In the rearview mirror, I watched Julian swallow. He stopped nodding his head along to the music. His face blanched.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Harlow continued. “How’d the two of you meet? Tell us all about your romantic courtship.”
Her voice unnerved me. But more so, what she was asking unnerved me. I, of course, desperately wanted to know everything. Every tiny detail that made up my family history and, in only a slightly hyperbolic sense, made up the fiber of my very being.
I elbowed Harlow, which I had meant as a signal to knock it off, but instead it made her push it further. “And why did the two of you break up? There’s got to be a juicy story there, right?”
I swallowed. That was the question that had been lurking in my brain since I’d discovered The Shoebox three years ago. The question that so much hinged on. Why had Julian left? Had he not wanted me? Was he cruel to my mother? Worse, maybe, was she cruel to him?
I desperately wanted my answer. Answers. But I also didn’t. Because sometimes there is freedom in not knowing. You are able to fill in the blanks with whatever whimsical explanations you wish. You are able to cast the characters how you want, mold their motivations to your liking. You are in control of the narrative. You’re not bound by cold and hard and possibly upsetting facts.
I expected Julian to shrug off Harlow. I didn’t expect him to crack open so easily. But to my surprise, he drew a hand through his messy hair and said, “Okay. I guess I should start with when Lena landed in America.”
Julian Oliver was going to fill in those blank spaces.
Oak Falls, 1994
America was not what Lena had expected. Sure, as the plane had hovered above the tarmac, about to touch down in New York City, she’d spotted the landmarks she’d been primed to watch for—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the various skyscrapers that burst from the ground like overgrown teeth. She couldn’t stand looking at them for more than a few moments. They made her unreasonably nervous. And nauseous. The gravity-defying nature of the city unsettled her.
But her time in New York City had been a complete blur. A whirlwind through customs, where the shaggy-haired man had made her repeat everything at least three times. His hair color was one she’d never seen before—a bright orangish yellow. It reminded her of the sun back home in the late afternoon when it shone so brightly and whitened the whole sky.
“To study,” she’d said. “At Hampton University in Indiana.” She’d practiced saying “Indiana” many times before she’d boarded the flight from Amman, but now that the moment was here, the foreign, multisyllabic word stuck to her tongue like wax.
The customs officer had looked at her with confusion. She’d found this odd, as back in Jordan she’d been the top English student in her class. She’d been praised for her authentic accent, her perfect pronunciation.
“Study what?” the officer had asked. He’d run his hand through his curiously colored hair.
“Medicine,” she said. This is what she’d told her mother in their endless discussions of her plan to go to America to study. She’d known then that her only sliver of a chance of getting her mother to agree to her outrageous plan was to pledge an allegiance to a career as a doctor. That would be a source of family pride—her following in the footsteps of her father. As her father was dead, and he’d had no sons, this was a particularly compelling proposal.
And so her mother had finally acquiesced. But now, standing before the customs officer, Lena knew in her heart of hearts that she would never become a doctor. Something about that realization thrilled her. Something about that realization also terrified her and shamed her.
“And you have a student visa?”
Lena nodded, her tongue becoming waxier by the minute. She fumbled in her purse for the corresponding paperwork.
The whole ordeal was stilted and uncomfortable, but she’d made it past customs with her stamped passport and her single rolling suitcase with the ornery left wheel that always pulled to the right. And now she found herself riding in her cousin’s husband’s car, winding through grassy hills toward a town called Oak Falls. A place she couldn’t even imagine, no matter how many hours she’d spent poring over the glossy brochure that Hampton University had sent to her from across the Atlantic Ocean.
She remembered the day that brochure had arrived. She’d held it in her hands as if the paper itself were made of magic. Her golden ticket.
She glanced out the window and had two distinct thoughts:
I’ve never seen so much green in my whole life.
I miss home.
The ache for home was palpable. It wasn’t just a feeling. It was a physical thing that had taken up space in her stomach and was crawling its way up her chest.
“It’ll fade,” her cousin said, as if she’d read Lena’s mind. She briefly looked over at her. Her cousin was sitting in the backseat with her while her husband drove them. “It will get easier. The first year is the hardest. If you can make it the first year, you will make it. If not, you can always return to Jordan.”
She said the last sentence like it wasn’t really an option. And of course, Lena knew it wasn’t. She’d made her choice and now she had to make it a year.
She had to make it forever.
Once classes started, Lena began to understand that most of her fellow students lived on campus in small rooms all stacked next to one another. They even shared communal bathrooms, which she found to be a very strange custom. When her classmates asked her where she lived, they seemed to find her answer odd, as it was not a name like Bancroft or Wilton or Straton. But instead a simple address—21 May Street.
“Twenty-one May Street?” they would say, assuming that they had heard wrong, that Lena’s answer had somehow gotten lost in translation. But no. She was uncertain about many things, but she knew she lived at 21 May Street.
She’d memorized that address. Spent hours practicing saying it in front of the mirror.
“Isn’t that kind of, like, far from campus?” one girl with curly blond hair had asked.
“Yes,” Lena had said, making sure to enunciate properly. She’d recently found that many of her English words seemed to get stuck in the base of her throat. She was trying her best not to swallow the words, not to silence her own voice. “It’s by the hospital. I live with my cousin and her husband.” Then Lena added, “He’s a doctor.”
The girl had politely nodded and then gone to sit with her other friends. Lena always sat in the middle row. Alone, always. She’d naively believed that her loneliness would subside once classes started, but if anything, the classes had made it worse. She was more aware than ever just how alone she was. How untethered.
Living with her cousin was tolerable. T-O-L-E-R-A-B-L-E. That was the best English word she could think of to describe the experience. It was not torturous nor was it pleasurable, but Lena was surviving. Her cousin had come to America with her husband, who was a doctor. He worked at Hampton University’s teaching hospital. He was a pathologist who believed he should have been a surgeon. He was perplexed and somewhat dismissive of Lena’s claims that she intended to become a doctor.
“Not a surgeon, though, correct?” he’d asked her one night as he helped himself to another serving of bamieh. He’d raised his caterpillar-like eyebrows in what she supposed he intended to be a jovial manner, but came off as slightly hostile and competitive.
She would’ve been more offended by this line of questioning if she actually believed she was destined to become a doctor.
Her cousin tried her best to make Lena feel at home. She made mansaf from scratch, driving miles out of town to find a grocery store that sold halal lamb and the right type of rice pilaf. Lena didn’t have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t have cared less if the lamb was halal, and that the mansaf only made her miss home more.
This particular afternoon, Lena had decided not to walk the two miles back home immediately after her last class let o
ut. The air had begun to turn crisp and the leaves on the trees were turning the color of fire—a natural phenomenon she’d never experienced and was charmed by.
She pulled her jacket closer and followed a pack of students as they headed toward the main drag of campus. She browsed by the local shops and café, finally settling on an unremarkable-looking diner. She figured the menu would probably be easy enough to translate. She was still in the stage of trying at all costs to avoid embarrassing mix-ups.
A short girl wearing a red-checkered apron shouted at her from the back of the restaurant to sit anywhere she wanted. Lena glanced around the mostly empty room that was filled with metallic booths with sagging cushions and metallic tables with uncomfortable-looking chairs. The diner was less bright and lively than she’d thought it’d be. Disappointed, she slid into one of the ratty booths.
A menu for the restaurant, uncreatively named Oak Falls Diner, rested on the scratched metallic tabletop. She grabbed it and began to study it, slowly reviewing each choice aloud in her head.
Chili cheese dog, her mind sounded out. That sounded absolutely revolting.
Cheeseburger with fries. At least she knew what that was. But she hated the way Americans served their meat. Pink and raw, practically bloody.
Small garden salad. She looked at the picture accompanying this menu choice. It was the saddest-looking salad she had ever seen. Lettuce that somehow managed to be both pale and fluorescent at the same time, glistening in some sort of sauce.
Her menu perusing was interrupted by a voice. “So what will it be?”
When she looked up, she saw a man. He was dressed from head to toe in denim, a leather cuff on his left wrist. His hair was the color of uncooked corn, his eyes unnervingly blue. Something about those eyes reminded her of home, of her uncle’s olive farm that sat on the rocky hills of Jabal Ajlun. In the winter months, she and her cousins would roam the windy hills and the sky would be a bright and impossibly clear blue. They would be able to see over the hills for miles and miles, which made them feel like little kings and queens.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to rush you,” the man said, but he didn’t take his blue eyes off her. “Do you need more time?”
She shook her head and took a deep breath before forcing herself to slowly say, “A cheeseburger with fries, please. Fully cooked, please.” She silently cursed herself for saying “please” twice. She knew it would make her language sound stilted to American ears.
He cocked his head to study her more intensely, and not for the first time, she felt naked without her hijab. She had tossed it in a trash can at JFK, feeling slightly heartsick at the sight of the scarf that had once been her mother’s—the scarf that her mother had tenderly wrapped around Lena’s head before sending her off to the airport to fly across the ocean to America—floating to its graveyard, nestled between discarded candy bar wrappers and glossy tabloid magazines.
She hadn’t tossed her hijab out of some strong personal conviction. She’d never felt oppressed by it. In Jordan, she didn’t mind it at all. Actually, most of the time, she’d enjoyed wearing it. Sure, it was slightly uncomfortable, especially in the midday heat, but she mostly only wore it in public anyway. Never in her own house, as after her father passed it was only her, Aaliyah, and her mother.
So why had she tossed it? Well, she’d seen the way the customs officer had stared at it. She knew then that it marked her as different. And she did not want to be different in America. She wanted to be American, though she had no idea yet what that entailed. So yes, she’d tossed the headscarf. And every day since, she’d heard the ghost of her father chastising her for abandoning her identity so quickly for the sake of some perceived convenience. When she felt like defending herself, she would bitterly think that the hijab marked her as weak in the eyes of Americans, and she had not come to America to be weak.
She had come to change her life.
She had come to carve out a space for herself and fill it up without apology.
What she didn’t realize then, but would come to realize many years later, is that she would spend the rest of her life making, searching for, and studying art that attempted to prove the very opposite—that it was not the hijab that had made her weak, but her willingness to so quickly shed an integral part of her identity. All the tiny write-ups in the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Village Voice that threw out words like “regret” and “nostalgia” would get close to understanding her purpose, but would never nail it. Her art would be and was an art of atonement. A reckoning of convenience versus belief. An exploration of the old immigrant adage of how much of yourself were you willing to destroy in order to melt into America.
But all of that would come later. For now, she was focused on the man who was openly studying her hair, which she’d admittedly spent a lot of time on that morning—brushing and then clipping back her bangs with a barrette. Her cousin, who still dutifully wore her hijab had watched her with interest, perhaps even judgment, not saying a word. As Lena studied this man, this strange man with the unnerving blue eyes, take in the soft waves of her brown mane, she felt an uncomfortable quickening in her pulse.
She instinctively reached out and touched her hair, tucking a few strands behind her ear.
“You sure you want the cheeseburger?” he said, and leaned in toward her in a conspiratorial manner. He lowered his voice and continued, “Between you and me, the cheeseburger here is not very good. Especially not if it’s fully cooked. Though it’s probably safer to eat that way, I’ll give you that.”
She turned away from his gaze as she felt her cheeks beginning to warm. “Is that so?”
“Yeah. Really nothing is that great here.” His voice was still a hushed whisper. There was something intimate about that. “If you want a real solid cheeseburger, you should let me take you to Mickey’s down on Trout Road.”
She frowned at him and said the only thing that popped into her mind. “But I’m hungry now.”
“Then let’s go.” He held out his hand, and she stared at it for a moment before taking it. He pulled her out of the booth and they walked out of the diner, hand in hand.
He didn’t drop her hand once they exited the diner. This both terrified her and exhilarated her. They walked the hilly streets together, presumably headed toward Mickey’s, him still holding firmly onto her hand.
“I’ve never been to Mickey’s,” she said finally.
“I figured.”
She stopped walking and turned to look at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” he said, a grin spreading across his face, “if you’d ever been to Mickey’s, you wouldn’t bother coming into the diner.”
“Are you from here?”
His grin widened. “Guilty as charged. Born and bred, unfortunately. A townie. And you?”
Despite herself, she smiled. “Where do you think?”
His eyes lit up with amusement. “That’s a dangerous game.”
“Are you afraid to play?” The words surprised her once she’d spoken them. It was unlike her to be so playful with a stranger. She was normally cautious, reserved. A cat of a person.
He dropped her hand, and she felt a panicked thud inside her chest. Here in the fading outside afternoon light, she was able to get a better look at his face. He was handsome for sure, but he was not by any means the best-looking man she’d ever seen. His skin showed damage from teenage acne and his nose hooked slightly to the right, but there was something about him. A magnetism. A fire. A charm that made him more handsome than he should’ve been.
“No,” he said. “Should I be?”
“Very,” she said.
And just then, she realized that she had been wrong before. His blue eyes didn’t remind her of home. Nothing about him felt like home.
He reminded her of America. Of her American dream.
VII.
“We’re here,” Julian said.
“You can’t stop there,” Harlow said, and I felt the same way, though I was
in too much of a daze to really say anything. Imagining my mother at that age—only a few years older than me now—required as much of a suspension of disbelief as envisioning dragons. It was nearly impossible to picture her as anything other than the polished, put-together older person I knew her to be. “Seriously,” Harlow pushed. “It was just starting to get good. You apparently had some game.”
I squirmed at this comment, and Julian laughed lightly. Wearily. “Don’t worry, girls. I promise I’ll tell you more later.” He glanced at me. “But now it’s time to meet your grandma, Tal.”
We pulled up in front of a white farmhouse. It sat on the top of a gentle hill, and a large oak dominated the left side of the yard. It was surrounded by acres and acres of rolling grass. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out many details, but there was a low glow coming from the porch light that illuminated four well-worn rocking chairs.
Home, my mind instantly thought. And then, No, it quickly corrected.
It’s funny how some places just feel familiar in your bones, even if you’ve never been there before. I studied the rocking chairs—solid wood, solid craftsmanship—and wondered if Mom had ever been here. If she’d ever sat on that porch, legs up, chatting happily with Julian as the sun sank lower and lower into the sky. I wondered if Julian would tell Harlow and me about that later.
Thinking about that scene made something inside me ache in both a good and a bad way.
I was about to ask if we were just going to sit in the car all night when the front door of the white farmhouse flung open. A squat woman stepped out onto the porch. She was wrapped in a cream-colored terry-cloth robe and her sheet-white hair was piled high on her head.
“JP?” she called out. Her voice had a noticeable Southern drawl to it. “Is that you?”
“JP?” Harlow said. “Who the hell is JP?”
“Julian Parker Oliver,” I answered before he could say anything.
“Right,” he said softly. “That’s what my family calls me.”