BARBARA BEDWAY

Death and Lebanon

Ohio

Mashaya ruins the night for everyone, both aunts say it has to stop. After dinner they find her sitting on our bed already in her nightgown, dark circles under wide green eyes. Aunt Philamena says tell us, habibti, what do you see? Tree shadows? Branches against the windowpane?

The dark hair swings no from side to side.

Something you hear, then? The backyard dogs howling, your old aunt here snoring? Maybe Mr. Truskaloski upstairs hacking out his lungs? No?

No.

Mashaya, child, something makes you scream.

Sitting in our bedroom window I watch the bonfire in the yard across the alley. With my cheeks against the cold pane of glass I see our neighbor wrapped in shawls bringing food on a plate to her dogs. They leap up in their chains. The high-pitched barking goes on and on. If our aunts weren’t watching, Mashaya would be in the window with me, watching that fire in the tall metal drum.

You tell me, Ajunya, Philamena says, what can I do now?

At home I am Ajunya and Marcia is Mashaya, but only at home. In the Miner’s Supply my aunt calls me Angie; it’s Marcia who stocks the shelves. To her customers my aunt speaks Polish, Russian, a little Greek. Her sister Hikmet gets by with just Italian. Everyone here came from somewhere else but my sister and I are the newest: two years here from the Lebanon, because of the events. I was nine and Mashaya eleven when we came with our sitti, called grandmother here, to live with her daughters in America. At night I sit in our window and think of Beirut: the flashes of light, the ten-second count to the artillery’s boom.

Ajunya, are you listening? Look at your room. What can I do that I haven’t done? What?

We live with bare walls and a bare floor; all pictures, mirrors, crucifixes got put away and their ghosts with them. Because of Mashaya’s dreams our aunts hang up every piece of clothing, never move the furniture when they clean; leave the dresser top, the floor, the chairs bare of anything that in the night could become the head or neck or arm of a stranger. Mashaya told them: his nose is twisted in the crucifix, his eyes shine out of the mirror. Sometimes there is no stranger but something else. Still, Philamena has to open the closet door to poke for hiding strangers, then shut it so the hanging clothes can’t shape themselves into the wrinkles on an arm, a face, the back of a huge hand.

Well?

Xaala, I don’t know.

Mashaya, look at me, even your sister can’t tell what it is, she sleeps right next to you. At least she’s trying to. Everyone has to sleep, child. Mashaya, can’t you look at me?

Philamena slaps her reddened hands against her black dress. She is so tired from these interrupted nights that her heavy body sags and her legs and ankles swell. Aunt Hikmet, thin and belted inside her own black dress, tells her beads in the doorway.

Mashaya, Mashaya.

Philamena hugs my sister, whose face disappears in the dark woolen sleeves. Outside the bonfire is low. It will die before Mashaya can watch it.

Aunt Hikmet brings her rosary into our room. She kneels on the rugless floor and we face her. I hear the crack of my sister’s bony ankles. She smiles at me and tucks her nightgown under her knees. Philamena leans on my shoulder and groans to her knees. Beads click. We pray.

We pray hail marys for the dead: for our mother, who died having me; and for our sitti, whose life gave out once she got us, safe and sound, to America. We pray for who’s not dead but dying, the old women Hikmet visits in their homes every week, nuns and widows giving out after years of a life in Christ. We pray for the Lebanon and all the true Lebanese, the believers in Christ, who must not give out until peace comes to the country at last.

Amen, Hikmet says, while my sister’s lips are still moving. She’s forming silent words to someone, to God or whoever it is, to keep our father from giving out in the Lebanon.

IN BED we listen to the sound of our aunts’ slippers scuffling down the hallway. We count one minute and hear the creak of their beds. Mashaya reaches for her shoebox from under the bed and I pick up the rosewater bottle by the bedpost. We rub the rosewater into our skin and we sniff each other.

That’s good, Mashaya says, and hooking her long hair behind each ear, she bends over her dusty box. Some nights she needs to look and some nights she leaves it alone, but for sleeping she always needs the rosewater smell and the sight of its thick blue bottle.

I hold the flashlight pen while she sifts through her treasures from the Lebanon. There’s dirt and broken glass and Sitti’s hypodermic needle for her insulin. In a rubber band Mashaya keeps strips of posters she tore off the walls of Beirut. She has eyes and hair and lips and shoulders from a hundred different boys, boys whose families plastered their pictures all over the city to honor their sons dead in the events. The boys might have been kidnapped or died fighting in the streets but it’s Mashaya who keeps them, their creased smiles and folded eyes.

Hold this, she says, and hands me a strip of wide forehead.

Somewhere in the box she thinks there is a whole face but we haven’t found it yet. Once our sitti said we were close, we almost had it, but the eyes looked in different directions.

Let’s give up, I tell her. Nothing looks right tonight.

Hold the flashlight closer.

The pieces are getting too crinkly to see.

You’re not even looking.

I’m tired of looking.

Then we’ll never find anything.

She puts back the lid and folds her hands on top of it. I tug at the blanket and wait. She won’t look by herself. Sitti helped when I wouldn’t but Sitti died months ago so it has to be me now. I know I should search more but my eyes are too heavy, they close when I tell them not to.

Can we sleep now? I ask her.

I never sleep. She leans down to slide the box under the bed.

You do sleep. You have to. You dream.

I dream with my eyes open.

The dreams began after Sitti died. For the week she was sick Mashaya sat beside her next to the trays of pills and needles. It was summer, the hot air thick with unfallen rain, but Sitti was keeping us indoors. She watched and worried in her bed damp with sweat. She yelled y’allah, y’allah, get inside, and pointed toward the ceiling where she said she saw a locusts’ swarm. Hikmet ran for the doctor but Mashaya closed the window and started to shake. Sitti called her Melania, our mother’s name, and pulled off the cloth Mashaya tried to press to her forehead.

Melania, she said, her gray hair loose and damp across the pillow, get inside. Locusts are the teeth of the wind.

Beirut

Papa and his cousin Faisz sit at the kitchen table, talking in French about guns. Both prefer to speak in French. They say the true Lebanese are Europeans by way of the Phoenicians. We have no relatives in France but Papa is proud to have two sisters-in-law who live in America. He sends us there once a year for a month, where he forbids us to speak any Arabic.

Sitti laughs at the two men. She calls them mughnuuni, crazy ones, and scrubs her pans viciously. Mashaya dries them and hums to herself over the names and numbers of guns we all know by heart: Katushka, Kalishnokov, Duska; American M-l6s, Czech M-58s.

I know Papa is sad he has no sons to help him defend the Lebanon. He is handsome in his olive-green army uniform of the phalanges libanaises; his high black boots, the beret atop black hair cropped close to the scalp. He has a plan to get to the teenagers firing a 122-millimeter gun from the Cercle de la Renaissance sportive. The boys fire round after round into the Christian section, then they strut—Faisz gets up to show us their strut, with his hands high on his hips—they strut free as birds across the Avenue de Paris and jump for a swim into the Mediterranean. Faisz says sometimes they pick up rackets for a quick game on the tennis courts nearby.

There are battles all over the city and my father has chosen his. He and Faisz fold up their paper and diagrams and pick up their M-16s.

Au revoir, Papa says, kissing Sita.

Ma issalame, she answers, facing her dishes.

Papa slams the door.

Remember, Sitti tells us, untying the clean white rag from around her grey bun and sinking into a chair, just remember. The French say merde for shit but believe me, it still smells the same.

She turns on the radio for Sharif Akhaoui’s daily report. He used to give rush-hour traffic reports but now he tells where the roadblocks are and what bridges are safe to cross.

Today, he is saying, you would be mad to go out. The gunmen are everywhere, every street is dangerous. Do not go out. Do not even try to.

Sometimes we listen to Akhaoui for hours while Sitti stares at the radio. Today he is naming street after street. No pharmacies opened, no bakeries. Do not go out. People telephone him with new sniping in Ashrafiyeh, with kidnappings in Ain al-Rummaneh. He repeats every ambush, every kidnapping.

Sitti keeps one hand on mine and an arm around Mashaya. No one touches the dial. Akhaoui’s voice gets higher and louder. He screams by the end of the day.

MASHAYA’S JOB is to set the trash on fire. Just before curfew at seven o’clock she runs out to the street with a few drops of kerosene and lights the tips of the garbage. While the fire is spreading she tries, quick as she can, to pull out what she wants: broken bottles, bloody scarves, twisted pieces of metal. She won’t touch moldy bread and she hates the daytime, when flies stay round the piles of trash and keep even the cats away. I don’t like the nights when the sky glows red from tracer bullets and we hear rats in the cellar where we sleep on a mattress by the stairs. The rats make a soft, scuffling sound that doesn’t worry my sister. She says if you can hear them they’re not near you yet.

When our neighbor Mr. Helou left the city, he took a wide glass jar filled with dirt from his home in the mountains. Mashaya keeps bits of crumbling stone from the porch outside in a shoebox beside our mattress. What she pulls from the trash she lines up in a corner and shows me before we sleep. She loves hard things with jagged edges, blackened in parts by fire. In the dark she gives me a sliver of glass and I do what she wants me to do. My fingers curl tight around it; she squeezes my hand with hers. When I open it up my hand is bleeding.

Mesquina, poor thing, Mashaya says, and taking back the sliver of glass she covers the cut with her mouth.

SITTI SAYS we are going to America. It’s early morning and we’re sitting in the kitchen where it’s still dark. Yesterday the lights flickered out and for the first time did not come back on. When the telephone is working, Sitti is busy calling, making her plans. We have to get to Cyprus and we need gold. While she’s talking, Sitti drinks her arak with vodka because there’s no water and there’s no bread either. She won’t let us go to the bank building downtown and take water from its oriental fishpond, as certain neighbors have done. But she hands us dried figs to suck on while she cradles the phone to her ear. I chew and chew to make the most juice I can, but the taste is still bitter smoke from the garbage fires and dust from the April khamsin.

All week clouds of yellow dust have blown across the city, settling onto the still bodies left in the street and seeping past the newspapers taped over our broken windows. The dust keeps Mashaya moving from room to room, shaking herself and kicking at the choking air. She stops when we hear roosters crowing outside; she says we could be in the mountains if we shut our eyes, listen to those roosters and the quiet of no cars moving in the street. By the living room window we shut our eyes and hear Sitti yelling from the kitchen.

It’s too early but already there is the crack and whoomph and boom of the fighting from the city center. We hear gunmen scuttling over the walls and into the empty streets. They wear thick ski masks and run with their guns pointing to the sky. Sitti slams down the phone and shouts for us to get into the cellar. She stays on the top step because she’s never able to make the climb back up from below. With both hands she helps herself sit down near the wall. Missiles fizz through the air. Sitti’s voice is tired and hoarse.

I think we have a boat for this weekend, she says. Girls, can you hear me? That’s two days. You can stand anything for two days.

YOUR BOAT is Anthony Quinn’s yacht, Papa says, stepping into the kitchen as Sita slams the living room door and stays behind it. You’ll go out with le tout Beirut. Tell them, Faisz, tell them what a boat that is.

Faisz says that is quite a boat. It’s going to have a swimming pool and possibly two. The boat leaves from Jounieh, and in Jounieh all the shops are open and the streets are clean. People dance by candle-light in the Four Seasons Hotel.

I ought to be recuperating in Jounieh, Faisz says, holding up his bandaged hand. He and Papa have dark bristle all over their faces and they smell like the smoke of hashish. It’s quiet again, still as mornings used to be. Papa comes back only in the quiet. He’s brought bottled water and bread from Damascus. The wooden part of his rifle gleams around the sticker of St. Theresa holding a cross.

When you come back from America, Papa says, Jounieh is where we’ll live. He hands each of us a gold coin with a reindeer on one side and tells us to hide it from Sitti.

This is to help you come home, in case I can’t get there myself you’ll have money to get your own tickets.

Pierre, Faisz says, what are you doing that for? They could get stopped and searched on the way to the boat, someone might think they have more somewhere else.

Mashaya starts crying into Papa’s shoulder. His uniform is rough but she stays there with her head down and tugs at the buttons. Papa says we won’t get stopped, it’s taken care of. Faisz reaches for me.

Do you know why you have to go away, habibti? he asks, gathering me carefully into his arms. It’s because of war, you have to understand war. Everyone looks dangerous now, even children. We were on sentry duty this morning, your father and I, and we saw an old man in slippers alone in the street. Your father looked through his binoculars and said he seemed empty-handed, but your father had to shoot him anyway. Now, do you know why he did that?

Mashaya burrows into Papa’s uniform. She says nothing and I don’t want to.

Tell them, Pierre, Faisz says.

Papa is trying to smooth the thick tangles in Mashaya’s long hair. His wiggling fingers try to work their way through the clumps, but can’t.

I know where the man lived, Papa says. He wasn’t going to make it anyway.

Be serious, Faisz says, stroking my arm with his bandaged hand.

Papa says, I am.

PAPA SAYS we were needed for a maneuver.

He came into the basement with his flashlight and put his face next to ours. He still smelled of hashish and his reddened eyes were large. Mashaya jammed the lid onto her shoebox but our father was not looking there.

Hurry, he said, everyone has to help. Even old women like your sitti are helping but Sitti’s asleep, she’s had too much arak today.

At the top of the stairs we looked in on her, asleep on Mashaya’s bed.

She’s out for the night, Papa said.

We stumbled in the dark to the front door and Papa lit a cigarette with one precious match. In the flare I saw Mashaya with her hands in fists staring ahead at the door. There were two soft taps. Papa stooped to kiss us.

This lady is Mr. Helou’s aunt, he said. You do what she says and you’ll be back before curfew. Ajunya, stop smiling, there’s nothing funny about this.

I did feel my mouth stretched wide but I wasn’t smiling. I tried to believe my body was nothing, that I could get through the streets like air breathed out of a chest. My chest felt so tight it seemed only the thinnest breath could escape.

Papa opened the door and gave us to the old woman standing there. She had thick hands like Sitti’s and dressed like her in a black dress and a rag around her head. She carried a small shovel and told us to say nothing until we got where we needed to be. Papa touched her shoulder and said he had to meet Faisz. He picked up his gun and disappeared into the dark.

The old woman led us down two dark streets where nothing moved. A match flared in an alleyway but no hand seemed to hold it. We stopped at a building site near the corner. Mashaya let go of my hand. More women with children came out of the side streets and alleys; everyone holding shovels, trowels, dustpans.

Do this, the woman told us, pulling a sandbag from the pile of them and holding it out in front of her. We each took a side of the bag while she shoveled dirt from the site into it. I heard her breathing hard and praying in French under her breath. My hands shook and I dropped the bag twice but Mr. Helou’s aunt muttered I know, I know, and picked my side up for me. Mashaya’s hands were still as she stared at the thickening bag. When it was filled we laid it aside and filled another, then another, until our arms were aching and our breaths were loud in our ears. Two boys pushing a wheelbarrow helped us toss our bags in with others.

Now run, the woman told us. It’s one street down and one street over.

People we couldn’t see were scurrying into the alleys and buildings. Mashaya and I ran, holding each other’s slippery hand and stumbling over the rubble. Behind us we heard the crack of a rifle but we were standing up so we ran on. I thought of invisible things, of a breath that breathes on and a look without eyes. Then my chest was so tight I could think of nothing and held tighter to Mashaya’s hand.

We got one street over and our house was easy to find. Sitti had put a forbidden candle in the window, and was waiting.

Who told you to go outside?

She pinched me, pulled me through the doorway and yanked Mashaya in by her hair.

Who? Your father?

She cursed and slapped Mashaya, who started to laugh and fell down on her knees, laughing harder. Sitti slapped her again and cursed our father, the Lebanon, and Jesus Christ. An explosion too near the back of the house stopped her.

Y’allah, y’allah, get downstairs.

She blew out the candle and groped for our hands. Mashaya was still laughing.

SITTI IS SO CONFUSED this early morning. While the taxi waits she rushes around the kitchen and bedrooms, swiping at dust with a rag and fluffing up the pillows. She curses the squatters who took over Mr. Helou’s house, then says it can’t be helped. But they let their goats wander along the balconies; they cook their meals on the floor. Enough, enough, it doesn’t matter. Get your sister, it’s time to go.

After five minutes she finds us in our bedroom, where Mashaya is stuffing strips of paper into the sides of her suitcase. Her blue sweater is grimy and stained and it smells like smoke from the fire she set this morning. She won’t brush her hair and she won’t take off that sweater.

What, child, is this?

Sitti picks among the folded clothes in the suitcase, finding dirt and broken glass and pieces of twisted metal. She takes Mashaya’s face in her hands and looks a long time into her eyes.

Mesquina, poor thing, she says, but Mashaya pulls away. She runs past me and I brush at the ashes that settled onto her hair.

Don’t touch me, she says. I’m burning.

Ohio

Saturdays Philamena works in the store and Hikmet takes my sister to the counselor. I make tea for Mashaya and pour in lots of milk. She stirs it, the spoon goes round and round.

This time, if the counselor says Mashaya must give up her box, she won’t go back again. If the counselor says that all refugees feel that way at first, attached to some physical thing, she’ll tell him we’re not refugees, not like the Palestinians, we know we are going back.

Hikmet from the porch yells y’allah, y’allah. Mashaya shrugs and brushes past. She leaves her rosewater smell.

Alone in the kitchen I push back the curtains and put three plates in the sink. By the window I say my prayer. Beirut. God, let it be like this:

The first time Papa comes back from maneuvers, I say, Don’t come in. I say, Father, if you come in, the kitchen chair where you sat with your maps won’t sit still for you anymore. If you come back, the table will collapse, the edge where you rest your hand will bend and the legs fold under. Don’t try to come in. The door won’t let you, the knob that you twist won’t turn in to us, won’t give us away. God, let Sitti be in her place at the sink and Mashaya will be at the window. Let everything here be what belongs, water in jars and bread flat and white on the table. God, God, let here be where Sitti does not die, where Mashaya stands wiping our plates in the light of the open window.

Why We Are in the DAR

MAMA MADE TABBOULEH, and that took courage. The ladies of the DAR did not know those tastes mixed up together, the crunchy bulgur wheat and the lemony mint dressing. By now Mama can make it just as our Lebanese grandmother taught her to: she so finely chops every bit of parsley and scallions and tomatoes so the red tomato mingles with confettied green and white onions and presto, you’ve got a Christmas dish, Mama says. But she will not mound the tabbouleh in the center of a plate and surround it with torn bread and lettuce leaves for scooping, because to some that would be exotic and primitive and not at all sanitary. To be considerate we’ve put out white and green mints in a bowl by the tabbouleh, because the DAR ladies are not likely to munch on parsley leaves as our grandmother did, to sweeten their onion breath.

A tureen luncheon means we must also cook up those little Swedish meatballs that the ladies love, and the yellow “perfection” salad all Jelloed up with shredded carrots and cabbage and crushed pineapple wiggling within. The ladies will bring covered dishes and a setup of their own, so as not to make too much trouble for the hostess, who is my mother today for the first time and she says God willing the last.

The Christmas decorations are up no thanks to Uncle Bashir, who promised to help now that Papa is away but he’s too mad at Aunt Melania to think straight. He has gone and visited the funeral director uptown and warned him for the umpteenth time that when he, Bashir al-Hadiri, is laid out in the Dulkoski Funeral Home, his only sister is not to be allowed in, no matter how pitifully she begs; she must be deprived of the final comfort of viewing his mortal remains. And that is her punishment for saying that his oldest son, my cousin Assad, should not wear white suits summer and winter, he looks like a blackberry in a glass of milk.

My sister Louise is good at winding ropes of pine along the banister and she makes fancy red bows out of ribbons saved from Christmases before we were even born. There’s so much to do Mama has us staying home from school with headaches. But we are not worried on that account. Mrs. Roth, my fifth-grade teacher, says our mother writes the best excuse notes—she said you could excuse or forgive the Hadiri girls absolutely anything, given their mother’s perfect penmanship and expressive paragraphs about even the common cold.

Well, for God’s sake, my mother exclaims, setting out the water pitcher on the desk where the Regent will preside, we have no flag. The ladies of the DAR salute the flag first thing in their meeting which is after lunch and usually Mrs. Winston brings the tabletop flag no bigger than my Barbie doll but she will not be here due to diverticulitis. Call Virginia Reberson, Mama instructs Louise, who is bowing everything that can be bowed, she has circled the punch bowl with ropes of pine and draped the chairs and mirrors and doorways and though Mama says it is a bit much I believe it could be in a magazine.

“Look at that snow,” Louise points out the window, one last rope of pine hanging across her arms. “This may be the last time we ever see snow,” she says cheerfully, and I know she is already planning her complete, year-round Florida wardrobe with pale yellows and pinks to set off her suntanned skin. Mama says she herself is going to live in Bermuda shorts, but if I want to hide my scabby knees and still stay cool, well, I can always settle for pedal pushers.

I am dragging folding chairs up from the basement which is really my father’s job but he is in Florida sending us postcards about the job interviews that he has to go on since Mr. Carlsbad the school board president said he should not be rehired as a teacher because he is a direct line to the Pope. Mama says that’s a fine way to treat a decorated war veteran of the First Infantry Division, the Big Red One: No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great. Well. Mama says Mr. Carlsbad can kiss our suntanned behinds; soon we’ll be in Florida where the weather is simply too sunny and pleasant for folks to make a fuss about keeping Catholics out of the public school system.

Mrs. Celestia Carlsbad herself is coming after all, how can she have the nerve, Mama says. Last year she was Regent and opened meetings with a gavel that her father, Judge Waldron, used to scare the bejesus out of immigrants like my grandmother, who sold a little Jake’s Leg to feed her nine children during the Prohibition. Sent her to jail for a year, which is not so big a shame as you might think. Well God knows people were lucky to have someone like your grandmother to go to, Mama told us. People came to her because the whiskey was good and if it wasn’t the best at least people knew they wouldn’t die from it. There were boys went blind from bad whiskey, and what did the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Judge Carlsbad care about them?

This is just the place and time to tell that my mother’s mama was president of the WCTU, but only for one year.

Still, it hurts my heart to think of my grandmother, we called her Sitti, the Arabic word for grandmother, to think of her way down in Alderson, West Virginia, at the federal prison and my nine uncles and aunt, then children like myself, sent off to the county home with only beautiful red-haired Aunt Melania taken in by relatives. Even today I do not like it when someone tells me not to make a federal case out of something because federal anything is a serious matter and will have consequences far beyond the county jail.

Virginia Reberson said she will bring her flag, Louise reports, and I see Louise has changed into her black straight skirt and blue mohair sweater, which so perfectly matches her blue eyes and sets off her perfectly flipped light brown but she says dark blonde hair, that I feel wounded even looking in her direction. Mama tells me fifth grade was an awkward year for her, too, but I am date-colored like my father, with coal black hair and brown eyes, so I will never have eyes matching a color that I love. Look at Natalie Wood, Mama will always say, but brown eyes are not the first thing I think of when I see Natalie Wood, and her hair, by the way, flips perfectly in West Side Story, which Louise and I have seen eleven times in theaters from here to Columbus.

Waiting in my bedroom closet for me to change into is a red corduroy jumper with a white-yam poodle on it. Can you imagine Natalie Wood in that?

Maria of West Side Story would surely not have been able to get into the DAR, Daughters of the American Revolution, its chapters standing in the same relation to the Mother Society as the Posts of the Grand Army of the Republic stand to the head of the army. It says this in the booklet Mama has sent for, and she has followed directions to track down what is needed for her to join, based on PEDIGREE and PATRIOTISM, the DAR. She has proved lineal descent from a Patriot of 1776. Today in the membership she will write the name of the far-back relative who is getting us into the DAR, Mr. Gideon Baruch Eli Wolcott, born 1756, died 1801. She will also write her name, Mrs. Eugenia Lee Wolcott Hadiri, but it is that Hadiri that is the main thing, the name that my mother wants to see inscribed in the membership book of the DAR.

“Honey, go change into your jumper now, and do something with your hair, it looks like you combed it with a fork.” Mama is rushing by in her housecoat with her makeup on, already beautiful but only half dressed. It’s eleven-thirty and at twelve o’clock sharp the ladies will arrive, snow-haired Mrs. Letitia B. Waldron and vicious Mrs. Celestia Carlsbad, Lily Irene Jackson who is not so bad in the talking-to department, she has a granddaughter that babysits us and never once inquires as to what religion we are being raised in, mixed up the way we are. Mrs. Augustus Adams Guild will need a footrest, and when I bring it to her I must refuse the quarter she will offer me and agree that a Catholic in the White House demands vigilance from us all.

Daddy is a Catholic and some people are vigilant about him. The school board will not hire him again, due to his being a direct line to the Pope. Plenty of Presbyterians and Methodists can coach so why bother with someone who takes orders from Rome. Is what the school board says, we hear. Louise and I do not take orders from Rome, because our parents are going to let us decide what religion we want to be when we come of age, which is sometime far in the future, possibly 1969. Still, it is worrisome in summer to watch your friends coming home from Vacation Bible School with coloring books and mimeographed sheets of songs that will help them get into heaven when you yourself have been reading Nancy Drew and listening to Oklahoma! on the reel-to-reel.

I wish to God, Mama says, whenever we point this out to her, there were Unitarians somewhere close by.

Oh why now does the phone have to ring, says Mama with a run in her stocking and the nail polish bottle in one hand and that tiny black brush in the other that she’s dabbing on the run behind her leg. “Get it, Phoebe, will you?” and I do and it’s Dad and I shout out about the tabbouleh and the ladies but he says I’m beat let me talk to your mother.

Mama unclips one pearl drop earring and leans against the kitchen wall, cradling the phone in her ear. “How’s it going, honey?” She is silent for some moments. “Oh, Yusef, no. Stop right there. Don’t even consider it.” Mama puts one hand over the phone and tells me to run up and get her dress off the bed. But I’m not so fast going up the stairs and I hear her repeat, “Yusef, we agreed. You cannot work for your brother. It’s out of the question. Out of the question.”

Louise is half way down the stairs with Mama’s sheath across her arms. She puts a finger to her lips and sits down on the stairs. I say not a thing and join her too. My mother is saying, we both hear her clear as day, “Yusef, Yusef, listen to me. You’re a teacher, we’re moving so you can teach. You don’t have to be a gofer for Sheik Bashir. Well, I’m sorry, but you know how he treats you. He’ll always put his own son ahead of you. What do you know about the real estate business? Don’t. Don’t do this.”

Louise looks at me, rolls her eyes and shrugs, but I know she cares, her mouth is in a frown. Maybe she’s thinking that her dark blonde but really light brown hair will not be lightening in the Florida sun. This year, anyway. Not me. I’m thinking I just don’t want to hear Uncle Bashir asking me another first communion question, or see the Redman sisters down the lane standing at our front door, asking could they look at the A-rab that lives in this house. Everybody must be so tan in Florida they won’t know the difference, tan or Arab.

Mama hangs up the phone with no good-bye that we can hear, and a few seconds later there she is, at the foot of the stairs, mascara in streaks down both her cheeks. She takes her dress from Louise and sinks down on the bottom step with her head against the banister.

“So, girls,” she says, “so girls.” Her eyes are closed and she is rubbing her forehead, rubbing and rubbing it in circles with the palm of her hand. “Well, now we know, don’t we? If we ever doubted. Blood is always thicker than water.” Louise nods knowingly, but I don’t see the point. Mama could just call Uncle Bashir and tell him to mind his own damn business. He can’t get any madder at her because he’s already said that when he’s dead he doesn’t want her coming to the funeral home or the funeral, since she flat out refuses to convert. I start to remind her of this but we hear the crunch of gravel down the lane and see Mrs. Waldron’s big black Buick pull up with a carload of the ladies, every one of them wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

“You two go help them with their things,” Mama says, climbing up the steps to her room. “Tell them I’ve got the tiniest little headache and I’ll be down in a minute.” Her bedroom door shuts softly and here we are. I am still not changed and my hair’s not combed but Mama didn’t seem to care so I don’t either. “Come on,” Louise says, sighing in the same way Mama does. She stands up and brushes off her skirt. “I’ll write our name in the membership book, if she won’t come down.” I nod. And if Mrs. Augustus Adams Guild gives me a quarter for her footrest, I’m going to take it and never say a word.

Turning Lebanese: A Family Story

IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, I visited a tiny village on Mount Lebanon fragrant with the scent of mint and roses, and wondered why my grandmother had never wanted to come back, not even for a visit. Seventeen years earlier, her children had offered to buy her a plane ticket, and when she firmly declined it the matter was dropped. Yet every spring she asked to be driven to a wide field a few miles from her home in Adena, Ohio, where a slender stream sprang out of the hillside. There she picked mint and held up the sprigs for her children to smell. “Mit al-Lubnan” (“like Lebanon”), she said. She wondered at the sheep in America, with their truncated tails, and told her children about the sheep with large, fluffy tails that grazed on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. My father found her a picture of one in an encyclopedia entry under “Syria.” She was content to look at that.

When thousands of Syrian-Lebanese arrived in this country at the turn of the century, as she had, and were referred to as “Turks” because their passports bore the stamp of the Ottoman Empire, the irony was lost on their new countrymen. My grandmother believed that if a Turk walked into her kitchen the food would spoil. She said that when the Ottoman tax collectors came to her village the blood ran in the streets. Her happiest memories seemed to be of cooking for the cardinal, whose ample larder filled her with awe. Though Lebanon was proclaimed an independent republic by the time her family could afford a plane ticket in 1960, she seemed to doubt a fundamental change in the country she remembered. “In Lebanon,” she told us, circling her stomach with her hands, “only the bishops are fat.”

There were so many versions of Lebanon told by the relatives who visited my grandmother’s house. I heard that Lebanon was not Arab at all but Phoenician, that Lebanon was only a mountain, but the most beautiful mountain on earth. I heard that the reason the family came first to the West Virginia side of the Ohio River was that the people of Mount Lebanon always look to settle with water in front and hills behind—escape and sanctuary, necessary to the ahl-al-jebal (people of the mountain), which they had remained since the seventh century when their ancestors fled the Orontes River Valley and persecution by other Christian and Islamic tribes. But by 1960, my grandmother had long ago left both hills and water. When the 1908 flood in Wheeling, West Virginia, took two of her children’s lives, she moved with her husband across the river and inland to Adena. When her son chose to marry a Protestant, she told her new daughter-in-law: “Ma’alesh. It doesn’t matter. There is only one God, the same God, for everyone.”

I arrived in Lebanon with little knowledge of the country save what my grandmother had told me. I recognized the smells and tastes of the country because of her kitchen; I recognized the rooms in the houses filled with long couches and settees from her living room, arranged to be welcoming to guests. What I did not recognize was the appropriate answer to the question from my hosts, shopkeepers, and friendly students at the American University of Beirut: What are you? I’m an American, half Lebanese.

But what are you? Your religion? Your rite? Your village? Your family? Without answers, I was a stranger there.

There was everything and nothing of what I expected in Lebanon. After a civil war with roots in seventh-century fears and twentieth-century politics, few Lebanese felt safe looking beyond the tangle of clans and religions for the answer to what are you? “I am against my brother,” says a village proverb, “my brother and I are against my cousin; my cousin, my brother, and I are against the stranger.”

Years ago, when my grandmother was offered her ticket to Lebanon, I had begged her to go and take me with her. It was so hard not to persist: She danced the dabke at weddings; she blessed our leave-takings in Arabic. Why would a Lebanese not want to go back for a visit? Her answer was to take me on the front porch with my school notebook and pencil. We sat on the long divan and she wrote down the numbers one to ten, saying each out loud, holding up the right number of fingers. We went on with the lessons she hoped would help her, at the age of seventy-two, to count and make change in English. She was the stranger, too.

In Her Own Hand

USUALLY WHEN SHE ASKED, she was sitting in the yellow recliner in front of the television set. Maybe we’d just watched Queen For a Day, her favorite, and finished cracking all the pistachio nuts on the TV tray between us. My Aunt Phoebe would still be in Bedway’s Market next door, and Aunt Lillie, cooking supper in the kitchen. We had to be alone, or she would never ask. Soon my father would be coming from his office on Main Street to take me home to Cadiz, his heavy footsteps tramping onto the enclosed front porch with windows facing Hanna Avenue. Then my grandmother, whom we always called Sitti, the Arabic word for grandmother, pointed to the paper and pencil on a nearby desk and said what sounded like “Gibbet me.” It was time for her English lesson. She was seventy-two years old.

My two older sisters used to give the lesson, and I felt a solemn awe, at the age of eight, that Sitti would ask me, too. I brought her the paper and pencil, and we slid the bowl of pistachio shells to a side of the tray. I printed my name first, in gigantic, tilting capitals that took up half a page. It was her turn then. Long minutes went by as she put down the four letters of Mary, her name in English. I tried again, smaller capitals, straighter sides; she reprinted hers exactly as before, but bearing down harder on the pencil lead. The late afternoon sunlight had faded by the time we were satisfied, but we turned on no lamps. The black-and-white television set continued to flicker, and its voices covered our silence. When we heard my father’s footsteps on the porch, we stopped. It seemed our names on paper were her secret, and she folded them away into the pocket of her dress.

The brick-paved road that signaled to sleepy children we’d reached Adena from Fox’s Bottom still rumbles beneath passing cars, but there are no longer Bedways in the green-shingled house on Hanna Avenue. Once there were eleven, and the nine children grew up to be my seven aunts, my uncle Toni, my father, John. When I was five, I played a jump-rope game to name all Sitti’s daughters, a skip each for Angelina, Phoebe, Genevieve, Lillie, Elizabeth, Adelaide, Geraldine. I never knew my grandfather, who arrived from Lebanon at the turn of the century and peddled bolts of cloth and housewares up the red-dog paths to the Ohio Valley mining camps. The floods of 1907 convinced him to move his family inland from the Ohio River’s shores, and he opened a grocery in Adena. For a while certain confused citizens of the town thought the dark-eyed, dark-haired family in the big, black car were gypsies traveling light.

We were a bit mysterious, I thought, even at the age of five. A stay with Sitti meant labneh and olives for breakfast, and marcouq, the flat Arab bread we called “shovel bread” and rolled up to dip into hummus or salads or ate in the dull American way, with butter. A stay at Sitti’s meant the words of a foreign language were always spoken to you or over your head-strong consonants, catches in the throat, words that settled on us, like the gentle habibti, a sound that meant we were loved. Sometimes Aunt Phoebe called a salesman or a complaining customer majnoon, and we made our own translation. On hot summer nights we heard teenage boys drive mufflerless cars through the single traffic light. My aunts shook their heads while Sitti smiled. Kul deek ala mazbaltu saiyah, she said—something like “Every rooster on his dunghill crows.”

If late at night you couldn’t sleep, you’d find your way to the kitchen. And if you finished the stuffed grape leaves, or diminished the labneh by half, there was nothing to fear in the morning. My aunts and Sitti were grateful a child had a good appetite. Alakel ad al mahabba, the Lebanese say: “The food is according to the love.”

Years later I studied the language Sitti brought to Ohio from Mount Lebanon, and learned that that familiar word for crazy, majnoon, also meant “touched by God.” But much of her vocabulary remains mysterious, and especially certain words I never actually heard but whose power I still remember.

When we left Sitti’s house for the drive home after Sunday visits, our last glimpse was of her in the doorway in her dark-blue dress, hair in a bun, her right hand making the sign of the cross as she blessed us in her language. What was she saying? What were those words? In our pockets there were no papers with names in her language. She prayed as she watched us children waving from the back seat, facing her until we turned off Hanna Avenue, afraid even into adulthood to miss the sight of her pronouncing the words that got us safely home.