The Atlas dispatcher always responded the same way — so unmoved, the flatness sounded artificial — as if I didn’t call twice a week, the same voice from the same address, asking for exactly the same thing:

“Please send a car with the best and the newest suspension. I have had a very serious head injury.”

“Car with good suspension. Ten minutes. Thank you.”

It was a kind of politeness. The Atlas drivers were less formal. They knew me by face from before. I was the woman with the long scarves and the heels and the still-wet hair who called almost every night from that west-end cul-de-sac, a Montreal street so small, uninitiated drivers would argue with the dispatcher that it didn’t exist. I was headed downtown, usually meeting Antoine at some dinner or opening. The Atlas car would always honk from precisely in front of the house, a standout facade among the row houses of Avenue Bourgeoys, white painted brick with black shutters, scarlet geraniums in boxes at every window in summer, miniature conifers in winter — a bit of an Edwardian dandy, just a noticeable house.

I’d come out with the Discman headphones already on, quickly voice the destination, and hope for the best. When it was good it was great, the cab swinging east over Mount Royal, the chandelier sky above and the velvet city appliquéd with skyscrapers below. Sometimes the city and the music and the silver disco moon would collide in a crescendo so exhilarating it felt like I was living in one of Antoine’s classier commercials, and this is when — usually Boulevard Côte-des-Neiges — if it was going to happen, it happened: “Goddamned potholes! Goddamned city!” I’d say nothing, and hope the driver, in his front-seat world of aggravation, would work it out on his own. Sometimes my silence backfired and he’d put on his own music, so loudly it would shrill through my earbuds, acid flung on my private film reel. It was always Arabic music. I assumed all the Atlas drivers were Lebanese. I assumed all Montreal Arabs were Lebanese.

-----

They hadn’t heard from me in a year. Then I returned to them last winter. Always 10 am, always Mondays and Thursdays, in a worn green canvas coat with a corduroy collar and a sensible hood, a knee-skimming jacket that was a country-weekend thing when I was well and now made me feel like a retarded school bus kid who had to dress with easy snaps. I used a tripod cane and carried with me a Paddington Bear cushion, an item that had been forgotten at our house by some friend’s child and presently provided both a nice size and density for my automotive needs. I’d lie face down along the back seat, my nose in Paddington’s taut belly. “I have had a severe neurological injury,” I’d say — at this muffled juncture it was always neurological, the scariest word I could pull out of my hat — “please be very careful on the potholes.”

For even the most relaxed drivers, the city became like a minefield. The ones with shit shocks tried it only once. Then the same driver started coming every time. I checked the laminated photo ID displayed in the felted space between the car’s side windows. Mohammed Zandi. “What injury?” asked Mohammed, and I said, “Something like whiplash,” a lie much easier than explaining that the skin of my spinal cord had decided to imitate Swiss cheese, that the operations had only made the holes bigger, that I was leaking spinal fluid until I had none, no cushion around my brain, soft brain knocking against hard skull, no buffer, and every car ride felt like a prelude to an aneurysm.

Mohammed drove me to a Chinese acupuncturist who tried to save drops of neurological water with tiny silver needles. Mohammed had a big, white Mercedes with sporty tan leather seats. He also had a system. He would drive down Bourgeoys on the left side of the street, deftly avoiding what he termed the “roller ride” of the right, then he’d get onto Avenue des Frères, hazards flashing, ten kilometers an hour, impervious to the symphony of anti-Mohammedan beeping that had descended on the street. “Who care!” he’d cry, waving and nodding with glee at the honkers. The street took us to Avenue Girodet, a street freshly repaved by the city, and one we could take the whole way down, smooth as a magic carpet ride, a stretch like heaven.

After a couple of weeks, Mohammed wanted to know how I got home. “I can wait,” he said, pointing to the acupuncturist’s building. “Even wait hour. No problem.”

But the rides back were my mother’s job. Twice weekly, I’d endure the torture of a 1990 Hyundai Sonata, about as cushy as a medieval bear trap, containing a mum so nervous transporting me she’d expostulate Hebrew curses every time we encountered a crack in the pavement. “Sorry, sorry, Mamaleh, there is nothing I can do!” she’d wail, speeding up instead of slowing down. Even the black marble of Girodet was jagged in my mum’s tin jalopy, with its hard plastic interior and its filigree of flaking rust and its Tel Aviv bumper stickers and atmosphere of guilt so heavy I felt it on my eyelids.

After my last round of surgery, my mother retired. She had been the sort of travel agent who could get a passenger from Aeroport Dorval to Ben Gurion International via Warsaw via Frankfurt via Charles de Gaulle cheaper than any Internet outfit. She retired to take care of me. I had told her not to. Antoine was shooting another series of beer commercials, and those paid generously, and I still had some money to tide me over. The weekly housekeeper, Mathilde, had agreed to come in every day — she gave me lunch, she changed the bandages, and she cooked dinner when Antoine came home. It was all figured out. I had decided I would have no nurse. I would especially have no mother — who was an expert in highly vocalized sympathy pains — as nurse. Not a mirror I needed, thanks.

I told Mohammed lifts back would be excellent. When I let my mother know about the arrangement, she said: “Ooooo-kehhh,” in that singsong way that meant she was going to cry when she hung up and then call her sister in Haifa and grouse with outrage over how she’d retired for me, and I was so cold, and she thought we’d lie in bed and watch TV together, and — ai! — now she had such a migraine, because I just didn’t understand what it was like to have a daughter so sick; how much pain it gave her. If I knew, I’d be nicer.

-----

Mohammed loved the facade of the Bourgeoys house. He often commented on it when he dropped me off — the pristine white brick, the little conifers in window boxes. “But of everything, I like curtains the best,” he said. “Good for taxi driver to look at when waiting.” I was glad he noticed them, our living room blinds.

There were three leaded windows, and for a while we’d left them undressed. The living room was the site of much raucous interior decoration by Antoine and me, and we liked showing it off, even to pedestrians. It all started when Antoine found a stash of art gallery posters that his mother had collected when she was a teenager — Matisse, Picabia, Calder, a treasure trove — and we framed them all in shiny red lacquer. After that came an eighteenth-century sofa so large and so covered in cherry pink velvet the dealer called it a “settee fit for a harem.” We had bookshelves built all the way up a wall, and there was a shining brass Victorian fireman’s ladder for reaching the top shelves. The room felt like a fun house for heavy readers, and its winking refs continued into the powder room next to it, covered in a wallpaper that was like a collage of tabloid headlines from 1960s British sex scandals — WOULD-BE PM TAKES THE MICKEY!

I’d found that wall covering in a minuscule antique shop on Notre Dame Street. The store was owned by a frail woman who had the most transparent skin I’d ever seen and a real eye for vintage papers and fabrics. Antoine hated the paper at first, but after one prolonged use of the powder room he came around. “There are some situations,” I told him, “in which it’s good to have a little something to look at.”

“We are going to have some fucked up children with wallpapers like that!” he yowled in his weirdo English, pushing me up against the pink sofa, undoing my jeans from behind, mouth on my neck. It was going to be Beatrice for a girl, Maxim for a boy, and after we moved into Bourgeoys, they had a way of plopping into our conversations — out of nowhere, there’d be a baby sitting in the middle of a sentence.

The fabric for the living room windows came from the same shop. The owner remembered me. “You bought the sexy English wallpaper,” she said, tapping the side of her head with a skeletal finger. “I remember. So today, it’s for a baby’s room?” “Not yet,” I said smiling, thinking about the dizzy spells I’d been having; the headaches and need for afternoon naps. It was possible. “Let’s choose something fun anyway,” I told the lady. “Quelque chose un peu rigolo.”

She had me heave it out from under a man’s weight in other rolls. “A novelty textile from the turn of the century,” she said, the cuffs of her cardigan quivering as she unrolled the dusty bolt on the cutting table. “This fabric will improve your view of the city.” It was an irresistible pun — a material printed with a map of Montreal. “‘The City of Montreal Corporation, 1890,’” she read off the fabric’s corner. “Just look how so many streets didn’t exist yet.” The woman suggested I have Roman blinds made, the kind that fold up when you pull a string, instead of drapes. “When the blinds are down,” she said, “you will see the pattern of the map perfectly.”

-----

After coming out of the hospital from the last round of procedures, I wondered if my wallpaper comment didn’t comprise some sort of premonition. There are some situations in which it’s good to have a little something to look at. The doctors wheeled me from the medical tower, upright lab coats pushing some soft matter cocooned in blankets and morphine. On the yellow, day-lit street I saw amazing pedestrians flitting about, balancing takeout coffee and cell phones, talents they didn’t even know were talents. The surgeon was reminding my family that at home I should be furnished with an adjustable bed, “to facilitate mealtimes.” The electric bed should be set up on a ground floor. Near a window is nice. “She can try walking to do toilet,” said the surgeon. “But mainly she’ll need to be flat, for brain comfort. Her fluid will be highest in morning, lowest at night.”

My Bed-o-Matik arrived from a shop called Nuits Magiques. Antoine laughed heartily at the ugly, remote-controlled granny bed. “Next we will get one of those bathtubs with a door,” he howled. This ribbing was Antoine’s way. “You know, like they advertise on your Larry King.” Ho, ho, suddenly geriatric American television shows were “mine.” Antoine wasn’t prepared for this, me as mute blanket slug, nights radioactive with pain, him with his lifestyle flashing before his eyes.

Although he did know where to put the bed. He undid the stop latches of the bronze wheels that footed the cherry sofa and pushed the couch to the far end of the living room. The delivery men were instructed to position the Bed-o-Matik along the front wall, with its three windows and blinds of Montreal looking out onto Bourgeoys. The long, boxed radiator beneath the windows became my warm bedside table. Antoine had stacked it with fine, fresh notebooks of slippery European paper, and a second-hand War and Peace, an orange paperback brick sitting there like an old joke — good time to read War and Peace — and a new taunt — just try to lift it. “Nice books,” explained Antoine, “so your brain won’t rot.”

I couldn’t parse a printed page. I kept the blinds closed and looked at those instead. I could see the sun’s position through them. When it filtered through the Molson estate, warming the belly of my brace, Mathilde brought my lunch. When it illuminated the corner of Avenue des Pins and St-Denis, I had a hot drink and a change of plasters. When it lit past Papineau, entering the deep east end of the city — the blue ribbon of the St. Lawrence to the south — it meant the roaring waves of excruciation, the indescribable sensation of a brain sinking waterlessly, were closing in. Flatness won’t help you now, take the pills, ma petite, don’t be a martyr.

I loved my window map. I made friends with its antique lines the same way a kid blinking under cartoon sheets adopts the baby stalactites in a stucco ceiling or the knotted faces in wood paneling. I once even asked Antoine to turn the Bed-o-Matik around so that I could get a better view of the third window, with the fabric showing the fat blue vein of the St. Lawrence. “So you are finally finished with Bellefontaine?” he asked.

Bellefontaine was right in front of my eyes when I lay with my chin on my shoulder, head tilted toward the first window. In the mapmaking year 1890, this immense acreage belonged to the Sulpicians. Only one road — Avenue des Frères — fed into the Catholic green from the forests and farms to the west. I was fascinated by des Frères’ singularity in destination. There were no streets flanging out from it — no Girodet, no Bourgeoys. I imagined slow, pious feet walking in orderly single file, farm boys and sturdy sons of lumberjacks following the path. Every night, when Antoine came with the pills, when the pain was already curling everything in, I wanted to know, “Antoine, when will I be able to go to Bellefontaine?”

Antoine was surprised by the persistence of the question. Bellefontaine was entirely unromantic as dream location — just up the block from our house, and the site of a venerable bit of civic squabbling. The Sulpician land had long become home to a convent of Grey Nuns, and the nunnery had long been dwindling. Bellefontaine was so vast as to encompass its own forest, certainly too much for the fifty remaining sisters to keep up, yet they guarded their territory with fearsome determination. The nuns would not sell a cubit to the city or to the needy school board, and they would not allow the borough access. There was a tall, point-topped iron fence that protected Bellefontaine, miles of erect iron arrows dotted with hand-lettered Proprieté Privé signs. The fence swept all the way down to the top of Bourgeoys, where there was a hole, two bars missing, easy trespass.

Before I became ill, I liked to take my mother’s energetic spaniel there when the weather was warming or work felt too much. He would turn arabesques in the high grasses, and I’d trace out where 150 years ago there were hedged gardens. He’d sniff the edge of the forest while I sat under a cedar and looked at the stone motherhouse, the old seminary, with its grand western hallway of Palladian windows, a passage that must have been lonely for the echoes of steps. Sometimes I’d see a single nun. I’d smile and wave warmly. No trespassing sinner would wave so nicely and freely. Please share your huge empty land with me. The nun would usually smile back — a small, nodding smile through a six-foot window. You, OK, but don’t start telling the whole blessed borough. So we had an agreement.

Antoine, when will I be able to go? First he said, “Soon.” Then he said, “In a year.” Then he said, “One day.” As fall deepened into winter, I decided it was best to start keeping the blinds open.

-----

Mohammed understood my need for strict regularity. No matter how deeply snowed the streets, he was never late. When a new and unavoidable pothole emerged on des Frères, he’d warn me in advance. And when he dropped me off at home, he’d wait in the car until I was in the vestibule and waving through the pane of the front door. He’d signal back, and only then would he drive off, making a nimble U-turn out of the cul-de-sac.

One day in late January, I noticed he didn’t make the turn, but just kept on going straight, something, I then realized, I’d seen before. What was Mohammed doing at the northern edge of Bourgeoys? I puzzled lazily over this small mystery. There wasn’t much between the ending of the row houses and the fences of the nunnery. On the east side there was a quaint apartment building with a tiny, glass-fronted grocery store. A Middle Eastern family owned the nameless shop. Antoine, who is not exactly the king of political sensitivity, called the shop “Chez l’arabe.” He thought this very Euro. “Everyone in Paris says they are going ‘chez l’arabe,’ even if their local store isn’t owned by an Arab,” he once informed my mother. “Well, the owners here are definitely not Jews,” answered my mother, who added that no Jew would ever be so business-stupid as to open a shop at the closed side of a dead-end street. “After forty years in Quebec,” said Antoine, hand cupping wise-guy mouth, “your mother still has sand in her shoes.” My mother just nodded.

Across the street from Chez l’arabe was a park. I could see the park from my windows, a square with a few benches, almost a continuation of Bellefontaine outside its gates. I didn’t see Mohammed loitering around there, and he didn’t return to his car with groceries, either. It was a good half hour before he drove out of Bourgeoys. I deduced that he must have been visiting someone in the apartment building. A sick relative, perhaps. He made her sugary mint tea and served it in a glass sashed with a folded paper napkin.

Mohammed thought it hilarious that I had given it any thought. Chez l’arabe had that winter introduced a hot lunch bar. “Best lunch in the city,” he said. “Wife makes. Favourite food of all Atlas taxi drivers.” The shopkeepers brought out a few folding chairs every day at noon. “Homeland cooking,” continued Mohammed. “Lamb stew, chicken with celery, saffron rice ....” The owner’s wife would sometimes save the crispy bark from the bottom of the rice pot for Mohammed. “Like a rice cookie!” he said, and I replied, getting into the spirit of the lunch excitement, that it sounded delicious, and so unlike the Lebanese food from most takeout places, the pitas filled with shaved, greasy chicken.

We were at a red light, the merest blush through layers of window steam and frost and white shards blowing from a low, gurning sky. The weather was so treacherous that Mathilde had fished an old purple ski pole out of the basement for me to use instead of the tripod cane. The leather crackled as Mohammed twisted his shoulder around to see me better. “It’s not Lebanese food,’ he said, recognizing that I had his own nationality on the same plate. He was eyeing me in his back seat: a little girl and her bear cushion and silly pole. “It’s Persian food. Persian people. Like Atlas taxi drivers — all come to Canada in 1980s. Big immigration.”

Just the walk from Mohammed’s car into the clinic had me covered in white. “You very snow,” said the Chinese acupuncturist, as she helped me undress. She put the needles in, angled a heat lamp at my belly, and left the room. The room became arid. Persians, Persians, I thought, swallowing dryly. Who were the Persians? Enemies of the Jews in the Purim story. The seat of culture of the ancient Middle East. Invaded by Arabians. When? Dunno. Where? Not Iraq — we would have heard “Persian” on TV more often. Not Saudi Arabia, not Syria. I remember a neighbor with a baby stroller, the day we bought the house. The corner store is very good, family run — the stroller lady said it was a store owned by an older couple — they have these fantastic giant cashews — their daughter was a well-known journalist — they also have these huge flatbreads, bread the size of a tabletop! — she was twenty-five when she was imprisoned — they said she was a heretic or a national threat or something — she died on a hunger strike in jail — a horror! Can you imagine being the mother? Iran. It was Iran.

My rides with Mohammed ended abruptly. The acupuncturist said she wanted me to take a break from the needles. With the outings gone, my weekdays dribbled into each other, just time sludge. I recognized the weekends because I despised them. Mathilde was off, and Antoine was not ideal. He’d sequester himself in the TV room upstairs during the daytime and leave for parties at night — “Petite, where are my cufflinks?” “Do you think this scarf is too feminine?” — leaving me with extra painkillers. One Sunday he woke up at 3:30 in the afternoon, the sun already touching roofs. I had spent the day looking out the window, eating cookies from a box left on the radiator. “You spend all day looking out the window,” he said, emerging in an open housecoat. He announced this as if my other option, the one I wasn’t choosing, was going out flamenco dancing in a red dress. “Fuck, I think I’m hung over,” he said, holding his forehead. He was wearing no underwear. I had forgotten what he looked like naked, so fuzzy. On languorous Sunday mornings in bed, I used to call him mon gros nounours, my big bear. “Fuck, I need coffee. Do you know if Mathilde remembered to get the organic milk?”

Mathilde had been forgetting all sorts of things. Her mother in Quebec City was in hospital. Then her mother in Quebec City was in need of homecare. Soon enough, Mathilde went to Quebec City. Antoine left it to me to find her replacement. He was very concerned for our dinners. Antoine was a man who needed a proper plated supper, with an appetizer or a dessert and the right kind of wine. He said it wasn’t too much to ask. But it was. I couldn’t find new help, never mind the sort who could make choucroute the way Antoine liked and who knew which Brouilly was the good one.

Antoine was ordering us takeout and complaining every night that it was terrible. He’d put a box of glutinous beef in black bean sauce on my tray and then pretend he didn’t hear when I called him when it was done. “I’m watching a show for work,” he’d say, eventually clomping in with eyes rolling, a fourteen-year-old forced to take out the garbage. He had become fanatical about watching animal documentaries on HD. He was developing an over-arty Darwinian theme for the beer commercials. “Tigers ruling the jungle, the bloody survival of the fittest!” he explained, scratching the air. “Raaarrr!” Antoine did not save the leftovers from the takeout food. Something about day-old Chinese in the house offended his sensibilities.

-----

I sat up at 11:30 in the morning and counted. Eight row houses. Someone in the store will see my cane and will open the jingly-belled door. I will have ten dollars ready in my hand.

On your marks, get set .... I couldn’t get my socks on. Fuck the socks. I couldn’t locate a bra. Fuck the bra. I had about twelve minutes until my brain hit my occipital bone; I didn’t need supported breasts. Sweatshirt over brace, front zip, good. Hooded retard coat, snap, snap, done. Lowest hat on the coat tree, pom-pom, fine. Sweatpants riding up unshaven calves, lovely, lovely. And ladies and gentlemen, she’s off. Left, right, keep going, one door, two doors, three — slow and steady wins the race — breathe, in, out, you are fine, fine — she seems to be trying to speed up, ladies and gentlemen ....

Short-term memory loss is not uncommon among people with no brain suspension. I’d like to think that, sensorially deprived for so long, I walked into the shop and was lusciously overcome — swept away on a whirling mandala made of mastic candy and multicolored veils. But I can’t remember. I don’t know how I chose from the hot bar or whether I left my ten-dollar bill crumpled on the penny saucer. I remember taxi drivers. I think I cut the line.

I woke flat-backed on the Bed-o-Matik, toes purpling in sopping sneakers. A sectioned Styrofoam takeout box, the kind with the lid that pops up too easily, was balanced on my belly, rising and falling with my breath. I curled my neck to see. There was lamb stew with saffron rice and a galette of the prized pot crust scraped off the bottom. Plastic cutlery was rolled up in a flimsy paper napkin and taped to the top of the box. When I finished eating I sealed the box with the bit of tape, lifted my head an inch to aim, and tossed in the direction of the trash. Basket. Woo. I lay my head down again, thinking that it was the nicest food I’d had in a while, and that there was no way I could try that demented trip again.

The next day I was just out of the living room, on a mission to extract baked beans from a can, when the doorbell rang. I recognized the Styrofoam box before I recognized the woman. She kept her eyes down. I was wearing an Israel, Just Do It! T-shirt, a fun sporty bootleg purchased in Tel Aviv’s Carmel market in 1990. In the fresh air, I smelled dog droppings, a smell of promise in this neighborhood, the scent of thaw. “I can bring you lunch,” she said. “Every day at noon, if you like. You may alert me to any food preferences.” She looked up to see my reaction; for all she knew I was a mute, in addition to being housebound, and a supporter of gross human rights offenses. Just Do It!

“Of course I will pay you,” I said.

“Yes, yes, certainly. At the end of the week is fine,” she replied neatly, turning to leave. Under a forest green Loden-style coat, she wore a neat beige skirt suit, the sort of outfit the nuns wore on days off, except she had no head covering over her short hair. “Thank you,” I called out, a peculiarly Jewish brand of shame turning me yellow. A woman comes to my door as kindness incarnate and I’m fanning bills.

Samira’s lunches became an outsized part of my week. Antoine, too busy moping or primping for nights out at the clubs, didn’t ask about my lunches, and so I didn’t tell him. I liked having a secret. I’d watch Samira walking her quick, poised walk, as if she were running away from something, elegantly, every day at noon. My blinds were always pulled up then, but their bottom folds still formed a narrow town above the blue sky outside. Samira swam the St. Lawrence, hurled through the CP train yards and whizzed through the borough of Verdun to get to my house. Samira was maybe five years older than my mother. She had studied medicine in Tehran in the 1960s. She didn’t buy “something like whiplash,” but didn’t require anything more.

After a few weeks, I offered Samira extra money, “For coming all this way every day.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, placing the folded bill back on my lunch tray with her long, calm fingers. “It’s only a few doors down. The walk takes one minute.” It was a Tuesday. She had brought me cherry juice along with my meat and rice. The juice came in a stiff, shiny sack that you pierced with a thin, specially angled straw. She swiftly punctured the pouch and gently placed the juice near that day’s Styrofoam box. “I love the cherry juice,” I said, licking my lips like a child making cutesy on a TV commercial. “OK,” she said, and glided out, Verdun, CP train yards, then passing my mother charging across Bourgeoys in stretch pants, yoga mat under her arm. My mother’s steps reverberated through the house like a stampede.

“Where did you get that lunch?” she asked.

“The store on the corner.”

“You know they have some Israeli food there — labneh and zatar.”

“It’s Persian food.”

“Labneh is Israeli food.”

“No, it’s Middle Eastern food. Israelis eat it because their country is in the Middle East.”

“I grew up eating labneh.”

“Yes, and if the Jewish state had set up in shop in Sweden, you’d have grown up eating lingonberries.”

“What does Antoine call that store? Chez l’arabe?”

“They’re not Arabs, they’re Persians. Persians are not Arabs.”

“You know they were a very cultured people, the Persians. Anyway, all the same now. Are you finished eating?”

“Yes.”

“Give me — I’ll eat the rest,” said my mother. “Yoga was so hard today. I almost feel a migraine coming on. Still, your muscles feel so good after yoga, like your inner muscles.” My mother said she had class again on Thursday. “It’s just a few blocks away from here. An Israeli woman gives them in her basement.” A grain of rice flew out of her mouth and onto the wood floor. I stared at it. “I’ll come after,” she said. “I’ll bring your lunch.”

“It’s OK, they bring it.”

“Who? The Persians?”

“The Persians.”

“Tell them not to bother on Thursday. I’ll pick it up. Do I give them money, or do you give them in advance?”

-----

When I was seventeen, I brought a new boyfriend home. It was then possible to have ten new ones in a year, but Tim must have been special, because I hadn’t brought the others in to meet my mother. Tim said he was “half-Iranian”; maybe if he had used the term “half-Persian,” my mother wouldn’t have looked up from her milky Nescafé the next morning, eyes still slitted with sleep, and said, as if weather reporting:

“Mamaleh, it’s in their blood.”

“Who?”

“People like Tim.”

“What?”

“The hatred.”

This was the woman retrieving today’s saffron chicken. A woman who believed the Jews invented labneh. She’d be in the shop in her yoga pants, preening her nationality before all the Atlas drivers, in needless self-defense. It’s in their blood/What?/The hatred. She’d go into the store thinking Iran. Iran wants to nuclearize Israel to bone dust. I was trying to telepath her the message They left. Their daughter died in a fundamentalist jail. They never wore Just Do It! headscarves in bomb camp. They are from the seat of culture in the Middle East.

I had to keep my mother out of there. I fiddled with my bed controls. I flicked the side of the radiator over and over as if launching a fleet of miniature anti-mum fighter ships. I kicked off a slipper in frustration, and it flew across the living room and skidded under the cherry pink sofa. Perfect. I was having a tantrum about my lunch delivery, and now my foot was going to be cold. She made everything so complicated.

I ate in silence and my mother watched me. She brought this too-thick mango nectar instead of the cherry juice that came with the strong little straw. I told her I was too tired to talk. She soon left.

The next day, Samira didn’t come. For an hour, I looked out the windows for the neat suit carrying the white box. I saw people passing, walking their coffees and cell phones under high-floating clouds, never looking up at the white wonders pushing together, pulling apart, making and erasing holes of blue sky, nature always working so hard. I picked up the portable. The 411 operator said there was no listing for a store on Bourgeoys. “Are you sure it exists?” she asked. I dialed my mother’s number.

Mom, I have no lunch.

“I have barley soup and cheese bagels,” she said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” After I finished eating, my mother took the tray away. I watched her attractive, heart-shaped bottom as she walked to the kitchen. If I get out of this, I thought, that’s what mine will eventually look like.

“You know, she didn’t know you had a mother,” she said, clanking in the kitchen. “The woman at Chez l’arabe. She said she didn’t know about me.” I didn’t answer. My mother brought me tea, a bag mingling with mint in a glass with a rolled paper napkin tied around its middle.

“Did you tell them at the store that you were Israeli?” I asked.

“I told them I was also Middle Eastern,” she said.

“And?”

“And they wanted to know from where, so of course I told them we are Israeli.”

Samira didn’t come again. My mother brought my lunches, things she made, kugels and bourekas. I saw the birds arrive in Vs through holes in the doily clouds and alight in the park outside Bellefontaine. I saw people taking their coffees for a walk. I saw ladies with strollers. I saw Samira sitting on one of the park’s benches, outlined by a low disk of orange sun. I saw Samira wave warmly; I saw my mother wave back; I saw two women who had made an agreement. &