Free American Taliban by Pearl Abraham

skirmish with Katie, or whatever it was. He’s a resilient, smart boy. He’ll make you proud. He’s already making you proud. Look at all the scholarship he’s taking on.
    Oh, I know, Barbara mourned, and laughed, and laughed at herself for mourning and laughing. He’s wonderful and wonderfully smart. My baby.
    BETWEEN THE THREE OF THEM , even with John on crutches, and with Barbara serving as the lightweight brigade, they worked quickly, passing one another in the corridor, carrying on a conversation in passing: Barbara carried John’s laptop and Harman/Kardon sticks; the pillows and quilts; she left the box of books and the suitcase of clothes for Bill; she picked up a still-unopened white box, noted its nonheft and return address, wondered aloud as to its contents, and pronounced the strange name—Al-ma-Ha-laat, John corrected, meaning the store, he explained. I ordered some books and a dervish CD.
    Dervishes, Barbara thought. Long-haired gurus’d had their moment in the sixties and seventies, when she was coming of age, but were they making a comeback now, in this new millennium, this moneyed age in which Republicans were actually, unbelievably, looking good again to American voters? Perhaps it was just John beingJohn, reacting in counterpoint. He found her socially conventional, he once said, and convention is an enemy to art and love.
    According to whom? she’d asked.
    According to—um—I don’t remember.
    Wait until you’re my age, Barbara said, and judge me then. At your age your dad and I were revolutionaries. In ’67, we traveled down to D.C. together. We marched.
    Bill brought in the cooler of drinks and food, opened a Coke, and stepped out the back door onto the patio. Not bad, he said.
    The doorbell rang. John’s first visitor: Noor, with a brown pita wrapped in paper and tied with bakery string. From her book bag, she withdrew a small bag of coarse salt.
    It’s a Middle Eastern custom, she explained. Bread and salt, for a new home.
    Lovely, Bill said, introducing himself.
    Barbara found a pretty dish to use as a saltcellar. From the cooler, she brought out cheese and a bottle of champagne and went to find glasses.
    I can’t stay, Noor said. But I wanted to ask you, John, when’s your first class?
    Monday afternoon.
    Shall I meet you at the Sharia after? We can go to a little place I know nearby.
    WHEN HE ARRIVED for his first day of classes, Khaled was waiting for him out front, smoking a cigarette.
    I appreciate this, John said.
    Khaled shrugged and squashed his cigarette with the toe of his black Pumas. He wore Levi’s and a bomber jacket, but his shirt was a tunic, Pakistani style.
    He took one of John’s crutches, and they made their way up the stairs slowly.
    The letters carved into the stone above our heads, Khaled explained, taking the tone of tour guide, spell the Ten Commandments in Hebrew: I AM GOD, DON’T STEAL, DON’T LIE, DON’T FORNICATE , and so on. Jews it seems need their codes carved in stone. The rest of us just remember them.
    Khaled had a weird way of drawing out his words, as if he didn’t care that much whether he said them or not, which John found interesting, though the bit of anti-Semitism was not. But maybe this wasthe usual thing people say about each other, and he was just overreacting in an overly politically correct American way.
    There were fourteen kids in his class, all male, between about seventeen and twenty-one, he guessed. Most of them wore some sort of head covering, in white or color. John wasn’t sure whether it was for religion or style. And though they all spoke English and appeared American, they also didn’t seem fully American; they were like some kind of hybrid. Maybe it had something to do with Brooklyn. They were urban, but not D.C.-style urban.
    They eyed him warily and kept their distance in an obvious way intended to make him feel it. When he took a seat in the desk nearest Khaled, several nearby already seated students abandoned their