I took the crucifix off now, pressed it to my lips, and laid it on the table. It was scratched badly, but I would polish it carefully and give it to Nadia, who needed it more than I did.

I had worn it six months too long, six months since Kareem had called me to say it wouldn’t work, that we should stop “talking.”

I’d never told him about that day in Jerusalem—my private adventure, just me and the city’s walls, cemeteries, churches, and mosques, the afternoon before the one when I first knew that we were too different after all. Before I really understood that my stumbling Arabic didn’t cut it, and that I would carelessly blink and lose him to an eye that framed us both but remained, itself, invisible.

HANAN

Preparing a Face

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

—T. S. Eliot

Her cousin was coming to America, and Hanan was again reminded by her mother that, though she’d never met Rola, “Blood runs deep.” Mama always said this maxim as if she’d invented it, similar to her other famous decree, “Oil and water don’t mix,” to refer to Americans and Arabs. She said these things in her clipped accent that Hanan’s friends insisted was “enchanting.” But for Hanan, it was yet another difference between them. A symbol that she didn’t speak Arabic all that well and that her mother’s English was still burdened after twenty-six years in America. But Mama just dismissed it and said Hanan was always being so dramatic and why didn’t she just stop it?

The accusation of drama usually ended such conversations, the kind that started when Mama said something that made Hanan feel inadequate. “Hanan, when you serve coffee to guests, you start first with oldest person. Why you always forget? You almost have college degree, but you cannot remember so simple a thing? You insulted Abu Hatem.” And it wasn’t even her words so much as that clucking, hushed sound that she forced through firmly pressed lips, her tongue rattling against the cage of her mouth.

Whenever her mother rebuked her for committing these cultural transgressions, Hanan wanted to pound her head against the wall. She knew the words and the embarrassment over what she’d done would pop into her mind at the most unexpected moments. It was at such moments, sitting in the subway car or reading her email at work, that the memory of her mother’s lopsided frown and flared nostrils would hit her like a punch in the stomach.

The worst was the recurring memory of the time she had taken a seat next to her elderly uncle Ibrahim during a family gathering and had crossed her ankle over her knee. While she tried to chat with her impenetrable uncle, everyone else in the room—her parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles—had either glared at her or shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Only later that evening, when everyone had gone home and she was washing dishes for her mother, had she been told that the bottom of her foot had been plainly visible and facing Uncle Ibrahim.