Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

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I formed a warm animal attachment to Aroush: to her smooth, square feet, to the clean smell of her scalp when I held her in my lap. As I had predicted, Mrs. Mansour, when she did notice them eventually, took the smile and “Haa” as evidence that in due time her daughter would map the stars or choreograph a ballet. But we were both happy. I had a renewed hope that one day I could bring Aroush to respond to her own name, to hold a ball with both hands, to point to objects when I named them. I felt like a teacher again: not necessarily heroic, but useful.

My textbooks and store-bought toys gave way to the elements. I took Aroush outside into the garden, touching her plump feet to the dry, rough patches of grass. I gave her flowers to smell. We lay down and gazed together at the shapes the clouds made. One day I filled a bowl with ice and another bowl with warm water. I cleaned out an old medicine dropper and found the spray bottle that I used to water the plants. I bathed her hands in the ice water and then in the warm, cheering as she reacted to the change in temperature. I squeezed the medicine dropper onto her palms and wrists. She was mildly ticklish, as I learned from her squint and sigh whenever something brushed her face, and so, playfully, I raised the spray bottle and misted her cheek with it.

Aroush began to scream: a guttural sound, higher-pitched than the moan that told me she was merely upset. She stiffened at the knees and elbows and squeezed her eyes shut. I felt the resistance in her body, the sudden rigid terror. “It’s all right, Aroush,” I said. “It’s just water.” Stupidly, I misted her palm. Her screams turned into violent choking noises; her face grew purple. I dropped the bottle and picked her up, rocking her until my knees hurt.

In the afternoon I watched Mrs. Mansour hoist Aroush onto her hip and drape her with the veil as usual. Accustomed by then to keeping secrets from her, I said nothing about the spray bottle. Parents at the special-needs school in Manila would take offense the moment we asked about a bruise or scratch, hearing only accusation. Are you a parent? I’d been asked, more than once. Then you’ve got no right. No right! She might ask why I’d sprayed Aroush in the first place — question my new curriculum, based as it now was not on science but on my own instincts. Why I had inflicted things on Aroush that would have tormented even a regular person.

That night Ed came home angry, having suffered some humiliation at work. “If a Bumbai screws up, it’s my fault,” he said. “Always my fault. None of the credit, all of the blame.” Sand sludge had accumulated in one section of the desert pipeline, and acids had eaten away part of the pipe wall. Sections would have to be replaced, at great cost to the company. “No good! This no good!” Ed shouted, imitating his Arab bosses.

“Aroush is terrified of spray bottles,” I said. “Today I spritzed her with the one I use on the plants, and she started screaming. As if I was torturing her.”

“They’ve got no right,” Ed continued. “Dressing me down like a schoolboy. That oil has got my blood in it!”

“A spray bottle. Can you imagine? Is there anything less threatening than that? I can’t wrap my head around it.”

“I can,” he said. I looked up — surprised, though I should not have been, that Ed had listened to me through his own complaints. “What did you expect?” he said. “She comes from a race that cuts off people’s body parts for petty crimes.”

His face was flushed. I touched his forehead, which was hot with fever. Upset as he seemed, I envied Ed his clarity. I had always been fascinated with kinks in the natural order, with anomalies, but my husband was a man who dealt in diagrams and blueprints. At work Ed drew up flowcharts and predicted outcomes, checking that the pipeline did in real life what he’d said it would on paper. His view of Arabs and Indians, and our place among them, was no different. Could he be right? Was there some brutal form of discipline I didn’t know about, involving spray bottles, and why would Aroush need it?

“I’m calling in tomorrow,” he said. “Screw them. Let’s see how their precious pipe does without me.” For the first time that evening I noticed that his voice was hoarse, as if hours of defending himself had worn it out. His nose was congested. A better wife surely would have noticed earlier.

It would be his first missed day of work in the time I’d known him. The next morning I chopped ginger and boiled chicken for Ed’s soup while Aroush took her morning nap and played peekaboo with her while he watched television. “These women!” I could hear him chuckle from the den, where he watched Dynasty while I changed Aroush’s diaper. “They’re something else!” The lid on the pot of rice began to rattle.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, standing in the doorway of the den with Aroush in my arms. On-screen the wife and ex-wife of the same man were waist-deep in a lily pond, clawing at each other. “Can you keep an eye on Aroush while I get your lugaw ready?”

“Where’s she going to go?” said Ed.

“Just watch her. Please.” He reluctantly followed me into the living room, where I set Aroush down in her recliner. When Ed approached her, as one would a curiosity in a museum, I couldn’t help but feel protective. “Don’t get too close,” I said.

Ed stopped and held his hands up.

I smiled. “I don’t want her to catch your cold, that’s all.”

In the kitchen I added rice to the broth and shredded the cooked chicken from the bone with a fork. The porridge was close to done when Aroush screamed — the strained, desperate sound I had heard only once before. I dropped the ladle.

In the living room Ed was crouched over Aroush with the spray bottle. Her body had stiffened at the knees and elbows.

“Don’t!” I ran and knelt to shield Aroush’s body with mine. Mist from the bottle landed on the nape of my neck.

“I wanted to see for myself,” he said. I picked Aroush up, her wet cheek against mine, and backed us both away from Ed. He looked like the child who has just learned to throw salt on a garden slug and watch it implode. “You’re right — it’s uncanny. She’s got something against that spray bottle.”

I glared at him, rocking Aroush. His eyes were bloodshot, and I could imagine the brain behind them, busy at the work of redrafting. Updating his diagram, based on new data before him. Arrows pointing in directions he had not foreseen; an invisible line along the living room carpet, with him on one side and us on the other. Ed stood, and the spray bottle toppled to its side. I turned from him, shielding Aroush as he walked across the living room. Her skin and dress were damp.

“Sally, you never wanted a child,” he said. Sweat trembled on his forehead and above his lip, despite the air-conditioning. “Now, all of a sudden, you want one? I’ve stopped being enough for you? All because you made this limp, drooling, delayed child smile?”

Of course he had heard me, even in his sleep; why should I be surprised? All my life I had heard wives complain of husbands who paid no attention to them. Why couldn’t I appreciate mine? “Go and rest,” I said in a voice I hoped sounded calm. “I’ll bring you your lugaw in a minute.”

He went, trailing a sweaty odor behind him. I swayed in place until Aroush’s body relaxed against mine. It was Wednesday. In a few hours Mrs. Mansour would pick her up, leaving me alone with Ed in this house for the weekend.

—

The following Saturday, Aroush was late. By nine o’clock she had yet to arrive. I turned on the television. Had Mrs. Mansour somehow found out what Ed and I had done? I wanted an Annie Sullivan for my Aroush, I imagined her saying, her fine, aristocratic face hardened against me, but now I find you are hurting rather than helping her. I watered the plants, dusted the shelves, dried the dishes. I configured the toys in the living room, then dismantled the arrangements and started over. Finally, when it was nearly eleven and time for Aroush’s morning nap, the gate bell chimed.