How to Make Liberace Jealous

Lebanon became home to the largest number of Syrian refugees and to the largest refugee population per capita in the world. In a country of four million, there were more than a million refugees, though the actual number was closer to a million and a half. So much pain, so much destitution. So many refugees. And sometimes it seemed that you wanted to interview every one of them, to provide an ear for all the tales. I remember listening to you on the radio saying there was nothing you could do to ameliorate the situation, that you felt helpless and pointless, but that you thought doing nothing would have been a crime. You could bear witness, you said; observing was the one thing you knew how to do. If you could listen to their stories, maybe their stories could make sense. Only what was narrated could be understood. You traversed the country—granted, it’s a pygmy country—talking to all manner of Syrians. You went to different corners of Beirut, down south to Sidon, up north to Tripoli, to the west, beyond the mountains to the Beka’a Valley.

What surprised me after I read the couple of essays you wrote were the details that stuck in my head, the idiosyncrasies of being human. I recalled some of the people in your writings and not others. I didn’t remember much about the people you wrote about who were tortured, not much about the suffering of living as refugees. The woman with the sequin pantry, however, was one of those who remained ineradicable in my memory. Though she lived in a tent that had been erected in the middle of an onion field, she refused squalor. This gorgeous woman in her early twenties had an impeccably clean home that was decorated in an understated style except in one respect, the tent’s masterwork. She had studded her entire pantry with sequins, with results Liberace would have envied. You thought she must have spent untold hours gluing sparkles onto sheets of wood that would become a pantry to store nonperishables. Intricate and delicate, no spot left uncovered, so over the top that many a drag queen would kill for it.

You desperately wanted it.

You said she seemed embarrassed when she talked to you, admitting that it took her a long time to finish it, longer than she’d anticipated, what with caring for her four offspring, cooking, cleaning, and tending to her husband and in-laws.

“It’s good to have something beautiful to come home to,” she said. “The children love it.”

“I do too,” you said with real appreciation. “It’s magnificent.”

She blushed, then beamed. A shy grin, and her eyes rose to meet yours. “We had a ton of sequins,” she said.

In the essay, you wondered what kind of person would think it was a good idea to donate thousands of sequins to Syrian refugees who had nothing left, whose entire lives had been extirpated.

Bright, shiny, gaudy, useless sequins?

A fabulous one, of course, a lovely, most wonderful human being.