Chapter 6: Asma (1989) - The Daughters of Rosebud

Asma woke up cold and stiff on the floor to the phone ringing. The room did a lazy turn around her. Disconnected memories from the cast party the night before burst through her brain fog, lurid and sharp one moment and fuddled the next. Watermelon Jell-O shots in Dixie cups. An expanse of red dots of light in darkness. Salma’s oversize eyes like a character from Speed Racer. A joint passed to her again and again. Singing the crass words from “Add it Up” at the top of her voice. Ruby watching her quizzically. Her father’s face contorted with rage.

The phone rang again. Her skull was too small. Her mouth tasted foul and metallic. She was naked, half on and half off the mattress on the floor, and had no recollection how she had gotten there. The ringing jangled her insides, and bile rose up her throat. Eyes closed, she felt around with her arm searching for a pillow or blanket, anything to cover her nakedness. Her hand made contact with a throw pillow, which she pulled to her chest like a life raft.

Despite her parents’ belief that shame should be a governor to her behavior, it was not actually a feeling with which she was familiar. Except that morning. The thought of her father made her burn. She felt dirty, as though she had done something wrong and was, somehow, responsible for what had happened the night before. Vaguely, in the back of her mind, she thought that what happened wasn’t her fault. But tell her body that. She shivered, cold with goose bumps.

Who was that man? It was a rare day that her father touched her in any way, a pat on the back, a passing hand on the shoulder. The man last night had been a stranger. She felt reduced to a body. An object. A thing someone else could do something to with no consequences. The knowledge that her father saw her simply as an extension of himself was a bitter pill.

And once again, where was her mother? Earning one more notch on her present-but-not-helpful belt? Giving cover to her father and his worst instincts?

She loved horror movies for the thrill of fear and rush of adrenaline. But after the events of the night before, she realized that the ginned-up, fake fear she felt watching a slasher film was as close to real fear as kicking her legs under the sheets was to sex.

Leading up to the weekend of performances, Asma’s thoughts had not been about whether she would remember that one line she seemed to have a mental block against or have stage fright. They hadn’t even been about how her parents would react to the play. She knew they would be scandalized by the kissing and sex scene and had briefly questioned whether it was the right decision to invite them but then had quickly reminded herself that this was their issue, not hers.

In fact, shocking them had been the point. She wanted her parents to see her for who she really was. She wanted them to be confronted with the fact that she was not a child. She wanted an end to the charade: her and Salma going to great lengths to protect them from the knowledge of anything that might make them uncomfortable and their efforts to protect her and her sister from whatever misbegotten beliefs they thought might corrupt. In a strange way, the play was the vehicle through which she wanted them to see the cultural clash she and Salma lived with every day, the out-of-body-ness that was a part of their daily existence. She wanted her parents to be challenged, reasoning that once the play was over, the bar would be lower for her in all future endeavors and, by definition, Salma.

No, the predominant thought in her head had been the coming loss of Ruby. It was a canyon wall, looming over her, casting an impenetrable shadow over all else. She knew her grief, in part, came from the anticipatory loss of the bubble in which she’d inadvertently found herself. The community of the cast and crew, the sense of safety and belonging, the joy and play of rehearsal, the intensity of performing, they were all wrapped up in her feelings for Ruby. That she may not see Ruby again or be part of such a group felt like a real loss. Once the play was over, there would be no reason for them to see each other. Ruby would go back to being a nurse, and Asma would go back to being just a student. It felt the same as being a child when Mamoo and Aunty returned to the city after a weekend visit—that she was being abandoned and left behind.

Everything and nothing had changed between them after the night of the party. They spoke to each other at rehearsals in the same way they always had. Ruby gave directions about how Asma should say a line or where she should stand in a scene. They talked in group settings. If someone had observed them, there was nothing that indicated there was anything special or particular between them. But there were subtle signals, which Asma analyzed and cross-analyzed. Did Ruby look only at her when addressing a comment to a group? Did Ruby intend to touch her fingers when passing her a soda? Did Ruby always say goodbye with her eyes as Asma lingered at the back of the auditorium after rehearsal? Ruby now featured prominently in Asma’s dreams, the final person in her mind as she fell asleep and the first thought she had each morning. The connection felt as heavy as a weighted blanket, pinning her down and flooding her with a sense of angst and well-being.

Asma waited for Ruby to say something about staying in touch after the show—maybe they could go to dinner or coffee or meet up sometime—but there were only last-minute reminders and instructions given to the entire cast. Even as she thought it, she knew it wouldn’t happen. They had never done those things before, so why would they start doing them after? The full extent of their relationship was in the presence of others. Asma had considered the ways in which their paths might cross again. Maybe Ruby would direct the spring play. Maybe she could walk by Ruby’s house on the off chance that she would see her and come out. Maybe she could get hurt and go to Ruby’s ER. In any other situation, she would have initiated the conversation; she was allergic to passivity and waiting for others. But with Ruby, she simply couldn’t. The fear of her disinterest, the potential that she saw her as just a kid or another student, immobilized her. The silence, the absence of any future, fell around Asma like a shroud.

If someone had asked her what she wanted, she would have said she wanted Ruby in her life as a friend or a mentor. She felt like a fangirl. There was so much about her that Asma admired. She was self-assured, patient, funny, and simply cool. Asma had the impression that while Ruby was friendly to everyone, there were few in her inner circle. Irrationally, she wanted to be part of that small orbit. But even as she thought it, she knew that the feelings Ruby engendered in her were far more complicated.

On the day of the final performance, Asma had decided she would bring up the subject of staying in touch at the cast party. But that hadn’t happened. After seeing her family, she had staggered back to the auditorium, holding her stomach, feeling like she was about to throw up, dodging cars pulling out of the dark parking lot. She bent over in the bushes behind the building until she could gather herself. By the time she had changed into her regular clothes and arrived at the cast party, she was already high. With few inhibitions and a need to forget, she drank too much and too quickly. Ronny offered her a pill, and she took it. She met Ruby’s eyes at one point and vaguely remembered her intentions, but then she lost them again. She blocked the events from earlier in the evening until someone poked her in her stomach playfully and she was reminded of the pain she was promised yet to feel.

The phone continued its ringing insistently until, finally, she inched her aching body toward it. It was Mamoo.

“Are you still sleeping? It’s two o’clock.”

“Oh God,” Asma moaned.

“What’s wrong?” he asked abruptly.

“Uh, just not feeling great.” Asma cleared her throat and tried to make her voice sound stronger. “What’s going on?”

There was a long pause. “Sorry we weren’t able to stick around to see you after the performance last night.”

She smelled the sickening scent of crushed roses and crawled fully onto the mattress and piled all the pillows on her aching body. “Where’d you go?”

“We had to leave, darling.”

Then they both went silent.

Mamoo cleared his throat. “It’s Sunday night. Are you coming for dinner?”

All week, she looked forward to her Sunday-night dinners with Mamoo and Aunty. She saved stories from her week to entertain them with. In their presence, she felt like a normal nineteen-year-old. And God knows she needed that tonight.

“Did you see Salma?” Asma couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.

“Yes, of course. We sat with them.” Mamoo paused, and his voice became tentative. “Did you see your parents?”

Asma grunted in acknowledgment.

“We really want to see you, darling. Can you come over tonight?”

Nausea and fear bolted through her. Did they know? “I’m really behind, Mamoo.”

“We can come to you and just go to a quick dinner.”

“I’ll stop by one night this week.”

Asma sat in her car, Mamoo’s late-model Mercedes that he had given her before she started college, and idly fiddled with the radio dial. Usually, slipping behind the wheel and inhaling Mamoo’s lingering woodsy smell made her feel much the way her Trusty Steed had when she’d first gotten it. Invincible. But not today. She lifted her arm to adjust the rearview mirror and dropped it heavily. What if they knew what had happened that night and wanted to talk about it? What was she supposed to say?

It had only been a few days since the play, and every minute of that time had been a kind of suffering. She wanted the memory of the whole night to disappear unacknowledged into the vagueness of the past. She had wildly miscalculated. Frustrated at her own lack of foresight, she simply had not understood the scale of her parents’ reaction. What else was her father capable of? Instead of clearing the way for Salma, her parents would scrutinize her every decision more carefully and withhold permissions and privileges. The shame and embarrassment she’d felt when she had woken up the morning after the play had festered and given way to a lethargic malaise.

She was trying so hard to evade the muddiness of her feelings for Ruby and the events in the parking lot that it left room for little else. Avoidance took a type of energy. Her attention jostled between the unsettled terrains of Ruby, her family, and school. There was too much time for thinking and not enough to look forward to. She wanted to see no one. She missed classes by sleeping through her alarm. Classes she had been coasting through all semester had gotten hard. She was behind in all her subjects, found gaps in her understanding about key concepts, and yet could find no motivation to catch up. She picked up the phone handset from time to time to make sure it worked and then remembered that Ruby didn’t know her unlisted phone number. The only time the phone rang was with Salma’s callback code, but she didn’t call back. What was there to say?

She was unable to get Ruby out of her head, and at the same time, the idea of seeing her now, after the discombobulated memories from the party, was too much to bear. Her emotional state felt like the mottled shadow that was slowly starting to appear under the surface of her skin. After she glimpsed the damage to her body, she started taking a shower late at night when no one else would be in the communal bathroom. Instead of the pain fading, it continued to grow and deepen. She felt like she was going to be permanently marked with this loss.

When she finally arrived at Mamoo’s, Aunty was in the kitchen on the phone, pulling things out of the fridge. Her phone had an extra-long cord and a receiver with a special attachment so she could walk around hands-free without straining her neck. As she stepped out from behind the fridge, Asma couldn’t help but notice how round Aunty was getting. She could hear her father’s snarky comments about how they didn’t take care of themselves. He prided himself on his self-control. Where had that legendary self-control been in the parking lot? Aunty hugged her as she walked past. Who cared what he thought?

She stood at the big windows in the family room. Moody, heavy clouds scudded briskly along. Winter was descending. Asma was an unwilling participant, already resentful of the coming darkness and cold. Maybe after she finished her studies and was a doctor, she would end up working at the same hospital as Ruby. Asma imagined stepping into an elevator to perform a rare and highly risky surgery. Ruby would be standing in the elevator and smile, her dimple deepening, and say, “It’s you.” Asma shook herself to rid herself of her silly fantasies.

Aunty hung up the phone and came to stand by Asma; their reflections emerged in the glass like shadow selves. There and not there.

“Were you talking to your mom?” Asma asked.

Aunty nodded self-consciously; she was always on the phone with her mother.

“What do you talk about?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Aunty laughed.

Asma understood that feeling. That’s the way she and Salma had always been. Until recently. What would it feel like to have that kind of relationship with her mother? One where you were driven to tell her everything and nothing.

They walked to the kitchen, and Aunty handed Asma a head of lettuce to clean while she minced garlic into perfect, tiny cubes.

“What did you want to talk about?” Asma asked.

“Let’s wait for your uncle. He’s running late from work.”

Asma ripped the lettuce leaves roughly.

“You must have a lot of time back now that the play’s over,” Aunty said.

“Yeah.” There was a part of Asma that was desperate to talk to someone about the crush of her feelings. Someone who wouldn’t judge or ask big questions that she couldn’t answer. Aunty fit the bill, but even as she thought it, Asma knew she never would.

Aunty poured olive oil into a shallow pan and scraped the garlic into it. Asma loved to stir anything and took the wooden spoon from her hand and sautéed the sticky garlic until it released its sweet funk. She thought of her family’s stove in Rosebud that had broken many years ago and that now functioned as a countertop. Her father had even covered it with a spare plank of wood on top of which they had placed a plug-in griddle with two small burners set in stone age steel, salvaged from the bug market. Her mother was too short to comfortably handle the elevated height, and so she either stood on her tiptoes to stir whatever was in the bottom of the pot, or she asked Asma for help.

“Do you talk to your brothers as much as your mom?” Asma asked.

“Goodness, no. Actually, one of my brothers is here for a conference in a few weeks.”

Over the years, Asma and Salma had met Aunty’s family in passing. Mamoo had been recognized a few years before at an awards ceremony, and Aunty’s “real family,” as Asma and Salma referred to them, had come from Wisconsin to attend. Asma, Salma, and their parents sat with Aunty’s parents at one table with Mamoo and Aunty, and Aunty’s brothers, with their wives and children, sat at the adjacent table. Asma had been unable to peel her eyes away from them. Aunty’s brothers talked loudly and laughed heartily. Their green-eyed, shiny-haired children acted disinterested in everything. One brother had his arm draped over the back of his wife’s chair while he leaned over, whispering conspiratorially to the other brother, eyes shining with glee. The other brother was balding like Uncle and held his head up with one hand, a wide grin on his face, deliriously writing on the program for the event. Aunty turned around to shush them more than once. The wives elbowed their husbands to quiet down. The brother passed a note to Aunty at their table, almost tipping over his chair to reach her. And while speaker after speaker droned on, Aunty shook with silent laughter as she read the note. Asma had wanted desperately to see what was written on that piece of paper and felt an irrational and acute sense of having lost something. Maybe it was the idea of brothers or maybe that she would never be a part of a family in which playfulness and teasing were part of the family language.

They served themselves pasta and salad.

“Tell me about your brothers.”

“You know. I was the child of an immigrant also,” Aunty said.

Asma took a bite and chewed as many times as she could without it seeming weird. “But not really, right? I mean, your mom is American.”

Aunty nodded. “You’re right, of course. Moms have an outsize influence on the feel of a family, and so, in that sense, we were raised in a more typical American way. But even though we did all the same things as our cousins, we were definitely not the same. We were vegetarian for one thing. We went to India every few years, which, thirty years ago, was about as strange as going to the moon. My older brother refused to go to India in high school because he didn’t want to miss baseball.”

“Did you feel Indian?” Asma asked. “Or American?”

Aunty paused for a long moment. “American. Probably because our mom ran interference with him, we kids never had to manage our dad’s sense of being let down. Or at least, I rarely ever felt like I disappointed him. My brothers on the other hand . . .” She laughed. “They were wild. I think any frustration my parents felt at their behavior was probably just the normal frustration parents have with their teenagers’ choices.”

They ate quietly. Asma picked at her salad and asked softly, “How was it when you and Mamoo met? Did he feel conflicted because of the religious differences? Between the two of you, I mean.”

There was always a pause before Aunty responded, like she was really considering what she heard. “From my perspective, no. But you have to remember, I met him after he’d been living by himself for ten years. So I think he’d already worked through some of those things.”

She said this like it was a common understanding. All Asma knew was that Mamoo had gone from Pakistan to England to study and then come to America. There were no details.

“If I really think about how young he was when he moved to England . . . oh, it shocks me,” Aunty said.

“How old was he?”

“Sixteen! Can you imagine figuring out a new country, a new language, by yourself and at that age?”

“What? How?” Asma imagined a sixteen-year-old Mamoo with a full head of hair. She had been nervous when her parents left her at school an hour away. What kind of terror must Mamoo have felt boarding that plane? It was good to have moments where she felt lucky for her life.

“To go to university. Surely you know this.”

“I know he went to college in England, but I didn’t know he was so young.”

“Oh, he was very young. Maybe you should talk to your uncle about this family history.” But the way she said it didn’t sound like she thought it would be such a good idea. “What about you? Is there a special boy?”

Asma dropped her piece of garlic bread into her spaghetti. “Me? No, no, no.”

“I’m not asking if you’re dating someone. I understand the, er, difficulties such a situation would create. But is there someone you like?” Aunty leaned over the table, wide-eyed, like a girlfriend waiting for a juicy bit of gossip.

Again, Asma wanted to tell her about the thoughts racing circles in her head, but what was there really to say? That she pined for Ruby, not really knowing what she was pining for? Her attention? Her conversation? Her presence? That she was doing badly in school and risked her scholarship? Her father had punched her? If she were to start talking her heart, she was unsure of what would come out and what would happen next.

Mamoo came home just then, tie askance. “The house smells great,” he said and plopped down at the table. “Mari jan, did you tell Asma?”

Here it was. Asma’s shoulders drew up. They were going to talk about the aftermath of the play. She would have to deny it or say it was no big deal and pretend like everything was okay, and then what? Would Mamoo call and yell at him? What would her father do? Come get her from school? What would happen to her?

“No, we were waiting for you,” Aunty said, putting a plate of pasta in front of Mamoo and rubbing his head.

“Did you hear about your parents?”

“No.”

“They’re going to Pakistan.”

It was so not what Asma had been expecting. “Huh?”

“Your grandfather is sick, and he wanted to see your father one last time,” Aunty said.

“Oh.”

“Salma’s going to stay with us while they’re gone.” Mamoo’s voice rose in excitement even though he was trying to keep his face somber.

Asma nodded.

“Won’t that be great?” Mamoo asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“We wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You know. It’s so sudden, and we didn’t want you to be upset.”

Asma stared at Mamoo and Aunty, both of whom studied her expectantly across the table. My God. They really are that sweet and naive. They had no idea the weight that was lifting off her shoulders as they spoke. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?”

“Yes,” both Aunty and Mamoo said, in unison.

“Okay.” Asma was so relieved that she didn’t really care what they were saying. They didn’t seem to know about the night of Pippin, and she had nothing to answer for.

Mamoo stammered. “So will you come here on the weekends so we can all hang out?”

“Sure. Of course.” Asma nodded. She wanted to quickly get off the topic of her father just in case more questions were coming. “Aunty and I were just talking about when you two met.” She would never have asked this question in her parents’ presence. There was no concept of how you met someone. Marriages were simply arranged.

“Uh, well, okay then.” He seemed surprised. “We met at the end of my residency.”

“But how?”

“Well, um, my attending was scheduled to give a talk on cardiomyopathy to the afternoon shift nurses over lunch. He couldn’t make it last minute, and he asked me to go on his behalf. I thought I would be speaking to a handful of nurses. But when I walked in, there must have been at least seventy-five of them.”

Aunty grinned.

“I didn’t have notes because I just thought it would be conversational. More like a discussion, you know? But with a group that size, there was no way that was going to work. In those days, I was still pretty self-conscious about my accent. All I could think about was whether this throng of people, all young women, by the way, would be able to understand me.”

“You don’t have an accent, Mamoo,” Asma said defensively.

“Darling, he does, and it was much heavier back then.” Aunty was unsparing.

“They were clearly expecting a lecture while they ate their lunch, and I’d managed to forget everything I’d ever known about the subject. I felt like I was going to pass out. And then, out of nowhere, this woman walked towards me, slowly, almost floating.”

Aunty rolled her eyes. “I put a glass of ice water in his hand and told him to take a drink because—and this is not just me saying this to make the story better—he was swaying like a cartoon character.”

“I’ve since learned that it’s best to look around the room while giving a talk, looking at a point just above people’s heads, without meeting their eyes.” Mamoo demonstrated by looking at the top of each of their heads. “But that day, I looked only at your Aunty in the front row. I really have no idea what I said. But she found me after the lecture and said, ‘Thank you. That was great.’”

It was clear that this wasn’t the first time they’d shared this memory. It was their origin tale, passed back and forth and burnished like a talisman that still carried some remnant magic.

Aunty looked up at the ceiling, like she was trying to remember something, and grinned slyly. “He said, ‘Thank you for making me feel good.’”

“I’m lucky that I didn’t blurt out, ‘I love you,’” Mamoo said sheepishly.

Asma was dreamy. She could feel the slow, languid movement of the porch swing and the shared heat of their body under the quilt. How would Ruby and she think back on that night?