Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [98]
But they were doing well in America. Many times Leda prepared me meals in their home. That was the only place she was without her hijab, and she looked very different. Her beautiful long hair swirled as she moved, and her mobile fece was filled with expression. Their small house was clean and calm, even with five children.
Our first meal together had been awkward. Leda served naan, shish kebabs and dolmas stuffed with rice, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. I knew that she had worked all week in the factory and then spent her weekend cooking this meal. I was embarrassed that she wouldn't allow me to help serve and that she wouldn't sit down with Ahmad and me for the meal. As the two of us ate and Leda served, Ahmad stated, "We Iraqis treat our women like queens."
Leda and Ahmad had an arranged marriage. However, they clearly loved and respected each other. For his time and place, Ahmad was actually a feminist. He cared for the kids while Leda learned English. When she talked about her current job at the dog food factory, he looked sorrowful. He said, "I want Leda to get an American degree."
Leda said her job was very difficult and unpleasant. Some of her coworkers were kind, but many were unintelligent racists. She felt humiliated by this work, but she would do anything for the family.
Ahmad worked hard, too. In Iraq he'd been an architect. Here he worked as a clerk at a convenience store and as a baker. He -believed girls and boys should be educated equally. He felt they could study together until junior high, but then they distracted each other. He argued that adolescents were unable to work in the presence of the opposite sex, a point I found hard to dispute.
Leda disapproved of public displays of affection and the way American women show their bodies. She said, "Women are jewels, not toys. They should respect themselves."
Both Ahmad and Leda felt women should be able to divorce and keep legal rights to their children. Neither believed men should be allowed to beat their wives. Still, they disapproved of the high divorce rate in America. Ahmad said, "In Iraq, marriage is a shirt you wear the rest of your life. If you tear it, you mend it."
Both Ahmad and Leda were unfailingly kind to me. In spite of their economic situation, they often gave me gifts, not only of the meals but of flowers or books by Iraqi writers. When I left, Ahmad would say to me, "I am your brother. Leda is your sister."
It was Leda who encouraged the women in the support group to talk openly to an outsider. Thanks to her, I had been greeted as a friend. I'd been coming for a while now and I approached the meeting with eagerness but also anxiety that my skills were not adequate to the sorrow of this group.
Tonight it was early June. I walked under linden trees, with their sweet aroma, and entered the community center. The women were waiting for me at a table with hot tea, nuts, and dried fruit.
The Afghani women had been in Lincoln only a few months. They had come to escape the brutal civil war, the repression of women by the Taliban, and the famine. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, it prohibited women from going to school, working, driving, or leaving home without a male relative. All women were ordered to be covered in "black tents."
The Afghani women were coming from a place where seven-year-old girls were sold as wives for a few bags of wheat; where women who taught girls to read, even in their own homes, could be killed; and where villages were invaded and all the men between seventeen and seventy were lined up and shot. They arrived from a place where families froze to death and all women's health