Habibi

They flew to New York in steamy June, left their seventeen suitcases and Liyana’s violin stored at the airport, and spent one day lugging stuffed backpacks around to the Empire State Building and riding up to the inside of the Statue of Liberty’s head. Poppy was retracing his steps. He wanted them to see exactly what he had seen when he first came to the United States.
“When Miss Liberty appeared through the fog holding up her hand in the harbor, I felt she was an old girlfriend welcoming me. I’d seen so many pictures of her.”
“It’s not just a hand, Poppy, it’s a torch,” Rafik said. His mother flashed him a quieting look. She wanted Poppy to keep telling stories.
Poppy recalled, “When I saw a sign for hot dogs, I thought they were made of dog meat. It scared me. I thought the big shiny trash cans were mailboxes.”
Nineteen years after his first arrival, they ate giant pretzels from a cart on the street. The big grains of salt on the pretzel skin tasted delicious. They bumped into disoriented families on summer vacations. They ate double scoops of Rocky Road ice cream.
“After this, you’ll call ice cream booza,” Poppy said. “And it won’t have marshmallows, either. I don’t think they’ve crossed the ocean yet.”
“They’d get wet,” said Rafik. Liyana rolled her eyes.
Liyana felt exhilarated by the skyscrapers. Their glittering lines lifted her out of her worry. She wished she could ride every sleek elevator up and down, punching buttons, seeing who got on and off. Some days you remembered the world was full of wonderful people you hadn’t met yet. She bought seven postcards with different pictures- the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square, the fish market- imagining which one she might send to Jackson.
By the time they returned to the airport at sundown for their night flight overseas, a storm was swirling somewhere over the dark Atlantic. They heard rumors about it from passengers at the gate. Ominous booms of distant thunder made Liyana feel edgy inside. Yippity loosebugs, she thought. Their flight was running two hours late. Liyana kept her eyes on the other people waiting to fly. She wanted to see if they looked nervous. But they only looked sleepy. A yawning lady with a flowered scarf tied under her chin lugged a food basket jammed with Jell-O boxes, paper napkins, and coffee filters. Didn’t they have those things in the Middle East? Another lady rolled up her husband’s raincoat and made her little children lie down on the floor with their heads on it. No one looked nervous at all.
When Rafik unzipped his backpack and pulled out a giant sack of Cornnuts, Liyana went to sit at the other side of the gate. She couldn’t stand to sit next to somebody crunching. She scribbled in her notebook: One Indian lady in a purple sari crying. The size of good-bye.