Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Page B

her arms on the top of the front seat, and told her what had happened.
    “I don’t know what to do, Aunt Amel!” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”
    “Oh, honey, don’t worry!” she said. “You’re fine. You’re perfectly normal.”
    And, when we got home, Mama and Wasen and I sat down at the kitchen table, and Mama talked to her in such a gentle way, her eyes searching Wasen’s eyes, being a mother to her at that moment. She explained that what had happened was a wonderful thing, the thing that makes a girl a woman and allows us to have babies. As I listened, I felt proud that I had a mother who was so knowledgeable and gentle. Yet I felt left out. Wasen was an adult now, and I was still a child.
    Later, my friends teased me that I just a little girl playing with Barbies. I went into my room, packed up all my dolls except for Basma, and gave them to Radya to take home to her little sisters. Then I took the Quran down from the highest shelf in our house, where the holy book is supposed to be kept, and put it in my lap. I didn’t exactly pray to get my period, I just recited some phrases I remembered from Bibi and wished. Not long afterward, I got my wish.
    I was the only girl I knew who was excited about getting her period, and certainly the only one who ran out of the bathroom upon discovering it and told her father. This sort of openness was unique to my family. A woman’s body is considered very private in Arab cultures and not to be discussed with men, even fathers.
    “Congratulations, you are a woman now, habibiti !” he said, using the arabic term for “my beloved” or “honey.”
    Mama was a biology teacher; she had an embryo in a jar in her high school classroom of a baby that had died in utero. She was also a natural artist. After I got my period that day, she took me into the kitchen and took out the pencil and white notebook she kept by the telephone. Mama always sketched when she was on the phone. She sketched on the margins of books as she read. Her hands were always drawing, always in motion. She drew graceful, lifelike nudes on the walls of her bathroom, then periodically painted over them over and drew more and painted over those. Curious, Haider left his Legos and followed us into the kitchen. She didn’t send him away. She began drawing sketches of men’s bodies and women’s bodies and explained how each worked. Art and science came together in her graceful diagrams with all the curving lines. There was an elegance inside me, inside all women, I never could have imagined. She drew a circle that was a woman’s egg and a small creature that was a man’s sperm, and said that when the sperm met the egg, a cell was formed. She drew pictures of cells dividing and of those cells dividing until finally a baby was created.
    “But how does the sperm find the egg?” I asked.
    “When a man and a woman love each other the way Baba and I do, they get married, and they start having sex, and the man puts the sperm into his wife,” she said, and she drew a diagram of this.
    I started giggling. My parents didn’t exactly talk about sex in front of us, but I somehow knew it was something secret that they did in private that made them feel good, a forbidden thrill that I would understand one day when I got married.
    “There’s no need to giggle about this word, Zainab,” Mama said. “Sex isn’t silly. It is a beautiful thing. It is a time when a man and a woman come very close to each other and produce beautiful children like you and Haider and your baby brother.”
    I remember Haider staring at her drawings through his long dark bangs. Haider was very smart for a second-grader. He was smart in the way my father was smart, in math and science. He didn’t say much unless he was arguing with me, but he didn’t just memorize new information, he processed it inside his brain until it made sense. I learned by observing and asking whatever questions popped into my mind until I was satisfied I had