So many people visited Salim’s buzzing living room, Kathmiya was used to opening the door and seeing everyone from wizened old professors to suspected gangsters. Leah welcomed each visitor with a smile—until the day Marcelle showed up.
“She must be after money,” Leah mumbled. But Kathmiya recognized the keen desperation in Marcelle’s eyes and knew she wanted something more valuable and more elusive: reassurance.
After all, Kathmiya had seen her mother fling a bundle of dinars at a matchmaker only to be sent away in shame.
“What do you want?” Leah asked sharply.
Maybe it was the good feeling from having helped that strange widow who showed up at her mother’s job, maybe it was sympathy toward Marcelle, or maybe it was just human decency that prompted Kathmiya to invite her in. “Please,” she said, “come this way.”
Leah shot her maid a look but Kathmiya just shrugged as she saw them to the sewing room, where baskets of fabrics were stacked next to small bins for threads.
“Would you like some tea?” Kathmiya asked, since neither sister was talking.
“I’m fine,” Marcelle huffed. “And that’s exactly the problem. Not sick, like my sister was when she got pregnant.” She fell back into a claret-colored chair.
“You mean…?” Leah asked gently, suddenly tender. Marcelle nodded, trying to cover her anxiety. “I never should have left the family,” she whimpered, the shell of her pride cracking under the pain of childlessness.
Kathmiya picked up a shirt and started mending a button. She was utterly sick of these spoiled people and their petty problems. Leah was telling Marcelle about the tricks their mother was using to keep the jinn out, like pouring sesame oil on the ground to appease the devils.
“She’s doing this for you—for you to have a baby,” Leah insisted.
“Is it helping?” Marcelle asked, as though she didn’t already know about her own success.
Kathmiya could almost taste the rising hope. She knew it all too well. It had a rich but fleeting flavor, like that chocolate Shafiq had once brought her. Nestlé, it was called.
Tell her the truth, Kathmiya willed toward Leah. If you lie, it only gets worse.
“I think it’s helping,” Leah said.
The hope was so powerful it even pulsed through Kathmiya. She decided she had to at least see those rituals Shafiq complained about so much.
When Reema showed up a week later, Kathmiya brought her to the same sewing room. This time, Marcelle was waiting there with Leah.
“The chief rabbi wrote this prayer for you,” Reema said, reverently holding a small square of stiff paper, inky with Hebrew letters. She barely seemed to notice Kathmiya, who was wiping the ornate iron sewing machine for an excuse to stay and hear the rest.
Marcelle was overdressed as usual, this time in a raw-silk outfit garishly patterned in green. “This is all you brought me?” she asked bitterly.
Kathmiya stared at the mystical-looking wad, wishing someone would offer it to her.
“Eat it,” Reema instructed.
Or maybe not.
“Eat it?” Marcelle repeated.
“It will bring you children,” Reema insisted. She had none of the suppressed greed of market hucksters, only an alluring sincerity.
Watching Marcelle chew the thick paper, Kathmiya wondered whether there was a prayer she could eat to get a husband, a home, an escape. Maybe if I got one with Hebrew letters it would work on Shafiq…
She knew that would be impossible. Futile to even hope for such a buried wish. But she’d be watching Marcelle all the same.
It only took a few weeks before they got the answer. “Some gift I received,” Marcelle complained, brushing past Kathmiya as though there were no one there. “I guess Nana was too cheap to give me a real present. All of her money goes to the boys.
“If she loved me,” Marcelle prattled on, “she would give me something really valuable. Not an old piece of paper that tasted like chemicals and stained my teeth.”
Kathmiya wondered whether Marcelle’s husband was thinking of abandoning her. It was bitter comfort that some people had it even worse than a single girl.
“She gave you what she valued most: her traditional remedies,” Leah said defensively.
“You know what she values most, because you have it,” Marcelle prodded.
Kathmiya had the definite sense she was about to hear something she shouldn’t.
“That piece of jewelry again? You’re still after it?”
And yet she was gripped by the conversation. With Marcelle ignoring her existence, and Leah too absorbed to care, it was easy for Kathmiya to sew herself into the background.
“You got all the luck and all the heirlooms,” said Marcelle. “I’m not the only one who knows,” she added.
“Moshe, right? What does he want? My whole trousseau?”
“At least you should share the good luck piece. The one that’s blessed.”
“Fine!” seethed Leah, sliding out of the room.
Marcelle waited with her arms folded across her chest. Leah came back with a tiny cloth sack, barely big enough for a pin. “Nana gave it to me with her blessing, just like she gave you plenty when you married.”
Kathmiya expected Marcelle to be grateful, but instead she said, “I like it because it’s lucky. But I’m not sure if it’s enough to make my husband happy. He’s very angry, you see. And when he doesn’t get his way, well, you don’t want to know.”
Her veiled threat reeked like poisonous smoke.