Lebanese Blonde by Joseph Geha

Author:Joseph Geha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

The ICU visitors' lounge was in the hospital's old wing, at the end of a dim corridor. Behind its frosted glass doors, though, the lounge itself appeared to have been recently remodeled. All primary colors and hard plastic furniture, it put Sam in mind of some fast-food place, a Big Boy's or a Denny's. There were even those stamped tin throw-away ashtrays scattered about.

The room seemed larger for being nearly vacant. The TV, tuned to a whisper, was showing an old cowboy movie in black-and-white. The room had newly installed floor-to-ceiling windows, tinted blue, and the light passing through them felt somehow cool, like blue fluorescence.

The muffled TV gunshots continued—Pfh! Pfh!—like the mouth-sounds children make playing cowboy. The old Mystic Theater on Bush, a supermarket now, used to show films back-to-back every Saturday afternoon: Rocky Lane, the Durango Kid with his kerchief mask, Lash LaRue. Sam loved them all, but none more than Hopalong Cassidy. Probably because Hoppy was old, with white hair like Baba. And, like Baba who paid bums to do odd jobs around the store, hauling and sweeping, Hoppy had Gabby Hayes to get supplies or tie up the bad guys for him. As a side-kick, Gabby not only resembled the bums who hung out all along the bar district of Summit and Cherry, but being toothless, he spoke English like them, too, muttering and wheezing, spit flying whenever he got worked up.

During those first months in America Baba had insisted that Mama take Sam to the Mystic every single Saturday afternoon to learn English. Baba himself had no patience for the movies, finding the experience too trifling and passive for grown men.

Mama went reluctantly. The rapid-fire cowboy slang gave her such headaches. And all those cows mooing and milling about. She regularly confused the bad guys with the good guys, and she yelped with alarm whenever the cowboys slapped leather and the lead started to fly.

Born in Damascus, and a Christian, she had heard the stories of the Sit Sineen massacres just across the border, as a child had beheld with her own eyes the violence of the Druze revolt and the French bombardments; so nothing Sam said could persuade her that the bullets up there on the screen were fake, that nobody was really dying. Sometimes she rose out of her seat and made her way amid the gunfire up the Mystic's long center aisle to wait for him in the lobby.

Baba died in this very hospital, just upstairs. Now, standing here at the visitors' lounge windows, the television whispering at his back, Sam looked out in the direction of the store, somewhere deep in the North End, and imagined Mama in her bay window, her own television whispering English at her; she who never learned English, who never learned to do the bills, the shopping, the driving around; who couldn't answer a phone. What else had Sam expected from a father with hair as white as Hopalong Cassidy's? He'd somehow always known that someday Baba would be leaving her to him.

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