Page 27 of Kiwi Sin
On a cold, sunny Wednesday in mid-June, Aisha turned to face me in her chair before the start of Biology and said, “I’m disappointed in you.”
My head jerked up. “What? I’m sorry, what …”
She laughed. “I keep waiting for you to invite me to your birthday, and you never do it. It’s onSunday.I invited you tomybirthday, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was lovely.” A family dinner, with savory dishes I’d never encountered and longed to know how to cook. I’d sat with her little brothers, her mum and dad, and her aunt and uncle andtheirkids, all of them singing a song to Aisha and then eating a yellow cake with raspberry filling and buttercream icing. The cake had had Aisha’s name spelled out on the top in different-colored icing, and candles stuck into it. It wasn’t as moist as when you got the time exactly right, but it was so pretty, and the candles were beautiful.
Afterward, I’d “slept over.” Sleeping over was a thing, it seemed, though Aisha’d had to explain it to me. Ateenagething, which was what we were meant to be.
It was like time zones, when it was breakfast time to you and the middle of the night to somebody else. In Mount Zion, I’d have been a woman for a year now, sleeping in my own room with my husband, getting ready to have a baby. Here, I’d be a child myself for years yet, because that was what “teenager” meant. That you weren’t grown, and you weren’t even expected to work.
“But why would you do that?” I’d asked Aisha. “Sleep over? If you have a bed at home?”
“Because it’s more fun,” she’d said. “Like having a sister to tell secrets to, in the dark. You never did that?”
“No. Ihadsisters to tell secrets to in the dark. And everybody had one bed. You’d have to swap, and that would be odd, sleeping with somebody else’s family. You can’t …”
“Oh,” she’d said. “You can’t look at boys other than your brothers, and you’re all in the same room. Sogross.”
Now, she said, “So why haven’t you invited me?”
I didn’t know what to say. I finally stammered out, “I don’t … there won’t … I’ve never had a birthday like that. There isn’t much … any celebrating.”
“Why not?” she asked. “People are people. Doesn’t everybody want to make a big deal of their birthday? It’s your special day!”
I had to think about it. “You aren’t meant to be special at Mount Zion. It’s a community. And anyway,” I went on, trying to joke about it, the way other people joked about their lives, “with everybody eating together, it would be cake every day, and singing, too. There’d have to be a woman specially assigned just to make birthday cakes!”
Aisha said, “Right. Passing over the awfulness of Mount Zion—you’ve never had a proper birthday?Ever?Then I’m going to do it. I’m going to make you a birthday cake, and come over and eat it with you. That is, if you’re allowed to invite me. I mean, you’re not actually a prisoner or anything, just because you’ve never invited me before, when you’ve been at my house five times?”
I said, completely awkwardly, “It’s my family’s monthly lunch on Sunday, though. There’ll be twelve people already.” Just twelve, because Dorian had texted Daisy that he and Chelsea “couldn’t make it.” The stain of Mount Zion, was what that was. It was too different, toowrong,for Chelsea to witness, and she was married to Dorian! What would anybody else think?
Aisha said, “Won’t your mum—wait, your sister, or whoever, cook for one more person if you ask? My mum always says one more doesn’t matter. Especially if I bring the cake, though it’ll have to be two cakes, probably, for thirteen people. I wish I knew how to make cake. I’ll ask Mum to teach me. She’ll faint with gratitude that I’m finally interested. I won’t come if you don’t want me, but—really? You don’t want me?”
I said, “I’ll be the one cooking dinner, but I can’t just—”
“On yourbirthday?”Now, she was staring.“This story just keeps getting worse and worse.”
Class started then, and we had to stop talking. I worried about it all day, and that night at dinner, which Daisy had cooked this time and which we were eating in the main house, I said, sliding into a break in the conversation—Frankie had been having a “passionate discussion” with Gray about labor standards, which I was barely following— “Excuse me. Gray?”
“Yes?” he asked. “Are you going to explain the unintended consequences of a higher minimum wage vis-à-vis the rising cost of childcare, contrasted with the benefit of lifting more of the population out of poverty?”
“Oh,” I said. “No. It was a different question.”
“Thank God,” he said. “Let’s have it.”
“Do you think I could have a friend to lunch on Sunday?” I asked.
“You’re the one cooking it,” he said. “I’d say that gives you at least one invitation. Male friend or female friend?”
“I wouldn’t—” I began to say in shock, then realized he was joking and switched to, “Female friend, of course. My friend Aisha from school. She wants to bring—”
Daisy and Frankie were looking at me in surprise. Frankie said, “You want to bring herhere?During familylunch?Aunt Constance and Radiance are still wearing long dresses! Radiance is still wearing hercap.Could itbeany more humiliating to have somebody else witness?”
I said, “Aisha wears a hijab. So maybe it won’t seem as odd.”
Gray said, “This will be an interesting cultural exchange. You said she wanted to bring something. What kind of thing? A copy of the Koran? Testing Aaron’s sophistication level, possibly.”
“You realize,” Daisy said, “that Muslims don’t eat pork.”
