Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [38]
Chapter 4
ALL that GLITTERS ...
THE WIZARD OF OZ
Recently I visited friends from Northern Iraq to celebrate their daughter Noora's tenth birthday. They live in an apartment complex run by Lincoln's most notorious slumlord. Shady Acres is a stucco building with six units on the outskirts of town. Just west of the building is a trailer park, infamous for its tornado deaths, and next door to the east is a triple-X dance club featuring a dancer named Anna Mal. As I walked toward my friend's place, I passed an empty unit with its door open. Piles of beer bottles and magazines, trashcan liners filled with old clothes, and unfurled rolls of toilet paper filled the place. I wondered if someone called this unit home.
My friend's place was clean and neat, an oasis of order in this chaotic universe of sleaze. Zena, her husband, and four kids lived in a two-bedroom apartment. Zena greeted me with a big hug and led me into the living room where a small television blared cartoons. I asked about the new baby and Zena said she was sleeping. I asked about her husband, a gentle man hurt in the war, and Zena said he was at an ELL class at the library.
Zena's daughter Noora carried her stuffed dog, Toto, over to show me. Her two younger brothers ran by in Spiderman underwear. I called the three oldest kids Snap, Crackle, and Pop, because their favorite food was American breakfast cereal—the more sugary the better.
The living room was dark and bare with no curtains on the small windows, no pictures on the walls, and only one saggy couch. Like many refugees' homes, it was a weird amalgamation of Disneyesque cutesy stuff, goods from the old country, used furniture, and discount-store toys. Video games, Pokémon figures, and plastic motorcycles were piled everywhere. I noted a pack of Marlboros and an ashtray, new since my last visit.
Zena looked at me apologetically as she lit up. "My job makes me smoke. Since I work there, I do many bad things." Zena worked for a food-processing plant that used up, then discarded, its workers. I had been trying to get her a better job, but she had limited English and couldn't read or write in any language.
Zena was a small, almost fragile, woman who worked eight-hour shifts lifting heavy buckets in the frozen-food locker. Her arms were always tired and were growing weaker. She knew of workers who could no longer lift bags of groceries or their own babies. Tonight, even though it was hot outside, Zena was dressed in several sweaters. In the food locker she wore three jackets, a wool cap, and two pairs of gloves. Still, she was always chilled there and she told me, "I can never get warm. Not even on weekends."
While we talked, her sons banged action figures into each other and zoomed their motorcycles around us. Noora watched an animated version of The Wizard of Oz. Zena said the kids had memorized the five cartoon videos they owned. As if to prove this, when the video reached the scene where Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together, Noora jumped up, clicked her heels together, and recited Dorothy's speech. I laughed and clapped but felt a twinge of sorrow at this young Kurdish Dorothy looking for home.
This family had come from a very different world than they now inhabited. Zena was sixteen when her marriage was arranged, and like many brides from her country, she first met her husband on her wedding day. Now Zena was twenty-eight, caring for four kids and an ill husband and supporting the family. She had many more burdens and far fewer resources than she ever imagined would be her lot.
She hadn't been able to attend ELL classes and was learning English from television. It was amusing, but unnerving, to hear Zena express herself in cartoon language. "Yikes. We run for our lives."
Noora was dressed in a long pink dress and her hair was curled and adorned with barettes. I handed her my gifts, two books, the first books the family had ever owned. Noora examined them happily. I offered to read them to the kids and they gathered around eagerly. First I read from A Light in the Attic,