Habibi (2 page)

“You know,” Poppy said, “I never planned to be an immigrant forever. I never thought I’d become a citizen. I planned to return home after medical school. I didn’t know”—and here Rafik picked up the familiar refrain with him, like the chorus to “America the Beautiful”—
“I’d fall in love and stay for so many years.”
Rafik covered his heart with his hand and closed his eyes. Poppy laughed.

Poppy wanted Liyana and Rafik to know Sitti, their grandmother. He would transfer to AlMakassad Hospital in Jerusalem—he’d been in touch with them by mail and fax. Liyana and Rafik would have doubled lives. When Liyana was younger, she used to think this sounded like fun. That was long before last night’s kiss.

The biggest surprise about the kiss was it didn’t come from Phillip, the person on Liyana’s right at
the movie theater, who
might
have kissed her because they’d been good friends for years and she had a crush on him, but from Jackson, on her left.

Jackson was in her social studies class. Liyana liked the way he smelled—like Poppy’s old bottle of English Leather. They’d traded notes about Mali and Ethiopia, and she complimented him on his enormous vocabulary. Sometimes they stood together in the lunch line, discussing the dazzling enchiladas, and they ate together, but not every day.

Jackson had leaned over to ask what the actress in the movie had just said and the next thing Liyana knew, his lips were nuzzling her cheek. They moved to her mouth and held there for a moment, pressing lightly.

Liyana had no idea what happened at the end of the movie. It was a swirling blue blur, like an underwater scene. Afterward, her friends crowded toward the exit doors, laughing. Jackson tripped over someone’s empty popcorn tub on the floor. Liyana liked that he picked it up and threw it away. It said something about him. But they didn’t talk much at Claire’s pizza party, and all they said when Poppy picked Liyana up later was, “See you at school,” as if nothing had happened.

Still, there was something different between them now. A little glimmer. His lips were so
warm. Liyana had never imagined lips being warm.

And now she was leaving the country. The waitress refilled Poppy’s tea.

“What will we do with our things?” mumbled Liyana. The piano; the blue bicycles; the boxes of tangle-haired dolls Liyana hadn’t played with in years, though she refused to give them away; the mountains of books; the blackboard on an easel where she and Rafik left each other notes. It stood in the hallway between their rooms.

Did you take my red marker? Big trouble, buddy!

Red marker seized by Klingon intruders!

Who would they be if they had to start all over again? Liyana started thinking of the word “immigrant” in a different way at that moment and her skin prickled. Now
she
would be the immigrant.

Poppy curled his finger at the waitress. “Honey,” he said to her. “My potato is positively icy inside.”

Some days were long sentences flowing into one another.

They flew to New York in steamy June, left their seventeen suitcases and Liyana’s violin stored at the airport, and spent one day lugging stuffed backpacks around to the Empire State Building and riding up to the inside of the Statue of Liberty’s head. Poppy was retracing his steps. He wanted them to see exactly what he had seen when he first came to the United States.

“When Miss Liberty appeared through the fog holding up her hand in the harbor, I felt she was an old girlfriend welcoming me. I’d seen so many pictures of her.”

“It’s not just a hand, Poppy, it’s a torch
,”
Rafik said. His mother flashed him a quieting look. She wanted Poppy to keep telling stories.

Poppy recalled, “When I saw a sign for hot dogs, I thought they were made of dog meat. It scared me. I thought the big shiny trash cans were mailboxes.”

Nineteen years after his first arrival, they ate
giant pretzels from a cart on the street. The big grains of salt on the pretzel skin tasted delicious. They bumped into disoriented families on summer vacations. They ate double scoops of Rocky Road ice cream.

“After this, you’ll call ice cream booza
,”
Poppy said. “And it won’t have marshmallows, either. I don’t think they’ve crossed the ocean yet.”

“They’d get wet,” said Rafik. Liyana rolled her eyes.

Liyana felt exhilarated by the skyscrapers. Their glittering lines lifted her out of her worry. She wished she could ride every sleek elevator up and down, punching buttons, seeing who got on and off. Some days you remembered the world was full of wonderful people you hadn’t met yet. She bought seven postcards with different pictures—the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square, the fish market—imagining which one she might send to Jackson.

By the time they returned to the airport at sundown for their night flight overseas, a storm was swirling somewhere over the dark Atlantic. They heard rumors about it from passengers at the gate. Ominous booms of distant thunder made Liyana feel edgy inside.
Yippity loosebugs,
she thought. Their flight was running two hours late. Liyana kept her eyes on the other people waiting
to fly. She wanted to see if they looked nervous.

But they only looked sleepy. A yawning lady with a flowered scarf tied under her chin lugged a food basket jammed with Jell-O boxes, paper napkins, and coffee filters. Didn’t they have those things in the Middle East? Another lady rolled up her husband’s raincoat and made her little children lie down on the floor with their heads on it. No one looked nervous at all.

When Rafik unzipped his backpack and pulled out a giant sack of Cornnuts, Liyana went to sit at the other side of the gate. She couldn’t stand to sit next to somebody crunching. She scribbled in her notebook.
One Indian lady in a purple sari crying. The size of good-bye.

Some days I am brave, but other days I almost disappear.

Before the Abboud family left St. Louis, there were many times Liyana thought she would rather be anyone else on their block, someone who planned to stick around in the neighborhood doing dull things like going to Mannino’s grocery store and staring at watermelons and jars of peanut butter stacked up. She would rather
not
have to change her life.

She knew the bush with red berries that were probably poison. She knew which bus number to take downtown. Often the Abboud family drove around on slow Sunday evenings with their car windows wide open to “smell the air.” That’s what Poppy said people did in Jerusalem.

St. Louis air smelled of tar and doughnuts, old boards washed up out of the muddy river, red bricks, and licorice. Leafy greens of bushes and trees ran together outside their car. How could Liyana give all this up? She knew what grass smelled like, a rich brew of dirt and green roots, right after rain.

And her fingers knew exactly the best way to twist skinny green clover stems together to make a long chain to stretch across the street to stop cars. She would stand on one side and Rafik would stand on the other, holding his end for as long as he could pay attention.

Of course the cars could have driven right through the chain if they tried. Most drivers would laugh and motion for Liyana and Rafik to pull the chain back. But one day right after they started telling people they were moving overseas, a man in a red pickup truck slammed on his brakes, shook his fist from the window, and shouted that he’d tell the police and make them pay a fine.

“We are children!”
Liyana called out. He glared at her then. They dropped the chain and he drove away.

“Could he really do that?” Rafik asked.

“Let’s go in,” Liyana said. “I don’t want to play.”

Being little was a skin that fit.

It had seemed to Liyana that Poppy was walking differently during the weeks before they left. His stride had a new lift in it. He made lots of overseas phone calls. Mrs. Abboud would watch him and raise ten fingers like a coach or a referee when she thought he should get off.

But he also kept falling into silent spells. At the dinner table he forgot to remove the blue denim baseball cap he wore for yard work. He wasn’t combing his hair as carefully as usual. When he read a newspaper story about demonstrations in Jerusalem, he rolled the newspaper into a tube and slapped it against his arm.

“What’s up?” Liyana asked him as he poured gasoline into the lawn mower for the last time. He jumped. “Are you worried we’re making a mistake?”

“No,” he said. “I was just thinking about … how I like doing this.”

She caught him staring at odd things—the hinge on the pantry cabinet, the medicine chest in
the bathroom. When she asked what he was doing, he said, “Remembering.”

Liyana, too, had been trying to memorize at least one small detail about each house on their street. The blue cottage with the crooked chimney, the green two-story only half painted. Did the painters break their arms? Did they lose their enthusiasm for that color? The brick house with the pink vine wrapped around its forehead in the summers. Liyana might never see the cherry trees or tulip beds or gray pebbles or cracked sidewalks again.

When she was younger, before she went to middle school and her arms seemed to grow longer in the night, she knew the easy latitude and longitude of her world. Now she was moving away to a land she knew little of, except the skillet of olive oil with crumbles of garlic and pine nuts browning on the stove. Liyana’s mother stood over the skillet with the spatula poised, like a scientist. Poppy would pass through the house lifting his nose to the air, saying, “There it is, there’s my country.”

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.”