Ramadan Ramsey Read online

  He paused at the edge of the checkout counter to look into the mirror near a display of cheap sunglasses. His fresh haircut, a flattering fade, accentuated the best features of his naturally tanned face. The sharp lines of the cut darted at his temples, arrowing toward his marbled eyes, an unprecedented swirl of blues and greens and grays with flecks of white, as if Moneted by Providence in a random act of ocular Impressionism. Uncle Adad was sitting up on his stool behind the cash register waiting on customers, but Mustafa could feel his gaze. From his perch, Adad was aware of every movement in the store. His acute vigilance was all the surveillance system he needed. In his most ecstatic moments of observation, he went from merely seeing to being a seer, displaying a near-prophetic ability to predict what was about to happen in the store. During Mustafa’s first week at work he had demonstrated his skills by whispering what almost every customer was going to buy or, in more showy moments of predilection, to steal. Malik had the gift as well, and Mustafa sensed that his cousin, who was busy in the back mopping up a puddle of milk, and his uncle were exchanging a rippling, telepathic plea for him to stop primping in the mirror. Primping was necessary only if you were in pursuit of attention, and a particular kind of attention at that. They wanted him, so the tension of their unspoken prudence said to Mustafa, to take two steps away from the door, through which the potentially “bad business” girl had just exited, and finish his break inside, and then get his butt back to work. But their reticence said something else to Mustafa, for Uncle Adad could have simply dispatched him to the office for a roll of cash register receipt paper or the reading glasses he was always forgetting on his desk. Or Malik could have told him to come mop up the milk. They could have easily stopped him from going after Alicia—but they did not. In their hesitancy, Mustafa read a tacit encouragement. Uncle Adad had his beloved Aunt Zahirah; Malik had Sanaa, the pretty girl from Damascus, whom he was going to marry next year. The older men must have, without even realizing it, actually wanted their young male kin to sample the company of a woman, to test the power of his manliness. Mustafa assumed this to be true (and it was), and he stared out the window with water-lily-eyed want. Alicia had paused at the first island of gas pumps and was looking back at him. As he began walking out to meet her, Uncle Adad’s and Malik’s eyes lifted from their routine busyness and locked across the room, just in front of Mustafa. Their restraint, a mix of anxiety and permissiveness, held, and Mustafa took another step forward, and then another, moving gracefully through the caution tape of their affection.

  Alicia’s heart, like most hearts, could rarely be said to race, but what is the sudden vision of love approaching, if not an emotional approximation of the thrill of Churchill Downs? There is a galloping swiftness to young love. A loping and a lurching forward. A remarkable velocity of feeling. No wonder we still measure the force of great engines by the accumulated power of horses. We could quantify the pull of passion by it, too. Lust, even. Love—it wants to leave all of its rivals behind. To get there first. To win—and what purse grander than a human heart? Never mind that Alicia and Mustafa were in New Orleans, Louisiana. That it was December. No matter where you are when it happens, it’s as if you are in Louisville, Kentucky—in early May, in a big hat or a bow tie—cheering yourself on to victory.

  Alicia knew nothing of the famous Derby or its rituals, including the sipping of mint juleps, but whenever she saw or even thought of the dreamy-eyed foreigner from the Quicky Mart, she knew the sweet intoxication of desire. She knew nothing of saccharined and spearminted bourbon in silver cups. But nineteen and lonely—the existential equivalent of a fresh, fragrant leaf of mint being crushed into sugar—she was particularly vulnerable to the whiskey of romance. And it to her.

  Of course, it had been the disinhibiting effects of desire that had pressed Alicia, a somewhat shy girl who had been mostly “raised right,” as they say, to flirt with Mustafa in the first place. Red beans? Red beans! Where had that come from? She didn’t even know how to cook a pot of red beans—or anything else, really. Mama Joon had never been able to keep her in the kitchen long enough to learn how to cut an onion properly. In fact, she associated the smell of raw seasoning vegetables (onions, celery, garlic) with the hours and hours of time and labor it would take to cook whatever it was they were intended to flavor. A gumbo. A stew. Or, yes, a pot of beans. The impatience of her youth was incompatible with such rigors. But her little lie to Mustafa about cooking for him had set something simmering in him; she had seen it brewing in his eyes. As she watched him come out of the store right now, her mind shot through to a time when he would ask her about the meal she’d offered, and she’d have to confess her culinary incompetence. It would occur during some lighthearted, postcoital, pillow-talkish moment that had turned playful. Him: What! You lied to me? Her (giggling): I’m sorry. Neck nibbles of forgiveness. Penance? A non-negotiable submission to a round two.

  But first, here came Mustafa now, walking toward her with a gangly gait, emboldened by a catalytic hunger. Here she was chomping on another Lay’s potato chip, riveted by the fantasy of what today might do to tomorrow.

  The closer he got to her, the wider his grin became, as if she had the power to incite good humor. He stopped abruptly, for fear that if he took another step he would burst into laughter. Yes, he wanted to greet her with a smile, but if he was cackling uncontrollably, he would appear a fool. The pause was just the respite he needed to relax into the winsomeness with which a young charmer should step to a girl, and he bobbed his head back, chinning a handsome hello.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Alicia.”

  “I know.” He had heard someone call her name once, though he had forgotten how to pronounce it. “Hello . . . Alicia,” he said, trying out the enunciation for the first time, liking, without even realizing it, the familiar Al-essence on the tip of his tongue, the lingual affiliation of the girl with his god.

  “And you are . . . ,” she prompted him.

  “Who me?” He looked away, up at the $1.15 Regular gas sign, then back at her with an arched, accusatory right eyebrow. “Me . . . I am Skinny Israel.”

  “Skinny Who?” Now it was her turn to grin, mostly with incomprehension.

  “That name you call me.”

  She shook her head. “I never called you any name.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, stepping a little closer. “You say you want to cook for me—the red beans.”

  “Right,” she said, flinching with guilt.

  “Okay—and then you say I am the skinny country of the Jew.”

  She hunched her shoulders upon hearing what were to her Mustafa’s inscrutable words. He was speaking okay English, but they were still going to need an interpreter.

  “Skinny Israel . . . Skinny Israel . . . ,” he repeated. His voice had gone high-pitched, falsetto, mimicking her voice, succeeding just enough for her to untangle the last few syllables.

  “Oh, God!” She laughed, with the gusto that comes from being in on a joke. “No! Skinny . . . as . . . a . . . rail. It’s just something we say. ‘Skinny as a rail.’ I don’t even know what it really means. All I can think of is like a railroad track, maybe. Or, I don’t know, like streetcar tracks. You know, the rails are what the wheels roll on.” She put her hand out and sliced it forward through the air of confusion. “A rail is narrow. Skinny. Like you!”

  Streetcar tracks? He had ridden the St. Charles line one day shortly after coming to town. Poking his head out the window, he had felt like a bad little boy, though the breeze had kissed his face, absolving him of mischief. That is, until the driver had—Hey, you—brought him back to the accountability of adulthood. He closed his eyes now and envisioned the long, chugging ride from Canal Street to Audubon Park and back. He saw the heavy, grooved iron wheels nuzzling the tracks; the narrowness of his frame, his profile slight enough, no doubt, to fit snuggly into the metallic embrace of those wheels that transported passengers into and out of the heart of New Orleans. And his head fell back as his laughter, harmonizi
ng with the streetcar clanging in his head, drowned out his embarrassment. When he opened his eyes to Alicia’s animated delight, he wished he could have been more mortified, if that would have made her laugh harder.

  They were both still smiling when he said, “So you don’t like the skinny boys?”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “Ah, you say, you say . . .”

  His saying “say” was their cue not to say anything else, a license to look at each other—and feel. Language had distanced them, divided them with its wall of words. Action had brought them together. Close.

  They were only about a foot apart. Mustafa had never been this close to the brownness of a Black girl’s face, unless you counted the way he had sometimes almost touched his nose to a television or a computer screen to inhale the prettiness of the dark-skinned girl in Destiny’s Child, having ogled his way past Beyoncé to the relative exotica of Kelly Rowland. That’s who Alicia reminded him of. Beyoncé, with her Arabian glow, was too much like the beautiful Syrian women he knew, including his mother, to pique his interest; Kelly’s forthright foreignness, on the other hand, had seduced his exploratory impulse, her dark womanhood pointing his desire toward, well, a destination, intensifying his passion to the heights of a masculine quest: wanderlust. For, oh, there was a moment in the music video for their latest song, “Bills, Bills, Bills,” near the end, right at the 3:40 mark, where Kelly had a close-up when she said “you” as she pointed both of her index fingers directly at the camera, at you, at Mustafa—her lips puckered for as long as you cared to pause the scene on the computer. (No, he didn’t always end up going down corporate wormholes when he went exploring on Uncle Adad’s iMac.) And another close-up of her at 3:53 saying “think,” with one finger tapping her right temple and the other her left cheek in pantomimed pensiveness. The combination of the “you” and the “think” was a blend of sensuousness and contemplativeness he found immensely gratifying, and endlessly rewindable. He couldn’t help endowing Alicia with Kelly’s alluring complexity, and her proximity to him right now was a wonder, a real-life encounter with American-girl glamor. Only his natural chivalrousness—and a faint paralysis at being so near to her—kept him from reaching up to touch Alicia’s smooth brown face.

  The silver crucifix she was wearing shined up at him, mercifully giving him a reason to avoid her stare, and he let his eyes angle down at the fortuitously positioned Christ on a chain. A fleur-de-lis adorned each end of the cross, surrounding the martyred saint in a feminine embrace. Mustafa had seen this floral symbol all around New Orleans, and he assumed it held some significance he was unaware of, as did the letters, INRI, engraved above Jesus’s drooping head. The mystery of all that, nestled as it was in Alicia’s bosom, coalesced for him into something of a sacred lust. He felt helpless, dumb with desire. But what did it all mean? Swooning with hunger from the day’s fast and, more so, for her, he heard only one answer—Uncle Adad’s warning—love.

  Is he staring at my breasts? she wondered. Aww . . . his first real, if awkward, show of actually wanting her. She pinched the crucifix and twirled it between her fingers. Yes, he was probably just another boy about to run some game on her. Cute accent and comic mangling of the vernacular aside, Mustafa had all the makings of a Creole Don Juan, and she knew one of those when she saw one. She had fallen prey to the Seventh Ward boy/Sixth Ward girl passionfest before (the light-skinned-guy, dark-skinned-chick thing); indeed, it was her pattern, if she had one at all. Anthony Whoever, just last summer, her most recent “boyfriend”; she had mentally blocked his last name, if she had ever known it. Whatchamacallit Francis. It seemed that, somehow or another, they had all been named for saints, and her Catholicism had been her ruin. She’d lost her virginity to a boy named Martin whose mother would never even call him to the phone. It was as if the woman could hear too much melanin in her voice. But she didn’t want familial courtesy from this one, this Mr. Skinny Israel, or whatever his name was. She just wanted him.

  Alicia and Mustafa were meeting at the precise moment when young people stride out of adolescence toward the triumph, or tragedy, that is the fully formed self. Maybe love is only a means, a carrot dangled to insure forward movement. Time had jockeyed them into position; their momentum could not be stopped. The rules they were about to break—only seconds from now—were impossible for them not to break. Like records of speed and fortitude, like hearts, they were made to be broken.

  She let go of the crucifix, reached into the bag of Lay’s, and took out another potato chip. Mustafa’s eyes zoomed in on her hand—his desire converting to actual hunger. When she glanced up, his palpable craving inspired in her something like pity. She paused—instead of crunching into the chip, she extended it to him. A simple act of generosity, it was, in fact, a temptation. Of course, she was unaware of just how much she was complicating his life. He thought he knew—but he was wrong. Admirably, he shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  “I can’t . . .”

  But the way he said “I can’t” made her feel how much he wanted the potato chip. She also understood he meant that he shouldn’t, that eating the potato chip was forbidden. (Then, the darkest thought: What if—if he could deny himself the chip, he could deny himself her? Oh, no, there’d be none of that.) Maybe it was the seriousness of his tone, which conveyed regret, that allowed her to intuit the religious nature of his rejection of the chip. And, too, this hint of sacred denial may have induced her to do what she did—in the manner in which she did it.

  As if to prove a point, if only to herself—just because you couldn’t cook didn’t mean you couldn’t feed—she took the chip, wafer-like in its aura and dimensions, and lifted it up halfway between them, as if in offering. All her years of Catholicism—her entire life, really—had endowed her with full knowledge of the authority of this graceful gesture. Only she, since the age of seven, when she had celebrated the sacrament of her First Communion, had always been on the receiving end of this ritual, as the priest raised the metaphoric disk, the symbolic body of Christ, that most blessed of commodities, up to the needy parishioner. It felt as natural as breathing to Alicia, legitimized by centuries of faith and repetition, for her to complete the act and to expect Mustafa to participate in its conclusion.

  She didn’t even have to tell him to open up. When she brought the potato chip to his mouth, Mustafa’s lips parted swiftly, mechanically, like the mouth of one of those notorious vintage metallic banks. In part, it was a gasp, an inhalation of excitement, at the certainty of what was about to occur, at what he was already unable to stop from happening, and the slim opening was all Alicia needed to insert the sliver of crispy, savory sustenance into his mouth and rest it gently onto his welcoming tongue. Her thumb slid slowly against his lower lip as she began to pull her hand away, and the accompanying friction, viscous and sensual, exposed the incipient spindles of saliva already forming in response to his pleasure, lubricating the lazy withdrawal of her finger.

  His eyes closed in concert with his lips, and the potato chip melted against the roof of his mouth. Suddenly ravenous in its irreligiousness, his body worked a swift chemistry with the unexpected, intrusive sodium and carbohydrates. Who knew salt could taste so sweet! A digestive dizziness ensued, a swooning at once spiritual and physiological. Mustafa felt both lightheaded and lighthearted, his guilt at breaking the fast of Ramadan blurring with his communion with Alicia. There was something godly in his vertigo. What was the root of dizziness, after all, if not the supplication of an entire planet to a mighty universal force? And if the very ground upon which he stood was vulnerable to the pull of gravity, what chance did he, a mere man, have against the magnetism of a woman? If Earth had the humility to be turned by such force, who was he to deny nature? Not to succumb, if that were possible at all, would have been the real sin. This pronounced rotation of the planet upon its axis, this spinning in his head, felt as necessary as salvation.

  Alicia gripped Mustafa’s arm, steadying him. “You all right?”


  He opened his eyes to her quizzical face. “Me?” he said, before swallowing hard and clearing his throat. “I feel so good!”

  The official bad business of feeling good would be consummated two nights later, in the privacy of Alicia’s bedroom, with Mama Joon out working her hotel night shift. They would tiptoe around the rules of Islam and Ramadan, which Mustafa would explain to her; they would leap over the hurdles of her religion, which she would outline for him.

  “Does this make you a bad girl?” he asked after they had first made love. Alicia was lying on her back, wearing nothing but her crucifix, which he reached over and touched. Rubbing the hard metallic charm between his fingertips accentuated the softness that welcomed his knuckles as, one by one, they dimpled her breasts, forever commingling for Mustafa the two sensations.

  “That’s what confession is for,” she told him. “If no one was bad, the church would go out of business.”

  “Right,” he said. Of course, church was business, too! Mustafa liked Alicia’s way of thinking. He applied her logic to his religion as well. Would Ramadan be necessary if people were not sinners? Whatever was wrong with his accepting the potato chip from her was the thing at the core of the joy of Ramadan. The necessity for doing penance was a joy. The existence of a cleansing ritual, pointless unless you were dirty, was a joy. The promise of renewal was a joy. Forgiveness was a joy. And the bad business of making love to Alicia, which would persist for the entire season of Ramadan (and beyond), was, too, at least this year, the very reason for Mustafa’s Ramadan—and, yes, a joy! Every nightly session of passion they shared prepared her for confession and him for the next day of fasting. When, at the outset of the Catholic sacrament of forgiveness, she heard herself say to the priest, as the penitent must, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” she began to hear what was not intended in the overture to contrition. Rather, she heard the demand of the blessing as payment due for her sin. Mustafa experienced a similar reversal of meaning with regard to his daily fasting. The hours of daylight would tick by quickly, without his even noticing he had not eaten. Then he would gratefully consume his evening meal—iftar—not because he was starving, but to gain the strength to dine upon Alicia. She had become his real feast. Being without her was the fast he needed to break. When they held each other, enraptured, they felt as though they were reaching the pinnacle of fulfillment—and why shouldn’t they—each slaking a hunger that itself had been fed and fattened by faith.