trash.
By year’s end, my mother had received a visa to the States, to work as a nurse at a veterans hospital in Baltimore. We moved into a small apartment with rough orange carpeting that had likely seen legions of feet. I had my own room but slept in my mother’s bed.
During the days, she left me with the elderly lady down the hall, who insisted that I call her by her first name. We settled on Harriet Auntie. She stunned me with her generosity—a gold tin of chocolates, an Easter basket, a baby doll that drank water through one hole and made water through another. When I showed my mother the doll, she said that if I liked cleaning up pee so much, I could have her job.
Early in the following year, we received a phone call from my father. “He’s coming,” my mother said, carefully placing the phone in its cradle. I waited for her to weep or laugh or smile, but she kept her hand on the phone, staring at it as if it might spring to life. I knew better than to ask her for specifics, but I imagined a heroic and mysterious escape that included hot words of confrontation, a raised fist, a blackened eye, and a passport produced from the dark tunnel of The Sheikh’s sleeve.
•
The man we collected from the airport, the man sitting in the living room, is not the heroic type. He is thinner than in the photos, with coffee-glazed teeth and shoulders that slope like a worn wire hanger. His shirts are lined with a burnt odor that my mother can’t get out, no matter how many times she pulls the trigger of her OxiClean.
Aside from the first time he saw me and kissed the top of my head, he hasn’t once moved to hug me, as other fathers do. He almost seems afraid of touching my mother, who has stopped with the heels and the blush. Once, we all ate dinner while watching a white family eat dinner on television. Those white people had so much to talk about that the food never even arrived at their mouths. The mother said things like
How was your day?
and
Want seconds?
My father took seconds from a bottle of Jameson.
But this evening, I have caught him alone in the living room, his slippered feet on the coffee table. His eyes are closed, furrows across his forehead, a glass of whiskey in his fist.
I go closer. His fingernails appear recently trimmed, maybe bitten away in that far-off country where he welded metals by day and worried by night. I can just make out the faint freckles across his nose, like a handful of birdseed, the same freckles that appear across my nose every summer.
His eyelashes all of a sudden flutter open. His lips part, releasing a gust of whiskey.
“You’re breathing on me,” he rasps.
I stop breathing altogether.
His lips widen into a smile I’ve never seen from him. “I’m just playing,
molay
. Were you afraid?”
“No.”
“You’re too uptight.” He extends his glass to me. “Here, have a little sip.”
I take the glass with one hand and drink from the oppositeside of where his lips have left a mark. The sip goes flaming down my throat, and my belly shudders and shrinks, offended by what I’ve poured into it.
He chuckles. “You want more?”
I shrug okay.
“No you don’t,” he says sharply. “Remember that.”
He tells me to turn on the radio. I lean over the stereo resting beside the television and nudge the tuner across fields of static. All I can find is classical, a whiny violin and no words to go with it. Sad as a book with no pictures.
My father sits up in his chair and puts the glass between his feet. “I used to play violin,” he says. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know that?” he says, as if I don’t know how to spell my own name. “In the Gulf, I knew a girl who played the violin so beautifully she would make you cry.”
My mother enters the room, her cheeks shiny with cold cream. On her way to the kitchen, she eyes me, my dad, his glass.
“She has school tomorrow,” my mother says.
He nods emphatically. “Yeah, yeah, we’re just
By year’s end, my mother had received a visa to the States, to work as a nurse at a veterans hospital in Baltimore. We moved into a small apartment with rough orange carpeting that had likely seen legions of feet. I had my own room but slept in my mother’s bed.
During the days, she left me with the elderly lady down the hall, who insisted that I call her by her first name. We settled on Harriet Auntie. She stunned me with her generosity—a gold tin of chocolates, an Easter basket, a baby doll that drank water through one hole and made water through another. When I showed my mother the doll, she said that if I liked cleaning up pee so much, I could have her job.
Early in the following year, we received a phone call from my father. “He’s coming,” my mother said, carefully placing the phone in its cradle. I waited for her to weep or laugh or smile, but she kept her hand on the phone, staring at it as if it might spring to life. I knew better than to ask her for specifics, but I imagined a heroic and mysterious escape that included hot words of confrontation, a raised fist, a blackened eye, and a passport produced from the dark tunnel of The Sheikh’s sleeve.
•
The man we collected from the airport, the man sitting in the living room, is not the heroic type. He is thinner than in the photos, with coffee-glazed teeth and shoulders that slope like a worn wire hanger. His shirts are lined with a burnt odor that my mother can’t get out, no matter how many times she pulls the trigger of her OxiClean.
Aside from the first time he saw me and kissed the top of my head, he hasn’t once moved to hug me, as other fathers do. He almost seems afraid of touching my mother, who has stopped with the heels and the blush. Once, we all ate dinner while watching a white family eat dinner on television. Those white people had so much to talk about that the food never even arrived at their mouths. The mother said things like
How was your day?
and
Want seconds?
My father took seconds from a bottle of Jameson.
But this evening, I have caught him alone in the living room, his slippered feet on the coffee table. His eyes are closed, furrows across his forehead, a glass of whiskey in his fist.
I go closer. His fingernails appear recently trimmed, maybe bitten away in that far-off country where he welded metals by day and worried by night. I can just make out the faint freckles across his nose, like a handful of birdseed, the same freckles that appear across my nose every summer.
His eyelashes all of a sudden flutter open. His lips part, releasing a gust of whiskey.
“You’re breathing on me,” he rasps.
I stop breathing altogether.
His lips widen into a smile I’ve never seen from him. “I’m just playing,
molay
. Were you afraid?”
“No.”
“You’re too uptight.” He extends his glass to me. “Here, have a little sip.”
I take the glass with one hand and drink from the oppositeside of where his lips have left a mark. The sip goes flaming down my throat, and my belly shudders and shrinks, offended by what I’ve poured into it.
He chuckles. “You want more?”
I shrug okay.
“No you don’t,” he says sharply. “Remember that.”
He tells me to turn on the radio. I lean over the stereo resting beside the television and nudge the tuner across fields of static. All I can find is classical, a whiny violin and no words to go with it. Sad as a book with no pictures.
My father sits up in his chair and puts the glass between his feet. “I used to play violin,” he says. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know that?” he says, as if I don’t know how to spell my own name. “In the Gulf, I knew a girl who played the violin so beautifully she would make you cry.”
My mother enters the room, her cheeks shiny with cold cream. On her way to the kitchen, she eyes me, my dad, his glass.
“She has school tomorrow,” my mother says.
He nods emphatically. “Yeah, yeah, we’re just
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