The Inferno

Dinner was at Paradise.  My sister and I hopped into Nabil's SUV.  We had no idea who Nabil was or how he knew our family.  Turns out, he went to high school and pre-medical school with my parents.  He told us that this dinner was a reunion of doctors, all of whom studied and graduated together.

We arrived ten minutes late, and we were the first ones there.  Our table was for forty.  As we peeled the skin off the almonds resting in ice, men in French cuffs and Italian leather shoes strolled up with their blond-ed wives with eyes made up like insects.  Upon each arrival, the whole table stands up, and the couple kisses and greets their way around the perimeter.  About an hour later, the table had filled, and the greeting ritual took at least a solid seven minutes.  And you can't sit down until the whole table agrees that it's time, so you just kind of eye your arguileh and smile at the social melee beyond.

I quickly realized that by "doctors" Nabil meant male doctors.  The only exception was my mother.  Of the fifteen woman there, she was the only one who held a PhD.  Her eyes weren't like insects.  She wore soft mascara and a black shirt with a floral pattern on her right shoulder.

I sat across from Maria.  Her cellphone rang every five minutes like clockwork, and she'd innocently silence it only after her obnoxious ringtone had interrupted every conversation around her.  Whenever I looked at her or tried talking to her, she'd tilt her head down slightly so that, in order to make eye contact, she would have to glance up at me.  Her eyelashes fluttered in a slow-motion worthy of Olympic gold.

We sat between la jeunesse and the parents.  Thankfully, my sister was to my right, so after the first storm of mezze I angled my chair in such a way as to erase Maria from my field of vision.

Throughout the dinner, the parents--seated miles down the table--would call to their kids, "Kareem, stand up!  Stand up!"  Kareem would rise.  He was a shining trophy and smiled knowing full well his parents were busy flattering him while the other parents, impressed, would nod vigorously.  This happened around seven or eight times to Kareem, Sameer, and Sherine.

It was pretty miserable.  I caught the first ride out of Paradise, never to return again.