Barbara Henning

 

Protestants and Catholics 

In a backyard in Warren, Michigan, I’m sitting at a picnic table eating potato chips when a young girl arrives maybe seventeen in a super tiny mini skirt with a diamond belly button ring and a boyfriend carrying a big boom box. Surprise. A stripper for the father’s 60th. The groom’s family in Baghdad gives a dowry of a million dinars to the newly wed couple. The skinny belly button girl wraps her legs around the birthday boy’s face and the men put money in her panties. The wives sit around smiling and drinking. You dance without your number. The price for brides in Iraq went down as the death toll went up. Watch me in this number wrap around another. The light from the Wolverine game on the overhead television screen cuts across the lawn. Someone whispers—Get the girl’s number, and we’ll try to reform her. After the war, female teachers in Iraq got a raise and the marriage rates doubled. On the front porch, sitting with the children, I watch the couple drive off counting their money and heading over to another backyard party. We’re seven boom legs crossed and criss-crossed and that makes a point. Life in an occupied city is not kind. Hand dust glass talk of sliding in the air. “The problem is you’re a Hazaras and I’m a Pushtan.” I’m still on the porch when my phone rings and it’s my friend sloshed, depressed, and thinking about making love. The problem with you, he says, is you’re too literary. Glitter-haired girls, twirled gold scarves, belly-button rings. On the way home my passenger (who wouldn’t let me shave my legs when I was fourteen) says, “You don’t know everything about him. When we went out dancing, he would get up on the stage and dance with the hula girls. And you,” she points her finger at me, “you used to take your clothes off in art classes for money.” Then we decided to get married.