Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri

we’d made tea and locked ourselves in, playing music while we talked through the urgent issues.
    Days earlier, we’d had a breakthrough. We’d been trying to find an activity that would require us to be out of the house every Friday afternoon. But what activity? We’d researched for days, and decided that computer classes were our best hope. Now we were racking our brains for ways to get our fathers to agree.
    “I don’t know if my father will go for something like this,” I said.
    “Your father would at least consider it, but there’s no way my father is going to agree.”
    “Maybe one of your brothers might convince him that it’s important, and that one of my brothers will be watching us. He’ll listen to one of his sons. I also think we should approach both fathers at the same time, and make each one believe that the other has already agreed.
    That’s the only way they’ll go for it.” \020”I don’t know, Norma. All they have to do is call each other and they’ll find out we’ve been lying.”
    “But what are the chances they’ll actually do that? I mean, if we can persuade your brother Suhal to talk to your father, then your father will think that Suhal has already made sure that my father approves of the idea.”
    For hours, we talked back and forth, on and on. Finally, Dalia said, discouraged, “Maybe it would be better if you just took the class by yourself
    “That won’t solve the problem. You want to be able to see Michael and Jehan too, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do.”
    We decided we’d call some schools on Monday to find out when their classes met. Then talk to Suhal. If we could lure him to the salon on his way home…
    “Do you really think we can pull this off?” Dalia asked.
    “We convinced them that we needed a computer for the salon, so we should be able to convince them that we need computer classes. We already have the computer, and they keep telling us that we wasted our money on it because we hardly use it.”
    It was the only solution we could come up with.
    “I hope it works.” Dalia was clearly worried.
    “It will, you’ll see. Now let’s go eat some mahalabiyya before my
    brothers gobble it all.” \020On Monday morning Dalia picked me up for work as usual. September in Amman is a strange mix of winter and summer. The early morning is cold, with occasional bursts of cool winds, the remnants of the freezing desert nights. During the day, the temperatures once again feel as if they are reaching their summer highs. It’s as if the transition from summer to winter sneaks in during the night, and the only evidence of its lurking presence is the one or two degree drop in afternoon
    temperatures. The cool winds are not strong enough to fight the heat of the summer sun until at least the end of October, leaving September full of sumptuous summer days.
    We bought two newspapers on our way to work that day, through which we searched for advertisements for computer classes and made a list of all the possibilities. We started by listing the ones nearest Abdoun, where Michael and Jehan lived.
    Our first hair appointment was not until ten-thirty. That gave us enough time to call these places before we began work. We hurried into the break room. I locked the door and switched off the salon lights so we wouldn’t be interrupted.
    “Do we have enough money saved up to pay for this out of the business account?” I asked. Dalia was our business and personal bookkeeper; she’d always had a better head for numbers than I had.
    “When I made the deposit last week, we had 7,253 dinars in the bank. That should be plenty,” she assured me.
    I felt urgency to get going on the calls.
    “Relax, ya butbouta, we still have time. Enjoy your coffee and smoke a cigarette, it’ll calm you down a little,” she said and tossed a cigarette my way. Butbouta literally means duck, but used as slang it implies that someone is acting hyper in a cute way. Which I was. But we had never planned