1 March 2011

A Thousand Sighs: Part three Amina to Amy

A Thousand Sighs: Part three

3. Amina to Amy
April 1982 – September 1990


Virginia


We arrived (or returned depending on who was calling it) to Virginia on April Fool’s Day, 1982. It was spring and all the flowers were blooming; as I remember it, it rained a lot, certainly more than I thought I’d ever seen before then.
We stayed the first few days with my great aunt, someone who was almost a stranger to me but, it seemed, very quickly, we had a place to live of our own; a big house, an old house for America, though on our old street, it’d’ve been the newest by far; built at the end of Reconstruction by a colonel in the former CSA. It was strange to have so much grass and trees about; that took me a long time to adjust to. But, my great aunt was nearby; she had found this house for us and, just as she had taken in my mother all those years ago, now the prodigals had returned.
Aunt Minnie was not quite directly across the street; her much smaller bungalow faced the empty lot on one side of our house. Other relations weren’t too far away; my mother’s mother lived at the far end of town in an apartment, my mother’s brother and his two sons were less than ten minutes walk away in their somewhat overgrown house … and second cousins and farther were all around. My American Grandmother was already beginning to slip into her long decline; soon, she’d move from her apartment to the retirement community.
My American uncle, Charlie, was around a lot in those days; he made fairly strong (and reciprocated) efforts to befriend my dad (including the two of them trudging off in the woods every autumn to go deer hunting, along with assorted offspring; Charlie, even if he had a doctorate in history, affected to be a ‘good ole boy’ and made it his business that every niece and nephew would learn to shoot straight.) Charlie’s sons, Jim and Rob (or Jimmy and Robby as they were still trying to shed when we arrived), were raised virtually motherless and seemed a little wild to us; perpetually shaggy and dirty, but, also, incredibly appealing and ‘cool’ – though some of that was probably age (Jim was thirteen and Rob eleven when we arrived).
While he’d been ‘only’ the Second Assistant Director of the Municipal Water System in Damascus, he was now the boss; he’d been hired as director of Water Treatment for the Town of Riverport. On paper, of course, it looked like a promotion but, while one was a city of millions, the other was little more than an overgrown village.
Riverport exists, as the name would suggest, on the bend of a river – the North Fork of the South Branch of the Shenandoah – though if there’s a port, it only exists for the smallest of craft; even canoes would have a hard time maneuvering through there. Like Damascus, there are nearby mountains and steep hills (including an extinct volcano) rising nearby but, unlike the Barada valley, the Shenandoah Valley is almost excessively green; everything not actively farmed, it seems is covered with hardwood forest. At first, I remember being a bit confused by the colors; instead of dusty duns and tans, everything seemed almost overly bold and florid.
Where we’d lived in a rather closed space with twice as many people in Syria, suddenly, we were in a big house, a white clapboard structure looking dangerously outwards set in the midst of greenery. Our new house had been built by a Civil War colonel a decade after the war but Riverport itself had been the site of a battle (a totally insignificant one but a battle nonetheless) in 1864 and, earlier, Stonewall Jackson had passed down Main Street a few times with his Brigade. Once, we found a civil war bullet in the yard; my father still has it somewhere.
I had my own room for the first time and I could look out from my window onto neighbors' yards and gardens, houses and horse barns. In the alley, there were hitching posts, not a mere relic but put there for the convenience of the Old Order Mennonites who’d drive their buggies in to town and need somewhere to tie them up. The first time I saw these plainly dressed people, I mistook them for our own; I proudly announced to my parents that I had seen Muslims going into the Bank; I got so excited … and confused my parents …


School


And I started school again. I was excited the first day; it had been more than six weeks since I’d last been in class and I worried about whether I’d fall behind. My mother dressed Aisha and me in new clothes (well, most of our clothes were new, or, at least, new to us) and walked with us to the school. She took me to my classroom and said goodbye.
As I stepped in, I was excited; so many new faces (and how different they looked!). The teacher stopped what she was doing and introduced me to the class (calling me ‘ay-my-nah’, but I barely noticed). Everyone smiled at me. She asked if I knew how to read; I nodded, still not having said a word. She asked if I’d write my name on the board … so I did. This would be easy; we had done this at my old school.
I stepped up, took a piece of chalk from the teacher, looked at the board and began writing from right to left and said the letters as I wrote:
“Alif … meem … noon … ta marboot!” I said in triumph. “Amina!”
And stepped back … and the teacher and whole class stared at me.
“What is that?” the teacher asked.
“Name my,” I said, smiling proudly.
“Do you know ABC?” the teacher asked.
I looked at her blankly.
She sighed, took me by hand and led me from the classroom, then to the principal’s office. She went in and spoke to him … and he then took me to another classroom, one better suited for me … filled with toys and younger children; I had just been ‘demoted’ to kindergarten … until I could learn to ‘talk right.’
I survived – and learned rapidly to speak correctly. Every day, I learned new words for things, new grammar; my English vocabulary was probably growing by a hundred words a day. I stopped mangling things and was able to talk to my classmates more and more every day.
After school, Aunt Minnie made a habit of sitting for hours with Aisha and I, going over our English, correcting us; I’d get to go and play faster than Aisha as she had far more catching up to do (she was too old to send back to kindergarten so, the first year, she had been placed in the ‘special ed’ class).
And by the time summer came and school ended, we were both speaking English without accents (unless you happen to consider Shenandoah Valley English an accent) and playing with the other kids in our neighborhood without any problem; it took a little longer to catch up socially and on pop culture but, in no time at all, it seemed, we were catching on. True, we didn’t realize why our friends scorned Coy and Vance as impostors but, soon enough, we were aware of Star Wars and Superman and everything else; we went to see ET at Roth’s 1-2-3 in the summer as well as Annie, the Dark Crystal, and the Secret of NIMH. At first, we wore old clothes over and over again, but, gradually, our clothes became new; we went to the mall with my grandmother and aunt and they dressed us until we stopped looking like foreigners.
I missed my old friends, though, missed Syria terribly … missed the smells and the sounds and the family and the food … so, in the summer, when my cousins came, I was thrilled. They’d landed not in Virginia but in Georgia; my uncle was working now, but not as a college professor. He washed dishes in a restaurant, worked himself to the bone … and then led prayers at a house-mosque on Friday. My aunt Saffiyah also worked, stocking shelves in a grocery store at night and mopping floors. And all the cousins lived in a tiny apartment …
So, Ridwan, Raghad and Rania would come up to stay with us for most of the summer. Rania shared my room and we’d lay side by side every night whispering in what was mostly Arabic in grammar but was probably half English in words. We would play with dolls all day out in the green grass, staring in awe at rain in the summertime and taking fright from lightning and thunderstorms. I remember my father loading us all in the car and taking us to see Star Wars at the drive in when it was re-released and everyone but me fell asleep before it was over as it was very, very late and we all had to be carried back into the house. I recall watching the fireworks over Silver Lake on the Fourth of July …
and, in August, my father left with the cousins, taking them home to Georgia and I cried. But, I was almost American by then.


Reading down dreams


I started back to school at summer’s end. Every morning, I walked alongside my sister as we made our way across the street, past the little post office and behind the bank. We would have to watch out for horse droppings as we passed by the hitching posts where, sometimes when we were lucky, we’d find that an Old Order family had left their buggy while they were about their business.
Aisha loved horses. I thought they were nice enough and, of course, I wished that I had one of my own, wished that I could ride but she, she really loved them. When one was tied up, no matter how late we were or if it were cold or raining, she would insist on stopping and talking to it, stroking it. She begged father to get her a horse or, at the very least, sign her up for horseback riding lessons.
We lived in rural Virginia, not quite in horse country, but close enough, so such a dream could easily be had: we might have lived in a small town, but, even there, in the town, there were people with horses on the next street. In the countryside, there were many stables. Aisha and I were signed up for riding lessons; my father told us when he signed us up that horses are in our blood, that we must never forget that we were Quraysh and the grandchildren of a cavalry officer. My mother laughed.
Every week, we would go out to the stable where older girls work, grooming horses and leading ones our size through basic skills. Aisha was always better than me; she was always far more in love with horses than me, knew more about them, understood them better than I ever did.
Looking back, I thnk that I can guess some of the reasons why she had such a love for them and I did not. Certainly, the fact that her horses didn’t care that her English in those days could be fractured helped her at a time when she was teased far more than I ever was for butchering English. But it was more than that; she didn’t just like them she loved them, dreamed about horses, covered her bedroom with pictures of horses, knew everything there was to know about horses.
Later on, she would be in a few shows and, when she was on the verge of womanhood, she’d be one of those glamorous teens sweeping the stables and leading the little girls through basic skills and making them laugh in delight. Maybe, horses held some allure for her that they never did for me; I’ve heard that girls who love horses long for freedom and crave masculine presence. I don’t know; I never did … but Aisha was _good- with horses; she still is … they love here, she loves them and, take away her horses even now, and she might die …
Later, too, she would show far more musical ability than I ever did; she could sing, she could play instruments.. I’ve always been lucky to be able to play the radio.
My dreams were always a bit stranger than hers and it took me years before I could even try t understand what all was in them. The first week of first grade, our teacher separated the class into different reading levels. The same teacher who had kicked me out just a few months earlier now placed me in the ‘high’ group as I could already read simple English and was one of the oldest girls in my class.
I took my textbooks home with me and I finished everything but the math book in the first week. I brought them back to the teacher and asked her for more; she didn’t seem quite sure what to do with that.
She asked me if I had had any problems reading any of them.
I answered, yes, and showed her where I am confused, by contractions (what does this can tee mean? I remember wondering.).
She shook her head and then she showed me the books in the back of the classroom; I started reading through them all, Dr Seuss and other first readers, more complex ones and even a children’s encyclopedia.
From the very first days of first grade, I loved the class trips to the school library. I read everything I could, taking out as many books as they’d let me. I remember finding a book called “Trolls” and loving it, reading it over and over .. and then the same authors’ books of Norse Myths and Greek Myths, then other ones on similar themes.
The next year, I discovered the land of Narnia and the Mushroom Planet and Oz and Matthew Looney … and kept on reading and reading … I devoured the adventures of the Boy Scouts in their time machine and then of Tom Swift, found a book called The Hobbit and started eating up books of history, one after another, Van Loon, R J Unstead, Everyday life in …, everything I could find, just gobbling up one after the other. I read book after book about the American Revolution and the Civil War, because that’s what was in the library …
At some point, I found a book with a photograph of a girl on the cover and, after thinking that she looked like me, decided to read it: The Diary of a Young Girl. I started writing my own diary for a while after reading that, and found myself wishing, not for the last time, that like her, I wished that I had a true friend I could talk to about everything. Rania was the closest, I thought, but I could only see her a few weeks a year and among the girls in my classes, I was, I feared, still too much an outsider. I dreamt of having that perfect friend who would understand me when I babbled about books and stories and history and so on and would always want to play the kind of games I imagined playing but that no one else was ever interested in …
I didn’t notice that most of the books I loved most were written for boys; I did, however, notice that few had girls as heroes (and none half-Arab Muslim girls) but it didn’t bother me. Instead, I imagined my own stories, full of action and heroics, magic and so on.
My closest friend at school, David, was a boy and, when we’d play, we played fighting with swords or were superheroes. We’d sit under a tree at recess and play such things while the boys played kickball and the girls played house games. Sometimes, we’d play together outside of class. Behind his house, there were little old, rundown buildings that we would use as fortresses (I don’t quite realize what it means that they are slave cabins; later on, it’ll strike me as bizarre in retrospect).
I got older steadily; I found myself having trouble reading the blackboard and my teacher recommended that my parents take me to the eye doctor. And, if I weren’t already awkward and self-conscious, I had to wear glasses, thick heavy ones that would leave red marks on my nose when I took them off. At least, I told myself, they made my nose look less enormous; I was already conscious that it was bigger than the little button noses the girls with golden hair all seemed to have.
I had few troubles with class work; if anything, the opposite. I was almost always the first one done with tests, the one who had her hand up first with the answers and so on. (If you’ve ever seen the Simpsons, I was a lot like Lisa though with less self-confidence.) I took standardized tests and did ridiculously well on them (I’m still more than a little embarrassed about my listed IQ). My parents petitioned to have me skipped ahead a year, back to being among my actual age mates; the school decided not to as I was too small and wasn’t ‘socially mature enough’.
Around my fifth grade year, a little shop opened up a few blocks from us selling nothing but used books and records. The day I first saw the sign, I was excited to go in it and explore; paradise! I would find endless genre books from decades before there; one book I recall finding the first day caught me with a stunning picture on the cover: a man carries a dark-haired woman, barely dressed, through a magical archway. I wanted to read it and, when I saw that it was about a man from Virginia, I knew this book had been placed there for me. I read it fast, staying up all night reading, and I was both disappointed and excited to find out that there were ten more sequels to this “A Princess of Mars”. When my parents saw it, they looked disapprovingly at the cover art but they told me that, if I want to be a Martian princess, I can be. I was taken a bit aback at that; when I’d read it, I had imagined myself to be the rescuer, not the rescuee! I was strange …
I know that sometimes, then, I wished I was a boy; not a lot, though, considering. I read stories for boys and imagined myself in them, though never as the fairy tale princess, always as the knight on horseback. I wrote a very bad pastiche of a Barsoom adventure, starring myself. All I recall is the opening (I lost the rest long ago):
“I don’t remember ever being young and I think I have been alive forever. I am Meena of Barsoom, formerly of Virginia.”
And then I told of adventures fighting through hordes of green men, blue men and so on to retrieve some treasure and take it back to Helium. I think my heroine even rescued a member of the Imperial family … and never really noticed that she was female! Maybe, I should have written it as a boy …
More, though, I wished that I wasn’t Amina but Amanda. I wished that I didn’t have dark, wavy hair and imagined myself with straight, golden hair, wished I had blue eyes rather than dark … and wished that my father didn’t have an accent. I wished that, when I was asked what church I went to, I didn’t have to say ‘none’, that, when it came time for weekday religious education (WRE), I didn’t have to stay back with the other odd balls (a Jehovah, a Mormon, a Catholic, a Jew, and me). I wished I didn’t have to avoid certain foods …
I imagined myself ‘Amy McClure’ and thought how much better life would be … how much more popular and happier I would be, how I would have a zillion friends and be picked first for teams …
When I’d first come to school in Virginia, I’d been called ah-meh-nah … and that was quickly shortened to ah-mi, like the French word for friend … and, more and more, I wrote my name and said it as ‘Ay-me”; Amy … and dreamt that I was her …
I imagined that, when I was older, how I would dye my hair golden yellow and get colored contacts, thought about a nose job … and wished only that I were pretty and blonde and just like everyone else …


Naomi


Next door to us, when we first arrived in Riverport, there lived an old couple in another old, wood frame Victorian house. I can’t recall their names these days and all I remember of them was that, once, the woman gave me candy. Not long after we moved in, the man passed away and the woman went to live in a home. For a long while after that, their house stood vacant; I could see it empty from my bedroom window and, sometimes, I wondered if it might be haunted, or, maybe, I just hoped that it was; then I could go and have adventures there, find a ghost or some treasure ...
Eventually, it was put on the market and, as I remember, sat empty for a long while more with a ‘for sale’ sign in the front yard. Finally, though, it was bought by a childless couple close to my parents in age. Mr. and Mrs. Davies, as I knew them, had moved up to Riverport from Richmond though neither of them had, as I recall it, very strong Tidewater accents. He was a college professor; she was a food chemist who worked for one of the huge turkey producers at the far end of town from us.
I was startled when we met her and she insisted that we – my sister and I – call them by their first names (Susan and Gary) and when she told us that she was a vegetarian (based on her experience in slaughterhouses); both were bizarre things to me in those days (as well as to Riverport’s conservative sensibilities). He was odd; he would lay on their porch staring at nothing or work on his old MG for hours. My parents took a liking to them; they still keep up. I suppose it wasn’t that odd as my parents were also somewhat hippie-ish by the standards of Riverport; neither couple fit very well into the town’s social life.
After they’d lived next to us for a couple of years, Susan got pregnant … and, when the baby was born, she hired an Old Order girl to help her with the baby and housekeeping. I remember seeing the young woman (who was only a few years older than me) arriving when Gary would go and get her some mornings from the farm that she lived on. Sometimes, she’d stay overnight with the Davies; I could see her bedroom light from my room in what had always been dark until then.
Our house rose up almost immediately over their yard but, on that side, only my bedroom window looked down into their back garden as they had a high wooden fence making it almost blind from our house otherwise on that side and invisible from the street. In those days, I used to like to sit atop the hot water heater under my window and read; my perch was warm in the winter, breezy when I had the window open. From there, I could see out across the backyards and rooftops of Riverport and daydream.
And, from there, one day, I looked out into the Davies’s yard and saw that their nanny was sitting in the back garden – but, instead of her usual dowdy print dress and head covering, she was wearing a bikini (or so I assumed) and she was reading a book. I found myself staring at her for a long while and, eventually, she must have felt my eyes on her … so she looked up and waved at me and I waved back.
“Hey!’ I called and she called back and we exchanged mild pleasantries but I couldn’t quite hear her so, I climbed down off my perch, scurried down the back staircase, and clambered out a window into their backyard.
She greeted me and waved me to sit in another lawn chair by her. I introduced myself as Amina, the girl who lives next door; she said she was Naomi Weaver, the babysitter. I told her I knew. We laughed that our names were similar and we talked about the baby (who did have a name: Madeline Davies) and so on.
Naomi told me she was seventeen; I asked if she was in school, she said, no, her people didn’t usually finish high school. And I, nervously, told her that I was twelve and would go to Roger Sappington Junior High School next year.
We talked for a long time about this and that. The whole time, I was noticing how mature and pretty she was; long, wavy golden hair tied up in a bun, bright blue eyes, an almost pinkish face and a woman’s body, just the way that I wished that I looked. But, even though she was grown up and pretty, she was talking to scrawny, gawky me like a peer.
Finally, I asked Naomi what had happened to her clothes; she laughed and said she was working on her tan and thought no one could see her until I had spotted her. She’d been out sunbathing here for weeks! I laughed and so did she.
Then I asked her about her covering and her plain dress and she started telling me what they represented, that women were enjoined by Jesus to cover their heads when they prayed and that they should always be praying, and, once she’d been baptized, she had to dress that way.
I asked if that meant when she was a baby she’d had to wear a covering and she told me, no, only after she’d joined the church last year and told me about their beliefs in adult baptism and such.
Then, she asked me where my family and I went to church and I said that we didn’t; I explained that we weren’t Christians at all but Muslims and that was why my mother covered her head. She didn’t seem bothered by that but, instead, she only asked if I would and I said that, maybe I would, when I was older. She laughed at that and said maybe we weren’t all that different.
We quizzed each other on religion and talked about the book she was reading; it was some sort of Christian novel. And we talked about other things and then my mother was calling me so I crept back home.
The next day, I was up in my window reading and I saw Naomi out there again; she waved me down so I went and joined her. This time, I thought ahead and brought my book. She asked if I was going to try and tan too; I said I had no bikini. She laughed and told me she didn’t either; she was just in her underwear! I laughed at that and, after a second, copied her, pulling off my jeans and laying out beside her under the afternoon sun in my underpants and t-shirt, wondering if I should take off my t-shirt even though I wore nothing under it.
Naomi told me she wished she had skin like mine for then she could tan easily; I told her not to be silly, she had much nicer skin than me. And we read and laughed and drank lemonade. And I thought I was intensely cool for having a friend who was a real live teenager ...
We did this a lot and talked about a lot of things; eventually, Naomi invited me to come to church with her. I told her that I had to ask my parents’ permission and I wasn’t sure if they’d give it.
Surprisingly, they did; apparently, they weren’t as close-minded as I’d thought (in fact, they were fairly committed to us finding our own paths, but more about that later). So, Naomi wrote out directions and, very early the next Sunday morning, my father drove me far out into the countryside, past the cider press, and down a few dirt roads and to a clapboard building with no sign and no steeple. It was hardly what I expected a church to look like; none of the churches in Riverport were anything like so simple. Outside, plain dressed men and women got out of horse-drawn buggies and stood around talking to each other as they wandered in. The whole place had the sweet, fresh rotten scent of healthy horses, like a stable.
Naomi came up and greeted me profusely when she saw my father’s car and, taking me by arm, led me into the church. Inside, men sat on one side in bare wooden pews, women on the other. No cross or flag or anything marked the room as anything special.
All were clad in modest clothes, plain dress clothes, all the gown women covered. Then, they said some prayers and sang some songs without instruments and read long passages from their Bible. After that, one of them, a man dressed in a long frock coat, got up and gave a long sermon about how you were supposed to love your neighbor. I paid close attention to everything as I had seen few things like this but much of it was lost on me. The whole service went on for several hours and, when it was done, everyone left, talking gladly among themselves.
Naomi introduced me to many people and, when they asked where I was from, I told them Damascus originally and I was startled that they all seemed to know of it, asking me if I knew the Street that was called Straight and other things like that.
Then, Naomi invited me to come to lunch with her family; we rode in a buggy driven by her father back to their farm. He let me take the reins for a moment and told some corny jokes. When we reached the farm, we ate far too much food (chicken and bread and too many vegetables, then pies of various type) while everyone quizzed me about my religion and what we were allowed and not allowed to do and I realized I knew less than I should.
After lunch, Naomi showed me the farm: cows and horses in large number (her father was mainly in dairy) as well as chickens and sheep and hogs …
I was fascinated; when my father finally came and got me, I couldn’t stop talking about how much fun it had all been. He laughed when I said that, maybe, I would be a farmer and an old Order when I grew up.
I hung around Naomi for a long time after that; I thought she was intensely interesting and cool and everything else … and I thought I was especially lucky to have a friend who was older and more mature than me. Eventually, of course, Naomi stopped working for the Davies. She got a job in the farmers’ market off the main highway north of town, working at the counter for a cousin of hers. I would always look for her whenever we were there. Not long after that, she got married to an Old Order man who had a farm on the far side of the county … but, even now, I still get long letters from her, telling me she’s praying yet that I might become a Christian and giving news of her children.


Mosques


When we first came to Virginia, Muslims were few and far between, mosques even farther. The first few years, the Greater Riverport Islamic Community consisted of my family with, occasionally, a foreign student or two from one of the colleges. Later on, a Pakistani doctor took a job in the next town, then a professor at one of the colleges, and another and another …
But, for many years, praying meant praying as a family, my father leading prayers or, if he was at work, my mother. Sometimes, we’d drive to Washington, DC or northern Virginia and link up with Muslims there, especially around the holidays. Early on, my parents found a Coptic Egyptian family in the next town; we’d sometimes visit with them and, whenever we or they were going to an Arabic store in Northern Virginia or DC, they’d call the other.
My parents didn’t drink or buy pork products but, from necessity, rarely kept strict hallal; it simply wasn’t an option unless they either did their own slaughtering or did all their meat buying far from home. Later on, they did begin keeping an ever stricter hallal but that was in another state.
They did conscientiously keep the Ramadan fast every year but, until I was in high school, they refused to let me do so as I was too young. For Eid, most years we would go to DC or elsewhere where there were Muslims in large numbers; my mother had had to make quite an effort to get our school to allow us to be excused but, from sheer persistence, she succeeded. After Eid prayers, we would hang around with the other Muslim kids … and everyone would talk about their Eid gifts. And, when I went back to school, I’d have to explain how it was our ‘Christmas’ (and every year, one of the four of us would ask why we had no Christmas tree or why Santa never visited us).
By the end of the 1980’s, though, the Muslim community had grown large enough that they began talking about having a mosque; up until then, when there were organized prayers, it was mostly my parents or one of the other Muslim families hosting everyone else for dinner, prayers and discussion. Typically, they’d do this on Sunday nights (as no one needed to work). I recall dinners of Pakistani, African, and Arabic dishes all mixed up and sitting around half bored with the much younger children of the other Muslim families.
From weekly dinners came talk of a mosque; it wasn’t realized until after we were gone but it stands now … and grows, along with hallal shop and Muslim cemetery …
Things change … nowadays, our old town has a Russian church and a Kurdish cemetery. ESL classes in my old school are filled to overflowing, mostly with Latinos but also with people from all over the world. People who look more like me are no longer so strange on the street …
Sometimes I envy the children growing up there now … or anywhere in the US, maybe. Back in the 1980’s and even early 1990’s, we’d get strange questions, like “Is a Muslim that thing you all wear on your heads?” … and, in Virginia, no help for learning English or being darker … Nowadays, I guess, there are worse things …
I never was asked if I was Mexican or spoke Spanish then; now, it seems every Arab I know gets asked that. Or if they know Osama … and now they have peers, not just siblings … which maybe is better and maybe is not; I had to become American fully by diving in and being as American – Redneck American at that – without any alternative. Maybe that was better … maybe it wasn’t …


Holidays


From the first year that we were in Virginia, the same pattern was set for the ‘holiday season’. We celebrated Thanksgiving, as do, in my experience, most non-Christian families in the USA. The first year, simply as our house was the largest, we played host. And over came my Great Aunt, my Grandmother, my mother’s brother, and his sons.
Every year after that was basically the same people with slight differences in faces (my uncle brought a serious girlfriend a couple of times; later, so did his sons) while dishes were steadily refined. A couple of times, in addition to turkey, we had venison, shot by Uncle Charlie or my Dad (Charlie tries to get at least one deer per year and makes his own sausage and burgers from it). But, basically, a very American meal was always had.
Thanksgiving, the first year, wasn’t terribly mysterious to me. It was explained clearly in school as to its origins, traditions and so on … but, after Thanksgiving 1982, I became increasingly mystified as Christmas approached.
The name of the day meant nothing; Santa Claus meant nothing. Classmates and teacher were startled that I had no idea who he was. When I asked my parents, they told me he was just a story. But so many of the other kids seemed to believe in him …
I couldn’t figure out why; it was obvious to me that Santa Claus was no more real than the Cat in the Hat or Mighty Mouse. I told all the other kids I came into contact that, that Santa was a fake, argued it, and disproved him … and they told their parents what I had said. Some parents complained to mine about what I was doing …
And when they saw we had no Christmas tree or decorations, it was even more upsetting … someone called my parents ‘communists’!
The next year, I was less inclined to share my disbelief. Instead, I was anxious that we should have a Christmas tree … and my parents sat me and my sisters and brother down and explained the true story of Jesus (how his mother was a Virgin and gave birth to him under the palm tree, how he prophesied as a baby and was a great prophet, ascended living into Heaven, and will return at the end of time, proclaiming his humanity and the One-ness of God, to the Great Mosque in Sham).


Seventh Grade


When Seventh Grade started it was, I hoped, a chance for new horizons, more than just the same tired kids from elementary school; now, I was going to be a middle school-er and, finally, I hoped, people would forget my once broken English; new teachers, new classmates, all of that. There’d be 300 students in my grade instead of the same 60 or so; the county combined five elementaries into one.
Come the end of that summer, I went off to an evening of orientation; my parents walked with me through the halls so that I could see where all my classes were; here was homeroom, here Pre-Algebra, there Science and so on. All the children, as I remember tried to remain calm as the teachers talked about what they would do and we met each other, often for the first time. We exchanged shy greetings or, when we’d gone to elementary school together, pleasure at seeing old faces among the new.
Everything went fine enough until we got to my fourth period class: Gym. As soon as the teacher, Coach Wiley, had made his presentation and asked for questions, my father raised his hand, wondering if it was necessary that I need to wear gym-shorts and t-shirt and shower in public and so on. Of course it was, the coach began, then paused, and asked my father if he had another daughter …
“Yes,” my father proudly answered. “You gave her an exemption from dressing out for gym.”
So the coach went over the exemption rules; medical excuses would have to come from a doctor, religious issues would need to be cleared with the principal … and so on … but I would have to wear my gym uniform over longer clothing.
I was humiliated, naturally; here was a classroom full of people most of whom I didn’t know and my foreign father had to go and, in his funny accent, announce to them that I was ‘different’. I felt, at the time, like I could have died.
And when school started, I felt all eyes on me, dressed like a fool; sweat pants with shorts on the outside and having to explain to everyone why … getting dressed and undressed in a room full of other girls and becoming aware that some, at least, of my classmates had begun to develop; some had breasts and wore brassieres, some were beginning to get hair on their bodies and not just on their forearms (like me) …
I was, I thought, envious; I wished I had round breasts – any breast whatsoever actually at that age and for years after – and found myself paying too close attention. So, the staring half-foreign girl with the ‘special’ clothes and heavy glasses … my self-consciousness quotient was too high.
At least, it turned out that I wasn’t the only girl with a special status in fourth-period gym; there was also Lori Armstrong who was asthmatic and had one of those precious doctor’s notes. So, on the days when the rest of our class was to be in the gym, she was stuck sitting in the bleachers; I noticed that she was reading my kind of books. At that time, if I recall correctly, she was plowing through the Lord of the Rings.
Sometime that first week, I ended up sitting by her in cafeteria and that, fairly quickly, became a pattern. So, we gradually got to now each other; we were in most of the same classes and were almost always seated in alphabetic order so even our lockers were side by side.
Lori had gone to Pleasantdale Elementary, but only since fourth grade, she told me; after her parents got divorced, her mom and her had moved here from Pennsylvania. She did, I thought, have just a trace of a northern accent; distinct from everyone I’d known in real life (who either had a variety of Virginia English or an Arabic accent), almost like some glamorous film or television star. It sounded really appealing to me; I even tried to copy her every now and then. It was, I thought, ultra-cool to sound like a sophisticated Northerner, instead of a Virginian or an Arab.
Lori could draw really well; she made sketches in her notebooks of characters from novels or of our teachers or cartoons of animals in clothes talking and doing things. Somewhere, I still have a picture she did of me; heavy glasses, long, stringy hair, and all … but definitely me as I was then. She also, at my urging, drew me as I imagined myself; an adult woman in jeweled but scant clothing and armor waving a sword, like something off the cover of one of the books we both read.
I loaned her my Martian novels; she shared various fantasy novels with me – The Elfstones of Shannara, Thomas Covenant – and we read Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and the Silmarillion together. Pretty soon, we were thick as thieves.
Sometime that fall, Lori invited me to spend the night at her house on a Friday. I asked my parents if I could; my mother saw no reason not to but my father needed persuasion;
“We don’t know these people,” I can still hear him saying. “What kind of family does she have?”
And so on.
But I talked him around with sheer persistence. I went home with Lori on her school bus and we were let out by the townhouse she and her mom shared. We sat up all night, talking and watching TV (she had cable so I think this was the first time I’d ever actually seen MTV). We discussed every guy in our grade and agreed that most of them were vomit-worthy. We made fun of the bands and ordered pizza delivered – I had to explain to Lori why I wasn’t allowed to eat pepperoni or sausage. And, when my father came and picked me up in the morning, I was exhausted but happy. For the first time I could remember, I had a ‘best friend’ who was my own age and was in my school.
All through Junior High, we followed the same pattern; usually, I went Friday to Lori’s but sometimes, she came to our house. She didn’t have any siblings so it was a lot more exciting for her, I suppose. I recall her being impressed with my mother’s cooking; it never occurred to me that other kid’s mothers didn’t cook everything from scratch or bake their own bread or anything like that.
And we’d sit up nights talking, at each other’s houses or on the phone. We talked about school and music and books and boys. And, when everything was said and done, were just about the biggest nerds among the girls in our school.
I found some pictures of us from back then. I'm too skinny and small, with thick wavy hair that’s a little under combed and a little snarled and big glasses. Lori was a full head taller than me, a little chubby, with curly blonde hair and glasses. I remember telling her that I was jealous that she’d gotten a figure before me; she looked a lot more like a girl than I did even on the day we met.
We both, if I remember, were always behind the fashions and always were way too self-conscious. Neither of us were ever cool or trendy, even by the behind-the-trends standards of a country town.
We'd spend hours dreaming up ways we wished we could get in trouble but never did and, then, we’d share her big Queen size bed and keep talking almost 'til dawn. We made prank calls, bought or stole cigarettes, learning to smoke them like the cool older girls we saw, practicing blowing smoke rings like the sophisticates we believed ourselves to be. Sometimes, we'd sneak wine or liquor from her mom's cabinet. Usually, we'd wander around the mall which wasn’t too far from her house, maybe play a video game or two, try to flirt with the older boys, or watch a movie. So, passed seventh and eighth and much of ninth grade.


Desert Storms


The summer between eight and ninth grade began like almost every other. Lori and I hung out some; Aisha rode her horses, worked at the stable, and practiced for the high school band; Amr and Alia were underfoot and annoying; my cousins came up to visit for a few weeks in the summer; Rania and Lori met each other and I thought that each one was jealous of the other. I was disappointed that they weren’t thick as thieves right off … but when I left the room and came back, they were whispering and laughing and wouldn’t tell me why.
By now, the Georgia side of the family was doing better. They’d moved up from apartment to rented townhouse to owned house in a better suburb (my father had helped with the downpayment). Uncle Omar had moved up from dishwasher to cook to restaurant manager as his English had gotten better; meanwhile, he was also leading prayers in what was starting to become one of the larger mosques.
Lori and I were both very interested in what Rania reported to us about big city styles and such; for the first time, I was aware of myself as the country cousin. I was also very aware from talking with Rania about school and friends that she went to classes with lots of yellow and brown and olive kids, with names like Geeta, Rosario, Su Jin, and Linh, and had lots of Muslim and Arab friends … while I was ever so much more isolated.
My father and hers meanwhile sat up late into the night, discussing something big, looking over drawings and sketches and wouldn’t tell us a thing …
Summer got even more interesting as July ended and August was about to begin. My father’s sister, my aunt Ibtisam, and her husband, Uncle Hamuda (really, Muhammad al Sibayi), came to visit us along with their children. Hamuda had been a friend of my father’s when they were in University in Syria; through him, he’d met my aunt. After they’d gotten married, though, he’d taken a job working for the Kuwaiti water authority and had done well for himself. Now, their oldest daughter, Zainab, was about to start college in the USA; she’d been accepted at a private women’s college in Virginia. Her parents decided that, if she were to go to the USA, they’d come with her and use it as an excuse to visit the American relations.
So, uncle, aunt, eighteen year old cousin Zainab and her two younger brothers (Ayyad and Laheb) and much younger sister (Salma) came to visit us, bringing the total in our house to twenty! A crowd, even if it was just for a few days … the boys were sleeping in tents in the yard, girls in the house, everyone talking a mile a minute in Arabic …
The parents discussed all manner of things; everyone was excited in those days that, soon, with the end of the Soviets and the success of the Intifada, a Palestinian state would come and, as well, freedom would return to Syria; it was just a matter of time, after all … all the Russian puppets were falling. …
And we, the children, had other thoughts. Zainab played for us the latest popular Arabic music and let us make copies from her tapes and showed us how to dance like an Arab woman; thrusting shaking hips and all of that. Aisha took her and Raghad to the mall. The boys – Ridwan, Ayyad, Laheb, Amr, and even Ramzi – played endless pick up games of soccer. Reem and Alia did little kid things; Salma tagged along with them.
Rania pointed out to me that Ayyad was the same age as Aisha, that he was our fathers’ sister’s son, and was not bad looking … I told her that even thinking about that was gross … she nodded, shrugged and left it at that.
Meanwhile, one of my cousins, Rob, was back home for the summer after his first year in college in Atlanta. He’d looked up Omar and family a few times since he’d been down there (they’d been coming to Virginia every summer so they were hardly strangers) and dropped in to visit as well … and I felt a slight tinge of jealousy when, instead of spending time playing soccer with the boys or even talking to his ‘real’ cousin (me), he seemed more interested in chatting with Zainab, taking it on himself to give her “American University 101”.
And, just before one set of cousins was set to go back to Georgia, the phone rang in the middle of the night … and I heard my dad and my uncles half-yelling in excitement … my aunts and my mother joining in and every one making noise, cousins stirring and running around … Rania still slept so I got up quietly …
I stumbled downstairs and found them watching television, flipping between stations filled with fuzz or off air, desperate for news.
“What’s going on?” I asked as bleary I wandered in.
“The Iraqis!” Uncle Omar said excitedly. “There’s war!”
And, in bits and pieces as others of us kids wandered in, I figured out what had happened, or what was known to have happened: the Iraqi army had invaded and overthrown the government of Kuwait.
My father was saying how this was probably a bad thing; my uncle wondering why Saddam didn’t take out Assad instead. Someone said that, next, he’d sweep down through the Gulf and take out all the corrupt rulers. Why was that good? Saddam was a Baathi and an Aflaqi; they were Muslims, weren’t they? But Saddam wasn’t a Nusairi … and on and on … speculation, excitement, anger, pleasure … and my uncles and father were all excited and bewildered and seemed very foreign right then … and only my mother pointed out that Kuwait was a US ally … (Uncle Hamuda even voiced the idea that maybe, now, the Kuwaitis would know humility if they had to win back their land in jihad …)
And what about the cousins? Uncle Muhammad had been the one who’d received the call; it had been a friend of his who’d called. What would they do? They weren’t sure whether to head back towards Kuwait and their lives there or turn around for Damascus or stay in the USA; right now, they would stay with us until they figured out what was going on …
Everything would be all right for everyone in a few days, everyone said …
So, I went back upstairs and back to bed … and Rania stirred and I told her everything and that everything was fine.
But it wasn’t.

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