Page 249 - A Woman Is No Man

Deya

Winter 2009

A new year began, and nothing changed. In class, Deya found it hard to

pay attention. She felt adrift and nauseous. When school let out and she got
home, she retreated quietly to her room, where she ate alone, emerging only
to wash the dishes after dinner. A thousand thoughts flicked through her
mind like cars on a subway train: she should visit Sarah again, she should
leave, she should stay and marry Nasser if he would still have her. But
nothing felt right. Every time she tried to talk to her sisters, she’d clench up,
racked with nerves and anger. To them, nothing had really changed. Nora

had even said as much one night while trying to comfort Deya. Their
parents might as well have died in a car accident, she’d said; they needed to
move on. Deya hadn’t been that kind of person before; she definitely wasn’t
now.
Most of all she thought about Isra, trying to understand the woman she
thought she’d known all these years, yet had so grossly misjudged. When

Sarah had first started telling her stories of Isra, they had felt like precisely
that: fiction. But now Deya clutched at the stories desperately, each one a
clue to the woman her mother really was. She tried to stitch together the
scattered pieces of Isra’s life, to weave them into a full narrative, a complete
story, a truth. But she couldn’t—something was missing. There was more to
Isra. After everything she had learned over the past weeks, she knew there
had to be.

She sat in Islamic studies class, staring blankly ahead as Brother
Hakeem paced in front of the chalkboard. He was discussing the role of
women in Islam. Once or twice she could feel him looking at her, waiting
for her to question something in her usual way, but she kept her eyes trained
on the window. He recited a verse, in Arabic: “Heaven lies under a mother’s

feet.” The words meant nothing to her. She didn’t have a mother.
“But why is heaven under the mother’s feet?” a girl asked. “Why not
under the father’s feet? He’s the head of the household.”