Once classes started, Lena began to understand that most of her fellow students lived on campus in small rooms all stacked next to one another. They even shared communal bathrooms, which she found to be a very strange custom. When her classmates asked her where she lived, they seemed to find her answer odd, as it was not a name like Bancroft or Wilton or Straton. But instead a simple address—21 May Street.
“Twenty-one May Street?” they would say, assuming that they had heard wrong, that Lena’s answer had somehow gotten lost in translation. But no. She was uncertain about many things, but she knew she lived at 21 May Street.
She’d memorized that address. Spent hours practicing saying it in front of the mirror.
“Isn’t that kind of, like, far from campus?” one girl with curly blond hair had asked.
“Yes,” Lena had said, making sure to enunciate properly. She’d recently found that many of her English words seemed to get stuck in the base of her throat. She was trying her best not to swallow the words, not to silence her own voice. “It’s by the hospital. I live with my cousin and her husband.” Then Lena added, “He’s a doctor.”
The girl had politely nodded and then gone to sit with her other friends. Lena always sat in the middle row. Alone, always. She’d naively believed that her loneliness would subside once classes started, but if anything, the classes had made it worse. She was more aware than ever just how alone she was. How untethered.
Living with her cousin was tolerable. T-O-L-E-R-A-B-L-E. That was the best English word she could think of to describe the experience. It was not torturous nor was it pleasurable, but Lena was surviving. Her cousin had come to America with her husband, who was a doctor. He worked at Hampton University’s teaching hospital. He was a pathologist who believed he should have been a surgeon. He was perplexed and somewhat dismissive of Lena’s claims that she intended to become a doctor.
“Not a surgeon, though, correct?” he’d asked her one night as he helped himself to another serving of bamieh. He’d raised his caterpillar-like eyebrows in what she supposed he intended to be a jovial manner, but came off as slightly hostile and competitive.
She would’ve been more offended by this line of questioning if she actually believed she was destined to become a doctor.
Her cousin tried her best to make Lena feel at home. She made mansaf from scratch, driving miles out of town to find a grocery store that sold halal lamb and the right type of rice pilaf. Lena didn’t have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t have cared less if the lamb was halal, and that the mansaf only made her miss home more.
This particular afternoon, Lena had decided not to walk the two miles back home immediately after her last class let out. The air had begun to turn crisp and the leaves on the trees were turning the color of fire—a natural phenomenon she’d never experienced and was charmed by.
She pulled her jacket closer and followed a pack of students as they headed toward the main drag of campus. She browsed by the local shops and café, finally settling on an unremarkable-looking diner. She figured the menu would probably be easy enough to translate. She was still in the stage of trying at all costs to avoid embarrassing mix-ups.
A short girl wearing a red-checkered apron shouted at her from the back of the restaurant to sit anywhere she wanted. Lena glanced around the mostly empty room that was filled with metallic booths with sagging cushions and metallic tables with uncomfortable-looking chairs. The diner was less bright and lively than she’d thought it’d be. Disappointed, she slid into one of the ratty booths.
A menu for the restaurant, uncreatively named Oak Falls Diner, rested on the scratched metallic tabletop. She grabbed it and began to study it, slowly reviewing each choice aloud in her head.
Chili cheese dog, her mind sounded out. That sounded absolutely revolting.
Cheeseburger with fries. At least she knew what that was. But she hated the way Americans served their meat. Pink and raw, practically bloody.
Small garden salad. She looked at the picture accompanying this menu choice. It was the saddest-looking salad she had ever seen. Lettuce that somehow managed to be both pale and fluorescent at the same time, glistening in some sort of sauce.
Her menu perusing was interrupted by a voice. “So what will it be?”
When she looked up, she saw a man. He was dressed from head to toe in denim, a leather cuff on his left wrist. His hair was the color of uncooked corn, his eyes unnervingly blue. Something about those eyes reminded her of home, of her uncle’s olive farm that sat on the rocky hills of Jabal Ajlun. In the winter months, she and her cousins would roam the windy hills and the sky would be a bright and impossibly clear blue. They would be able to see over the hills for miles and miles, which made them feel like little kings and queens.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to rush you,” the man said, but he didn’t take his blue eyes off her. “Do you need more time?”
She shook her head and took a deep breath before forcing herself to slowly say, “A cheeseburger with fries, please. Fully cooked, please.” She silently cursed herself for saying “please” twice. She knew it would make her language sound stilted to American ears.
He cocked his head to study her more intensely, and not for the first time, she felt naked without her hijab. She had tossed it in a trash can at JFK, feeling slightly heartsick at the sight of the scarf that had once been her mother’s—the scarf that her mother had tenderly wrapped around Lena’s head before sending her off to the airport to fly across the ocean to America—floating to its graveyard, nestled between discarded candy bar wrappers and glossy tabloid magazines.
She hadn’t tossed her hijab out of some strong personal conviction. She’d never felt oppressed by it. In Jordan, she didn’t mind it at all. Actually, most of the time, she’d enjoyed wearing it. Sure, it was slightly uncomfortable, especially in the midday heat, but she mostly only wore it in public anyway. Never in her own house, as after her father passed it was only her, Aaliyah, and her mother.
So why had she tossed it? Well, she’d seen the way the customs officer had stared at it. She knew then that it marked her as different. And she did not want to be different in America. She wanted to be American, though she had no idea yet what that entailed. So yes, she’d tossed the headscarf. And every day since, she’d heard the ghost of her father chastising her for abandoning her identity so quickly for the sake of some perceived convenience. When she felt like defending herself, she would bitterly think that the hijab marked her as weak in the eyes of Americans, and she had not come to America to be weak.
She had come to change her life.