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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472028627 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2012 |
| Series: | Sweetwater Fiction: Originals |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 285 |
| File size: | 975 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lebanese Blonde
A Novel
By Joseph Geha
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11845-8
CHAPTER 1
Before we know it, that was how Uncle Yousef liked to begin his funeral homilies, with an American phrase he'd adopted to mean Once upon a time. "Before we know it, the ship stop in New York Harbor," he would announce to the congregation, "an' we step down on Ellis Island." Yousef's voice was high-pitched, and he sprayed his esses — ssshtep, Ellisssh. Children in the congregation tittered to see the spit fly, lifting their faces as they followed its arc up into the ceiling lights and then down again toward the casket positioned directly beneath the pulpit between a double row of candlestands. The casket was kept open during the homily, awaiting the final administering of ashes and holy water.
"He first come here," Yousef continued, pointing down at the silk-covered face, "the same year McKinley was shot." Or, "She come the year before McKinley died." Or two years after. An assassination, rather than the turning of a century, was the hallmark by which an entire generation had signaled its arrival. Settling into America, they grew old with the century. And as they grew old and began to die off, one by one, Yousef spoke at their funerals. Archdeacon of St. Elias Church, educated in the seminaries of Antioch and Damascus, and so almost a priest, he would recount in the formal intonations of High Arabic, how, before we know it, ticket agents were riding up Mount Lebanon on donkeyback, sent by steamship companies that needed people to fill their steerage holds. In village after village, from the Biqaa Valley in the north down to the mouth of the Litani River, they announced cheap passage — Just imagine it, America! — to a place where one found gold lying in the streets. At the beginning only a few bought tickets. Those few, anticipating the crash of the silk industry, and understanding that nothing would be left for them after that, not even the work their fathers had done all their lives long, said to one another, Yallah! Let's go! So they went, the trickle before the flood. For those who remained, mail began to arrive from America; there were letters to be read aloud by those who could read, and there was something else in the envelopes. American dollars. W'Allah! — they had indeed struck gold!
Here Yousef liked to pause, briefly raising both hands to his shoulders as if in benediction, his tiny frame so compressed by age he could barely see over the pulpit's lectern. "So, the rest of us packed up what we could not sell off, and we followed." But unlike the many others who came in the great migrations, who also marked their arrival by the shooting of McKinley, the ibn Arab from Syria and the Lebanese littoral were not escaping the oppression of unfair regimes. The old folks laughed out loud to hear their grandchildren assume as much. For the Christians, anyway — and the first waves were nearly all Christians from the Mountain — for them the treatment by the Hamidian Turks had been not nearly as repressive as to their Muslim countrymen. All this was before the First World War, of course, and the Great Famine that followed it.
They never came here to stay. Yousef stressed this. They came here to take the gold back with them and live out their days like pashas in the most beautiful mountains of the most beautiful country in all the world. "But," he would add, "the first step away takes you all the way away." So that in the end, who remembers the old country? He pondered his own question. Over the years Yousef's eyebrows and mustache had remained black while the hair of his head had turned iron gray. For fun some called him Professor because his bushy hair was reminiscent of a comic popular on the Ed Sullivan Show. Also, because of his tendency to hold forth whenever he had an audience, the way his homilies often drifted off on tangents of their own.
"Forget the old country!" You rolled up your sleeves instead. You learned the money first, then the language. Books and schools were for your children, not for you. "America grasps you by the ankles of your children!" Here Yousef would fall silent, wait for the high, piping echo of his own voice to fade. That trip back to the old country you were planning to take in five years? "Before you know it, ten years. Before you know it, fifteen!" Before you knew it, a two-week charter tour in the summer, excursion fare, after your children had sold the store. With luck, you would make it back in time to die in the shadow of Mount Suneen, under the grape arbor of the village where your family name was born. "But even that is not the end!" No, in the end your children will send for your body, have it boxed up and brought back to America to be buried. Your dust, now American dust.
Because the ibn Arab sometimes got carried away at graveside services, Samir Tammouz's job, once he'd parked the hearse, was to position him-self directly behind the immediate family, smelling salts in his pocket, hands at his sides, ready to catch fainters or, if needed, to grab and hold back those who might try to throw themselves onto the descending coffin. But today a sudden cloudburst kept anything like that from happening.
One minute Sam was standing there, his thoughts adrift in Uncle Yousef's homily — What year was it McKinley got shot, anyway? 1900? 1902? — and the next minute the sky opened up. It took everyone by surprise — thaw or no thaw, this was still January, still Toledo, Ohio — soaking the mourners even as they rushed to huddle under the canopy tent. And throughout the downpour, Yousef continued on in that high, piping voice of his, from invocation to blessing, one prayer after the next after the next. Not hurrying, not slurring a single syllable. Greek, Syriac, English. By the time he finally ended the service, closing the prayer book with a damp thump, his bushy hair lay matted flat and dripping over his ears.
After Sam dropped the hearse off back at Tammouz & Sons, all he could think about was going home and getting out of his wet clothes. He didn't even touch the lunch his mother had laid out for him, her eggplant menazlit with chickpeas and cinnamon tomato sauce; instead, shedding shoes and tie and suit coat, he made straight for the bathroom. There he stood under the shower until finally Mama began rapping on the bathroom door to remind him not to use up all the hot water. When he stepped out, he heard her on the phone in the kitchen. She was speaking Arabic, and he stopped toweling off to listen. It was the funeral home, he could tell by her subdued tone. A moment later, he heard the approach of her slippers on the hall linoleum.
"Yallah!" she called out to him, Get going! She rattled the doorknob. Good thing he'd remembered to lock it.
"What is it?"
His cousin Aboodeh was on the phone, she said. They needed him back at the funeral home.
"When?"
"Ride now. Yallah!"
"But what for?"
"Jeem Weel-zoun," she said, pronouncing Jim Wilson as if it were an Arabic name. "He's waitin' for you ride now at the airport." Then, adding another "Yallah!" she rattled the doorknob again.
"All right, okay. Tell Bud I'm getting dressed!"
Sam listened for the flap-flap of her slippers before dashing across the hall to his bedroom. His work suit was wet, so his dark sport coat would have to do. Tammouz & Sons insisted on the professional look, even for a Jim Wilson. The funeral home was only a few blocks from here, and the usual routine was for Sam to walk there, take one of the hearses and go pick up Aboodeh, whose new house was all the way over on the East Side. From there it was a straight shot up I-75 to Detroit Metro, where Passenger Jim Wilson would be waiting for them. At the cargo dock. In a hermetically sealed metal box.
He was choosing a necktie when Mama let out a sudden invocation to the Holy Trinity, "Ism il Ab, ou'l Ibn, ou'l Roh il Idous ...!" her voice elevated, meant for him to hear. She was losing the last of her patience. He'd screwed up at work a couple times, nothing serious, and she'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since. He patted down his tie and smiled. As if you could get fired from your own family!
In Little Syria there were plenty of women — Aunt Libby for one — who had come to America believing that over here you roll up your sleeves and work elbow to elbow with the men. But there were also a few like Mama who, in their heart of hearts, never really left the remote hill villages where they had been born. Married off as children practically, to men twice their age, these had become widows in their forties. In their fifties they were like old people who had to be driven to the store, whose mail had to be read to them, notices from the city translated, their bills paid, their own checks written out for them above the large childish loops of their illiterate signatures. As their neighborhoods began to dissolve and their families dispersed into the Greater America beyond Little Syria, the lives of these women became increasingly difficult. To meet their simplest needs, they had to navigate daily the guilty waters between gratitude and resentment. And because they had learned to do so little for themselves, many of them remained, for their children, impossible to leave. Every one of these households had at least one grown, unmarried child.
When Sam was down at the curb, pulling on his overcoat and waiting for a break in traffic, he had the feeling that she was up there in the living room's bay window, ready to lean forward in her chair any minute now and start tapping the pane with her wedding ring.
As he stepped down from the curb, the sudden bray of a siren sent him right back up again. A fire truck lumbered around the corner, so close he could feel the heat of its engine. Then another fire truck, and then a third. Behind him he could hear the carryout's display windows vibrating. There must be a really big one somewhere. Neighborhood businesses had seen a rash of fires lately. Aboodeh said it was most likely arson for insurance, or as he liked to call it, "Syrian Lightning." Typical Aboodeh, with his pinky ring and his imported leather sports jacket: You don't have to be in the know, just sound as if you are.
The wail of the sirens stretched and faded until it was hard to tell whether they were coming or going. Leaning out to see, Sam turned and caught sight of his reflection in the carryout's display window. Something about the face caused him to stop short and take another look.
He hadn't always looked so much like her, had he? And yet those cheeks, puffy beneath the eyes, were definitely hers. So were those double worry creases between the eyebrows. He'd heard that such things happened. Married couples beginning to look alike, people who lived together. Even dogs and their masters! Why couldn't Baba have stayed alive a little longer, at least until his son's features had become more fixed? Sam tried jutting his chin out, like Baba's. Narrowing one eye.
But then, sure enough, from the bay window above the carryout, here came the tapping of Mama's wedding ring against the glass. Rapid and insistent, it pierced even the traffic noise. He stepped out to the curb, turned and looked up at her and struck a pose: hands out at his sides, palms up, in Baba's gesture of exasperation. Yoh! What else?
He could read her response through the window. Hiz Teezak! her lips were saying. Shake your ass! Yallah! Get a move on! Yallah! Yallah!
The rain returned, appearing now as an icy, drizzly mist. Sam buttoned the neck of his overcoat. At least Tammouz & Sons wasn't far. Turning thecorner off Erie, he could see it already. A funeral home on a dark winter day, you'd think it would look spooky, but all that had been remodeled out of it years ago. Old advertising photos showed a turreted Victorian with ocular attic windows and a stone half-fence in front, topped by iron spikes. Exactly the kind of place you'd choose, Aboodeh liked to say, if you're a Jaycee scouting out a site for next Halloween's haunted house. But back in the sixties, when Aunt Libby had the remodeling done, black was out. Funeral homes had started to brighten up and modernize, replacing velvet drapes with miniblinds and refinishing dark woodwork in stains of blonde. Some places had even begun featuring pastel-colored hearses. The clergy, too, were beginning to look on the bright side. Latin Rite priests started celebrating funeral masses in white vestments, upbeat folk guitar solos replaced the Dies Irae. Nowadays at Tammouz & Sons, with the turrets blocked over and the fish-scale shingles on the upper stories sheathed in white aluminum siding, most people wouldn't know what the place really was, if not for the sign set low in the front lawn, its neon outline of a clock above the motto ... In Time of Need.
The office where Aunt Libby ran Tammouz Enterprises was situated off the back hallway, and the keys to the hearses and company limos were hung on a pegboard just outside her door. Sam followed the brick walk that curved between the side of the house and the monument display, slabs of marble and polished granite set up to resemble a family plot, iron fence and all. One of Sam's first jobs had been to weed and hand clip between each and every headstone. One summer, crawling on his knees with the clippers, he'd come up with the idea of finishing off the weeds once and for all by sprinkling around the headstones some leftover glutaraldehyde that he'd found in a metal drum outside the prep-room door. It killed the weeds all right — and every other living thing in a ten-foot radius: grass, bushes, marigolds, a pair of saplings all the way on the other side of the driveway.
An accident, but it immediately became a family story, told for laughs: the time Sammy used embalming fluid as a weed killer. He was still a kid, with hardly any English yet, and already he knew what "fuck-up" meant. Worse, it was a reputation he was beginning to earn. At the funeral home, he was always bumping into stacks of folding chairs or accidentally knocking over rings of wreath wire or fake-marble flower stands. Every closet and hallway and stairwell was kept so cluttered with junk — with votive racks, collapsible biers, urns, candelabras, with pairs of "Praying Hands" in molded Styrofoam — that the whole house was an accident waiting to happen. A bull in a china shop, Sam had overheard Aunt Libby say of him once. She didn't think Sam knew enough English to understand, but he got the gist.
His struggles with English were such that the nuns had repeated him in third grade, and again in fourth. Eventually though, he did adjust, graduating high school the June before last, class of '73. And with honors, too. Not bad, but then again, he was twenty years old at the time!
And so sick of school that he opted to join one of the family businesses, even if it meant he had to start at the bottom. Which was exactly where Aunt Libby had put him. Unfortunately, the bottom was where his tendency toward clumsiness showed itself most starkly. And his absentmindedness, too. Like the time last fall when he ran out of gas driving the hearse in a funeral procession. It had been his responsibility to keep the tank full, and he thought he'd checked it a day or two before, but he couldn't be sure. Either way, it was a sight that nobody in Little Syria would ever forget, a Tammouz & Sons funeral cortege kept waiting in the rain while a handful of mud-splashed mourners pushed the hearse uphill toward a Sunoco station.
Sam wiped his wet shoes on the doormat outside the service entry. It was dark stepping inside. The blinds were drawn, and the air heavy with flowers and cigarettes. Down the hall Aunt Libby's office door was cracked open, emitting a shaft of smoky light. He could hear staticky voices from her police band radio. She always kept the scanner on, a remnant from the old days when Tammouz & Sons operated an ambulance service. He pulled the door shut behind him, turned and felt his shoe strike against something. A wooden folding chair appeared out of the dimness tipping toward him. Quickly, he reached out and gingerly leaned it back, resting against the stack of chairs behind it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lebanese Blonde by Joseph Geha. Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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