The Twenty-Ninth Year Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Truth

  Transcend

  The Female of the Species

  Dirty Girl

  Armadillo

  Gospel: Texas

  Halfway to July

  The Socratic Method

  Oklahoma

  1999

  Gospel: Rumi

  New Year

  The Worst Ghosts

  Telling the Story Right

  Call Me to Prayer

  Gospel: Beirut

  Nineteen in Retrograde

  Pray Like You Mean It

  Not a Mosque

  You’re Not a Girl in a Movie

  Step One: Admit Powerlessness

  Tattler

  Common Ancestors

  Chaos Theory

  Honeymoon

  When I Bit into the Plum the Ants Flooded Out

  Instructions for a Wife

  Gospel: Newlyweds

  Gospel: Insomnia

  The Temperance (XIV) Card

  Even When I Listen, I’m Lying

  Step Eight: Make Amends

  A Love Letter to My Panic // A Love Letter to My Husband

  I’m Not Speaking First

  Step Four: Moral Inventory

  Either I’m Coming Back or I’m Not

  Unmarried

  The Honest Wife

  Turnpike // Ghost

  Self-Portrait with No More Wine,

  Step Two: Higher Power

  Gospel: Diaspora

  Wife in Reverse

  Heirloom

  I Can’t Tell Which Haircut in the Photograph Is Me

  Can I Apologize Now?

  Ordinary Scripture

  Dear Layal,

  On the Death of WWE Professional Wrestler Chyna

  Cliffhanger

  Aleppo

  Upstate I

  Upstate II

  Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Hala Alyan

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alyan, Hala, 1986– author.

  Title: The twenty-ninth year / Hala Alyan.

  Other titles: 29th year

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024865 (print) | LCCN 2018026008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328512727 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328511942 (trade paper) Classification: LCC PS3601.L92 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.L92 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024865

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © Caroyl LaBarge

  Author photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

  v1.0119

  FOR TALAL

  who always knows before I do

  Truth

  I’m allergic to hair dye and silver. Of the worlds,

  I love the Aztecs’ most of all, the way they lit fires

  in the gouged chests of men to keep the world spinning.

  I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.

  I will never be as beautiful as the night I danced in a garage,

  anorexic, decked in black boots, black sweater, black jeans,

  hip-hop music and a girl I didn’t know pulling my hips

  to hers. Hunger is hunger. I got drunk one night

  and argued with the Pacific. I was twenty. I broke

  into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar. I wasn’t twenty.

  In the winter of those years I kept Christmas lights

  strung around my bed and argued with the Italian landlady

  who lived downstairs about turning the heat off,

  and every night I wanted to drink but didn’t.

  What I changed, I could;

  what I couldn’t, I endured.

  DOROTHY VAUGHAN

  Transcend

  You tell me we must forgive the heat. Everyone is talking about the latest shooting.

  The city shimmies its indigo rooftops. A soldier couldn’t forgive his daddy. A sheriff wanted to chalk the pavement.

  In Aleppo a child white as a birthday cake, limp in her father’s fists. 600,000 dead. You must’ve added a zero by accident.

  I tug your pants to your ankles and make you speak God.

  There are a hundred videos of the same moment shot from a hundred different angles. I watch every single one.

  I let her pull the white out of you.

  The father looking the camera directly in the eye. Look, her name was. Who will catch him when his knees buckle. Look, the mortar grows on our houses like moss.

  The exile knows his bones are 206 instruments. There is a song in each one.

  I filmed the sky to show you the pale face that lives within it. See that eye? Ask it to love you.

  The Female of the Species

  They leave the country with gasping babies and suitcases

  full of spices and cassettes. In airports,

  they line themselves up like wine bottles.

  The new city twinkles beneath an onion moon.

  Birds mistake the pebbles of glass on the

  black asphalt for bread crumbs.

  If I drink, I tell stories about the women I know.

  They break dinner plates. They marry impulsively.

  When I was a child I watched my aunt throw a halo

  of spaghetti at my mother. Now I’m older than they were.

  In an old-new year, my cousin shouts ana bint Beirut

  at the sleeping houses. She clatters up the stairs.

  I never remember to tell her anything. Not the dream

  where I can’t yell loud enough for her to stop running.

  And the train comes. And the amar layers the stones

  like lichen. How the best night of my life was the one

  she danced with me in Paris, sharing a hostel bed,

  and how sometimes you need one knife to carve another.

  It’s raining in two cities at once. The Vendôme plaza

  fills with water and the dream, the fountain, the moon

  explodes open, so that Layal, Beirut’s last daughter,

  can walk through the exit wound.

  Dirty Girl

  See, I knew I’d make my mama cry if I stole the earring, and so into my pocket it went. I asked America to give me

  the barbecue. A slow dance with a cowboy. Pop goes the grenade. Pop goes the Brooklyn jukebox. Give me male hands, oleander white, hard, earnest, your husband in the back seat of his own car, my jeans shoved down, the toxic plant you named your child after, a freeway by the amusement park that jilted girls speed across, windows rolled down, screaming bad songs at the top of their lungs.

  After the new world. Before the New one. The Peruvian numerologist told me I’d be trailed by sevens until the day I died.

  Everything worth nicking needs an explanation: I slept with one man because the moon, I slept with the other because who cares, we’re expats, the black rhinos are dying, the subway pastors can’t make me tell the truth. Tonight

  Z isn’t eating, and five states away

  I’m pouring a whiskey

  I won’t drink.

  I count the green lights. Those blue-eyed flowers your father brought when I couldn’t leave my bedroom. The rooftop, the weather,
the subway empties its fist of me, the red salt of my fear. A chalky seven stamped on the pale face of the sleeping pill.

  What I mean to say is

  I’m divisible only by myself.

  Armadillo

  I know there was a boat. My mother, seventeen, her hair tangled in the sea breeze. She is sitting near the rudder. There is my father: mustached, cigarette-lipped, answering prime minister when anyone asked what he’d do with his life. Kuwait, early 1980s, and the world was as exquisite as it had ever been.

  Once, we went to New Orleans for vacation. We slunk through the swamp in a small boat and everyone saw an armadillo except my brother. He wept for it to reemerge. A family joke ever since.

  These things happen. My father said I love you; my mother kept the baby. Like a lighthouse during a nor’easter, theirs was a love filled with static. Easy to falsify.

  The children are three little houses. One built with wind, one with color, the third with brick. The windows aren’t windows at all.

  Years later, my brother became afraid on a rollercoaster and my father yelled at the operator—some Kansas kid—to make it stop. He did.

  Sometimes, I tell my brother, I wonder if I ever saw the armadillo myself.

  My mother is sitting in the basement of our Maine house. There is a blizzard and I’ve just learned the word for shelter in French. She is pregnant, and crying.

  Vierzon, three hours south of Paris. We all lie in the dark and watch the old stars with their arcade lights. We predict our fortune for the coming years. None of it comes true. I marry. Talal stops drinking. Miriam learns to turn her phone off. The Doha villa still makes me cry and it takes a decade to understand what my parents always knew: all the love in the world won’t buy you what you wanted in the first place.

  I’ve been working on the same joke for years. The punchline is you were happy all along.

  When Hezbollah captured those Israeli soldiers, my parents argued with guests, aunts and uncles, neighbors. They were two hearts of the same machine. They shut every room up.

  I’m flighty, yes, but every klepto is a romantic at heart. I’ve circled entire houses just to watch my mother’s cheek on my father’s shoulder. Each was the fever the other learned to live with. When my mother returned from Scotland with her graduation robe, my father rushed to the door murmuring my doctor, my doctor.

  Don’t tell me that it isn’t love. You haven’t seen the photographs. Their small, young faces. My mother wore white lace. My father clapped while the guests danced.

  What do we do with heartache? Tow it.

  I know there was a boat. Before my father slammed a car door to walk across a Midwestern highway. Before the Portland fight where my mother dropped a plate of lobster. Before did you hear him say habibti, my brother and I nudging each other at every kiss, each shifting cloud on the car rides home, an armadillo that may or may not have existed, this whole goddamn world the inch between their shoulders in the front seat.

  Gospel: Texas

  First grasshopper.

  The seventeen windows

  of that simulated

  colonial town,

  peering in every

  single one. Pretending

  the air we churn

  is butter. First valentine card.

  Poison ivy I

  never got. My grandmother

  asking the Burger King cashier

  for pommes frites.

  First shooting

  star. First silverfish. First carrot

  in snowball. Kansas on the

  weekends, the blade

  of I-35. Permission slips.

  My mother

  dressing me as a

  Pilgrim for a school trip.

  Arabic word for girl

  longer than

  English word for

  no.

  Halfway to July

  They call it heaven’s intersection: the dry grass soliciting rain like loose change, a Budweiser can flattened beneath someone’s boot, the train’s lonely call for itself.

  All the exit routes: someone else’s jeep, the bottle of pills, your daddy’s DNA.

  I kept the bullet for the wrong reasons; I wanted people to ask. Like a good anorexic, invisible and magnified at the same time.

  What do we know of Oklahoma? The flatness.

  The tyranny of a wind falling in love with itself.

  Through the windows of finer houses, I saw lives trudging like bison toward the thaw.

  There are things I could tell you. I lost the bullet. I once saw birds peck a house until a woman came out. Every time an officer asks my name I lie.

  Have you heard the one about never going home again? The morning always rises on that awful house and the birds cry and you call me girl and I let you.

  The Socratic Method

  That last morning of December, I asked my father if he ever has nightmares. My father said no. He’s as lonely as Wyoming, a perfect country for no one to see. Baba, did you want the tailgating, the silver Dodge, the dog you fed waffles? No wonder I can only love two men at a time. No wonder I threw away every instrument I touched. In the mornings, I clutch my chest and chant God forbid God forbid. I have dreamt your death a thousand times. You were born for this, to haggle over café tables, lining up for the donut peaches in Vierzon’s market. It takes a romantic to leave a city; I understand this now. Those cardboard boxes, how they opened faithfully for you, little brown hearts, how they carried everything you would ask of them.

  Oklahoma

  For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land, and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home—mirame, mama—but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.

  1999

  I had lived in a desert before. I did. I forgot the za’atar my mother said she fed me in Iraq. I forgot my grandmother’s house in Soo-ree-yaa. There I was, eating the prickly pears even though they always made my tongue itch. A teacher in Texas told me I’d never learn how to pronounce my own name in English and she was right. I wept until my mother took me to McDonald’s. In that house I was the only child. I danced in the hot winter. In ten years, a boy will leave marks on my arm because I call him a redneck. I stole a Barbie pink windbreaker from the cubbyhole at school. There was nothing in the pockets. Even before the sun rose, my father went outside to smoke and watch the birds fly east. He loved the ugly ones best of all.

  I had never seen true desert before: cactus beds and milk-white sand, sand that ran for days, the lipstick-red of dusk. There I was, digging through piles of library books to steal the best ones, lumping my bed-sheets into a mouth to kiss. I wasn’t quick enough to stop the boy’s hand under my shirt. I starved myself to starve my mother. In that house we made a house for each of us, the cornfields a row of brunettes after the winter drought. In ten years, a man will fall in love because he recognizes the Midwest in me. He will leave a note in the pleat of my coat. When the final box was taped up, my father eyed the house once more before turning back toward the Dodge, destined to do it all over again.