Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [69]
Now Rickie looked amused. “You wash your hands before you pray?”
“Listen, you haven’t seen religious. You’re not supposed to touch alcohol or cigarettes, and women cover themselves up totally, all but their eyes.” She held her hands in front of her face, peering through her fingers. “If a man sees a woman’s foot, even, or her shape, it’ll lead him to impure thoughts, see? And it’s all her fault.”
“Man, that’s harsh. I thought Aunt Mary Edna was harsh. You believe in that?”
“Do I look like it? No, my mom never even wore the veil. Her parents were already pretty westernized when they left Gaza. But I have cousins who do.” Yeah?”
“Yep. The American version is a scarf and a long raincoat. I’d always have to do that whenever we went to the mosque with Mom’s relatives in New York.”
His eyes widened. “You’ve been to New York City?”
She wondered what that place was in his mind. As far from the truth as this barn was in the minds of her Bronx cousins. “A hundred times,” she said. “My parents both came from there. We always tried to go back for their families’ holidays. I think the deal on religion between Mom and Dad was that we’d skip the guilt-and-punishment stuff and celebrate the holidays. Feasts, basically.” Lusa smiled, thinking of boy cousins and music and reckless dancing among lawn chairs in a small backyard, festivals of love and fitting in. “I grew up on the best food you can imagine.”
“Huh. I thought people that didn’t believe in God just mostly worshiped the devil and stuff.”
“Whoa, Rickie!” She laughed weakly, sitting back down on her milking stool. “Don’t you think there might be a couple of options in between?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “Maybe.”
This was her cue, surely, to shrug this boy off and shoo him home. But then what? Wait for Cole to explain her to this family? Her body ached with the burden of her aloneness. Nobody was going to do this for her. She pressed her folded hands between her knees and looked up at him. “Who are you saying doesn’t believe in God? Jews believe in God. Muslims believe in God. To tell the truth, most Jewish people and all Muslims I know spend more time thinking about God than you do around here. And definitely less of their church time on gossip.”
“But different gods, right? Not the real one, not our’n.”
“Yes, your’n. Same exact God. His technical name is Jehovah; all three factions concur on that. There’s just some disagreement about which son did or did not inherit the family goods. The same-old, same-old story.”
“Huh,” he remarked.
“Do you know that most of the people in the world are actually not Christians, Rickie?”
“Is that really true?” He grinned sideways like a schoolboy trapped by a trick question. Then lit another cigarette to recover his dignity, raising his eyebrows in a question to make sure it was OK.
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Can you say something in Jewish?”
“Hmm. Maybe you mean Yiddish. Or Polish.”
“Yeah. Something in a language.”
“Between Yiddish and Polish I’m not good for much. My bubeleh lived with us before she died—my dad’s mother—but she was, like, classified. Dad wouldn’t let her speak anything but English in our house. Wait, though, let me think.” She rehearsed the phrase in her mind, then recited aloud, “Kannst mir bloozin kalteh millich in toochis.”
“What’s that mean?”
“‘You can blow cold milk up my ass.’”
He laughed loudly. “Your mammaw taught you that?”
“She was a pissed-off old lady. Her husband ran off with a coat-check girl in a nightclub. You should ask me about Arabic, my mom taught me a bunch of things.”
“OK, what’s one?”
“Ru-uh shum hawa. It means ‘Go sniff the wind.’ Bug off, in other words.”
“Rooh shum hawa,” he repeated, with dreadful inflection, but Lusa was touched by his effort. His willingness to stand here and talk with her about foreign things.
“Yeah, roughly,” she said. “That’s pretty good.”
Rickie smirked a little. “So,” he said, exhaling smoke, “did you have other Christmases? Where you’d get presents and stuff?”
“Other Christmases, other