Habibi

Published in The Bathroom, Issue #3:

I am twelve, dressed as a bride.

The Armenian who had come to photograph our family seemed enamored with me, posed me carefully in our family photo. “The girl,” he finally said as he was preparing to leave, “can I photograph her alone?”

My mother retrieved her bridal headpiece, the headband dripping with ropes of silk and scarves. The one I’ve been trying it on in secret for as long as I can remember. She smoothed my hair under the band, arranged the fabric to drape around my face, placed her own bangles on my wrists. She kissed me on the cheek in a way that made me very lonely, as if she were already saying goodbye.

My father, too, smiled in an unfamiliar way as I sat gingerly on the forbidden rug, in the room where the children were never allowed, among the my mother’s best baskets and our clay water pitcher, a smile I wouldn’t understand until much later. “Chin up” the nice Armenian man said softly, and I like a queen, balanced the cascade of frankincense-infused fabric on my head. I arranged my embroidered dress to fall just so over my bare legs, my grandmother’s embroidery, the native stitch of Ramallah. The Armenian studied me, tucked one of my legs under the other and rested my hands on my knee so you could see my mother’s red ring. I pressed my lips together the way she did in photographs, straightened my posture, tuned out the giggles of my brothers and sisters so as not to ruin the pose.

As he fussed with his camera I pretended that I was a bride, that this headdress was mine and these bangles and that ring, too, and even this nice Armenian with the round glasses and soft-looking moustache. I pretended that I was the queen of Palestine.

When I finally saw the picture many months later, I was unprepared for my own rouged lips, the soft halo of pinks and golds that infused all the photographs of that time like an invisible patina.

“You are beautiful, habibi,” my mother said, admiring the thick paper image of the woman I would become.