Chapter 7: Salma (2007) - The Daughters of Rosebud

I cause quite a stir. When I come to, Sophie’s mom is hovering over me, my left wrist in her hand. A circle of gravely serious faces peers down at me.

Sophie’s mom looks me intently in the eyes and says something I can’t quite understand. I am mortified and scramble to sit up. If I could just stand, I could finish whatever it was that I was doing. I hear a familiar voice speaking far away. I think I will cancel dinner with Emil. He’ll understand.

Sophie’s mom touches my shoulder and says, “Let’s hold off for a minute.”

“I’m fine.” My mouth feels like I have rocks in it. I recall the last image I saw and just want a little space, a moment of quiet, in which to reexamine the memory. But there are all these people crowding me.

Another mother comes over with what looks like a spitwad. She carefully opens the sodden brown paper towel—the kind in the bathroom and above the sink in my room—so as not to tear it and approaches me to, what? Wipe my forehead? Oh God. Make this stop. I push her hands away. This is my classroom, and I must reassert control.

I sit up in the middle of this circle of near strangers and feel like a spectacle. My knee-length skirt is bunched up, and I am horrified at the thought of what I may have revealed. People are speaking loudly about me as though I’m not here. Perhaps this is how kids experience the world. Words are coming back. The familiar voice is now loud and in the hallway.

The principal, Betsy Scott, who annoys the daylights out of me and every other staff member in the building, rushes in like she’s going to take charge. “Not her! Not that one!” Wait. That’s my voice. I clasp my hands over my mouth and close my eyes. As if wires are being reconnected, my head informs me that I am in great pain.

“You hit your head pretty hard, Miss Chaudhry. Go slow.” Dr. Greta, Sophie’s mom, says.

She asks the parents to please give me space, and the classroom slowly empties out.

“My knees were locked,” I lie. I touch the back of my head and feel a bump the size of a golf ball. When I look at my fingers, they are covered in blood. I’m afraid I might fall back again. I have always hated the sight of blood.

The raised voices are angry and then, suddenly, stop. Paramedics come in. Betsy announces over the PA system that curriculum night is ending early. I may not be taking in everything that is being said, but I am taking in enough to know that forever after, this will be the year that curriculum night ended early. Because of me.

The building quiets while all the people that give it life empty out. The paramedics take my vitals and clean my head. They tell me I’ll have a nasty headache. I don’t need to go to the hospital, but I should make sure to go see a doctor. They look at Sophie’s mom, embarrassed, and she holds her hands up in mock surrender.

Sophie’s parents help me stand, and I see that Emil is sitting on a child’s chair, the face of a character drawn to look worried. “I’m going to drive you home.”

I start to say that I’m fine to drive, but Sophie’s mom, so benign and gentle to this point, takes an authoritarian tone. “You may not drive, Miss Chaudhry. I’m quite certain that you are concussed. Stay away from computer and TV screens for a few days.”

“My kids . . .”

“Will be fine. You will not be unless you take a few days and rest.”

I scan the room to see my ghost, but there is no one there. I am wildly dizzy.

Emil puts his arm around me, and we walk slowly down the main artery of the school. He whispers in my ear, “You’ll do anything to get out of curriculum night.” I giggle and stop immediately as my head explodes in pain.

Betsy Scott follows ten feet behind us like a worried and well-meaning wraith.

“Whatever you do, Salma, do not look back. Do not meet her eyes.” Emil is on a roll.

“Stop. It hurts to laugh.”

He sits me on the bench at the front door while he goes to get his car. I try and make sense of what the last thirty minutes have brought at the same time as trying to work out how I’m going to get to school in the morning if my car remains here. Seemingly out of thin air, Marlene appears next to me. Her face is red and mottled, mascara streaks down her face. She wrings her hands overwrought. Everyone is an overdrawn character tonight.

“I’m so sorry, MissCh . . . Salma. I am just so sorry.”

My hand grips the top of my head. “Marlene. Please.” I want to tell her to be quiet. I want to tell her that I don’t have it in me to reassure her right now.

But she is not listening, just crying and holding my free hand in both of hers, kneading it like a cat palpates a cushion. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“Why are you sorry?” I groan.

“That she was coming or that’s how she’d show up . . . how am I ever going to be able to show my face again?”

“Marlene. What are you saying?”

She looks at me like I’m thick. “That was Roberta.”

And then finally, finally, I understand. Roberta is Ruby.

I remember Ruby. I met her once at a cast party. Twice, if I count the time I saw her the night of Asma’s rehearsal. She stood on stage, hand over her eyes as though watching for something coming over the horizon. Even from half an auditorium away, her presence was palpable. I had accompanied Asma to rehearsal to watch the cast run lines in the musty auditorium. At first, I thought Ruby was a man, hair shorn close. Asma had approached her shyly. They spoke, and when Ruby turned, the stage lights caught her at such an angle that her cheekbones, high and sharp, seemed cut from marble and her hoop earrings twinkled. All these years later, I can still see her standing on stage, legs placed wide, the settler of my sister’s heart.

That woman who was so sophisticated and feminine, who so clearly stood in her own power, was nothing like the flailing-crab person on my desk, pushing papers and books onto the floor while trying to right herself. When she had looked up at me, her color was all wrong, as though she was sick, her hair nappy and uneven. But it was her round eyes, so sad and dead-looking, that told me who she was.

I can still see Asma’s expression when she returned to the party trailing Ruby, her face glazed like she’d seen God.

I have a concussion and am home for at least one week. There will be no more headstands for a while. I used to think I had a high tolerance for pain given how I lived, with the shut-in, dark suffering that is my constant companion. But I was wrong. This headache is nothing like I have felt before. It is physical and concrete and unavoidable. I remember my mother’s long days closed in her bedroom with the blinds drawn tight against her migraines and experience an unwelcome pang of empathy. I make myself stay in the living room and common areas of the house until it is time for bed at night. I am nothing like her.

Mamoo is staying at my house, even though I don’t think it’s necessary. He pampers me with peppermint tea and salt-and-vinegar potato chips. It is all I’m able to manage through the nausea. He reads to me. We tell stories about my kids, past and present. We nod off for minutes and hours, he in the recliner and I on the sectional sofa.

I try to think about Marlene and Poppy and their connection to Ruby, but it is smoke, incapable of being isolated and examined. There is something niggling me, a crucial understanding just out of my mental reach, but I can’t seem to grasp it. When I try to figure out exactly what it is that I know and what I still need to learn, the details elude me, and I float away into sleep.

Emil comes over after school and, with great flair, cooks elaborate meals, which turn my stomach. He and Mamoo giggle like two second-grade girls. For a little while, it feels like I have my old Mamoo back. Emil tells Mamoo that he is hurt that Mamoo volunteers throughout school, but not in PE. Mamoo says, “What kind of a role model is a chubby man who can’t touch his toes?” It breaks my heart that they are both starved for home, a place where someone is always waiting for you.

Emil brings me cards from my kids. He knows that I am worried about their progress. Everything I teach is in preparation for the next piece of learning. I want to write emails to the substitute teacher about what needs to be accomplished in class, but Emil tells me that Mrs. Morris and Ms. Rhodes have split my class into two and have absorbed them into each of their own classes. They have retained a substitute class intern, Ginger, so each class has two adults. I am assuaged.

We are scheduled to visit the Amazon rainforest in just a few weeks, and there is much to do to prepare in advance. It is a monumental task, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it this year. I try and develop a plan for pushing it by one week, but I find it hard to concentrate.

Emil says that Marlene wants to call on me. My phone number is unlisted, and unlike many, I do not have a mobile phone. I pretend like I don’t hear him. I do not want to be found. I have not told Mamoo about why I fainted. So far, only Marlene and I know. And Ruby. My secrets pile up.

My dreams are nesting dolls. Dreams within dreams. Intense and discomfiting, burrowing into the oldest of places. One dream is not enough to transcend; my consciousness peels away layers trying to find the heart of the thing.

There it is thick with the scent of home, as familiar as cousins. There the cumin is sizzling and releasing its salty, sharp odor. There is cardamom blossoming in the air, promising a treat. The day is bright and sunny. I am welcomed to a new day of childhood where my only responsibilities are to find pleasure. Asma and I ride bikes downhill. She is close enough to touch. Even in my dream, I am conscious of the fact that I don’t want to be left behind. My jaw grinds tight with fear of the steep hill. I must keep up. Asma turns to me and asks me what I’m saying, and only then do I realize that I am talking. Saying the same thing over and over. I jar myself awake, but I am still there. I feel summer. Humidity on my skin, the smell of green in my nose, and the respite of shade.

I do not want to wake up. I do not want to confront what is waiting for me. To realize, yet again, that I am in the after part of my life. To face my role in all that happened. To make the decision on whether I should meet my father or not. To tell Mamoo that he has called. To find out what happened to my mother. To see Marlene and Poppy again. To tell Mamoo that I have seen Ruby.

* * *

I was worried about Asma and wanted desperately to check on her, to tell her about our parents’ return, but she didn’t respond to my nightly callback attempts. I hated that Abu had started invoking me as the model child or the one whose innocence needed to be protected. I did not want to be the person against whom he set an example. At the same time, I was growing resentful of how her actions somehow resulted in me being punished. Did she hold me responsible for what happened? Had she lumped me in with Ami and Abu, leaving me stranded on the them side of the invisible line? Did she think I should have stopped Abu? Could I have?

Until that point, we had experienced almost every milestone at the same time. We were only allowed to do the same extracurricular activities, which met at the same time, such as Brownies and math club. We even started our periods on the same day. The day before it had happened, Ami had whispered, “You might be a woman soon” with a panicked expression. We were used to her saying things that made no sense. The next day at recess, I went to the nurse’s office because I found blood in my underwear and discovered Asma there for the same reason. We came home early from school and suffered through Ami’s halting explanation of where the maxi pads were kept, how we were to throw away used pads wrapped in pieces of newspaper, and that we should never, ever, discuss this subject around Abu because men didn’t know about periods. The whole time she spoke, she looked at the wall behind our head, like we weren’t there. She never explained how to use a pad, what cramps were, that we may need deodorant, or anything else about growing up. Everything we learned came from that pamphlet the school nurse gave us and each other.

Mamoo booked a flight for my parents midweek. I think they had always believed they would return to Pakistan, if only for a visit.

For a long time, when I was little, I thought we lived in America for just right now and was surprised to hear my mother tell a teacher at my fifth-grade parent-teacher conference that we had immigrated to the US. It was the first time I’d heard that word to describe us. I thought immigrants were people who had come to Ellis Island. Immigration is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event, an extraordinary extraction requiring as much energy as escaping the gravitational pull of earth. Leaving everything you know behind in the blind and foolish hope of a better life in a place unseen is difficult enough the first time and virtually impossible to repeat. “When we go home” was said with the same reverence as some people said, “When our ship comes in,” more of an incantation of hope than an actual belief.

I stopped trying to call Asma. She deserved to know that they were playing chess with her life, but I couldn’t tell her if she refused to talk. Even though it had been less than a week since the play, the list of things I needed to tell her about was growing quickly. The more time that passed, the more ground there was to cover and, increasingly, the more daunting that conversation felt.

One day I returned from school to competing, cloying smells. Ami stood at the dining room table lost in thought, making little noises under her breath. The table was covered with a random assortment of cheap goods and freebie items Ami normally stored in the closet under the stairs: a cloth shopping bag, a boxy baseball hat, gaudy notebooks and small notepads, and the culprits responsible for the olfactory assault—small bottles of cheap cologne and perfume, their fragrances swirling together.

She didn’t hear me, and so I cleared my throat as a warning. She didn’t turn and kept making small little sounds, not quite rising to the level of muttering.

I walked into her field of vision and lightly touched a folded T-shirt with a logo for our local baseball team emblazoned on the front. “What is all this crap?”

She startled and immediately stopped her sounds. “Just presents, for people at home,” she said distractedly, picking at her hairline. Over the course of the prior few days, she had managed to lose one eyebrow, and her fingers were now looking for the next front line. She picked up a snow globe with a dolphin improbably swimming inside, walked around the table, and put it down on the other end. “I’m so glad I’ve been setting things aside for this day.”

I tore my eyes away from the iridescent snow, hypnotically fluttering and descending slowly down to the water. “These are gifts?” I lifted a notepad with a slightly puffy rose decorating the plastic cover. I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.

She muttered, like she was conferring with herself. Then she said, “Oh, that’s one of those sniff things you and Asma love. But don’t itch it. I want it to be new for your cousins.”

Usually, I would have felt that unique combination of pity, guilt, responsibility, and sadness that I associated with my parents, wanting to save them. I understood how much hope and expectation they had built up over the years around a homecoming. They wanted to return home as a success story, the mythical émigré made good. The reality was that they couldn’t afford to go out and buy new gifts, and these knickknacks, long hoped for and acquired over many years from sales bins at the dollar store or regifted items, were a way of taking gifts for everyone, no matter how distant a relative, and thereby promoting the idea of largesse and having made it.

“It’s called ‘scratch and sniff,’ not ‘itch and sniff,’ and we loved it when we were nine years old. This is all junk.”

“Oh no! They think Khala Mamouda will love it. Don’t you think? Or maybe Rabia?” She pulled the notebook away from me and rubbed its cover with her hand.

I attributed her weird pronoun usage to tiredness and feeling overwhelmed.

“I have no idea who these people are. And besides, you’re going back for a death, Ami. Not a party.”

There are norms I equate with my culture: the avoidance of conversations around emotions and the acceptability of artifice and pretense in the service of making yourself or your family look better, richer, or more devout. That day, I wasn’t willing to engage in things like expressing grief for a dying grandfather I had no memory of and never heard stories of or pretending that I knew the preferences of an aunt or cousin I had never known. Callous impatience was a small rebellion, but the only type I was capable of.

The sense of shell shock that had hung over us in the car after Pippin had vanished as fervent preparations for the return to Pakistan got underway. The speed with which my parents moved on from the events of that night sickened me. Yes, there were a ton of details to work through before leaving for two and a half weeks. But how could they just move on so quickly? It felt like an added betrayal on an already long list of them. I was angry at Abu for crossing a line that should never have been crossed. I was angry at Ami for her passivity. And I was angry that, once again, I was left to pick up the pieces.

This is all true. But it is also true that something was affecting Ami profoundly. I have visited and revisited this time period in my mind, and I have no words for it other than she was unsettled, swinging maniacally.

Mamoo and I took Ami and Abu to the airport in the middle of that week. I watched Mamoo closely for signs that he might know how the night had unfolded, but there were none. If anything, he was even more upbeat and cheerful than his usual self.

At the drop-off curb, Abu patted me on the shoulder. He met my eyes fleetingly and pressed some money into my hand. “Be good. I know you won’t give them any trouble.” And then, so softly I thought I might have missed it, “Keep an eye on your sister.”

A family in the adjacent parking space was saying a tearful goodbye. A grandmother held two young children to her while her adult daughter freely wept. The sound of jet engines taking off whooshed overhead. Cars jostled for a spot in the drop-off lane. Whistles punctured the air with yells of “Keep moving.”

My nose started to sting, and I felt the advent of tears. I don’t know if it was because of the tumult of the week, my father’s assumption that I was his stand-in, or because I wished I had a grandmother who doted on me, someone who was always in my corner and believed I could do no wrong. Or maybe it was because I am the kind of person that observes people and measures the shortcomings of my own against the perception of theirs. I stood there with tears running down my face, embarrassed for Abu and myself, and mumbled a thanks. We weren’t used to goodbyes.

Mamoo lifted the suitcases out of the back of his SUV and gave rapid-fire instructions in Urdu to Ami, who didn’t take her eyes off him. “Visit Cathedral. Go to our old house and see if anyone’s living there. Take pictures. Check to see if Chachi and Chacaji are still alive. Give my salaam. Visit Ami’s and Abu’s grave site. If there’s still no gravestone, get one. I’ll pay for it.”

Hearing Mamoo speak Urdu was jarring. I had never really thought about the fact that it was also his native language. His Urdu, so natural and so awkward at the same time, was brusque and quick with no hesitations or pauses signaling a search for phrase or expression. He used the informal tense but spoke in a formal tone. I thought about all the times growing up when Ami said something to Mamoo in Urdu and he responded in English. He did that to not exclude Aunty. The failure to speak his first language must have cost him something. And at the same time, on some level of my brain, I could tell that there was a complete story behind every one of Mamoo’s directives. I wanted to drill into each and figure out what he meant. I needed to understand our family history. What was in Pakistan, and how did it relate to what we were living in America?

An airport traffic guard blew his whistle at the car next to us, waving his arm. The car behind Mamoo’s pressed closer and closer, waiting for our parking spot.

I opened my palm and found a wad of one-dollar bills and a single twenty-dollar bill. Even now, when I pay someone in cash, I feel slightly embarrassed. I can still feel the crumpled bills, warm and slightly damp from Abu’s hand.

I must approach certain memories from the side. Just in case. After everything, I still have unguarded moments of empathy and appreciation. Even tenderness.

Abu called, “Sadia, challo!”

Ami gave me an awkward side hug. She had drawn in her right eyebrow with pencil that was now smudged. It had been a stressful week for everyone.

Eyes wide, she nodded her head at Mamoo’s quickening instructions. “Don’t offer your in-laws help with money or immigration. We don’t need to be dealing with constant requests.”

Mamoo held Ami’s arm in one hand and pulled her along. He carried her suitcase across the walkway to Abu and continued whispering intensely in her ear. I wonder what he was saying to her. If I were to ask him now, would he remember that drop-off the same way I do? Would he remember what he was saying to her?

Then they were off, walking through the sliding-glass doors into the brightly lit interior, their figures receding into silhouettes. Ami looked over her shoulder at us and gave a small wave. When I think of my mother, that is one of the images that comes to mind. A small woman in a big building unsure of who she is or where she’s going.