“So?” she’d said, using her fingers to funnel a stream of warm water into the belly and down the insides of a serving bowl.

“You never do that!” her mother had exclaimed. “It’s an insult to show someone the bottom of your foot—everyone in that room is going to be talking about it. My brother Ibrahim will probably never come here again.”

“Mama,” Hanan persisted, her irritation flooding over her like the water now spilling over the sides of the bowl. “Mama, how can he be mad at me for something I didn’t even know I was doing?”

“Crazy girl,” her mother muttered, and stalked over to the sink and slammed the faucet handle shut. Then she walked out of the kitchen and upstairs. Hanan could hear the stairs creaking and a bedroom door slam. Defeated, she tossed the sponge into the sink and headed upstairs herself. As she passed her parent’s door, she heard her mother’s high-pitched, fierce tones. Her dad’s voice was muffled and soft, as usual. She knew that he’d come to her tomorrow and give her a kiss on the cheek, then pat the same spot he’d kissed as if to make sure it stuck, and tell her not to worry about it.

Hanan closed her own bedroom door, and then, still hearing Mama’s rants, she stacked the small decorative pillows on her bed along the bottom edge of her door to keep it out.

When she was finally in complete silence, sitting on her bed and gazing at the pillows lined up like soldiers at the front line of a cultural war, when she finally felt safe in her fortified room, she decided she was not an Arab. Her father was an American, born to Arab parents, but her mother hadn’t been born here—she’d grown up in the hilly town of Ramallah, had fled a series of wars, had left behind camps strewn with shrapnel, legless corpses, wailing women, and eyes too weary to weep. But Hanan had been born right here, in Philadelphia, in St. Agnes Hospital on Broad Street, and she had lived here all her life, next to Mrs. Carpetti and her four cats who kept eating the flowers on her windowsill, right down the street from the corner deli, owned by Mr. Spinelli with the white hair who’s always asked her when she was a kid, “You dark-haired cutie-pie, you sure you not Italian?” before giving her a chocolate candy. This was where she was from, and who cared if she shoved her foot in someone’s face?

The morning that they drove to the airport to pick up her cousin Rola, Hanan and her mother hardly spoke. Hanan drove the two of them in her small red Ford Escort, which she’d bought after dropping out of college and getting a job in a clothing store. Her mother had her own car, a Lincoln Continental so large that she could barely see over the steering wheel, and she did drive, but only within a five-mile radius of their home so the neighbors at least would see her. She was afraid to venture much farther than that. Hanan had almost laughed when Mama had said, “The airport is too far. You drive to bring Rola?” She’d wanted to say “no,” but she was curious about her cousin, who had never been to America, according to Mama. She wondered how much she would have in common with Rola, or if she’d have anything in common at all. Would her cousin expect her to be a docile Arab girl, the lone flower on the dark terrain of wild America? She wondered just how wholly Rola bought the package of irreverent Americans, which she was sure Aunt Warda, who was probably a carbon copy of Mama, had taught her.