I’d spent the previous week telling her that she was nuts, AK-47 crazy, but she paid me no mind. My mother explained that every individual dealt with traumatic stress differently and one couldn’t predict wartime behavior based on non-bombing personality. As the Israeli missiles hit, my father drank, my mother cooked, my brother brooded, and my sister shopped for diapers. During non-bombing she was probably as rational as any Lebanese, but with each missile she grew more and more erratic. Her pink room brimmed with disposable diapers, four distinct piles from floor to ceiling; one diaper bag at the top looked like it was suffocating because it couldn’t fit between the ceiling and its brother below it. My sister had stuffed a dozen bags under the baby’s cot and at least twice as many under her bed. She had enough diapers to ensure that her son would be wearing them until he was six years old, maybe seven. When I pointed that out to her, she shouted, “Well, I might get pregnant again. It happens.”

But then this morning, we turned on the diesel generator to watch the television news and the announcer informed us that the Israelis had bombed the Johnson & Johnson warehouse the night before, incinerating everything in it.

“Why?” my mother asked the television.

My father looked at the bottle of scotch, but it was still early in the morning.

My brother sipped his coffee. “I’m sure terrorists were hiding between the shampoo and the Band-Aids. No more tears.”

My sister beamed, seemed to have grown taller in her chair. “I told you we’ll run out of diapers. Just you wait, they’ll bomb the Procter & Gamble warehouse next.” She was talking to us but looked as if she were addressing a large invisible audience. She pursed her lips and blew on newly painted fingernails.