| George and Odette
Johnson’s Park, New Jersey, 1953 |
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| Young and carefree
he sits astride the picnic table, one leg stretched out on the bench leaning back against her as she leans forward, her arms cinched over his. With her movie star smile and rolled scarf sweeping her dark, glossy hair— a watch-out look in his eyes, they are laughing into the camera, the summer light blazing. They do not know they will suffer years later, though so far away, the civil war in Beirut, that she will see on the evening news the home her mother and four brothers lived in blown to bits before her eyes. An end with no end. That she will grieve alone in the basement standing her face to the wall, not speaking, not moving—for who knows how long— until finally her husband’s sister, like a warrior will come, will talk softly of the children, force her back into the world of the living. And he, a boy who would hang upside down from a tree in Brooklyn, or by his fingers out a window six stories high, had no fear. Risk and crazy love his life-blood. Though the gambling will get him for years, and finally his memory will go. They will take his car keys away, but he will still catch a bus for Atlantic City, for the thrill and the smell of the casino. Though she will weep in a closet remembering orchards of fig trees in Tripoli, a big family, the whole Levantine world she left behind to marry him. In the end, they will have fifty-four years together, a swan’s song. He will give out first, and she will follow quickly as when she was a young girl first in love. |
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