The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

Having my head in the clouds was my way of surviving.

Nora

But now that she was trimming fat from my carnitas, she might as well have been trimming joy from my life.

Effrain

My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

Nora

We were like a thrift-store tea set, there was always one piece missing.

Maryam

I won’t ask you to understand what happened. I just want you to imagine it.

Driss: Is he speaking to the reader posthumously?

These arguments had long ago become rehearsed. Circular, even. It didn’t matter what I said, my father would always return to the same point. Saddam was a bad guy, we’re the good guys. The two of us weren’t fighting about the war, we were fighting about something else, something that had lain unspoken between us for many years.

Jeremy

Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.

Nora

Leafing through the realtor magazines from the dispenser outside the shop, you pretend to read. Eventually you learn to recognize the letters that go with the pictures: h-o-m-e.

Selma

This is where the plane took you.

Selma

While the music played, I sat on the couch and closed my eyes, moved not just by how beautiful the piece sounded, but by how easily Nora had opened her heart to me. She held nothing back, and it terrified me that someday she might expect the same of me.

Jeremy

some people started acting like I was a monster, a creature with horns and fangs. But I wasn’t. I was just like them: I loved my family, played with my dogs, bought lottery tickets whenever I filled up at the gas station, then spent days fantasizing about what I’d do if I won millions of dollars.

AJ

It wasn’t easy to accept that the man we loved had done terrible things, because love itself is a singling out of one person over countless others.

Nora

Home, above all, was the family who loved me. Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.

Nora