Topic: A Stranger

Topic: A Stranger

This is hard to admit, but about twenty years ago I let a stranger into my home.  I not only let him into my home, I married him after an embarrassingly brief courtship.

Ismail was 30 years old and had recently come to the United States from Jordan.  Arabic was his first language but he did speak English surprisingly well.  He was not the usual type of guy I went for.  There was a strong physical connection between us, although when we first met, I thought the attraction was one-sided. He told me I was beautiful and FAT.  When my eyes teared up and I started to leave the restaurant, he backpedaled and insisted he meant the “fat” comment as a compliment.  Fat meant he liked my womanly curves and that it was a sign of wealth and prosperity according to him.  I don’t know if he was giving me a line, but I choose to believe that he might it in a nice way.  I was already weary of the dating scene that I found myself thrown into as a divorced mom in my thirties.  So much had changed since I first married at age 22. My dating motto at the time was “what’s love got to do with it” so when Ismail proposed I saw it as a win-win.  He had a bachelors degree in computer science and a good job, but his time in the US was limited unless he got a green card.  What was in it for me? We didn’t have much in common.  But he was smart, well-mannered, and would help pay the bills, take out the trash, mow the lawn, shovel the snow, change the oil in my car, provide security and companionship on the nights my kids stayed with their dad and their new stepmom.  And I could check out of the dating scene- for a time.

There was a popular movie in the nineties called Green Card in which Andie McDowell plays an American and Gerard Depardieu, a French man who get married for purely utilitarian reasons. The story was much like ours except in the movie they ended up falling in love.  One scene that I found to be true to life was the immigration interview, in which immigration services determines that you’re really married and living together as husband and wife.  After Ismail and I got married we had to go through the same rigorous process to verify our marriage was legit.  They asked questions ranging from what brand of cat food we purchased to how many times a week we had sex.  They asked for wedding photos and were careful to interview us in separate rooms so there could be no “helping” each other out. We passed. 

Our marriage was not without struggles.  The language barrier was huge. We didn’t like the same movies, books, tv shows or music.  The only American movies he liked were low on dialogue and relied on action and lots of violence.  His creative use of English amused me.  When he became impatient, he would resort to Arabic and raise up his hand saying “halas” which mean “enough.”  He tried to substitute halas with American slang one day with a raised arm saying, “Talk it to my hand.”

He was very literal.  I played The Police song “Roxanne” for him.  It’s about a prostitute named Roxanne and the main lyric is “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light, walk the streets for money, you don’t have to sell your body to the night.”  I had a cat named Roxanne and I found him singing the song to her with the lyrics paraphrased in his heavy accent, “Roxanne, you don’t have to fuck around.” 

He claimed that he wasn’t a fan of my cats, but once when I returned home from a business trip, he told me he had taken my cat, Mohican, to Blockbuster Video with him.

“You mean you took the cat inside the store?!”   

“Yes,” he replied, “Everyone was astonished,”   

I liked how he used words like astonished in casual conversation.   But he didn’t get the concept of having a pet and treating it like a member of the family.  When my cat broke her leg and her surgical repair cost me over $300, he was the one who was astonished.  He thought I should have had her put down.  She was just an animal, he reasoned. 

He didn’t understand my life’s work in nursing homes.  I was a Director of Nursing at a nursing facility and was working on my master’s degree in health administration and getting my nursing home administrator’s license when we were together.  “I do not understand this,” he said, “You take all of your old people and you make them live in one house away from their families?”  I didn’t like the way he put it, but I could see how it could look that way.  He accused “you Americans” of treating animals better than the elderly, and I had to admit there was some truth to that.  As much as he criticized Americans though, he desperately wanted to be one. 

The religious difference was huge.  He was a devout Muslim.  He had a call to prayer on the computer that was in our bedroom and it loudly let us know in Arabic that it was time to pray.  He got up round the clock, laid his prayer carpet thing (can’t remember what he called it), faced Mecca, and said his prayers dutifully even in the middle of the night.  I had to respect that.  I was raised Catholic, and I wasn’t nearly as observant.  He never tried to convert me.  My biggest faux pas was when he brought his friend Raed over during Ramadan, a time when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, and I made them tea.  I thought they just fasted food, but no, these guys were serious.  They didn’t even drink water all day. 

We stayed together for a little bit after we passed the immigration interview.  What ended it for me was when I discovered he was corresponding with a young girl and she was sending him salacious photos via email.  “Sexting” and even texting wasn’t a thing yet.  I found out the girl was at least over 18, but barely.  He defended his actions.  All they were doing was corresponding.  She lived in Cleveland. When I suggested that I start a similar correspondence with a young man of my choosing he was staunchly opposed.  That wouldn’t be right, cause I’m a woman.  That was when I sent him away, and he didn’t argue.  He got what he wanted.  The last time I physically saw him was at our dissolution hearing in early 2001. 

The last time we spoke was shortly after 9/11.  He called me and said, “I want you to know I did not do this.  I am not a terrorist.  I just wanted a green card.  What happened is not right, and it is not the way of Islam.”  He said that the air travel required by his job had gotten next to impossible.  He was almost always detained because of the way he looked and spoke.  He shared that a bunch of teenagers tried to beat him up just for walking down the street, but he outran them.  He told me he might end up going back home if things didn’t get better.  And then he thanked me and said he could never repay for what I’d done and how I’d helped him.   I wished him well, and then just like that the stranger was gone.