Page 127 - A Woman Is No Man

Deya

Winter 2008

Deya straightened in her seat and stared at her aunt. “You’ve never been

married?”
“No.”
“And you haven’t been in Palestine?”
Sarah shook her head.
“But why would Teta lie about that?”
Sarah looked away for the first time since they’d sat down together. “I
think she was trying to cover up the shame of what I’d done,” she said.

“What did you do?”
“I ran away from home before my mother could marry me off. That’s
why I never visited all these years. That’s why I had to reach out to you in
secret.”
Deya stared at her in disbelief. “You ran away from Teta’s house?
How?”

“I waited until the last day of senior year, and then I left. I got on the
school bus and never came back. I’ve been living on my own ever since.”
“But you were so young! I could barely come to the city today without a
panic attack. How did you make it?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Sarah said. “But I managed. I stayed with a friend for
the first year until I could afford to live on my own. Then I rented a small
apartment in Staten Island. I worked two jobs to pay for community college

and changed my last name so no one could find me.”
“But what if they had found you?” Deya said. “Weren’t you afraid of
what they would’ve done?”
“I was,” Sarah said. “But I was afraid of other things, too. Fear has a
way of putting things in perspective.”

Deya shifted in her seat, trying to absorb the image of her aunt running
away from Fareeda’s house at eighteen, her own age. It was unthinkable.