My mother’s house (a designation my father finds troubling) has two living rooms. Many Arab homes have this more formal space, used to entertain guests, or generally indicate a family’s wealth. When we were little, my mother took this second space very seriously, perhaps because our means were meager at the time. The Salon (as it was called) occupied the largest room of the house. My grandfather, my father’s father, built this house, and the Salon is one of its most elegant elements: the outer wall is rounded, and features four windows. There is a separate entrance to it from the Veranda (porch/balcony). It’s capacious interior held all of our birthday dances, as well as the pre-ceremony wedding celebration for my sister Lubnah. I see myself in that room as I was at 14, 14 or so years ago. I am wearing a short pastel floral dress with a fitted bodice, a skirt that flares out. The sweetheart neckline is laced white, my tan shoulders a stark contrast. My body is the body of what I imagine is an “average” 14-year-old girl: tiny waist, small shapely breasts, trim arms and calves. As anyone here could tell you, I was a vision, an angel, a toy doll.
The round room (what I have really always thought of as the ballroom) is no longer the Salon. Stripped of its grandeur, the ballroom feels naked and lonely to me. Inside the dancing ghosts of that girl and her family and friends trip over a broken coffee table, a storage cabinet, three twin size foam mattresses no longer in use. Now the Salon is a boxy room with one window off the side of the informal living room. It’s become a utilitarian space for guest overflow, a rare occurrence these days, where everyone is too busy getting by to visit, and we are all grown up, too big for birthday dances. I can’t say I miss the Salon’s opulence, but I miss what it seemed to symbolize. The celebration of my sister’s marriage (she remains the most stunning bride I’ve ever seen), the ignorant happiness of my girlhood.
To employ what by now is probably an obvious metaphor, I can’t help but feel about my body like I do the ballroom. Here I am, creeping up on 28, and my body can’t begin to approximate the girlish version of myself. I don’t miss that girl’s insecurities, for even then I was told I was too fat, and I believed. I don’t miss how she took her peer’s cruelty as her due. I don’t miss how she played down her intelligence as to not overstep boundaries with her friends. Still though, amidst all that tension, I was beautiful in a way I will never again be. Wasn’t I? Dredging it up, I can’t exactly recall. I don’t remember feeling pretty, but I remember being called fat. I ran with the popular kids, had a boyfriend five years older than me. Surely that means something?
When I greet folks who haven’t seen me in the last ten years, when my weight really increased, and I became officially, undeniably fat, they are shocked to see the body I have now. Some of them comment on it. Lubnah’s mother in law, for example, told me to lay of the Kanafa (a kind of pastry) my first night here, so I wouldn’t get fat. When I told her it was a little late for that, she replied that I could still lose some weight during my trip. Hadn’t I been a beauty queen before, she said? She was so hopeful, I found myself bereft of a reply. Some say nothing, though I can see the surprise in their faces. Maybe they too are nostalgic for a better, thinner me. A more beautiful me. A more Arab me?
My fatness combined with my nose ring, I’m guessing, nail the final coffin in my foreignness. Or perhaps more broadly, my apparent lack of concern about my fatness combined with the way I present my body (piercings and cleavage included) indicate that I am no longer “bint al balad”, a daughter of the country. But then, I never was: our family was always the American family. It bolstered my adolescent popularity, marked me as an exotic entity. Even strangers can read it. I walk down the street with my niece, and can hear people speaking about us, speculating in Arabic about our origins, my dress, my nose ring. I speak to shop owners in fluent Arabic, pronouncing all its unique sounds, and they are befuddled. They ask if I am from the Arabs in Israel, and I reply I am from the Arabs in America.
Truthfully, being here takes me back to my girlishness, all that hope and fear but bottled in a much larger body. Standing in front of familiar strangers, I gather my will against their memory of my body, my identity, try to remember and be myself as I am, faltering enough to grant them psychic access. Being in the ballroom makes me long for the intimacies I shared with my friends and classmates of yesteryear, intimacies that distance and neglect on all our behalves have left dry and wilted. Standing in the shadow of my sister’s marriage, and the heteronormativity that’s as everyday as the occupation, makes me long for the girl who knew she wanted a husband, and children, a nice Arab life in this lovely Arab town. I find myself wondering about Rami J, what he’s doing, if he’s married. I shake the ghosts, as best I can, reconfiguring my body into its strength, its modest beauty. I think of the many rewarding, life altering friendships I have, and know that I am lucky to be shaped and blessed by the traces of those former connections. I tell myself that if I do run into Rami, I will at least kiss him this time. Both the girl and her contemporary deserve as much.
