the United States, her sister’s boys have grown old. Mother Fadhma looks twice to pick out Farouk in his businessman’s suit and tie. Qassim lost all his hair, but he remains the comedian, still joking with the others outside one of the garages he owns. Boutros, a medical technician, appears quietly content as the father of four girls. Abd has an even darker complexion now that his hair has grayed. Mother Fadhma wonders whether it is his scientific career or his stormy marriage that is to blame.
The men stand beside cars or in stiff family groups, or play ball with their sons and daughters. Everyone looks smug and overfed, even the children. “Like fattened calves,” Mother Fadhma whispers to herself. In their rush to assimilate, her stepgrandsons in their Cleveland Cavaliers jerseys seem to have lost any connection to Jordan.
Normally the old mother would not have expected gratitude. She has long been accustomed to unrewarded work. She was the one who scrimped and saved; she had even sold her few pieces of gold jewelry to pay for their travel. While they didn’t have to constantly thank her, she wouldn’t mind being remembered once in a while. Mother Fadhma becomes aware of Muna’s eyes on her. The girl had been remarking on one of the pictures, but the old woman had been far too engrossed in her own thoughts and hadn’t paid attention. It occurs to her now that Abd’s daughter shouldn’t be blamed for her father’s and uncles’ apathy, just like she cannot be faulted for a toddler’s tears. It really is time, Fadhma thinks, to rid herself of this burden of resentment. Ever since Muna’s arrival the Jordanian family has been too preoccupied with their own troubles to be truly hospitable. Leaning over, Mother Fadhma wipes the sleep from her granddaughter’s foreign eyes—her first act of intimacy toward the girl—then returns the stack of pictures to the table. She pours out two demitasse cups of Arabic coffee and tells Muna and Samira to start without her, as she gets up, albeit painfully, from the bed and moves slowly from the room.
She returns with a battered cardboard box and declares proudly, “Every piece of correspondence the family sent over the years.” Inside, neat bundles of papers and letters are tied with brown string. At the bottom lies a faded powder-blue airmail envelope, as dry as onionskin. It contains extra passport photographs taken before each of Al Jid’s children—her sister’s and her own—left the country. Fadhma wants her granddaughter to see her aunts and uncles when they were young and starting out in life, full of hope.
At first Muna doesn’t recognize the two yellowed snapshots of Magda and Loulwa. “Look at them!” she exclaims, somewhat baffled. The middle-aged, overweight women in Ohio bear little resemblance to these two rouged, willowy girls. The next picture is easier to identify: “It’s Hind,” she cries out. Muna knows Mother Fadhma’s second-youngest daughter well. At age sixteen, Hind was sent to live with Muna’s family in Cleveland. She was only two years older than Muna. It took a while, but eventually the two girls became close, Fadhma knows through Hind’s letters home. She also wonders if Muna agrees with her daughter’s assessment that it was during this period that Abd and his foreign wife fought most bitterly.
As Muna leafs through the old photos, Fadhma unties the string around Abd’s correspondence. “The freak pockets of snow at home did not prepare your father for the severity of American winters,” she tells her. In Greenville, Illinois, his German landlady, Mrs Schneider, had given Abd the clothes that belonged to her deceased husband, a man who had been over six feet four inches. “‘Not all the loaves of Wonder Bread and peanut butter and jelly I eat during the night shift at the town’s cafeteria,’” Fadhma starts reading, “‘are ever going to make me taller.’
“Then he found work in an extremely dirty kitchen,” she says, grimacing at the next letter. “‘I got rid of ten-day-old pork chops—eight big bags of stinking garbage!’ But your father wrote that this job was not without its benefits. The owner, it seemed, sewed better than she cooked and cut down the dead man’s clothes to fit him.” When Abd was hired as a hospital ward orderly, he paid his landlady for his new wardrobe and sent home to the family whatever cash he could spare.
He had also written about a very shocking incident. One evening, after he left work and went to a bar. Mother Fadhma’s voice rises in excitement. Her eyes still grow wide with the horror she felt all those years ago. Fadhma still can’t imagine the dens of iniquity that are American bars—do the women walk around naked? Is this how all the young Arab men become ensnared, end up forgetting their families and staying abroad? Pushing aside her fears for the sake of her guest, she says brightly, “After your father ordered a beer, your grandfather appeared to him: ‘As real to me as the bottle in my hand, and all Al Jid kept saying: “So I’ve sent you all the way to America to drink alcohol?”’”
Feeling as though she is holding a precious time in all of their lives, Mother Fadhma smiles gratefully at Muna for allowing her to share it. “I can’t tell you the excitement these letters caused when we first received them.”
Samira, who has been watching quietly and listening all along, interjects, “Whenever an airplane passed in the sky, all us kids used to point up and call out, ‘Abd! Abd!’”
“And one by one,” Muna inquires, “all of them left home?”
“Yes,” Fadhma affirms. Why pretend otherwise? In the beginning she thought of her husband’s children, both home and abroad, as two equal halves of the same whole. But as one place claimed more than the other, it simply wasn’t true anymore. Apart from the letters and the funds that were sent home, they disappeared. By the time her own children were old enough to travel, Fadhma understood she was losing them for good.
“Their lives are better there,” she sighs. What she wasn’t going to say was that during those days she still clung to an unreasonable belief that Abd, the son who was destined to care for them, would not desert her and Al Jid completely. She continued feeling that way even when her stepson’s financial contributions began to arrive less frequently and his letters exhibited a marked change in tone. Instead of reporting minute details of his day-to-day life as a way of including his parents, he seemed to be building up defenses. Occupied by his intense studies for a college degree in chemistry, he had little to write about. The personal news he included was ominous. He was becoming friendly with another foreign student, a young woman and fellow immigrant to the United States from the Philippines. Then, without warning, they married.
It was a blow to the family. No one in the Sabas family married a stranger. Abd had not only wedded outside his tribe but outside his culture. And who could predict the consequences of such reckless behavior? Fadhma feared the worst, but it was Al Jid who took the news particularly badly. He had already mapped out his son’s life. He had chosen a suitable woman to be Abd’s wife and even made the initial approaches. The young couple would have probably ended up in the Gulf, where his son, the chemist, would have worked to support the rest of his siblings. When that was no longer feasible, Al Jid accepted the inevitable and sent his blessing… even though it was not asked for.
The second eldest’s brazen independence humiliated his parents, but there was worse to come. Another letter in Fadhma’s box, one that had been folded many times and shoved to the bottom—never referred to but never forgotten—had been written in English. It arrived after Abd’s wedding. But with no English speakers in the village, it remained unopened until business called Al Jid to the capital. That night he returned home clearly depressed. Mother Fadhma thought it was the low price for barley, but when she inquired, he pulled from his pocket the letter with a translation written in Arabic. In an expressionless voice, he read, “‘All you do is write and ask for money. How dare you bastards keep bothering us! I’m pregnant, and your son wants me to give you the little money my family sends to me. Go to hell.’”
Not even this message completely destroyed Mother Fadhma’s confidence in Abd. Her illusions were finally shattered a few years later, when a snapshot arrived in the mail. The picture was of a little girl in a grass skirt and Hawaiian halter top, with an orange lei around her neck. Her hands were held to one side and a bare foot pointed forward. It was Muna, aged three and a half, poised to dance the hula. The accompanying letter was simple and direct. Fadhma recites it as though it arrived yesterday:
“‘My dear family, I am writing to you from my lab, the only place I can find peace. I have a good