WHEN MATUSSEM RAMOUD opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. He was amazed by this. By six o’clock, the floors of his house vibrated with drumming and music. “Naima.”
He had become increasingly bemused over the years, wandering into abstraction, traveling in and out of conversations like a visitor to foreign places. Only at his drums did he seem to focus, concentrate with the purpose of remembering, steering rhythms into line, coaxing a steady—in his word, peripatetic—pulse out of air.
His wife’s face was imprinted on his consciousness. He thought of her as he drove to work in the mornings through ice and rain. His sense of loss was sometimes so potent that he became disoriented. His need to drum grew sharp as a knife cut; he tapped and shuffled behind his desk. He made his secretaries nervous, and visitors to his office would stay for only the briefest sessions until his tapping became too much. Matussem’s daughters, Jemorah and Melvina, could tell when he was really napping—not just feigning sleep to eavesdrop—because his feet would start jerking rhythmically, tapping out time to Charlie Parker. After their mother’s death, they heard him both mornings and evenings, alone or with his band, tapping in the basement, drums humming, tripping and rushing, giddy, loud-voiced. This sound had followed the girls through the years, from their father’s first riffs on a child’s kit he’d found in the basement to the Snazzy Sound of Mat Ramoud and the Ramoudettes.
None of the relatives in Jordan understood Matussem’s life in America; but even those who never left the Old Country except for summer vacation knew that after work at the hospital maintenance office, Matussem made money as a drummer. When he played jazz they heard noise, and when he played Arabic music, they could dance; this was good enough for them. So when his sister Fatima, who lived in Syracuse, heard that the Syrian Orthodox Church was throwing a welcoming party for an archbishop from Jordan, she got on the phone and called her brother.
“We need loud, we need big name, we need free,” she said, stabbing at the keys of her terminal. “You fit to all three, perfect!”
“Who’s saying?” Matussem said. “You never even heard us and you saying loud. You think because it is your family name it makes a big name? And we get four hundreds for three one-hour sets. Sometimes. One time we did.”
There was the kind of silence over the phone that made Matussem’s skin crawl. Silence was the opposite of his sister, a by-product that resulted whenever she was concentrating her powers. He’d always thought she worked at the library because it gave her a place to charge up. She’d immigrated to America from Jordan in 1960, a year after he did, in order to keep an eye on him. He squeezed the phone receiver, trapped between her silence and whatever was coming next. Finally she said, “Matussem, Matussem, Ya Matussem, remember when you are five and I am six and I give you all my grabia cookie to eat? Do you?”
Matussem had no such memory. He put his hand over the receiver and sighed as deeply as he could. Then he said, “Yes?”
“And you remember when you are six and I am seven and I make this boys stop pick on you and call you shorty?”
“Fatima, please, take pity—”
“What I am saying exactly! I am taking pity on you all your life and these how you repay me. These how you treat she who give the breads from her mouth, her flesh and blood—”
“Fatima, Fatima”—he switched the receiver from his right to left ear. “We play free for your party. Okeydokey.”
“Inshallah!” she cried. “I should be so lucky!”
“What Inshallah, what, Fatima?” he asked in the tone of someone crossing the desert.
“Inshallah I live till these Sunday! Maybe I drop dead tonight and you dance on my grave. Maybe you and Allah will that I should make carpet for your feet!”
“What time on Sunday, O sister of mine?”
“Seven o’clock,” she said, aching to fly full throttle into recrimination. She resorted to punching at the terminal keys again. “On a dot. Look respectable for once. Tell Jemorah and Melvina to wear dresses—there good families there to look them over.”
Rather than remind his sister of what she already well knew—that one might as easily put a jinni into a bottle as put Melvina into something she didn’t want to wear, he said, “Your wish, my command. Good-bye, O great big sister of mine.”
THE AEROGRAMS FROM Uncle Fouad or Auntie Rima always began arriving in winter, mentioning the possibility of a visit. By June, the relatives started to descend and Family Function Season officially began, thick with upstate humidity and sweating relatives who thought somehow that this was preferable to the desert.
It was mid-May, the first real thaw in a season that had been thick with snow; Jemorah was at her desk in inpatient billing. Like Matussem, she and her younger sister, Melvina, worked at Johnson-Crowes Hospital: Jem out of necessity, Melvie—as she put it—out of “destiny.” Jem’s job was simple, if meaningless; she totaled the previous day’s billing on an adding machine and stuffed the itemized invoices—one semiprivate, two catheters, three hypodermics, and so on—into the patient’s folder. She filed, sorted, distributed, and stapled. Mostly stapled. She also answered the phone: “Good morning, inpatient billing, may I help you?”
She heard the songs of furies, of the lost and broken and wayward. People with mothers dying or children dead.
“My son’s been in the hospital since birth and now he’s going to die if he doesn’t get heart surgery. What am I supposed to do with these bills? Seven hundred dollars consulting! And I don’t have any insurance. My God! What is this one?—two hundred fifty-eight dollars for an anesthesia tray?”
“You need to speak to one of our patient reps—”
If the caller hung on, if the funnel of tears, illness, and terror had not sucked this caller down into its eddies, then Jem had to take a message and deliver it to a representative. When the patient reps saw Jem coming, bearing a white phone-message slip, they groaned. “God, get away from me.” “Please not another one.” “Jesus, you’re a curse.”
Jem had just finished a foot-wide stack of filing; there were a variety of ink blotches on her hands, one heart-shaped dot near her nose; her wild hair was gnarled into a bun and speared by a pencil, and her lower lip was caught in her teeth, her expression something close to perpetual surprise. In contrast, Melvie—skin, hair, uniform, even her mind—seemed sleek as stainless steel.
Melvie called that Monday from her office in critical care upstairs, her voice cool as chrome. “Warning, warning,” she said. “It’s Family Function Season again.”
“What? That doesn’t start until June.”
“It’s May thirteenth and I’m sure you realize Aunt Fatima doesn’t take chances on a late start. She had one of my women summon me from a code blue to tell me the Archbishop’s welcoming party is Sunday night.”
“No,” Jem said, shaking her head. “I can’t do it; I’m not ready. It’s too early in the season, isn’t it? No, I just can’t do this one.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Be more specific, Jemorah. Do you mean you’re incapacitated, or that you just won’t cooperate?”
“You know what I mean,” Jem said, voice shrinking. “I never have any fun at these things. Why should I go? What’s the point of it?”
She heard a background sucking, gurgling noise in the pause before Melvie’s answer. She imagined her sister holding the receiver with one hand and vacuuming out a patient’s lungs with the other. The sound had an exquisite crispness to it, eloquent disapproval. Jem knew that one reason Melvie made such an excellent nurse was not because of any kindly nature, but because she was annoyed by illness and held patients personally responsible for their own diseases. A weakness of will, she’d heard Melvie say more than once.
Jem recognized that Joan of Arc tone in Melvie’s voice now, as she was saying, “Fun doesn’t even enter into this picture, Jemorah. Don’t you know that by now? There is no Fun—there is no Why. We’re talking about Family.”
Jem held her breath a moment, listening to the electric silence that vibrated along the telephone lines.
“Spare me the passive-aggressive tactics, Jemorah,” Melvie said. “You’re wasting your silence. Guilt runs off my back, as you are well aware.”
“I know, I know.”
“Just stick with me,” Melvie said. “And remember the bedouin saying: ‘In the book of life, every page has two sides.’”