Ice-Cream Black & Beige

What a hot, dry gargantuan summer!

Aliya sat in the back of the bus, her veil forming a line of perspiration at the lining of her forehead. A sweat mustache had already decorated her upper lip and she contemplated whether to wipe it with her fingers and risk smudging her foundation or wait for it to dry on its own.

The man sitting next to her gave her dirty looks. It must be the veil, she thought miserably as she tightened her grip on her backpack. She was on her way to visit her mother at the north east part of the city, a manicured, upper state avenue where she could easily separate the smell of roses from geraniums. Her visit was expected to not take more than one hour, despite wishing she could stay longer. Her father lingered at the other end of the world; in the darkest alley of a forgotten neighborhood. They lived in a trailer park, a ghetto of sorts, where the less fortunate races segregate to stir away trouble and to avoid making contact with the upper-class citizens. Somehow, the thought made her feel more like a side dish than a human.

“This damn weather is killin’ me.”

Aliya glanced at the fancy woman who wore mismatching clothing items and kept fanning herself. She wondered why a woman with pearl earrings would be taking the bus just like normal people.

“Fake pearls,”

Aliya stared right at the creepy ass hater who had been eyeing her all day in wonder. Did he just talk to her?

“Replicas of originals. It’s all ceramic in that dogeared end of hers! Not more than a few cents.”

Aliya didn’t know how to react to this sudden invasion of privacy. She nodded at the guy and watched as the bus stopped to engulf more passengers.

That’s when she saw the ice-cream man.

He was the last to enter and the only one who didn’t find a place to sit. His hair was a mass of mahogany and gold. A tattoo of a grizzly bear in action was embroidered on the right side of his neck. As he licked his way through an ice-cream cone –of some bizarre flavor, it seemed, unless they make beige and black flavors these days- she imagined his slippery tongue working its way down her throat.

“His what?!! How could I even…”

Aliya was a Muslim, and a devout one at that. She prayed five times a day. Never missed a prayer no matter how that cost her in terms of getting teased at school or leaving the soup to brew longer than it should. To her, praying had been more than reciting verses from the Koran. It was an escape. Some people escaped by reading books or watching reality TV. For Aliya, it was praying. 

While praying, her mind could drift off to all the good things that used to be in her life; her mother’s chicken enchilada, her Dad’s genuine smile, the day Deena –their neighbor back in the days when her parents were still together- smiled at her and planted a cold, damp kiss on the tip of her chin. She knew that what Deena did was wrong by her code of ethics, but she didn’t mind. She tried to analyze it on the basis of sisterly love or strengthening bonds of humanity. Prayer also made it seem right, so right.

While praying, sometimes Aliya skipped the regular verses and mumbled random stuff to Allah. She knew He would be listening at that particular moment, especially if it was Dawn prayer or Twilight prayer, so she would tell Him how she hated Jason, who always pulled her veil and called it a turban or how she wished she could have Melissa Janssen’s body without having to cut down on her daily pasta intake. Sometimes she would question why He made her mother turn her back on her Dad, but one look at his drunk, sorry ass and she knew. Aliya didn’t need a god to tell her what a loser her dad was and her mother wasn’t meant for a life in Loserville.

Ice-cream man sat down when the Lady with Fake Beautiful Pearls left. He was still licking his way through the ice-cream and Aliya felt her throat dry out like a pile of wood ready to be thrown into a gaping wide furnace. Ice-cream man must’ve sensed it because he smiled and offered her a taste.

“Try it, unless you’re a germophobe,” he said with a wink.

Aliya was amazed by his stricken voice. It was not a child’s yet not really a man’s voice. It could be anybody’s voice. Hell, it could even be her cousin Khadija’s voice. She was never icky when she had to drink after a friend or take a bite after her Dad devoured half off a sandwich then threw away the rest in favor of a bottle of liquor. She brought the scoop to her mouth. The cone felt warm and sticky from where Ice-cream man’s hand imprint had been. She closed her mouth on the top of the scoop, imitating a scene she once saw in a porn movie that one of her male cousins sneaked into a sleepover back in the good days. She remembered a woman circling a dick with her tongue then closing her mouth around it, sealing it with her breath. She remembered running from the room while her cousins –on her mother’s side of the family- went hysterical. She barraged in while her mother had tea with the ladies and cried into her lap.

“I don’t want to sleep at Aunt Roberta’s house again, Mama.”

“Why, dumpling?”

“Cuz Angel is showing us a film where a woman is eating a man out!”

Aliya blinked away dense, nostalgic tears and concentrated on the task at hand.

The taste of the ice-cream struck her as odd. She shook her head and looked at mahogany hair, helplessly.

“Licorice and malt. Just go through with it and you’re gonna fall in love. It’s a fucking addiction!”

“Why did you choose the bear on your neck?” she asked -her mouth numb from the bizarreness of taste.

“Why are you covering your head?” He leaned into her and she looked down, blushing. The ice-cream thickened as it made its way down her throat.

“You go first,” he said.

She looked up, puzzled. But as she saw the eager expression on his face she realized he was as curious as she had been.

“It’s a religious thing.”

“What does it symbolize?”

“Chastity. Virtue.”

“These are good things?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She pointed at the snarling bear again and asked, “What about you? What do you symbolize?”

“Oh, it’s just my spirit animal. It’s supposed to refer to a lot of crappy qualities that I happen to acquire none of but as far as I know, this animal knows something about me that I ought to figure out.”

“How?”

“You know the Sierra Nevada? They say if you hike up Mount Tallac on your own, you would meet your spirit animal on a moonlit night.”

“That’s a good thing?”

“Depends on how you see covering your head when it’s 104 outside.”

She raised an eyebrow. The way he said it didn’t make her feel bad, even though she had had enough stones thrown at her because of her veil in this life.

“Don’t you think it could be a sign of faith?”

“I don’t really think it’s a sign of anything,” he said as he narrowed his eyes at her.

“Same goes for your tattoo. All that crap about spirit animals.”

“If you touch the bear,” he said, and leaned sideways with the gnarling bear facing her, the ink so black and glossy that it almost broke free of his skin, “it might come to life.”

She rolled her eyes and lifted up her fingers. She ran her fingertips on his skin. He was radiating with heat. His hair smelled like fulgurites. One moment she was touching his tattoo and the other she was sniffing his mass of hair and tattooed neck, burying her nose in the raw smell, unable to bypass the moment.

When she came to her senses, everybody in the bus was watching her. Their looks ranged from pure hostile to downright disdainful. She felt the heat stemming from ice-cream man’s body encapsulating her, throwing her in the middle of a drought in Sahara. It was not that her temperature rose in shame. She was just humiliated by the thousand and so eyes that slowly sucked whatever energy she had left.

His reaction, however, was more bemused than shocked.

“I’m Mason, by the way.”

She stood up and went to the exit door. She held into one of the bus-straps feeling hot, sharp tears rushing to her eyes.

“I know what your spirit animal is.”

Aliya turned. Mason was standing right behind her. She could feel his charwood breath blazing through the cottony material of her pale blue headscarf. His weird, burnt breath would have otherwise made her recoil, but somehow it made him more alluring. Like he was all fire and clay, freshly manufactured by Allah, and hasn’t been carried through the regular canals of uterine fluids, semen and blood.

“Please let me go.”

Why did she desperately want to leave? Was it the fact that she was beginning to feel the time lag and the more she spent on the way to her mother, the less time she had to spend with her? Or was it the fact that he was so beautiful and she swore to Allah not to do anything that hasn’t been Koran-approved? Her mother told her it’s okay to have feelings for other boys –just boys, her mother had assured her with a nervous smile- and try to find out where her feelings would lead her to. Her mother, the devout Upper Eastside Catholic, had been in love with her father, the ragtag Muslim from the ghettos. She ran away to marry him –and was disowned from her family all through the 11 years of marriage- yet left him 10 years later when she had had enough of his downward spiraling life. The burden fell upon Aliya’s shoulders. 

She had to pay the bills and clean the U-Haul van as best as she could even though she didn’t even have proper cleaning tools. She could still remember bitterly going to a friend’s slumber party and watching the other morning in fascination as the maid used a vacuum cleaner to make the Persian carpets spotless, the air pump swallowing away the bread crumbs, dirty napkins and dust bunnies into its vacant vortex. She cried all night at home and the next day, her father got her a semi-used one from a garage sale. That was the best day of her life. Even better than the day she wore the veil.

“I just want to buy you dinner,”

She looked at him. He was still so close and she couldn’t lift her eyes off him. She accepted his invitation because she was hungry and because at her mother’s –actually the family mansion where her grandmother stopped saying hi to her ever since she wore the “rag on her head”- she was offered nothing but cookies and milk.

At the cozy Mexican restaurant that Mason suggested, they ate and ate. Aliya was reveling in the smell of hot tamales, cheesy enchilada casserole and fish taco pizza. Mason tossed it all back with mango margaritas while she told the waiter, “Just mangoes.”

At the end of the meal, she was too full to function. She couldn’t even talk or think straight.

“How did you end up with a head covering?”

She wondered why he was so obsessed with her veil. She calmly told him that she willingly chose to cover her hair out of love and respect for God. She didn’t want to be a temptation to men and chose the path of virtue and decency. Immodesty is the route of all evil, she said as she sipped quietly on her frozen mango smoothie.

“But you are still a temptation. Apparently!”

His comment caught her off guard. She placed the glass of smoothie on the aluminum table top. She never thought anybody could see her as “sexy”, especially someone who was in fact sexy. It’s not because she wasn’t sexy. She was, really. It just wasn’t that obvious, not with her sense of style, anyway. At least that’s why she wore the veil. Now she was released from the daily fretting of whether she would look good in a year-and-a-half old pair of shoes. If she was anything like her friend Shahira, who wore a veil under pressure from her parents, she would walk with naked arms all day. Shahira’s bra size hadn’t changed a bit over the years, neither did her butt circumference. One Eid, all the girls hung out together at Mama Rabiya’s house; an old, two-story mansion that once resembled a luxurious villa. They played a game of measuring each and every girl’s butt circumference. Hers came second after Tanisha. And oh what a victory it was to be right after her holiness Tanisha.

“Thank you,” she smiled at Mason.

His expression didn’t change. He leaned towards her and offered her his last tamale, “Don’t thank me for something that’s yours.”

“You gave me confidence. I never saw myself pretty,”

She wanted to say it. But she held her tongue at the end. She knew she should be smarter than opening up to boys, especially mahogany-haired, tattooed boys like Mason. That would give them the upper hand in the relationship.

“Now you’re using the r-word again!”

She excused herself and went quietly to the restroom. There, she took off the veil and watched herself in the large, frameless mirror.

Her hair was a tiny bun at the top of her head. When she was younger she would have it in short dreadlocks as her hair never grew further than the tip of her shoulders. Now all she had to do was pull it up high and secure with a colorless hair band, then wrap the veil around her head. It felt so much easier and depressing all the same. She looked back at the semi-locked restroom door. Even here she could smell the fresh tamales being made, the margarita shots clinking and the frying sound making the atmosphere more perfect than it actually was; even with the intense heat seeping deeper and deeper into her bones.

She held the veil within her hand. To wear or not to wear. She imagined Mason. His smile as he greeted the real her, the one without a head covering. Yet she imagined Allah like she drew Him as a child –a tremendous cloud, staring at her either happily or grumpily, depending on how she had been behaving.

“Just for today, ya Allah. For the love of the prophet,” she heard herself whispering, veil clutched in her hands, steam covering the surface of the mirror. The cloud of mist kept spreading and spreading, until the only reflection she could see was the muggy outline of her small self.

That was all she needed to make up her mind. And go!