I, The Divine

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One of my earliest memories is of the day of my father’s wedding. I remember crying, wanting to ride with him in the motorcade. I must have caused some confusion. After all, Druze tradition says nothing about a bridegroom’s offspring. His three girls stayed behind, waving our brief good-byes to all the men in the cars. They were leaving and bringing back a bride. I was carried by our nanny, Violet, and cried onto her shoulder as the blaring car horns became unbearable.

Sometimes I wonder what it must have felt like for my stepmother. A girl is supposed to be ecstatic on her wedding day. According to tradition, getting married is what we live for. Hope your wedding day is soon, they say. To young girls even, barely ten years old. May we all celebrate your wedding day. What did it feel like for her, though? She waits at her father’s house, all dressed up in white. The men in her family all proud, happy, one less mouth to feed, one less honor to defend. All parade in front of her, congratulating her, sauntering away, getting drunk. All the men happy she is marrying a man of a higher station. Good things to happen for the family. The women ululate, the groom is a doctor. She sits with her back to the window, hears the cars honking, looks back to see the caravan approaching. The ululating grows louder. The men go out to greet the arrivals. A hundred men come out of the cars, some with machine guns. Shots are fired in the air. They scream, they shout, they hail the hero. The groom will be getting some tonight. The men have come to collect their prize. More men shouting, some come into the house. She stands. The strange man, the groom she has met only twice, smiles at her. She walks out with him. Her whole family follows. She rides in the first car with her husband. Her husband’s family follow, and her own family after them.

How did she feel? I cannot begin to imagine.

My father divorced my mother, an American, and repented. He decided to marry a woman according to the traditions of his forefathers. He found himself a much younger girl, not too pretty, not too ugly, never even looked at a man, who would look upon him as her god. A simple girl from a poor, uneducated, mountain family. A girl who had been to Beirut only once even though she lived less than half an hour away.

She arrived home an outsider. She desperately tried to please the family, to belong, but we were already entrenched. We three girls saw her as a usurper, taking our mother’s place. My grandparents saw her as a usurper as well, from a lower-class family pretending to be part of ours. We criticized her cooking, we made fun of her dress. We laughed at her. Even my father did. I remember walking in on her crying in the kitchen. I have to admit I did not feel sorry for her. She was making burghul and had burnt the bottom. It was too late to make anything else because my father had to have his meal at one-thirty every day on the dot. She served the burghul, and for days my father and grandfather made jokes about her new method of cooking, smoking the meals.

Slowly, methodically, she took control of the household, and of the family. She began instilling a discipline unheard of in our home. I rebelled.

Before my stepmother arrived, my father used to teach us girls all kinds of curses, mostly pornographic swear words that would make grown men blush. Whenever his card-playing friends visited, he would trot us out and we would recite our teachings. All would laugh hysterically. In Lebanese, cursing is an art form; I was its Rembrandt. My stepmother was horrified when she heard us. She instilled a no-cursing rule. She took away my main attention-grabbing activity, my star-making vehicle. I saved my best curses for her and was severely punished. In later years, she would adopt a stray African gray parrot who would make my cursing sound amateurish in comparison, a feathered demon who would become in some ways her best friend.