Habibi (3 page)

Liyana was quiet. She flicked at a mosquito, thinking how people considered other people. Did other people think
she
was strange? Sitti was eighty and Poppy said her mother had lived to be ninety-nine. What if it ran in the family?

Liyana and Poppy sat silently in the backyard while their gray cat, Sami, leaped down from the top of the wooden fence to bury his nose in the grass. Sami was going to live at their aunt’s house, but Rafik and Liyana worried she might forget to feed him. They had discussed giving him tranquilizers and stowing him away in a backpack.

Liyana asked Poppy, “Do you remember that Emily Dickinson poem I liked a lot in second grade that starts, ‘I’m nobody, who are you?’”

“Sort of. But I never thought you were nobody.”

“I’m even more nobody now than I was then.”

“Oh
habibti,
don’t say that! You’re everything you need to be!”

“Poppy, remember when you told us your twentieth birthday was the most important landmark day of your life? I do
not
think it will be a very good day in mine.”

“That’s okay. You’re only fourteen. You have a lot of time. And I only meant it was the landmark
day of my life till
then
. I’ve had
lots
of better landmarks since. Like the days you and Rafik were born! And every day after! Twenty was just a ittle—blip—now that I look back on it.”

Liyana wrote down what he said.
“A little blip—now that I look back on it.”
She closed her notebook as Sami ran toward them with a lizard in his mouth.

Their family was half and half like a carton of rich milk.

Liyana and Rafik had tucked three apology notes into mailboxes in their neighborhood. Sorry to Mrs. Moore for borrowing her daisies more than once. Sorry to Lucy Hummer for calling her a witch after Rafik’s ball skipped into her yard and she kept it a week before pitching it back. Sorry to Frank for leaving a sign on the windshield of his antique station wagon without wheels that said HUNK OF JUNK.

Their mother was having problems with her own mother, Peachy Helen, Liyana and Rafik’s other grandmother, who lived by Forest Park in a high-rise apartment. Peachy wore flowery dresses and high spots of blush on her cheeks and she couldn’t
stand
it that they were leaving. She was addicted to their after-school phone calls. She was used to dropping in at a moment’s notice. She stayed with Liyana and Rank when their parents went out of town. She and Liyana often ate lunch together on Saturdays at fancy ladies’ tearooms.
they chose custard pies off the gleaming dessert cart.

After she heard they were moving, Peachy Helen kept crying. She even hung up on Liyana so she wouldn’t hear her cry. This cast a dim glow on Liyana’s mother, who suddenly had trouble finishing sentences and meals. She would leap up from the table, thinking of more things she needed to do.

Liyana and Rafik lettered poster-board signs for the Estate Sale while their mother gathered stacks of yellowed newspapers from the corners, throwing them into recycling bins. “I would hardly call this an estate,” she said dubiously. But the woman at the newspaper who copied down their ad had been adamant—a “Garage Sale” meant you carried things outside and an “Estate Sale” meant you sold the whole household from the inside out.

Harpsichord music blared from Liyana’s cassette player. Liyana said, “Estate Sale sounds disgraceful to me, as if we’re planning to display stained baby clothes and sticky ketchup bottles! I hate it!”

She worried, What if Jackson came? What if he saw the dumbo Pretty Princess game with half its jewels missing in the bargain bin? What if her girlfriends pawed through her threadbare socks,
Nancy Drew mysteries, and frayed hair ribbons, casting them aside and choosing none?

Her mother arranged sale items on long folding tables they’d rented and urged Liyana and Rafik to get their suitcases organized, all at once. Liyana packed a pink diary with a key, the Scrabble game, and a troll with rhinestone eyes, collecting other childhood treasures—the Mexican china tea set, the stuffed monkeys—to leave boxed up in Peachy Helen’s already-stuffed closets and in a friend’s barn. She arranged a small box of odd treasures—stones, butterfly wings, a carved wooden toad—to give to Claire.

Liyana sorted through perfect spelling tests and crackly finger paintings from a box under her bed. She folded the red velvet embroidered dress that her faraway relatives had stitched for her long ago. It had arrived in the mail wrapped in heavy paper, with twine knotted around it. Now she was going to meet the fingers that knotted the thread. She polished her violin, placing it tenderly back in its case with the white cloth over its neck. She considered whether to take an extra cake of rosin along with new strings. There was so much to think about when you moved.

Rafik tried to throw his old report cards away, but their mother caught him. Who even
cared
about the minuses on his old conduct grades by
Now? If the cards went into the barn boxes, mice might chew them up. The
E
’s and
S
’s could turn into dust.

Rank agonized at length over his beloved Matchbox car collection. He lined fire trucks and emergency vehicles on one side of his bed and vans and trucks with movable doors on the other side. Poppy had said he could take ten or twenty. Rafik felt nauseated trying to decide which ones he’d have to abandon. Liyana, passing his room with another cardboard box in her arms, found him poking race cars into his socks.

“So let me pick for you,” she offered. He shook his head, knowing she had a strange preference for milk trucks and tractors. Liyana left him alone and pitched the box onto her bed.

Poppy poked his head through Liyana’s doorway. “You won’t need those shorts,” he said. “No one wears shorts over there.”

“That’s not true! I’ve seen pictures of Jerusalem and some people are definitely wearing shorts.”

“They’re tourists. Maybe they’re pilgrims. We’re going to be spending time in older places where shorts won’t be
appropriate
. Believe me, Arab women don’t wear shorts.” He walked away.

Lately Poppy kept bringing up Arab women and it made Liyana mad. “I’m not a woman or a full Arab, either one!” She slammed her bedroom door, knowing what would happen next. Poppy would enter, stand with hands on his hips, and say, “Would you like to tell me something?”

Liyana muttered, “I’m just a half-half, woman-girl, Arab-American, a mixed breed like those wild characters that ride up on ponies in the cowboy movies Rafik likes to watch. The half-breeds are always villains or rescuers, never anybody normal in between.”

She rolled six socks into balls and found some old birthday cards tucked beneath them. Then she had to read the cards.

Poppy knocked on her door.

Liyana opened it and threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry, dear Poppy. What if I don’t take my very short shorts? What if I only take the baggy checkered old-man shorts that come down to my knees?”

He shrugged, hugging her back. “Maybe you can wear them when we visit the Dead Sea.” That was the sea so full of salt, you could sit upright in it as if it were a chair.

Liyana gave her short shorts to Sandee Lane, her friend down the block who kept saying how great it was that they were going to live in
“Jesus’s hometown.” Liyana didn’t think of it that way. She thought of it as her
dad’s
hometown.

“Where did all these people
come from?
” Rafik whispered during the Estate Sale.

He and Liyana sat behind a bush next to their house in the thinnest, softest grass watching customers travel up the sidewalk. They must have driven in from other neighborhoods. Thankfully, no one looked familiar.

One woman carried out their dented metal mixing bowl. A man pulled Poppy’s lovely green wheelbarrow behind him. Liyana covered her eyes. “Oh! I’ll miss that wheelbarrow.”

She thought of all the things she
couldn’t
pack, imagining the slim green locker she would have had at high school next year if she weren’t moving to the other side of the ocean. She thought of Lonnie and Kelly and Barbara, her friends, just starting to streak their lips with pale lipstick for special events. She and Claire didn’t, because they thought it was dumb. “Lucky you!” Claire had said. “You’ll miss the tryouts for youth symphony next season.”

“Lucky you!” Lonnie had said. “There are really cute guys in Jerusalem. I’ve seen them on CNN.”

“Lucky nothing.” Liyana had said private
good-byes to the third step outside the school cafeteria where she ate when the weather was nice and the chute at the library where she’d poured her books since she was five and the fragrant pine needles on the trees between their house and the Ferraris’. Liyana and her friends used to make forts on the ground inside those branches.

Liyana and Rafik had never yet found out what animal lived in the hole by the back sidewalk. It wasn’t a mole—moles made big mounds in the middle of the yard. How could they leave when it still hadn’t come out?

Rafik poked her, whispering, “I am NOT BELIEVING this! Look at that! Someone just bought my Dracula Halloween costume, the ugliest costume on earth! I was
sure
it wouldn’t sell!”

That evening their house looked stripped. A few large pieces of furniture people would pick up the next day wore red tags with names and phone numbers on them. The piano was going to live with M
ERTON
at 555-3232.

Their mother played Mozart the night before the piano left. Liyana noticed she wasn’t keeping her ponytail pulled back neatly in its silver clip as she usually did. Loose strands of hair cluttered the sides of her elegant face.

“Amazing,” she called out to Liyana in her bare room, “that Mozart could write this when he was six and I have trouble playing it when I’m forty.”

Liyana could play one line better than her mother could. She got up from bed to show her and was startled to see tears gleaming on Mom’s cheeks. She placed her hands alongside on the keyboard.

“Your hands are more like your father’s,” her mother always said.

Liyana’s hands and feet peeled in the springtime like Poppy’s did, an inherited genetic trait. She didn’t sweat, either.