Amreekiya by Lena Mahmoud

Author:Lena Mahmoud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2018-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia never announced Amtu Samia’s pregnancy, at least not to us kids. She just started showing fast. She hadn’t gained much weight, but she had been so thin before that her protruding belly stood in great contrast to her skinny arms and legs. As she entered her second trimester, she looked better than she had before; her body and face were filling out, her straight chestnut hair came in thicker, her skin showed some color.

It was the first time I noticed in over three years of living with her that Hanan looked a lot like Amtu Samia. Before I only noticed the early lines that framed Amtu’s mouth and her sallow skin.

I didn’t think it was possible, but she became even lazier when pregnant. I used to only clean and cook, but now I had to bring wet washcloths for her to put on her forehead and bring food up to her bedroom when she was feeling too tired to get up.

“I want to have a little sister so I can be like Isra to her,” Hanan said one day while she rested her head on her mother’s belly, watching an Abdel Halim Hafez movie. Amtu Samia’s pregnancy hormones made one of her few consolations watching all the Hafez movies she owned and having her relatives in Jordan send her more nearly every month.

“No, a son will be better,” Amtu told her daughter. “There’s too many women in this house already.” She looked over at me with her eyes narrowed.

Amtu got her wish. She was having a boy.

And that’s when Amu Nasser’s interest in the baby awakened. He spoke about his plans for this son to go to an Ivy League school, which Amu had dreamed of for himself since his childhood in Jerusalem, but he ended up “only” going to Berkeley. He said that this boy would follow in his older brother’s footsteps, though he didn’t seem to believe that part of it. Rasheed was just about to start eighth grade, but he had been getting into a lot of trouble, and his grades were dismal.

Amu hadn’t yet resigned himself to having a loser for a son, an oldest son no less. He would lecture Rasheed about how he would soon be a man and had to act like one. Amu Nasser would look at his son’s quarterly report cards and sigh and fuss about them, but he wouldn’t yell or name-call the way he did with me. “Do you want your little brother to see you this way, see you with these bad grades going to a community college?” he would say to Rasheed.

Rasheed would shrug and say, “He won’t even know anything when he’s born. What’s he gonna care about my grades?”

Amu gave him countless lectures about how he had risen from a poor family in Jerusalem and worked his way to Berkeley, where he got his law degree. “I had no money, no nothing. I never slept more than three hours every night.

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