by Alia Yunis
“Look, nobody better than the people in Middle East understands what it is to have your land attacked, as we were here on September 11,” she heard Jamal’s impassioned voice resonate. “But let’s look at how President Bush responded. He took an eye for an eye and then went for every other body part—on people who had nothing to do with it.”
Jake was making the cuckoo sign. Dina turned away from him and pushed the earphones farther into her ear. Jake pulled out the right earphone.
“That’s enough of the kooks, D,” he said. “Give me back my iPod.”
She waved Jake aside. The rest of the day Dina was preoccupied with Jamal’s voice … and butt.
After watching the Lakers game on TV with Jake that night, Dina closed her business law book and ran her finger along her bookshelf several times until she found A History of the Arab People, a colorful paperback her Tayta Fatima had sent her on her twentieth birthday. Dina had dutifully replied with a thank-you note and placed the book on the shelf as she had done with all the other books her grandmother had given her. Tayta Fatima chose books for their color scheme, and Dina found that they added life to her apartment’s decor. She sat down and began reading.
Two days later, Dina was looking at Jamal’s flyer again when her mother called from her veranda in Houston.
“How’s Jake?” Randy asked before Dina could tell her about how she herself was doing.
“He’s sleeping off an all-nighter,” Dina answered, letting her mom believe she was talking about studying when in fact he was at home puking from Los Angeles tacos and too much tequila at his frat house the night before. “But it works out fine because I can study by myself today without any distraction.”
“See, his passing out couldn’t have happened at a better time,” Randy said. “It’s a sign. Soraya says we just have to see the signs. She saw a baby giraffe at the zoo thirty years ago, and that’s how she knew she was pregnant with Amir.”
Randy’s signs were all about Jake. Jake, so blond, so blue-eyed, so tall, so white-toothed, the son of a corporate executive whom Bud, Dina’s dad and lawyer to Houston’s star crooks, had kept out of jail so far. Jake was a fantasy son-in-law for Randy, who also claimed that it was a sign that both Dina and Jake had been accepted to UCLA law school and that both had immediately felt that the Mexican food there was nowhere near as good as Texas’s.
After saying goodbye to Randy, Dina went on eBay to forget her conversation with her mother. She bid on a vintage Pucci dress with her dad’s credit card. Then she went to the library.
However, Randy was right. Signs were exactly what Dina witnessed as she looked outside the window of the law library “No Blood for Oil,” “Not in My Name,” and “How’d Our Oil Get under Their Sand?” she read as an antiwar protest marched by, giving her a perfect view of Jamal Masri’s butt. Holding up one end of a banner saying “Say Can You See My Democracy,” Jamal was the march’s leader.
Dina guzzled half of her bottle of water to purify her skin, as her mother had taught her. Then she ran a brush through her hair, thinking her dark roots were getting too obvious. After the quarter ended, she’d go see Carlo, maybe let him give her bangs, too. She slapped on some lipstick and checked her teeth for color stains in her window reflection. She closed her books and left the library.
RANDY WOULD HAVE killed Soraya if she knew what signs Dina was reading. Beyond snide comments on the spending habits of the rich Arabs shopping at the Galleria, whom no one could really differentiate from the rich Mexicans, the Middle East had kind of faded out of daily conversation in Houston since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. But with September 11, Arabs were back, worse than ever. Dina, who hadn’t been alive in 1973, didn’t remember Abscam and Munich. Randy had worked hard to make such history irrelevant to all three of her daughters.
She and Bud had moved away from Detroit, away from Om Kalthoum on staticky speakers, talk of tangled global conspiracies, and the odor of frying falafel.
With Bud, Randy had built a life doing all the right things for maximum public viewing: the Junior League, the Humane Society, elite gym membership at the Houstonian. Hell, if she didn’t think she’d get caught, she would have tried to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.
She was very glad that Bud was almost pale, not dark like Laila’s and Nadia’s husbands; didn’t have an accent; and had a last name that could pass as anything, even Jewish. Just to make sure they weren’t mistaken for Arab or Jewish in Texas, Randy got a nose job to get rid of the bump she’d inherited from Fatima. Then she had given all her girls solid American names: Loretta, June, and Dina. She had named her youngest daughter after Dina Merrill, the pretty heiress to the Post cereal and E.F. Hutton fortunes. She didn’t discover until years later that Dina was a far more common name in the Middle East than in the States.
She had even changed her own name—and Bud’s—when they arrived in Houston. “Oh, Bud and I just thank y’all for inviting us to your barbecue,” she had said with her nasal Midwestern accent to her new Texas friends. That barbecue was where Bashar had learned he had become Bud. His eyes had poked up out of the cowboy hat she’d purchased for him for the occasion. It was one of the few times Bud had questioned his wife, now Randy even to him.
“When’s the last time you heard someone say what kind of name is that—oh, Palestinian—oh, yeah, that’s what I need, a Palestinian lawyer?” she had whispered to him as he bit into his chiliburger. “A lawyer descended from people who lost their land and haven’t been able to win their legal right to return. Oh, yeah, that’s the kind of lawyer everyone wants. If anyone asks where you’re from, just say our house is in the River Oaks area.”
And if anyone asked where his grandparents had sailed from, he asked if they wanted to partake of his membership at the Houston Yacht Club. That usually sealed the deal. Bud’s only ambition was to succeed enough to honor his parents adequately for all the hours they had spent doing research at a small university’s chemistry lab so that he could go to a bigger university. He knew that was why they both had died of lung cancer so young. Anything else on Randy’s agenda, he accepted. He preferred domestic peace to arguing. He did enough arguing at work.
DINA STOOD ON the steps of Royce Hall, forced her eyes away from Jamal’s butt, and telephoned Jake like a good girlfriend.
“Hey, babe, I’m going to protest this war,” she said. “Come join me, sweetie.”
“I got to go blow chunks again,” Jake howled. “Montezuma’s revenge is back.”
Dina put away her cell phone and saw Jamal’s eyes locked on her. He waved her over.
“So you came, after all,” Jamal said. “There’ll probably be camera crews by the time we get to the Federal Building.”
“Oh,” she said. He hadn’t said she looked pretty today, which was usually how guys said hello to her.
A graduate student in a head scarf handed Dina a sign that read “No Blood for Oil.”
“Thanks for coming,” the girl said, sounding anything but sincere as she looked at Dina’s platforms from the Nordstrom Half-Yearly Sale.
“I like the color of your scarf,” Dina replied. “It really brings out your eyes.”
Jamal laughed. “Come on,” he said, chuckling. “Move your ass.”
Move yours, she thought, her face turning redder than her Clinique blush.
“I knew deep down you had to care,” Jamal said. “After all, how could you not? God, in our families, if we weren’t talking about the Middle East at dinner, we probably weren’t talking.”
Dina pictured Randy and Bud and her sisters gathered around a roast with succotash and twice-whipped potatoes, their faces lit by an elaborate deer antler chandelier, the five of them distant dots on a long table made of Texas Hill Country oak.
Then Dina remembered something. “They flinch and bite their tongues,” she said.
“Hey, let’s save that for later.” Jamal winked. “Whatever it means.”
“I mean my parents have started flinching and biti
ng their tongues when they watch the news and it’s about the Middle East, especially when others are around,” Dina said. “Like at the gym.”
He nodded. “My mom bites her nails when Bush comes on TV in a restaurant or something … but at home, look out. We got to hold our plates down.”
“My mother would never break her china,” Dina said. “It’s Limoges.”
“I can’t tell if you’re shitting me or not,” Jamal said, and gave her a decidedly flirtatious sock in the arm. “But it’s sexy. … Whoa, look at the turnout.”
Jamal was swallowed up by thousands of chanters and hundreds of signs surrounding the Westwood Federal Building: READ BETWEEN THE PIPELINES, ANOTHER PATRIOT FOR PEACE, and RESISTANCE IS FERTILE. Dina couldn’t see much more than signs in the swelling crowd. Police maneuvered through the masses, avoiding getting nicked by the signs. Luxury cars drove by and honked approval. Passengers in other cars leaned out and made the peace sign or gave the finger. Dina was swept into a wave of protesters moving to the demonstration’s epicenter.
“No democracy in my name,” a girl with the kind of brown hair that should never be without highlights—but was—shouted into a megaphone, one of many megaphones with a crowd chanting back to its user. After a few more rallying cries, the girl spotted Dina and gave her a smirk as if to say, “What’d you come here for?”
“Support our troops,” the girl chanted into the megaphone, and everyone repeated after her, “Bring them home now.”
Dina hesitated only for a moment when the girl looked at her again. She joined in, using her full cheerleader lungs.
Dina was very pretty and very loud, and so she was used to being watched. But now she wondered whether these badly dressed people were looking at her because they questioned her sincerity. To make sure they— and Jamal—knew she was just as committed to world peace, Dina expelled even deeper from her diaphragm. Miss Sissy, her first and favorite cheerleading coach, had taught her well.
After a few more chants, the girl took a break and stood next to Dina. “You got some set of lungs, sister,” she said. “And I can’t believe that you got here in those shoes.”
“Kinross squad leader senior and junior year.” Dina shrugged. “I’m Dina.”
“Allison,” the girl said. Dina noticed her twang.
They shook hands. “So where are you from?” Dina asked.
“San Diego,” Allison answered. “How about you?”
“Houston,” Dina said. “But you sound like you’re from Dallas.”
“I was born there,” she replied. “My granddad’s in Houston. Harlon’s BBQ rocks. Don’t get stuck in California forever, like me. When you start jonzing for decent barbecue, you’re screwed.”
She patted her stomach and handed Dina the megaphone. “I got to go pee like a pregnant lady, which I most definitely am not—and you got the best pipes around here.”
Dina tried to give the megaphone back, but Allison already had gone off in search of a toilet. Dina looked for someone to hand the megaphone to. Instead she found lots of brown faces, as well as several black and white ones, turned to her for guidance.
With no chanting, the home team’s crowd could lose its cohesive spirit. Every cheerleader knew that.
“P … E … A… C … E,” Dina spelled out into the megaphone, hesitating just a fraction on the first two letters. Then she found the groove she knew so well. She started stomping her feet. “How about, how about, a peace shout. Say P … say E … say A … say C … say E. How about a peace shout.” She clapped to the beat to get the crowd pumped.
“War, hell no, hell no, no hell, hey no war,” she chanted, reading off the signs. She almost lost the beat when she saw Jamal looking at her. When he smiled, she was energized far more than she had been by Kinross’s overtime games, even when she was dating the quarterback.
Dina made up three new chants for the crowd before a Channel 13 reporter in a really great Armani jacket stuck a microphone in her face.
“You’ve got quite a following,” the reporter said. “What message are you sending to Washington today?”
Jamal was making his way toward her. She didn’t want to disappoint him. “Nobody better than the people in Middle East understand what it is to have your land attacked, as we were here on September 11,” she said, echoing what Jamal had said on KPFK. “Two and a half years later, let’s look at how President Bush—”
Jamal subtly pushed Dina to the side. “What she means is that we don’t really care about human rights in Iraq,” he told the Channel 13 reporter. “A rebel insurgency in Uganda has killed 300,000 people in the last eighteen years, and 1.2 million people have lost their homes. Darfur in Sudan has refugees starving to death by the thousands. Do we care? No. We’re picking our atrocities based on oil.”
The crowd around him clapped and roared. Dina heard a lot of “Way to go, Jamal” and “That dude so rocks.”
“Anytime you need help with the press, just let me know,” Jamal said to Dina. “I would have been here earlier if I had known.”
“It was only Channel 13,” Dina said, surprised that she was so annoyed with him for coming to her rescue.
“Want to come over for dinner?” Jamal asked. “We can watch ourselves on the news. We got a lot of awesome coverage.”
As a general rule she didn’t accept going to a guy’s place on a first date, but … well, he was very committed to human rights. As such, he’d understand her position on sex, she told her better sense.
“Just dinner,” Dina stressed. “And I’m serious.”
“Did I say anything else?” he asked. “’Cause if I did, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, just me being silly,” she apologized, worried that perhaps for once she didn’t have the upper hand with a guy. He kept walking and because she didn’t want him to get too far ahead, she skipped a step ahead of him and turned around. “Slowpoke.” She smiled. He smiled, too, and they kept walking.
Jamal stopped at the 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard.
“You want anything?” he asked.
“Nah.”
“Ah, come on, let me get you something.”
“Oh, all right, big spender,” she said. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
“Right on.” Jamal smiled. He went up to the Indian man at the counter. “I’ll have two lottery tickets.”
When they left the store, he handed her one of the tickets. “Do you know what your chances are of winning?” she asked.
“What the hell,” Jamal said. “I’m not going to get rich doing the right thing, so I might as well try and get lucky tonight.”
Dina put the ticket in her purse and ignored the double entendre.
The walls of Jamal’s apartment were decorated with posters of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, and Zapata. Dina did not know all their names, but she recognized them from T-shirts sold at hipster stores on Melrose Avenue. All the remaining space was dedicated to photos of Jamal protesting something: Iraq, Alaska oil drilling, antiabortion measures, capital punishment. There were also photos of him teaching at an Indian tribal school and working at a soup kitchen.
Jamal put out hummus and bread and olives and smiled—no, grinned—at her. She was starving, and so she wolfed down the food, not inspecting the plasticine plates for caked-on leftovers, as Randy had taught her. Jamal reached over and put more olive oil on her plate.
“Better that way,” he explained. “Hey, grab the remote. Let’s see who put us on. Try Channel 7. I talked to them for a long time.”
As soon as Dina turned on the TV, Jamal grabbed the remote from her and flipped through the channels quickly, past car chases, vitamin scares, and Brad Pitt and Anna Nicole Smith updates until he found coverage of the demonstration. Then he got pissed. “Man, ten seconds is all they gave us,” he fumed. “What the hell, they aired a lost puppy story instead. Dogs, man; they care more about dogs than peace.”
Dina got lost in his excitement and let him put his arm around her. “Michael Jack
son might have had another nose job?” he yelled at the TV “Where’s the humanity, man?”
THAT NIGHT IN Houston, Fluffy leaped off Randy’s lap when she squeezed him too hard upon seeing her daughter on CNN with “Arab-American peace activist” typed across her chest. Bud pumped his fist in the air after getting over his own initial shock.
“Go peacemakers,” Bud chanted. “Go peacemakers.”
When Jamal came on, Bud said, “That Palestinian kid next to her has eyes as green as Fluffy’s.”
“How do you know he’s Palestinian?” Randy asked.
“The Masris are a good family. From Nablus,” Bud said, sounding more like an Arab than he ever had since they had moved to Houston. “Hey, sweets, we ought to be recording this.”
“Give me my cat back, Bud,” Randy said, and yanked Fluffy away, ignoring his protesting meow. She turned off the TV.
DINA DID NOT see herself on TV because by the time CNN, FOX, and MSNBC showed her clip, she had dropped the remote and could only feel Jamal’s warm hands on her breasts. The guy knew how to kiss a girl. She’d never felt herself losing control of the situation. That was what guys did, not she. Oh, God, she could feel herself getting wetter as his hands went down to her stomach.
A Taco Bell commercial on the TV stopped her. Jake was puking on Mexican food right now while she was making out the way only people in her mother’s romance novels did. She pushed Jamal away.
“Watching yourself on TV must really turn you on,” Dina joked.
“It wasn’t the TV,” he said, which was what she had hoped he would say.
“I should go home,” Dina said.
“Okay, I get it. You’re one of those good girl types,” Jamal said. “That’s what bites about Arab chicks, I got to say. Give me a second to deflate here.”