F O R E V E R YO U N G NONFICTION
S am ant h a Cooke
ow am I supposed to explain to our relatives that you were baptized? We’re Muslim!” This was how my nene greeted me the day after I returned from a weeklong beach vacation with my best friends. I sat at her kitchen table, plucking olives from the big salad bowl she had placed at the center. I raised my eyebrows at my little sister, Ryan, who dropped her napkin on the table and stifled a laugh. “First of all, Nene, we aren’t Muslim.” “We are Muslim, Samantha.” Nene, who was fierce and could be backhandedly mean, was also loving and kind. Where other grandmothers would bake cookies, Nene would make cucumber sandwiches for my friends and me as we swam in her pool. Nene was the most stubborn woman I knew. She didn’t run the AC in her house, so even during harsh Florida summers, we held many a conversation with sweat dripping down our foreheads. She was backward in many of her practices; she donated money to the SPCA every month but always talked about how much she hated Ryan’s cat. She was a product of her environment. She had been raised in Cyprus, a small Mediterranean island, and at sixteen, she had been married off to my dede. The conversations I had with her usually centered around her life in Cyprus and her belief that our Turkish heritage automatically meant we were Muslim. Now, the way she said it so definitively in her bright kitchen made me wonder if perhaps I was Muslim. “I don’t eat pork,” Nene continued as she set a plate of my favorite Turkish dish, dolmas, in front of me. She stared at me, and I knew she was waiting for my explanation of the shenanigans she had seen. “Nene, that video was a joke!” The video, pure evidence now that Nene thought I was a sinner, had been filmed a few days earlier by my best friend. We had spent
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