WHEN JEM WAS nine, she liked to kneel on the couch and pull a brush through her mother’s hair, so it crackled like fire. Nora’s fingers around baby Melvina were long and slender as tapers. When Matussem came back from work in the winter night, he was snow-flecked, his lashes wet and silk black. Matussem stamped and the snow shook from his coat. His hair was all black then and curly, like his daughters’. After he was dry again and they had eaten dinner, he gathered Jem up and sat next to Melvie and his wife.
“Now, well, girlses,” Matussem said, his English at the time unwieldy. “Tonight I tells you about moon and gazelle. There was and there was not one nights when the gazelle see these moon in water place, a lake, like ink these lake. The gazelle she ask moon in sky, ‘Whad now? Who these in water?’ These moon, joker, she like the laughs. She say, ‘This my sister moon of the water. Don’t drink her up or the fishes will swim out of the water to find her.’ But these gazelle, she tries drink the moon out of the water, because then gazelle will be beautiful like the moon. She think the fishes will make parties and go dance around her. She drink and sister moon goes from water, and a hump come there, on her back, and she turns to camel! And moon—she laugh, laughing moon! So lesson for daughter, if you listen to moon you get turn to camel. So go to bed when Mama she says to.”
Then Melvie, who at two was already impatient with her father’s semitranslated proverbs, would run to Matussem, slap her tiny hand on his arm and shout, “Da! Fight! Fight!”
IN JEM’S DREAMS the moon became Jordan, the place where her father came from. Her father was the gazelle and he waited by the black water’s edge, staring at the moon. Sometimes she woke crying from this dream, and then her mother’s face would replace the moon and her fingers like candles would smooth back Jem’s hair. “Hush. Hush,” she said. “Those are only stories.”
Nora would leave the room then, vanishing like the tail of the jinni’s lamplight.
Twice a week, Aunt Fatima and Uncle Zaeed came over for dinner. Fatima and Zaeed had faces like Jem’s father’s, the same clear tint of earth. Fatima looked at Jem and Melvie, her eyes black as cups of Matussem’s coffee, and she murmured in English, “Beautiful! Beautiful babies! Pure as water. You come back to home soon, come back to Old Country, marry the handsome Arab boys and makes for us grandsons!”
Nora’s lips tightened to a streak. She stood and left the room. Melvina rushed over to her aunt, tiny fists raised, shouting, “Fa! Fa! Fight! Fight!”
Later at night, Nora bent over the girls, tucking them in. “Your home is here. Oh, you will travel, I want you to. But you always know where your home is.” The ends of her straight, long hair brushed their faces, its bright red fringes swinging and making sparks. Soon they would be flying to the moon to visit their other family.
NORA HAD REFUSED to get all of the shots and vaccines the family had advised for the trip to Jordan. “Typical Arab patronizing,” she’d said to Matussem. “According to your sisters, young women don’t know how to take care of their own bodies.” They rented an apartment for a month in the center of Amman, Nora insisting that silent Baby Melvie would surely cry all night. “Amerkani,” the aunts, who’d borne thirty-eight babies between the six of them, said to each other. “Too good to stay with us!”
No one knew how long she might have walked around in pain and with fever without saying anything, not knowing the danger. She had seemed fine for most of the visit, then one night about two weeks after they’d arrived, Jem had been awakened by her mother’s breathing. It was ragged, vibrating through her. Jem went into her parents’ room, drawn by the rattling, and she was shocked that her father could lie asleep next to this woman who lay turning into stone.
Jem had touched her mother’s leg and it was hot and stiff as rubber. She pulled back the sheet and her mother began to tremble. Jem could see her mother’s eyes open, watching her. “Please cover me,” she said. “I’m so cold, I’m freezing.” Her lips were blistered and scorched; her hair looked tarnished.
Jem sometimes felt that the disease should have carried her off with her mother. When Jem was very young, her mother had told her that when she was first born they’d had German measles together and had lain in the same sickbed with fever for weeks. Sometimes Jem dreamed of that early time. The illness would be there; moist and warm, it clung to them like a vapor as they held each other. They breathed together, in and out, sharing breath. Her mother’s arms encircled her. The fever was smoke, fire in their skin. The smoke filled them, thick in Jem’s chest.
AUNTIE REIN TOOK over the family in the weeks following Nora’s death. She was seventy-nine years old, straight and strong. She’d outlived her five siblings, including Matussem’s mother, her younger sister Amira. Rein had married a rich cousin in Forty-seven and emigrated from Nazareth to a grand house in Beit’oon, a village on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. After Nora had died, they brought her body into Rein’s large stone bathroom. Nora’s hair floated around her, red as lit tobacco against the marble column of her body. There seemed to be a haze in the room that rose from the steaming water they emptied over her. Rein’s new tub had running water, but they had to pour it into buckets, cart them down the stairs, and set them on the stove to heat. Fatima, who’d flown back home from the States the day she’d heard of the death, had carried the buckets two by two. In the tub, Jem’s mother turned into a cloud, her features drifting apart; when Rein lifted her body out of the tub she seemed to scoop up a current of water.
Rein was short and heavy, but she could run up and down the stairs like a girl, and she squeezed the breath out of Jem when she held her. Rein wore her white hair in a long, thin braid that fell past her waist. After washing Nora’s body, Rein brought Jem into her bedroom, which was filled with carved wood and brocade curtains and vaulted ceilings. They stood together by the mirror and Rein undid her braid so her hair spread and shimmered like a silver mantle, and she drew it around so it cascaded over Jem’s neck and shoulders. For a few moments inside that white tent, Jem felt comfort again.
AFTER THE DEATH, time unmoored itself and went drifting down Auntie Rein’s marble halls, pooling along the stone floor. Jem felt like she was living inside the Waterbabies tale that her maternal grandmother used to read to her—fairy-children like mermaids swept along the world’s currents. She swam in loss, and it seemed other children were different, at great distances from her. Only her cousin Nassir, who had recently lost an eye in an accident, seemed able to understand. He stayed at her side, and they took walks to the corner store for bubble gum and eggs. “Atini atnosh beyda,” she would say. The shop owner placed the eggs in a paper bag and Jem, used to the protection of cartons, would then run home and present them to the kitchen staff smashed and leaking.
In Jordan the pleasures of the familiar were gone. There was little available milk; making pancakes was an exotic production that attracted attention in the neighborhood. The ice cream was thin and oddly flavored; vanilla tasted like perfume. But every day at noon Jem and Nassir went together to the main square for cones. There were also boys who walked the cobblestone streets in the early morning holding trays of warm, seeded bread rings on their heads. Each morning Jem and Nassir ran to them. “Atini kahk,” Jem would say and then share with her cousin.
Her mother was also somehow there, her memory residing in the steepening streets. She was a jinni, whose real activity Jem could scarcely remember, less a memory than a presence who might fly out from any crook or corner, perhaps from the tubs of corn and butter vendors carried on muleback. A week after Nora’s death, Jem began to wonder if her mother had ever been real, or if she was just a sweet story that Jem had told herself.
Nassir and Jem rode through the village together on shaggy burros. The bedouin women admired Jem and petted her; when they brought Melvie along, the husbands liked to hold her hoisted up under her arms, feet dangling down. Aunts and uncles took them to visit huge, ringing churchyards, banked in tier after tier of wildly colored flowers. In one chapel, they found a shining altar where the infant Jesus was supposed to have been born.
Jem and Nassir sat together on the stiff horsehair sofas of her great-aunt’s house, eating plates of the salty basket cheese and yogurt lebneh and Syrian bread, staring at the television static, or watching relatives who congregated around what was the only telephone in Beit’oon.
At other times after the death, Jem wandered Auntie Rein’s limitless house, feeling the flesh-ache of her mother’s absence, continually expecting that she might still find her mother alive and waiting for her beyond the next hallway, mistaking the backs of other women’s heads, the curves of their hands, for her mother’s. The house went on and on, its rooms opening to patios and great flyaway windows that she could step through; it was hard to know where the house stopped and the outdoors began. Jem stood by an open window that looked out on the flagstone walk and a night wide as the Dead Sea. She felt herself drawn as if pulled toward the open space, as if her mother had reached for her in that moment, as if her soul had just slipped through one of the big windows, out to the sky.
At night, schools of stars shone through skylights and tall, arched doorways and lit the marble floors along with constellations of lamps and hanging chandeliers. Jem saw little of her father, who was sequestered behind the study doors. Rein had shut him away to protect him from the flow of visitors and their communal grieving. There was a television in nearly every room, but the reception was poor and there was little being broadcast; the static Jem heard drifting in the halls and through the windows was only occasionally interrupted by reruns of The Saint and Car 54, dubbed in French or Arabic. There were servants who brought her plates of cheese and sweets and the hard, dried balls of yogurt that she liked to gnaw on. Jem lingered under the vaulted ceilings, amid food and noise, and tried to give herself up to forgetfulness. Melvie, who was two and some months, had taken to a wet nurse—a local mother Rein had employed—as easily as an infant, and her skin glistened, though she fussed and constantly demanded to see her sister and mother.
Rein meant for them to stay. Her own family was grown, involved in their own concerns, and she’d outlived her husband. She would hold Jem in her lap for hours, brushing the little girl’s long hair back with a boar’s-bristle brush till it shone with a blue steel light. But they stayed for just a few weeks, the body stored in a hospital morgue, then Matussem finally decided to bury his wife in her home earth. He had begun to look as if he’d been winnowed away, his shirts and suits all too big. Jem was frightened of the shadow that Matussem had dropped into, and she cried because she didn’t want to leave. Matussem, too, seemed startled and nervous when he looked at his daughters.
An hour before they were to depart, Auntie Rein took Jem to her garden. There were sunflowers and mint, and farther back, Rein showed Jem where the baby cucumbers grew, curling on their knotty stems. She brought in a basket of the tiny things, each just big enough to fit into the palm of her hand. They rinsed them under the kitchen tap, and Rein set out a dish of coarse salt. They sat at the table and dipped the ends in salt; the skins were soft, not at all bitter, and the sweet and salty cucumber was delicious to Jem. Once they’d finished them, it was time to leave, and Rein held Jem and told her they had vegetables just like that back in Jem’s own country.
FATIMA CLAIMED THAT Nora’s death was a “failure of modern medicine.” “Shocking, too much,” she said, flicking her black hair back with one long fingernail. “Jordan so modern, like suburb of New Jersey. Such thing don’t happen in the Modern World,” she’d say, then add, grim faced, “Your mother. I know she didn’t really liked us.”
Back in the States, Fatima played at mother, dressing them in ruffles and singing endless Arabic lullabies, until one day Melvie, who was then two and a half, bit her wrist and drew blood.
Their father said the relatives had snubbed Nora and gossiped about her, driving her to despair, the relatives and neighbors and their “attitude.” “Sure,” Matussem once said, “all those Jordanian crones, making like they never see red hair before. Like redhead Arab women haven’t been crazy in love with henna bottles ever since Cleopatra. Like they never seen I Love Lucy reruns! Give me break.”
THE DAY THEY’D returned from Jordan with a body in cargo, Nora’s parents had met Matussem and the children at the airport. Matussem had seen them all the way across the terminal as the noise of the crowds faded into a silence that filled his ears and weighed down his legs. He was carrying Melvina; Jem, who was nine, held his free hand. The closer his wife’s parents came, the less recognizable they were to him. Their features melted apart in despair, becoming stranger and stranger, until, as they drew near, he forgot what faces looked like.
They cried, they spoke to him and gestured, the words falling into pieces, broken, repetitive noises, until at last the sounds were hammered down into a glowing brand, a heated sign; a passage in his mind was thrown open and he heard his wife’s mother saying, “You killed her. You. You killed her. You. You killed—”
His daughter’s hand in his was iron hot.
His in-laws never forgave him. Although they called the girls on birthdays and holidays, they wouldn’t see them in person. “It hurts too much,” his mother-in-law had said to Jem, “to see so much of our daughter mixed up with the body of her murderer.”
Whenever she’d called, the girls’ grandmother had closed the conversation by saying, “Tell your father to tell you the truth.”
Melvina, when she was six, answered her, “I already know the truth.”
Jem had said good-bye, hung up, and asked: “Dad, what is the truth?”
Matussem looked down, shrugged, and said, “How could I ever know?” Then he put on a Coltrane record and said, “Listen, here’s the gospel according to Saint John.” And Jem stood in the living room, thirteen years old, listening.
A YEAR AFTER they returned, Matussem moved his family from Syracuse to Euclid, to nights of pure dark, caught in the teeth of stars, the ventriloquist crickets calling to them. He saw their country home as a place of perfect forgetting, lost in a gully of trees, boundless fields ragged with Queen Anne’s lace and thistles. It was built into a rise, to be entered on two levels, downstairs in front and upstairs in back. The bedrooms were downstairs facing over the front lawn, living and dining rooms up; everything was a little odd about the place. Jem liked its windows and clarity. She tried to forget the bleak forms of priests and beetle-browed neighbors crisscrossing the cool stone of the bedroom floor in Amman, her mother’s hand turning from hot to cold in her own, the black-suited doctors clustering around the bed, the flock of relatives, faces nodding at her, hands of claws, the plumage of mourning, and outside the wet streets, cats crying like babies at night. In their Syracuse house, when they’d first returned, the ghosts were so thick that Jem had wanted to scissor her arms through the air, to place her hand over Melvie’s eyes to protect her.
Jem loved the new house. It was sprawling, almost haphazard in design, as if the earth had buckled and red timber and glass had risen from the rift, just as natural as the slate, blue spruce, and lilacs that flanked it. In the suburban subdivision where their mother had once lived with them in a house of particleboard and balsa wood, a train track ran not fifteen feet from the back door. At times the track pounded so loudly that small objects danced across the floors. It was a dark place, close with memory, the scent of absence. In the country, Jem would take to the lawn chairs on a warm evening and feel she was rising up to a shelf of trees and acres of the lightest air. She felt the change in herself, as if her mother’s life had been a river paddle that, in leaving, had churned swiftly through her. The trees had a black midsection, a soft belly near the earth where the bluest needles lay down and swept the grass.