Page 73 - A Woman Is No Man

Deya

Winter 2008

The days after reading Isra’s letter felt muddled. Deya couldn’t stop

thinking. Could she have misjudged her mother? Could she have
remembered her incorrectly? It was possible. What if her mother had been
possessed by a jinn? That would explain why she had always been so sad,
not because her marriage was unhappy or because she didn’t want to be a
mother, or worse, because she didn’t want her. Still, Deya wasn’t
convinced. The jinn sounded like something from a fantasy novel—curses
and exorcisms didn’t happen in real life. Yet her mind raced of its own

accord. Could her mother have taken her own life? And if she had, then
how had her father died?
At home, Deya hardly spoke to her sisters. In school, she dragged
herself from one class to the next, unable to focus even on Sister
Buthayna’s literature seminar, which she normally enjoyed the most, sitting
forward in the very front row, her nose buried in whatever book they were

reading. Staring out her classroom window now as Sister Buthayna read a
passage from Lord of the Flies, Deya wondered if her grandmother was
right. Maybe if she hadn’t spent her days curled between the pages of a
book, her back turned to the world, she’d have a better grasp on her life.
Maybe she would know how to let go and move on. Maybe she would have
realistic expectations for her future.
After school, she rode the bus home in silence, lifting her eyes from the

window only when they reached their stop. She and her sisters walked
down Seventy-Ninth street toward home, Deya moving quickly, as if she
could outrun her thoughts, and her sisters trailing behind, dragging their feet
along the snow-covered sidewalk. It was a cold, overcast day, and the air
smelled like wet trees with a faint hint of something. Car fumes. Or stray

cats maybe. It was a Brooklyn spice she often smelled on the seven-block
walk to and from the bus stop. There was an empty coffee cup on the corner
pavement, blue-and-white cardboard, crushed and mud-stained. She caught