The Picture

No, I am not okay.

I spoke to the picture of my mother and father that he’d pulled from its frame. The wrinkled picture, yellowing, twenty years older than me, was taken on the night of my parents’ wedding. They were in the large courtyard at my grandfather’s house, standing under the branches of a date palm covered in tiny white lights: a time that seemed simple and carefree.

In the picture every inch of my father’s body was smiling. He had snagged himself a beautiful wife, twenty-two years his junior, appropriately vivacious, young, innocent, and fit to be a wife for an entire lifetime, after his first wife had died and left him with two sons he didn’t know how to raise, because raising children was, as he believed, “women’s work.” The iqal he wore on his head was slightly crooked, but who would notice that, with all this joy on his face? My mother had braided her hair and decorated it with a string of pearls. She’d told me many times that they were natural pearls. Each one was unique and had its own constrictions and creases. She’d tell me you could only get a necklace like this in Bahrain, where she was from. Like a crazy mermaid, she had decided to go off and marry a widower as a kind of adventure. “If you get married,” she’d said to me once when I was looking at their wedding pictures, “we’ll fix your hair the same way.” I was lying on their double bed, my legs dancing excitedly. “Then you’ll do the same thing for your daughter and it will become a family tradition.”

How would my mother feel if she knew how I got married, without anyone paying attention, as if they were covering up a scandal? And if she knew that I was hopelessly infertile, that I wouldn’t have a daughter or a son, or anything remotely like one.

In another picture, a different one, two other faces appear: Saqr and Fahd, my half brothers. Saqr is fourteen, round, a smile on his face, a frown in his eyes. Fahd, skinny and sad, is ten. He died from a fever four months after his father remarried.

My father’s late wife lost all the girls and gave birth to two boys before dying of kidney failure. Her story ends there so another story can begin. How could an eighteen-year-old girl raise that somber boy just four years younger than her? I don’t know how she did it.

When I was born my mother was twenty. Saqr was sixteen. By the time I was two years old, he had gone away to school. He came back a year later with a long beard and wearing a shortened thawb, the number eleven still in place between his eyebrows. My father had to pay the costs the state had incurred to send him away for the year. Saqr settled for a vocational training certificate and went to work as an official in the Ministry of Interior’s archives, another faraway basement holding thousands of files.

When he was twenty-one, Saqr decided to get married. I was five. I don’t remember anything about the days Saqr and I lived together under the same roof. He married Badriya and had Wadha, who is three years younger than me. His wife continued having children, more and more children, because he asked for them. There was always room for another child to whom he would provide a proper upbringing for the betterment of the ummah—the Islamic community. That was the whole point.

That story is in another photograph. But this one that concerns me, it’s just of my father and my mother. My middle-aged father whose eyes overflow with happiness, and my mother, who barely looks at the camera, barely smiles, in her dress with the long lace sleeves and pearl buttons, a bouquet of jasmine in her hands.

They must have been good together. I think about that now as I contemplate my marriage that is about to end. No doubt theirs was an exceptional marriage, in order to deserve this end, to die together, in a car accident on Arar Road, after returning from Jordan where they’d closed a deal to buy seven pieces of land for no more than 1,700 dinars each. The deal of a lifetime! my father, who could smell a good deal a million miles away, had said. He closed the deal of a lifetime and reached the end of his own.