November, 2000

That November night, the sleet turning into snow promised a snow day. Marwa moved away from her desk and still glowing computer, away from IMed dialogues about math homework and upcoming Intel project deadline meetings. She lay down on her bed and shut her eyes. She liked the noisy sleet against the window that shifted sound volume with the silent snow carried by glass-thumping wind gusts. She saw the lovely (Burnt Siena Crayola color) equations for Brownian motion somewhere in her mind as if on a whiteboard that some of the teachers still called blackboards.

The boards in Joey’s elementary school classroom were green slate, and his teacher used yellow chalk. The sounds of voices, words written on different-colored surfaces, the numbers and symbols from her physics class (AN UNTESTABLE IDEA IS NOT EVEN WRONG said the poster border at the back of the room), all harmonized with the sleet and snow and blizzard wind. Marwa didn’t feel sleepy. The words Her Divine Box kept repeating inside and above and below all those other images and sounds in her head. The words aroused her. And she was still furious at Judy.

Dimly, she wondered if she put on her hijab, would her heart stop pounding so hard? Marwa exercised some mental muscle when she tried to keep out the images of Prix in magazines and on billboards, on the entire side of tall buildings, and recently in perfume commercials on tv. Those pictures of Prix invaded from the outside, but more often and far worse, now he walked out of the dark back of the cave in her mind, casually, as if he lived there.

Marwa was sure it was her visual cortex flashing, directly connected to the primordial rat-brain in her hippocampus with a direct neural route to her genitals. Clitoris, she knew the ugly word. It was cut off in African coming-of-age mutilations. Judy and she had watched a re-run of the Seinfeld episode when he couldn’t remember a girl’s name, but he knew it rhymed with a female sex word. Dolores, clitoris.

At lunch when they had talked about Mecca and the Kaaba, when Judy had gone poking around Allah, Marwa had not said anything. Also, she hadn’t told Judy about Prix. Her Div– the words made the world go black. At the lunchtable, Marwa had gone rigid with fear, not rigid with arousal like now where it was swollen and throbbed. Now it was even terrible to say the name Divine Box for the shoebox her mother had given her for secret keepsakes.

She had been seven years old when she’d started keeping her secrets, but she hadn’t decorated the __Box until she was eleven. The first thing she had to save was what she dug up when she was planting bulbs in the fall with her mother in their front yard in Far Rockaway, it was the place she still dreamed about as home. At seven years old, Marwa had happily dug in the dirt with a red-handled trowel, doing an often-praised job of digging holes the right amount of inches down for daffodils and tulips. Her mother despaired over the non-metric measurement, but Marwa’s exactitude had impressed her mother and still caused a proud smile to bud on Marwa’s face.

It blossomed entirely when she got off her bed and found her __Box where she kept it hidden at the back corner of her closet, opened it, and took into her hand that first magic object. Her trowel had hit a stone, and when she dug it out, it looked like no other stone she had ever seen. She had taken it to her mother for identification, and her mother’s fascinated frown made Marwa feel very special for finding something that really interested her.

“This is not natural, I think,” her mother said. “See, the marks on it. As if struck by a knife or another stone.”

“Maybe it’s the Indians’! The Rockaways lived here.”

“It’s not flint,” her mother puzzled.

Marwa had taken the approximately two inch by half inch rectangular wedge of stone to school for Show and Tell. All her classmates had held it wonderingly. Marwa could barely endure it when one of the boys tossed it from one palm to another, but the teacher told him to stop. No one ever identified the stone, its composition, age, or possible use. Marwa had taken the stone home and knew she had to keep it in a safe place. This magic stone she in her palm now. Her mother had given her this shoebox. Marwa’s Divine Box.

The blizzard kept blasting against the tall apartment building, coming straight down from Canada along the air shaft of the Hudson . But it wasn’t the Arctic winds that cooled Marwa’s heat, it was the small right-angled edges of the Indian stone in her hand. It calmed her. It said, I am here and you are safe. There were many other objects in her Divine Box. She picked up the carefully folded, very small lovely cloth that had been her hijab and held it against her heart with her other hand as if apologizing to her younger self.

The hijab had made her feel special and womanly when she had first been allowed to put it on. She had felt proud and humble at the same time. She thought she was pleasing Allah. She knew she was pleasing her father who had looked at her in a different way on that day. Then she thought of Juliet in the essay, silently rebelling against her parents, Juliet Capulet, who never spoke again as a child after her very own Nurse encouraged her to marry Paris after she had married Romeo and made love with him. She wouldn’t even argue with her Nurse anymore or her mother or father — her father who threatened to disown his only child, send her out to the streets where she could only become a whore if she refused to obey him.

“Her chaste treasure,” Marwa thought, but she knew that was Ophelia from HAMLET. They’d read a book about anorexia in Psych class with Ophelia in the title so she’d read the play on her own. She’d be reading it in AP English soon. Then Marwa felt hungry and remembered she had to finish the math homework because maybe there wouldn’t be a snow day after all.

Leaving her bedroom to go to the kitchen had become risky since Marwa had stopped being Mu’hajiba, wearing her hijab. She never knew which of her parents or older brother would scold or glare at her. Joey had been asleep for a couple of hours, but he never bothered her about it. Marwa and Joey were in some sort of league together now, which only angered her parents more as she was such a bad example for her little brother. Stopped being Mu’hajiba, Marwa thought. To wear or not to wear, to be or not to be. She was not thinking of Hamlet, though. She was seeing Prix, leaning patiently against a mental doorway. The poor, small stone in her hand couldn’t entirely keep him away. She put it and the scarf back into her Divine Box and braved the other side of her bedroom door.

As Marwa had feared, her mother was in the kitchen, putting together tomorrow night’s dinner of wara’ enab. The boiled grape leaves, to be filled with spiced rice and the ground meat she was in the process of draining, were cooling and drying on paper towel. The kitchen smelled heavenly.

Marwa’s mother was giving her the silent treatment. Her mother’s silence was harsher than speech. First, Marwa felt sorry and desperate to reach out and put her mother’s palms against her own face in the gesture she always used when she showed her children unspeakable love. Then, as was becoming familiar, Marwa felt anger so terrible it scared her and made her understand all that talk, freshman year, about Achilles in the ILIAD.

Marwa thought, fine, if she doesn’t talk to me for a minute, I won’t talk to her for an hour. Unconsciously and instantly, Marwa saw rather than calculated how long it would take before she could say a word to her mother. As always, the coolness of numbers and arranging them in equations pleased her and felt like a partial replacement for her mother’s withheld love.

But then her mother spoke. First she recited in Arabic and then, pointedly, translated as if Marwa no longer could understand. “Every son is a blessing, every daughter is a curse.”

Marwa’s resolve to silence shattered as quickly as her mother’s had. “If I ever have a daughter, I will never repeat those words to her.”

“We will see. We will see,” her mother said, cleaning the shining stainless steel sink.

“When you treat me like this, you teach me how to treat you,” Marwa said.

Marwa’s mother stopped moving and then turned to face her. “What do you think you are doing? Where do you think this is going? How can you disappoint your father like this? How can you break my heart?”

Marwa furiously ordered herself not to release the tears. “Mommy, how can you break mine?”

“It is one heart between us, and you are breaking it. Who will pay for you to go to college, then?”

Marwa recoiled as if struck and leaned against the facing counter. “You would do that?”

“How can you expect your father to pay for your education when you are no longer his daughter?”

“All my work — all your work — you could turn your backs on that?”

“As you have turned your backs on us. On Allah.”

“This is economic blackmail. This is politics. Mommy–”

“You know nothing about the world. I love you. Your father loves you. We cannot let you walk naked in this world. ‘We have bestowed raiment/ Upon you to cover/ Your shame, as well as/ To be an adornment to you.’ ”

“I am not naked. It is only one piece of cloth. ‘But the raiment of righteousness,–/ That is the best.’”

“Oh, you are too smart for your own good. You are ‘modern’. You are ‘American’. You are an individual. And when you turn away from us and turn around, there will be an individual there, standing all alone and naked, and the world will eat you — This is what happens here, the child rejects the parent, it is against Allah.”

Marwa struggled to breathe, and her voice sounded harsh. “That is paternalism. That is politics, not spirituality. That is not Allah.”

Her mother’s hand flashed like light and struck her. “Blasphemy! What follows – chaos, war, rape — you do not know what men are –” and then her mother started crying, and they were both crying.

Through the tears and nose-running lymph, Marwa kept hearing a new voice speak out of her mouth, “So you think religion is the gang that protects me from gang rape? If I can stay inside the folds of hijab or chador and all the misogynist laws and hateful sayings, then I can exist — as a sheep in the fold, protected by the very wolves who keep me penned! And you left your family behind, didn’t you, Ummee? Did you think I would not imitate you? That is why you’re so angry with me, because I am doing exactly what you did, for the same reasons you can’t admit, and you feel guilty that I will be hurt because of you. But I won’t, Ummee, or I won’t be any more hurt than you were, leaving the people you still love in Egypt .”

Marwa could see her words had struck her mother back. Now her mother stopped crying and looked more thoughtful than furious. Her large dark eyes remained troubled, but the worst of the storm had passed.

“I came to this godforsaken country because I loved your father and he loved me. There was no work for him in Egypt because his family was poor and he was the oldest of nine. You know this. I am ashamed to have broken my parents’ hearts, but we are one heart in Allah. They understand this. I do not understand you.”

“I think you do. I think you want me to argue with you. I think you want me to win. I’m just not good enough at it. Yet. In 7th grade, when I was voted to play the judge in the class trial, you said I couldn’t, good Muslim girls couldn’t be a judge. What was I supposed to tell my class and the teacher, that we lacked a gene for judicial thinking other girls had? That’s the same hateful, superstitious logic that justified Hypatia of Alexandria being skinned alive by the Christian Bishop because she was a genius mathematician. ‘Don’t think’ doesn’t mean ‘can’t think.’ If you and Baba won’t send me to college, I’ll go on my own. I’ll get a scholarship. I know how to work hard. You made me strong.”

“All strength comes from Allah.”

“Allah is a merciful judge. A+ for that class trial. So Allah gives me strength. If I have it, it must come from Allah.”

“This country is poison. It will kill you. It is materialism and individuality and filthy music.”

“Living in this country is not just about the money you and Baba make and can send to what you call home in Alexandria . It’s why you moved from the garden where we planted the daffodils together and counted the worms, so I could go to Stuy. It’s Sharif at Brooklyn Poly and everything for Joey, basketball and baseball and ice hockey and Internet access to the public library– no, no, because in Egypt , Ummee, yes they have public school and university, but Baba brought you here for hope, Mommy, it’s hope. That’s the last, best thing shut inside Pandora’s Divine Box. People should make their own laws that evolve, not blindly obey laws that oppress them because they call history God–”

“You are so in love with this country, where I can be no more than an adjunct at Columbia — when you were little, they made you sing in school, ‘O Columbia, the gem of the ocean!’ — I am not Professor because I am not a man!”

“They have women professors at Columbia . You don’t have an MA or a Phd.”

“I was Professor in Brooklyn at community college!”

“No. You were an adjunct there, just the kids called you Professor. Columbia would treat a man without advanced degrees in Arabic the same way.”

“Because he is ——-”

“No, Mommy, not because he is Muslim.”

Marwa’s mother covered her ears with her palms and tightly shut her eyes and lips. She shook her head back and forth. Then Marwa reached out and placed her own hands on her mother’s face as she had wished her mother had welcomed her. Marwa’s mother’s eyes opened. Neither of them said another word that night. Marwa released her mother’s soft cheeks and smiled, returned to her room, and finished her math homework.

The next morning, the apartment was strangely quiet, as home always is after a blizzard ends. Marwa did not get up in time for school as her clockradio had been turned off while she slept. It was, indeed, a snow day. Only her father went to work at the bank. Her mother had kept Joey busy and quiet so that Marwa and Sharif could sleep. When Marwa went into the kitchen for something hot to drink, she found that her mother had prepared her favorite, cocoa from Zabar’s. It was kept warm in the double boiler on the stove, and her mother had left out the cocoa container so Marwa could see.