And So Goes the World
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National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. (From “About” on NaNoWriMo.)
My National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project is titled And So Goes the World. As I work to complete the last 19,000 of 50,000 words, it seemed appropriate to include an excerpt from the book on this blog. Much of the novel is set in Brooklyn. Some specific streets and buildings are fictitious:
Copyright: November 2008, Jamie Dedes, All Rights Reserved
I was born at St. James Hospital in Brooklyn, New York at 3 a.m. on March 23, 1947, healthy but skinny, my mother reported years later when asked. My first memories are of a dark, soulless apartment, which holds no place in my heart, and my sidto’s house, which reigns at its center even now, sixty years later, as a place of order, security, and relative sanity.
The house, a white Dutch colonial with forest green trim and a stoop painted brick red, stood on Courtney Way, near Fort Hamilton and about a half-block from St. John’s Episcopal, the Church of the Generals. My Lebanese sidto, our family’s matriarch and my mother’s mother, lived in that house along with other relatives who had survived the war years.
In that house, Sidto made sweet, black coffee and cooked cinnamon-scented chicken soup in pots that were always full, ready at any time for family and guests. Out of fresh, bottled milk, she prepared laban that was as white and refreshing as new snow and as tart as a lemon. With her gnarled arthritic hands, she would pour it into a Mason jar, which she wrapped in a Navy surplus blanket and set to incubate behind a steaming, silver radiator in the living room. In a room at the back of the house, I slept with her at night in a hard bed with a soft, white chenille cover that smelled of bleach and mothballs. There was another smaller bed in the same room for my older half-sister, Tecla. An accomplished equestrian, her carefully shined English leather riding-boots waited patiently under the window for her return.
There was a sitting room at the front of the house. It looked out over a hydrangea bush that bloomed blue-purple and voluptuous in the summer. Its branches were brown and empty in the winter. Uncle Georgie was brown and empty too, but for him it endured all year long, no matter the season. His days and nights were spent staring out the window, endlessly worrying the side of his right hand with the fingers of his left. His lashes curled in silky black fringe, a soft foil for the coarse kinky hair that framed his solemn dark-olive face. Sometimes the sun would warm the sitting room, its light casting Uncle Georgie’s face in shadows and reflecting in the tears that would suddenly and soundlessly spill down his checks dropping to his lap unchecked. “Shell shock” is what they told me. “A soldier’s disease.” One morning when I went to sit with him, he was gone. “Shrapnel.” “He was riddled with it.” “One piece found its way to his heart.” Often after that I sat in his chair to think of him. I tried to imagine away his pain. I worried the side of my right hand with the fingers of my left in silent, childish memorial.
There were more uncles who lived in that house too. Uncle Daher was married and lived upstairs with his other family. Uncle Emil and Uncle Peter lived downstairs with Sidto. These two were single, though Sidto was anxious for them to find good girls and get married She said then, when it was time for her to go to heaven, she could leave with a light heart.
Sidto spent her days keeping house for her sons, cooking and doing laundry. I hadn’t started school yet, but I could read better than she could. Well, she couldn’t read at all, not in Arabic or English. Proud, she would try to make me believe she could. When she was done ironing my uncles’ hankies, she’d ask me to sort them by initial and then stop me to show that she could pick out the right ones for each without help. She’d do the same thing with the mail, having learned to recognize the first letters of all her children’s names whether written in cursive or print.
Uncle Emil was good natured and kind. Once a week, he would pull out the Motorola TV and let me watch Sergeant Preston of the Yukon with him. Uncle Peter had a raw and raucous character. He often used naughty English words because he knew Sidto couldn’t understand them. Both uncles came and went with pats on the head and pennies for candy.
There were two other uncles: Uncle Bashir was living as a recluse in Pennsylvania after being jilted by the girl to whom he was engaged, and Uncle Fadi who was married to a beautiful, laughing Polish woman. Her name was Aunt Gosia, and she looked like the girls in Reingold Beer commercials. Uncle Fadi and Aunt Gosia lived on a street called Peony Road in far away New Jersey, raising their offspring as real suburban American children. It was these two uncles who actually owned the house on Courtney Way, an investment for them in which their mother and younger siblings could be safely housed as the family found its way from war-time endeavors to those of peace.
And then there were the girls which, of course, included my mother. There was married and sadly childless Aunt Badi’a who had irritable-bowel syndrome and worked in a factory. Aunt Selma was married and bore two robust and fun-loving city boys. A fourth girl, Aunt Cala, the eldest of my grandmother’s ten children, had rebelled against the family’s American experiment and returned to Lebanon when she was fifteen. Her one traditional golden necklace was taken in anger from her neck. I never did meet her, but that necklace rests in her memory in my jewelry drawer now. My grandmother never forgave her and never mentioned her. My grandfather was notable by virtue of his absence. He was not dead, just gone. He went unmentioned as well.
Most days in Sidto’s house followed a pattern of minor ritual and sameness that passed effectively for security. But Tuesday’s rituals were special and different from other days. My grandmother had several women friends whom she had met on the boat coming from the old country. Tuesday was their day to visit her since she never left the house and stoop. There was always Lebanese coffee, a sweet demitasse fragrant with cardamom, and a store-bought chocolate cake. They seemed to view these cakes with nearly absurd delight, a dessert so different from the old, familiar baklava. Something they did not have to make themselves. The coffee, called Al-Qahway in the Arabic, was integral to all entertaining, a hallmark of Lebanese hospitality, which is legendary.
Tuesday was As the World Turns day. None of them could speak English. Nonetheless, they were clearly taken with this weekly soap opera, creating their own stories as they watched. As I remember their stories now, they were far more risqué than the real thing and seem worldly for women whose lives were so sheltered. These wild, juicy imaginings of theirs were carried on somewhat sacrilegiously right under the eyes of Jesus, pictured in a large copy of DaVinci’s The Last Supper which hung ostentatiously in the dinning room. As long as I was quiet, which I always was given the incentive, I was allowed to sit with them at the big dining-room table to enjoy mid-afternoon milk and chocolate cake. I was infamous as a picky-eater, but I would eat anything with sugar.
Today’s post on Musing by Moonlight:
I Think I Can . . . I Think I Can . . . , which provides details on NaNoWriMo
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