IT SEEMED TO Jem that when the calls started, they came all at once like a burst of daggers. Beginning in early August, a month after Fouad’s departure. “May I speak to Mr. Fouad Mawadi.”
“But—he doesn’t live here—” Jem would say.
“This is given as his home phone.”
“He lives in Jordan.”
“Jordan, near Elbridge?”
“Jordan, the country.”
Usually there’d be some sidestepping, a few leading questions, a couple of sidelong accusations. Then Mrs. Baymore or Ms. Harrison or Mr. Minway would get down to business, the message always the same: we have charges here for a purple Naugahyde couch…a statue of a giraffe…thirty-five Hawaiian shirts…a Barmaster blender…
Always overdue. Not a penny paid.
Fouad had apparently begun opening store accounts and charging the moment he’d first stepped off the plane in America, two months ago. This was only the first wave of creditors just starting to tense up over missed payments; there was no telling how much he’d charged in more recent weeks. When Jem had some time between calls she would pause to wonder about what might have been going on in Uncle Fouad’s mind during those apparently intoxicating moments of transaction. Was the plastic card some sort of miraculous passkey to him? Funny-money to be used over and over, like something out of a kid’s dream? More likely, as the shrewdest, most successful businessman in the family, Fouad knew exactly what a credit line was. Not that Jem felt he had no scruples, exactly, only that he was able to push inconvenient matters of conscience to the back of his brain. A place where the idea of family was not real, but a kind of needlepoint that Fouad could hang over the mantel while he boarded a plane, leaving behind over a hundred unpaid bills.
In the Old World, Jem thought, family must be as abundant and invisible as air—just as precious—just as easy to exploit. In America, maintaining a family at all sometimes seemed like a miracle.
The collection calls went on day after day for a week. Nothing stopped them, not begging, reasoning, or sighing. Nothing until Melvina answered the phone at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. Jem sat up in bed eavesdropping through the wall to Melvina’s bedroom.
“Yes,” Melvie said. “No, no—one moment. I’ll have to ask you to state your name and business clearly before I can give out any information….”
“I see…I see….” Jem could hear her saying, I see, over and over as Jem imagined the expanding list of Fouad’s purchases: twenty-eight pairs of cowboy boots, two Golf Tips from Harry Subotnik, an emerald pinkie ring from Montgomery Ward, Kmart, J. C. Penney. In the middle of all those dry I sees, Jem knew Melvina was caught between her loyalty to order and her sense of personal dignity. She would be outraged that Fouad had reneged on his bills (Melvie herself didn’t believe in credit), and she would be infuriated that the collectors were dunning her family in order to reach the guilty party.
It didn’t take her long, though, to sort through the ethical dilemma, and after a few of these calls, Melvie began asking for the name of the caller’s superior.
“Because I intend to report this phone call to the proper law enforcement agencies, Ms. Katerina Dutley of accounts payable at Daisy World. I will investigate what grounds I may have for a harassment suit. Although, if your company was foolish enough to bestow a Daisy World charge account on Fouad Mawadi, then your company has an even deeper problem than greed, intolerance, and aggression.”
The calls began to trickle off as Melvina answered them. Then she began to call the collectors herself, initiating a reverse harassment campaign at billing offices and collection agencies across the country. She called herself the Joan of Arc of collection. Melvie also telephoned Uncle Fouad at his home in Amman. She talked to Auntie Rima, since once Uncle Fouad returned home he reverted back to King Fouad, who wouldn’t touch telephones, microwaves, television sets, or clock radios for fear of radiation. He would sit in his private chair, a new La-Z-Boy recliner from Montgomery Ward, and eye his wife as she spoke on the phone, asking every five seconds, “Who is it? What do they want from me now? Get rid of them,” as Rima ignored him.
Melvie could hear Fouad in the background, bellowing in Arabic, “What now? For God’s sakes, God the merciful, the compassionate, who is it?” as soon as the phone was lifted.
Melvie thought of Arabic as the tongue of the hearth, of irrational, un-American passions, of pinching and kisses covering both cheeks. Tongues could climb Arabic syllable over syllable like fingers ascending piano keys, enabling great crescendos of screaming. Arabic represented to Melvie the purest state of emotional energy.
She began speaking to her aunt in Arabic, “May the grace of Allah and his prophet be upon you.”
She heard Rima saying to Fouad in English, “A salesman.”
As a result of her phone call to Aunt Rima, Melvie secured the promise of a certified check to cover all Fouad’s debts as well as pre-payment for three more years of Jem’s graduate school tuition and living expenses. “Ya’an deenak,” Melvie heard Rima screaming through the overseas cable scramble at her husband. “Imbecile! You’ve been screwing over my baby brother! Do you think that everything disappears when you get on a plane and turn your fat ass in the other direction?”
Melvie’s father, Rima added, was out disco dancing.
A FEW NIGHTS later the phone rang at three in the morning. Jem grabbed it off her bedstand; at the same time she heard an extension click and Melvie saying, “Well, it took you long enough. Don’t they know about phones over there?”
“Girls, girls, it’s me!” Matussem shouted so Jem flinched from the receiver. “Guess where I am calling! What time it all there?”
“Three A.M.,” Jem said, lying back in bed.
“Lower your voice, Mr. Ramoud. We aren’t conversing over Dixie cups,” Melvie said.
“I’m at Uncle Fouad’s house, crazy or what? You sound like you right at the next door! Fouad is waving, everybody waving, hi, hi, everybody says hi. Fouad give me big check he says for some kind of bill.”
“Hang on to it,” Melvie said. “Dad, I looked into your return flight. You can move the return date up without a big penalty, so if you’re really making yourself miserable—”
“Return? What return? I maybe stay extra longer. Why come back? This place is A-okay great, not like olden days. They got VCR, every night big parties, food, dance. Heck with it all, Euclid is great place to leave, let’s face these. Look, Rein just put for me plate of megluba, roast lamb, koosa mashie, why don’t you girls ever put for me plate of koosa mashie?”
“Well gee—” Jem started, just as Melvie shouted, “Koosa mashie? You don’t even like koosa mashie! What is this? I don’t believe this!”
There was the sound of a woman’s voice in the background on Matussem’s end and he came back and said, “Girls, girls, your Aunt Rein want speak to you. You remember your nice old Umptie Rein? Hang on.”
The girls’ aunt came on and began speaking in an ancient Arabic that Jem strained to make out, her comprehension better than Melvie’s.
“I want Jemorah to marry my youngest grandson, little Nassir,” Rein said. “He’s a very good boy, thirty-five years of age, and he’s coming to America for a little more schooling, and he needs a wife right away to watch him. I want Jemorah for him because he’s an educated boy, he needs someone with brains to make him happy, God save us all. This is very important to the family and I know I don’t even need to ask, because this is the only thing now that would make me happy, and if she wouldn’t do it, God forbid, I would have to go and die like a dog in the street, God willing. Then there would be a family war, who knows what, may God forgive. Luckily my sister’s good boy, Matussem, has already promised Jemorah to him. All done. Fine. Good-bye, good-bye.”
There was a long pause; Jem could hear the pounding of her pulse mixed in with the grain of international static. Melvina’s breath had grown louder and louder during Rein’s announcement, until, when Matussem came back on, he said, “Melvina, you sounding like you have tornado in your nose.”
“Mr. Ramoud, what was that? Something about marriage and Jem and war.”
“Oh,” Matussem chuckled. “Oh, that? Slipped by my mind. You know, with so much parties and fun. I guess I make a little marriage contract for Jem. They so serious here. But just wait, I bet you they forget all about—”
“I’ll do it,” Jem said, her heart shaking, feeling released and terrified, a dive off a high cliff.
“What?” Matussem and Melvie said at once. Then there was a thud over the phone and Melvie came running into Jem’s room. “What are you saying? What is this?”
“I’ll marry Nassir and come back with him to live in Jordan with you and the rest of the family if you want,” Jem said into the phone, staring at Melvie. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m ready to do it.”
“Wow, you don’t say,” Matussem said. “This a crazy world or what? Here I thinking you going to maybe be little mad, something nuts like this.”
Melvie folded her arms. “I want to talk to you, Miss,” she said.
Jem clung to the receiver and pulled her bedclothes higher. “Dad? I think I better get off the phone.”
“Oh no!” Matussem laughed. “This Fouad’s phone bill, no problemo!”
Melvie made a sound a little like a growl. “No, I really better be going now! Bye, Dad!” Jem hung up.
Melvie leaned her head back against the wall and held the sides of her forehead with her fingertips. “Explain to me—” she said, tilting her head toward Jem. “I’m a simple person, easily confused. I must need help on this one. You’re going to Jordan to live with the rest of the Ramoud family? Is that right? Did I hear you correctly?”
Jem shifted sideways in her bed and propped herself up on one elbow. “I’m tired of fighting.”
“‘Fighting’! Do you understand that Auntie Rein is ninety-nine? Do you really plan to worry about her committing suicide?”
“You don’t understand. I’m tired of fighting it out here. I don’t have much idea of what it is to be Arab, but that’s what the family is always saying we are. I want to know what part of me is Arab. I haven’t figured out what part is our mother, either. It’s like she abandoned us, left us alone to work it all out.”
It looked in the night dark of the room as if a shade had lowered over Melvina’s eyes.
“They’re always saying that Americans don’t understand or appreciate what family or community is, as if we need to be trained, like animals. Maybe they’re right,” Jem said. “Remember Uncle Eli? How he wouldn’t even let any Americans into his house the whole time he lived in this country?”
“Wait a sec,” Melvie said. “Wait a sec, wait a sec. Let me tell you something about our mother. I watched her die. I remember everything. That night is the only real memory I have of her. My consolation is that I believe she lets me know what she wanted.”
“You were two years old.”
“I hear her voice. Then and now. We have conversations from time to time. Talks, check-ins—I look at the moon and she answers.”
“Melvie.”
“Not everything can be written up for the New England Journal of Medicine, Ms. Ramoud. There are phenomena that evade the microscope and the rational mind every day. My own experience—call it intuition, gut feeling, what have you—is really quite modest in the larger scheme of the paranormal. What it boils down to is the sense that she didn’t want us to be tied down to anything. She would say ‘I want my girls to be free.’”
Jem stared at her sister, through the wet black of early morning, trying to see Melvina clearly. “You never told me this before.” Jem felt something twining between them in the air, set into motion. She looked at the black beads of her sister’s eyes, intent on her. She took a breath and said, “All right then, but what about now? Where does that leave us? I’ve spent so much of my life not daring to look up, look around at what there might be for me. I’ve spent so much time trying to please her, to guess what she wanted. And listening to Aunt Fatima telling me how to be good, to please my mother, to be a good girl, which means, as far as I can tell, to shrink down into not-thinking, not-doing. Well, I don’t want to waste away doing jobs that make me numb. You say our mother wanted us to live freely. I don’t want to keep hanging on to a place or a dream that comes from someone who is not around anymore. I’ll marry and move to Jordan. And I’ll be free because I’ll be with people who have my name and who look like me.”
“You don’t know that,” Melvie said. “You don’t know anything of the sort.”
Jem watched Melvie turn and leave, her downswept gaze brushing the room.