The Family Dinner
By Soniah Kamal
Early in our friendship I asked Noreen what she was doing stocking Wise Health's shelves with five varieties of protein bars, when she could just as well be living at a spa. (I'm straightforward, which Mike says is one of my charms, though the way he says 'charms' makes it sound like a skanky word). That's when Noreen told me about her miscarriages and wanting to stay busy, busy, busy until a baby came. Why Wise Health? Because it's a five minute walk away from her house (there is a Hooters and a Donut shop too but apparently neither have the cachet a health store, according to her, does) and, apparently since she has a chauffer back home, she's never learned to drive and cannot possibly because she's terrified she'll run someone over.
I must say it gives me a thrill to watch Noreen dusting between the loose herb racks, coughing hysterically even if a fingertip worth of lavender, or nettle, or chamomile floats by her face. I feel like Camilla Bowles, Prince Charles' true love, watching Lady Di soil herself. The day Noreen discovered a dead rat in the toilet right behind the potty was a riot. She nearly fainted. So much for cachet I thought as I pretended to be perfectly okay depositing a fat, gray lump into a paper bag and throwing it out in the dumpster. Noreen thought it was another example of the evolved American woman being able to feel sorry for dead vermin and being able to touch it too.
"We may as well be perfect," I joked, "even if we do shop at second hand stores for good party clothes and think a good time by definition involves buckets of naked flesh."
I was trying to convince Noreen about the merits of no clothes, and she me about fully clothed; I guess that's about the time I was roped into Eid gatherings: Islam's Christmas.
I didn't deck up much for the first one, denims and a sequined T-shirt. I'd feared they'd be a morose bunch dressed like black birds discussing gradations between sins and sinners; I was pleasantly surprised. They were fully clothed all right and for fully clothed a terribly festive bunch, a right hubbub of yakking and laughter with a million children running underfoot between adults who patted them indulgently and seemed to know which child was whose. It was a like an uproarious family dinner where everyone actually liked each other, or at least pretended to so well that they fooled me. (Although the segregation (voluntary, Noreen told me) with the women gathered on one side of the hall and the men on the other scared the hell out of me. It was like they were being punished, I told Mike, or were homos.)
This particular Eid party, like all others I would attend, was a potluck affair. I gasped the first time I saw how much food crowded the table which, if it could speak, would have shouted 'For pity's sake.' That first time I'd taken a shrimp salad from Costco, a feast of an appetizer if you ask me, and rather costly except it looked like a sell out in the midst of deep dishes overflowing with warm, home cooked curries and yellowed rice.
"I could have made mulligatawny soup or something," I said to Noreen, but she was too busy meeting and being greeted by swarms of women, who smiled at me, graciously, before dissolving into their native tongue as if even their smiles had been nothing but an automatic tic for the foreigner.
It's not like they can't speak English you know, I told my eldest sister. She said that she didn't think they were trying to be exclusionary or rude or anything just that it sounded like when she was with Ric's Italian family and no one bothered to even translate anymore they were so used to thinking that she was one of them. I secretly agreed with my sister, but I didn't tell her because I wasn't too fond of Ric's family and didn't want to associate anything positive with them.
The men, at these Eid gatherings, ignored me completely, you'd think I had cooties, or was going to jump them and defile them or something, but within a matter of hours I noticed they didn't talk much to women in general, not even their wives. I mean a man telling his wife to get him a glass of water is not exactly talking. Shitty kitty, even when Lord Mike while watching football from the Sofa Throne orders of Paula the slave girl refills of cola and chips, I do get all kissey kissey in between, and if his team is winning, I'll playfully smack him on the head especially if I'm getting irritated with trips to the kitchen. I can't imagine any of these wives, no matter how irritated, dishing out a smack or two. I bet they'd be divorced on the spot like in a movie Noreen was watching once.
"Reciting 'divorce' thrice," she said all teary eyed, "is incorrectly depicting Islam. It doesn't work like that."
"There has to be some truth in it," I said as Noreen squirmed. "I mean it is in a movie. They do check facts."
I kept arguing the point and I think I pissed Noreen off completely, but she's such a sweetheart she still packed hoards of food she'd made for me to take home, knowing how Mike likes spice now and then, and how I refuse to cook curries on account of the smell.
"Noreen," I said as I got ready to leave, "You're a good girl."
I felt Noreen held me in particular regard. She had to, for, if someone came to my house, expected to be fed, defended a movie they had no idea about and then laughed at my culture to boot I'd have kicked them out fair and square and then hung up on them ever afterwards. But here was Noreen saying See ya.
I suppose that's why I'm friends with her- she's so mellow, so chilled, like she's discovered her place in the world and words aren't going to budge her.
I must say Mike was a bit pissed off at me later when I told him what all I'd said to Noreen, but the truth is I think outfits from her part of the universe are funny looking. At these Eid gatherings most of the men dress in voluminous white tunics with equally tent like baggy pants, all that's missing is hoods and then they'd really look like KKK rejects, I swear, all grim, as if they've been spanked into sobriety.
The women look like a cross between well-stuffed turkeys and over zealously decorated Christmas trees, an obese clump of color like regurgitated jellybeans. Actually once I got used to the kaleidoscope I thought them rather gorgeous, like parakeets studded with diamonds and other jewels.
"The Christmas Trees wear," I told my sister, "the bright ass colors black people wear in hair parlor movies." I didn't tell her about the jewelry though, it would dredge up memories of our deceased mother, still a great loss for us all, for the jewelry these women wore was the sort I've only seen Joan Collins wear back in the day when Mother lived for new episodes of Dynasty: trains of solid gold bangles inlaid with rubies and emeralds and sapphires all the way up their asses, even the poorest of them, which is a big joke to me.
I'm poor and look it and rightly so with a wedding band, a measly wire around my thin rod of a ring finger, my only ornament. The only time the Christmas Trees speak to me is when I'm stuffing their sticky desserts down my throat by the handful.
"How you keep your figure?" they ask adjusting the long scarves they wear over their gargantuan chests and even bigger bellies. I tell them I didn't bother to have any kids. That shocks the geniality out of them for a bit. I can just hear them, in private: "Americans!"
My Granddad used to say that. I'd be sitting in his lap, a sugar cookie in one hand, with the other pulling his long, thick white beard, the longest and thickest and whitest I've seen since, half paying attention to he and Mother decrying some book which they'd soon be sending out a petition to get banned. Granddad would say, shaking his head as I tickled his ear with the end of his beard, "The downfall of this country is the countrymen itself. Americans!"
Since Granddad's time I think this country's really changed. For one thing my high school, back then, was all white. Let alone colors, we didn't know any of this Eid, Diwali, Hannukah crap; certainly commercials weren't interrupted the way they are now to wish the majority of this country a happy holiday it doesn't have the first clue about.
Last year's Eid gathering coincided with Christmas (I took Noreen to a tree trimming party. She had a ball. If she'd had her way we'd have all stood back watching her fix the tree up like, she said, a traditional bride and then clapped till we were sore). Along with the usual potluck chitter chatter there was a Christmas tree, a sorry ass one if ever there was, but never the less, decorated with a smattering of star shaped cookies (which were eventually handed out to the endless kids that are always creating a rumpus at these events (these people, I swear, have never heard of decent bedtimes)) and crowning the Christmas tree: a colossal crescent.
Apparently the green pine and stars and moon were supposed to represent the fusion of the Pakistani flag and America or some such, and though I thought it was hysterical, by the time I got home I wasn't laughing anymore. What gumption, what audacity. If my Granddad were alive he'd set them straight with one roar for desecrating Jesus' birthday when we've got to respect Mohammed (Holy Prophet, Noreen always corrects me).
This was the last Eid gathering I would accompany Noreen to before she became pregnant and so very busy. Had I known I would have certainly made more of an effort to be in less of a bad mood over the fusion tree.
Noreen had her baby and since they'd decided to keep the gender a surprise I was worried they might collapse if it was a girl. One of my sisters had watched a prime time special about how these communities are plagued with wanting boys, so of course when Noreen kept telling me that she didn't care what they had, that in fact they preferred a girl, and Silk Socks corroborated so very emphatically, I thought surely they're dying for a boy.
No one could have been more ecstatic than me when they were as ecstatic as they were upon begetting a girl. I've seen enough ugly, bald newborns to last me a lifetime thanks to my sisters but Noreen's daughter was cuter than I expected, a little button with a plume of soft, jet-black hair. I gave her a basket crammed with baby food. I'd gone all out and splurged on organic Step 1 jars of every possible variety.
As expected once Noreen became pregnant she stopped working and once she gave birth we began to drift apart. Old jokes about dead rats and Ellen's bunions became, indeed, old after a while. Of course these days when Noreen comes to shop, her live in nanny pushing the stroller behind her, most of the new part timers stare but stay clear, she looks ominous with her perfect lip pencil, gloves and neck scarf.
When I tell them she used to work here once, cleaned out the loose herb section like any one of us they say 'Get Out!', and even when Noreen and I have a chit chat as I ring up her cart, they stare and afterwards, whistling loudly, say
"Well, look at that. There's hope for us all."
Lately I have been looking at that: I suppose you'd never think looking at Noreen that she could have worked in here, mopping the floor like any of us but always trying to get out of it and beaming when I'd take over. Looking at me, I guess, you can't think of me anywhere but here. Lately I've also begun cooking a curry or two once or twice a year; Mike enjoys it, and so do I.
"Damn kids," I said to Mike once. "Coming into the word just to split apart the best of friends, or sisters."
"Are you saying," Mike said swallowing, "that you want a baby?"
The great untold truth is that everyone can live without everyone, that most people go through life dreaming about what it would be like to live without the people they are living with and that, if they could just start over, they'd never choose anyone they'd chosen: even their kids.
"Oh Hon," I said hugging Mike tightly, "No."
The leaves are turning color. This year we plan to drive to Aspen, Mike and I, and watch them together, if only because there's nothing else to do and because we can.
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