Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (31 page)

I sit in the grasses at his grave. I name this day Holy. I walk back to the house thru the cockleburs that tear my legs. I will remember
ogi:do:da
. Who creates unless he has a vacuum to fill? A white crayon on white paper. A snowfleck in the sky. Who thinks of justice unless he knows injustice? Georgia sits on my lap under a corner of the white shawl. Her owl-eye looks from the window at birds in the wisteria. I think what we do matters. I tell her this & her ear flicks the shawl-edge. I stroke her old fur. She holds her paw over my knee. If the house were burning, yes, I’d take the back of her neck in my teeth & climb thru the pantry window.

JOSEPH GEHA

Looking for the charm against the Evil Eye, Nadia stretched up on the footstool—a tomboy in her dungarees—and searched the shelves of the bathroom cabinet one by one. The charm was a tiny object, no larger than a rosary bead, and it was forever getting lost. But despite the clutter of this house (her grandmother threw nothing away) it was forever turning up again, too.

Sitti, her grandmother, had had the amulet ever since the old country when she herself was a child. A Lazerine monk claimed he’d found it lying amid the rubble of an ancient excavation and, hoping to gain some favor, he brought it directly to Sitti’s uncle, the district magistrate. When the monk was gone—the favor granted or not, Sitti never said—her uncle simply looked down at the charm in his hand and shrugged. After all, what was this thing to him? Nothing more than a drop of porcelain painted to look like a miniature eyeball. And so the amulet was forgotten, mislaid until after his death when it turned up again among his things. No one claimed it, so Sitti decided to keep the charm for herself. Attaching it to a stiff golden thread, she’d had the amulet ever since, over the years misplacing it, yet always finding it again somewhere.

But not here. Here on the top shelf there were only razors, old women’s salves, and jars of black ointments meant to be kept out of a child’s reach. Nadia stepped down from the footstool and carried it back into the front room.

“Achhh….”

The long, familiar moan floated down the hallway from the kitchen; Sitti must be searching there now. And Mikhail was still in the front room where Nadia had left him, still doing nothing to help.

“Mikhi,” she said, “it wasn’t in the bathroom either.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Crossing his legs on the sofa, her brother spoke without turning to look at her.

“Then it has to be in the cellar. Me and Sitti, we looked everyplace else.” Mikhail said nothing. “I bet I know where in the cellar, too.” She waited for him to ask where. He didn’t. “How much you want to bet,” she went on anyway, “that it’s in one of those boxes Uncle Eddie took down there last spring?”

Still her brother said nothing. He would not even look at her.

“Mikhi? You wouldn’t just sit there if Uncle Eddie was here. He’ll give you the belt again for not helping.”

At that, Mikhi turned his gaze, slowly, the wide brown eyes of their father. “You telling?”

“No, not
me
.” She wanted very much for him to believe this, but even as she spoke she realized that her voice was too solemn, unnatural in its earnestness. “I meant
Sitti.
”

“Don’t make me laugh.” He was her little brother by two years, yet it seemed always as if he were the older one. Nadia was the one who giggled and could keep no secrets.

With another loud moan, Sitti left the kitchen and went into the dining room directly next to them. They remained motionless, silent in the ticking stillness of the front room lest she hear them and be reminded of their presence in her house: maybe if she forgot that someone was here to listen she would stop groaning that way—achh—every time she bent over, every time she pulled open a drawer or leaned back her head against the dizziness.

“Achhh….”

(It hadn’t been long after breakfast—maybe she was still drinking her coffee—when the pain and the groaning began. “What’s wrong, Sitti?” Mikhi kept asking her over and over, but she wouldn’t answer. Later, as the noon heat grew unbearable to her, she undressed, put on a nightgown, and braided her hair up off her neck.)

Sitti was a short woman, her broad hips spreading the nightgown as she bent low to pull and shove at the buffet drawers. Nadia almost smiled, watching her through the archway; the nightgown was white, and except for the three iron braids sticking out, her grandmother looked from behind like a little fat altar boy.

“Achhh….”

Her groans were getting louder, and a hint of worry flickered across Mikhi’s eyes. Then, just as quickly, he brightened, curling himself into a hollow of the sofa and tucking the souvenir cushions one under each arm so that their tasseled corners met beneath his chin like a silver beard. He grunted twice, as if to hold his sister’s attention, then he made a face at her—an old man wagging a toothless mouth—and she had to turn away to keep from laughing out loud.

“Achhh….” It was Arabic, but Nadia knew it meant nothing, wasn’t even a word so much as the sound of effort and pain.

The drawers were crammed full of all sorts of odds and ends, and Sitti would be busy there a long time. That was her way: looking for one thing, she had to stop and muse over every other thing she came across. She could throw nothing away.

The satin pillows looked smooth and cool against Mikhi’s hands. The American pillows, Sitti called them. Uncle Eddie had brought them home for her from the navy. The blue one had on its decorated side the figures of anchors and stars, the
red one a poem stitched in silver thread. When he came home to stay, Uncle Eddie read the poem aloud to Sitti, showing her how the first letter of each line spelled the word
Mother
. The women said that Sitti was lucky to have at least one son who cared so much for his mother. What they meant, of course, was that the children’s father did not care so much because he left. Especially since Papa was the elder son and it was his duty to stay. More than that, the custom still held, even here in America: a widower with children is expected to either remarry or else return to his mother’s house. Papa did neither. Instead, he remained in his own house after the funeral. For almost five years until, one hot July morning, he dressed Mikhi and Nadia in their Sunday clothes and brought them to Sitti’s house, all their things packed in grocery bags. And after that he simply went away.

Nadia watched a moment more as her brother’s fingers brushed lightly over the stitching, tracing stars and letters, then she stood up. “I’m going to look in Sitti’s room again.”

Mikhi looked up from the cushions. The charm wasn’t in Sitti’s room, they both knew that; the bedrooms had been searched twice already, and all she was doing now was simply trying to put off having to go down to the cellar alone. Mikhi’s wry, sidelong glance mocked her.

She crossed in front of him, ignoring the face he once more made at her, lipping his teeth that way to get her laughing. She was only eleven, and a girl given to giggling, but she wasn’t a fool. Mikhi was up to something, all day just sitting there and doing nothing to help. There was going to be trouble—once more Uncle Eddie would have his snakeskin belt out and flashing—and she would be a part of it. She’d have to be. Mikhi was younger than her, yet she had always followed his lead, even into trouble.

“Mikhi?” she paused in the doorway. “I don’t want to go down there alone.” Nadia kept her eyes downward on a
curled edge of the rug. Sitti was dying, or said she was, and she needed the amulet to ease the pain of her dying. At least it might quiet her. “Will you come with me when I go?”

Again he didn’t answer. Nadia stomped angrily into the hall—her dungarees, bought large so she’d grow into them, slap-slapping at her ankles—and pushed open the bedroom door.

Sitti’s room was papered with dark flowers. The walls, like everything else in that house, were cluttered. Holy pictures hung in uneven diamond patterns above the bed, and there were photographs everywhere, dark-framed pictures of Sitti when she was young, of Jiddo—Nadia’s grandfather—rimmed in black because he was dead, and of Papa and Uncle Eddie when they were little boys. None of them were smiling, not even little Papa, his big eyes staring blankly at her through the dusty glass.

The dresser top had been cleared at least twice that day, and there was nothing on it now but a small statue of the Virgin. Almost two years before, when Uncle Eddie was still in the navy and it looked like he might be sent to Korea, Sitti had taped a folded dollar bill to the statue’s base. Like a prayer, almost.

(“… Great to be back,” Uncle Eddie had kept saying after his discharge. “Great to be back.”

“What was it like?” visitors would ask.

“We never did go overseas, unless you count once to Panama. Mostly it was up and down the West Coast.”

“And how was that?”

“Truth is, I was lost the whole time. Really. I never knew where I was. And when we put in it was even worse. I was always getting lost in the cities. You honestly don’t know what homesick is until you’ve been out there.”

Then Uncle Eddie would take his mother’s hand in both of his. “Great to be back.” He praised her cooking every
single day of that first week home. “Great to be back,” he said it even to himself, idly fingering one of the sofa doilies, then actually noticing it, as if discovering at his very fingertips yet one more familiar marker against the lostness from which he had returned….)

The bedroom was warm, musty with the smell of sleep. Nadia opened a window, then knelt and put her face to the faint breeze. Except for the furniture and the pictures, this could have been her old bedroom at home. The two houses were almost identical, both built of glazed brick with tall, narrow windows and rooms that were dark even in daytime since they shared walls with the row houses on either side (and beneath those rooms the cellars, damp honeycombs of thick walls and uneven floors); both houses, too, were within that same general neighborhood of East Detroit, the Little Syria centered at Congress Street and Larned. Pressing her face to the window screen, she could see the dome of the Maronite Catholic Church and the onion-shaped twin steeples of the Greek Orthodox. Farther up Congress there were shops that sold woven artifacts and brass from the old country. They had food, too, things that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Detroit; pressed apricots, goat cheese, sesame paste and pine nuts and briny olives. (“The food, that’s what I missed most,” Uncle Eddie said. “The Americans, they don’t know how to eat.”) And there were the
ahwa
shops too, where old men sat all day amid tobacco smoke and the bitter smell of Turkish coffee.

On Saturday mornings Americans came into the neighborhood to shop. Women, mostly; the merchants called them “Mum” (and behind their backs “College Mum,” not so much because of the university nearby as for the way these women spoke English—everything in the nose). Nadia often used to sit outside just to watch the college mums pass. While most women dressed up in hat and gloves to go shopping,
clutching a narrow black purse, the college mums seemed younger than that. They always had on something bright, like a scarf or a bandanna. The handbags slung carelessly from their shoulders were huge, made of woven rope or straw, and patterned with beads. Usually they wore no makeup, and with their hair pinned up or back there was always something boyish about their faces. A few even dressed in trousers, like men. And they were always excited about something, always smiling as they pointed out this or that to a companion who’d never been there before, exclaiming too loudly about the inlay work on a cedar music box or the smell of a foreign spice, and always asking “Oh, and what do you call
this?
” as if they’d never seen a barrel of olives before. The shopkeepers would smile back at them and say
olives
in Arabic, and the college mums loved that, chattering on and on as they spent their money. By early afternoon they would begin leaving—silly women—and always Nadia wished that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss and vicious homesickness.

“Achhh….”

The drawers of Sitti’s dresser were sticking with the heat, and Nadia had to tug hard to open them. In a corner of the bottom drawer, tucked beneath the stockings and yellowed underwear, were several envelopes banded together. These contained photographs never pasted into the album books, among them the two or three remaining pictures of Nadia’s mother. Since she was an American, the old people hardly ever mentioned her when they talked of the dead. Nadia barely remembered her at all, and she always envied Mikhi who, though younger, could state with the quiet assurance of a witness that their mother’s eyes, which were so dark in the photographs, had been bright blue.

Cached also amid the underthings were broken rosaries, pages from Arabic prayerbooks, shreds of holy palms plaited years ago into the shapes of crosses and crowns of thorns. Although the younger people gave such things a kind of grudging respect (the whole time he was at sea Uncle Eddie wore the charm against the Evil Eye—the very one that was missing now—and he said he wasn’t the only one on his ship with a lucky piece), it was usually just the old people who were careful not to point at certain stars, who never ate from a yellow dish or left a slipper upside down with its sole stepping on God’s face. Once, Nadia told her uncle about how Mikhi had imitated the ritual that old people had of kissing a piece of bread that had fallen to the floor. It was so funny, she had to tell somebody; Mikhi popping his eyes in exaggerated horror as the bread fell, the reverence with which he picked it up and kissed it, finally working his mouth sideways and sucking passionately, the way people kissed in movies.

Uncle Eddie didn’t laugh. Instead, he simply lit a cigarette. Nadia began to worry as she watched the smoke puff twice with each rapid double-drag. It was a busy, nervous way of smoking that Uncle Eddie had learned in the navy. Her uncle had always been quick to laugh at almost anything. But as the months passed after his return from the service, Eddie seemed to grow more serious, more easily irritated. Some said that it had started while he was still in the navy, just after he’d heard that Papa was gone.