Read Online The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger - Free Book Online

gone to bed. There weren’t many minutes left on her father’s phone (it was morning in Dhaka, and the Flexiload place in Kaderabad Bazar wasn’t open yet), and so Amina had to use another card to call them back. Her mother was crying, and it was hard to understand her. Her father told her not to worry, but when she asked why her mother was crying, he said:
    “She’s crying because she’s going to miss your wedding. She’s going to miss it because I can’t afford the ticket.”
    “No!” Amina said. “We decided—it didn’t make sense. Twentyhours for four hours. Three thousand dollars for one party!” She could hear hammering in the background: a new building was going up across the street. Her parents complained that the new apartments would be much better than theirs, but Amina was disposed to look on the bright side. The neighborhood was improving.
    “Tell her it will be only a small party,” she told her father.
    “Your wedding party. What kind of terrible parents don’t come to their own daughter’s wedding?”
    She started to argue, but her father wasn’t listening. Her mother was saying something in the background.
    “What does she say?”
    Her father paused so long that she would have thought the call had been dropped, except that she could still hear the sound of hammering on the other end. It was morning in Mohammadpur: the sun behind the haze, the kids walking to school in twos and threes, the crows on the telephone wires, and the call of the vendors—Chilis! Eggs! Excellent Quality Feather Brooms!—or her favorite, the man who took your plastic jugs and gave sweet potatoes in exchange. Once again she had the disorienting feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present. Only on the telephone did the streams ever cross. At the other end of the line, another Amina was hiding her head under the covers, stealing just a few more minutes before the cacophony outside forced her to put two feet on the cold, tiled floor.
    “Tell me, Abba.”
    Her father’s voice when it came was stoppered, strange, as if he’d swallowed something whole. “She says it would’ve been better if you’d never been born.”
    George shifted sleepily in the bed. “Tell them you’ll call them back tomorrow.”
    Amina gripped the head of the bedpost. From their room she could see the house behind them, windows blazing in the dark.
    “Tell her the food is going to be terrible,” she whispered to her father. “Tell her there is a popular dish called ‘pigs in blankets.’ ”
    But George was awake. “Are you talking about food
now
?”
    “It doesn’t matter about the food,” her father said. “The point is that you are her only child.”
    “Do you, Amina Mazid, take this man, George Stillman, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
    “I do.”
    The corresponding question was asked of George, and then the city clerk declared: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
    George leaned toward her, and Amina leaped back. From the chairs behind them, Cathy made a hiccupping sound. George’s face tightened in a familiar way, like the mouth of a drawstring bag, and when Amina glanced behind her, she saw an identical contraction on the face of her new mother-in-law. She hurriedly stepped toward George, smiling to let him know that it was only that she was surprised, not that she didn’t want to kiss him in front of his family and friends.
    Many hours later, after cocktails at Aunt Cathy’s, the reception dinner at Giorgio’s, and then cake, coffee, and the opening of gifts at George’s mother’s house (Eileen had insisted that Amina call her Mom from now on), when they were home in bed together so much later than usual, George had asked why she hadn’t wanted to kiss him.
    “You didn’t tell me,” she explained.
    “You didn’t know there was kissing at a wedding?”
    Amina had to think about that for a minute, because of course she had known. She had