Free In the Country by Mia Alvar Page B

other.”
    I squinted, then squeezed my eyes shut. I shook my head. Small, deferential Minnie, who’d backed out of a peaceful strike: she could not be capable of it. I coughed, thinking I might choke, my eyes burning. At the same time, my vision seemed sharper, clearer than before.
    Minnie wasn’t dead to me after that; in fact what she became was more alive than ever, revealed to me in new textures and colors. I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions no one, until now, had seen. She’d been silently striking all along; she didn’t need my protection. What arrogance, to think I should take up her cause, even the score. I was no smarter than a child, who didn’t understand nuances. She was not my mother. (And God only knew, of course, what little mutinies my own mother had waged, in secret: the better life she’d planned for me could not have been enough to get her through her own, every day.)
    I had to believe that my friend had suffered, that humiliations I could barely imagine drove her to cruelty.
You’ve been through a lot,
I could say,
but the child isn’t the one who put you through it.
Of course Aroush would be the one to pay the price; Aroush, the only one less powerful than Minnie, the only one who couldn’t punish Minnie back. Aroush, who’d done nothing to deserve punishment.
    I did not, in that Awali playground, tell Minnie that her suffering was not Aroush’s fault, or that her rich employer was a human being too. I drove her home, and then myself. At dinner, I did not tell Ed to spare me his pronouncements about the
Bumbai
and
Arabo
. Their theories had had years to harden; my love for Aroush and sympathy toward Mrs. Mansour couldn’t topple them in one day. All I knew to do, and had to do immediately, was right my own mistake.
    —
    I invited Mrs. Mansour to spend an afternoon with Aroush and me by the small kidney-shaped pool in our compound. “Parents’ Day,” I said. The kindergarten classroom, with its finger paintings and bulletin boards, had made me nostalgic for a “real” school. A glimpse into our days together would prepare Mrs. Mansour nicely for the truth. If she could see her daughter’s actual education with her own eyes, she would find joy in Aroush as she was, aim for humbler milestones, no less miraculous for being within reach.
    Mrs. Mansour had dressed Aroush in a ruffled pink bathing suit and waterproof swim diaper. “Thank you for bringing us here,” she said, when I unlocked the gate to the swimming pool. “This is quite a nice vacation.”
    She was being polite. Surely there was nothing the Astroturf and cement walls had over the boutiques of Bond Street. I eased Aroush’s arms into a pair of orange water wings and brought her car seat to the edge of the pool so that her feet touched the surface. Her toenails were painted a dark beet color. I splashed her right foot into the water, then her left, causing her to smile and shiver.
    Mrs. Mansour removed her sunglasses and applauded. I took Aroush from her car seat and submerged her to the waist, supporting her against my chest. We faced Mrs. Mansour. I cradled her against one arm and flicked water from my fingers onto her neck and face. She blinked and smiled again. Holding her that close, and smelling the particular warmth of her scalp, I almost lost my nerve, tempted to keep the truth, and the real Aroush, to myself.
    “Teacher,” Mrs. Mansour called, “when first I see you, I know you are the right one for Aroush. From looking at you—so independent, so
able
—I know you are a modern woman.”
    I bowed my head. Again my eyes hurt as if they’d been blinded and gained total clarity all at once. The sun winked in a million facets off the water. I could hear every slight movement that Aroush and I made through it.
    “This is how I will like my girl to be. Alive in the world. I would like that she understand business, understand computers,