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It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.
It was in that moment that she first realized: I wasn’t like her.
I communicated something to my mother as I stood there smiling in a pair of men’s pants, a message I didn’t know I was sending her. She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could. Look at me, I wanted to say to her then. Please don’t look away.
THE NEXT DAY ANNA AND I MET UP AT OUR APARTMENT before dinner. She was wearing a V-neck sweater and a corduroy skirt, an awkward effort to look feminine in spite of her boyishness. Maybe she thought it would better ingratiate her to my mother. But her efforts were in vain—I knew my mother wouldn’t be all right with this situation, especially if she looked even more like a woman.
As we were taking our first bites, my mother mentioned a friend whose daughter was getting married. I felt a burn of jealousy. Anytime I heard of another Arab girl’s engagement, it immediately snapped me out of my gayness. “How’d she meet him?” I asked.
“Through the community,” she said. Years ago I’d drifted away from the community, which consisted of Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians living in the D.C. area. When I moved back to D.C. after a year in Italy post-college, I’d taken part in weekends of pregaming at posh lounges followed by bass-pumping, douchebag-frequented clubs, an activity I would’ve gladly traded for, say, cleaning toilets. “He’s from a very good family.”
Hours later I was staring at newborn Karim through the glass partition, thinking him superfluous and knowing things would now be different, my mother no longer mine entirely.
She had chosen a place on the Upper West Side known for its burgers, but I ordered a salad. I imagined she was judging me in that moment. I’m familiar with that judgment, after years of anorexia. I was past it by then, but still, how could I eat something so unsexy as a cheeseburger in front of the sexiest woman in the universe?
After all, the professor did seem fabricated. Perhaps, to the extent that I’d cobbled together the pieces I had, she was. Though like the “Orient,” I chose to believe she was an idea with some corresponding reality; she was more than simulacra.
As I read, relief quickly gave way to fear. “It’s a good thing I don’t trust you,” she had written. “Because if I did, I wouldn’t have had a reason to search for confirmation.”
“I don’t care what you choose to do anymore,” she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it. She then shot me a piercing look before shutting the cab door. “Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.”
I WAS FOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTIFADA BEGAN.
On the television screen, scenes appeared from Nablus of coffins shrouded in Palestinian flags. Young men in stonewashed jeans and bandanas peeking out from behind graffitied walls and stacks of flaming tires, throwing a seemingly endless supply of stones. Israeli soldiers in tan uniforms and laced-up combat boots pacing around checkpoints with machine guns, chewing gum and looking both vigilant and bored. These were my first images of the conflict that shattered our homeland and scattered my family.
them. Soon I began taking pills to numb the pain—I’d gotten the number for a notoriously irresponsible psychiatrist whose contact info had made the rounds among my coworkers at the club. He put me on a cycle of amphetamines during the day and Xanax at night, to come down and get a bit of sleep.
She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand. I picked Facing Love Addiction off the shelf and opened it to the beginning: “Love addicts have an uncontrollable appetite for the object of their affection.”
Unable to be present in their own relationships, they find an escape hatch to numb the pain.”
Still disgruntled about the early-bird suppers, I asked, “Dinner’s really at five? What if where I’m from we never eat before nine?” “Doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” Nancy said. “Here, we’re all Americans.”
In the late 1980s, during the intifada, it had been a consistently hellish process; the holding room a swarm of families all kept waiting for hours with no water or air-conditioning in desert heat.
As an American. I’d tuck my Jordanian passport away, along with any visual sign of my Palestinian heritage. I would sport my Asics Tigers, flaunt my Hanes V-neck. I’d flash my American passport. Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.
When I finally got to the luggage area my suitcase was gone.
Love the flashback to the last time her belongings were out of sight
Across the table a woman started crying onto her burrito. “Will I ever escape this?” she wailed. I turned and faced the wall to hide my laughter. We were all so perfectly absurd, so perfectly pathetic.
I asked Greg where he was from. South Carolina. His voice was deep and his mouth barely moved when he spoke. “I’ve been to Charleston once,” I told him, not mentioning that I’d felt completely strange there, like the only Arab for hundreds of miles, maybe thousands. I asked him about the toys.
It me
Greg was already buckled up in the back row, and I was glad for it. He was the only person I’d spoken to so far, which made me feel disproportionately close to him.
When I confessed to the group that I had developed feelings for the center’s nutritionist, after an all-night G-chat correspondence precipitated by her filling in the second half of a Shins lyric that I’d posted as my status, Anna approached me.
At the time I didn’t realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwiches at home by choice.
• My resistance to groups is likely a response to my culture’s fervent embrace of them, which locates value not as much in the individual as in the cohort they belong to.
And I would cry, because I desperately wanted to be closer to them, to stay up until dawn playing cards and watching rom-coms. But I was the American cousin, which inspired a resentment that my mother, depending on her mood, promised me was rooted in jealousy or lambasted me for, as though I had chosen to grow up in the States.
She told us about times when her mom was able to hold down a job, and how proud Molly was of her when she did. I felt a sharp tinge of empathy, the guilt and resentment both exceedingly familiar.
I stared at the clock as the minute hand eclipsed the hour hand for the third time and decided that only a white man would feel comfortable taking up so much space.
If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.
Some of my strongest memories of my father involve him weeding the garden or watching television. He did not want to be bothered, especially not by his immediate family. Activities that allowed him to completely shut out our needs and emotions seemed to resonate with him.
As a child I would ask my mother what was wrong with him. “Why can’t he look me in the eye?” To which she would answer, “Because he’s afraid of women. In fact, he hates them.”
Along with the twelve-year-old girlfriend came a Mercedes convertible and two motorcycles. “Men like their toys,” he responded when I asked why he needed so many vehicles, especially when he spent most his time parked in front of the TV.
“He’s just always blaming her for everything, punishing her for having needs,” I said to Richard. Greg looked up as though he was going to defend himself, but then stayed quiet. “Making her out to be some kind of monster.”
He obviously preferred Nintendo to human contact.
AIM had just come out. My screen name was Juniper18, a combination of my favorite scent of Bath & Body Works lotion and my purported age. “What size are your tits?” BigCoq4U would ask.
I came to worship them, these older men. I craved the wisdom and guidance they willingly offered and that my father withheld.
Stereotypes exist for the inhabitants of different Arab cities.
To be a woman who desired other women seemed even worse, especially shameful and shocking in its lack of reverence for the male-centric culture. Why would you want to exclude men, the stronger, better gender, from the equation?
In high school, it didn’t take long to realize that I coveted Eman, whose body was like a temple.
“Are you seeing anyone there?” I once asked. I was careful not to specify a gender, simultaneously avoiding an assumption of queerness and implying it.
When we caught eyes he waved, then came over and asked if I wanted to dance. He seemed like someone my mother and the community would be impressed by, a good candidate for marriage.
“I have confirmation.” My heart thumped so hard I could practically hear it. “That bridesmaid is definitely gay.” “No way,” Eman said. “How do you know?” “She came on to me last night,” I said, keeping my eyes pinned to the floor. “She invited me to her room.” The words practically burned as they left my mouth. “That’s disgusting,” Eman said. “What did you say?” “I told her she must’ve gotten the wrong idea.” I felt the heat spread across my face. “And that I like men.”
I looked down and traced the stripes of my sneaker with my index finger. “My secret is that I slept with someone, then outed her while keeping myself in the closet.”
“No one’s under any obligation to announce their sexuality,” he continued. “What do you want her to do, get a tattoo, wear a sign?”
When I realized I’d been right about him, I didn’t feel vindicated, or smug, or pleased. I felt frightened, and disturbed by the familiarity. Worse than receiving rage was the ability to detect its remnants.
During the Wednesday night Big Book meeting, a recovering alcoholic defined intimacy as “into-me-you-see.” I’d written it down on the back page of my journal.
As a child I was lavished with attention for being Laila’s daughter. In fact, that was the extent of who I was. “Inti bint Laila?” You’re Laila’s daughter? “Yee! Habibti!”
“When you told me you were beautiful and I was average, I felt bad, because that’s true, and I can’t believe you would actually say it to me.”
