I saw the beads, and I was reminded that I was a survivor, like my mother.

ALIYAH

Aliyah’s Fan

Many years ago, Aliyah’s father had given her five dollars for winning the fourth-grade essay contest. More importantly, he had finally allowed her to have her own room—the beautifully decorated, pristinely maintained, but rarely occupied guest bedroom facing the alley, which flowed like a concrete river between the cemented backyards of the row houses on the block. Despite its paltry 10' by 10' size—some people’s closets were bigger—it was finally hers. Her brothers had resented her for months and plotted revenge from their bunk-bed headquarters in the middle room, but it was her space now, this room with a window and salmon pink walls and a picture of the Virgin Mary, wearing bright blue robes, that hung above her bed. And the door even had a working lock.

This first memory of her modest success seeped into Aliyah’s thoughts as she closed her apartment’s door behind her, listened for the “click,” and headed to the subway station. Having been summoned by a late-night phone call, she was going to visit her parents. “Your story, in that magazine,” her mother had said. “We just want to ask you about it.”

Then, in an urgent whisper, “Abuki za’laan.” She’d heard it before, though usually in reference to something her brothers had done: “Your father is furious.”

As she briskly covered the three blocks to the station, Aliyah imagined him sitting in the kitchen last night, reading her story while he sipped her mother’s tea: Lipton infused with fresh peppermint leaves. Every Arab mother grew peppermint in her garden or, in her mother’s case, in the pot on the ledge of the kitchen window. He’d read, often flipping back to the front cover of the magazine to see again, “Featuring fiction by … and Aliyah al-Rawi.” He’d smile to himself and think, “Goddamn it, my daughter is a real writer.” (“Real” meant, of course, that she was getting paid for her words, not merely in the contributor’s copies that were like jewels to her but that her father disdained.) But then, he would arrive at the part in the middle, the part she had rewritten, cut, reinserted, and reworked a dozen times. One paragraph, eighty-five words, caused his eyebrows to arch and his fingers to pull agitatedly at the ends of his Hercule Poirot mustache. And he would think, “Goddamn it, I can’t believe she wrote this!”

When she jogged down the steps into the station, the familiar stench of heat and urine rose up to welcome her, and she reminded herself that she’d had to include that part. It had been too funny, too perfect to slice out. The words slipped back into her mind one by one, as if to parallel the clink her tokens made as she dropped them into the machine. “Uncle Ghassan’s blue beret looked painfully snug on his rather large head and the stench of J&B on his breath alerted the bride. He gave his nephew’s new wife a sleepy smile. As he leaned in to kiss her cheek in congratulations, he started—to everyone’s horror—to tip over in the direction of the white-clad queen of the day. His hand snatched at anything—and settled on the pearl-sewn bodice of her dress, ripping it down to her waist as he fell.” Even now, as she boarded the train, Aliyah smiled to herself. No free seats, so she stood by the door and wrapped her hand around a slim, aluminum pole as the train jerked forward. That wedding scene had been born of her editing adventure, mainly because she had abandoned all efforts to disguise the truth. After all, she was hardly the first writer to recycle real life.