told me not to worry, maybe he was having car trouble or his cell phone was turned off. An hour later, the police came.

  Nora

  In sleep, I was lost to a world my father still inhabited. We were together in a bright room and the air smelled of the sprig of wormwood with which he flavored his mint tea. He was doing his crosswords, chewing on his pen cap as he considered each clue. Three letters, Nora. The father of all things, the king of all things. Any id
eas? War, I said without looking up from my piano. Aha! Thank you, Nor-eini. Then I opened my eyes, and the walls of my bedroom closed in on me, their bright white an assault on my senses. A weight settled on my shoulders like an unwelcome coat. Waking up was the hardest time of the day now, when I remembered he was gone.

  I turned to my side, curled myself up into a ball. Staring from above the dresser was a younger version of me, in a picture of the jazz band taken just before the junior-year recital. Black dress, hair in a severe bun, lips in an impatient pout. How eager I had been to leave home! And yet what wouldn’t I give now for another day here with him. I closed my eyes again, hoping to reenter the dream, but it was useless, I was wide awake. After getting dressed, I put some Coltrane on the stereo, and sat on my bed to send an email to the headmaster at Bay Prep. At the time, I was substituting for an English teacher who was on maternity leave, but I’d left Oakland immediately after hearing about the accident, so I composed a note to the headmaster, explaining what had happened and saying I hoped I would work for him again soon. He would replace me, I knew, and it would be tough to find stable work like that. Then I heard voices down the hallway.

  When I walked into the living room later, I found Detective Coleman sitting on the leather sofa, her legs crossed at the ankles, a file folder on her lap. She had dark eyes and long lashes that jutted out like pine needles. A small scar cut across her right eyebrow. My mother had a framed photo in her hand, which she was showing to the detective. “This was in 1980, before we moved to California.”

  “Hello,” I said, and the detective stood up to shake my hand.

  But the moment Coleman sat down again, my mother continued, “This is my husband, Driss, and this is me. That’s our daughter Salma between us. She was two. And this—Nora, how do you say, the tower that warns the ships?”

  “Lighthouse.”

  “Right. That’s the lighthouse of Casablanca behind us.”

  “You moved here from Morocco, Mrs. Guerraoui?” Coleman asked.

  “Yes, in 1981. It’s a long story.”

  “Would you like something to drink, Detective?” I asked.

  “Coffee, if you have any. But please don’t make it on my behalf.”

  I went into the kitchen, tossed out the coffee, and started a fresh pot. Over the years, I had heard the story of the old country many times from my father; I couldn’t bear to listen to it now. “It was a Saturday,” he would say. That was how he always started the story. “It was a Saturday. The Saturday before finals week.” I think he liked that story because it had the easily discernible arc of the American Dream: Immigrant Crosses Ocean, Starts a Business, Becomes a Success.

  He told the story from time to time, just to remind himself that everything turned out fine for him. But all that changed one September morning. At least for me, it did. I remember that the smell of smoke reached me first. I was fiddling with the car radio, trying to find a station that wasn’t playing commercials. Next to me, my father drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. “Just put NPR on,” he said. But I was sick of the news. That was why I’d insisted on going to work with him that Saturday morning—I couldn’t bear the news any longer. I settled on a station that played classical music, leaned back in my seat, and let the colors wash over me. Then I smelled smoke. When my father made a left onto the 62, I saw a gray plume rising in the distance. I thought it was a burning car or a propane tank, but as we got closer, I realized the smoke was coming from the shop.

  We turned onto Kickapoo Trail to find Aladdin Donuts burning like a stack of hay. In a single motion, my father jumped out of the station wagon and pulled out his cell phone, just as Mr. Melendez at the 7-Eleven across the street came running toward us. “I called 911,” he said. He told us he’d been changing the paper in his cash register when he heard the sound of screeching tires. He’d thought nothing of it until the smell of smoke came drifting in through the doorway, a mix of gasoline, ash, melting plastic, and caramelizing syrup. Years later, a whiff of smoke, even if only from a beachside barbecue, can still conjure up my memories of the arson. Standing beside my father that day, I watched the flames lap at the store sign until the glass frame cracked. In the distance, a cacophony of sirens rose, ending in a deafening roar as the firefighters drew up to the lot. Under the spray of their hoses, the smoke turned a cloudy white that made my eyes water and my nostrils burn.

  It was a junior officer from the San Bernardino County Fire Department who found the cause of the fire: a brick wrapped in a rag that had been doused in accelerant. “Homemade,” the officer said.

  “I know,” my father replied. He had seen this kind of thing before, he said, in the Casablanca protests of 1981. He shook his head in disbelief. I think he was just realizing that he had moved six thousand miles for safety, only to find that he was not safe at all.

  When we returned home, we found my mother where we had left her at six in the morning, sitting on the sofa with one foot tucked under her, watching CNN, where footage of the twin towers burning in New York still played in an endless loop. “What happened?” she asked, standing up.

  My father told her.

  I walked past them to my bedroom, where I peeled off the T-shirt and jeans that now reeked of smoke. But even after I showered, I couldn’t get rid of the smell of soot. My hair was redolent with it. From the living room came the soundtrack of my life—my parents arguing with each other. “We should go back,” my mother was saying.

  “Go where?”

  “Home. Casa.”

  “We can’t go back, Maryam.”

  “Of course, we can.” Morocco had changed, my mother insisted, things were different now. But my father didn’t think this was true. Besides, the Mojave had grown on him; he couldn’t imagine living in a big city like Casablanca anymore.

  “We’ll move to Marrakesh, you’ve always liked it there.”

  “But what about Nora? She’s still in school. No, no. We can’t move.”

  Even after I walked back into the living room, they continued talking about me as if I weren’t there. They argued for days. And the more they argued, the more my mother turned to her Qur’an. She had found solace in it after the attacks, reading it to calm herself every morning after listening to the stream of tragedies on the news. At the dinner table, she would often quote from the holy book in her perfect Arabic enunciation, which none of us could ever hope to replicate. And she’d started praying again. She had never before shown much of an interest in religion so, even as he accommodated them, these changes took my father by surprise. But when he came home one evening to find all of his beer in the trash, he went to bed without speaking to her.

  Thus began an eight-month period that I sometimes thought of as the Cold War. Every morning, my mother would take the beer out of the fridge, pour it down the sink, and toss the bottles into the trash bins, and every evening my father would bring home another six-pack. When he installed a separate fridge in the garage, she stuffed it with meat and vegetables. He complained he was not free in his own home; she said she did not feel safe in it. He went out more; she took up karate.

  The fighting began to diffuse after the insurance settlement came in, and my father used the money to buy an old diner. It was called the Pantry. What could be more American than that? “Everything will be fine now,” he promised her. “You’ll see.” This was how the Cold War ended, and an uneasy peace returned to our home. But one blowback of the almost year-long conflict was that I couldn’t live in that home any longer; my parents’ endless fighting made it impossible. I thought of college as a safe haven; I was desperate to leave.

  By the time I returned with the coffee tray, my mother had put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, wedging it between a color picture of Salma and Tareq at their wedding and framed handprints of the twins. A different portrait of my father had been taken out of its frame and now sat on the
coffee table, in front of Coleman. “Do you have children, Detective?” my mother was asking.

  “Yes,” Coleman said. “A boy. Miles.”

  “Salma is a dentist. She’s great with kids.”

  I poured a cup of coffee for the detective. “Miles, after Miles Davis?”

  “No, Miles Aiken. My husband loves basketball.”

  Coleman took a sip of her coffee and waited for me to sit down before she opened her notebook. “Mrs. Guerraoui, the autopsy confirmed that your husband was the victim of a hit-and-run motor vehicle accident. He suffered multiple injuries, both from the immediate impact to the right side of his body and from hitting the pavement afterward: a broken hip, five broken ribs, a punctured lung, bleeding in the head. It appears he was crossing Highway 62 at Chemehuevi, probably walking to where he was parked, when he was struck by a car or truck traveling east on the highway, landing him back on the north side of Chemehuevi. The medical examiner said that the extent of his injuries suggest that he died almost instantly. The time of death is estimated at about nine thirty p.m. on April 28th.”

  The scene I had imagined, and which I was helpless to stop from unfolding every time I thought about the accident, came into sharper focus. Yet the new details only deepened my anguish. I didn’t know he had landed on his head or that his lung had been punctured. How long had it taken for him to die? Did he measure time breath by breath, waiting for someone to come help him? A fresh pain shot through me, so raw it made me want to scream.

  Coleman grew quiet. She was giving us time to absorb the news, I think. At the other end of the sofa the cat raised its nose in the air, detected a scent, then trotted out of the living room after it.

  “Ya lateef,” my mother whispered, “ya lateef.”

  “I should also mention,” Coleman said, “that Highway Patrol would normally take over at this point, but I’m already three days into the investigation, and they asked if we could see it through.”