Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the essay “In-Betweens” by Diana Abu-Jaber.

The narrator moves to Jordan with her Jordanian father, American mother, and two younger sisters.

One night after my sisters and I are in bed and the baby cats have ceased their crying, my parents come to our room, whispering and nudging each other, their smiles sly, as if they shared a private joke. They shake us out of sleep and say, “C’mon, we’re going to do something!”

We yawn, slide out of the warm caves of our beds; our parents are gesturing us out the front door, their laughter lowered and mesmerizing. Then we are running across the stone courtyard—my sisters and I barefooted in cotton pajamas, the stones waxy beneath our feet. The neighbors and the street are all asleep, the buildings shut up, rose-tinted under a brassy, round moon. In one corner of the courtyard, tilted under the staircase to the upper floors, is the scooter, its red gleam muted now, private and soft. For a moment I think of my grandmother back in New Jersey, who wears a lipstick in the same fluid tones: red shot through with an undercurrent of blue. I look back at it as my parents open the car.

We drive through parts of the city that I’ve never seen before, where the lights glow like melted butter and the girls on the sidewalks are wearing brimmed hats and high heels. Men smile and turn to watch our car passing: I watch back, hands pressed to the window. Then we race beyond the glowing streets—they dwindle to a star—and the road ahead of us is long and dusty blue and smells like a warm, blue must, like the heat of a sheep’s back.

When we finally get out of the car, there’s a gravel lot, an expanse of folding chairs, patios, sparkly restaurants wedged in a long crescent along a flat blackness like gleaming enamel. Dad holds his hand out toward the gleam. “And what did I promise you kids?” he asks, though I recall no promises related to anything like this. “It’s the Dead Sea!”

We’ve come, as usual, with no preparation, so my parents let us run into the water in our underpants—like theJordanian kids around us. The salt water is satiny, so soft and dense it seems to bend beneath our arms. My father, who is generally afraid of the water,comes out and shows us how you can sit in the sea. He lazes back in it, and my sister tows him around by his hair while he makes boat sounds.

One of the restaurants on the lip of the water has a string of red lights that drop their reflections in the moon lit water; they make me think of the lonely red scooter. After a while, I straggle out of the water, yanking up my soggy underpants with their sprung elastic waistband. Mom is stretched out on a canvas chaise longue, holding a drink with a little parasol on the side. She wraps me shivering into a beach towel and makes room for me beside her on the lounge.

I blink out of my towel cave at this new place around us, then touch my mother’s ribs through her cotton shirt. "Mom, how long do you have to be best friends with someone if you're best friends?"

She flitters at my bangs; they’re drying stiff with salt. “Well, honey, I don’t think there’s any rules about that. I guess you can be best friends with someone your whole life if you’re lucky.”

“Are you and Dad best friends?”

It’s hard to make out her expression under the cherry lights. She seems to be thinking about it, staring out to where Dad is still drifting around, piping and tooting like a tugboat.

“You have to do whatever your best friend says, right?”

Now I can see her face—amused and wary. “Why do you say that?”

“Dad said to come to Jordan,right?”

There is even less sound now than before, if that is possible, just a slip of waves on the shore, a sighing wash like the sound of someone saying hush,hush, or the rustle of the palm fronds arching over the sand. “Your father . . . needed us to come here, he needed to see—what it felt like.”

“What does it feel like?” I ask quietly, not quite knowing what I’m asking, just following the path of the questions.

“I don’t think—” she starts, then stops. My father is climbing out of the dark wash of the sea. “I don’t think it feels the way he remembers it.”

I put my hands on her waist—something that feels a little like a spark of alarm bounces through me. “Does he know that?That it doesn’t feel the same?”

She looks over her shoulder, my father’s shadow falling toward us in a long, cool slip as he walks beneath theneon lights. “He’s still finding out.”

The medicinal waters of the DeadSea roll behind us, and the wild, heavy scent of honey, rocks, and thyme tempers the air. People come to dip themselves in these waters, to be cured of everything from skin ailments to spiritual wasting. I breathe it in deeply and sense a sort of dawning sweetness—of loss and nostalgia.

Reprinted by permission of The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.