“So you fight with your mother, it seems,” said Rola, moving closer to her. Hanan felt suddenly protective of her. “Does it happen very much?”

“Once in a while,” said Hanan. “She thinks I should be some perfect Arabic girl, you know, that I should enjoy making cookies and looking for a husband.” Like you, she thought.

“I know,” Rola said sympathetically. “My mother is the same way. Everything I do is wrong, and I don’t act the way she wants. I always have to be polite and sweet, even to people I can’t stand. Like Uncle Ibrahim.” She glanced at Hanan. “You know, of course, he embezzled from the bank he used to manage in Jerusalem? That is why he came to America. He cannot return back!”

“No way! Well, you wanna know what I did to him?” Hanan confessed her story about sticking the bottom of her foot in their uncle’s face.

Rola laughed silently, shoulders quivering, then sighed and said, “They are very much a different generation, I am guessing. I should say to you,” Rola added in a quiet voice, so soft that Hanan could barely hear her. “I came here thinking that my aunt—your mother—would be different than mine, because she lived here in America. I had hoped …” She paused, then shook her head and smiled. “Well, she’s more like my own mother than I thought … but they are sisters, so it makes sense, of course.”

Hanan didn’t respond. She felt she needed to sort out this new information. John walked up to them just then, looking weary as usual. “Hello, ladies.”

Hanan introduced him to Rola, and before she knew what was happening, John had pulled her surprised cousin onto the dance floor. Shit, she thought. This had been their plan, but it just wasn’t right anymore. She slammed her glass down onto the bar and hurried after them, cutting through the mass of people like a diver scissoring the water. Rola was trying politely to extricate herself from John, who was pulling her deeper and deeper into the center of the dance floor, like a small ship being sucked into the eye of a swirling, deafening whirlpool.

Hanan called out to John to stop, to call it off, that she didn’t want to do this anymore. But the music was louder here, and she felt her whole body vibrate with the noise thumping out of the massive speakers hanging from the rafters above the dance floor.

John was dancing with Rola now, or at least he was dancing, and Rola, jostled by the crowd, was looking around wildly, her hands clasped over her mouth. Hanan reached her just as John stopped, and put a hand on her elbow.

“Rola!” Hanan yelled, “Are you OK?”

Rola shook her head and took her hand away from her mouth long enough to shout, “Beit al-mai? Beit al-mai?” She was sweating hard.

“What’s that?” John shouted.

“Bathroom,” Hanan shouted back. One of the few words she did know. She steered Rola away to the women’s bathroom in the back of the hall.