Everything was going pretty badly at my Baba’s house — messes that never got clean, zero privacy, constant mooning and pranks — and I was considering moving out for the fourth time in one day, when my brother Ibrahim decided to move back home with his new Catholic wife, Dorothy. They’re only 21, but Dorothy wouldn’t have sex with him unless they got married. Leave it to my brother to marry a good Arab chick in disguise.
I had just pulled into the farm and was lugging my mannequin head into the house. I use the head when I teach at Moda College. My parents once hoped I would become a scientist, marry an Arab (even though there are none around), pop out three or four kids, and win the Nobel Prize for Science. Instead, I’m a hair stylist and I teach on the side. Today’s class was on blow-outs.
I snuck past my little little brother, Jaseem the twin; he was practicing his hoodlum walk in the field, one jean-leg rolled up to the knee, his baseball cap tilted to the side. When he saw me and the mannequin head, he shrieked. Then, he told me the news.
“His wife?”
“And… He changed his name to Abe.” The lettering on Jaseem’s cap spelled out “5-a-day!” He was practicing to be a hoodlum in a fruit-intake-awareness hat.
I turned in a huff and walked up to the door. I am a 29-year-old virgin and still living at home, on a farm in Jackson, 75 miles away from any Arabs. Baba wants us to be our own little community. That means I take care of all the humans, while Baba takes care of the one surviving goat, the horseless stable, the chickens and the two peacocks, which fly up and scratch you in the face if you mess with them. Peacocks think they’re fancier than chickens, but they’re not; they still have to live in a coop, no matter how hot their feathers look.
* * *
Abe and his new wife sat on the couch silently as Baba explained the situation to us. My brother had disappeared, with almost no notice, a year earlier. He had graduated college early and thought his genius ass belonged in Lansing, working for the state. That is where he met Dorothy. Apparently, he wasn’t enough of a genius to get into her pants without marrying her. And now, we were all to welcome them “home.”
I stood up, the mannequin head still in my arms. “And what the hell say do I have in this? This is my house too, Baba. Where do you get aaaff telling Catholic brides they’re welcome in my house?” I have a Michigan accent. I can’t help it.
“Ya binti, no need to be waving your doll head around. Abe is welcome here, and so is Dorothy. Let’s make peace… and dinner.”
“I’ll be damned! Who the hell is Abe? Last I checked that bastard’s name was Ibrahim.”
“Bastard is right — I changed the name Mama gave me to the name I wanted.”
“Phhh!” I snorted, “You changed your Arabic name to the name of some nerdy Jewish accountant?”
“Whatever, your name is so hard to pronounce, Dina, I’m sure you understand.”
The twins were snorting and crying from laughter on the rug. I went to the other side of the house, into the reading room, flipped on a light and pretended to read a kilt catalog. I looked at the male models’ hairy legs, wishing I had just married some dude. But every single guy I have ever tried to date was chased away by Waseem’s nerdiness, Jaseem’s pranks and Baba’s rudeness: he would reply to my dates’ “Is Dina home?” by hanging up the telephone or slamming the door in their (handsome) faces. I simmered over how easily he’d accepted Dorothy, put my foot up on the chest we used for a coffee table, and noticed a dead bird taped to a piece of cardboard a few inches away from me.
“Waseem!” I yelled out, “What the hell is this deceased bird doing in the reading room?”
Waseem came in, his thick glasses resting on the bridge of his perpetually-dripping nose. “I found it in the field. It’s a hubbingbird.”
“I can see that,” I said. I picked up the cardboard and stared at the bird. The hummingbird’s feathers glowed iridescent green and blue, like the lake in summertime, and the neck was dotted red. Its wings were still for once, and dark. The whole thing was the size of two thumbs.
Waseem took the bird from me and slowly placed it in a thick frame. He brought out a hammer and nail, and asked me to help him hang it up along with the rest of his framed “miracle discoveries” which lined the reading room’s walls: a butterfly in mid-chrysalis, a stray sock that belonged to no one in the house but which he’d found on a peacock one afternoon (I was sure this was not a miracle, but a Jaseem prank), a doll’s eye he had uncovered in the coop but was sure belonged to a chicken, and a mysterious little bell whose source no one knew of, but which Waseem had found in a big flower at the edge of the property.
I handed him a pencil and asked him to mark where he thought the dead hummingbird should hang. He left a small lead mark on the wall, between a picture of his older brother and the chrysalis. I hammered the nail in while looking at my brother’s photo. “Can you believe he has the nerve to get married? And move back home?”
“I like his new bustache,” Waseem said, ignoring me.
“Mustaches are for old dignitaries and cops.”
“I like dem. Dey look like furry worms.”
I stood in front of the now hung-up, framed dead hummingbird and waited.
Waseem picked his nose.
“Thank you?” I said. “Freakin’ thank you would be nice.”
“Thanks, Dida,” he said and walked off, in search of more treasure.
Part Two
In the kitchen, I sprinkled a frozen casserole with rosemary sprigs from the garden and baked the dish at 350 degrees. I waited, listening to the egg timer tick. Outside, a punk-rock-looking bird hooked its claws around the fence; a Ruby-Crowned Gimlet. The bird’s body was grayish brown, and had, at the very tip of its head, a red flame Mohawk. I wished my customers at the Salon were as adventurous.
I have a thing for birds. When I was a kid, I used to watch them through my thick binoculars, and I kept a Bird Journal with a red feather, from a red-throated Loon, taped to the front cover. I loved the Mute Swan which sometimes glided across the pond on our property; loved the Vermillion Flycatcher and the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron which alighted on the wooden fence on early Fall mornings; the cute, little field sparrows; and the dark, slutty-sounding Harlequin ducks. On Sundays, while my mother took care of the baby twins and “Abe” tried to break into my room, I hid inside my tent and read an encyclopedia about birds. I loved the name of the Swallow-Tailed Kite most, and one afternoon, when I came home from school, Baba took me to the coop and showed me one, a white bird with ink-black bordered wings which had accidentally flown to Michigan. We stood together in the smelly coop and watched the new bird, and I worried about how it would get home, but I didn’t want to ask Baba, fearing he’d launch into a sad speech about Palestine. I still remember him crouched by the cage, his then-young face smiling. I took out my journal and noted both the bird and my Baba as accidental transients.
Now, the only red-throated Loons I see are my bridal customers, who scream and plead for thicker, more voluminous hair-pieces.
* * *
The timer buzzed and I took out the casserole, brought out the plates and silverware, and called everyone to Supper. They came in sheepishly, and Baba cracked open a bottle of Brandy to celebrate Abe’s marriage. I rolled my eyes. Dorothy sat and waited for the food to come to her. I wanted to throw a drumstick at her freckled face.
“Dida says you have a stupid bustache,” Waseem told Abe.
“So does she,” Abe said.
“I never said that. Waseem is hallucinating.”
“You said they were for old digbaberries or something.”
“Yes. Like Baba.”
“I love my mustache,” Baba said, cutting the casserole into six perfectly even pieces. Baba likes equality. This is because when his parents finally died, he inherited a piece of land big enough to build a telephone booth on, while his brothers inherited acres and acres of olive trees.
“I do too,” Dorothy said.
“I’ve never seen you without it,” I said.
“You want me to shave my mustache, you coiffera! Well, I won’t. Ever. Well… if Palestine ever becomes a state, I will shave it.”
“I don’t ever want Palestine to be a state,” Jaseem said. “Because you’ll make us move there.”
“Don’t be silly,” Baba said. “We will never move there. We live here.”
“But why dot?” Waseem said. In addition to reading organic Chem books, he was peeking at some Chomsky on the side.
“Because I don’t belong there anymore,” said Baba.
“On the telephone-box-sized land.” I said.
“I told you never to mention my land again!” Baba said, waving an asparagus spear in my direction.
“Sorry, Baba,” I said.
“Jesus loves the Palestinians,” Dorothy said. The table went silent. We are the kinds of Muslims who pray for tax breaks (Baba), Nintendo DS games (Jaseem), Anatomy coloring books (Waseem), pussy (Abe) and the guilt-free conscience to move the fuck out of the house (Yours Truly). The only thing keeping us from being out-right atheists was the fact that none of us had ever eaten pork. We were bound to God through the absence of pig grease.
“And some Palestinians love him,” Baba said, swigging brandy. “You ought to take Dorothy to Nazareth sometime,” he said to Abe.
“Yes, and no one there would bat an eye. Imagine me taking my Christian white boyfriend back to Palestine with me?” I said.
“You have a boyfriend?” Jaseem gasped dramatically. Everyone laughed and banged the table with their palms. I got up and left the kitchen.
“Come back,” Baba shouted after me. “Really, it won’t be the same without you. Who would do the dishes?” They all roared again, and I felt their laughs sink into my back and my shoulders as I climbed the stone stairs up to my room. They just kept laughing, except for Dorothy, because she knew that now the dish-washing would befall her.
Part Three
My mama is no longer with us. I wish I could tell you she died romantically of a Staph infection she contracted from one of her patients at the hospital; that we couldn’t fly her to Palestine and watch her body rot as we waited to get through checkpoints, so we buried her in Hollow Cemetery; that her name is a bright and weightless leaf on the headstone: Selima Amir; that we visit her grave every Saturday.
But she is literally no longer with us: she left us for a Japanese entrepreneur who was in Detroit to check out Ford’s output of hybrid SUVs: the suits took him for a drive in the country and their car hit a deer. He ended up at our local hospital, where Mama was his nurse. She helped heal his broken ribs and nursed him back to health; he returned the favor by giving her a three-carat ring and asking her to run away with him to Osaka. It took her a whole hour to decide. Her shift ended at six in the morning, and by the time we woke up at 7:30, she had already packed her things and left. She never said goodbye to me, just scrawled a note on the corner of my birding jounal: You won’t understand, she wrote, as if it were an order. And just like that, Mama had flown the coop.
It became my job to take care of the guys. I made breakfast every morning, packed their sack lunches, and alternated cooking dinner with Baba. This had less to do with my need to be a good Arab girl and more to do with our collective need, as a family, to have a house that is not on fire. The one morning I was running late and the boys had to make their own breakfasts, they chose peeps, with pop tarts in lieu of cookie sheets. The gooey mess dripped down to the base of the oven and promptly caught on fire. I heard later about the fiasco that followed: red fire engines in front of the barn, and half a dozen firemen partaking of strong ahwe with my Baba, who wore an apron and served the coffee to them out of small demitasses on a silver tray. Never mind that he never served me coffee this way: they had all taken the occasion of the boys’ irresponsibility to have a little coffee party without me.
* * *
The next morning, I had twelve bridesmaids’ hair to style. I drove a half hour to the salon, blasting the stereo and letting my hair fly out of the cracked window. I’m a co-owner of The Jeweled Crown. We do hair, massage, nails, makeup, hair removal, weddings, and other events. We’d recently hired a muhajjaba hair stylist, Jauhara, who rented out one of the rooms we reserved for massages, to do other muhajjabat’s hair in the privacy of the room. Turns out chicks who wear hijab like to get their hair did more often than chicks who don’t.
Our master colorist, a boy named Keith, was once a girl. Other stylists sometimes ask him how “it works,” and he offers to show them, and they giggle wildly. Once, a muhajjaba wanted to get her hair colored by him, since he’s a much better colorist than Jauhara. He flat out refused, because she obviously thought that Keith wasn’t really a man. Eventually, the exotic hotness of doing a veiled woman’s hair took over and Keith abandoned his moral and ethical objections and got down with the peach-blonde lowlights.
They all rib me for living at my Baba’s house and taking care of the boys. The only consolation is that I am saving all my money, and one day I’ll be able to live in my own house. They don’t know I’ve already saved enough money to buy two shacks in Detroit and a barn in the UP if I want to.
“Speaking of weddings,” I said, putting curlers into a bridesmaid’s hair, and told Keith and Jauhara about “Abe.” They laughed so hard the bridesmaids under the blow-drier chairs heard them.
“You should teach those fools a lesson right now,” Keith said, “and move out.”
I said that when I closed my eyes and imagined the guys living without me, I saw flames, or worse, fireman coffee parties.
“You’re afraid they’ll burn or celebrate without you,” Keith teased.
“Live herrr alone, you estrange boy-gerrel,” Jauhara said. “She’s good gerrel. She’ll leave when she finds good man to marry.”
“I have,” I said, “I’m marrying Keith.”
Keith rolled his eyes. He didn’t believe in the institution of marriage.
A few hours later, we were spraying the bridesmaids’ poofy crowns and wishing for superpowers. Have you ever tried to please a bride? You’d be wishing for them too.
“Which would you rather have,” Keith said, “Flight or invisibility?”
“Flight,” I said, without thinking.
“I hate heights, so I’d choose invisibility.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re the most extroverted bitch I know,” I said. “And wouldn’t you want to fly all over the place, whenever you wanted?”
“Shit yeah,” Keith said, “and I would. I’d fly first class on a Boeing to Paris. In those comfortable big seats that look like fans.”
“I’d fly with my body. Then I could go whenever I wanted. I wouldn’t have to wait for flights to take off.”
“You’ve lived in Michigan all your life and you’ve never even been to Toronto.”
“She would fly,” Jauhara yelled, “to Balestine. She would strab her bee-bull to her body and fly them over checkboints.”
“That would be nice. For about three seconds,” Keith said, “then the army would shoot her down.”
“He’s right.” I said. “But I still choose flight. And when he flies to Paris, I’ll float by his plane and flip him off.”
“I won’t see you, ‘cause I’ll be wearing a cool satin eye-mask.”
“That would make the stewardesses suspicious, don’t you think? A floating eye-mask?”
“Not as suspicious as Homeland Security would get about your flying Arab ass. And they prefer to be called flight attendants, now.”
At the end of my shift, I swept up the floor, which I like to do because it brings me comfort, like gathering stray strands in my mind. I wished I wasn’t going home. When I was done sweeping, I had a bagful of black-brown-red-blonde hair; the mixture looked like fur from a full-body wax of Bigfoot.
After work, I drove out to teach a seminar on up-dos. I carried my mannequin head into Moda College and used a large, round brush with thousands of bristles on it to show a dozen women how to give their customers big, bouncy crowns. “You could have been a bird expert,” Mama’s phantom voice curled into my ear, and I phantom-ly snapped back, “I am an artist.” The thirteen blow driers hummed loudly and I lectured to the girls over the noise.
Part Four
Waseem and Jaseem punched and kicked each other in the field. I could see them from my bedroom window. Soon, Abe and Dorothy came home and everyone ate barbecue on the cold patio. I refused to join them. Instead, I used my old bird-watching binoculars and spied on them as they dined like a family. I drew the shades, finally, and took out my headdress from the closet. Some people have meditation, some drugs, some shopping: I have this headdress. A bride came in once and asked me for a swan-like crown for her wedding. She was a dancer at some Greek-town casino and had a strong showgirl-head-gear aesthetic. She brought in a headdress from one of her acts so I could model her swan-crown after it. I spent three weeks gluing white Mute Swan feathers onto the plastic mold I had begged Keith to help me make. In the end, the headdress itself looked like a swan, and at her wedding, she tossed it like a bouquet into the crowd of female guests. I caught it… Okay, Okay, I elbowed a couple of nine-year-old girls and dove to the ground to catch it. That was four years ago. Since then, I’ve made it my personal religious experience every Sunday to carefully paint one headdress feather a different color. Some of the feathers are sky blue, some coral; a few are mermaid’s tail, hummingbird’s neck, and seaweed. I am painting today’s feather bright red.
When I was setting the feather to dry, Dorothy knocked on my thick wooden door. I knew it was Dorothy because I have memorized everyone else’s knocks, and Dorothy’s was feminine, sweet, almost like my Mama’s. I hesitated to let her in.
“Dina. I just want to talk.”
“About what?”
A long, tumbleweed-across-the-landscape silence.
“My hair.”
A few seconds later, she was on my cushion-topped seat in front of the antique dresser and mirror. I ran a bright-red brush through her hair.
“What do you want to do with it?” I motioned at her long, straight, brown tresses, which hung limply against her small, modest breasts.
“Something simple. A trim?”
“A what? Sister, I don’t do trims. I do transformations.” I put a hand on my hip and waited.
“I’m scared.”
“I can te-e-e-ell!” I sang.
“What should I do?”
“Well, what have you always wanted but were scared to do?” I said. I waited while she bit the inside of her cheek.
“Something punk,” she whispered. “Like, crazy. Short.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. I took out the clippers.
At first I was thinking less Ruby-Crowned Gimlet and more Flock of Seagulls. But the more I talked to Dorothy, the more I liked her. She was from a crazy family, too, and she wanted to be a photographer. I cut and cut and I blow-dried and added shine and gel and mousse and styled and styled. When I was done, she gasped at her reflection ecstatically.
We descended the steps, Dorothy slowly, like a princess, I her bitch-in-waiting. I liked it. I hadn’t felt girly in the house in years, not since Mama and I played dress-up or did our nails together.
Slowly, a hush fell over the boys in the living room, and Abe looked up at Dorothy. She flung her arms up, finally, and said, “What do you think?”
“Your hair looks like…” Waseem started.
“A picnic basket!” Jaseem finished.
“More like picnic leftovers,” Abe whispered.
Dorothy ran back up the stairs in a loud fit of tears.
“How could you?” I said, directing my voice at all four of them. I was standing at the very first step. I wish you could have seen me. I looked like a queen atop a staircase made from cut rock and diamonds, the boys, my misbehaved servants.
“How could you?” Abe yelled up at his queen. “Aren’t you supposed to know how to cut hair?”
“And aren’t you supposed to know how to treat a wife? Huh. I guess it’s hereditary,” I said.
“That is unfair,” Baba said. “Your mother’s leaving had nothing to do with the way I mistreated her.”
We all looked at him.
“Besides!” Baba said, “You have done a terrible shit in Dorothy’s hair.”
Dorothy screamed again.
“You are all ridiculous!” I said. Waseem pouted. “Except you, Waseem.” Jaseem hung his head down. “And you, Jaseem. God! If you keep making these faces I’ll never move into my own house.”
“Leaving home,” Abe said, sounding like some Swami, “should have a lot more to do with your ability to be independent and less to do with the faces some kids make.”
“Whoa! Did you just try to advise me? I’m twenty-nine! Go to hell!” I said, ran to my room, and slammed the door.
Dorothy was sitting on my bed, flattening the points I had sculpted into her hair.
“I don’t want to be married,” she said.
“It’s never too late to annul it,” I said.
“I guess I could do that. I’m not really that Catholic,” she said, and stroked my headdress, which I had left out on my bed. I reached over her and picked up the feathered crown, and walked it to the closet.
“Sorry. This headdress is my religion,” I said.
She nodded, and fresh tears streamed down her freckled cheeks.
Abe screamed and yelled and Dorothy screamed back all night. I hid in my room and waited for morning.
Sometime around dawn, I heard one of the twins bang down my door. I got out of bed and shuffled across the room, noticing that my closet was wide open. Jaseem burst into the room. “Dorothy is missing!” he said.
“Oh, joy.” I scratched my bed-knotted hair.
“We’re off on an excavation!”
“He means a search expedition,” Waseem popped up from behind him.
I threw on my robe and we were off looking for Dorothy. Baba and Abe held one flashlight each, and Abe tried to blame the whole thing on me.
“Women are very sensitive about losing their hair,” he said.
“And about their husbands telling them it looks like shit,” I shot back.
We tried the garage, the basement, the field, the stables, and finally the chicken coop. The chicken and peacocks sounded their horns at us. We shone our flashlights until our beams landed on a strange looking bird; a multi-colored swan. “That’s my headdress!” I shouted.
Dorothy was wearing the crown on her head, and hiding her body under a pile of hay.
“Lea me alone, allo you,” she slurred.
“Dorothy, baby, come on,” Abe pleaded. “I didn’t mean anything I said.”
“Gaa a-eh!” she yelled. Baba’s bourbon bottle glinted a few hand-lengths away from the headdress.
“I totally respect Dorothy’s need to be alone,” I said, slowly creeping up to her. “I’m just gonna grab this real quick.”
She clasped her hands around the swan crown. “Nuuuh!” she said. “I kee is on til m- hair gow back. Ahhate yoo!” she yelled at Abe.
Baba shrugged and went back to the house. Waseem and Jaseem followed. I saw that I would never get my headdress back if she was going to be stubborn about it, so I decided to hide out in the barn until Dorothy passed out again. I told Abe I would take care of her, and soon, he was off to bed, too.
A few minutes later, Dorothy stirred. “Weh I leaveeen tomaa,” she slurred.
“I’m leaving, too. In a few hours.”
“Fo goood?”
“For work,” I said. A few minutes later she was snoring, and I was thinking, Poor Dorothy. She couldn’t survive for a day in that house, and I’ve survived 29 years. I slowly peeled the rainbow swan off her new haircut.
I crept back into my room, the crown in my arms. Just to be safe, I decided to take it with me to work, in case Dorothy went through with her plan to escape and took my precious headdress with her.
Part Five
I wore the crown on my drive to Detroit, just after dawn, and thought of a folktale Mama used to tell me when I was little, about a couple who longed for a daughter but had three sons. They prayed for a girl day and night, yet she never came. Finally, they begged God to send them any girl at all, even if she was a ghoul. They just wanted a little girl. Nine months later, the wife gave birth to a daughter. The three boys hated their little sister and believed she really was a ghoul, and one night, accused her of eating the family’s lambs, which had been missing, one by one, from the family farm. Sad and scared, she struck out on her own. She wandered aimlessly throughout the land, until she found a magical nightingale in a cage. She freed it, and for a reward, the nightingale gave her a home of her own, and she never looked back. I envied the ghoul girl and stopped at a drive-thru donut place; drowned my jealousy in powdered sugar and raspberry jelly.
My first customer was a teenager from Dearborn. I braced myself for the therapy session I would have to launch. I can usually tell which customers want to talk, and which want to rant. I almost never get a customer who wants silence, but even when I do, they usually ask me how I ended up doing hair. The teenager’s name was Lamia. She wanted her hair straightened, and when I tried to dissuade her, saying all she needed was a haircut and her curls would be mad bouncy, she wouldn’t hear it. She wanted straight, shiny hair.
I washed and conditioned her hair, listening to her try to figure out why my family lives in Jackson. “My Baba wanted to live on a farm,” I said. “He grew up on one.”
“My dad grew up in a shack on a mountain in Sidon,” she said, “But he still has to work and have Lebanese people around him.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“You must be really free at that farm,” she said.
I laughed and told her I was the nanny and the maid.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she whispered.
“No,” I whispered back.
“I do. But don’t tell anyone.” We were miles away from Dearborn but she was worried someone at the salon would know someone who knew someone who knew her parents. Hey, it’s happened.
“Are you seeing him tonight?” I said.
“Yeah. But when he picks me up, I have to roll my seat all the way back so no one on Warren Ave sees me with him.”
“Are you serious? You have to roll back the car seat?”
She gave me a grave look and nodded, as I put her hair through the ceramic straightening iron.
* * *
I drove home that night and thought of what my life would be like if we’d lived in Dearborn, or if I lived there now. People would never talk about me on Warren Avenue: who would care?
On the back-roads just outside Chelsea, a flock of birds — Sandhill Cranes — congregated in the middle of the road. I slowed down but I knew they’d fly away as I approached, and they did. All but one: it was heavy on top, with long, spindly legs, and a red eye-mask around its face. I kept my foot on the gas, confident that the Crane would eventually get the picture. It didn’t. The bird practically dug its heels and refused to get out of danger. I broke, hard, and swerved to keep from hitting it, and instead, crashed against a telephone pole. The windshield’s glass cracked slowly, but remained intact, so that when I looked out of my car, I saw everything through a large web of glass-flakes.
I shielded my eyes with my shaking hands, and climbed out of my car. The entire front hood was accordioned against the pole, and both my wheels were spinning slightly off the ground. I took out my cell-phone, but there was no reception. The Crane was still in the middle of the street, staring me down behind its red mask.
“Get the fuck out of the road!” I waved, but it ignored me.
I waited by the side of the road for help, but no one drove by, so I walked up towards the town. It was cold and a little damp, and I dug my hands into my coat. I looked back at my car, and the mannequin head peeked at me behind the broken glass. Eventually, I reached a small gas station, and the attendant told me I could use the phone booth in the back.
First, I called the cops, to file the report, then a tow-truck, then, my insurance company. At last, I had to figure out what to do with myself. I looked through my phone for numbers, past Baba and Jauhara, and landed on Keith. I dialed his number and he picked up at the fourth ring.
“A fucking duck? In the middle of the street?”
“A Crane,” I said.
“You have the worst luck,” he said. “I’ll see you in about an hour.”
I hung up and stood in the booth. This was how much Palestine my family would inherit. It was warm, and comfortable. I stood there for a long time, until I saw Keith’s Mini-Cooper on the horizon. When we approached my crushed car, I imagined the doll-head driving it home; imagined Baba and Abe and Jaseem and Waseem welcoming her as though she were me.
“Stop here a sec,” I said. Keith pulled up and I got out.
I reached into my car and grabbed the doll head. Moda College wouldn’t be the same without it. But I left the headdress in the backseat. Eventually Waseem could hang it up on the miracle wall, between the hummingbird and the peacock sock.
We drove back to the salon. When we passed Dearborn, I watched the tips of telephone poles, shut-down mills, and farther up, the clouds. Then, I reached down to the plastic lever and leaned my car seat all the way back, and Keith rolled his eyes.
