I flirted shamelessly with Mhammad that spring of 1985. It was a game at first, an unspoken competition between Sabah and me. When he showed no interest, I obsessed and stalked him long enough to engineer repeated “chance” encounters in the stairwell of our building. He was handsome indeed, and I found myself constantly thinking about him despite our age difference.

“Congratulations, Nahr.” Sabah rolled her eyes. “You said hi to him in the stairwell. That’s groundbreaking.” I enjoyed what I thought was Sabah’s envy. “More than just hi,” I said, and added that he was planning to attend an upcoming wedding party in our neighborhood. “He said he wanted to see me dance,” I lied.

Our friends squealed, but Sabah said nothing.

My plan worked. Even though my mother made me stop dancing at the wedding after a few songs—“It’s too much, Nahr!” she said—I knew I had caught his attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off me that night. I don’t remember much else from that summer, except that I told my friends I had found the man God intended for me.

Mhammad and I met regularly, at the beach, parks, and malls. My friends, even Sabah, covered for me with Mama. He told me stories about Palestine much different from my grandmother’s and parents’. In his version, there was a nightlife for young people, where they danced and partied, went to cafés, parks, and clubs. Palestinians were still allowed to access the Mediterranean beach back then, and we talked about our shared love of the ocean. He wanted to know about my life. He was not fond of the desert heat and was struggling to adjust in Kuwait. He said he would have left weeks ago had he not met me. “Your friendship means the world to me,” he said. He seemed vulnerable, and his need for me made me believe that I loved him. I told him so. Months later, he and his aunt’s family were in our home, asking for my hand.

I fantasized about fairy-tale love and sex, about having my own house, children, and a job like modern women—maybe as a smartly dressed secretary like the ones on the covers of women’s magazines. I was preoccupied with finding the latest appliances to suit the life I imagined. The kind of semimanual washer at our house—where we fed each item through rollers to squeeze out the water—would not do. Some people even had dishwashers that cleaned, rinsed, and dried their dishes. I wanted one, and Mhammad promised I’d get it. I imagined being the envy of all my friends.

Sitti Wasfiyeh was delighted, although suspicious about the appliances. “I don’t trust a machine to clean dishes. It won’t scrub things clean. You’ll get bugs in your house. I’ll never visit you,” she warned.

Mama counseled me not to rush into making such a big decision. She thought Mhammad too old for me, and admitted, years later, that she almost forbade the marriage, but the force of my enthusiasm and joy made her doubt her instincts. “You had the biggest personality in the family, and without realizing it, we all deferred to you,” she told me. I thought Mama’s reservations were the misplaced concern of a woman whose marriage hadn’t worked out, and I rationalized that my story was beginning differently from hers.