“Dinner’s ready, Kathy,” her mother called out. “Do you want us to start, or should we wait for Rashid?”
“Let’s wait,” Kathryn said. “He said he’d just pick up coffee and cereal, I don’t know what’s taking him so long.” She carried a couple of moving boxes from the living room of their newly rented apartment to their bedroom, and sat down on the bed, letting out a long sigh.
The front door opened with a bang.
“Amazing!” Rashid said. “All of this stuff from Walmart for less than a hundred dollars.”
“You were gone a long time, we’ve moved all the boxes into the other rooms so you and Kathryn can unpack them. Everything all right?” Kathryn’s mother asked.
“Great. Everything is better than all right.” Rashid set his shopping bags down on the counter. “The place is huge. They have everything. I was looking at watches, and camping equipment. I spent an hour just to find the coffee. I have more bags in the car.”
“Robert,” Kathryn’s mother called to her husband, “can you help Rashid with the bags?”
“Coming,” Robert called back from the hallway as the front door slammed again. “Kathryn,” he stopped at the bedroom door, “are you all right?”
“I guess,” she looked up from the bed. “I just feel like Rashid is different here.”
Kathryn’s father took a step into the room. “How so?”
“I mean, he’s clean-shaven, he’s wearing a baseball cap and jeans. You heard him going on about Walmart. He seems so…so American,” she picked up a framed wedding photo from one of the open boxes. “Hard to believe we are the same people.” From behind the frame Rashid smiled in his starched silk kurta pajama, she looked irrepressibly happy in a traditional red wedding dress and chunni, light glinting off the gold thread and beadwork along the border.
“Life changes,” her father said simply.
“It’s so strange, I feel almost homesick, but I am back in my own country.”
He smiled, “Not strange, that’s just reverse culture shock.”
“Really?”
“Of course. I felt it when I came back from diplomatic postings.”
“Does it pass?” she asked.
The front door banged again.
Her father smiled ruefully, “Everything passes. But for now let Rashid try out being American. He’s just doing what you did in Pakistan.”
Kathryn looked at the photo again. She just wanted to cry, to lay down in the bed, and wake up back in Dubai, back in the international life they had made for themselves.
“Kathy, Robert, come for dinner,” Margaret called out.
“Come, let’s eat,” he said and walked out.
At the dinner table Kathryn’s father raised his wine glass, looked from his daughter to his son-in-law, “Welcome home, welcome to our country. I hope you’ll both find comfort, opportunity, and prosperity here.”
“And happiness,” her mother added.
“I hope so too,” said Rashid.
“Insha’allah,” Kathryn said out of habit as she raised her glass.
“Kathryn,” Rashid said, amused, “we’re not in an Islamic country anymore. You Americans don’t wait for Allah, you make things happen. Is Walmart successful because of Allah? No, somebody hustled, somebody worked hard, and the system is set up for business like this. I can only imagine what my father’s business would have looked like if he had started it here with this kind of big capitalism.”
Kathryn’s stomach turned as she brought her glass to her lips, hoping to conceal the tears welling up in her eyes. This was not the Rashid she had fallen in love with.
“Rashid, have you checked in with your company yet?” Margaret changed the subject. “When will you start?”
“I called my manager yesterday, and he’d like me to start as soon as possible, but I can’t until I complete the test for my hazardous materials license and my FBI clearance comes.”
“FBI clearance?” Kathryn’s father asked, “What for?”
“Some of our tools use radioactive materials to take measurements in the well,” he explained.
Kathryn shoved her chair back and rushed to the bathroom. Rashid tried not to look irritated, Kathryn had been so moody since they had moved to America.
Kathryn heard only muffled voices as she knelt over the toilet, retching. As the nausea passed, she sat on the chilly tiled floor and tried to cry, to express some nameless shapeless grief, but the tears would not come.
That night, after her parents had gone to their hotel, Kathryn and Rashid lay in bed, willing their bodies to synchronize with the local time zone. He wrapped his arm around her. Wordlessly, she turned her back to him so they fit together like two spoons.
He caressed her belly, her hips, the curve of her backside. He touched her breasts, discovering an unexpected fullness in one and then the other. She startled him with a little cry of pain as he squeezed her nipple. He smiled to himself, turned her over so he could place his head on her belly.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He lifted his head to look at her, laughed a little and said, “You’re pregnant, yes?”
The next day a home pregnancy test kit, blinking a little blue plus sign, confirmed his intuition. He laughed and embraced her, picked her up and spun around. “Let’s call my family in Pakistan, my father will be too happy!”
“No, not yet. You’re not supposed to tell people so early. You have to make sure the pregnancy continues without a miscarriage.”
“Are you sure? How long?”
“I don’t know,” she placed a hand tentatively on her belly, trying to feel what might be happening inside. “I’ll ask my mother.”
“You just said we shouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Oh, you’re right,” she sat down wearily. “I guess I’ll have to get a book about pregnancy.” She looked up at him. “Do you want to have a baby?”
He responded to the fear in her expression by wrapping his arms around her shoulders, leaning down to kiss her head. “Of course I want a baby, especially with you.”
“But we’ve been arguing about everything since we came to America.”
“Habibti,” the Arabic term of endearment always made her smile, “we are arguing about politics, economics. This, this is family.”
She smiled, fleetingly. “You know, everything will change once the baby comes.”
“Everything always changes. That’s life. Imagine, I was in Pakistan, then in London, then in Dubai. Now I am here in America, with my American wife. Until now I have wanted my life to change. This change is a blessing.”
She looked up at the playful sparkle in his eye. She tilted her head, ready to kiss him.
He leaned down, close enough that she could feel his breath on her lips and said, “Now can I call Pakistan and tell them?”
“No!” she slapped him with mock force. He allowed her to wrestle him to the floor, laughing and shrieking, moving between the furniture and the boxes, until, panting, she stopped resisting. He rolled her onto her back, unbuttoned her shirt so he could kiss her just below her belly button, paused and unzipped her jeans.
She watched him undress himself, as she had so many times now, admiring his strong frame, his deliberate, confident movements. She opened her legs to allow him in, feeling the presence of this man, who had been her lover, was now her husband, would be the father of their child.
He moved gently with her, shyly almost, feeling they were not alone. He responded to the pressure of her hip turning him over so she could straddle him. The late morning sunlight coming through the window cast diagonals of light and shadow across her face and torso. He held her breasts with something like awe. She closed her eyes in pleasure and he noticed a radiance in her skin, independent of the light, impervious to the shadow. From deep within he felt a swirl of passion; pride, protectiveness, as he thought about the life inside her.
She rode him with increasing intensity, feeling herself approaching some precipice. As she let go, she moved in suspension, tentacles of warmth unfurling from her pelvis.
He waited until her movements slowed, like a receding tide, before rolling back above her. He finished quickly, then rolled off and lay next to her on the floor, breathing heavily.
“If the child is born here, he’ll be an American,” she said.
“He or she,” Rashid said.
“He or she will be American by nationality,” she continued, “but also Pakistani by heritage. We’ll have to make sure the child is both, not half and half, and not neither.”
“Of course.”
A stack of books about pregnancy, birth, and babies grew on Kathryn’s bedside table faster than her expanding belly. Rashid teased her one night as she opened yet another book. “Do you really need to read more? What else is there to know?”
The pregnancy had brought about a truce in their political debates, so she tried not to take offense.
“I want to be prepared.” She fluffed the pillow behind her. “And you’re gone all the time working, so what’s the harm in reading?”
“In Pakistan, no one reads books about pregnancy and birth. Is it so much more complicated in America?” He sat next to her on the bed.
“In Pakistan your sisters-in-law have your mother around, their aunties, all their female relatives probably explain everything to them. My mother is three hundred miles away and none of my close friends have been pregnant while I was around them.”
“OK,” he said playfully turning her book upside down.
“And in some ways it is more complicated in America,” she righted the book. “The obstetricians are so quick to cut women open.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cesarean sections. In the last three weeks, every single woman I’ve met in the park or the grocery store who talks to me about pregnancy has had a caesarian section.”
“What for?”
“Maybe because the doctors are impatient with a slow labor, or women get scared about how long things take because they’ve never seen a birth before. In Los Angeles the c-section rate is almost thirty percent.”
He thought for a moment, perplexed. “So why don’t you go to Pakistan to have the baby? Mummyji will take care of you. I’ve only heard of surgeries in Pakistan for emergencies.”
She closed her book thoughtfully. “But she’s not my mother. Maybe my mom could come for the birth.”
“Our girls always go to their mothers in the last month of their pregnancy. They leave their husband’s family until the baby is a month or two old.”
“I’m thinking,” she said tentatively, grasping the book protectively, “I’m thinking the surest way to keep a doctor from cutting me open is not to be in the hospital, to have the baby at home.” She braced herself for his reaction. “With a professional midwife of course.”
He shrugged his shoulders, “Sure, why not? My parents were both born at home.”
She felt the baby move, and pulled Rashid’s hand over her belly. Rashid curled up next to her, waiting.
“That’s it?” she said incredulously. “You agree that we can have the baby at home? You aren’t going to argue with me about it?”
“No. Do you want me to?” he said with a grin.