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The Marriage Pact

We were eight years old in my first memory of the marriage pact. Mona and I were at Zaina’s house. Her oldest sister had just gotten married, and we were bursting with talk of all that we’d seen and heard at the wedding. We looked like mummy brides, wrapped in her mother’s headscarves. Mona had found ribbons and flowers which she’d braided and pinned into our hair. We took turns being the bride while the other two played the parts of sisters, supporting the train, giving admonishing smiles during the Yelwa, and bobbing up and down in exultant dances.

‘When she came through the door, everyone was so quiet,’ Zaina said, standing at the door to her room, holding a bouquet of fake roses. ‘All the lights went out and there was just a spotlight on her, and then “Heb AlSa’ada” came on and she started walking. Like this.’ She took solemn steps forward, her feet drowning in the heels we’d pilfered. Mona held and re-draped her train as she walked. I was supposed to sing the song, but I was imagining walking down a long aisle with a spotlight on me while everyone stared. It wouldn’t be like weddings we saw on television where the man stood at the end. It would just be me and a never-ending aisle leading to an empty settee. I could trip and fall, walk too slow or too fast, forget to smile at the photographer or drop my bouquet. Anything could happen.

‘Dahlia!’ Mona whined, drawing out all the syllables in my name. I started singing, but Zaina had already reached the desk chair we were using as a kosha. She turned to look over her shoulder while Mona metamorphosed into photographer, snapping shots of Zaina smiling, laughing, and looking coy. I knew what was coming next; I always got the groom’s role.

‘Yella ya mi’ris,’ Mona hissed, waving me back towards the door.

I obeyed, hurrying down our makeshift aisle. Mona immediately sprang into action, chanting the groom’s song as I walked back towards them. The man had it easier; he didn’t have to milk the moment. He was encouraged to walk as quickly as possible to his bride. I got to Zaina and gave her a kiss on the forehead before taking the chair beside her. Mona re-draped the train and continued to snap fake photos as we interlocked our arms and mimed sipping juice from tall, flutey glasses.

‘We should get married together,’ Zaina said, sighing up to the ceiling. ‘All three of us, on the same day.’

‘Yeah!’ Mona cried, clapping her hands together. ‘And we can have one big party!’

‘We could all walk down the aisle together,’ I offered.

‘No!’ Mona and Zaina shouted, frowning at me. ‘We’ll take turns,’ Zaina said with a nod.

‘Who goes first?’ Mona asked.

Zaina chewed her lip and picked at a scab from where she’d scraped her elbow. ‘We’ll go by the alphabet.’

‘Yeah!’ Mona exclaimed, linking fingers with Zaina and waiting for me to join.

My stomach clenched into something hard and tight and unfamiliar, but I added my fingers to our ‘promise’ link and we shook on it.

We were terribly young then, and they were only words.

The pact changed, evolving as we matured: at ten, we dismissed the alphabet idea as stupid and decided the eldest should go first; a few years later we would sometimes draw straws or have a competition to see who could flick their marble the furthest. We chose arbitrary ages that seemed far off in some unseeable future—twenty, twenty-two, twenty-seven. By fifteen I wanted out of the pact, but was kept in by Mona and Zaina’s un-wavering enthusiasm. At nineteen, Mona decided the pact wasn’t cool and joined me, but in our early twenties the two of them were back in competition.

Our families thought the pact was charming at first, some adorable little fancy for little girls. They saw it as early confirmation that life would turn out like they expected it to, that their daughters would turn out as planned. Later, it became funny, an amusing anecdote to share at gatherings, something to laugh about with friends and aunties. Finally, it became tiresome, just one more thing for our mothers to worry about in their efforts to see us settled in happy marriages. Whose daughter would go first? Even then, there were comparisons. Mama wanted to beat the record she’d set with my sister Nadia, who was married at twenty-three. When Mona got rowdy, her mother would say she needed to set a good example for her younger sister, but what she really meant was ‘Don’t do anything to lower your chances.’ And Zaina’s parents were forever reminding her how small the country was, and how everyone knew everything about everyone and she should never forget that.

I’ve often wondered whether it might not be better to eradicate the nuclear family altogether, to just let us disperse like loose seeds, striking our roots into some foreign earth, unfettered by customs and bonds and the burden of ancestry. How much damage do parents do, unintentional though it may be? A word that cleaves the psyche, a withheld embrace that ripples through generations, an episode that festers like an open wound. Might these things not be so easily avoided if we all just scattered ourselves to the wind?

There was a lot of weeping in our house, mostly by me, but my mother did her fair share. There were times, when I wasn’t speaking and spent my days locked in the bathroom, that I would wander the house at all hours of the night. Gliding down the halls and up the stairs like some restless spirit, I would pass my parents’ room, and from within I would hear her sobs – like something was desperate to break free of her – and Baba’s quiet, comforting nonsense. I never knew exactly what her tears were for – love, grief … despair. With my mother, it was like my little cousin Bader, who could never tell if the face you were giving him was a happy or sad one. I couldn’t decipher her tears, and for the longest time I wasn’t even sure she was on my side.

Our lives are sustained by rituals. Up in the morning, shuffle to the bathroom, pick out an outfit, coffee run, and head to work. Family lunches on the weekend and rushing outside when the first rain of the year comes. Gathering around the table for futoor during Ramadan and buying new clothes for Eid. Compulsory calls to relatives just back from vacation, three days of funerals for those that have died.

A man comes to see you, and it’s a whole other set of rituals. You wait at the top of the stairs, never greeting him at the door – that’s for your chaperones to do. When your mother and sister and aunts have ushered him into the fancy sitting room, you still wait five minutes or so. You stand on the stairs, and maybe your nerves die away or maybe they gather strength like a western dust storm, obliterating everything in its path. Finally you come down, you kiss his mother’s cheeks and nod politely at him. Don’t smile too much, that reeks of desperation. Let the chaperones do most of the talking; let him lead the discussion. He speaks English to impress you. Try not to spill the tea when you pour it for him.

‘So, I’ll be working at St Thomas,’ he said, plopping two sugars in the hot liquid, ‘but I’m also giving a lecture at Oxford while I’m there.’ The stirring spoon looked tiny in his hand, like something from a dollhouse.

‘But you’re so young,’ Mama exclaimed, nudging another slice of pound cake his way.

He shrugged with a smile that was meant to be modest, but I could see he was pleased with her comment. By midnight I would have forgotten what he looked like. ‘Yes, well, I worked hard at school.’

‘Dahlia always got by well at school,’ she said, patting me on the knee. ‘Decent grades, but I thank Allah every day she didn’t get it in her head to be a doctor or some such.’

‘It’s difficult work.’ He nodded. ‘Long hours.’

‘Yes, and a woman’s hours shouldn’t be spent on other women’s husbands and children at the expense of her own,’ added Mama.

‘True,’ his mother said, smiling at me like she was proud of the choices I’d made.

I didn’t make many choices. It wasn’t my choice that they should come over that night, or that I should participate in this ritual. The only thing I had chosen was my dress. It was my go-to number. Black. Simple – ‘Boring,’ Mama said – and straightforward. I’d worn it so many times that the buttons down the front had gone a bit loose and the organza layers of the skirt had dulled. It was the polar opposite of the one Mama had laid out on the bed. That one was colorful and frilly and not me. She’d bought it the previous spring because I’d needed to ‘get in touch with my roots’. The dress was cocktail length, but designed to resemble a dara’a, with multiple layers of cotton and chiffon and thick silver embroidery in the shape of Arabic calligraphy. The fabric was rich, weighty with expectation, and I imagined for a moment that I could read my future in those curling, twisting letters: noon for Nasser, the name I’d always assigned to the hypothetical husband I might one day have; ain for wedding, the word that would return to everyone’s lips over the next few months; sa’d for patience, which people always told me would be rewarded.

I’d squashed it into a heavy, loose ball and shoved it deep into a drawer.

‘Her father considered medicine long ago, but I confess that I talked him out of it,’ Mama continued, shaking her head. ‘It was selfish, but I wanted him home at normal hours, not spending his nights with dying people.’

‘A natural instinct,’ the suitor said, inclining his head like he was at an interview, which I suppose he was.

The sadu carpet under the coffee table was woven in thick strands of black and white and bold red. Geometric patterns bordered by thick blocks of color. An Arab’s idea of neutral. I picked a thread at random and followed it down through the weave. My eyes tracked it up and over the ziggurats, sliding down the incline of a diamond, hopping across little interruptions of white. The pattern was a choice someone had made, the will of another that the thread was obliged to bend to. If you picked the right thread, you could follow it back to the beginning. Thread Zero, the one that started it all, the one holding it all together, that one element upon which everything was built.

Did my life have one such string? If I pulled at it, would it all come crashing down?

Later, when our guests had left with promises of forthcoming calls, I headed to a complex of restaurants by the water. It was a beautiful night, clear and calm, with that sweet, clean scent that was such a rarity. The parking lot was full of Porsches and BMWs growling with impatience; I’d borrowed the Jag, and I handed it over to the valet despite knowing Baba wouldn’t like it.

I left the line of rumbling cars behind and walked the long corridor of the open-air compound. There were portable heaters dotted around the outdoor seating areas, their flames high and orange. A Mexican place had tiki torches instead, but they didn’t seem to do the trick judging by the people in their coats and wraps. There was barely any conversation to be heard over the clinking and clattering of plates and glasses, the obsequious tones of waiters, and the tinny music dropping from the speakers. Hardly any of the people at the tables were even facing one another; instead their chairs were directed at the aisle I was walking down. They fiddled with their phones and watched the people passing by; sometimes they turned to their companion to comment on something – a skirt too short, a blouse cut too low, or a patently ridiculous choice of footwear. I was wholly unremarkable, I knew, with the boring black dress and my sensible slingbacks that didn’t have red soles. I passed unnoticed, eyes barely sweeping my form before moving to the next person.

I moved through the outdoor seating area of the Italian restaurant where I was meeting the girls. The queue was five groups deep at the door, but I spotted Zaina seated at the far end of the area and the hostess waved me through.

She gave me a big hug and said, ‘Mona’s running late as well.’

I took the seat across from her, facing the water. The restaurant jutted out over the shore, slightly away from the main complex; it was quiet away from the hullabaloo at the start of the compound. For a moment I could almost imagine I wasn’t there, but at a café on the South Bank, watching lights play over the Thames. But it was Kuwait, and the moon was out, low and slinky in the sky, trailing a long, blurry milky way in the water. A light breeze played with my hair and ruffled my dress, but it really wasn’t too cold.

A waiter materialized at our side seeking a drinks order, his gray and white uniform crisp and glowing in the light. I asked for water. Zaina already had a Coke in front of her, and she barely looked up to tell him we were waiting on a friend when he tried to shift to food orders. She tapped at her phone, and I stared at the water. Minutes passed. I got my water, and our table got a bread basket and a plate of vinegar and olive oil before she put it down.

‘So, how’d it go?’ she asked, coffee-colored eyes turning to me.

‘Same old, same old.’

She scowled and leaned forward, elbow to table, rounded chin in palm – the picture of attentiveness. ‘Well, what happened?’

I was too tired to rehash it all, but I knew she wouldn’t let up, and it was better to get it out before Mona joined us and spun it into a whole thing. I never knew where to start with such stories, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. ‘We talked about … scuba diving.’

Her brows rose against her pale forehead. ‘Why?’

I shrugged helplessly.

‘I mean, what got you there?’

I shrugged again. ‘We were talking about that Gutentag Red Bull thing—’

‘Flugtag,’ she corrected with a laugh.

‘Whatever, and that led us to talking about extreme sports in general, and that took us to scuba diving.’

She frowned thoughtfully, her fingers playing with the gold hoops in her ears. ‘Is scuba diving an extreme sport?’

‘In my book, it is.’

‘And did you tell him you’re scared of open water?’

I shook my head. ‘Mama was giving me her agree-with-everything-he-says-or-I’ll-kill-you look.’

‘Ah,’ she said, nodding along with the sympathy of someone who’d been on the receiving end of such a look. ‘So, not a love match, then?’

I let out a mirthless laugh, my eyes straying over the water. ‘That’s not really the point, is it?’

She leaned back in her seat, pulling her olive-green scarf tighter around her. ‘I guess not.’

The water rolled in and out. Our eyes met, and I could tell she was about to force this cloud away. It was a familiar routine. ‘Well,’ she finally said, ‘maybe he’ll want to see you again, and it’ll go better.’

I pulled a slice of bread from the basket and started tearing it into small squares I had no intention of eating. ‘You do realize we were talking about this same shit when we were in college? Ten years, Zaina.’ She nodded along, eyes glazing over, and I knew she was thinking back to those hours in the cafeteria where all we could talk about was which of our classmates we’d consider marrying. ‘I was so naive. I just assumed that by the time I was thirty I’d have those things we went on and on about, like it was a given. But look … it’s a decade later and nothing is different.’

‘I know.’

But she didn’t know. Her gold wedding band, tucked under the five-year-old engagement ring, bore silent witness to the fact that she might have understood what I was talking about intellectually, but she didn’t really know. How could she? I shook my head again and turned back to the water. She was preparing a more elaborate reassurance, I could tell, but Mona showed up before I had to hear it.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Traffic was a nightmare,’ she said, bustling around the table to drop kisses on our cheeks before taking a seat.

Mona was all flashing lights. If I found solace in blending in, Mona was my opposite. She lived for the flash, loved the spotlight, craved all those appraising eyes, confident they always found her worthy. Everything about her was designed to attract attention, from her Mia Farrow circa Rosemary’s Baby hair to the outfits and the statement jewels. I often wondered if we’d have been friends had we met later in life, or if she’d known at six how little I’d end up caring about fashion, how utterly drab I’d be capable of looking. Though perhaps that was a positive in her eyes, a contrast designed to highlight her fabulousness, like a matte frame on a glossy photo.

The waiter bustled over as soon as she was settled. Luckily Mona was never one to ponder menus and asked for her standard chicken salad. Zaina opted for a salad as well. I’d planned to console myself with a plate of pasta, but I crumbled under pressure and seconded Mona’s order.

‘How are the plans coming along?’ Zaina asked when he’d noted everything down and left.

‘Not bad,’ Mona said, running a hand heavy with cocktail and knuckle rings over her smooth, brown hair, and I thought, if I were as small as her I’d cut off all my hair as well.

‘Rulla’s gone a bit crazy on us,’ she continued, ‘which is weird timing since all the plans have been finalized.’

Zaina gave her a sympathetic look. ‘It’s probably just because it’s getting so close.’

‘Yeah, but she needs to calm down. I was never like that for my wedding. She completely lost it at Mom when we were at the tailor the other day. The florist called to say her bouquet would have ten white roses instead of fifteen, and she lost her mind.’

‘Why can’t she have fifteen?’ I asked.

‘The bouquet would be way too big, proportion-wise,’ she replied, looking at me like it was obvious. ‘Rulla thinks bigger is better, but she doesn’t need that many.’

Zaina nodded in agreement. ‘So what happened?’

‘Nothing,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Rulla and Mom started yelling at each other, Mom stormed off, and I gave Rulla a lecture on proportions all the way home,’ she finished with a chuckle. ‘Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.’ She put a hand on my arm to get my attention. ‘You’re going to be in the Yelwa, right?’

I was saved from an immediate answer by the arrival of our food and the resultant shuffling of things on the table to make space, the offers of extra cheese, more bread, fresh pepper and the like.

The last time I participated in a Yelwa must have been at Zaina’s wedding. That particular tradition is the only one where the bride doesn’t really take center stage, despite being perched on her own little makeshift throne. No, the focus isn’t on her, but on the ones surrounding her – the unwed girls, family and close friends circled around her chair, holding a large, green and gold embroidered blanket over her head. I remember the feeling, standing there clutching my bit of fabric while all the women watched us flutter and flap the thing over the bride’s head. They ought to have been directing good wishes to the bride, and perhaps they were, but everyone knew the women took it as an opportunity to get a good look at the unmarried girls. ‘That one in pink might appeal to my son.’ ‘The one in yellow is too tall.’ ‘Yes, but prettier than the one in ruffles, don’t you think?’ We were presented for quite a long time: at least fifteen minutes, or three songs, whichever finished first. Standing there, flapping and fluttering the fabric, trying to keep in time with the music and the chants of blessing. Flapping and fluttering, until our elbows locked and our arms threatened to fall off.

‘Hey,’ Mona said, drawing my attention back to her. ‘You’ll do it, right?’

I puffed out a breath, pushing my fork through the salad. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ she said, frowning. ‘She’s my sister.’

‘I’ll be the oldest one doing it.’

She smiled, and though it was full of sympathy, it wasn’t lacking in resolve. ‘All the more reason not to say no.’

I looked from her to Zaina. She was holding her breath, forever fearful of confrontation. But it was such a little thing, and Mona and I had been friends for a long time. I nodded my assent.

‘Excellent,’ Mona said, attacking her salad with relish now that things had been sorted. ‘It’ll be fun.’ I scoffed at her attempt to console me. We’d been to a lot of weddings; she wasn’t fooling anyone. ‘Okay,’ she continued, black eyes drifting up to the sky in thought for a moment. ‘You, Heba, Eman, and Fatima makes four from our side. The groom’s family can get the rest from their end. Did I tell you how my aunt called to remind me about it?’ Zaina and I shook our heads. ‘She calls and goes, “Mona, how many virgins have you found for the Yelwa?”’

Zaina nearly choked on her chicken, and my laugh caught the attention of the guys at the neighboring table. Mona leaned forward, and we followed suit. ‘I said to her, “I can find unmarried girls, but beyond that I make no promises.”’

The boys shifted their torsos towards us, leaning forward and back around each other for a better view at what had us laughing so hard. We pulled in even closer to one another, Zaina’s hand covering her mouth as she giggled uncontrollably. I shook my head at the nonsense our aunties were capable of speaking. Finally, we composed ourselves, calm and quiet in a moment, reduced to a dome of decorum, and Zaina asked Mona about her job. I wasn’t listening though; I kept thinking about what Mona’s aunt had said. I wondered what it would be like if the Yelwa cloth could somehow detect non-virgins, like if the fabric started to smoke when I held it. I imagined the pointing, the gasping, the shaking of heads as the fabric burned my fingers. I wondered how many girls it would smoke for; would I really be the only one?

Later that night I lay panting in my bed. There was a vise around my lungs, squeezing tight. It burned. I sucked in air through my nose and mouth, great big gulps, but it didn’t help. My lungs continued to sting like acid. I flicked on the lights, turned on some music, needing as much stimulation as possible. Maybe it would distract me from the sensations, from the certainty that I was, at that moment, dying.

There’s this lore, or perhaps it’s superstition. It’s about a demon called a yathoom who comes to you in the night. He sits on your chest, feet splayed in a squat, growing heavier and heavier until you wake because you can no longer breathe. Even waking will not save you; he’ll cling while you gasp and scratch at your breasts. When you feel on the brink, like you can’t take it anymore, the yathoom rolls off and back down to hell. He’s only supposed to visit on Thursdays, which is both arbitrary and unexplained.

I’ve had one for years. He adheres to no schedule and cannot distinguish day from night. His splayed feet bear claws, sunk into my chest beneath my armpits. He is a compression on my lungs that I can’t shake. Some days he gives me respite, curling on my diaphragm so I’m hardly aware of his presence, but it’s never long before he’s back, slathering my lungs with his black cement tongue. I tip my head back every so often, mouth open in a silent scream, but nothing startles him. He just hugs me tighter.

Sometimes I think my yathoom is my loneliness in form and function. Something my subconscious has obsessed over so much, it’s been made real, like that mythological monster who only exists because you believe in him. Maybe that’s true of all monsters, I’m not sure.