Sandwiched in Between

It doesn’t feel like the Thanksgiving season until I have a Gobbler hoagie from Wawa clutched in my hands. Forget the autumn leaves, the brisk weather, or the occasional odd decorations. It’s that hoagie. Wrapped in crinkly white paper that quickly becomes translucent the longer the hot sandwich sits inside, it is a glorious mash-up of the staples found at my family’s Thanksgiving dinner table. Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce... all crammed within a roll that is totally unprepared for its glorious contents. It’s like the bread goes into shock, just totally falling apart. The Gobbler looks nothing like the advertisements plastered around Philadelphia, on buses, the SEPTA trains, on billboards…

“You’re seriously going to eat that?” Amina asks as we sit down on a bench in Rittenhouse Square, a fancy park that just beckons you to have a picnic in it. Lush gardens with stone barriers perfect for perching on top of, and a fountain so old it has a landmark sign on it, the mosaic tiles lining the bottom glittering in the afternoon autumn sun. The square is bustling, the weather surprisingly warm. People are out and about with their dogs, and young couples with little toddling kids who dash after one another are laughing as they jet across large patches of grass.

The sandwich is warm in my lap, the paper gone clear after walking several city blocks to get to the park from Broad Street. I unwrap it carefully, the contents precious, and glance over at Amina’s plastic bag.

“You could have gotten one too, you know.” I smile at her. “I mean, who gets a salad at Wawa?”

“I get the salads at Wawa,” she playfully snaps, her nose crinkling in a way that drives me crazy. Her dark brown eyes flit down to the sandwich in my lap and back up at me, her winged eyeliner making her gaze feel even more penetrating. She smiles and my heart flutters. “That paper is gross. How do you have gravy on your jeans already? Look at your hand!” She grabs my hand and then tosses it back at me, like it’s a filthy rag. “It’s sweaty! From carrying a sandwich!”

I take a bite and audibly moan. The bread is soggy, but it’s soggy with gravy, and the flavors just explode in my mouth.

“Sorry, I can’t hear you over all this joy.”

“You don’t make any sense,” Amina scoffs, taking her salad out of her bag. It’s prepackaged neatly, and she peels off the plastic, mixing everything together. It’s some kale and quinoa thing. She aggressively points at me with her plastic fork in an exaggerated way, to the point that her thick black curly hair jostles around her shoulders. “You are literally having everything in that sandwich at your parents’ house in, like, five hours. And at mine in four.”

“It gets me psyched. This sandwich is the hype man for Thanksgiving dinner.” I take another bite and have to mentally force my body not to shudder. This sandwich is everything. A little kid hustles by us, chasing a tennis ball, his tiny hands outstretched in front of him the entire way. “Besides, does your family even do Thanksgiving like this? The stuffing and all that?”

“What? Of course!” She laughs. “Are you expecting turkey moussaka or something? Grape leaves?”

“No, I… wait, what’s moussaka?” I ask, taking another bite of my sandwich.

I glance back at Amina when she doesn’t answer, and her face is turned up in worry, looking straight ahead. It’s the kind of expression she gets during tests in pre-calc, or when graded papers are getting passed out. Forward, eyes intense, mouth a straight line.

“Hey.” I nudge her, and she shakes her head quickly, looking back to me, a soft smile back on her face. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” she mutters. “Nowhere, I just… ” She stops and exhales. “You told them I’m coming, right?”

“What?” I scoff. “Of course. Right after we visit your place. Pretty sure my mom would flip out if I brought surprise company; she takes Thanksgiving very seriously.”

Me and Amina had only been dating since September, just these past three months after a summer of flirting through Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs. But I feel like I’ve known her forever. We’ve been in classes together since freshman year at Central. So, maybe not forever, but three years, most definitely.

“You know I can’t wait for you to meet everyone,” I continue, my heart feeling full. “I talk about you, like, all the time.”

“It’s just… ” She puts her fork down and sets her salad aside. “Look, Mike, I don’t want to make this weird, but… ”

“What is it?”

“It’s just, have you ever brought home… someone... like me?”

I shift around on the bench and look at her, and she stares down into her lap, which is significantly less gravy-stained than mine. She’s wearing tight black jeans and vintage boots that come up halfway between her knee and her foot. I reach out and take one of her hands, an array of bracelets jingling as I bring it closer to me, thick silver rings on several of her fingers.

“What do you mean, someone like you?” I ask, running my fingers over the top of her hand. She pulls her hand away slowly and sighs.

“Michael, you know what I mean,” she says, shaking her head. “Look, I know your exes. Okay? Becca? Anne? And your parents, your family and all... they’re sweet from everything you’ve told me, but you know, they’re — ”

“White,” I say, nodding slowly at first and then a bit faster. “They’re white. This again? That’s what this is about?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just — ”

“I’m not white,” I say. “They don’t have any problems with me at Thanksgiving. Or Easter. Or Christmas!”

“Come on, that’s not even remotely what I’m saying here, and you know that.” She shifts around on the bench to look at me, and I realize we’re not really sitting next to each other anymore, but across from each other.

“It’s just... this feels silly,” I mutter. “We keep circling back to this. Why?”

“Because we should talk about it,” Amina presses. “All your exes were white girls. This is new.” She points at herself and at me. “Do they know?”

“It’s not like I told them, ‘Hey, I’m dating Becca, she’s a white girl’ when I was seeing her. What’s the difference now that I’m dating a brown girl? Did you warn your parents about me?”

“I didn’t say you had to warn your parents. And no, I didn’t, though maybe I should have.”

“What’s the difference between all that and saying I’m dating someone like me? They’ve seen photos of us!”

“Like you — ” She starts and stops, taking a breath. “The difference is that they were white girls, and I’m not.”

“I’m not white either!” I exclaim, heat brewing up in my chest. “And my parents are the last people in the world who are going to be racist. Would they adopt some ambiguously brown Middle Eastern kid if they were racist? Heck, my sister is from Honduras.”

My family is like a Saturday morning television special, one of those old ones you can laugh at on YouTube, in grainy washed out colors with some powerful lesson about acceptance. The more you know.

“I’m just saying.” Amina says, getting up, and I can hear her patience fading. “You should maybe tell — ”

“There’s nothing to tell! We don’t even see color in my family, you know?”

There’s a beat, a bit of silence in the air as Amina glares at me.

“Wow.” She breaks the quiet first.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing.” She shrugs. “It must be nice.”

“Can we… ” I reach out and take her hand, but she shirks away from it. My chest tightens. “Look, can we just drop this? I hate talking about this. It’s the only thing we seem to fight about, and I don’t want to fight.”

“It’s a privilege to be able to drop things like this in the first place,” Amina says, sitting back on the bench. “Not everyone can. Most people have to fight because of what they look like. Who they are.” She grabs the little plastic container with her barely eaten salad and closes it up, tossing it back in the Wawa bag.

“Wait, where — ” I start.

“I’m going to go help my parents get things ready,” she says, standing back up. “Just come meet me at my house at, like, four, and then we’ll head to see your... colorblind parents after.”

“I’m — I’m sorry I messed up our lunch date.” I reach out for her hands, and this time, she takes one of mine. “I just, what do I say? To make it better? I have no idea what to say to any of this.”

She reaches out and pats me on the face.

“You don’t have to say anything. You just have to shut up and listen more often.”

—

Amina’s family lives in the quiet Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia, where smattered among the charming row houses you can spot the occasional mansion tucked away in the brick. I’ve strolled by her home what feels like dozens of times, walking her there from class or after we’ve gone out, coming back from the movies or rummaging for used books in Giovanni’s Room, my favorite bookshop-slash-nonprofit thrift store.

I look up at her house, dark copper stars hammered into the front, like most older Philly homes. It’s a wide row house, a dark red brick that casts a strong contrast to the lighter brick houses attached to it, with dark green shutters on the windows and a bright yellow door. They’re empty now, but over the summer, the window boxes on the bottom two windows overflowed with bright wildflowers. It’s how we started talking, even after years of being in school together, after she saw me leaving comments on her Instagram photos of them. I keep trying to think of a more romantic story for how we met but haven’t quite come up with anything yet.

I know there’s a yard. The house has a thin iron gate off to the side, in a rounded arch that breaks the seam between her house and her neighbors’. I can always make out a spot of green beyond the brick walled alley. But what it looks like inside the house? With her family? No idea.

I take a step up on the stoop and ring the doorbell, a soft chime echoing from someplace inside. That’s when I notice all the voices talking inside, blending together as footsteps sound off, making their way to the door. It swings open, and there’s Amina. She smiles.

“There you are,” she says, motioning for me to come in. I lean in for a kiss and she backs away quickly, looking into her house and then back at me. “What are you doing? None of that. No way. Get in here.”

I walk in, and the home is an explosion of color. Deep reds and golds are everywhere, and the air is heavy with delicious smells. Her family has furniture that doesn’t look like it’s been put together hastily after an Ikea visit, the “extra pieces” buried in a kitchen drawer.

“I thought you told them about me?” I ask as Amina hurries ahead of me, leading the way. Toward the back of the house is what looks like the kitchen, with a big sprawling table topped with piles of food.

“I did. Not everyone can make out in front of their family.”

“I wasn’t trying to — ” I start, but she looks back at me in a way that tells me the conversation is over. “Fine, fine.”

Amina’s family is already gathered around their kitchen table, which is this gorgeous piece of furniture. Everything in here feels older than me, and it’s as though the sentimentality of every object is just pulsing in waves. There’s history laced into every object. A cabinet with large glass doors, full of little pieces of kitsch. Couches covered in sheets of plastic, like they’re too valuable to sit on. Paintings on the wall that are actual paintings, not prints.

“So... this is Michael,” Amina says, and I turn back to the kitchen table and watch as several conversations in progress stop, multiple sets of eyes looking at me expectantly.

“Hi,” I say, waving awkwardly. There are two seats next to each other at a corner of the large dining table, and we walk over there. I sit, and the plate in front of me looks like it’s seen some things, old with a few chips here and there, a fading illustration of some birds in the center.

“They were my great-grandmother’s.” I glance back up at... Amina’s mother, I think, across the table, who nods at my plate and then looks around the table. “We bring them out for holidays and family gatherings.”

“That’s amazing,” I say, looking back at the dish. “I don’t think anything in our house isn’t from Target or Ikea.” There’s some... strange swirling feeling inside my chest that I can’t quite pin down. I shake it off.

“This is my mother,” Amina says, my assumption correct, and then she gestures around the rest of the table. “My father, my sister Nalia, my uncle… ” She continues talking, nodding to everyone, and I just can’t help it.

This. This is the sort of family people expect me to have when they meet me. The sort I sometimes think about, when I’m alone and everything is quiet. Long bus rides. When I can’t sleep at night or wake up too early, staring at the ceiling. And it’s not that I want this. It’s that I feel like I’m supposed to have it. And I don’t. And it’s a weird, impossible emotion to pin down.

Now I recognize that strange swirling feeling.

And why me and Amina keep having the same conversation.

And I really want to get out of here.

“So, Michael, where are you from?” one of Amina’s aunts asks.

I glance over at Amina, and she immediately looks embarrassed.

“I mean, I'm from here. I was born in Philadelphia,” I start, but I know what she’s asking. And it’s not like this is a bad thing; it’s just hard sometimes. “But I’m Palestinian.”

Amina’s entire family erupt in oohs, looking at one another around the table.

“When did your family move here?”

“Are they first generation? Second?”

“From where in — ”

“That’s, um… ” I look to Amina again, and she’s physically wincing. “That’s a little more complicated, I guess? I’m adopted? I don’t know that much. Anything, really.”

There’s an awkward beat of silence, and I look around the table for something, anything, to talk about other than this. It’s never easy. Being… this, on the outside, but feeling entirely different inside. I’m not the person people see, and I never know how to talk about it.

And then I see it.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing at something on the table.

“Oh, that’s my pumpkin and sweet potato moussaka!” Amina’s aunt exclaims. I look at Amina, trying so hard not to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then she looks at the moussaka. “Shut up.”

—

We’re getting closer to Fitler Square, the neighborhood my family calls home. It’s a bit like Amina’s neighborhood in Queen Village — row houses and the like, the occasional stone building tucked in between, with large towering walls and big windows.

I love my little neighborhood. Really, that’s what Philadelphia is: a bunch of little neighborhoods, scattered all about. There are tons of tiny side streets that are barely half a block in length, tucked away and hidden between blocks, with streets built in the 1800s that cars can’t drive down, and homes so skinny I have no idea how they fit furniture through the doors.

Well, I do know. They shop at Ikea. Like my parents.

“Have I mentioned that I’m sorry?” Amina asks as my parents’ tucked-away side street comes into view.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I’m used to all that.”

“I know but... I kind of thought my family wouldn’t be like that?”

“Did you warn them about me?” I ask, grinning.

She smacks my arm.

“Those kinds of questions always come up. It’s not a big deal.” I sigh. Though it kind of feels like it is, I really don’t want to dig into that. It’s my weight.

We turn the corner onto my parents’ side street, Rainey Court, a dead-end street that is hidden away in the middle of a small city block. There are a handful of homes on this street that look out of place — a large white mansion with an obnoxious gate for one, which is right across the street from my parents’ simple row house. Amina scowls at the eyesore, and as we approach my family home, she stops me in the cobblestone street.

“Hey.” She smiles and pulls me forward. She kisses me, and it’s like all the tension from those questions in my back and shoulders flows out of me, my entire body sighing. She pulls back and we both exhale, and if I could blush, I would.

“I promise. They’ll be cool,” I say, hopping up the stoop to the front door. I jiggle the doorknob, but it’s locked, so I wrestle for my keys in my pocket.

Before I can put the key in the lock, the door swings open.

It’s my mom, blonde hair and all smiles, her bright blue eyes wide and welcoming. They flit over to Amina, and her face turns up in an expression like she might cry.

“Mom — ” I start.

“Aminaaaaaaa!” my mom says, skirting past me and down the three little steps to the sidewalk, her arms wide open. She hugs Amina, who is staring at me wide-eyed, like she has no idea what to do. My mom lets her go and holds her shoulders. “We’ve heard so much about you. Welcome to our home.”

“Th-thanks?” Amina says, in almost a question.

“I’m here too, Mom,” I mutter as she walks right by me again, leading Amina into the house.

“Oh shush, you,” she says, shooing me away as the two of them go inside first. I follow quickly and close the door behind us.

My mom is smiling like someone who is hiding something, someone with a surprise. She turns to our dining room, which you can see right from the front of the house, just a little past the small living room. “Michael told us all about you, Amina, and well, his father and I wanted you to be comfortable.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Becker,” Amina says, still glancing back at me.

The table is already set, my father sitting at the very end. Some of my cousins sit around the living room, plates in front of them, gossiping about who knows what, while my aunts and uncles sit at the table with my dad. I pull out a seat for Amina and she sits down, and I settle in next to her.

“What can I get you?” my mom asks, clasping her hands together, so eager to please.

“Mom, it’s okay, we’ll just pick at stuff?” I look at Amina, who nods. “We ate a bit at her parents’ house.”

“Well, I hope you have room for dessert.” She smiles and hustles over to the kitchen, returning quickly with an apple pie.

“Oh! And how could I forget!” She dashes off again, and I look over at my dad, who shrugs and shakes his head.

“School okay?” he asks.

“Yup.” I nod.

“We have hummus!” my mom exclaims, placing a platter down on the table, using the end of it to scoot the apple pie out of the way. And there it is, an impossibly large spread of store-bought hummus, a little dish full of olives, and some poorly chopped-up pita bread.

My heart sinks, and I glance over at Amina. Her mouth is open just a little, and she looks like she’s trying to figure out what to say.

She looks at me, and I shrug. I mean, what am I supposed to do?

“Hey — ” I start.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Becker, I, uh, have to make a phone call,” Amina says before I finish anything. She flashes me a glare and walks out of the house, closing the front door behind her.

“I told you that was going overboard,” my dad grumbles, shaking his head.

“Hummus? Seriously?!” I look from my mom to my dad, and my mother has a deer-in-headlights look on her face, like she can’t process what just happened. I get up and walk toward the door. “I’ll be right back.”

Amina is standing in the middle of the tiny street, looking down at her phone, and catches me as I close the front door.

“Told them about me?” she asks, shoving her phone in her pocket. “That’s what they think?”

“Amina, they didn’t mean anything — ”

“My family didn’t have some spread for what they assume your white family likes. A green bean casserole or, like, a platter from Panera Bread.”

“That’s not — ” I close my mouth and snort, trying so hard not to laugh.

“You think this is funny?” Amina asks.

“Come on, that Panera Bread joke was hilarious. You’re funny.”

Amina digs the toe of her boot into the cobblestone street.

“I’m sorry,” I say, taking a few steps toward her. “They really do mean well, I swear. And I did tell them about you. I talk about you all the time. Every day. They’re tired of it. I’m the sorry one. I’m the one who never wants to talk about why this” — I point at myself and the house and then at her and then just gesture all over the place — “why this might be complicated and weird. My outside doesn’t match the inside. And I can’t help that.”

Amina snorts.

“Oh, now you get to laugh?” I ask.

“Maybe.” She grins. “It’s just like that horrible sandwich of yours. That Gobbler mess?”

“I don’t get it. What about it?”

“On the outside, you’re sure it’s just this one simple thing. A sandwich. And then inside it’s a jumbled mess, stuff that doesn’t belong together. Things you wouldn’t assume based on what you see on the outside.”

“Hey, I am not a sandwich.”

There’s a pause, a silence in the air.

And then we laugh.