Peacocks roamed the hills freely, like royalty. All they need do was look pretty to be admired, to be thought of, to inspire in others a desire for possession of an unattainable beauty. They couldn't fly though, at least not high enough to travel far. They could only swoop down from a tree, let's say, to join the others on the green by a lake. There, they would fan out their long iridescent tails to display several eye-spots used to ward off the winds of misfortune.
What Agnes didn't know was, divorce was as common as spring cleaning each year in within the society she'd found herself living. And unlike those feathered creatures that could be heard "Yeeowing" each morning, "pretty" made no promise. Sadly, it wasn't in her to understand that a woman's beauty didn't necessarily fade as the years passed, but instead, a woman's beauty slowly transformed over time like a majestic mountain, shaped by the sediment of the sky's tears, the sea's passion, a river's laughter and the earth's anger when it shook.
Perhaps she had forgotten to bring with her the ayn al-ḥasūd, or evil eye talisman, from Lebanon upon her journey to America as a young girl. Her Grandmother, Ramia, had given it to her when she had turned thirteen to ward off the envy of other girls and the jackal, should it turn up at the foot of her bead, unexpectedly. She had loved her grandmother who had died too soon. Possessing it may have also warded off misfortune and kept it at bay in her newly adopted country. Seemed though, she had left her past on those distant shores, as if her story were someone else's story, not her own. She never spoke about her childhood, not even with the American man she had married, a man who knew little about the language of the Arab heart.
When she found herself in divorce court at the ripe age of fifty, it was not her husband nor his lawyer whom she feared most, but the fact that she had not yet applied her rose lipstick. So, she politely excused herself from her female attorney Jennifer's presence in the courthouse hall before the hearing, and led her nineteen year old daughter into the lady's restroom. Once there, she searchingly stood at the mirror, touched her fingers to her short thick black hair and with great poise and a trace of sadness, she carefully twirled open her lipstick, leaned in and slowly applied a shade called Rose Madder to her full lips. This was all she wore throughout her life, just lipstick, no mascara, colorful shadow or kohl liner. It's all she needed. Her eldest daughter looked on in confusion. What did it matter? This lipstick at this time. After so many years, the man she married had not one shred of regard for the woman who bore him three daughters, yet here she was, carefully applying the deep rose hue, as if her beauty depended on it, as if it would make him reconsider, as if her beauty would spark a miraculous healing to his pruned heart and have him begging forgiveness. Truth be told, as a salesman, he had easily hid all his earnings and to the court, he claimed not a dime.
Any heart she hoped him to have had was apparently absent, at least to her daughter's understanding. Her daughter, Maysah, silently watched her mother and stood by her with concern for what was to come. It had been a strange day of stunning revelations. Once the hearing had begun earlier that morning, her husband, Henry, from Arkansas, had sat with a smug look upon his face, all coiled up next to his attorney and seemingly unaffected. Agnes had been seated on the other side of the courtroom with their eldest daughter and a look of resignation in her soft hazel eyes.
Her eyes welled up at thought of losing all she had come to know. She glanced at her daughter, guiltily. She had let her daughters down. She carefully placed her lipstick case back into her worn leather purse and straightened up for round two in the courtroom.
*
"Norak? Norak listen to me. I can't. Norak?" Agnes hung up the receiver.
