Nobody believed what I said about Siti, not even my mother. Maybe she didn’t want to accept it, maybe it was too painful, like opening your eyes to the yellow glare of the midday sun, so she resisted.
“Nadia, your grandmother is dead,” my mother said, soothing me back to sleep. She knelt on the floor, hovering over my bed, stroking my hair along my back the way she used to when, as a child of twelve, I cried for my father. A drunk driver had hit him that year, but it took him three months to die in the hospital. “They’ll have to take me kicking and screaming,” he’d promise, lying still in his hospital bed, in too much pain to even clasp my hand. But he left without a sound.
Now my mother smoothed my hair again in long, com- forting strokes that ended in the middle of my back, before starting again at the top of my head, like a skier at the summit of a steep slope. Except that now I was twenty-one and seeing visions of my grandmother.
“But I saw her,” I repeated stubbornly, my shoulders still shaking. I’d awakened, screaming, minutes earlier, prompting my mother to burst in from her adjoining bedroom.
“What did she say?” she asked, patiently. Nervously.
“Nothing,” I sighed. I knew she wouldn’t believe me or, worse, would try to argue with me, begging me to “be logical.” “Go back to bed—we’re both tired. I’m fine now.”
My father had never spoken to me again after he died, though I willed him to. Many nights that year, I’d lie attentively in bed, conjur- ing up his image in my mind. Not as he looked in the coffin—pale and pasty, the mortician’s makeup job masking his smooth olive skin—but as he looked when he played baseball with me or as he sang songs during road trips to entertain Mama and me. Since I was always in the backseat, I could only glimpse his mustache and lips in the rearview mirror, sometimes his white teeth when he smiled, pleased at how well he’d delivered a particular verse. So his half-face is what I frequently imagined, though it never spoke to me, only gazed at me sadly, apologetically, lips pressed together.
On the other hand, my grandmother arrived in my dreams the same night that she died—she flew in quietly and settled into the brightest corner of my mind. She wore her pale blue housedress, its large pockets weighed down with her large bundle of keys, her packet of cigarettes, chapstick, quarters for the washing machine, and the eyeglasses that she refused to wear. They were unusable anyway, hav- ing been badly scratched by the constant companionship of sharp- edged keys. Her face was rolled into a quiet smile that would often unravel into a sneaky grin, reminding me of the times she allowed me a clandestine reprieve from my punishments as soon as my mother left our apartment. Siti’s hands smelled salty, like the brine of the grape leaves she was eternally stuffing and rolling at the kitchen table while listening to her tapes of Om Kulthoum in concert. “That woman had a voice, God bless her,” she would say, shaking her head in amazement, her fingers working quickly and steadily, stacking the completed grape leaves in piles before her, like an arsenal of snow- balls on a winter afternoon.
The first night she appeared, she said, “I’m sorry that I didn’t wait for you.”
“Mama’s still upset,” I replied. We had to hurry to the hospital when the nurse called, but Siti had died before we reached her room. I could tell immediately upon entering the cold room that we were too late, from her closed eyes and the way her mouth drooped open. Mama looked as if she’d been betrayed.
“You have to help her, habibti,” Siti said, touching my lips with her fingers. I could taste the salt on her skin and see the green stains from the leaves on her cuticles, outlining her wide, square nails. I also recognized the added acidic taste of the lemon that she used to scrub out the stains. I liked when she called me habibti, “my love” in Arabic. I’m the only grandchild she said that to, maybe because I was the oldest and resembled her the most.
“OK, but come back,” I said. She grinned and left, and I didn’t cry two days later when we buried her, even though all my aunts beat their foreheads and wailed and my uncles sobbed into their hands like children. They had flown in from Jerusalem for the funeral, argu- ing that their mother should be buried back home. But Mama, ex- hausted from crying and lack of sleep, had hysterically insisted that Siti be buried here, in Philadelphia, because she’d come with Aunt Nadia to live with us when Baba died. “She wouldn’t want to leave us now.”
As we wearily watched them lower her coffin into the cold ground, Mama was amazed at my calmness. “It’s OK to cry,” she told me, holding me tightly. “We all miss her—it’s OK to cry.” I nodded, not knowing how to tell her that she had misunderstood.
(Excerpt from “Back to the Surface")
