Behind You Is the Sea

by Susan Muaddi Darraj

That’s what ruined my sister, that way of saying, “Nice girls don’t do this or that.”

“The living,” he continued, “used to pause for the dead. Out of respect.”

Destiny put everyone on a stage, to play a role, and sometimes the spotlight slipped off you to give you a break. At other times, it burned into you directly, relentlessly, as you stumbled through a soliloquy of exhaustion.

She thinks America is one big trick that God played on her.

My eyes linger on the mother-of-pearl plaque in Arabic script above the desk. I run my fingers over the curved letters, swirling like little breaths. “Can you read it?” I hear him ask behind me. I read aloud and then translate it for him: “Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy.” I glance at him then continue. “You have left now only the hope of your courage and your constancy.”

“Sometimes I’m on two of these calls at a time,” he complains behind me. “Wow,” I murmur sympathetically, wanting to tell him Reema works two jobs in one day and comes home so broken and tired she can’t eat. Arabs are ridiculous; even if they live a dream life, they want to star in some tragedy. If there is no tragedy, they imagine one.

“We have to pray before, during, and after,” she says. “We surround him with prayers.” She seems so convinced of what to do that I’m jealous of her security, her faith. My eyes fill with tears and my throat feels itchy, and I want to ask her if she’ll surround me too.

“Food is love. You have to pass your love into the food,” Sits said solemnly, like she was reading from her Bible. “We lived during three wars. Lentils kept us from starving. Your Seedo and I—we love eating them. It reminds us of those days.” “Why would you want to remember? If they were such bad days.” “They were terrible,” Sits said, nodding. “But it’s good to remember. So you can look at your life now and say alhamdulilah.”

Instead, he was clutching his masbaha and rocking back and forth, worrying the beads with trembling fingers.

She didn’t want him to judge Baba somehow, the way everyone else had, as if his actions explained anything at all about him. He’d hit her, yes, but he’d also revealed a truth that, after so long, was a balm to her busted heart.

She’d seen the staff playing checkers, sitting for tea, watching TV with residents in the main hall. Trying to fill the void of being forgotten. How sad, she thought, to devote your life to your family, only to be shut away once you’d become inconvenient.

She didn’t want him that way. She wanted him to herself for a little while longer. Because before his frenzied outbursts, his screaming rages, there were moments of lucidity. Of beauty and clarity. A few minutes at least during which he shone through, when he turned to her fondly and said, “Remember when I taught you to play tawla? And then you started cheating, you scamp.” Those times—when he knew her, before the fog descended and obstructed his memory—those were worth it. During his good moments, when he called her “ya binti,” she recaptured him. The way he loved her. She recaptured the way she used to love herself.

It struck her then, as she sat by Baba’s bed, watching his chest tremble as it rose and fell, that her baby would never know him as a grandfather. Even of something as simple as this, she would be robbed.

What choice did she have? People married for lots of reasons, and love wasn’t usually one. Sometimes marriage was nothing more than the cool shade of a tree in a scorching desert you couldn’t otherwise survive. That’s what bothered her the most, she said. What? he asked. “That I don’t really have another option,” she replied.