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slices of turkey on pillowy white bread, smeared with mayonnaise and slabs of avocado. Eating was no longer something I could do while driving a car or walking or reading or talking on the phone—like lovemaking, it commanded my full attention, its sensual pleasures obliterating all thought. I was becoming someone I no longer recognized: consumed with desires for food and touch and beauty and comfort, burrowing like an animal deep into its nest.

4
Joining the Tribe
    W e should get married,” Ismail said one night. He lay on his back in the dark, speaking to the ceiling. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if marriage were a durable piece of furniture we should purchase to fill an empty space. Guest lists and honeymoons were not on his mind; instead he was thinking about health insurance and property rights and my protection in case anything happened to him.
    Weddings did not hold the same sway over him as they did for me. He had never slipped a wedding dress onto a Barbie doll, then marched her tippy-toed across the carpet beside Ken to a makeshift altar. Nor had he spent countless hours on the playground playing fortune-telling games that pivoted on two questions: whom would I marry and how many kids would I have? He had not sat cross-legged on a carpet in front of a television set, glued to the screen as Princess Diana swiveled her delicate wrist at an adoring crowd on her wedding day.
    I was nine years old the summer of her spectacular ceremony. Watching the wedding on TV, I was transfixed by the sight of a horse-drawn carriage pulling up to a cathedral. A princess emerged from a gilded door in a billowing white dress like buttercream frosting, big dollops of white decorating her slender white shoulders. This was no Disney movie; this was
real life.
With her shy smile, Princess Diana tilted her head demurely to show her gently feathered hair. Her straight-backed prince with his broad, ornamented chest held out his arm for her. She put her arm in his, and they turned their back on us, floating away into happily ever after.
    As far as I could tell, Ismail was not burdened with fantasies of happily ever after. He had never stood in a tight cluster of women wearing matching, unflattering pastel-colored dresses, laughing awkwardly about the ritual toss of the bride’s bouquet, then elbowing and scrambling after it when it was launched into the air. Instead he had tussled over UN rations tossed from the truck that came through his village once a week; he’d watched neighbors walk away with pockets bulging with canned food, while he went home with none. He had gone hungry when a drought destroyed a season’s crop, seen young siblings die, and nearly lost his own leg to an infection because he lacked health care. Instead of unspooling fantasies about the future, his imagination produced vivid scenarios of hard times. He knew how quickly life could take a turn for the worse, so he wanted me to be prepared: to have health insurance, own half his home, be protected in case of emergency. For him, getting legally married was as practical as having a first-aid kit in the bathroom.
    Every time he suggested marriage I snarled at him like a cornered animal, as if he had just flatly stated I should walk several paces behind him or ask his permission before I leave the house. I had already lost so much control. I had gone from being a single woman with a promising future to being pregnant, unmarried, and unemployed—to spending my weekdays lounging on the frayed couch of his tiny apartment in sweatpants, listlessly watching my body change as if it were a nature show on television. Terrified by the prospect of motherhood, I was still coming to terms with being married to the child I carried. I often woke in a cold sweat from frantic dreams of trying to claw my way back into the past. I balked at losing any more autonomy. His practical approach to domestic partnership seemed tragic. Marriage, I imagined, was about being swept into one’s