He doesn't know if he should wait for Joryleen outside the church, as the worshippers in their pastel spring outfits push out into the April air, which is turning watery and chill as clouds overhead tarnish darker. Ahmad's indecision is prolonged while, half hiding behind a curbside locust tree that survived the demolition that created the lake of rubble, he satisfies himself that Tylenol was not in the crowd. Then, just as he decides to sneak away, there she is, coming up to him, serving up all her roundnesses like fruit on a plate. She wears a silver bead, holding a tiny reflection of the sky, in one nostril-wing. Beneath the blue robe all along there were the same sort of clothes she wears to high school, not dress-up church clothes. He remembers her telling him she doesn't take religion all that seriously. "I saw you," she teases. "Sitting with the Johnsons, no less."
"The Johnsons?"
"That family you were with. They are big church people. They own do-it-yourself laundry places downtown and over in Passaic. You've heard of the black boor-shwa-zee} That's them. What you staring at, Ahmad?"
"That little thing in your nose. I didn't notice it before. Just those little rings on the edge of your ear."
"It's new. You don't like it? Tylenol likes it. He can hardly wait till I get a tongue stud."
"Piercing your tongue? That's horrible, Joryleen."
"Tylenol says the Lord loves a sporty woman. What does your Mr. Mohammed say?"
Ahmad hears the mockery but nevertheless feels tall standing next to this short, ripe girl; he looks down past her face, with its gleam of mischief, to the tops of her breasts, exposed by a loose-necked springtime blouse and still glazed with the excitement and exertion of her singing. "He advises women to cover their ornaments," he tells her. "He says good women are for good men, and unclean women for unclean men."
Joryleen's eyes widen and she blinks her lids, taking this unsmiling solemnity as part of him, which she might have to deal with. "Well, I don't know where that leaves me," she says cheerfully. "Their notion of unclean was pretty broad in those there days," she adds, and brushes back some moisture from her temple, where the hair is fine like a boy's mustache before he thinks to shave. "How'd you like my singing?"
He takes thought, while the chattering congregants stroll past, their duty done for the week, and the in-and-out sun makes feathery weak shadows beneath the emergent locust leaves. "You have a beautiful voice," Ahmad tells her. "It is very pure. The uses to which it is being put, however, are not pure. The singing, especially of the very fat woman-"
"Eva-Marie," Joryleen supplies. "She's the most. She never gives it less than her everything."
"Her singing seemed to me very sensual. And I did not understand many of the words. In what way is Jesus such a friend to all of you?"
"What a friend, what a friend," Joryleen pants lightly, in imitation of the way the choir broke up the hymn's phrases suggesting the repetitive (as he understood them) motions of sexual intercourse. "He just is, that's all," she insists. "People feel better, thinking he's right there. If he isn't there caring, who is, right? The same thing, I 'spect, with your Mohammed."
"The Prophet is many things to his followers, but we do not call him our friend. We are not so cozy, as your clergyman said."
"Hey," she says, "let's not talk this stuff. Thanks for coming, Ahmad. I never thought you would."
"You have been gracious to me, and I was curious. It is helpful, up to a point, to know the enemy."
"Enemy? Whoa. You didn't have no enemies there."
"My teacher at the mosque says that all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed."
"Oh, man. How'd you get this way? Your mother's just a freckle-faced mick, right? That's what Tylenol says."
"Tylenol, Tylenol. How close are you, may I ask, to this fount of wisdom? Does he consider you his woman?"
"Oh, that boy's just trying things out. He's too young to get fixed up with any one lady friend. Let's walk along. We're getting too many looks."
They walk along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen's body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, "I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith."
"Instead of being good, don't you ever want to feel good?" Joryleen asks. He believes she is sincerely curious; in his severe faith he is a puzzle to her, a curiosity.
"Perhaps the two go together," he offers. "The feeling and the being."
"You came to my church," she says. "I could go to your mosque with you."
"That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity."
"Wow. That may be more than I have time for. Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun}"
"Some of the same things you do, though 'fun,' as you put it, is not the point of a good Muslim's life. I take lessons twice a week in the language and lessons of the Qur'an. I attend Central High. I am on the soccer team in the fall-indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot-and do track in the spring. For spending money, and to help out my mother-the freckle-faced mick, as you call her-"
"As Tylenol called her."
"As the two of you evidently call her-I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be 'fun,' observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest. Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed."
"So strict nothing happens, right? Turn left here, if you're walking me home. You don't have to, you know. We're getting into worse neighborhoods. You don't want to be hassled."
"I wish to see you home." He goes on, "They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value."
"Oh, my," Joryleen says. "In whose eyes? I mean, who's doing this valuing?"
She is leading him, he feels, close to the edge of betraying his beliefs, just in responding to her questions. In class, he observed at the high school, she talked well, so that the teachers became engaged with her, not realizing that she was leading them from the set lessons and wasting classroom time. She has a wicked streak. "In the eyes of God," he tells her, "as revealed by the Prophet: 'Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity.' That's from the same sura that advises women to cover their ornaments, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not even to stamp their feet so their hidden ankle bracelets can be heard."
"You think I show too much tit-I can tell by where your eyes go."
Just hearing the word "tit" from her lips stirs him indecently. He says, staring ahead, "Purity is its own end. As we were discussing, it is both being good and feeling good."