Zeitoun Page 6

  Zeitoun pulled up and parked the van on the street in front of the house. Kathy watched him approach. She never doubted his ability to care for himself in any situation, but now her heart was jumping. She was leaving him to fend for himself, leaving him to chop holes in the attic with an axe? It was insane.

  He and Kathy stood in the driveway, as they had many other times when she and the family were leaving and he was staying.

  “Better hurry,” Zeitoun said. “Lot of people leaving at once.”

  Kathy looked at him. Her eyes, much to her own frustration, teared up. Zeitoun held her hands.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. People are making a big deal for no reason.”

  “Bye, Daddy!” Aisha sang from the back seat.

  The kids waved. They always waved, all of his children, as he stood on the driveway. None of this was new. A dozen times they had lived this moment, as Kathy and his children drove off in search of sanctuary or rest, leaving Zeitoun to watch over his house and the houses of his neighbors and clients all over the city. He had keys to dozens of other houses; everyone trusted him with their homes and everything in them.

  “See you Monday,” he said.

  Kathy drove away, knowing they were all mad. Living in a city like this was madness, fleeing it was madness, leaving her husband alone in a home in the path of a hurricane was madness.

  She waved, her children waved, and Zeitoun stood in the driveway waving until his family was gone.

  * * *

  Zeitoun set out to finish securing the rest of his job sites. The air was breezy, the low sky smudged brown and grey. The city was chaotic, thousands of cars on the road. Traffic was worse than he expected. Brake lights and honking, cars running red lights. He took streets that no one fleeing would use.

  Downtown, hundreds of people were walking to the Superdome carrying coolers, blankets, suitcases. Zeitoun was surprised. Previous experiments using the stadium as shelter had failed. As a builder, he worried about the integrity of the stadium’s roof. Could it really withstand high winds, torrential rain? You couldn’t pay him enough to hide there from the storm.

  And anyway, in the past it had been little more than a few hours of squealing winds, some downed trees, a foot or two of water, some minor damage to fix once the winds had passed.

  He already felt good. New Orleans would soon be largely vacated, and being in the empty city always felt good, at least for a day or two. He continued to make his rounds, secured the last few sites, and arrived home just before six.

  Kathy called at six-thirty.

  She was stuck in traffic a few miles outside the city. Worse, between her own confusion and the unprecedented volume of cars, she had gone the wrong way. Instead of taking the I-10 west directly to Baton Rouge, she was on I-10 heading east, with no way to correct her error. She would have to cross Lake Pontchartrain and swing all the way back through Slidell and across the state. It was going to add hours. She was harried and exhausted and the trip had barely begun.

  Zeitoun was sitting at home, his feet up on the table, watching TV. He made a point of telling her so.

  “Told you so,” he said.

  Kathy and the kids were expected at her brother’s house for dinner, but at seven o’clock she’d traveled less than twenty miles. Just short of Slidell, she pulled into a Burger King drive-through. She and the kids ordered cheeseburgers and fries and got back onto the road. A little while later, a foul odor overtook the Odyssey.

  “What is that?” Kathy asked her kids. They giggled. The smell was fecal, putrid. “What is that?” she asked again. This time the girls couldn’t breathe they were laughing so hard. Zachary shook his head.

  “It’s Mekay,” one of the girls managed, before collapsing again into hysterics.

  The girls had been sneaking the dog pieces of their cheeseburgers, and the cheese was clogging her pipes. She’d been farting for miles.

  “That is awful!” Kathy wailed. The kids giggled more. Mekay continued to suffer. She was hiding under the seat.

  They passed Slidell and soon met up with I-190, a smaller road Kathy figured would have less traffic. But it was just as bad, an endless stream of brake lights. Ten thousand cars, twenty thousand lights, she guessed, extending all the way to Baton Rouge or beyond. She had become part of the exodus without entirely registering the enormity and strangeness of it. A hundred thousand people on the road, all going north and east, fleeing winds and water. Kathy could only think of beds. Where would all these people sleep? A hundred thousand beds. Every time she passed a driveway she looked at the home longingly. She was so tired, and not even halfway there.

  She thought again of her husband. The images she’d seen on the news were absurd, really—the storm looked like a white circular saw heading directly for New Orleans. On those satellite images the city looked so small compared to the hurricane, such a tiny thing about to be cut to pieces by that gigantic spinning blade. And her husband was just a man alone in a wooden house.

  Zeitoun called again at eight o’clock. Kathy and the kids had been on the road for three hours and had only gotten as far as Covington—about fifty miles. Meanwhile, he was watching television, puttering around the house, enjoying the cool night.

  “You should have stayed,” he said. “It’s so nice here.”

  “We’ll see, smart guy,” she said.

  Though she was exhausted, and was being driven near-crazy by her flatulent dog, Kathy was looking forward to a few days in Baton Rouge. At certain moments, at least, she was looking forward to it. Her family was not easy to deal with, this was certain, and any visit could take a wrong turn quickly and irreparably. It’s complicated, she would tell people. With eight siblings, it had been turbulent growing up, and when she converted to Islam, the battles and misunderstandings multiplied.

  It often started with her hijab. She’d come in, drop her bags, and the suggestion would come: “Now you can take that thing off.” She’d been a Muslim for fifteen years and they still said this to her. As if the scarf was something worn under duress, only in the company of Zeitoun, a disguise she could shed when he was not around. As if only in the Delphine household could she finally be herself, let loose. This was actually the command her mother had given the last time Kathy had visited: “Take that thing off your head,” she’d said. “Go out and have a good time.”

  * * *

  There were times, however, when her mother’s loyalty to Kathy trumped her issues with Islam. Years earlier, Kathy and her mother had gone to the DMV together to have Kathy’s license renewed. Kathy was wearing her hijab, and had already received a healthy number of suspicious looks from DMV customers and staff by the time she sat down to have her picture taken. The employee behind the camera did not disguise her contempt.

  “Take that thing off,” the woman said.

  Kathy knew that it was her right to wear the scarf for the photo, but she didn’t want to make an issue of it.

  “Do you have a brush?” Kathy asked. She tried to make a joke of it: “I don’t want to have my hair all matted for the photo.” Kathy was smiling, but the woman only stared, unblinking. “Really,” Kathy continued, “I’m okay with taking it off, but only if you have a brush …”

  That’s when her mother jumped to the rescue—in her way.

  “She can wear it!” her mother yelled. “She can if she wants to!”

  Now it was a scene. Everyone in the DMV was watching. Kathy tried to diffuse the situation. “Mama, it’s okay,” she said. “Really, it’s okay. Mama, do you have a brush?”

  Her mother barely registered Kathy’s question. She was focused on the woman behind the camera. “You can’t make her take it off! It’s her constitutional right!”

  Finally the DMV woman disappeared into the back of the office. She returned with permission from a superior to take the photo with Kathy wearing her scarf. As the flash went off, Kathy tried to smile.

  Growing up in Baton Rouge, it was a crowded house, f
ull of clamor and extremes. Nine kids shared a one-story, 1,400-square-foot home, sleeping three to a room and squabbling over one bathroom. They were content, though, or as content as could be expected, and the neighborhood was tidy, working-class, full of families. Kathy’s house backed up against Sherwood Middle School, a big multiethnic campus where Kathy felt overwhelmed. She was one of a handful of white students, and she was picked on, pushed around, gawked at. She grew to be quick to fight, quick to argue.

  She must have run away from home a dozen times, maybe more. And almost every time she did, from age six or so on, she ran to her friend Yuko’s house. It was just a few blocks away, on the other side of the high school, and given that she and Yuko were among the few non–African American kids in the neighborhood, they had bonded as outsiders. Yuko and her mother Kameko were alone in their house; Kameko’s husband had been killed by a drunk driver when Yuko was small. Even though Yuko was three years older, she and Kathy grew inseparable, and Kameko was so welcoming and dedicated to Kathy’s well-being that Kathy came to call her Mom.

  Kathy was never sure why Kameko took her in, but she was careful not to question it. Yuko joked that her mom just wanted to get close enough to Kathy to bathe her. As a kid Kathy didn’t like baths much, and they weren’t a great priority in her house, so every time she was at Yuko’s, Kameko filled the tub. “She looks greasy,” Kameko would joke to Yuko, but she loved to make Kathy clean, and Kathy looked forward to it—Kameko’s hands washing her hair, her long fingernails tickling her neck, the warmth of a fresh, heavy towel around her shoulders.

  After high school Kathy and Yuko grew closer. Kathy moved into an apartment off Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, and they began working together at Dunkin’ Donuts. The independence meant everything to Kathy. Even in her small apartment off a six-lane interstate, there was a sense of order and quiet to her life that she had never known.

  A pair of Malaysian sisters used to come into the shop, and Yuko began talking to them, questioning them. “What does that scarf mean?” “What do you see in Islam?” “Are you allowed to drive?” The sisters were open, low-key, never proselytizing. Kathy had no real inkling that they had made a great impression on Yuko, but Yuko was captivated. She began reading about Islam, investigating the Qur’an. Soon the Malaysian sisters brought Yuko pamphlets and books, and Yuko delved deeper.

  When she caught on to how serious Yuko was about it, it drove Kathy to distraction. They’d both been brought up Christian, had gone to a rigorous Christian elementary school. It was baffling to see her friend dabbling in this exotic faith. Yuko had been as devout a Christian as walked the Earth—and Kameko was even more so.

  “What would your mom think?” she asked.

  “Just keep an open mind,” Yuko said. “Please.”

  A few years passed, and Kathy, through a series of missteps and heartbreaks, was divorced and living alone with Zachary, who was less than a year old. She was renting the same apartment off Airline Highway and working two jobs. In the mornings she was a checkout clerk at K&B, a chain drugstore on the highway. One day the manager of Webster Clothes, a menswear store across the road, had come into the drugstore and, admiring Kathy’s ebullient personality, asked her if she’d be willing to quit K&B or, if not, take a second job at Webster. Kathy needed the money, so she said yes to the second job. After finishing in the early afternoon at K&B, she would walk across the highway to Webster and work there until closing. Soon she was working fifty hours a week and making enough to cover health insurance for herself and Zachary.

  But her life was a struggle, and she was looking for some order and answers. Yuko, by contrast, seemed peaceful and confident; she’d always been centered, so much so that Kathy had been envious, but now Yuko really seemed to have things figured out.

  Kathy began borrowing books about Islam. She was just curious, having no particular intention to leave the Christian faith. At first she was simply intrigued by the basic things she didn’t know, and the many things she’d wrongly presumed. She had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible—Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testament (referred to as the Tawrat, or the Law), the Psalms (the Zabur), and the New Testament (Injeil). The fact that Islam acknowledged these books was revelatory for her. The fact that the Qur’an repeatedly reaches out to the other, related faiths, knocked her flat:

  We have believed in God

  and what has been sent forth to us,

  and what was sent forth to Abraham,

  Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob,

  and the Tribes

  and what was given the Prophets

  from their Lord;

  we separate and divide not

  between any one of them;

  and we are the ones who submit to Him.

  She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?

  And Muhammad. She’d been so misinformed about Him. She’d thought He was the actual god of Islam, the one whom Muslims worshiped. But he was simply the messenger who related the word of God. An illiterate man, Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), who related to him the words of God. Muhammad became the conduit for these messages, and The Qur’an, then, was simply the word of God in written form. Qur’an meant “Recitation.”

  There were so many basic things that defied her presumptions. She’d assumed that Muslims were a monolithic group, and that all Muslims were made of the same devout and unbending stock. But she learned that there were Shiite and Sunni interpretations of the Qur’an, and within any mosque there were the same variations in faith and commitment as there were in any church. There were Muslims who treated their faith lightly, and those who knew every word of the Qur’an and its companion guide to behavior, the Hadith. There were Muslims who knew almost nothing about their religion, who worshiped a few times a year, and those who obeyed the strictest interpretation of their faith. There were Muslim women who wore T-shirts and jeans and Muslim women who covered themselves head to toe. There were Muslim men who modeled their lives on the life of the Prophet, and those who strayed and fell short. There were passive Muslims, uncertain Muslims, borderline agnostic Muslims, devout Muslims, and Muslims who twisted the words of the Qur’an to suit their temporary desires and agendas. It was all very familiar, intrinsic to any faith.

  At the time, Kathy was attending a large evangelical church not far from her jobs. Though not always full, it could seat about a thousand parishioners. She felt a need to connect with her faith; she needed all the strength she could find.

  But there were things about this church that bothered her. She was accustomed to the kind of fiery preaching that the church offered, the extremes of showmanship and drama, but one day, she thought, they crossed a line. They had just passed the collection plates, and after they had gathered and counted the funds donated, the preacher—a short man with a rosy face and a mustache—seemed disappointed. His expression was pained. He couldn’t hold it in. He chastised the congregation calmly at first, and then with increasing annoyance. Did they not love this church? Did they not appreciate the connection this church created with their lord Jesus Christ? He went on and on, shaming the congregants for their miserly ways. The lecture lasted twenty minutes.

  Kathy was aghast. She’d never seen the collection counted during a Sunday service. And to ask for more! The congregants were not wealthy people, she knew. This was a working-class church, a middle-class church. They gave what they could.

  She left that day shaken and confused by what she’d seen. At home, after putting Zachary to bed, she turned again to the materials Yuko had given her. She flipped through the Qur’an. Kathy wasn’t sure that Islam was the way, but she knew that Yuko had never misled her before, that Yuko was the most grounded and sensible person she knew, and if Islam was
working for her, why wouldn’t it work for Kathy? Yuko was her sister, her mentor.

  Kathy struggled with the question of faith all week. She lived with the questions in the morning, at night, all day through work. She had just started her shift at Webster one day when a familiar man walked in. Kathy recognized him immediately as one of the preachers at the church. She came over to help him with a new sport coat.

  “You know,” he said, “you should come to our church! It’s not far from here.”

  She laughed. “I know your church! I’m there all the time. Every Sunday.”

  The man was surprised. He hadn’t seen her before.

  “Oh, I sit in the back,” she said.

  He smiled and told her that next time he’d look for her. He made it his business to make sure everyone felt welcome.

  “You know,” Kathy said to him, “this must be a sign from God, seeing you here.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  She told him about her crisis, how she had been disappointed with aspects of the Christianity she knew, in some of the things she’d seen, in fact, at his own church. She told him that she had actually been considering converting to Islam.

  He was listening closely, but he didn’t seem worried about losing a member of the congregation.

  “Oh, that’s just the devil toying with you,” he said. “He’ll do that, try to tempt you away from Christ. But this’ll only make your faith stronger. You’ll see come Sunday.”