Those ridiculous questions can cut, though. For example, take my own sister… When I told her I was marrying a man from Iran, her first response was not to ask if I was happy or if he was good to me. It was to ask, "Does he wash?" I was speechless.

And, then she rushed on with a story about one guy she briefly knew from when her then husband was a barber on the Navy base where they lived. This man who worked with her husband, in a Memphis sweltering August, smelled of sweat. In that nervous-secretive way I can only presume she thought I would enter into, she talked about how "those people don't wash."

No one among my kin grasps how the million tiny cuts like that leave scars like canyons on my heart.