Page 227 - A Woman Is No Man

She walked down Eighty-Sixth Street, stopping in front of a pharmacy.
It was open, to her relief, and she sat on the front stoop. The stinging along
the side of her head was easing. She pressed her fingers against her temples.

She was cold, and she wept. She wept tears of all sorts—anger, fear, sorrow,
but mostly regret. How could she have been so naive to think she could ever
be happy? She should’ve listened to Mama. Happiness was something
people made up in books, and she had been foolish to believe she could
ever find it in the real world.
Isra looked up to see a man approaching her.
“Excuse me, are you okay?” he said. “You’re bleeding.”

Isra wrapped her arms around herself and looked at the ground. The
man moved closer. “What happened to your head?”
“N—nothing,” she stammered, the English strange on her tongue.
“Did someone do this to you? Did someone hurt you?” She shook her
head. “You need to call the police. Hurting someone like this is illegal.
Whoever did this to you will go to jail.” Isra started to cry again. She didn’t

want to send the father of her daughters to jail. She just wanted to go home.
“You need to go to an emergency room,” the man said. “You need stitches.
Do you have anyone to call?” He pointed to a phone booth at the end of the
block. “Come with me,” he said, gesturing toward the booth. Isra followed.
The man placed two quarters into the shiny box and handed Isra the
receiver. “You need to call someone.”
It was the first time Isra had held a public telephone. The metal felt

crisp against her fingertips and sent a chill through her. Once she started
shaking again, she couldn’t stop. She held the phone to her ear. There was a
beeping noise on the other end.
“You have to dial a number,” the man said.
She didn’t know who to call. In those seconds, holding the phone to her
ear, Isra’s loneliness was the clearest it had ever been. She knew she

couldn’t call Palestine without a phone card, and besides, what would
Mama say except to go home at once, to stop parading her shame for the
whole world to see? She couldn’t call Adam’s beeper, not after what she’d
done. She had only one person to call, and she wept as she dialed the
number.

“Get in,” Fareeda said from the passenger window as Khaled parallel-
parked. Isra climbed into the car. “What were you thinking leaving the