MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Elmaz Abinader
Men
carried tables, women covered them. From the basement, from the shed, a
folding
table from the closet, pushed together where their heights didn’t match
and
tablecloths had to be laid end to end, patchwork quilt of Lebanese
brocade and
mother’s handmade lace. We sisters
were still in our church dresses but the brothers were allowed to take
off
their ties as they set up tea trays and card tables in the living room
and
dining room, going in and out of the house carrying extra chairs.
Our people were coming.
A small chill of excitement
ran up my legs. I loved the smothering fog of the crowd who would soon
arrive
and fill our house. The collection of our cousins and aunts and uncles
were
nothing like the people who lived in this small Pennsylvania town. They were not the ladies from church in
stiff hats or the families who circled the card tables when my mother
hosted a
Bid Five Hundred card party. Our people arrived with kisses,
boomeranging the
walls with Arabic choruses, grabbing us in large hugs, throwing our
faces one
side, then another, and back–three huge kisses, Lebanese style.
Our
people–relatives
from around Pennsylvania
and Ohio, from other small towns with factories and mills where the
fathers
worked and where trains ran right behind their houses across to
Bethlehem
Steel. Cars filled the street from our house all the way to my father’s
store
in town, up Cannon Hill, down Deep Crease. No one from Masontown except
for my
Aunt and her family was invited to these feasts. The neighbors who
stood on
their porches, hands on their hips, witnessed the gathering of priests
and
uncles and aunts; children and babies. These visitors looked like us,
dark and
shady, dressed in Jackie Kennedy suits and dangerous high heels, cheeks
blushed
red, and chins powdered light. They came smoking cigarettes, carrying
cookies
and letters from the old country.
On
the other side of our door was
Main Street with the slow Sunday traffic, the roads leading to my
school, to
the store, to my piano lessons above the McKay’s Furniture, to the
coalmines
and Girl Scout meetings, but no one from town approached the screen
door with
the metal S in the grate on the screen.
On
our side of the door, we circled
the table laid with roast lamb and yogurt, humus and tabouleh; filled
our
plates and bellies. Tiny cups of muddy coffee, diamonds of baklava
passed
around chairs in a circle. We yelled in a language no one knew but us.
Read
letters from far away drawing tears and memories. Music
played and we danced in lines along the
few open spaces of the living room and dining room. Time passed into
night.
Others in town basked in the rays of the Ed Sullivan Show. We leaned on
each
other full and complete. We inhabited this place and nowhere else on
earth
existed.
Elmaz Abinader’s books, Children
of the Roojme, a Family's Journey from Lebanon and In
The Country of My Dreams... , as well as her play, Country
of Origin, illustrate
personal lives of Arabs and Arab Americans negotiating hostile terrain,
cultural polarities, and geographic and social displacement. Her other
works, 32
Mohammed, Ramadan Moon, The Torture Quartet and Messages from
the Siege
provide an articulation of the effect of political ctions on personal
lives
both here and in the Middle East. The Oregon Drama Critics cited Country
of
Origin for its excellence by awarding two Drammies to the play and
to the
composer of the music, Tony Khalife. Other awards include a PEN Award
for In
the Country of My Dreams... and a Goldies Award for Literature.