First Comes Marriage Read online

  “Mama!” I said, from where I sat on her bed, with the sharp tone of surprise I believed was expected of a twelve-year-old.

  Mama ignored my theatrics. She'd always considered anything biological—pees and poops (Mama always referred to these in the plural), menstruation and sex—to be healthy topics of conversation. She unscrewed the cap from a tube of mascara and added, “That's how people think here. It's all about ‘my feelings,’ and ‘do I love him?’ But just because you don't love someone when you marry him, it doesn't mean you'll never love him. The important thing is to marry a good person, someone who shares your culture and religion, and then you'll fall in love with him later.”

  “Is that how it was for you with Baba?” I asked. “You didn't love him, but now you do.”

  “Things were different for me,” Mama said, brushing the mascara wand along her top lashes. “I hadn't finished high school, and Jidu had just married Bibi.”

  Jidu and Bibi are the Iraqi words for “grandfather” and “grandmother,” but in this case, Bibi was Mama's stepmother and Jidu's third wife. Jidu's first wife, Mama's mother, had died tragically and suddenly in her twenties. He remarried, only for his new wife to meet the same fate, this time as a result of a cooking fire. When Jidu found himself alone with seven kids between Mama's fifteen years and her youngest brother's eighteen months, his father pressured him to marry a distant cousin—a spinster in her forties, who lived in a palatial home with her brother, servants, and black cat.

  Now Mama tossed the mascara back in her makeup box and continued, “Bibi didn't like having us all around the house, and she thought she was doing Jidu a great favor because she married off his daughters to doctors. So I just said okay because I always did what I was told, and I got lucky. Your father is a kind man, and I now have you beautiful kiddies to be grateful for.”

  Mama affixed her name tag to her collar and kissed me on the cheek on her way out the door. As always, Mama was too busy to waste a moment on regret. She could have easily blamed Bibi for marrying her off to a man who was not just twice her age but also her complete opposite, a sickly, nearly humorless man, far too serious and literal for Mama's mischievous sense of humor, her boundless energy for exercise, dancing, and projects of all kinds. But Mama did not blame Bibi. Rather she moved her and Jidu into our tiny ranch home, putting me and Ibrahim in the same room until she could afford to build a house with a granny unit above the garage. And not only did Mama never dwell on how different she was from my father, but she also told me time and again what a good man he was, how he took in her family, how he encouraged her to go back to school, and how devoted he was to us kids.

  I believed this ability to embrace the relationship you were in was the upside to matchmade marriages. Muslim love was secure and uncomplicated, a decision entirely under a person's control, but American love was almost frighteningly fragile and mysterious. It had to be fallen into after a number of dates, and when couples on television and in movies finally uttered the L-word to each other, it was a grand moment, a surprise even to themselves. Maybe it was a frustrated, “Because I love you, all right,” cried out in the midst of an argument. Or a tearful, “Now that I lost you, I know I love you.” It was something that could befall them even when they were committed to other people. “We didn't mean for it to happen,” the cheater might explain to his former beloved.

  I feared the fickleness of American love—the notion that someone could love you and still fall in love with someone else, or like you but not be in love with you, or love you for a time and then lose that spark—but like all delicate things, there was something special about this kind of love. In a love marriage, you knew the couple at the altar were drawn together by more than their matching culture, religion, or family ties. They shared a connection to each other. The bride was someone wholly unique and irreplaceable, someone who made the groom misty-eyed watching her walk down the aisle, someone he'd describe as his best friend while holding her hand and reciting the vows that he'd written. These couples got married in weddings they planned for a year, and hired photographers to capture every moment, photographers who would later assemble their pictures into thick, bound photo albums and into framed portraits.

  Mama, on the other hand, kept her wedding photographs in a manila envelope stuffed in the back of a half-empty photo album. The pictures weren't even taken at her wedding, but at a stopover in England at the request of my father's sister who lived in Newcastle and missed out on the actual wedding, which Mama had told me was really no more than a dinner with some family members at home and had ended with her washing the dishes. In these photos, Mama was wearing an A-line wedding gown made from white and silver lace thrown over an acetate lining. She wore a rhinestone crown out of which flew yards of tulle that pillowed at her feet. In her hands were a bunch of red carnations, and she looked uncomfortable, as if she was trying to suppress a giggle. Baba wore a navy blue suit, his hair and mustache a slightly darker gray. He looked at Mama with what my siblings and I call “Baba's proud face,” lips forced closed as if to contain the beams of happiness shining inside him. In some of the pictures, Baba's four-year-old niece posed as the flower girl.

  Mama's dress still hung at the back of her closet but without any attempt at preservation. We were welcome to wear it, play in it, or do whatever we wanted with it. Her tiara, minus several rhinestones, was in my bedroom, left over from all the Halloweens that I'd dressed up as a princess. I wanted Mama's wedding things to be too special for me to use, but every time I'd offer to return the tiara to her room, she'd shrug and say there was no need. Sometimes she'd add, “I never really liked the things from my wedding. My uncle bought everything, and they just told me to wear it.”

  Mama's wedding memorabilia told the story of resignation, loss, and acceptance that she didn't tell. Mama could have been the subject of one of those pity documentaries, albeit with an inspirational twist—the Story of How One Woman Overcame Her Heartbreaking Childhood and Arranged Marriage by Taking Pride in Her Children and Getting Lots of Education—but as remarkable as I knew Mama's example was, I didn't want to repeat it.

  I wanted a love story with the Iraqi, Shia man of my dreams. I wanted to be a Wakefield sister who found her Tarek at Sweet Valley High, a Scarlett O'Hara who met her Raheem without the depravation of war, a Juliet who lived into old age with her Rumi. I didn't need a string of boyfriends or affairs—just one grand, sweeping love story so fantastic that it was worth a lifetime of romantic adventures.

  Because, falling in love was a veritable jackpot. There was the bounty of the feelings themselves, the spiritual connection, the physical attraction, the thrill of having a handsome man devoted entirely to me, but it was also redemptive. It was life's way of saying, “Here, little Muslim girl, since you were so good and stayed away from boys before marriage, you will be rewarded with the perfect, Iraqi, Shia husband who is so awesome you don't have to learn to love him.” And the story I had with this Mr. Khair Inshallah, Mr. Good God Willing, would immediately banish all my American friends’ pity and fear that I was getting married for the wrong reasons. “I love him,” I'd say, and it wouldn't matter if I only met the guy once in my living room with my family all around me. Americans forgave everything in the name of love, and so would I.

  Moment 1: Hadi was bouncing my Silly Putty around before it turned a corner and dropped into the hall bathroom's toilet. I was seven, and he was ten. He apologized with a quick, “I'm sorry,” before running off. Four years later, I was sitting on the edge of the bed in Jamila's room. He came in, handed me a paper bag, and said, “Here. I owe you this.” He left before I opened the bag and found a brand-new Silly Putty inside.

  Moment 2: Hadi, Jamila, and Amjad had come to stay with us the summer before I started the eighth grade. They arrived with gifts in hand. We stood around, opening our presents, boys in one corner of the room, girls in another.

  As I pulled back the plastic bag, Jamila said, “I don't know why, but Hadi insisted on paying for this
with his own money.”

  Inside was an EZ Bake Oven, something I'd told Jamila I'd always wanted but never got.

  I looked over at Hadi. Our eyes met, but he quickly looked down.

  Moment 3: We were on a family trip to Disneyland later that same year. Hadi pulled a thick, veined leaf off a tree and said, “Keep this. It's a present for you.”

  With exaggerated drama, I took it in my hands and said, “I'll treasure it always.”

  For the remainder of the day, I kept the leaf in my pocket and then later guarded it in my wallet. If we became a couple, I'd want this leaf as a reminder that we'd been brought together by more than our families. Hadi had liked me all along.

  I treated these memories as if they were in a savings account—there in case I needed them later—but I hoped I wouldn't have to make a withdrawal. As kind as Hadi was, I didn't feel those jumpy feelings that romance novels described when I was around him, no butterflies in my stomach, no inability to eat or sleep. He sported a messy mullet, and while this was a completely fashion-forward move in the 1990s, it did not work for Hadi. Because his hair was curly, the longer hair in the back bunched up into a wild, fuzzy ball reminiscent of an animal tail. He'd gone from chubby to last-notch-on-his-belt skinny, and he dressed like such a schoolboy with his shirt buttoned up all the way to the top and securely tucked into his pants.

  I was only thirteen years old, but I understood that our family friendship afforded Hadi and me opportunities to get to know each other that I would not have with another suitor, someone who'd likely appear with his family as nothing more than an evening dinner guest. On some days, this was reason enough to like Hadi. Other days, I wished there was someone else out there for me, someone from within our small community who my parents approved of, who I didn't have to convince myself to like.

  One evening Mama asked me to follow her into her walk-in closet while she got ready for bed. Right away, I knew she had something she wanted to discuss with me privately. In a hushed voice, she got straight to telling me that Um Sadek, a close family friend of the Ridhas, had asked Mrs. Ridha about me, and Mrs. Ridha had told her, “Don't even think about it. She is ours.”

  I stood there, holding the back of the chair that my mom usually tossed her clothes on, and tried not to show any reaction.

  Mama stepped out of a pair of pants, her voice brimming with pride. “And then Um Sadek told her, ‘Be careful. If you want her, do something about it now. A girl like that won't stay.’”

  I gripped the chair harder.

  “So,” Mama asked and pulled a T-shirt and pair of pajama pants out of her dresser drawer, “do you like Hadi?”

  My cheeks flushed with a mix of girlish flattery and a hot punch of frustration. Mama was asking me if I liked a boy when she'd always said feelings were irrelevant, that sensible girls put compatibility above all else. And I didn't know why she was telling me all this now. Had I just been spoken for as an eighth grader?

  “I don't know,” I said.

  Mama pulled the shirt over her head and added, “Because if you don't like the idea, I should hint it to your Khala,” referring to Mrs. Ridha as my aunt, a title of respect Iraqis applied liberally to any woman who was old enough to be their mother. “She is already worried that we will insist on somebody seyyid, and I told her that the Al-Marashis usually marry within the family and we always take an istikhara for this kind of thing.”

  I nodded at the unpleasant reminder. Even in the impossibly small world of boys I might be allowed to marry, there were obstacles to marrying an Iraqi, Shia like Hadi. My family belonged to a clan that claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, earning us the honorific title of seyyid. A man could marry a non-seyyid woman and still pass the title on to her children, but a woman could not. Since Hadi's family was not seyyid, our future children would lose their right to this distinction. Then, there was the custom of marrying cousins, both first and distant, or, at the very least, taking the permission of an aunt or an uncle before accepting a marriage offer from outside the family. And finally, there was the istikhara, the consultation of the Quran under the guidance of someone trained in the practice of interpreting its verses. According to my mother, no marriage in our family had taken place without one.

  “His mom may say all that to you,” I said, “but he actually has to like me, too.”

  “Hudie, the boy likes you. His eyes go wherever you go. And don't dismiss a mom liking you. A mom is more important than the boy.”

  It meant something to Mama that of all the girls Mrs. Ridha knew, she wanted me for her son. Mrs. Ridha was the closest thing the Southern California Iraqi community had to a matchmaker. She kept track of all the unmarried girls in our community, their ages, and what they were studying so she could make recommendations when asked.

  Mrs. Ridha's approval didn't carry the same weight with me, but at the same time, I didn't want Mama to discourage Mrs. Ridha's interest. Hadi wasn't just another Iraqi Shia; he was someone born in America, someone raised on the same movies and television shows, someone who likely shared the same romantic notions about love.

  “Do you have to tell them anything now?” I asked. “Can't we just wait and see what happens?”

  “That's what I've been doing. I say, ‘They're both young. Let's see how they feel when they get older.’ You never know. The boy could change his mind about you, too.”

  Mama's words tugged at me. As much as I wanted the space to consider other people, I took comfort in the idea that Hadi would be there, liking me. For as long as I could remember, I'd heard stories about our community's risky marriage market where the freshest, sweetest girls never sat on the shelf. Mrs. Ridha always had a cautionary tale about a girl whose shelf life was expiring. “You know, it's nice to want to go to school and study,” she'd say, “but a girl becomes twenty-four, twenty-five, and that's it. The only people who come for her are older, or they have been married before. Like this girl, I don't want to mention her name, but she was so pretty. Everyone asked about her, but she insisted she wanted to be a dentist. In the end, she became a dentist, but she married someone fifteen years older than her who had two kids from his first marriage. See how the qisma is.”

  Almost every marriage story I'd overheard Mrs. Ridha telling Mama ended with qisma, destiny. It never occurred to me to question how the poor girl in the story could be blamed for insisting on school if this relationship had been her fate, or to wonder if the girl might have actually liked the man with the two children. All I heard then was the tone of pity in which her story was retold, and that pity settled into my mind as a series of warnings—don't be too picky; our community is too small for you to hold out for the one; be the best girl so someone picks you first.

  When Mama entered the conversation, it was often to add this much-repeated piece of wisdom: “School will always be there, but the time for marriage won't.”

  Coming from grade-obsessed Mama, a woman who fell asleep surrounded by her textbooks and piles of flash cards, a woman who made everything wait until after finals, this notion that a good suitor was a gift of fate carried the weight of an irrefutable truth.

  “If you are motivated enough, you can do anything,” Mama would say. “I used to bring you to class with me. Sit you down with a little coloring book. It was fun.”

  Mama made it seem like a challenge—if you worked hard enough, there was no reason why you couldn't get married young and have a family and go to school and have a career. “A woman should always have a way to support herself,” she'd tell me. “You never know what can happen.”

  Our community of brain-drain Iraqis was filled with women just like Mama. Women who were doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and engineers: they got married young, had their children, and worked. Even the women who stayed at home with their children still whispered to their daughters, “Study. Study. Become something.” In our Iraqi American community, mothers did not offer their daughters one path over the other—marriage, school, and careers were all tied together in a
tight, little knot of what it meant to be successful. For the most part, this resonated with every definition of American success I'd grown up hearing, except for one important difference—love. In America, you had to fall in love.

  I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, settled in the middle of a neighboring agricultural town. My classmates were farmers’ daughters, workers’ daughters on scholarship, and commuters looking for a better alternative to the local public schools. For school events, the farming families would donate centerpieces made of colorful arrays of broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, and on free-dress days, many girls traded in their uniforms for their finest cowgirl gear—colorful denim pants without back pockets; plaid shirts with metal-tipped, pointy collars; and riding boots.

  When people questioned Mama's decision to send her Muslim children to a parochial school, she'd say, “Some religion is better than no religion.” That there were no boys at this particular school was a bonus. “Less distraction,” she'd add.

  At school, we began every class with a prayer and special intentions. With their hands folded on their desks, my classmates took turns praying for their sick dogs, dead grandmas, and fickle boyfriends. Praying for a boyfriend was something I never learned to accept. It sounded like praying for help with shoplifting or purchasing marijuana. For six periods a day, I listened to my peers ask God for variations of the following:

  “I'd like to offer a prayer of thanks for Ricky.”

  “I wanna pray for Ricky because we're going through a really hard time right now.”

  “I wanna pray that God will help me forgive Ricky for being such a big jerk.”