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The concrete steps have been beaten bad, like Baba whipped them the old fashioned way, with his big leather house sandals. I can kick the chunks and chips out easily, and the steps of our front door are pock marked where I’ve done so after school waiting for Mama. When Mama accuses me for ruining her house, I blame it on the snow, there’s some truth to that.
Teta is eighty-two. I don’t know her much. When I was something like four or five I sat in her lap and wriggled until she gave me something sweet to keep me still enough to snap color memories so I would know her one day. I don’t really remember it, but we have frames in our house that tell me the stories I was too young to remember now. As soon as I could make memories, Teta had a stroke and became a void, there are no sounds from her but knawing gums and strange raspy moans
that I think are meant to be words. We call her Teta, but I don’t know her real name. Mama makes my brother and I go over there after school to sit at her bedside for an hour or so. I wait here because I don’t know how I feel about going alone, and plus I need Mama to say “Teta, look who’s come to see you,” so I don’t have to say anything.
She lives across the street from us, my Teta. I can see the red glow of her table lamp through the open front door. I sit in line with the reddish air stain through Teta’s door screen that looks like bloody water, my white sneakers kicked out in front of me. It’s deep red in this winter cold, an aura that leaks out onto the grey cement steps. The neighbors mistake it for festive, but really Mama walks over there in the mornings and airs the place out. I wonder if Teta feels the cold?The musty smell doesn’t escape and the red crawls further beyond the house with each turn of day.
Turn, turn, turn. I’m spinning myself into a whirlwind, a gigantic black hole that’ll suck in my house, Teta’s house, the neighborhood, the world. It’ll glow red like Teta’s red, the way my cheeks glow red in the snowy air. It smells like snow and the clouds are a constipated grey. All I can see is a blur of red and grey and grey and grey. I wonder what it would be like to be a
tornado. I’d spin and suck and spin a disaster. Mama would scold me shaking her plump pointer finger at me, “NADIA!” I imagine it and crash to the Earth in a dizzy nausea, my hands on my belly button, the tornado still lives in my tummy. I am a fallen hawk.
I tug on my hair some and wait for Mama. My knees knock while I rub them together trying to touch the red accross the street with my white soles. The dark thin hairs are itchy where I can see them on my knee caps. Baba is hairy and so am I. I wasn’t always I don’t think, just one day I up and became a wolf. If I were a real wolf I’d eat red meat like one and howl and itch my flees. I’d stand high on a foresty cliff with pine trees and snow all around with smokey mist coming out of my warm nostrils and I’d howl a proud song. Wolves look like they are proud like that. Proud to be hairy wolves.
Baba is snipping the dead ends of the Dalia plants so they’ll come again next fall. The winter is coming early but the healthy buds are in bloom nevertheless. I love the Dalia. Baba says it reminds him of Teta a long time ago. He says they come from a village they call Nablus, North of Jerusalem, but when he talks about those days I see a distance in his eyes and it all seems too far away for me to understand. The blooms look wild this year, striated an orange and red to match the season like lustful stars of color against a grey washed Earth. There is a poem he read to me that went like that before, by a man who’s name I forgot. What a pretty flower.
Baba doesn’t see my chicken legs sprawled out over the steps, my woven ballet skirt flushed over my cold olive legs and knee high socks, but Mama, pulling into the driveway, does. I think it’s been a million times that she told me not to sit that way, and by the look on her face through the windshield it’s about to be a million and one. “3aib” She says, “3aib! 3aib!” 3aib means
nothing particular from what I gathered up. It’s like rude, undignified, shameful, sinful. It’s like saying, Shame! Shame! Shame! about 100 times. Everything is 3aib. Everything I do, is 3aib. Twisting a strand of hair behind my back I rehearse my lines for the boxing match I’m about to have with Mama over my own body, and I knock my knees together but like falling out
of love they kindof fall apart again. “3aib Nadia! 3aib! 3aib!”
Mostly no one notices the hair on my legs the way I do. Mama says I’ve always had the same amount, but I know it’s grown because it’s dark black and so long I think that I could probably donate it to charity to make long black flowing wigs. Mama uneasily draws her motherly hips from the driver’s seat with discomfort written on her face. The door is slammed shut and she
squints in my direction. It is monday.
“Hey Mama.”
“Sekree ijraykee right now Nadia, right now, close your legs please and sit like a lady.” I knock my knees again and press out my skirt with my iron hot hands.
“Mama at school today we had P.E. class again.” She proceeds to the trunk to get Teta’s groceries and her own in silence. I pretend like she’s listening and keep going. “ So someone said something again about me...” I rub my knee caps, it must be something like 40 degrees outside and it smells like snow. I’m surprised she doesn’t yell at me for not wearing stockings in the first place. “Reem does it, and she said she started when she was 13, and I’ll be thirteen in like a month you know.” I know I’m messing up but it’s too late to stop now. “I don’t really know what’s the big deal anyway. It’s my body.” I struck a nerve so hard that Mama jerked her neck a bit to the left like an itch she couldn’t reach with all the groceries in her arms. Walking right at me with furious eyes I had to squint, anticipating a slap of sorts.
“In the house, now, imshee, go, I do not want to discuss this with you again.”
“But why, you won’t even give me a good reason, what’s a good reason?!”
“I’m your mother and I said you’re too young. We don’t do these things Nadia, khalas enough, I said no.”
“Whatever, you do it.”
“Go get dressed for Teta’s, now Nadia. Now.”
I stomp into the house in big elephant stomps. She can carry her own groceries since I’m such a kid to her. I hear Mama cursing something awful behind me against the wind as the screen door clashes on its hinges. I have to put on Teta’s sweater to
go to Teta’s house. This day, It is a regular thing.
***
My eyes are a blood shot red to match my long sleeved christmas red turtleneck with a little snowman and real buttons down the middle, I call it Teta’s sweater cause I wouldn’t wear it in hell if it weren’t for Teta. My jacket sleeves are crossed as I tuck my hands into my armpits to keep them warm. Mama is calling my brother to hurry up and I take my own steps solo towards Teta’s red door. The wind whips my big chocolate hair forward, slapping the back of my neck and I let it engulf my face against the cold. I thought I’d suddenly lose my step and fall down a rabbit hole far away from this place. I’d fight kung-fu and be a wolf-child and rule the underground, like a dreamy carnival with my favorite cakes. I’d never grow small. I stop at the concrete steps of Teta’s door. There aren’t any chips missing, just tiny cracks and the rail along the sides are a little rusted at the bottoms. A spider web is knit in between the middle bars of the railing and it looks like an old one,
but I don’t grab the rail just in case, in case it would tell a lie for me someday. Spiders are peculiar. They never die. If you wreck a web it comes back in a day’s time, I’ve seen it myself. They might be magic, only once in a while you actually find the spider in the middle of its web. In Teta’s web, this web, I’ve never actually seen a spider, but the web always comes back. It must be magic.
Samy is running across the lawn, his chubby cheeks bouncing with every step. I love those cheeks cause they’re bitable and rosy like he stuffed five jumbo marshmallows in them and never swallowed.
“Wait Nadia! Wait! Wait for me!” I turn back around to the door to see if the red glow eats me in front of him like a horror story. He’d have nightmares for months I bet. He grabs my hand as Mama shoos us in. Teta’s house smells like paprika and cabbage.
“Teta look who’s come to see you. Remember them? You know them.” Mama’s busy about what looks like a hospital bed out of context with machines and pumps and tubes all leading to Teta. Her lips are shriveled and dry with food mush dried up at the corners and her cheekbones are high and her cheeks are hollow like a grey skeletonface. Samy sucks in his cheeks and bites the
insides to hold them there like he’s thinking hard about the creature in front of him.
“Nadia salmee. Go say hi to your Teta.” I slide my shoes across the carpet closer to this figure before me, a tiny frail head and arms above a sea of white blankets and dark blue sheets. I open my mouth to say hi Teta, but my tongue feels too big and I knaw on it in a mumbling sound of something similar. Teta knaws her gums and moans in a strange language. The red lamp
gives everything a red wash over the greyness like an illusion of color.
***
We make it home, thank God. Feeling like I just escaped an alien encounter my heels fly upstairs for a shower.
“Nadia! Go take a shower, right now!” Right now, right now, why is everything right now?! The bathroom is a warm gold and I turn the silver handle to start the steam. I can sit at the edge of the tub and look into the mirror while I undress. The turtleneck gets stuck while I’m pulling it off over my head like a clogged pipe but it gives finally as the clotting long waves fall over my bare shoulders, thick and dark. I prop my legs up against the sink and examine myself. There are about a million black hairs slowly calming themselves from standing up on end. I run my hand down to smooth them out but they turn every which way scattered over my olive skin. I pull the razor I stole from Mama’s bathroom last week from the back pocket of my jeans off the tile floor next to my pink toes. It’s a green one with a thin blue handle and Gillette engraved into the top. I touch the tiny silver blades to the tip of my finger and flinch faster than expected. It’s sharp and a little red bloo
d trickles down quicker than I can catch it in my mouth. Dipping my legs into the plugged tub of warm water that wavers halfway up my calves I dip the razor blade like I’d seen my cousin Reem do last week. She was in the bathroom when she told me to come in. I sat on the the toilet cover while I watched her, shaving creme slathered all over her calves, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, pulling off the hairs in slow straight motions of her hand while she talked off about a million things high school. I hadn’t heard a thing she’d said, taking mental notes of how to go about this thing. I took the blade to my ankle and proceeded until it was done. I did not stop once. The water looked dark washing my hairs down the drain.
I finished to find my legs smooth. Running my hands against my chicken calves I did not recognize them. Something rushed up and bit my insides all at once clinging somewhere that I thought might be my heart. I was going to have a heart attack and spend the rest of my life knawing my gums like Teta. Oh God Oh God. The water splashed all over the tile as I grabbed my white towel and wrapped it twice about my tiny body. Oh God. The door flings back to release steam amongst other things and I find myself standing dripping at the top of the staircase, the carpet puddled and imprinted at my feet and my hair flat and dreaded wet, stuck against my glistening face and shoulders. My mouth gapes open and only a single word escapes like a yell, like a strained screech, like a crow, at the tippy top of my swollen lungs,
“MAMA!”
I must have made her think someone died because she stampeded from the kitchen to see what was wrong and she never rushed so fast to meet my words. A cartoon expression on her face, she looked more like a heart attack victim than me.
“What?! What happened?” She waited for me. I was knawing me gums.
“What is it?!”
I looked down at my legs, moving for the first time from my statue stance at the top of the stairs, and then looked at Mama, who’s eyes had already gone where mine had been just a second before. She bit her lip, not angry, not swearing, not anything, just faceless and plain and biting her lip. Her hands were on her hips.
“Well, now you always have to do it.” And like that she turned from me and back to the kitchen like nothing happened just then and like I wasn’t standing with bare wet legs, hairless. I stood there for about ten seconds more, shivering and dripping.
***
It is Wednesday and time to visit Teta again. I’m sitting at the edge of the bottom concrete step waiting for Mama. Today is colder than the last two and there are reports of snow. I had worn my Pajama’s inside out last night so the miracle blizzard would cancel school and P.E. class, but it had only snowed enough to put a sugary powder over car windows and trees tops and some of the rounder bushes. Note to self: wear socks inside out next time too.
Mama was a little late today, and Teta’s door was closed. I could still see the red from the front window faintly. Baba hadn’t come home from work yet, and so it was just Samy, the nanny and I. I crossed my legs about my ankles and leaned over my knees, tugging on my head hair, the waves smelling like popcorn and a little shiny from P.E. sweat as I twisted a gigantic lock on my pointer finger. Where is she? Nana Sara opened our screen and motioned for me to come inside. Teta was sick and wasn’t going to see anyone today, even though I know Teta’s always been sick. I sat at the couch peering through our window like a cat, my cats eyes almond shaped and watching Teta’s for the red light to change.
My legs were still clean but running my hand up the sides it felt strangely like rubbing your hands against an office carpet. At school no one even noticed.
***
The funeral came on a Friday, the day of prayer, and right away after Teta passed. I hadn’t seen Baba since the beginning of the week and Mama seemed to be indifferently cleaning up the house, preparing for any guests, since my Baba was Teta’s eldest son. I fuzzily remember the way of things because of the proceedings of a funeral for a distant aunt sometime last year.
“We will see him at the cemetery” Mama said of Baba.
I wore a long black skirt and a black button down shirt with black socks and black maryjanes. My hair was down and curled against my face and with my dark eyes I naturally looked goth and somehow older than thirteen.
The drive to the cemetery was long and winding. It was snowing lightly and the wind blew the flakes every way, so that they all looked like a sea of lost white stars floating about in mid air. We arrived to a large yellowish green field, speckled with foliage under a bare tree with the black glistening coffin, a hole in the ground, and about 50 dark figures standing erect. Gently shutting the car door I straighten out my skirt that awkwardly sticks to my legs without taking my eyes off of the procession. A line of those dark figures I make out to be my uncles as I near my place by the oak tree. They all have solemn strong faces. Each have their hands crossed mafia style in front of them just at their stomachs in prayer for their Mother. Still and straight, none of them cry, not a single tear, I can’t make any out against their scruffed skin despite looking for just one harder than ever. My aunts are wailing sobs to the side of it all and my own Mama soon joins them with hug
s and tears. This militant row of men deep in thought, statuesque, is ended by my father. He is the eldest and final brother, standing there his face disturbingly calm in a mediterranean hue. The sheikh recites Qur'an for some time before the casket is lowered into the Earth slowly pulling it beyond me, further and further, until Teta is part of my past. The first brother recites a verse and shovels a single scoop of dirt and turns back to his place in line, followed by the next and the next. They are quick and solid, emotionless and respectful. I see the faces of the audience admiring of them, my uncles. Finally, my father grasps the shovel. His face twitches before leaving his place in line and immediately there is a silent stir on the wind. It carries passed him and he shovels his single scoop of dirt over his Mother. We wait at his pause, because he seems to squeeze tighter the shovel handle instead of lowering it solemnly. He breaks another piece of Earth, tossing it ag
ain over Teta. Again, and again, and again. There is a silence, the Aunts’ sobs cease to exist, and all that can be heard is Baba’s grunts over his Mother’s grave and the sound of dirt shoveling, and the hard thump sound of it all hitting the coffin below. The brothers grab him and there is a short battle to pull him away from the dirt mound and Teta. The shovel hits the ground in a banging-metal, shattering, ring that cracks the air and the gasps rise above the procession enveloping Baba who’s face shown that he knew what he had done. I feel a cold tear against my cheek for Baba and the stabbing prickles on my legs stand on end.
The ride home was quiet and still, each of us too far gone to say anything meaningful. I ran so fast from the car to the house turning once to see Teta’s red light was gone from her window, her door closed. I burst through the door without anyone attempting to stop me except for a faint and spoken call from Mama behind me, “Nadia,” but all I heard wwas “3aib!” flying up to the bathroom my heels clicking, with such a deep well inside I imagine I could’ve showered in my tears. I sat at the edge of the tub and undressed with watery eyes holding back and breathing deep. Air was never this soothing. I turned the silver handle and dipped my legs into the warm water, slightly too hot. Grabbing the razor blade I ran my forearm against my legs. The prickles were hard to see but they stabbed into my arm like tiny needles. I couldn’t smooth them down to a soft messy matte, they felt bristled no matter how I rubbed them. I took the green razor with the blue handle and dragged it slowly,
knicking myself only once. It bled a lot and ran down the drain mixed with hair in a dark red glow, unforgivingly.
~Nada Shawish is a pre-medical/creative writing major at The George Washington University. She is deeply inspired by her family, and thanks her mother and father for their quirks. She is a first generation Arab American.
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