Chapter 13 · Chapter 13

The sheikh's wife sends a girl to the rope of our tent before the sun is off the ridge, and the girl says nothing at all, only holds up one hand with the fingers together, which is how we are called to that tent. My mother puts the bread down and looks at me a moment past the length of the errand, and then goes back to the bread, because she has already done her part in this and it is not hers to do twice.

The council sits in the sheikh's wife's tent with the flap tied back. That is not carelessness.

A flap tied back in the morning means the tent is open, and an open tent is a tent whose business the camp may hear, and the aunts have arranged themselves accordingly: the sheikh's wife at the head with the good cushion under her, the eldest of them along the left where the shade falls first, and the rest down the right in the order they married into this camp, which every soul in the camp knows without being told.

There are eleven of them. I count while I am coming in, because counting keeps my face doing something.

I am twenty-four years old. I have stood in this tent for the naming of two brides and the burial of one, and I have never once stood in it alone.

A brass tray sits in the middle of the rug with a cloth over it, and the cloth is not the one it came in.

The sheikh's wife does not make me wait, which is its own kind of news. She lifts the cloth and there is the band. Silver, thick as a thumb joint, hinged, with a pin, and the smith has cut a line of little leaves around it that must have cost him a week.

It has been let out twice. I can see both places, small pale scars on the inside where the file went over the metal.

"It came yesterday," the sheikh's wife says. "With the salt. No message, which is delicacy, and no man of his own to say it, which is not."

"His mother's servant brought it," one of the aunts says, from the left, where the shade is. "In her own handkerchief. She cried at the rope."

That is the first rope put around me, and it is a soft one. I say nothing and let it lie on the rug.

"It is a gift," the sheikh's wife says. "A gift may be taken or refused. Nobody is speaking of a contract this morning."

"Nobody has to," says the aunt on the right who talks for that side. "The camp will speak of it for him. Eighteen years, and a band, and then a wedding in another man's tent. There is a way to do a thing."

There it is. Not the silver. The tent.

I look at the tray and the band and the eleven faces and the open flap with the light coming through it and the whole camp out there pretending to be at its work, and I understand that I have been brought here to be given a shape to wear, and that the shape is called reasonable.

"Say your word," the sheikh's wife says. "That is why the flap is tied back."

So I say it standing, because sitting would make it a discussion.

"He measured my wrist when I was a child," I say, "in my father's tent. My father agreed. I was not asked, and I have not been asked since. That is not eighteen years of waiting. That is eighteen years of a man holding a rope that other hands tied. If he had wanted me he would have come and asked me himself. I have been in this camp every year of it, in plain sight, and no one has had to go looking."

Nobody moves. The aunts on the right look at the aunts on the left, which is how this tent counts.

"The band has been let out twice," I say. "I have not grown since I was seventeen. He has been letting it out for a wrist that stopped changing, so that he could keep saying the promise was nearly ready. That is not a man waiting for a wife. That is a man keeping a place."

"Mind your words," the aunt on the right says. "He is your cousin."

"He is twenty-seven years old," I say, "and he has not built one wall in this camp, and he sends silver with the salt."

Then I bend down and take the band off the tray and put it on the rug.

Not thrown. I will not give anyone the story of a woman who threw. I set it down in the middle of the council rug where the weave is worn pale, and I straighten it with one finger so it lies square, and I take my hand back and stand up.

Outside, the camp stops pretending. I can hear it stop. Somewhere behind the tents a goat is complaining, and even the goat sounds like it is listening.

"Let it lie there," I say, "until the sheikh's wife decides where it goes. It is not mine to return and it is not mine to keep. I am done being the place it is kept."

The sheikh's wife looks at the band on her rug for a long moment. She is not a stupid woman and she is not a cruel one, and both of those are worse for me than if she were.

"You have made the camp a party to it," she says.

"Yes," I say. "That was the intention."

"Your mother will hear how you said it."

"My mother took the cloth out of her sleeve and carried it open in her hand where anyone could see," I say. "She will not be surprised by the volume."

One of the young wives on the right laughs, and covers it with a cough, and the aunt who talks for that side turns and looks at her until the laughing is finished.

The sheikh's wife sends a girl for water then, which means the talking is over and the drinking has begun, and that I have not been dismissed and not been forgiven. I sit. My legs are not as steady as I would like and sitting hides it.

They talk of other things — a birth at the far tents, salt, the price of a ram — and the band lies in the middle of the rug the whole time and nobody picks it up and no one's foot goes near it, and every one of them has to look at it while she talks about a ram.

When I come out the light is full and hard, and the men are at the far side by the sheikh's rope, and the Egyptian is among them at the edge, where he has been standing since before I went in, I think.

He does not come forward. He has not come forward once since the well, and I have begun to understand that this is not indifference but a courtesy so exact it looks like distance.

But he speaks. Once. To the men, not to me, in that flat voice that does not rise for anything.

"A gift may be refused," he says. "I have heard it said in this camp that a gift may be refused, and that the refusing is not an insult, and that a man who takes a refusal for an insult was not giving a gift."

Then he steps back into the line of the men and looks at the ground, and the sheikh's rope is tied off, and that is the whole of what he does.

My cousin is not in the camp to hear it. He is at his father's tents two ridges over, and by evening he will hear it word for word, and it will not be the same words.

The two fat camels are still standing in the sun. Nobody has led them home. Their hobble is slack and they have eaten everything within reach and they are beginning, in the way of camels, to look less like a gift and more like a bill.

My mother is at the rope of our tent with her sleeves pushed up, working, and she does not ask me how it went. She looks at my hands, which are empty, then at my face, and then she nods once and goes back to what she was doing, and I put my hands into the same basin.

Two days. Then a tent that is his and a door that will be tied from the outside, and I find that the thing I am afraid of is not the door.