“Don’t diss the Ivy’s,” he said sarcastically, flashing his University of Pennsylvania ring in her face.

“You haven’t even gotten your PhD yet!” she exclaimed. “How did you get a ring?”

He shrugged and asked, “So what are we going to do about your goody two-sandals cousin from the deserts of Arabia?” He leaned forward conspiratorially.

“Don’t diss the Arabs.”

“Touché.” He bowed his head low to the table. “Let me try to redeem myself: How about we show your cousin an evening on the town, you know, paint the town red and all that?”

Hanan pondered this thought. Her mother always hated it when she went out to clubs and parties, or just out with her friends. “We are Arabs,” she’d always say, “not Americans! This is not what we do!”

“What’s wrong with going dancing?” Hanan would argue back, wanting to truly understand this mysterious dividing line between Arabs and Americans, who faced off against each other in her mother’s mind like boxing opponents. In Mama’s mind, they stood in opposite corners, glaring at each other, waiting for the fight to start—in Hanan’s life, however, they were constantly dueling it out.

Her mother never gave her an adequate answer. The “I never had the luxury to go dancing” and “We were too busy fleeing from the soldiers to go dancing” logic never seemed reasonable, especially when Hanan flipped on the Arabic satellite TV stations to shows and music videos in which people—dressed like runway models—danced to Arabic, American, and even French and Indian music. And so Hanan spent at least one Saturday night a month with John and her other friends, hopping from club to club—from a disco joint, to a hip-hop club, to a blues bar—and she never got home before 2 A.M. And always, like a ghost haunting a house, a little, brown face would appear in the front window as Hanan’s car pulled into the driveway. It would quickly disappear behind the curtains and, as she opened the front door that had been left unlocked for her, Hanan would hear her mother’s bedroom door slam upstairs.

She and John stayed out late that very evening, talking and meeting up with some of their other friends, anything—Hanan felt—to avoid going home. Her mother, however, was upstairs and asleep when she came home at 1:00 A.M., and Hanan fumbled with her keys to unlock the door. She woke up late the next morning to the sounds and smells of breakfast being prepared downstairs. She started when she saw her clock read 8:42, but then remembered that it was Saturday and sank back into the pillows on her bed.

She gazed up at her ceiling as she listened to her mother’s and Rola’s voices, chatting in Arabic, complemented by an occasional masculine murmur—undoubtedly her father as he watched CNN on the small television in their kitchen. There were tape marks on her ceiling, yellow and brittle, but clinging nevertheless. Back in high school she had taped a poster of Rob Lowe right above her bed so she could fall asleep looking at it. Her mother had denounced it as indecent and ordered her to take it down, but Hanan never did, knowing that it would remain there because her 5 foot 1 inch mother would never reach it, even with a chair, and her father didn’t care enough to do something about it himself.