I glance at Jaffer, who watches all of the girls in this video with too much interest. Lina sits next to him wearing her ever-present polite smile. I know they are watching me dance with the bride, my back to the camera.

“Wow, she knows how to shake it,” Jaffer says.

My mother’s eyes dart in my direction.

“She’s really shaking it,” he shouts.

Jaffer’s mother points. “She’s good.”

“Mmm,” says Lina.

“Who is that girl who’s shaking her dance all over the place?” Jaffer asks with glassy eyes, looking like those boys at school who stare at the posters of naked ladies in their lockers.

My mother and I look at each other. I know she is mixed between angry and furious. She always wants to do what’s just right and appropriate and doesn’t want anyone talking bad about her.

I leave the room to prepare more tea, cookies, fruits, anything that will get me out of the room while I hear my ashamed mother explaining that the girl dancing, ilee bithiz, who is “shaking it,” is me, her daughter, his soon-to-be cousin, and would he please calm himself down. Hasn’t he been paying attention? I have been wearing the same—“too tight”—dress throughout this portion of the video. How could you not have realized?

Your eyes are the light of my eyes.

For you I sing this song.

Once I danced every night in a black slip with a candle burning in front of a barred window that often had Israeli soldiers on the other side of it.

It was only a room in my grandmother’s house in boring little Nawara, but hiz hiz hiz the way my feet taught my hips to follow the drumbeats, I imagined I was an imprisoned princess and the man who watched me from behind his gun was my evil captor. I would dance every night, waiting for the heroic prince who would rescue me and love me until the drumbeats stopped, which would be never.

I don’t tell my cousin’s fiancé this, of course, and he lowers his eyes when I serve them tea.

Your eyes are the light of my eyes.

For you I sing this song.

This year I told my family a thousand and one lies and went to a disco and danced for a beautiful man who came to love me, love me so much that I carried his credit card, wore his jewelry, and had lunch with him until I satisfied him in every way. Then he returned to his blond American wife and two blond American children while I folded myself into the boxes that once bulged with sparkling promises, waiting for the ache to leave, which it did eventually. Dance, shake it all out—hiz hiz hiz—with eyes closed and hips racing those awful drums.