Habibi

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Well, where was hers? Was she on the verge of finding out? Sometimes Liyana felt she had passed her own country already and it was an age, not a place.

  She wrote it down in her notebook.

  An age, not a place.

  What did it mean, exactly?

  Liyana loved thinking of first lines for stories or poems or movies.

  Since fourth grade, she’d kept a running list of them and liked to reread it to see if she could get the stories to go further in her head.

  The secret kiss grew larger and larger.

  No one had dialed her number for a dozen years.

  If she had known her cousin’s secret, would she have teased her at dinner?

  Sometimes she took her lists of lines to Mrs. Lindenwood, her old fourth-grade teacher who loved creative writing, and Mrs. Lindenwood would put stars by the ones she liked best. Or Liyana would read them to Poppy in the yard after they’d washed the dinner dishes, as he sat drinking a cup of Arabic coffee in his favorite green metal chair with the scalloped back. On one of their last evenings in St. Louis, Poppy said, “Tell me her cousin’s secret!”

  Liyana hadn’t read him the one about the kiss.

  “Sometimes you remind me of Sitti, my mother,” he told her.

  “Why?” Liyana had a little picture of Sitti in her wallet, standing in a long dress in the archway entrance to her house.

  “Making something out of nothing. It’s her favorite thing to do. She gets a whole story out of—a button. Or a rock.”

  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.

  ESTATE SALE

  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 MERTON 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.

  “Why couldn’t you have kept the piano?” Liyana said. “You could have stored it somewhere. Couldn’t Peachy Helen have fit it into her apartment?”

  There were only a few things Liyana’s mother was attached to.

  “Clean slate,” Mom said, as if they were talking in code, and Liyana said, “Huh?”

  “We are starting over.” Her mother’s voice was so thin and wavery, it scared her.

  She was usually so upbeat about things. Liyana and Rafik teased her about being the general of the Optimist’s Army. Positive thoughts, ho! Forward march! Liyana thought her words turned up at the ends, like elf shoes. “Look for the Silver Lining” was her mother’s favorite song. She made Liyana and Rafik memorize it. Their mother wouldn’t even let them say things like “bad weather.” She wouldn’t look at a newspaper till afternoon because she didn’t want bad news setting the tone for the day. Peachy Helen, on the other hand, crouched over the newspaper on her kitchen table, moaning over kidnappings, hijackings, and hurricanes as if each one were personal. “I can’t stop thinking about Sarah’s mother,” Peachy said once.

  “Who’s Sarah?”

  “The girl who drowned in Colorado.”

  This was some poor person Peachy and the Abbouds had never met.

  Liyana’s mother placed her American hand over Liyana’s half-half one on the keyboard. “Go to bed. You’re going to need all the sleep you can get.”

  On their last night in St. Louis, the neighborhood gave the Abboud family a going-away party in their front yard. The FOR SALE sign on the house had a red SOLD slapped across it. Liyana licked custard from a cream puff and stared at their familiar, rumpled neighbors in their summer clothes. They’d be around all summer and Liyana’s family would not. She eavesdropped on everybody—eavesdropping was her specialty. Talk about camp and favorite teachers and the opening of the neighborhood swimming pool made her feel wistful.

  She tried to remember the exact sensation of Jackson’s kiss, but it was dissolving in her mind. She wished she had thought to invite him to this. But he might not have come, and that would have been worse. Claire dropped a small velvet ring box into Liyana’s hand at the last minute and ran home crying. A tightly folded note tucked under a silver friendship ring said, “I will never ever forget you.”

  CIVILIZED

  I vote for the cat sleeping in the sun.

  When the weary passengers finally boarded the giant jet at Kennedy Airport and it lifted off the runway, her mother clutched Liyana’s wrist hard. “Oh my,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.

  Liyana pressed her face to the window and looked down. Every little light of New York City was a period at the end of a sentence. A dusty silver sheen in the sky capped the city as it shrank behind them. The airplane dipped and shivered. Liyana had only flown short flights to Kansas City and Chicago before. She had never flown across an ocean.

  After they reached their transatlantic altitude, Poppy took pillows and fuzzy blue blankets down from the overhead bins. Flight attendants moved up the aisles handing out bedtime cups of water. Rafik already had his head tipped off to one side, eyes shuttered, and mouth slightly open. Liyana couldn’t believe it. He could sleep anywhere, even with his life changing in the middle of a stormy sky. Liyana couldn’t imagine sleeping now. She pressed the button over her seat so a sharp circle of light fell onto her lap. She wrote in her notebook, “Do overnight pilots drink coffee? Do they take turns napping? A new chapter begins in the dark.”

  Even her teachers back home had been nicer to her when they knew she was leaving. “Why don’t you tell us about where you’re going?” Mr. Hathaway, her history teacher, had said the last week of school. He had never liked Liyana since the day she let Claire, who sat behind her, French-braid her hair in class. “Of course we all know about Jerusalem—it’s such a big part of religious history and constantly in the news—but why do you think people have had so much trouble acting civilized over there?”

  Civilized was his favorite word. Once when Mr. Hathaway said people were and animals weren’t, Liyana raised her hand.

  “Just—look at the front page of any newspaper,” she said nervously. It was harder to speak with a whole class staring at you. “Look at the words—for what people do: attack, assault, molest, devastate, infiltrate.”

  He raised one eyebrow.

  Liyana continued, “And that’s just one page!”

  When he invited her to write an essay about Jerusalem for extra credit and read it to the class, she gulped. “It’s a pret
ty big story.” Crazy words came into her mind. Yakkity boondocks. Flippery fidgets.

  “Interview your father…make some informal notes,” Mr. Hathaway said. “Just use your own information—no encyclopedias for this! It may be your last chance for extra credit, you know.”

  JERUSALEM: A BIT OF THE STORY

  When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem—that’s the ancient part of town inside the stone wall—he and the kids on his street liked to trade desserts after dinner.

  My father would take his square of Arabic hareesa, a delicious cream-of-wheat cake with an almond balanced in the center, outside on a plate. His Jewish friend Avi from next door brought slices of date rolls. And a Greek girl named Anna would bring a plate of honey puffs or butter cookies. Everybody liked everyone else’s dessert better than their own. So they’d trade back and forth. Sometimes they traded two ways at once.

  Everybody was mixed together. My father says nobody talked or thought much about being Arabs or Jews or anything, they just ate, slept, studied, got in trouble at school, wore shoes with holes in the bottoms, hiked to Bethlehem on the weekends, and “heard the donkeys’ feet grow fewer in the stone streets as the world filled up with cars.” That’s a direct quote.

  But then, my father says, “the pot on the stove boiled over.” That’s a direct quote, too. After the British weren’t in control anymore, the Jews wanted control and the Arabs wanted control. Everybody said Jerusalem and Palestine was theirs. Too many other countries, especially the United States, got involved with money, guns, and bossing around. Life became terrible for the regular people. A Jewish politician named Golda Meir said the Palestinian people never existed even though there were hundreds of thousands of them living all around her.

  My father used to wish the politicians making big decisions would trade desserts. It might have helped. He would stand on his flat roof staring off to the horizon, thinking things must be better somewhere else. Even when he was younger, he asked himself, “Isn’t it dumb to want only to be next to people who are just like you?”