I worked in what was known as “food processing” on every fourth Thursday night: in the basement of the co-op, I, along with the other members of my “squad,” bagged and weighed and priced dry goods and olives; we cut and wrapped and priced a variety of cheeses, although I tended to avoid the cheese, as it required some minimum of skill. In general the work was simple: the boxes of bulk food were organized on shelves in the basement. If dried mangoes were needed upstairs, you found the ten-pound box, opened it with a box cutter, and portioned the fruit into small plastic bags you then tied and weighed on a scale that printed the individual labels. Then you took the food upstairs and restocked the shelves on the shopping floor. You were required to wear an apron and a bandanna in addition to your plastic gloves. Open-toed shoes were prohibited, but I’d never owned a pair of open-toed shoes. For better or for worse, most people were sociable and voluble, like the woman talking now — this seemed to make the shift go faster for my comrades; for me, the talk often slowed time down.
“It just wasn’t the right learning environment for Lucas. The teachers really tried and we believe in public education, but a lot of the other kids were just out of control.”
The man working on bagging chamomile tea immediately beside her felt obliged to say, “Right.”
“Obviously it’s not the kids’ fault. A lot of them are coming from homes—” The woman who was helping me bag mangoes, Noor, with whom I was friendly, tensed up a little in expectation of an offensive predicate.
“—well, they’re drinking soda and eating junk food all the time. Of course they can’t concentrate.”
“Right,” the man said, maybe relieved her sentence hadn’t taken a turn for the worse.
“They’re on some kind of chemical high. Their food is full of who knows what hormones. They can’t be expected to learn or respect other kids who are trying to learn.”
“Sure.”
It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I’d grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were — for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault — compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism — ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc. — in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material — feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice — as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.
Noor interrupted my reverie of disdain: “Remind me, do you have kids?”
“No.” Noor was bagging the mangoes. I was tying, weighing, and labeling the bags.
“I couldn’t,” she said, “deal with navigating New York schools.”
How would Alex, or Alex and I, deal with it, if we reproduced? If I had enough money for private school, was I sure I wouldn’t be tempted? I was eager to change the subject. “Did you eat junk food growing up?”
“Never in the house, but with my friends — all the time.”
“What did you eat at home?” Noor was from Boston and was in graduate school now, I’d learned on our previous shift.
“Lebanese food. My dad did all the cooking.”
“He was from Lebanon?”
“Beirut. Left during the civil war.”
“And your mom?” I realized I’d been labeling the mangoes incorrectly, had entered the wrong code into the electric scale. I had to do them over.
“She was from Boston. My family on that side is Russian, Jewish, but I never knew those grandparents.”
“My girlfriend’s mom is Lebanese,” I said for some reason, perhaps to distance myself mentally from Alex and the topic of fertilization. Alena’s mother was also from Beirut, but who knew if Alena was my girlfriend. “Do you still have a lot of family in Lebanon?”
She paused. “It’s a long story. I have a kind of complicated family.”
“We have more than two hours,” I exclaimed with mock desperation, but, because Noor looked upset, or at least grave, I moved on quickly: “Nobody in my family could cook, so we—” But then she did begin to speak, both of us keeping our eyes on our work. She spoke quietly enough that we wouldn’t be overheard by the others, who were now discussing the merits of Quaker pedagogy.
My dad died three years ago from a heart attack and his family is largely still in Beirut, Noor said, although not in these words. I’ve always thought of myself as connected to them, even though I barely saw them growing up. My dad had a really strong sense of Lebanese identity and I did too. They tried to raise me bilingually. He was a very secular Muslim, as much a Marxist as anything else, and one of his parents had been Christian, but in the U.S., maybe as a reaction against all the racism and ignorance, he decided to join a mosque in Boston — really it was more of a cultural center than a mosque. I grew up going there a lot and developed a sense of difference from most of the kids I knew. In high school and then in college I was active in Middle Eastern political causes and majored in Middle Eastern studies at BU. I was involved with the BU Arab Student Association, although that could be complicated sometimes since my mom’s family was Jewish, even if not at all religious, and regardless, it was often tense with my mom because she felt I was only interested in my dad’s history, had identified with him at her expense. Anyway, about six months after my dad died, my mom started dating—dating was the word she used — an old friend of hers named Stephen, some kind of physicist at MIT, who I’d always known a little because we’d played with his kids occasionally when we were younger; he’d since been divorced. My mom told my brother and me about Stephen at dinner one night, said she knew it was going to be hard for us, but hoped we’d understand. We said we understood, although we were both weirded out, and my brother in particular was furious it was so soon, although I think he only expressed his fury to me.
I wasn’t living at home, Noor said, I was a senior in college and lived with friends, so I didn’t see Stephen very much, but my brother said Stephen was coming around all the time, and my brother and I were both pretty upset at the speed. We were both suspicious — how could we not be? — that their romance had a history, that it must have started when my dad was still alive. I told my brother that the relationship was probably just mom’s way of trying to deal with her grief, probably wasn’t serious, but every time I talked to my mom she seemed to be with Stephen. Well, about a year after my dad died I was planning to go to Egypt for three months because I’d been offered this fellowship at the American University in Cairo for recent Arab-American graduates, and I was also planning to visit Lebanon. A few days before my flight my mom called me and asked if I could meet her for lunch. It was immediately obvious to me from her tone that she was going to tell me she was remarrying, I knew it right away, and I knew she wanted to tell me in a public place because she thought it might temper my initial reaction, and then she would ask that I help her tell my brother, who was going to freak. I was surprised that I wasn’t angry, maybe in part because my parents had so clearly been estranged in the last years of their marriage, but I felt sad and a little sick and we met at some overpriced French place in the Back Bay.