At home, Nademah arranged the tablecloth and placemats. Safiya and Aisha set out the silverware and glasses. Kathy threw together a salad and poured milk for the kids and juice for herself and Zeitoun.
Zeitoun arrived with the chicken, showered, and joined the family for dinner.
“Finish, finish,” he said to his daughters, who were picking at their food, leaving huge swaths of it uneaten.
He had gotten used to it after all these years, but still, there were times when the waste got to him. The disposability of just about everything. Growing up in Syria he had often heard the expression “If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.” But in the U.S., it wasn’t just the prosperity – because New Orleans was not uniformly prosperous, to be sure – there was a sense that everything could be replaced, and on a whim. In his children he was trying to instill a sense of the value of work, the value of whatever came into their house, but he knew that much would be lost in the context, the waste and excess of the culture at large. He had been brought up to know that what God hates as much as anything is waste. It was, he had been told, one of the three things God most hated: murder, divorce, and waste. It destroyed a society.
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. Random House, Inc. 2010.
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