But thinking of Tariq was treacherous because, before she could stop, she saw him lying
on a bed, far from home, tubes piercing his burned body. Like the bile that kept burning her
throat these days, a deep, paralyzing grief would come rising up Laila's chest. Her legs
would turn to water. She would have to hold on to something.
Laila passed that winter of 1992 sweeping the house, scrubbing the pumpkin colored walls
of the bedroom she shared with Rasheed, washing clothes outside in a big copper lagoon.
Sometimes she saw herself as if hovering above her own body, saw herself squatting over
the rim of the logoon, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, pink hands wringing soapy water
from one of Rasheed's undershirts. She felt lost then, casting about, like a shipwreck
survivor, no shore in sight, only miles and miles of water.
When it was too cold to go outside, Laila ambled around the house. She walked, dragging
a fingernail along the wall, down the hallway, then back, down the steps, then up, her face
unwashed, hair uncombed. She walked until she ran into Mariam, who shot her a cheerless
glance and went back to slicing the stem off a bell pepper and trimming strips of fat from
meat. A hurtful silence would fill the room, and Laila could almost see the wordless
hostility radiating from Mariam like waves of heat rising from asphalt. She would retreat
back to her room, sit on the bed, and watch the snow falling.
Rasheed took her to his shoe shop one day.
When they were out together, he walked alongside her, one hand gripping her by the
elbow. For Laila, being out in the streets had become an exercise in avoiding injury. Her
eyes were still adjusting to the limited, grid like visibility of the burqa, her feet still
stumbling over the hem. She walked in perpetual fear of tripping and falling, of breaking an
ankle stepping into a pothole. Still, she found some comfort in the anonymity that the burqa
provided. She wouldn't be recognized this way if she ran into an old acquaintance of hers.
She wouldn't have to watch the surprise in their eyes, or the pity or the glee, at how far she
had fallen, at how her lofty aspirations had been dashed.
Rasheed's shop was bigger and more brightly lit than Laila had imagined. He had her sit
behind his crowded workbench, the top of which was littered with old soles and scraps of
leftover leather. He showed her his hammers, demonstrated how the sandpaper wheel
worked, his voice ringing high and proud He felt her belly, not through the shirt but under it,
his fingertips cold and rough like bark on her distended skin. Laila remembered Tariq's
hands, soft but strong, the tortuous, full veins on the backs of them, which she had always
found so appealingly masculine.
"Swelling so quickly," Rasheed said."It's going to be a big boy. My son will be
apahlawanl Like his father."
Laila pulled down her shirt. It filled her with fear when he spoke likethis.
"How are things with Mariam?"
She said they were fine.
"Good. Good."
She didn't tell him that they'd had their first true fight.
It had happened a few days earlier. Laila had gone to the kitchen and found Mariam
yanking drawers and slamming them shut. She was looking, Mariam said, forthe long
wooden spoon she used to stir rice.