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THE AMERICAN WAY  FRANCES KHIRALLAH NOBLE Mansour Malouf had a nagging wife. On a presser’s salary, she wanted a brocade couch and a chandelier that looked like a shooting star. They already had a daughter with a half-blind eye. Mansour’s wife called their daughter “Linda” in defiance of the expectation that the first girl in two generations and the child they never expected would be named after her grandmother, her situe, Mansour’s mother, who lived and moved in their house like a shadow. “Why do you come up behind me like that?” snapped Lena to her mother-in-law. The bewildered old woman pushed her open hands into her apron. “I was going to make lunch. For all of us. Mansour will be home soon.” Indeed, as she spoke, the city bus roared away from their corner, two houses down. One o’clock on Saturday. In a few minutes, Mansour would walk through the front door, humming the melody from a favorite aria, carrying a folded newspaper under his arm. With him would be Linda. In her hands, ragged necklaces of jacaranda she’d made from the twigs and flowers that littered the summer sidewalk in front of their house. Linda waited every Saturday for her father to return from his brother’s clothing factory, where he pressed women’s suits into commercial shape. By the time he stepped down from the bus, the only remains of his overheated morning were the pink blotches in his fair cheeks and his dampened hair, smoothed back. “Tameen, my precious,” Mansour said to Linda, as she half skipped to meet him. He always stopped when he saw her, to give her the chance to travel the distance herself, under his approving eye. When she arrived at his side, she looked up for a kiss, and he smiled 379 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 379 into her uneven face and wondered whether the clipped eyelashes which lined her left eye like the blunt-cut bristles of two tiny brushes would grow back before her next surgery. Together they traveled the squares of sidewalk, then turned up the walkway to their front door. Lena heard her husband and daughter come in. “Mansour, why are you singing when lunch is almost ready?” she called out. Dutifully, Linda went to the kitchen where the protein drink her mother daily prepared for her to enhance her strength swirled about in the blender. Mansour showered, singing, this time, from Puccini. Situe scurried from the stove to the table; the refrigerator to the table; the counter to the table, setting out the meal of grilled lamb with onions, Syrian bread and cheese, cucumbers and tomatoes in olive oil and lemon juice and hummus tahini (with garbanzos skinned, mashed and thinned into a dippable consistency that very morning). The final member of the household waited in bed for his food. Lena’s brother, Jimmy. Crippled in a warehouse accident before the war. Elevated in his white hospital bed, like an invalid king on his throne, an elaborate array of bars and rings hanging above him from the ceiling. Linda knew not to enter his room if the sliding wooden door had been pulled shut—even though the only television set in the house was in there, mounted high on the wall directly in her uncle’s line of vision, so that when the rest of the family congregated to watch a show, they looked heavenward as though waiting for an angel to appear; even though their only other bathroom was tucked in a corner inside. “Your uncle needs his privacy,” said her mother. “God knows he’s suffered enough.” No one knocked, no one called out to Jimmy, no one asked to retrieve a magazine or toy, unless that door was open. Then the room filled with people as naturally as it filled with air. For Jimmy’s jokes, his card tricks, his willing ear. Jimmy took all his meals in his bed, on a metal tray that clamped over his lap. After lunch, Lena called Mansour to the living room. “This is where I want it to go,” she announced as she pointed to a bare pink plaster wall. “We can’t afford it,” Mansour answered. “You say that every time we need something. Linda’s last operation—” 380  FRANCIS KHIRALLAH NOBLE 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 380 [3.144...

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