“Maybe you’ll get a new polka-dot dress?” I joked.

“Insh’allah!” she responded, laughing.

When the movie ended, we moved to help Siham clean up the mess we’d made: the pink coffee cups, the matching cake plates, and the bowls of watermelon seed shells.

“Don’t touch a thing,” she protested. “I’ll put them right into the dishwasher.” She tossed out the word casually, but the way she studied us to see if it had had its effect made me sure it was intentional.

Of course we followed her into the kitchen to see this dishwasher. It was large and white and gleaming. We watched her—enviously, I admit—open its wide door, stack her plates inside, and tell us how Nader had decided it was necessary. “He wants us to be modern.”

Later that evening, I seethed to Abu Nabeel, “Are we not ‘modern’?”

“Calm down, ya Imm Nabeel. We can have a dishwasher if you like. They are becoming more affordable. Soon, everyone will own one anyway.”

“I don’t need one!” I stormed. “I have two hands to wash my dishes!” And then remembering that he often helped me with this chore and others, I added, “We can do them ourselves, without fancy machines.”

He smiled and returned to his oud, the one instrument he could sit with for hours, playing and strumming all night. I tried not to encourage it, because he sometimes forgot he had a family living around him when he played, but I did enjoy listening. He was really quite good. The soft tunes filled our home, reaching from Aliyah’s room upstairs, where she read day and night, to the basement below, where the boys spent all their time lifting weights and organizing their baseball cards.

As he played, I sat beside him and picked up my new issue of Money magazine, which I subscribed to, along with Good Housekeeping, Time magazine, and the New York Times Sunday edition. I did not want to forget all that I had learned in college. My mind drifted from an article on retirement accounts to my friend Samira’s dorm room at Temple University. She and I were among five other Arab girls at the university. Her parents were in Lebanon, so she had a dorm room and freedom that I envied. I, on the other hand, only went to Temple because I’d gotten financial aid and the campus was twelve minutes from my parents’ house by subway. Even though they pushed me to get a degree, they never would have allowed me to go to a college that required me to leave home. I was lucky to even have the chance, they’d always reminded me.

Nineteen sixty-seven was my senior year, but we spent more time breathing politics than studying for classes and exams. We would gather in Samira’s room, because she had a radio, and talk anxiously. What did Syria have planned? What had Gamal Abdel Nasser said in his latest speech? Would the Arabs attack first, or would Israel? Most importantly, would my family return to Palestine when the Arabs won? Was our house still there, as I remembered it, nestled in the stony hills outside of Jerusalem?