The sliding doors shut behind her. Silently. Thunderously. Even as the plane had been landing, it had not seemed possible. Even as, eyes to the window, in that hazy state between sleep and wake, time zones, land and air, she had watched the lights approach, sparkle, swell…
Sama Zayat had flown.
She had flown before, many summers ago, from a tree. She had been four or five, and at the family house in Mesyaf. There had been pear trees, roses, trellises of vines, but also worlds and worlds of pine forests. She would climb over the fence, run off, disappear for hours, return, knees muddied, dress blissfully in tatters. It terrified Mama.
The day she got lost, they found her, by twilight, up in a tree, not scared—she did not know what that meant. From below, Baba bellowed; Mama cried. They looked so different.
Everything looked different: the last bursts of light and sky through the needles and the twigs… so beautiful she announced—in all seriousness, so Mama says—that she was going to become a bird.
She told them, calmly, that she was going to fly away, and climbed to the highest branch…
Touchdown. They had landed. Sama Zayat was seventeen and had flown over the Atlantic.
Arrival! Just as she read the word, an invisible force thrust the crowd forward, like a giant wave, sweeping Sama along. It was an emotion, palpable, more overwhelming even than takeoff had been. A feeling, like a dipping roller coaster. No, magnified, sublime.
They flew through the doors, to the carouseling luggage. One was hers to claim, like the country waiting outside. Her soles burned; her eyes flitted. Her suitcase was black, unlabeled. It took some time to locate.
She had not anticipated the sea of other unmarked suitcases and people. The buzzing in her ears: English! People speaking in English! In variegated, brightly colored, rising and falling accents. People speaking French, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese… exotic, incomprehensible, intoxicating. Swarming her senses. A delicious, welling blend of anonymity and communion.
No one looked like her, or at her, or would recognize her when she walked through those last doors. She was foreign in a sea of foreigners; tourists, immigrants, exiles, home-comers; in a country she could only glimpse in her mind, pink, gold. Into which she could dissolve but would remain insoluble, whole. So this was freedom: the possibilities of becoming.
Behind baggage claim, a sign, regal, in pink and orange neon:
DUNKIN’ DONUTS
Her heart flapped madly in her chest. Columbus must have felt this. This split-second feeling after a leap, onto a wave of air. There were Dunkin’ Donuts in Syria, but this one was here, in America! She wished her Mama could see it.
She took out the roll of dollars her mother had given her and walked up to the counter.
She had never had a donut, and in Syria, she had rarely, if ever, eaten alone. But she was not in Syria. And she didn’t know if she liked donuts. She ordered one, sugar-glazed, and a small black coffee.
Sama ate her first meal in the United States, alone, slowly, on her feet, at a tall and round steel table ringed with traces of past coffees. The texture, in her mouth and of the moment, was light, soft, unfamiliar. Exhilaratingly sweet.
She watched herself from a distance, in her wrinkled dress. Sugar rush. She could be anyone. Final bite. Sama Zayat was a person who liked donuts.
“Sama Zayat?”
Short, stout. Prominent nose. Thick, coarse, cindered hair. Thin round gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like Baba, she thought. No, he looked nothing like Baba. Except for the mustache. She could not imagine Baba in tweed, could not imagine him at Harvard.
“Did I pronounce it right?”
He sounded nothing like Baba. His voice was softer, deep, like pipe tobacco, with an accent she could not place. Crisp ks and ts, counterbalanced by gentle sshing ss. A hesitation, a half breath before he spoke. She had noticed it several times, interspersed in his lecture.
He had not looked as she entered, for which she had been grateful. He had simply carried on with the lesson, allowing her to slip into the nearest empty seat. She had not spoken, not dared look up from her desk until class had been dismissed.
Now the desks were empty, and she nodded.
“Yes, Sama Zayat”—newly alighted on campus, in America, and twenty enormous, mortifying minutes late to his lecture.
“I’m so sorry. I got lost.” Her English thick on her tongue, an ailment she had only recently contracted; Sama had an accent. It had appeared soon after arrival.
Professor Mendelssohn looked up and now, at her. A ray of light got caught in his glasses and glinted.
“I have been teaching this class in this same classroom for decades. I still get lost. Every semester someone shows me again.”
Crow’s-feet materialized.
“Where I come from, everything is very small.”
He did not say where that was or ask where she was from. The first person not to since she had landed in America.
Sama had an accent. Sama spoke English—or had thought she did—well. She had attended an American school in Syria, watched American television, read American books, danced to American songs on Friday nights that had ended in American drive-thru restaurants. She had craved America, had thought she knew America, had taken off, and landed.
Professor Mendelssohn asked, “How is your semester going so far?”
At orientation, she had gripped her lemon seltzer while witty quips crisscrossed the air over her head, sparking guffaws, slaps on backs, the clinking of cans and glasses. America had an accent—and it was strong. Slang and a sense of humor she could not decode. America spoke and dressed and sounded foreign. Except she was the foreigner. She felt like an explorer who had stumbled upon an obscure tribe. She had stood at the fringe and laughed whenever the others had, tossing her head back, vaguely dizzy. A heady sort of lightness.
Like stepping off a ledge, into a whirlpool of words, swirling so fast they blurred.
“Are you enjoying your classes?”
She realized she had not answered the professor’s first question. She nodded, too emphatically.
“It’s very… different.”
They, Sama, not it! She bit her tongue. That was why she had stopped raising her hand during lectures! She had no idea how to manipulate this language, navigate this maze of granite hallways, oak desks, and she was all alone and an idiot.
But then Professor Mendelssohn looked at her and said, “It is,” and from behind his glasses, something cut through the clear, hard wall she had been knocking against.
“It takes… time,” the older man said, enunciating, his own accent mild but unashamed and distinct. His English sounded earthier than an American’s, but somehow, his words were easier to understand.
“Everyone here is trying to find their place, even those students who seem most confident. I noticed you did not take part in the discussion at the end of the lecture.”
“I—”
“I hope you will next time. I’m sure you have much to say.”
She wasn’t sure, she wanted to tell him, of anything. She was very far from home and very separate.
“My English—”
“Can only get better,” he said, ticking his t.