Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Author:Susan Muaddi Darraj [Darraj, Susan Muaddi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Cleaning Lentils

Hiba Ammar

On Wednesdays, Sits’s house smelled like lamb stew, and on Saturdays like chicken marinating in sumac and lemon, the meat so tender it fell apart under the mere prodding of the fork. But that was it for meat—just two days a week. On all the other days there were lentils, brown, green, or red, simmering eternally in her grandmother’s blue enameled pot, and the piercing scent of onions mingled with basil plants that grew in a row of pots on her flaking windowsill.

It made Hiba sick to her stomach. All of it.

The whole world conspired to make her fat. That’s what it had to be. All that damned food sticking to her ass, piling up on all the layers of fat. And when she thought of her big ass, her gigantic ass atop legs that had no calves, her ass below a flat-chested torso, it made her even more disgusted. God and the ancestors liked to prank her—they’d sent all the curves to the wrong place.

Sits had given her a bedroom on the third floor. Even up here, the floor was tiled, so her bare feet, which also looked thinner, froze when they touched it. She’d called Sitti Maha “Sits” since she was a baby—it was the joke in the family, but Hiba had never stopped using it. There wasn’t a single square inch of carpeting in the little townhouse, but tatreez draperies and pillows everywhere. Sits swept the whole house once a day; three times a week, she dumped a cup of lemon juice and a half-cup of olive oil into a bucket of soapy water, and mopped three floors of the house, plus the basement.

Sits looked like she’d stepped out of a different century. Every day, she’d drape a white scarf over her hair, which hung down her back in a thick gray rope. She even covered her hair when she cleaned, except then it was a bright green bandana that said “Mick’s Bike Shop.” She explained to Hiba, who had been horrified, that some nice boy in a black leather jacket had been handing them out on the street one day. She’d asked for one, and he smiled and gave it to her.

“He was laughing at you.”

“No. I don’t think so. He talked to me about this.” She pointed to the rough cross and the lamb inked on the inside of her wrist. “He wanted to know who did it,” she said and shrugged. “I told him in the old country, and maybe Jesus had one like it.”

“I think he thought you were silly.”

Sits shrugged, but she had a strange look on her face, like Hiba was a stranger.

She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Hiba, coming off her own humiliation, lingered on Sits’s ignorance of hers.

Seedo took care of the outside. Wasn’t much of an outside, though. Her parents’ lawn was huge, bisected by the most winding, curling driveway in Guilford. The front lawn of Sits and Seedo’s house was Thatcher Street, which had four potholes that the city promised to fix and never did.

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