Etaf Rum - A Woman is No Man

“I don’t understand. When did you become so negative?”

Deya was silent.

“Is it because of Mama and Baba? Is that it? You always have this look in your eyes when we mention them, like you know something we don’t. What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” Deya said.

“Clearly it’s something. It must be. Something happened.”

Deya felt Nora’s words under her skin. Something had happened, everything had happened, nothing had happened. She remembered the days she’d sat outside Isra’s bedroom door, knocking and pounding, calling for her mother over and over. Mama. Open the door, Mama . Please, Mama. Can you hear me? Are you there? Are you coming, Mama? Please. But Isra never opened the door. Deya would lie there and wonder what she had done. What was wrong with her that her own mother couldn’t love her?

But Deya knew that no matter how clearly she could articulate this memory and countless others, Nora wouldn’t be able to understand how she felt, not really.

“Please don’t worry,” she said. “I’m okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Nora yawned, stretching her arms in the air. “Tell me one of your stories, then,” she said. “So I can have good dreams. Tell me about Mama and Baba.”

Their bedtime story ritual had started when their parents died and continued throughout the years. Deya didn’t mind, but there was only so much she could remember, or wanted to. Telling a story wasn’t as simple as recalling memories. It was building on them and deciding which parts were best left unsaid.

Nora didn’t need to know about the nights Deya had waited for Adam to come home, pressing her nose against the window so hard it would still hurt by morning. How, on the rare nights he came home before bedtime, he’d scoop her into his arms, all while scanning the halls for Isra, waiting for her to come greet him, too. But Isra never greeted him. She never met his eyes when he entered the house, never even smiled. At best she’d stand in the corner of the hall, the color rushing out of her skin, the muscles in her jaw clenching

But other times it was worse: nights when Deya would lie in bed and hear Adam yelling on the other side of the wall, her mother weeping, then even more terrible sounds. A bang against the wall. A loud yelp. Adam screaming again. Deya would cover her ears, shut her eyes, curl up in a ball, and tell herself a story in her head until the noises faded in the background, until she could no longer hear her mother pleading, “Adam, please . . . Adam, stop . . .”

“What are you thinking about?” Nora asked, studying her sister’s face. “What are you remembering?”

“Nothing,” Deya said, though she could feel her face betray her. Sometimes Deya wondered if it was her mother’s sadness that made her sad, if perhaps when Isra died, all her sorrows had escaped and settled in Deya instead.

“Come on,” Nora said, sitting up. “I can see it on your face. Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. Besides, it’s getting late.”

“Pretty please. Soon you’ll be married, and then . . .” Her voice dwindled to a whisper. “Your memories are all I have left of them.”

“Fine.” Deya sighed. “I’ll tell you what I remember.” She straightened and cleared her throat. But she didn’t tell Nora the truth. She told her a story.

Spring 1990

Isra arrived in New York the day after her wedding ceremony, via a twelve-hour flight from Tel Aviv. Her first glimpse of the city was from the plane as they approached John F. Kennedy Airport. Her eyes widened and she pressed her nose against the window. She thought she had fallen in love. It was the city itself that captivated her first, immaculate buildings stories high—hundreds of them. From above, Manhattan looked so thin, like the buildings could just crack it in half, as though they were too heavy for that small sliver of land. As the plane neared the earth, Isra felt herself swell up. The Manhattan skyline turned from toylike to mountainous, its towers and citadels shooting upward like fireworks bursting into the sky, overwhelming in height and power, making Isra feel small, yet at the same time bewildered by their beauty, as if they were something out of a fairy tale. Even if she had read a thousand books, nothing could compare to the feeling she had now as she inhaled the view.

She could still see the skyline when the plane landed, though now it was a faint outline with a bluish hue on the far horizon. If Isra squinted, it almost seemed like she was looking at the mountains of Palestine, the buildings like dusty hills in the distance. She wondered what else she would see in the days to come.

“This is Queens,” Adam told her as they waited in line for a cab outside the airport. Once inside the minivan, Isra sat near a window in the back row, hoping Adam would sit beside her, but Sarah and Fareeda joined her instead. “It’s about a forty-five-minute ride to Brooklyn where we live,” Adam continued as he sat beside his brothers in the middle row. “If we’re not stuck in traffic, that is.”

Isra studied Queens through the taxicab window, eyes wide and watering in the March sunlight. She searched for the immaculate skyline she had seen from the plane, but it was nowhere in sight. All she could see were endless gray roads, curving and looping back in on themselves, with cars—hundreds of cars—zooming along them without stopping. Adam said they were two miles from the exit to Brooklyn, and Isra watched as the cabdriver merged to the left lane, following a sign that read BELT PARKWAY RAMP.

They sailed along a narrow highway so close to the water Isra thought the cab might slip and fall in. She didn’t know how to swim. “How are we driving so close to the water?” she managed to ask, eyeing a large ship in the distance, a cluster of birds soaring above it.

“Oh, this is nothing,” Adam said. “Wait until you see the bridge.”

And then it appeared, right in front of her, long and silver and elegant, like a bird spreading its wings over water. “That’s the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,” Adam said, watching Isra’s eyes widen. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It is,” she said, panicking. “Are we driving on it?”

“No,” Adam said. “That bridge connects Brooklyn to Staten Island.”

“Has it ever fallen?” she whispered, eyes glued to the bridge as they neared it.

She could hear his smile in his reply. “Not that I know of.”

“But it’s so skinny! It looks like it could snap at any minute.”

Adam laughed. “Relax,” he said. “We’re in the greatest city on earth. Everything here is built by the best architects and engineers. Enjoy the view.”

Isra tried to relax. She could hear Khaled chuckle in the passenger seat. “Reminds me of the first time Fareeda saw the bridge.” He turned back to look at his wife. “I swear she almost cried in fear.”

“Sure I did,” Fareeda said, though Isra noticed that she still seemed nervous as they drove under the bridge. When they came out the other side, Isra exhaled hard, relieved it hadn’t collapsed on them.

It was only after they exited the parkway that Isra had her first glimpse of Brooklyn. It wasn’t what she had expected. Magnificent was a word you could put to Manhattan, but Brooklyn seemed plain in comparison, as though it didn’t belong alongside. All she saw were dull brick buildings covered in murals and graffiti, many of them dilapidated, and people pushing their way through the crowded streets with solemn looks on their faces. It puzzled her. Growing up, she had often wondered about the world outside Palestine, if it were as beautiful as the places she read about in books. She had been certain it would be, studying the Manhattan skyline, had been excited to call that world home. But now, eyeing Brooklyn through the window, seeing the graffiti scrawled on the walls and across the buildings, she wondered if her books had gotten it wrong, whether Mama had been right all along when she’d said the world would be disappointing regardless of where she stood.