I, the Divine (21 page)

Sitt Noha was oblivious to Régine’s irritation. A little girl, no more than ten years old, dressed in a similar aubergine housedress, came in carrying a silver tray with a pot of coffee. She gave each of the girls a cup. Janet shook her head, but Sitt Noha insisted. She kept moving the toothpick from one side of her mouth to the other. Janet could not take her eyes off it.

“Drink, drink,” Sitt Noha said in English, gesturing with both her hands. She followed that with an aspirating sound as she brought an imaginary cup to her mouth with one hand, while the other held the imaginary saucer steady. “Drink.”

“You must drink it,” Fatima admonished, “or she won’t be able to read your fortune correctly. She must have a coffee cup.”

“Can’t she do it without my drinking coffee?”

“She probably can but the coffee cup finalizes everything.” Fatima drank from her coffee cup, modeling the acceptable behavior to her friend. “She reads the patterns of the coffee sediments left in your cup, the dregs.”

“That’s disgusting.”

Sitt Noha shook her head, appearing to have understood the conversation. “Tell the girl one must suffer to know one’s future. Tell her to drink up.” She adjusted the ottoman beneath her, bunched up her housedress once more and, not so discreetly, scratched herself.

Sitt Noha turned Janet’s cup right side up. “Not ready,” she said in English, turning it over again. She turned Régine’s cup. “Almost ready.” Régine smiled in anticipation.

“I can see a husband already,” Sitt Noha said.

“Really?” Régine was twittering. “Is he tall?”

“Tall? Yes, he’s tall. Not too tall. He’s handsome. Black hair and a mustache. Ah, he’s an engineer. He will fall in love with you. I see that. There are problems.”

“What problems?”

“Your parents won’t approve. They don’t want you to marry him.”

“Why? Why? Is he from a poor family? He’s an engineer. They have to approve.”

“I’m not sure. It’s not clear yet because the coffee hasn’t settled. See this line. Look here. This shows how much he loves you. This here shows problems.”

“I must know why. They must approve. I don’t want to elope. I want a big church wedding and a big reception. Like my sister.”

“Ah, there you go. It says here there will be no church wedding. He’s a Muslim.”

“I can’t convert.”

“You will.”

“Are you sure he’s not a Druze? He’d be the one who would have to convert if he’s a Druze. Tell me he’s Druze.”

“No. He’s not Druze.”

“Oh, my god,” Régine exclaimed. “Don’t tell me he’s . . .” She could not even finish the sentence. Even Fatima gasped.

“No,” said Sitt Noha. “He’s not a Shi’ite. He’s a Sunni, from Beirut.”

“Oh, thank god.”

“Hey, maybe I know him,” Fatima said. “You know what. Maybe it’s my cousin Nabil. He’s studying engineering at USC right now. He’s tall with black hair and a mustache. Maybe it’s him.”

“Can you tell his name?” Régine asked Sitt Noha.

“No, not the whole name. It starts with an
N
though. See here.”

“Oh, my god. It
is
an
N
.”

“Oh, my god. It’s Nabil. You’re going to marry my cousin Nabil. We’ll be relatives. Like sisters.”

“Is he handsome?”

“He’s incredibly handsome,” Fatima gasped. “You have to watch out because every girl will be after him.”

“But he’ll be in love with me.”

“True, but after you marry him, girls will still go after him because he’s handsome and smart.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Sitt Noha said. “When it’s time, come see me. I’ll teach you what to do and he’ll never be able to get it up for another woman.”

The girls began giggling again.

Sitt Noha stared at Janet’s cup. She twirled it gently. “The coffee refuses to settle,” she said. “Her future does not want to be completely written. You tell her that, Régime.”

“What does that mean?” Janet asked. “How can my future be written?”

“All future is written,” Sitt Noha said. “We just have to know how to read it.”

“How come if all future is written, mine isn’t? Ask her that.”

“Her future is partially written, not all of it. I can read some of it, but the rest is yet to be written. That’s because she’s a girl with a strong personality.”

“That’s bad?”

“There’s no good or bad coffee. It’s just coffee. Nothing you can do about what is written.”

“So you’re saying I can write my future?”

“Not sure if it is you who will write it. It can be someone else. You’ll marry into a strong family. Stronger than you.”

“I’m not going to get married anytime soon. Ask her about my Middle Eastern history professor and why he hates me.”

“You will marry a Lebanese man from an old family. He’s a doctor. You’ll get very sick. This man will save your life. He’ll save you from certain death and fall in love with you. He will sell his soul for you.”

“That’s so romantic,” Régine said. “Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

“I don’t want to get married. I’m still too young to settle down. Anyway, what’s so romantic about getting sick and almost dying?”

“Tell her that her husband will save her,” Sitt Noha said. She chewed on her toothpick, moved it from side to side. “She’ll get married soon. She’ll have three children. Two girls and a boy. The boy will come last. He’ll be the jewel of her life. He’ll look as beautiful as her. The boy will be her gift to the world.”

“That’s perfect, Janet,” Régine added. “Two girls and a boy. That’s a wonderful family. Aren’t you happy?”

“I don’t want a family yet.”

“Hold on.” The toothpick snapped between Sitt Noha’s teeth. “Tell her I see trouble. Tell her I see trouble, but she can avert it. Tell her she has to change. Tell her the man comes from a strong family. They will swallow her. She can’t resist. Tell her she has to change, become lighter, learn to float. She’ll no longer be able to be herself, she will become part of a larger whole. She can’t move independently, she has to move with the family’s river. She’ll become the family. She can’t change that. The family swallows. It’s difficult for her. She’s beautiful. She’s strong. She is American. They don’t understand family over there. She has to adapt, she must learn to accept. She will change. Tell her she’ll drown if she tries to swim. She must not fight. The two worlds will clash and she’s not strong enough to fight. She should give up and float. Tell her the son will carry her. He’ll know how to float between two worlds someday. He’ll be the bridge. Tell her she has to learn to float not swim. You tell her that. You tell her all of it.”

“I don’t have to worry about that. I’m not getting married anytime soon. Ask her if she knows anything about my Middle Eastern history professor. Why does he hate me?”

“Tell her for an extra five Lebanese pounds, I can teach her how to make a curse, which will get her teacher off her back. Or else.”

Why runners make lousy communists. In a word,
individuality
. It’s the one characteristic all runners, as different as they are, seem to share . . . Stick with it. Push yourself. Keep running. And you’ll never lose that wonderful sense of individuality you now enjoy. Right, comrade?

The first time I saw the advertisement for running shoes, I cut it out and push-pinned it above my desk. That was in 1984 (it appeared at the Los Angeles Olympic games) and I was considering divorcing my second husband.

That wonderful sense of individuality.

I always tried to walk a path unbeaten by others, to touch the untouched. I moved from the land of conformism to the land of individualism. I moved from a country that ostracized its nonconformists to one more tolerant and more hypocritical. I moved from Lebanon to the United States.

The myth of the rugged individualist is integral to the American psyche. Most Americans, native and naturalized, consider themselves admirers, or at least indulgent, of individualists. I was no exception. It was only recently that I had begun to recognize the hypocrisy. As an American once wrote: Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

I am the daughter of a Lebanese man and an American woman, a fairly brief marriage. My mother, in a burst of independence, arrived in Lebanon to study at the American University of Beirut. She was a free spirit, did what she pleased. Like many foreigners who landed on Lebanese shores with dreams of conquest, she was swallowed whole. She fell in love with my father, got married, and had to subdue any sense of individuality she may have had in order to fit in, to conform to what was expected of her. I say
may have had
because at times I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a façade covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

Americans landed in Beirut in droves, getting off their cruise ships and TWA flights, wanting a taste of the Middle East without actually having to soil their shoes. Beirut obliged. It gave them a taste all right, but only a taste. The city hid its Arabic soul and presented the world a Western veneer.
Life
described Beirut as “a kind of Las Vegas-Riviera-St. Moritz flavored with spices of Araby.” But not too spicy.

They bought trinkets in the cute
souqs
built especially for them, but they spent their big money buying Christian Dior gowns in downtown stores. They bought hookahs and backgammon tables as proof of their having been in Arabia, as vindication. They visited quaint Arabic restaurants, but their main meals were the imported steaks and lobsters at the
cafés trottoirs
.

We are special, they said. We are different. When they went to the Ba’albak festival, they chose to see Ella Fitzgerald, never Umm Kalthoum.

So did I. I hated Umm Kalthoum. I wanted to identify with only my American half. I wanted to be special. I could not envision how to be Lebanese and keep any sense of individuality. Lebanese culture was all consuming. Only recently have I begun to realize that like my city, my American patina covers an Arab soul. These days I avoid Umm Kalthoum, but not because I hate her. I avoid her because every time I hear that Egyptian bitch, I cry hysterically.

I have been blessed with many curses in my life, not the least of which was being born half Lebanese and half American. Throughout my life, these contradictory parts battled endlessly, clashed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. I shuffled ad nauseam between the need to assert my individuality and the need to belong to my clan, being terrified of loneliness and terrorized of losing myself in relationships. I was the black sheep of my family, yet an essential part of it.

In 1988, I cut out a story from the
New York Times
about members of a high school football team in Hoboken who ambushed a solitary runner and beat him senseless, leaving him in a decaying ditch, shoeless.