A Somber Timbre

By Dinah Alobeid

Suburban strip malls succumbed to spacious fields. Raaz and Nora drove north in silence.

Constantina had been the effusive narrator to their trio. In the before. Before this drive to Nora’s picturesque college campus, upstate. Before Raaz and Nora became a solemn duet. Their drive flowed against the natural trajectory of the Hudson River. To Nora everything seemed to be moving backwards, sideways, the wrong way these days.

She fiddled with the radio and his eyes darted. Leave it be, he invoked wordlessly. She could hear his refrain echoing from her teenage years. Quietly domineering, he’d say none of your melancholy sap. It didn’t occur to him to care that his only child felt soothed by a somber timbre and a slow melodic march toward a sustained note of anguish. He preferred silence.

“Khalas,” he said. The incisive command jogged her rusty Arabic. Enough.

Cornwall-on-Hudson gave way to Little Britain when Raaz coughed. She handed him one of the water bottles she’d filled and packed along with orange slices, a mix of pistachios and almonds and cashews, dried figs and her mother’s favorite, small, spicy rice crackers.

Without letting his gaze leave the horizon, he took a long swig of the water. He struggled to shove the bottle back into the cup holder in the console between them, and Nora took it from him as if detonating a bomb. He nodded and then declared, “It’s illegal to cheat on your spouse in New York.”

Her ears had registered the statement as a muffled echo. “Huh? Baba, what are you talking about?”

“Did you know?”

“That it’s illegal to cheat in New York? No,” she said curtly, the surprise in her voice raising her tone and her eyebrows.

As she grew in age, so seemed to grow her parents’ oddities. Her mother Constantina’s sweet strangeness now lain to rest forever. Never again would Nora have her mother stroke her cheek, clucking like a preening rooster and muttering under her breath about mashallah this and hafiz alaqi that. The bits of religious prose she’d picked up from her father over the years. The artistry of weaving the words into her mother’s Northern Italian lolling stories.

“Massachusetts and Arizona, too,” Raaz replied to an unasked question.

Nora shifted in her passenger seat, afraid of the direction they were headed in. Her father always kept to himself, suppressing anything resembling emotion. She remembered every gruff grunt he offered her in childhood, the only verbal admiration over her mostly stellar grades. She could still hear the ringing tsk tsk when he sucked his teeth as her voice rose in excitement during dinners when she kneeled in her chair rising to meet her excitement in midair while describing her latest musical discovery.

“Thanks for the trivia. I’m sure it’ll be handy for my Allegory in Medieval Art class.”

He snickered into his own hands, gripping the steering wheel so tight his fingers conducted magic. Reversed aging made his olive hued hands twenty again as the wrinkles across his knuckles smoothed out in sloping arches. No trick of the light, of movement, could change his seventy-year-old mind.

“I hope you’re keeping up good grades in your business minor,” he said to the rearview mirror, and to no one and nothing.

He couldn’t see her. Refused to look to his right, or through the ether of the past into the present. Nora held onto her childhood belief that he never wanted to look at her, and really see what was there. Someone with his hair, her mother’s heart, and insatiable appetite for music, food, and devouring new worlds waiting to be explored. Whether it was a new folk album, Malaysian cuisine, or a local art fair, mother and daughter ran toward life giggling and with their arms wide open. As her father took on his traditional role as head of house and left so-called silly distractions to the women folk. A dated notion in a dated mind that refused to dance with possibilities.

Raaz knew only two facts in this life. He excelled at his job as an accountant for a pharmaceutical behemoth. And while he loved his daughter as one must love misshapen noses and webbed toes and strawberry birthmarks that forget to fade, he could never understand her. He didn’t know the feeling was mutual.

Constantina’s last six months under a terminal diagnosis didn’t dull a maiden beauty that hadn’t faded over fifty years. Now her and her velvety hazel eyes speckled with gold and green rested beyond this realm of reality.

Nora opened her window for something to do in the car. The whoosh of air sounded like a scream compared to the tinkling celesta in some obscure symphony playing. Her attempts at distracting herself weren’t working. She had to pry. The why of it all hovered. An uninvited third passenger daring them to reveal the darkest corners of themselves.

“Baba, why did you say that?”

“Because you need to think about your future. Why couldn’t you pursue a reasonable degree? You need to be prepared. You need to earn a decent living when you leave that glorified summer camp.”

In her nineteen-year life, her father had been thoughtful in everything he said. Had he meant to spout the taboo subject of adultery as a throwaway comment? Why the strange discourse for her return to dorm life after mother’s funeral? Is it just another strangeness to add to the multitude of otherness in her half-Arab, half-Italian household?

She had to know.

“Not school. Cheating. Why are you bringing it up?”

Her father turned his heavy-lidded eyes to her, and she could see the mauve-tinged skin beneath them darken in real time as if a time lapse played the reel of his long life. Tsk. Tsk. The small sound flitted out of his mouth in quick succession. The quiet beginnings of a thunderous moment of percussion in a subtle, unobtrusive symphony.

“It was one of the last things your mother said to me,” he said. “As she lay there dying to my face.” Another small whisper trickled out of his mouth, but Nora couldn’t make out the words. His silent words sharp and tart in his mouth, only he could hear them. Lying in our home, lying about it all.

“Why would she…,” she started.

“Why wouldn’t she?” he asked himself more than replying to his daughter. “She was something extraordinary. Too good for this world. Too good for me.”

“Don’t say that, Baba.” Her voice rose in anger at the end, she wanted to hit him, grab the steering wheel and send them both careening into the concrete median, the only thing keeping them from oncoming traffic speeding along the river the right way. Down its natural, winding path, trickling toward the future and not stymied in past confusion.

She had to say something. “Why don’t you look at me?”

“Don’t yell at me, child,” he said to her, his accent accentuated with percolating bile. His eyes glued to the horizon.

She opened her mouth. A slow scream welled inside of her and she let out a low-toned, guttural battle cry of release. Her father jerked the steering wheel expertly, pressing firm yet gently on the brakes to pull the car over to the shoulder. He let himself out of the car, racing to the passenger side and tripping over his own feet. Flinging the door open, he pulled her out by her shoulders. All he kept saying was stop, stop it, stop. Khalas, khalas, khalas.

The screams lasted a full minute suspended in the sediment filled air around them, before Nora slumped down into the dirt and gravel, her father’s hands on her shoulders sliding into position as he wrapped her in his arms.

“Enough,” she said.

Looking up at him she saw his face, eyes refusing to cry, watery with the reality that the only world he knew had disintegrated to dust. He couldn’t see Nora. But for the first time, she had a clear view of her father.

How strange this life of half and half, she thought. Half in English, half in Arabic. Half in otherness, half in her nondescript features and skin coloration camouflaging her origin. She hadn’t even lived half a life and felt mired in midlife misery. Now half of her foundation was gone. The Italian half of the household lay quietly in a cherry wood coffin for eternity. Or until decomposition took over, playing the musical stylings of decay. The unknowable sounds, shrouded in a mystery Nora yearned to hear. If only to prove her mother was once real.

THE END

Author Bio: Dinah Susan Alobeid is a writer, dancer, and marketing professional. Her fiction has appeared in DarkWinter Literary Magazine and her nonfiction and poetry can be found in Motherly, Spectrum Magazine, MediaPost, Luna Luna, and Blast. She lives in New Jersey with her partner and son.

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