Strings Attached

Strings Attached

94 Strings Attached Mother was an Edward Hopper painting—a woman drawn to a wedge of sunlight, an oil drum rolling down a quiet street at night. At thirteen she sailed from New York to Lebanon—wouldn’t take her eyes off the Statue of Liberty. She was the house by the railroad, an airmail envelope arriving, departing—the new girl who refused to sing the Lebanese anthem. Her marriage arranged at fifteen, she rode off on a white horse with a good Druze man. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She walked barefoot on hot gravel from Beirut to Bekefa to persuade my father to move to New York, and they did. Mother was beautiful as Sophia Loren—a perfumed scarf grazing as she floated by—the red curtain rising in a movie theater. Divorced at twenty-three, Woman’s Day called her “A pint-size gal in a man-size job.” She wore chemise dresses and high-heels, drove company cars, won trips to Europe. I called her Miro’s ladder receding into the night sky—the moon and the bird who couldn’t hear the dog barking down below. Mom was fluent in Arabic but never spoke it, changed her name from Fadwa to Freda— baked shepherd pies and Johnny cakes, cooked fasoulia for company. She believed in freedom, let us choose our own religion. We worshipped her. My mother loved Tchaikovsky’s concertos, Rubáiyát poetry, and poker till dawn. She was modern art, a light in the window—never the apron, or even the strings. ...