Dearborn

Stories

Ghassan Zeineddine

This is a collection of stories set in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan — the first Arab-majority city in the United States.

Roughly 55% of the city’s residents are of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. In the neighborhoods, a Palestinian falafel shop sits across the street from an Iraqi restaurant and an Lebanese-owned hair salon. Fragrant coffee is brewed with cardamom seeds. The Walgreen’s sign displays Arabic alongside the English. It’s exactly what the US is meant to be: a home that embodies and welcomes multiple cultures at once.

Author Ghassan Zeineddine is Lebanese-American, and he knows the people who populate his ten lightly connected stories. The quiet touchpoints reflect neighborhood life. Two friends routinely eat together in a burger joint. Later, that same restaurant is casually mentioned by another character in a different story. It creates at a sense that we readers are in the neighborhood, too.

Zeineddine also paints with the entire emotional palette. Some of the characters will break your heart: an ambitious DJ who single-mindedly chases success, a desperately lonely woman who goes to tragic lengths for companionship, innocent people run afoul of ICE. But there’s humor, too. Petty crooks cook up ridiculous schemes that work… for a while. In a fable called ‘Money Chickens,’ a father teaches his son how to hide ill-gotten cash inside frozen chickens.

In the beautiful, melancholy ‘Marseille,’ the narrator is Madame Ayda, a 100-year-old chain-smoker who survived the Titanic sinking. Sitting in her living room during a snowstorm, she tells a journalist about her childhood in Lebanon, her husband, and her eventual arrival in New York in 1912. It’s a poignant love story, travelogue, and immigrant tale, all deftly concentrated into seventeen pages. It’s complete as-is, but you’ll yearn to have this woman’s story expanded to a 600-page novel simply to spend more time with her.

A comedic standout is ‘Speedoman.’ Every Saturday, five married couples go to the Ford Community Center where the wives gather in the corner of the swimming pool — garbed in burkinis — while their husbands soak in the Jacuzzi. Gossip is the order of the day. One weekend, a stranger they dub ‘Speedoman’ disrupts their routine with hilarious results.

He’s tall and broad shouldered, more than anyone should be in winter. He wears a pink robe and carries a book. All intriguing details. Then he drops his robe to reveal his bathing suit: a sky-blue Speedo with an image of a Lebanese cedar tree on the butt.

The husbands are in a tizzy; they think he looks like a porn star, although they’ve never actually see porn. How dare he strut like that! They worry he’ll get too close to their wives. The ladies, however, are enthralled. The way he glides through the water, the cedar tree, and most tantalizing, the book on his chair. What, they wonder, is he reading?

Everyone’s fascination with Speedoman continues for weeks. This hairy, swarthy stranger attains levels of suave irressistability that are possible only when someone is the object of a crush from a distance. Both the husbands and wives are smitten. And the denouement of the story is both very sweet and quite funny.

Though these stories are distinctly about Arab people, they’re also very American. Set them in any other immigrant community in the US and the precise details would change, but much could remain the same: family bonds, the desire for a good life, the merging of old-world customs with the new to create something novel. That’s the heart of these stories — and what it means to be American.

‘The tea tastes of Lebanon,’ Baba said, slurping the warm liquid. He licked the drops off his mustache. Years later, my wife would make me aware of my own slurping sounds when I sipped coffee or tea. I wasn’t even conscious of them until she gently pointed it out. From then on, I would slurp my hot drinks only when no one else was around, not wanting to bother anyone but also not wanting to lose the memory of Baba’s habit, which made whatever he was drinking seem extraordinarily delicious.’ — Ghassan Zeineddineë

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