The same black hair, thick eyebrows, and full lips that fixed themselves around Drina's penetrating eyes were transformed on Layla's face by her sensitivity. The same features with distinct edges on Drina were soft and rounded on her little sister, Layla. The thick curls of hair, which all three had inherited from their mother, sprang from Drina's head in confused, reckless coils but fell as obedient tresses against Layla's back.

The good nun returned to the orphanage nearly every week after she had met Layla. Each time, Sister Clairie brought a box of goodies. Often, they were things to replenish Layla's medical supplies for the odd scrapes and cuts on girls who sought her out for mothering and bandages. But always there were chocolate treats and candy, which Layla shared with her sisters, Muna, and me.

To ease the hunger of Ramadan, Sister Clairie came each evening to the eastern wall of the orphanage and passed a warm pot to Layla through a small hole in the stones. Her charity was a delicious secret among the five of us friends. In Pavlovian fashion, we arrived at the hole at least half an hour before five, when the good nun was due to arrive. Already it was February, the crisp breeze chilling us on our reconnaissance mission as we gently shoved one another for a peek through the hole.

"She's coming!" I whispered when I spotted the fair skin and rosy cheeks in brown habit, a face that looked only for God and thrived in cloistered piety.

Drina pushed me out of the way. "I hope it's grape leaves and stuffed zucchini like yesterday," she said, peeking through the hole.

"Anything beats the crap Um Ahmed makes," Yasmina chimed in.

We all moved aside for Layla to receive the coveted pot of food, which she immediately passed back to us so she could speak with her Christian friend.

"I got it!" I assured everyone, hiding the pot in my blanket.

"Mmm, smells good," Drina mused, her nose in my blanket.

As we had been doing all month, we broke into the art studio to eat our meal. Yasmina, the youngest of the Colombian Sisters, the most practical and organized of us all, divvied up the food in five equal portions while we waited for the adan to beckon us with permission to break the fast. Muna fasted with us in solidarity even though she was Christian. We had no plates, so we used paint trays from the art supply closet and sat in a circle, our eyes tightly fastened to Sister Clairie's perfect gift and our ears keenly tuned to the first notes of the adan.

"Alllaaaaaaaho akbar . . . alllaaaaaaaho akbar . . ." poured in a musical lilt from the sky over us and we broke the fast "in the name of Allah the Most Merciful and Most Compassionate." We devoured the food in brief minutes, finishing together with the realization that we were all eyeing the pot for the last few drops of juice and flavor. Again, Yasmina stepped into her unofficial role as mediator. "Here's what we'll do," she said, rising to her feet, her black curls forced into a ponytail so tight it slanted her eyes and exploded behind her in a shaggy mop of wanton swirls.

"We'll play a game and the winner gets the pot," Yasmina announced. Looking around the room, she took her cue from a child's painting of balloons. "It's called the balloon game," she began, and assembled the rules, snatching ideas from the air. "To play the game," she explained, her bony form pacing, "you have to hop on one foot in a straight line and say the word 'ballooooon' in one breath until you run out of air. The one who hops the farthest wins."

I don't recall who won, except that it wasn't me. I do remember Drina's devilish look just before she sprayed paint on Yasmina, who fell out of the game as Drina erupted in her disorienting laughter. I jumped to Yasmina's aid with tubes of blue paint, which we squirted at Drina, while Layla threw paint randomly from behind the protection of her sister. Muna took no sides and hurled wads of papier-mache at anyone in her line of fire. The images of that evening are paint-splattered and full of laughter that turned my voice hoarse for several days following. We stayed late that night, trying to clean up the remains of the paint fight, and many years later when I returned to visit the orphanage, I saw a group of young girls playing the balloon game in the courtyard outside the art studio.

Miss Haydar caught me returning to the scene of the crime the next morning to retrieve my blanket. She was waiting when I climbed through the art room window, which we kept unlocked on a rig. The pain of Miss Haydar's five-hour interrogation was finally eased by Drina's approval once she realized that I hadn't told on anyone. Earning Drina's respect was a prize.

Though we had so little and often went without food, my memories of those years are ultimately happy ones, rich in spirit and substance. Jerusalem's winters were white and bitter, and we fought off the frigid nights with one flimsy gray blanket each. It was against the rules to share beds or push them together and there was hell to pay if we were caught, but that was one rule we frequently broke, sharing blankets and body heat. A new girl came to the orphanage a year after me, and she peed all over us on one such night when we were massed together in warm sleep. Her name was Maha and she only stayed for a few months, but after that incident, we were more selective about who we let into our throng.

Um Ahmed, the cook, prepared three meals each day for some two hundred growing girls. Breakfast, for which I was often too late, consisted of one slice of bread and unlimited hot tea. Dinner was the same, with an added slice of mortadella. Rarely did the content of these meals change over my four years in residence. Lunch, on the other hand, was the time to really eat. It was always some kind of stew, cooked in a huge metal cauldron, served over rice. We could eat as much stew as we wanted until it ran out. Problem was, the only meat it ever contained was from the cockroaches that lived in great abundance in the kitchen.

I got used to that, too. In fact, we frequently held contests to see who could pick the most bugs from her stew. The dark menaces could be spotted easily in dishes like okra and tomato stew. But for mulukhiya, a dark vegetable stew, the task was infinitely harder. On those days, some hapless girl inevitably ate a roach by mistake.

Muna had that unfortunate distinction once. Satisfied that, having picked out three bugs, she had found them all, she ate her whole plate. To everyone's audible horror, she dislodged from her teeth a dark filament that turned out to be a hairy cockroach leg.

Someone yelled, "Muna Jalayta got one!" and the whole dining room erupted in laughter and jubilant chanting-"Muna! Muna!"-until Miss Haydar burst onto the scene ordering us "animals" to be quiet. It didn't last. As soon as Haydar was out of earshot, the ruckus resumed as girls came to our table, expressing condolences and paying homage to Muna, like a soldier wounded in battle.

Prior to meals, we had to line up single file in a tiny courtyard outside the dining hall. At Miss Haydar's insistence, we were required to stand in five equally spaced rows before she allowed us to enter. We accepted her bizarre behavior as some still unidentified form of dementia, for she actually took the time to measure the distances between girls in each row. This exercise was particularly painful in the wintertime for everyone except the three girls who made it to the courtyard in time to get the "pipe positions." These were the spots around a thirty-inch metal pipe that ran up the wall in the courtyard to vent hot steam from the kitchen. If you stood next to one of its three exposed sides, you had a source of warmth while Miss Haydar prattled about with her ridiculous yardstick. My tardiness did not afford me the luxury of a pipe position, and I could never get used to standing in the cold for half an hour like that.

Only once did I get the privilege of the pipe, but not because I made it to the courtyard in time. Drina took pity on me as I stood in line one particularly cold night when I was also suffering a fever. She ordered a young girl named Sonya from the best of the pipe positions to let me take her place. I gratefully accepted, shivering in that warm spot until we could enter the dining hall for our dinner of one piece of mortadella, a slice of bread, and as much tea as we liked.

Of course, I recovered under Layla's care, thanks to her herbal concoctions and cold compresses. None of us was surprised, or even disappointed, when Layla announced one evening that she was converting to Christianity to join the convent after graduation and live with Sister Clairie. Drina thought it was a phase but Layla did eventually join the Carmelite Order of nuns, devoting her life to God and to the girls who went to live at Darel Tiflorphanage, where we had come into young adulthood behind stone walls and beneath the hard watch of Haydar.

But for Layla's nurturing, I would have lived bald in the orphanage because my hair was frequently infested with lice. Lice inspection day was the first of the month. A few days before, we all got busy picking lice from one another's hair to avoid the dreaded shaver. We'd line up in trains, pulling lice and pushing the little pests into kerosene-filled cans. Layla looked after my hair. And thanks to Yasmina's "white comb," another of her ingenious inventions, which could pull out hundreds of the little buggers in one swipe, my long black hair never met the shaver.

A sad "shaver story" happened to a pretty young girl named Souad who was about to graduate and get married. Her beautiful chestnut hair had grown to her waist when Haydar claimed to have found lice in it. There was nothing anyone could do but listen to Souad's screams as her wavy locks fell to the floor. Drina believed that Haydar was jealous of Souad and made up the whole thing about finding lice in her hair. "She knew Souad was getting married," Drina said, "and the old hag couldn't bear it." We all agreed.

Among Yasmina's other great inventions was the Z-tongue. This was a language she devised, similar to pig Latin except with a "Z" sound inserted between consonants. To the great irritation of Miss Haydar, we became quite fluent in this speech, which we put to use poking fun at her corpulence and nostrils, which started at the human and ended just before the clown.

The friendships I forged in the orphanage are the substance of my fondest memories of adolescence. Of course, I could never replicate the bond between Huda and me. She and I were forever bound by our childhood, by six days of terror in the kitchen hole, and by a sisterhood that remained unmatched throughout my life. But fate had snipped a tear in our lives, setting us on divergent paths.

Huda was able to visit me once during my four years in the orphanage. Although travel to Jerusalem was difficult, she made it there with Osama in February 1973 to tell me that they were expecting their first child. Their togetherness had bloomed with a quiet splendor I could not understand then, and the life growing inside her cast a halo of promise and hope around them both.

At first, I could not find my best friend in the beauty who seemed so grown up, so much more of a woman than I. She looked alluring and exotic, her eyes part tiger, part human. But her steadfast and tender character hushed her beauty, and her face pulled you in. Even decades later, after time had scribbled lines on her cheeks and furrowed the tales of age in her brow, Huda's face could hold you spellbound, as you searched for the secret you knew was there, just behind the yellow streaks in her eyes. She didn't know the extent of her own beauty and that made it even greater.

"I've missed you," she said, tears at the rims of her eyes. I think it was at that moment in my life that I first felt the coolness of my own heart and found Mama's walls cementing inside me. It frightened me to think I could so easily do away with the pain of loss and separation. I leapt toward my childhood friend, muffling my discovery and our sobs on each other's shoulders. She cried because she loved me and had felt a great void in her life since I had left Jenin. I cried because although I loved her, too, I could not feel it with the same intensity as she.

In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt temporary to me. Nothing could be counted on to endure, neither parents nor siblings nor home. Not even one's body, vulnerable as it was to bullets. I had long since accepted that one day I would lose everything and everyone, even Huda. I understood that in my best friend's arms that day, and I cried selfishly for myself, and for the crystals freezing over my heart.

"You're the best friend I've ever had," Huda sobbed. "Jenin is not the same without you."

Huda learned to love what she had and to take what sweetness she could from life, her memories as pillars of strength. The refugee camp was good enough. She found solace in the bonds she forged by the strings of her own heart. With faith and prayer she could manufacture serenity, even after soldiers ransacked her house in their endless search for "terrorists." As long as she could return to the arms of love at the end of each day, that was all that mattered to her.

We spent Huda's visit on the school grounds, as I was not allowed to leave, while Osama went off to the Old City. I introduced Huda to the orphanage gang, all of whom embraced her with warm enthusiasm, and we spent the day in the fun world of young women. We listened intently to Huda's responses when Drina grilled her about sex, for Huda was the only one among us to have experienced the great mystery. We took turns listening to her belly, trying to wake the baby, begging for somersaults. It moved a few times, like a shadow behind a curtain, and we screamed with delight each time at the sense of magic and miracle that only babies can inspire by their mere movements. The six of us ate from a pot of lamb in yogurt stew that Huda had brought with her. Yasmina divvied up the meat, concentrating behind the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.

"Those are interesting glasses, Yasmina. I've never seen frames like that before," Huda said. We answered her almost in unison, "She made them herself."

"She's always making and inventing things, our Yasmina," Drina said with uncharacteristic pride.

"I can make you a pair, Huda, if you have the lenses," Yasmina offered, eyes wide, eager for the chance to construct something.

As much as we wanted to believe that nothing would change, that we would remain a family of five friends forever, graduation crept toward us. In 1973, Drina had been out of school for two years, but she had remained at the orphanage as a gym teacher while she took college courses at the Islamic University. Layla had already embarked on her journey in the Christian faith and moved into a convent, living behind other stone walls. Yasmina and I graduated together that year, both of us with high honors, and Muna had one more year to go.

Though Yasmina was the smartest and most studious among us, a scholarship came my way instead of hers. It was offered by a group of wealthy Arab-Americans for Palestinian refugees. Since Yasmina's family had fled to Latin America and never had lived in a refugee camp, she was not eligible. I think the opportunity for a college education abroad made her wish she had lived in a refugee camp.

I emerged confident and drained from the last of five arduous days of academic testing and waited for the verdict. I wanted desperately to win that scholarship, but only for the validation it offered. I couldn't imagine going anywhere but back to the familiarity of Jenin, or perhaps I would remain in the orphanage to teach, like Drina. Certainly, I was not prepared to go to the United States, where the scholarship would lead. The world at home frightened me enough. Why would I risk going into an unfamiliar world where no one spoke Arabic and where I knew no hiding places? Getting high marks was an end in itself. My father had wanted an education for me and I had obediently planted my life in the soil of his dream. I simply wasn't conditioned to plan for a distant future.

But Yasmina had a small genius of foresight and made plans and fallback plans. She slapped me hard across the face when I told her, rather casually, that I might not take the scholarship.

"Who do you think you are, refusing such a gift?" Her question tolled in my ear. Only by extraordinary odds and rare luck could someone like me find such an opportunity in the pitiable destiny that was my birthright. Who did I think I was, indeed.

"I'd give anything to have that damn scholarship!" Now she was screaming, not at me, but at something neither of us could see. She screamed at the cruelty of chance that would not notice her intellect and the hours she had spent in study. She had dreamed of college, and she dreamed even harder when there were rumors of scholarships.

I felt ashamed in the shadow of Yasmina's disappointment, and that evening, while I sat alone on the balcony, she flung open the doors of friendship with good advice. "Don't be stupid, Amal. Get past the fear," she said, and returned inside, leaving me to the indifference of a crescent moon cradled in a star-speckled black ether.

When I was a child, Haj Salem told me that answers can be found in the sky if you look long and hard enough. He told me that the arrangements of stars were divine hieroglyphics that could be deciphered by faithful hearts. To that tapestry of stars, I offered up my greatest wound. There was nothing left for me in Jenin but scraps of my childhood and the debris of the family lost forever, all of it packed beneath the boots and tank treads of patrolling Israeli soldiers. If I returned, unavoidable marriage awaited me in the traditional culture of Jenin's refugee camp. My awful scar, my disfigured body, made me dread marriage, which would surely bring a new flavor of rejection and abandonment.

Who was I, indeed! A pathetic orphan, stateless and poor, living off charity. The American scholarship was a gift I had no right to refuse. It sat mercifully in the path of my father's greatest longings for his children. A pathetic orphan, stateless and poor, living off charity. The American scholarship was a gift I had no right to refuse. It sat mercifully in the path of my father's greatest longings for his children.

As the moon smiled in the sky, I begged the night to sweep me up by surprise with a dream that was my own. For in my life, I had not yet dreamed my own dream.

I could not leave without seeing Huda and Osama and their baby girl, whom they had named Amal.

As a going-away present, my friends at the orphanage pitched in with whatever they had, though it barely reached a fraction of the taxi fare. Amazingly, Miss Haydar made up the difference with one hundred shekels. More baffling still was the hug that accompanied her generous gift. I moved my eyes from the money to meet that talcum-faced woman who drew her eyebrows with a pencil and brought a grumpy temper to her commission of running an orphanage. Beneath her rutted exterior and slight insanity, I saw an insecurity and felt a sense of sisterhood when she put her arms around me.

"Thank you, Miss Haydar," I said sincerely.

"You're welcome. Make us proud."

Not wanting to be met by a crowd, I arrived in Jenin unannounced in the evening. I walked two miles from the Green Line, going through two Israeli checkpoints. Near the depopulated village of Allajune I found a Palestinian farmer who offered me a ride in his oxcart to Ziraain, on the perimeter of Jenin. He refused to take money-"I can't take money from a young Arab daughter"-so I thanked him and walked the rest of the way. Three Israeli tanks were perched on the highlands overlooking the camp. Always there. Always watching.

It was dark when I started down the hill into the maze of slum homes and random alleyways, but I didn't need light to navigate. I could simply close my eyes and see the dirt paths carved between homes. There was Ammo Darweesh's chicken coop, my best hiding spot. One meter ahead was Lamya's window, hung at eye level with two metal bars that her father had welded there after he'd caught a boy looking in. Then the path broke into three and I took the middle, most narrow, toward Huda's home. The dwellings on either side were shoulder-width apart and I dragged my hands along their clay walls, just as Huda and I had always done. A few lights shone from windows silhouetted by tired souls shuffling about, but most of the camp was sleeping. The land was turned over to a choir of crickets, and the wild cats gathered on garbage piles looking for spoiled food or for the rats that foraged in the same territory. If I had not known the abiding generosity of the people in this camp, I'd have been afraid to be there after dark.

I stopped at a blue metal door, dented and scratched. I knocked lightly.

Osama peeked through a rusted-out hole before I heard the clangy whimpering of bolts coming undone in a hurry. Osama's grin made his eyebrows stand at attention beneath the commotion of his messy hair, and his familiar good nature greeted me with delighted eyes.

"Ahlan! Ahlan!" he exulted, motioning for me to enter their small courtyard. A solitary electric bulb buzzed in the far corner, beneath which I could discern the outlines of hens sleeping on a bed of hay. Vegetables were growing in a long rectangular pot, hand-painted, no doubt, by Huda. Osama stopped my approach to their living quarters, the shadows revealing a sweet mischievousness in his face.

"Shh," he said, finger to his lips. "Let's surprise her." He led me with exaggerated tiptoeing into their home. I followed, watching the young boy of my childhood, now a husband and father with a wispy mustache nesting on his boyish face and an irrepressible love for his family leaking from his pores. Later, watching Osama and Huda together gave me a sure sense that they were meant for one another. After three years of marriage they spoke to one another in a way that reminded me of two kittens at play.

Huda threw her arms around me when I poked my head into the kitchen. Predictably, she started to cry, and both Osama and I poked lighthearted fun at her sensitivity.

They took me to little Amal's crib. She was a chunky baby, olive skinned like her mother, downy black cotton for hair. I sized up each roll of fat on her legs, neck, and belly with gentle pinches and kisses while she slept, and I warned Huda and Osama that I was looking forward to revealing their past shenanigans to little Amal as soon as she was old enough to get into trouble herself.

"Do whatever you want," Osama begged, "but please don't wake her!" They exchanged a look that betrayed a romantic interlude that had been interrupted by my visit.

The three of us reminisced and got caught up on the camp gossip. Ammo Jack O'Malley's replacement was a kind but distant Englishwoman named Emma who rarely stayed overnight at the camp. Ammo Darweesh had been caught selling souvenirs to tourists in Jerusalem without a permit and was serving a three-month jail sentence for that offense. Huda had become good friends with Fatima.

"Silly girl," Huda said of Fatima, "she has refused every suitor." And it was understood, but left unsaid, that she would have no man but my brother.

Osama went to bed around 2 A.M., leaving us to "girl talk." Whatever he thought that to be, he wanted no part of it. Huda struggled to stay awake, but eventually she fell to the call of sleep and the lull of my hand stroking her hair. But something in me, apprehensive and expectant, kept me vigilant through the night and sleeplessness could not tame the foreboding, which grew as my future crept closer.

Anxious, I walked out into the darkness and climbed onto the roof of Huda's dwelling. In the hot summers of our childhood, she and I had spent countless nights sleeping on the cool roofs of our shacks, exchanging stories, giggles, and gossip. From that vantage point, the United Nations refugee camp stretched below me in one square kilometer, so many souls packed in for the long and stubborn wait to return to their Palestine. Soon, the adan beckoned its first call for Muslims to pray while the sun inched toward the sky from behind the hills. The melodic resonance of the adan wrapped itself around me as if it were Baba's strong arms and the dawn's breeze fluttered on my skin like Mama's silk scarf. The sun rose behind the Israeli tanks and lookout post and orange flooded the sky, illuminating the part of my life that was irretrievably gone. I felt an ache for my days in that refugee camp. But a usurped life was my inheritance and I claimed it then and there with all the force of my confusion and longing, while the cocks crowed the announcement of another day.

I left a letter for Huda by the coffee in her kitchen, knowing that would be the first place she'd go when she woke up. Inside the envelope, I placed a necklace with a gold charm bearing the inscription of the Kursi Surah that Muslims believe bequeaths divine protection. It was a gift I had brought for little Amal.

I started toward the nearest crossing into Israel, where I hoped to catch a taxi back to Jerusalem. I took in the aroma of fresh falafel hanging in the still air trapped in the alleyways of the cramped architecture. A cage of canaries sang from someone's balcony, and I could hear the faint cries of babies waking behind the thin walls. A few people shuffled about, beginning their day, and roosters pranced along wherever they could find space. I felt dizzied by the task of departure while my legs commanded me toward Haj Salem's door.

There he was, the marrow of my childhood's merriment, moving about at his front door. I stopped too far away to be seen, watching as he made futile attempts to sweep away the pervasive dust at his threshold. My back leaned against a wall and I let my body slide into a fold as Haj Salem pushed the broom with arthritic motions. Holding my knees close to my chest, I imagined approaching him with a touch to his leathery skin, to cadge just one more story from our stolen Palestine. Maybe the one about the hardheaded shepherd from Khalil who went all the way to Akka looking for his sheep.

"I've seen it all. Those Khalili folks are so hardheaded, I think that's how come Allah put so much granite in Khalil. Else they'd break the mountains with their heads," he'd say, and laugh his magnificent toothless laugh.

Tears welled in my eyes and I pulled my knees closer. "Damn dust," I heard him say in a tone of routine frustration as he turned back into his home. The constancy of his comical daily battle against the dust and daily defeat by it made me smile, and I pulled myself to my feet at the bang of his metal door closing.

Back in Jerusalem, I went to retrieve my bags from the orphanage and to say good-bye to that city and all it had come to mean to me. Reaching into my pocket, I found a sealed envelope and grinned, knowing it was a letter from Huda. I placed it in an old tin box given to me as an Eid present by a charity from one of the rich Gulf States many years earlier. It was scratched and dented and it held my most precious possessions-Baba's pipe, the chest piece of Mama's prized thobe, her faded silk scarf, the dice Lamya had guiltily returned, and a stack of letters from Muna Jalayta, accumulated over my four years at the orphanage.

Even though we lived in the same dormitory, Muna and I communicated the goings-on of the orphanage and our secrets through letters. It was a way to conquer the isolation and boredom of our lives. As it turned out, these letters would become the chronicles of times we shared extra food, picked bugs from our meals, and combed lice from each other's hair. They painted the colors of friendships born of mutual need for survival and kinship. They contained tales of the "white comb," silly games we invented, and our adventures breaking into the art studio and clinic to steal paints and nursing supplies to give to Layla. In those letters she also wrote often of the boy she loved. His name, ironically, was Osama. I used to joke that I felt pressure to marry someone by that name since both she and Huda, my two best friends, would be married to Osamas.

I think of those years with nostalgia. It is true we had no heat to warm our nights or our weekly bathing water, but we had much of the stuff that warmed our souls. We were friends who doubled as mothers, sisters, teachers, providers, and sometimes as blankets. We shared everything from clothes to heartaches. We laughed together and carved our names in the ancient stones of Jerusalem.

We all crawled from the pits of dispossession and tried to survive as best we could under Israeli occupation. Our greatest pleasures were moments of normalcy. A crush on a boy. A card game. Telling dirty jokes while we washed our clothes by hand on the roof of the five-story building. Words of encouragement from a teacher. The bond we forged was molded from an unspoken commitment to our collective survival. It reached through history, straddled continents, spanned wars, and held our collective and individual tragedies and triumphs. It was girlhood letters or a pot of stuffed grape leaves. Our bond was Palestine. It was a language we dismantled to construct a home.

IV.

EL GHURBA.

(state of being a stranger)

TWENTY-FOUR.

America 1973.

FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY MARKED my first months in America. I floundered in that open-ended world, trying to fit in. But my foreignness showed in my brown skin and accent. Statelessness clung to me like bad perfume and the airplane hijackings of the seventies trailed my Arabic surname.

"It's okay. Haven't you ever seen an escalator before?" asked a pretty redhead at Philadelphia International Airport.

So, it was an "es-ka-lay-tor."

"You must be Amal." She extended a soft manicured hand. "I'm Lisa Haddad. My mom is just parking the car. We're your host family."

Lisa was younger than me but far more sophisticated and pretty.

"Hello," I said, looking at her with embarrassing envy.

"I decorated the guest room for you," Lisa said energetically on the short car ride from the airport to their home. It was easy to like her-difficult, in fact, not to. Her world was pastel colored, emotionally cushioned, financially solid, and politically inconsequential. I thought it odd and thrilling that she should seek my favor and approval.