Abu Hammam was the best kind of hole in the wall. Low ceilings, dirty linoleum floors, and perfectly cooked mensef, my favorite meal. A chaos of male voices greeted you as you walked in, coming from harried waiters and bronze-dark men in white smocks shouting over fryers and burbling pots, but I never felt uncomfortable eating there alone as a woman. You’d figure out on your own that you had to go upstairs if you wanted a seat, turning the corner on the landing into the quieter, lower-ceilinged room with plastic chairs and tables lined against the dingy walls, a few crooked pictures of the Dome of the Rock and the Kaaba hanging above them. Anything you ordered came with a hot stack of fluffy pita bread, which I never ate but took home for the birds, spreading crumbs around the soil near my olive trees.

When I first heard the restaurant’s name, I thought it meant Father of the Bathroom. Abu, father; hammam, bathroom – the only difference between the last name Hammam and the word for bathroom being a hard and soft H, a detail that was almost indiscernible to my immigrant ears. I only spoke Arabic when I visited Palestine and I’d lose a lot of the language in between visits. Abu Hammam referred, of course, to the family name, perhaps even a distant wing of my own extended family, the Hamamehs, who lived in McMansions in Texas and the outskirts of my village, Jiljilyya. Hamameh, incidentally, sounded equally to my ears like the word for pigeon, a euphemism for penis.

I ate mensef at Abu Hammam once a week, often alone but sometimes with Wadiyeh, who still hadn’t returned the case of DVDs I’d lent her on my previous trip to Palestine. Wadiyeh was an aspiring filmmaker who produced short interviews for an under-watched Ramallah news program. She was twenty-six, drank and smoked too much, and led men on, but I’m pretty sure she was still a virgin. She wore tight jeans and nude-colored heels, and when she leaned in to gossip or remark on a woman’s bad fashion, I could smell the powdery makeup she’d smoothed across her jawline like an airbrushed Lebanese TV presenter. I’d first met Wadiyeh at Beit Aneeseh, and soon we were sharing an argileh without wiping the nozzle, passing it lip to lip, pulling and exhaling minty vaporous smoke in the dimly lit garden of the historic single-story limestone house that served as the bar. At almost every table I saw people sharing the argileh nozzle, one passing it to the next with a cursory wipe.

It was Wadiyeh who’d invited me to the quasi-underground, loosely kept secret that was the monthly queer party for out and less out Palestinians hosted at some apartment, often one near the gouged-out construction site where Salam Fayyad’s people parked their cranes and bulldozers, or a big 1950s-era walk-up at the end of a street of newish, white limestone five-story buildings. I went every month, even though there were always too many white activists and upper-class European NGO workers, foreign queers and queer adjacents who were there for the anecdote, hoping to bed a native before their visa ended. This wasn’t really a problem, since Palestinians liked fucking foreigners just as much; it was easier being with people who wouldn’t be around for more than a few months or a year.

An hour into the party, both of us already drunk, Wadiyeh tried dragging me to some straight white guy’s apartment to drink and have a Monty Python marathon with a small breakaway group. I took her hand off my shoulder and flinched at her beer breath. I slurred that I was here to find someone to actually fuck, not play games with. She stared at me, taking in this breach of our friendship, but said nothing. She was too invested in her social standing to be seen spatting and left with the white guy and his group. I wasn’t sure if I meant what I said or if I just wanted to antagonize her, but when I thought about it, I decided I did mean it.

I scanned the room of frumpy couches, a makeshift dance floor and scruffy, curly-haired men dancing or absorbed in conversation. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts, which bored me, smoked and guffawed and tossed their curly hair, which bored me, and it was impossible to tell who was gay or straight, though everyone gave off straight vibes, which bored me. The Palestinian women all seemed cliquish, but I struck up conversation with a few and they were warm enough, if poised and too well mannered. One of them was supposedly Ghada Karmi’s daughter. She spoke with a very proper British accent and gave off super, super straight vibes. I wasn’t sure what she was doing there. Maybe she was into the novelty. I had my eyes on a woman I learned was from Haifa, with a buzz cut and maroon chandelier earrings and a black PFLP T-shirt, which suggested she would only be into other people who lived and breathed activism, wore black T-shirts and presented less femme than I did, even though I wasn’t that femme. But I was annoyed with myself for being most attracted to a Spaniard, Lucía, whom I’d met once or twice at daytime political rallies I happened upon at the Manara Square. She brought me over a glass of cheap white wine when she noticed mine was empty.

Lucía had mascara-framed hazel eyes and wavy caramel hair, and was wearing a red spaghetti-strap tank top and baggy jeans that hung loosely from her hips. There was a sprig of hair at her belly button. We sat on a cracked leather couch, drinking and sharing spit on her cigarette, when a small group of brawny Palestinian dykes walked in. They wore oversized T-shirts and shorts with high-top sneakers and had their hair bunched into tight buns or tucked under backwards-facing baseball caps. I couldn’t work out who was with whom based on where they sat, and Lucía and I played mix and match trying to work it out. Lucía said she had a long-term, long-distance girlfriend who wouldn’t leave her job in Madrid to join her in Palestine. She said they were ‘mostly open’, but seemed to be stretching the truth, and when I pressed, she admitted that the girlfriend hadn’t fully come around to the idea yet. I didn’t want to get involved in anything complicated, so I made an excuse and called a cab home.