Page 13 of Kiwi Gold
She was twisting that glorious hair into a rope despite her doubts, then doing some complicated woman-magic to knot it behind her head. “Come on,” I said again. “Let’s live dangerously. Why not? It’s New Year’s Eve, and we bought a ticket.”
6
THE HEART LINE
Laila
I thought,I’ll get my pashmina and my purse and my phone, I’ll text Poppy to tell her I’m leaving, and then I’ll walk home.But when we went back through the theater doors again, showing our wristbands along the way, the first person I saw, standing near the coat check, was a cop.
I grabbed my partner’s arm—I didn’t even know hisname.How could I not know that when it felt like I knew him?—and said, “Cop.Cop.”
He said, “It’s OK. We’re good.”
“I’m not letting you get arrested for helping me.” The cop had turned our way, hadn’t he? I thought so, though I wasn’t quite looking. “Come on,” I added, started to hurry in the direction opposite to the way the cop was facing, and hoped the man was following.
There was a tent draped with red and purple velvet at the opposite end of the lobby from the band. It had a hanging sign, a picture of a hand. Earlier, there’d been a queue here, but at the moment, there wasn’t. Perfect hiding place. “In here,” I told him, and wound my way through the brass-and-velvet-rope barriers and into the fabric doorway.
Inside, the light was dim, coming from flickering lanterns that were meant to look like oil and were actually electric, and the ceiling and walls were draped with purple and gold. A woman sat in the near-dark at a round table on the back wall, another lantern flickering beside her, casting a pool of light on a red brocade tablecloth. Tall and slim, she was dressed like the tent, her hair was wrapped in a shining cloth of gold, and her dark eyes, the only ones I’d seen unmasked tonight other than the policeman’s, were huge and luminous.
My mother’s eyes.
The head wrap was probably part of her costume, and the rest of it was a simple matter of robes and necklaces and golden hoop earrings, plus eyes made up to look larger than they were. But it didn’t feel like a costume. I felt safe in here, like it really was a refuge.
The woman didn’t say anything, just put out a graceful arm covered with thin gold bracelets, indicating two chairs across from her. I hesitated, then sat, and she said, “Cross my palm with gold and put your hand in mine, and I will read there what has been, and what is to come. What is within you to change, and the things that will never change, because they are your heart and your spirit and the desires that burn in you.”
Palmistry. That was what the sign with the hand had meant. And palmistry, like any kind of divination, washaram.I didn’t indulge in it, or not much. Sometimes, but just for fun. Call my relationship with it “complex.”
“Of course, I know I’m being too sensitive about Jessica coming to my party,” I’d told my mother on the day before my fourteenth birthday, doing my best to sound breezy and worldly-wise. “I’m a Cancer, though. We’remeantto be oversensitive.”
She’d drawn back like I’d slapped her, and the sunlight streaming through the windows of the ultra-modern house that had been her first design in New Zealand had lit up her dark hair, coiled behind her head as always and only uncovered here at home. “What is this?” she asked. “Divination, now? Only God knows your fate, and it is in God’s hands. If you study your lessons and work hard and are honest and kind, a good friend and a good daughter and a good Muslim, then you will have done your best in the world, and God will be merciful.Thatis what to know, not that you’re a Cancer.”
“I know it’s notreal,Mama,” I’d tried to explain. “It’s just for fun.” I didn’t offer up my heretical opinions on God, who didn’t seem nearly as important to my day-to-day fate so far as, say, working hard in school and possibly charming my dad, whose gruff exterior melted around my mum and, often enough, around me. And trying to be beautiful and mysterious, of course, something I couldn’t confess to my mother, because she seemed like she’d never had to try. So far, I was hopeless, but with my friend Poppy’s help, surely it was possible. Poppy always seemed to have confidence, even though she was a ginger.
My mother said, “Fun or not, a clever girl doesn’t tell everyone where her heart is soft. She saves that for her mother and father, for her sisters, perhaps, and later, for her husband. Surely, if this girl is so dreamy and sensitive, she knows to keep her secret self under the skin where it’s safe, as she covers her hair to hold her beauty safe, a treasure to be revealed only to family, and to her husband.”
I probably rolled my eyes, because in one of the lightning changes of mood that were part of her endless, effortless charm, she laughed. I laughed back and hugged her, and she put her two hands on my face and said, “And maybe this clever girl knows now not to tell her mother about every silly thing she talks about with her girlfriends, too. Customs. Who can say? All people are the same, deep down. We all want to belong to somebody. We all want to be good, to deal in the world with honor and dignity. We all love our children. The rest, the things on the surface that are different between us? That isn’t the most important.”
“You mean that you can be a good person and not be Muslim?” I asked. “Oh, the shock!” So daring and flippant, when I was a teenager and didn’t know anything.
She passed a hand over my own hair, still uncovered, “because only those things chosen freely please God.” Tied back to cover the nape of my neck, though, “a spot only your husband should see, not the boys on the street.” More contradiction. Maddening.
I adored my mother, I was bewitched by her casual sophistication, I was mortified by her sheer and unending different-ness, I was frustrated by her rules, and I despaired that I would ever be as beautiful or as fascinating as she was, all of that mixed up together.
She said, “Of course, silly bird. Are there no good people in New Zealand, then, other than Muslims? How could I live here if that were so? Only God knows how much our customs truly matter, but I’m happier with some of them. With others, not as much, perhaps. I still believe that God sees my heart and judges fairly. If God can’t do that, who can? As for divination, these horoscopes seem nothing but silly, but then, one must be silly when one is fourteen. What else would girls giggle about with their friends? But don’t tell me any more about it, please. And don’t tell your Baba, either.”
After she died, the questions and rebellion against the constraints of my parents’ religion, formerly pushing like water against a dike, gradually became a trickle once the dike sprang its first leak, and then a flow. By now, I was an uneasily balanced but mostly secular being. I’d chosen that path, and if I’d been wrong and there actually was such a thing as damnation, I was headed there already on greased skids. What was a little more sin?
I’d drunk champagne tonight. I’d been held by a strange man, pressed against the wall and against his body, and I’d felt the stirring there. In his body and, more disturbingly, in mine. It had felt shockingly, shamingly good to be held like that, exciting to the point of thrill, but wasn’t it still wrong, or at least dangerous?
Definitely dangerous. That was the real reason for those rules, maybe. That the world was dangerous, especially when your skin was thin and already bruised. Maybe my skin shouldn’t be thin and bruised, and maybe I should be as confident and sure as the women I saw around me every day, but … I wasn’t. Not quite. Not yet.
Goals.
The man beside me didn’t say anything, just reached into his jeans pocket for his wallet, drew out a twenty-dollar note, and put it into the woman’s hand.
“For you, then?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “For the lady.”
