I laugh with him, trying to keep the mood light. I know that he has to leave for work in half an hour, where he’ll face lines of customers at the food cart. People in suits and ties and office heels, coming out of office buildings, demanding cheesesteaks with only a “smidgeon” of onions or a soda with “very little” ice. Asking whether or not the meat in the hamburgers is lean and low-fat. Does he have Sweet-n-Low instead of sugar for their coffee? I want to always make these mornings pleasant for him. Just for this small window we rarely have together, between Hanan’s departure for school and his own for work.
But he recognizes my uneasiness anyway. He studies my face as I pour the tea for him, the smell of peppermint rising on the clouds of steam, then he pinches my arm gently. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Layla, I know when something is bothering you.”
“Hanan’s school has Parent’s Day today, when the mother or father spends the day with the kids, going to all their classes and meeting their friends and new teachers.” I sit down next to him at the table and stir sugar into our teacups. “And she asked me not to come.”
He waits for an explanation, so I add, “She’s embarrassed about my accent. I felt it from her before, but not like this.”
He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. This is actually one of the things I love about him. He doesn’t prattle and spew empty words and phrases, he just smiles understandingly. Sympathetically. And he squeezes my hand.
But he doesn’t comprehend the details, the nuances of my feelings. He was born in the States, raised here, went to school here. He speaks English with a South Philadelphia accent, stretching the last word of every sentence, making it elastic. “Have a nice day now, awh-ight?” or “You want ketchup and muustaard? No praah-blem.” I stopped helping him in the cart when Hanan was born, but I still remember.
He married me ten years ago, a girl from the Old Country, because he wanted to keep in touch with his culture. “I’m proud to be an Arab,” he said when we were courting. “And I’ve dated American girls, but they never understand my culture. I think they don’t really like it.”
I told him that I didn’t really understand American culture; I had only arrived a few months before. But I knew that there was an entire pack of Arab-American boys and girls, looking for spouses among us, the newly-landed. I wanted him to love me because I was myself, not because I represented some missing link in his life. But I took a chance on him, and I don’t regret it except in moments like this, when I wish I was American enough for my daughter.
He is always kind and eager to please me. We even spent our honeymoon back home in Ramallah, so that I could see my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. During those two weeks, I introduced him to the sights and landmarks of a country he’d always heard tales about, but that he’d never experienced. He got upset when I took him to visit the refugee camp where I used to live. His hands shook when he saw the children playing in the open sewers, and the holes, like gaping mouths filled with jagged teeth, that opened the surfaces of many of the homes. “You lived like that?” he seethed for days afterwards. But I wanted to show him the good things too, so we went to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Manger Square in Bethlehem, and the old city of Jericho.