Novel Pieces — Far Away Is Here

This summer I’ve been sharing excerpts from my novel-in-progress on social media, for motivation and enticement, along with photos of where I’ve been in between writing sessions. Here are the first six excerpts:

ONE

Most days, I wake up blank, but today I wake up knowing I have just only narrowly escaped from a snarl of dreams and into this room in Lebanon that is now my room.

Back home in Virginia, my beforetimes room is small, carpeted, quiet with the hum of our tightly sealed suburban house. Here, the room is large, the ceiling is tall, the windows open wide to the neighborhood, to cars honking and men shouting about the fruit they are selling today. The fan slowly rotates above me as I try to remember what was happening, sifting through dream-fragments about bullets and bread and tiny hands and places that are not here, a combination of image and story that must have been bad because Amto Maysa—Aunt Maysa—says, “You were sobbing, habibti, gasping, but I tried not to bother you because at least you were finally asleep.” I nod as my eyes focus. She’s wearing her bank teller’s uniform, that tight a-line skirt, the striped shirt in maroon and white, standing at the mirror on the inside of the closet door we now share, watching herself put on matching lipstick, blush, eye-liner.

I ask her if there were any explosions last night. I don’t know where the question comes from but it’s in me, hopeful.

“No,” she says, “nothing last night. You can stop asking, stop worrying. It’s been a while now, two weeks already since that last car bomb and two months since the shaheed.” Literally: martyr; actually: suicide bomber. I nod, and she breathes deep, then purses her painted lips at me through her reflection.

As I force a giggle, I catch sight of the photo, stuck above her with what looks to be decades-old masking tape, of the young glamorous woman in black and white, with the slash of red across her lips, the smile somehow both innocent and knowing. Hard to believe that’s Teta, my grandmother. Is she smiling at me? “Can you believe you’ve been here two months?” she asks, closing the closet door.

Feels like twenty years. Or twenty minutes?

TWO

“I love listening to you talk Arabic with your dad. Can you say something in Arabic to me now?” The question landed on her funny, somewhere between her stomach and her heart. It was as if the glowing end of the cigarette—isn’t it called a cherry?—said it, releasing syllables like wisps of smoke and brightening the dark. She suppressed the urge to say, b’hibak, ya habibi—I love you, my love. Even though he wouldn’t understand, it felt dangerous. Her head raced with it: b’hibak ya habibi, b’hibak ya habibi. Quick, she tried to push those words away. What should she say? B’bibak ya habibi. That thing when a word won’t let your mind go—until she said, “Mish-mish?” asked it as a question.

“What does that mean?”

“Apricot.” She finally looked at him, his dirty blonde, tousled hair, across his jaw that slight skein of neon stubble she’d only never seen this close, his Adam’s apple, bulging, like a cherry, like a plum.

“Do you, like, have a thing for apricots?”

“Not really. I guess I just like how it sounds?”

She said it again to prove it: “Mish-mish.”

He said it too and that was when he kissed her.

THREE

Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

War was everywhere and it was not here. Yes, Sami’s shop felt like the one place where she shouldn’t, couldn’t, talk war. Neighborhood gossip dripped from the plastic bananas on the counter, small talk coated the golden embroidered hung up on the wall of mythical scenes of ancient Lebanon. Sami was so happy, and so wise, like a character from an old film. And Meemo was so handsome and so casual, in his tattered suede jacket, calling Sami khayeh, my brother, and Basma was ukhtee, my sister, as he talked of this one’s secret affair and that one’s squabble with the new family next door. And, as ever, Sami replied by turning red and telling Meemo, Eib a-shoom aleyk. Shame on you. He smiled as he said it and Basma wondered, no, she knew, for the first time on this particular Saturday, she was sure, that Sami liked saying it to Meemo, liked Meemo, in that way. Did Meemo know it too? The thought made Basma tingle, somewhere deep inside she didn’t quite understand, and so did the way Sami went on to talk about fruit, about paradise:

“I work to uplift our neighbors with the fruits from our land. When we drink their nectar we pay homage to our country’s memory, to a time when everything was covered in green and blossoms and fruits. When Lebanon was part of Syria, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace, when Israel wasn’t even an idea, when all of this was Eden. When we were born into a lived in a universe entirely of our own making. Do you know what life was like then?”

Meemo nodded and Basma shrugged and Sami went on:

“It was all honey and fruit. No money, no wanting. You could walk gently and feed yourself at your leisure. Think your own thoughts and not worry that the thoughts of someone else might have power over you.” Sami raised his voice to a bellow and Basma looked around at the empty shop. She felt delighted and embarrassed...

FOUR

“But I want you to take your pleasure,” she said.

“I’m tired,” Meemo said. “It's nice to be here with you.” It was true.

“Okay,” she said, her voice sleepy, her breathing body limp against him. She was a stranger but, like this, soft-snoring now, she was everyone. Surrendered, she was love in a different sense, she was love at least an hour as he lay there with her, still as he could be. She was love until he eased her off of him, got up, looked in the bedroom at the slumped shadows of his friend and the other girl tangled in sheets. Meemo left the apartment, silent as a burglar. If questioned right then, Meemo would admit to feeling on top of the world, as if he’d seen everything now, knew everything, met some version of every woman he would ever meet, and now it was time to figure out what came next.

FIVE

Even though she felt more comfortable in English, Arabic was actually Sha’s first language—or to be more specific, a Beiruti dialect of Levantine. Her first years in Lebanon were the dreamtime, the disappeared, when English was the language reserved for her and Tina; they barely ever talked about it, about Fadi’s failed export business, about her parents’ broken dream of “going home.” When they had moved to Virginia to open Open Sesame, as if she were a pocket turned inside out, Sha went from speaking Arabic to everyone but Tina to only speaking it to Fadi. As time went on, she answered him in English more and more.

Those early years, when Sha´s friends were going to church, to Sunday school, Sha and Tina and Baba used to go to a local mosque. She remembered Tina in her gauzy headscarf, urging them all out the door. And when they got there, Baba would go his way to the men’s section to pray, Tina would go to the women’s section to sit, and Sha would go to the Arabic classroom, to repeat the alphabet over and over. Summers they would go back to Lebanon and the language would come back to her in force. Sha reveled in being Tina’s translator, sustained by a year of talking to her aunt and grandmother on the phone. But then Tina left, and Sha replied to all of Baba’s Arabic in English, they stopped going to the mosque, stopped going to Lebanon.

Still, Sha sometimes caught Baba muttering Quran under his breath, and still, she traced letters in the Arabic newspapers he would occasionally buy and spread across the kitchen table. Still, she had the chart of Arabic letters Tina had taped up on her bedroom wall that had long since faded, curled at the corners. And, every once in a while, a word or two or a sentence or two came to Sha, uninvited, making itself known from somewhere she had stored it, deep inside.

SIX

Tortas y Jugos Don Pepe, Sunset Park, BK

Fresh from my shower, I put on my yoga pants and a tank top, slowly, carefully, pull the fabric over skin, notice curves, aches. My period has been due a while. A month and a half since last time. Can you be a two weeks late? This tenderness in my gut is familiar, this ache that stretches across the tops of my thighs and through them too—familiar but different. These sensitive breasts; is this how they’ve always been?

I was the last of everyone, including Anju, who was in the stall next to me when I noticed the red blotch on my underwear, soaked all the way through my jeans, one spot just below the left pocket and a larger one lower down. What if people saw? I gasped, pawing at the fabric with a disintegrating piece of paper towel, and another, and another. Anju swore it didn’t matter and gave me her sweatshirt to wrap around my waist. She also got a pad from the nurse, the thick kind without wings. I hated walking around with this wet, bulky thing between my legs. I guess it’s what a diaper feels like? Of course I don’t remember being small and wearing an actual diaper, though Anju says she does, claims she remembers everything. Over and over, she has described her own birth, her coming into this world as the sudden movement from liquid darkness into the cruelty of air and dirt and heat. The shock of a hand slapping her bottom.

And I hear the slap, hear the doctor’s voice clearly, in the room, like I’d always imagined it but real, an excited bellow: it’s a girl!

I crawl back into bed. It’s nothing, I must the hearing things, I’ve been alone too much, I’m fine. I’m fine. I try to envision a river moving, but I can’t keep my eyes closed. There is a familiar Damascene box next to the row of Teta’s pills, inside it a tab of paper, with two faded lines on one end. The words Made in Israel, imprinted on the back. And also, there are the magic pills Meemo gave me. How had I forgotten about these? Two small yellow dots, like eyes.

Maybe if I take them, I’ll get myself back, I’ll remember, I’ll know. The box snaps shut.