Free An Unnecessary Woman by Alameddine Rabih Page B

responsibility. You’re her daughter and you don’t have a family. You were supposed to be taking care of her for all these years. It’s time, it’s your turn. We can’t do it anymore.” He doesn’t yell, but waits for me to contradict. He wants a reason to shout.
    I don’t give him one.
    He takes a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, holds it between his dry lips, dangling weakly, but he doesn’t light it. He’s a once-strong man reduced to mere rough and vulgar: doughy neck, broad shoulders, soft chin, eyes ringed with fatigue, distracted comb-over. His brown polyester pants, from a different suit than the jacket and vest, flap and squeal as he paces the foyer. He stares me down, waiting for me to cower. I do.
    I cower because even though he looks like a parody of a tough guy—always did—I knew him once to be dangerous and menacing. At the beginning of the civil war in 1975, he put on the cheap camouflage outfit of one of the militias, a tragicomic dress rehearsal. Don’t ask me which militia. I didn’t care then and I don’t now. He looked like a caricature, his spindly torso (not fat then, just slightly convex) decorated with medals and his shoulders with betassled epaulettes, triumphantly imitating Napoleon, the Corsican Comet.
    Bluster and hubris, that’s what he was, what he is, but that’s what makes him more dangerous in some ways.
    Think Bush—that indecent amalgam of banality and perdition.
How nations sink . . .
When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s request.
    An unpleasant thought.
    Whenever I think of Bush, I think of an image: a shattered visage in the desert sand.
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    A more pleasant thought.
    My half brother the eldest frightens me. He didn’t while we were growing up; then, he only irritated me. We shared a mattress and I regarded him as nothing more than a space eater. He was obtuse, careless, and, according to my mother, infallible. He found inordinate pleasure in practical jokes and all manner of horseplay. He cultivated an obscene satisfaction in bullying his younger siblings.
    After my husband left me, my mother did her best to convince me to follow him out the door and leave my home. She suggested that I exchange apartments with my half brother the eldest—his was small, fit for a lonely one; mine was larger, fit for a still-growing family, which included her, of course.
    “Look at how many rooms you have,” she used to say. “How greedy do you have to be? How selfish?”
    At first, I argued with her, but then I noted that it was more effective to ignore her, to allow her tongue unlimited flapping until it flagged. When it became obvious that her words weren’t having the desired effect, my half brothers jockeyed into the conversation. Each began to involve himself when his family increased its numbers—irresponsible reproduction being the family’s ennui annihilator.
    My half brother the eldest first appeared at my door after the birth of child number two or three—I should know which because I was there at the hospital for the birth (I was still not ready to abandon the family completely). Bluster and hubris. He wasn’t able to talk then, to converse or negotiate, but simply began shouting, demanding that I do the right thing. I stopped opening my door when I knew it was he. My half brother the eldest banged his simian chest and cursed outside. He terrified me, an incontinent terror.
    He returned and returned, again and again, the big bad wolf scaring me with his obstreperous threats, but you know, that worked against him. You not only inure yourself against the fear, finding it bearable after a while and coming to terms with it, you also absorb it. I absorbed it. It belonged to me and I to it; faithful companions, sisters, my fear and I.
    I remained afraid, but I was no longer scared. Children get scared. With every return, with each bang on my door, my fear and I matured a little.
    Before