First Comes Marriage Read online

  That night, as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined myself married to a man whose ambitions equaled my own, our life together in a prestigious university, never having left the United States. At first it seemed a dream come true, the mutual achievements, the shared time reading, the interest in each other's research, but then I considered what it might be like to be married to someone who had expectations of my success, someone who resented me for holding him back, someone like me.

  I sat up in bed and looked over at Hadi. I watched his hand, resting flat on his chest, rising and falling with every breath, and I wondered if being married to me was not the grand gift he allowed me to believe it was.

  The following Monday, I sat on a bench in the Plaza de Armas, glancing up at the circular gazebo at its center, its intricate iron railings and Hershey's Kiss–shaped roof. Hungry pigeons pecked the surrounding grounds in a furious rush, trying to eat their fill before the children, running about, chased them away. In every tree-shaded corner, vendors grasped giant balloon bouquets or stood behind stalls, selling potato chips doused in a squirt of chili sauce and a spray of lime.

  A warm breeze pressed against my skin, the sun illuminating the tiny hairs along my arms. If it was possible to fall in love with a location's weather, then it was happening. In the two months we'd been here, the weather was rarely warm enough for me to break a sweat but still not cool enough to make an always chilly person like me uncomfortable. Even when the sky clouded over and burst with rain, it still didn't get cold enough for me to need a jacket.

  It hit me then that if it wasn't for the English course and if it wasn't for Hadi bringing us down here, I wouldn't be downtown right now, enjoying the sunshine's embrace, about to reach into the waxy paper bag in my lap and pull out a hot croissant stuffed with Mexico's creamy goat's milk caramel, cajeta.

  That was the problem with Mexico. Every time I tried to write it off as the cause of all my problems, it slapped me with a beauty that made me feel as if I should shut up and be grateful to be here, seeing its sights, tasting its food, feeling its weather.

  After I'd dusted the last few crumbs of croissant off my hands, I grabbed my bag, crossed a busy street lined with horse-drawn carriages awaiting tourists, and passed through the imposing doors of the cool and musky cathedral. The cathedral's yellow dome and pointed towers dominated the entire downtown. It was a symbol of Guadalajara, its silhouette painted on every taxi, and it was coming to dominate my entire experience of the downtown, too. There was something about the elements of my life that it fused together, giving me hope that there might be some reconciliation for me, an Iraqi American Shia Muslim, in Catholic Mexico.

  Inside, I felt at home in the warm glow of the candle light, surrounded by the smell of melting wax, comforted by the passionate whispering of prayers. When I'd first started going to Catholic schools, I'd struggled during Mass. Coming from a religious tradition that forbids iconography and the consumption of alcohol, it was startling to attend services with the image of a bloody, tortured Jesus pinned to a crucifix hanging above me, to watch my classmates taking sips from a large chalice of wine. But year by year, I grew accustomed to the Mass, and even though I never actively participated, there were certain songs that touched me, prayers that I had inadvertently memorized, homilies that spoke to values I knew Islam and Christianity shared. Now rather than Guadalajara's cathedral feeling strange to me, it felt familiar, and its statues, crucifixes, and artwork were things that I recognized.

  That afternoon, I stood in front of the glass case holding the statue of Santa Inocencia. She was dressed in a long, frilly communion dress and lying down along a bed of white satin covered in amulets, photographs, and written petitions. The older woman next to me bowed her head and whispered a prayer over her arthritic, interlocked hands. When she was finished, she turned to me and said, “She is a martyr. When she took her first communion, her father killed her because he didn't want her to accept Christ.”

  I nodded solemnly, as if she were the first person to tell me this.

  “You can pray to her. Ask her for anything,” she added, her hands still intertwined.

  I didn't want to disappoint her, so I lingered in front of the glass case a little bit longer, thinking about this woman and how those very same words could have been spoken by a member of my own family. I could hear my mother, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles referring to one of our Shia tradition's martyrs in the same way, saying, “Ask them for anything. God may be able to deny you and me something, but He cannot deny them.”

  Now Santa Inocencia brought to mind the story of Ali al-Asghar, the Prophet Muhammad's six-month-old great-grandson. When his father, one of the Shia tradition's most revered saints, Imam Husayn and his army were surrounded in Karbala, they were cut off from their only source of water. Imam Husayn pleaded for a drop of water for his crying son, and the sight of this baby, the Prophet's own flesh and blood, withering away from dehydration made the opposing troops restless. To quell the impending mutiny, an arrow was sent flying into the baby's throat. Every year on the anniversary of his martyrdom, an empty crib is carried during the lamentation rituals in his honor. He, like Santa Inocencia, is a focal point for prayers, for mourning undeserved losses.

  A crowd formed around the glass, and I stepped away only to stop in front of a statue of a weeping Mary, robed in black. Imprinted on the placard beneath her was the title “La Dolorosa, the Sorrowful.” She was the first mournful Mary I'd ever seen, and she reminded me of the stories of Fatima az-Zahra, Imam Husayn's mother. She is said to appear at every service where her son's name is mentioned. Fatima is our symbol of a bereaved mother, and in Mexico, Mary represented the same.

  I felt an affinity here that I hadn't even felt among my MSA sisters. During the winter semester of last year, the religious studies professor who specialized in Islam taught a class specifically on Shiism. Several of my Sunni Muslim friends had signed up, but I could no longer sustain the face of unity that had meant so much to me in our women in Islam class. When my friends raised their hands and argued that the Shia practice of taking to the street and beating your chest in the name of a martyred Imam wasn't true Islam, I had to raise my hand and explain that this was merely an attempt to experience the suffering of a beloved icon and hero. When they objected to the Shia use of human imagery in their art, I had to clarify that doing so was not a form of idolatry but of storytelling and commemorating. When they argued that the Shia regard for their saintlike Imams was incompatible with Allah's oneness, I had to suggest Imams were merely vessels through which one communicated with the divine. But I sensed that here, in this cathedral, no such explanations were necessary.

  I continued to wander around the edges of the cathedral, but my mind itched. Mexicans added a mournful streak to their faith that felt so familiar, so Shia. All my life, I had toggled between my school life and home life, feeling too Muslim and Arab in one and too American in the other. But here the dominant culture's rules were not the same ones I'd defined myself against for so long. Here a grandmother had told me to pray, and her devotion had felt like home.

  Over the next few months, Hadi and I fell into something of a Guadalajara groove. I finished Level III Spanish, and from it, I gained both confidence in going around the city and an unexpected sense of pride. While Hadi had not quite picked up Spanish yet, he was taking Spanish classes on the weekends and consistently scoring above average on his medical school exams. When he came home, he practiced his clinical skills on me, checking my ears and throat, palpating my abdomen, and listening to my chest. Although we both had diarrhea all the time, this became an ongoing joke between us, an experience we came to refer to as simply “explosion.” And, finally, the time I spent with the American wives of medical students, grocery shopping together on the weekends and attending their monthly book club, opened my eyes to two important things:

  Marriage was a great equalizer. For all their romantic dates and surprise proposals, these American women still wound up in Mexico,
cooking, cleaning, food shopping, and doing laundry just like me.

  Babies were the answer. The majority of the wives were mothers or soon-to-be mothers, and I didn't see them fretting over their stalled careers. I was certain these women spent their days cuddling their glorious babies, never lonely or bored. My own mother had said my brother had cured her loneliness after she came to America. It was so obvious that I should have a baby, too.

  But when I shared my plan with Hadi, he squashed it with unwelcome reason. “Our lives are so unsettled here,” he said. “Do you really want to bring a baby into this? How would you feel if the baby had diarrhea and had to be taken to the hospital for dehydration?”

  I put my hands on my hips to further convey my indignation. “Just because our stomachs are weirdly sensitive, that doesn't mean our baby will be like that, too. There are plenty of people having babies here, and I only know of one woman who had to take her baby to the hospital with dehydration.”

  Hadi looked at me as if he had concerns for my sanity. “You do know you're not supposed to have kids because other people are doing it?”

  In a childish, mocking tone, I said, “Yes, I know we are not supposed to have kids because other people are doing it,” and because that wasn't immature enough, I accused Hadi of not letting me do anything. “It's like you're telling me, ‘Don't go to school and don't get a head start on having kids.’ What is this purgatory?”

  In the weeks approaching winter break, Hadi and I revisited this argument several times, each time circling around my plans to go back to school, with Hadi saying he didn't want us to have a kid if we were going to put our child in day care in a few years, me arguing that my mom had gotten through school by bringing me to class with a little coloring book, and Hadi concluding with what was another issue entirely. “Is it really wise to bring a child into a relationship that we still haven't settled into yet?” he'd ask. “Most of the time, I'm not even sure you like me.”

  This question was directly tied to another, more pressing, topic we'd been debating—how we'd divide our first trip back to California. I wanted to go straight to my parents’ house and stay the entire break, maybe return to Guadalajara at the same time as Hadi so we could share a cab on our way home. Hadi, on the other hand, believed we should travel together and split the time between both our parents’ houses. We were husband and wife, he argued, and that was what married people did. To drive the point home, he added, “And you want us to have kids? If we had a baby, would you take the baby away from me for a month, too?”

  Both discussions filled me with the urge to shake him, hard. The precise reason I wanted to go to my parents’ house was because I needed a break from being married. If we actually had a baby, then we could talk about the fair way to split our vacation time, but for now, all I wanted was to shop with Lina, dance with Aysar, and giggle all night with Diana and Nadia at a sleepover.

  In the end, I agreed to fly back to Hadi's parents’ house a week before we were scheduled to return to Mexico. Hadi tempted me with the possibility of packing up his brother's old car and driving it down to Guadalajara (Hadi didn't want to ruin his car on Mexico's potholed roads). We'd have to share the car, and I'd still take the bus to the Spanish classes I'd resumed taking at the local university, but at least there'd be no more hauling duffel bags of clothes to the Laundromat, no more plastic bags of groceries cutting off the circulation on my wrist while I gripped the pole on a crowded bus.

  My first few days home were a blissful show-and-tell. I showed off the haircut I'd gotten the day before I left, the clothes I'd purchased just for my arrival, my new Ricky Martin CD, and Spanish skills. But the days that followed brought no long-awaited respite from my irritable bowels. No joy in seeing how my friends had moved on with school, work, jobs, homes. No satisfaction when I visited my former professors without any research interests to share. I'd salivated over the idea of being home for weeks, and now that I was here, I felt buried under a heavy, stuporous funk, one that had turned particularly sour right after Mama's weekend phone call with Aunty Najma. Mama had passed along the news that two of my cousins who lived in Lebanon would be studying abroad, one at a university in Scotland, another in England.

  Although I went through the motions, visiting with friends at sleepovers and girls-only dance parties, I felt cooped up in my head for the remainder of the break, trying to unravel this mystery: if I was the one who was born in America, how had I wound up living the more culturally traditional life?

  At night, I'd lie in my bed, feeling as if my room did not belong to me. I was no longer the girl who'd chosen cherub throw pillows, a print of Victorian ladies in a café, and a wrought-iron bed. All through high school, I had been drawn to all things Victorian; it had been so easy to insert myself into Victorian love stories with all their restrained, unspoken love. But how foolish had I been to not realize that I would have never been the protagonist of one of these stories. I would have been the Mohammedan, the exotic Oriental, or the native savage.

  Now more than ever, I wished I was in school so a professor and a class discussion could help me analyze how familial, cultural, sociological, and religious forces had intersected to drive me to this choice I did not own. I wondered if I had an arranged marriage, a forced marriage, a working-things-out marriage, or a marriage reaching its end.

  The last possibility twisted me with heartache. If I attempted to undo my marriage now, the only future I saw for myself as a divorcée was manless, sexless, and childless. I questioned the wisdom of throwing away a life with a kind man and an equally promising father when all I really wanted was a do-over—to go back to being the girl who had lain in this same bed, filled with hope for her future—and to choose school over marriage, to choose to live my own life before agreeing to live my life for another.

  As my time at home approached its end, I dreaded seeing Hadi's family, but refusing to go would have required an explanation I was not capable of giving. On the appointed day, I took an hour-long flight to Southern California. Mrs. Ridha picked me up from the airport alone because we'd be going straight to a baby shower for a mutual friend. On our way, she told me that Reem Salaam had gotten divorced. Soraya Ahmed had broken off her engagement and was already engaged to someone else.

  I stared off into the crowded highway, my gaze blurring on the glint of sun that bounced off the car in front of us. Reem had gotten married the year before me. I had admired her beautiful dress, the way she'd danced and smiled the entire night. Soraya had announced her engagement six months ago. She must have been as unhappy as I had been, but instead of suffering through it, she'd had the courage to walk away. Now she had the chance to be happy again. Why did she have the strength to leave when I didn't? Did she value herself more?

  With my eyes still focused on the road, words left my mouth, words that surprised me. “I thought a girl with a broken engagement could never get remarried.”

  “Why not? These things happen.”

  “But the way we were taught, it seemed like a girl had only one chance.”

  “No,” Mrs. Ridha said, glancing in her side-view mirror as she changed lanes. “It's not like that. Because you young people were born here, we wanted you to understand the way our people think. We did not expect you to listen to everything we said.”

  Mrs. Ridha's words pierced me. My engagement, my marriage, my life in Mexico suddenly felt like a tragic Shakespearean misunderstanding. I'd thought our community's code of conduct was a matter of life and death and God Himself, and the entire time, our parents knew that this wasn't necessarily the case, that they were saying things to keep us away from the dangers to which they assumed America made us vulnerable, but still understood that we might do something else, maybe even expected it.

  I wanted answers to a thousand other questions, but even more than that, I didn't want Mrs. Ridha to see me ruffled. So I waited, thinking of something I could say that would make her explain more without giving away the impact her words had on me.

&nbs
p; After a long pause, I said, “I don't know if you know this, but Hadi never said anything to me at my prom. He didn't even tell me I looked nice, but I felt like I had to marry him because we'd gone out together.” Fearing that I'd gone too far, I added, “Not that it's a problem, but you know, then. That's how I felt.”

  “Who thinks like that? Of course, we wished you'd marry Hadi. From the moment I met your family, I loved your mother, and I always thought that, mashallah, you're just like her—good in everything. But because I knew your family takes istikharas about these things, I understood that it didn't matter how much we loved you or Hadi loved you. It may not happen.”

  I was quiet. Although Hadi's parents were so similar to mine on paper, they were different in practice. During this year that I'd spent as a part of their family, I was surprised by how seldom they turned to istikharas to make decisions. The Ridhas might have undertaken one a year if at all, but my family made several a day—if not by turning to the Quran, then by counting off on the sibha or prayer beads my father kept in his pocket. They looked to the istikhara as if it were a divinely inspired coin toss. Should I stay home sick today? Should I accept this invitation? Should I take this medication, eat this food, buy this product?

  Marrying into the Ridha family had made me see my family's reliance on the istikhara as curious and idiosyncratic rather than devotional, and now it was forcing me to question something so much more painful to doubt—the istikharas that had determined my own marriage. They made me agree to Hadi before he'd even asked for me, before I'd even attempted to make a decision about him in my own heart. In that sense, those istikharas had violated the practice's most basic conditions—that those requesting it be torn by indecision, that they hold a question as an intention in their minds. From the outset, Mama had been clear that these istikharas were hers—that she'd framed the intention from her perspective—and yet I'd accepted their outcomes as if God Himself was speaking to me.