The ambivalence that leads to the break up of a decade-long marriage must first face a mother’s wrathful disappointment.
Huda Hamed
Translated from Arabic by Zia Ahmed
My mother’s slap left an unmistakable redness on my cheek. It wasn’t a spiteful slap or reprimand, but rather a lifelong reflex that was triggered whenever she was surprised. She simply refused to understand that her daughter was now divorced from the man with whom she’d lived for years. I lifted my face slightly, left cheek numb from the severity of the sting, fighting back tears to affirm what she’d just heard from me.
“Yes, it’s true,” I said.
My mother had always been fond of perfection, so naturally she had to insist that something was wrong in this case. She gathered the papers she’d been grading and left the courtyard. A cold gust hit my face, almost blowing off my hijab, which I’d forgotten as usual to fasten with pins. I held on to it with one hand, while clutching with the other a small bag in which I’d packed a few clothes.
My mother went into the living room and put down her papers on a side table. I stood behind her, waiting for permission to sit like some stranger. Finally, we sat on the floor, leaning on patterned cushions atop rugs that she’d kept spotlessly clean since my distant childhood. Heavy curtains kept the room dark all day long. My siblings had married and moved away, leaving her alone in the house since my father’s death. She sat up straight, a deep sadness in her eyes.
“Why are you so concerned that I stay with him?” I asked.
Her hand twitched again. I turned my face away, but this time she only slapped her own shoulder. She went off to the kitchen to boil water for tea, leaving behind an uneasy tension. After a while, I heard the kettle whistle. I remained in place, quietly waiting for our conversation to resume. She returned and sat down. I leaned back against the pillows, tucking my folded legs under the striped blue-and-purple throw blanket. She poured the tea in silence, then handed me the cup without raising her eyes. She poured another cup for herself.
“Cold night,” I said, looking at her furtively while shivering a little.
“People used to tell me good things about the two of you all the time,” she said firmly, as if I hadn’t spoken. “The sensible girl and the good boy.”
I put the tea aside, slipping my hands under the blanket to rub my cold legs. “That’s just what people say.”
She held the hot teacup with both hands, drawing its heat without looking at me. “There never seemed to be anything wrong between the two of you. He’s a good man.”
I took a deep breath and hugged my body tighter. “Yes. But I didn’t want to be with him anymore.”
At last, she looked at me, eyes aflame. “My life with your father was also full of both sweet and bitter, but I stayed with him until the end.”
I relaxed a little, gripping the teacup tightly with both hands without taking a sip. “I can’t be you.”
She got up and began to rummage around the room. In the closet, she found a portable electric heater and plugged it in. Slowly, it began to glow red. Her face was now clearer than ever. She calmed down a little, then raised her head to look directly at me in anticipation of my story. I was certain that the story, when told well, would erase all her objections. But I didn’t know where to begin. Anything I could think of saying would seem trivial to her in light of the hardships she’d endured with my father.
She rescued us from an awkward silence, saying: “Your father and I used to make people envious. Do you know anything about envy? I mean the good kind, that feeling of utter happiness in another person’s good fortune. We would push people to see the possibility of a couple living together for their entire lives without fighting. Everyone was joyfully envious of the tenderness between us, hoping for a life like ours. We would turn to each other on noisy evenings, laughing to signal our understanding of the merest gesture. A nod would be enough for one to sense the other’s meaning. One of us would leave food in the fridge because the other wasn’t home by lunchtime. One would wait anxiously by the front door waiting for the other to come home. Do you know how much longing our relationship would provoke in others?”
The room began to warm up, so I put aside the blanket and took off my socks. I pushed my hijab down over my shoulders, then pulled my hair up, twisting it neatly and fastening it with a hairpin. Just as I was beginning to relax, my mother’s voice rose. “How will we tell people, especially your brothers?”
I’d opened the door to new problems without a good story to tell, something I’d neglected when ridding myself of a miserable life partner.
She continued: “You’ve been married for more than ten years. Among my children, you’re the only one who never complained about your spouse. You were always the most attached to your husband. I know that your sisters get into endless trouble, but you… never.”
I should have summoned up the courage to say: “Maybe because I saw you as an example. I always wanted to be like you. I used to deal with all my problems by summoning your face, channeling your ability to be a source of joyous envy for others. But this time I’ve failed.”
But I couldn’t say any of this, at least not eloquently. Meanwhile, her voice got louder and her face became harsher.
“What was it that you couldn’t stand? What was so unacceptable for you? Did he cheat on you? Hit you? There must be a reason, however improbable, to reach this ending.”
Until the moment my mother asked why everything was shattered, I’d had no specific reason in mind for leaving my husband, no argument I could make that could convince her, for things had festered slowly in my marriage year after year, with tiny details that couldn’t be put into a simple story. The warmth that filled the living room — in which I’d slept so often in my early childhood, where I’d always been a third party between my mother and father, where I’d seen and heard what shouldn’t be seen and heard — was awakening a forgotten longing within me, inexplicably making me feel safe during my life’s most vulnerable moments. I’d continued to sleep in this room until my brothers came and the house grew larger and its rooms multiplied. Nostalgia seized me, a transparent but expansive barrier that dulled my mother’s angry voice.
“You remember when he and I went to Iran?” I said, feeling less tense than usual. For once I wasn’t choking back tears — those unstoppable tears that inhibited the flow of words. I felt like it was the perfect moment for me to speak openly with her.
“We brought back a Persian rug. I’d chosen it with great care and I loved it very much. It had two woven fish hugging each other, one silver and one golden, on a light beige background. I put it in our bedroom so I could look at it every morning when I woke up. For some reason, those hugging fish evoked a special feeling in me, giving me the patience to figure out life with my husband. He loved it too, one of the few things that we’d bought together without much debate. But he moved it into the hallway for guests to see. He was quite proud of his aesthetic sense. The very next day I moved it back to the bedroom. Two days later I found it in the hallway again. On the fifth day, we argued loudly over breakfast about the best place for the rug. And then, we said to each other things we’d never said in all our years together.”
My mother stretched out her legs. In the cramped, now hot living room, her toes touched mine. It seemed that neither of us wanted to disturb the rare connection with the other. I thought she was about to cry. But when she moved closer to the heater to turn it down, the red glow on her face revealed tears already flowing down her prominent cheeks.
“Then you had no real reason for divorce,” she said, voice cracking. “You don’t even have a good story to tell people.”
A surge of words, much less organized than the thoughts in my head, rushed to my mouth. I said in a tone more casual than what I was feeling: “You and father believed what others imagined about you because you wanted it so badly. You’d been fighting for years to keep people focused on your good reputation. That remarkable level of understanding between you, it wasn’t quite perfect, was it, mother? I am your firstborn, I know very well.”
She shook her head wearily. “Don’t confuse my life with yours. Just don’t. What do you know? Seriously, what do you know? You’re ruining your life and the lives of your brothers for something petty. Yes, completely petty.”
I couldn’t find the right words to say. I couldn’t find a good story for my divorce. But as my toes pressed harder against hers, I remembered the girls who’d pass by when my husband and I were out on our evening walks, sighing softly in a desperate desire for a life like ours. I knew well that naive wish that everyone who’d see us walking together should be drawn to the tenderness of our married life, that young men should stop pedaling their bicycles to let contentment seep into their hearts. Despite the proliferation of children’s plates around us year after year, my husband and I always ate out of the same plate our whole lives together. Neither had a single meal that was exclusive to just one of us. We were doing it to arouse something in others around us, while involuntarily drawing nourishment from their compliments.
I was well aware that a single splash in the stagnant pool of our married life would reveal its inherent and extreme fragility, so both of us did our utmost to prevent even the tiniest pebble from hitting its glassy surface. Mostly, we succeeded, nurturing tranquility and gentleness between us for many years. But then, one of us wilfully let a very small pebble drop in the pool and watched in quiet desperation as the ripples from its splash expanded. The ripples grew into vortexes, but the other person failed to act, or perhaps secretly hoped to put the matter to rest, as if the task of preventing pebbles from infiltrating the heart of our life’s pool was boring and ridiculous. Each watched the other closely, waiting, wondering who was more capable of ignoring the pebble that was tearing apart the illusory tranquility between us.
The pebbles multiplied and collided with each other. And when one vortex grew in the heart of another in the pool of our life, only then did people’s envy for us disappear.
I said nothing to my mother about the thoughts swirling in my head. Darkness thickened around us. The sun must have set, but neither of us moved to turn on the lights. We lay across from each other with our backs against the patterned pillows. We hadn’t come to a satisfactory agreement about what we would say to people, for there wasn’t yet a good story to tell about my divorce. Only our toes continued to press gently together in rare harmony.
