Page 254 - A Woman Is No Man

Isra

Summer 1997

Isra sat by the window, nose pressed up against the glass, feeling a

turbulence rise within her. It will be okay, she told herself. But she was not
okay. At first when Sarah had left she had wept so violently that it seemed
as though the tears were rising from a deep spring inside her and would
never stop. But now she sat in a heavy silence. She was furious. How could
Sarah run away? Leave her alone like this? Give up on everything they
knew, on the life they’d shared together? Growing up, Isra had never once
considered running away, not even when her parents sent her to America.

What was Sarah thinking?
But worse than her anger was the other thought that kept returning to
her: What if Sarah had been right? Isra thought about Khaled and Fareeda,
how they had carried their children out of the refugee camp, leaving their
country behind and coming to America. Did they see what Isra saw now?
They had run away to survive, and now their daughter had done the same.

Maybe that’s the only way, she thought. The only way to survive.
A day passed, then another, then another. Every morning Isra would
wake up to the sound of her daughters calling her name, jumping into bed,
and a sickness would fill her. She wondered if it was the jinn. Just leave me
alone! she wanted to scream. Just let me breathe! Eventually she would
force herself to get up, gather her daughters, dress them, comb their hair—
all that hair, how they moaned as she untangled it!—sucking on her teeth as

she yanked a brush through their curls. Then she’d walk Deya and Nora to
the corner, waiting for the yellow school bus to take them away, and she’d
think, filled with shame and disgust at her weakness, If only the bus would
take the rest of her daughters, too.
In the kitchen now, Isra could hear Fareeda’s voice in the sala. Lately

Fareeda spent her days weaving a story of Sarah’s marriage to tell the
world, only to cry silently into her hands when she was done. Sometimes,
like now, Isra felt a duty to comfort her. She brewed a kettle of chai, adding