The grandness of the Great Hall, with its columns and its vaulted ceilings, makes me hate the undignified way my sneakers squeak on the polished stone. I wander into the Impressionist exhibit, which turns out to be more than just Impressionists. Representations of the Body: From Impressionism to the Avant Garde is essentially a study of nudes, a departure from the plein air landscapes typically associated with the Impressionists. I pause in front of Degas’s toilettes, Cézanne’s bathers, Renoir’s nudes. The women’s bodies are not overly posed or idealized; at the time, this was a provocation. I look for Mary Cassatt, for Eva Gonzalès, for Berthe Morisot, but I don’t find them. Gauguin is here, though, and the plaques beside his paintings of brown-skinned Tahitian women make no mention of his dehumanizing gaze, nor of the pubescent girls he had sex with in Tahiti. Matisse, too, is here, with his 1927 Orientalist fantasy, Odalisque with Gray Trousers: “I paint odalisques in order to paint the nude. Otherwise, how is the nude to be painted without being artificial?” In that moment, my body and the bodies of all the women I know are on the wall as sexualized ciphers for the desires of white men. I don’t know why I am here in this place where I should feel belonging but am, instead, an outsider. I’m grateful that the Met has little contemporary art. I know all the names, know who will be at the Venice Biennale this year and who was featured in the contemporary art magazines, but I can’t imagine my name listed among them. I’m not the only one, of course. The last time I saw one of my male classmates from art school, he consoled me about my artist’s block by telling me how few of the girls we studied with were painting anymore. It is one thing to have a body; it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning.
I stop to wash my hands on the way out. The museum’s bathroom is decorated with a print of a white woman posed over a clawfoot tub, her belly and breasts perfect pink globes. This is not Impressionism. She turns to regard the viewer at such a severe angle that it’s as though the artist has painted, instead of a woman, a porcelain bowl for holding pears.
* * *
By the time I get off the subway in Boerum Hill, it’s the golden hour. There are no signs of last night’s sparrows, just hot pavement and sweating brick. I make the left onto Hoyt from Atlantic and pass the Hoyt Street Garden and the peach stucco of the Iglesia del Cristo Vivo with its yellow sign. At the intersection with Pacific, I nod to the crossing guard in front of the Hopkins Center. I’m one building down from Teta’s apartment when I spot the owl feather, white against the green ivy that snakes over the brick posts on either side of Teta’s stoop. The tangled down at the base of its hollow shaft and its brown striping give the owl away. The feather is a fat, weightless thing, the tip oiled with soot, the down still warm from the leaves.
Brooklyn simmers in September, when the urine-and-soot stink of the subways sifts up through the sidewalk vents and Atlantic is noisy with restaurant-goers who don’t know that hummus is Arabic for chickpeas. While I fumble with my key chain, a white family pushes a stroller down the sidewalk, and the toddler inside reaches for the Swedish ivy bursting from Mrs. King’s window boxes. Lately I’ve been wondering how long Teta will be able to stay in this building. It’s the same story in every borough these days: the weekends bring the expensive strollers and the tiny dogs, the couples who comment on how much safer the neighborhood has gotten. Rent goes up and up and up. The family-owned bodegas keep on closing, replaced by artisanal cupcake shops and overpriced organic grocery stores whose customers hurry past the homeless and the flowers laid on street corners for Black boys shot by the cops. Some people go their whole lives in New York shutting their eyes to the fact that this city was built for the people who took this land from the Lenape. Sometimes I wonder why you never spoke of this—maybe you thought I was too young to understand, or you were just desperate to eke out an existence here. Now I am old enough to understand that we live on land that remembers. I hear the voices when I touch the brick or pavement, catch fragments of words exchanged hundreds of years before the island of Mannahatta was paved. I sometimes think about the Arabs and other immigrants who came here a century before my own family, hoping they wouldn’t be devoured by the bottomless hunger of the very forces that drove them from their homelands, hoping they could survive in this place that was not built for them.
Teta’s been baking: the stairwell is perfumed with walnuts and rose water. Inside the apartment, a fresh pan of bitlawah steams on the counter. If I’m honest, no matter how much I long for the apartment I had in Jackson Heights before Teta’s back pain got worse and she needed someone to take care of her, I’d miss the smell of her house if I left it. It’s just the two of us now, fielding the occasional call from Reem up in Boston. I can’t blame my sister for not wanting to be reminded of what we’ve lost; the gears of memory lock their teeth every time I remember.
I slip off my shoes by the door, allowing the purls of Teta’s Persian carpet to separate my bare toes. Asmahan gets up from the living room couch and stretches, then shakes the sleep from the ruff of fur around her neck. It wasn’t long before that horrible day that Asmahan came to us, but Teta and I never stopped calling her your cat.
“Better let the bitlawah sit, habibti,” Teta calls to me from her favorite armchair without looking up, “it’s hot. Get us a cup of coffee, eh?” The afternoon light catches on the white brow feathers of the scarred old barred owl that sits on the sill watching Teta every evening. Teta meets its gaze, but I pretend not to see.
Asmahan follows me into the kitchen. On my way, I pick up the half-empty plastic cups on the coffee table. Asmahan loves to drink from unattended water glasses, so Teta indulges her by leaving cups of water around the house. Asmahan knocks one over now and then—thus the plastic. The way Teta spoils that cat.
In the kitchen, I retrieve the electric bill and the unpaid rent notice I tucked in the top drawer, fold them, and stuff them in my pocket before Teta sees. I get out the tiny cups you brought with you from Syria when you and Teta came over to the States years ago. The painted blossoms look almost new. I don’t know how Teta keeps them so pristine, how she makes sure they don’t get dropped or chipped in the cabinet by the plates or the forty mismatched jars of spices we’ve got knocking around in there. We always make our own spice mixtures, just like the women in our family have been doing for generations. Teta’s got everything labeled neatly in Arabic, so those were the first few words I learned how to read. She has her own chai mixes, her own baharat, her own fresh za’atar. She makes them from memory, never measuring anything out, just estimating by the handful or the scoop or the pinch. The mothers and grandmothers of the other Arab kids I knew in school never wrote a recipe down, either; it was something you learned by heart. I’m sure Teta thought you would be around to teach me when I got older. Instead she had to teach me herself.
I fill the long-handled coffeepot with water and add the ground coffee, sugar, fresh-crushed cardamom. Out the window, impending rain hangs like dusk. Asmahan trots over to the kitchen table and hops up. Someone’s staring at me from one of the chairs. I don’t have to turn to know who it is.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say without turning my head. “You don’t have to get up.”