How To Make Your Man Smile by Itto and Mekiya Outini

I was there the day Meena and Batoul brought Said into the women’s hammam, carrying him between them in an enormous plastic bucket. The other women, six of them, all older, scattered like pigeons, seizing their towels, covering their breasts with their hands, shrieking, “Get him out of here! That’s an abomination!” as if none of them had ever seen a man’s organ before. True, they’d probably never seen one like Said’s, as petite and puckered as the nipple of a baby bottle, but it wasn’t as if he could do anything with it. I was the one who should’ve screamed. I was the one who’d never seen a naked man before, who’d never wanted to. But I didn’t scream.

I knew who Batoul and Said were because, for the last five years, Batoul had been going around trying to convince all the parents in town to marry their daughters to her son. “He won’t cause any trouble,” she’d said to my mother last year, as she’d said to dozens of mothers and fathers before her. “I don’t care if your daughter’s the worst harpy. All she’ll have to do is cook and clean and let him smile at her all day. He’s got the sweetest smile, you know. Of course, you know that I can pay.”

That was true. Batoul’s husband had died eleven years earlier and left her a fortune, making her the richest woman in town. She and Said lived in the big house on the hill, alone. Basically a ghost story in the making.

From the way the other women screamed, you’d have thought Said’s smile was a lascivious leer directed at their bosoms. In fact, he was just grinning placidly up at the ceiling, probably enjoying the cradle-like way that his bucket was rocking between his wife and mother. He’d come out of Batoul’s womb with that expression on his face, rumor had it, and hadn’t scowled a day in his life. The uproar in the hammam wasn’t about to put a damper on his mood.

It took the other women less than sixty seconds to evacuate that chamber, leaving me alone with Batoul, Meena, and Said. They hardly paid me any mind. From where I was sitting on the edge of the bath, legs kicking gently in the blistering water, I watched them lay down a mat on the floor, tip Said out of his bucket, and start scrubbing. Actually, Meena did most of the scrubbing. Batoul stood over her, arms folded, watching. I think she was just there to make sure Meena did it correctly.

Meena was a pretty girl, pretty enough that I might’ve felt a bit jealous, watching the way her ramrod posture accentuated the curve of her buttocks as she squatted, and how dark strands of hair came loose and hung damply in front of her eyes, and how her large breasts knocked together, but I’d already sworn off marriage and men, and she’d gotten hitched to one of the most pathetic men of all, so there was nothing to be jealous of. Besides, there were those burns on her thighs. They were clearly visible from where I was sitting, huge, pale scars that riddled her legs, all the way up into her nether regions. It was her father who’d done it, burned her with a poker, all because her mother, through no fault of her own—some women, I learned in health class at the university, are just born that way—happened to be a bit loose down there, and he’d taken this as proof that she’d slept with someone else before their wedding. “Like walking into a cave,” was how he’d put it when complaining to his friends. Of course, all the men had felt sorry for him, and most of the women, too.

“Like mother, like daughter,” they’d told him, or maybe he’d reached that conclusion himself. He hadn’t waited for Meena to get old enough to start chasing men of her own. He’d decided to teach her a lesson preemptively, when she was barely three years old. The problem was that she’d squirmed a bit during that first lesson, and what was meant for her inner thigh had ended up somewhere else instead, and everything down there had been ruined. That hadn’t been the end of the lessons, of course. Just the beginning. But from what I’d heard, that first lesson would’ve been more than enough.

Men were always doing things like that, which was why I’d made a promise to myself to never marry any of them. Instead, I was investing in my education, studying philosophy. This decision hadn’t been easy. My parents, as enlightened as they think they are, had balked when I’d told them, and ever since then, I’ve been called corrupt, and evil, and an infidel, and just about every other name that you can think of. Honestly, though, I’ve never really cared. If anything, I feel sorry for the women who called me those names in one breath and shrieked in terror at the sight of a shrunken little manchild’s baby bottle of a penis in the next. They must’ve been traumatized by their husbands, beaten and burned and raped and threatened and God only knows what else, and because they couldn’t do anything to those men, they were taking it out on Said.

It occurred to me, watching Meena squat over her husband, pummeling his back and shoulders with her palms as if he were a lump of dough, that this must also be why she had married him. I’d figured it was all about the money, which had to be nice for a girl like her, but all at once it struck me that money was only part of the equation: that Said was the perfect man for her, not only because he wouldn’t ever burn or beat or rape her, but also because she could do whatever she wanted to him, whatever she’d dreamed of doing to her father, at least when Batoul wasn’t there, and he wouldn’t be able to put up a fight. He might not even realize what was going on. Batoul was there that day at the hammam, however, standing over her daughter-in-law with folded arms, watching, and Meena had no choice but to keep scrubbing.

I remember that day for two reasons: first, it was the last time I ever felt sorry for Meena, who’d been my cautionary tale for years, the real-life example who sprang to my mind whenever I read papers by bell hooks or Germaine Greer; and second, it was the first time I started to envy her. Not for her looks. As I said earlier, she has those in spades, but it’s not as if I look so shabby myself. I’m sure I could’ve gotten any man I wanted if I’d played my cards differently. Besides, the damage done by her father more than cancels out her beauty. No. It was because I realized she’d outplayed me at my own game.

That night was the night Batoul died. Her eyesight was going, but everyone knew she wasn’t ready to accept that she was getting old, and so she went out for a walk around sunset, and strayed too near the edge of a cliff, and ended up plunging fifteen meters to her death.

That’s what everyone says, anyway. I have my suspicions. No one was there with her, and no one was back at the big house with Meena, either. No one except for Said. Who isn’t talking.

Regardless of how it happened, Meena inherited everything: the house, the fortune, and Said. She couldn’t read or write. She couldn’t add two plus two. She’d never gone to school. Her father hated her. Her mother was a pliant excuse for a woman. Her family owned nothing except for a tumble-down shack and two chickens. Still, overnight, Meena managed to make herself the wealthiest woman in town. My father had studied in France on a scholarship. My mother had dropped out of her Master’s when she’d gotten pregnant, but she reads and writes and speaks as if she has a PhD. I have no siblings to compete with me. I am the sole repository of my parents’ support and love. Yet here I am, years later, with my PhD in philosophy and nothing to show for it. I’ve traveled all over the country in search of jobs: nothing. I can’t even seem to find work at a high school. Being either a certified philosopher or a thirty-five-year-old spinster is already a bit too much. Evidently, being both at once is just beyond the pale. Even if I wanted a man, which I don’t, no man would have me now.

Every day, when I look out the window, I see Meena’s house on the hill—the house that she did nothing to earn besides marrying a disabled man and, possibly, pushing his aging mother off a cliff.

Six months after the day at the hammam, Said also died. No one really knows what happened. Some say she smothered him. Some say she simply stopped feeding him. Some say he was destined to die that day anyway, and neither doctors nor prayers could’ve prolonged his time on earth.

Meena lives alone now, which I’m sure is what she wanted all along. She doesn’t visit her parents. Not ever. Her mother has stopped talking, has become completely mute. Her father grows sicker, sadder, and older every year. Her brothers and sisters still visit him, but they all hate him. None of them is earning any money. He no longer trims his hair or grooms his beard. There’s always dirt on his face and his hands. When you pass him in the street, you can smell the sweat fumes coming off him, bitter, full of toxins. He smokes hashish whenever he can get it and drinks himself red-eyed before noon.

Even though he’s never heard of Hélène Cixous or Simone de Beauvoir, I believe that I could carry on a conversation with him. Some days, I think about going to visit him. I haven’t done it yet, but I may go any day now. The thing is, I don’t want to go empty-handed. The man has had enough useless women in his life. I wouldn’t blame him for not wanting one more around. When I go to see him, I will make him understand, whether he likes it or not, that I’m not like the others. I will go to him with something to offer, something that only my brain could cook up. Something whose value will be obvious to him.

We will sit together on the stoop behind his grubby little shack, where no one will see us except for his two sickly chickens, and there we will discuss the situation. It may take a few minutes, but my words will get through to him. When they do, his haggard face will break into a ragged grin: not like Said’s at all, not placid, not empty; a chip-toothed and yellowing rictus of comprehension.

I will also be smiling.

Our heads will swivel toward the house on the hill, with its shuttered windows and its overgrown gardens. By then, I will have put the finishing touches on my plan, which I’ve been working on for years, which still is not complete, but which will be complete, and perfect, very, very soon.

Still smiling, I will tell Meena’s father my plan.